End Game

The Impact of Science on Society

"Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible. Even if all are miserable, all will believe themselves happy, because the government will tell them that they are so."

- Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society p50, 1953

"Gradually, by selective breeding, the congenital differences between rulers and ruled will increase until they become almost different species. A revolt of the plebs would become as unthinkable as an organized insurrection of sheep against the practice of eating mutton."

- Bertrand Russell, "The Impact of Science on Society", 1953, pg 49-50

FLOW: For Love of Water

Flow: For Love of Water (2008)

How did a handful of corporations steal our water?

Water is the very essence of life, sustaining every being on the planet. 'Flow' confronts the disturbing reality that our crucial resource is dwindling and greed just may be the cause.

Architects of Mind Control

Architects of Control

Top Blogging Mistakes and Crimes

Technically, there is no right or wrong way, but you're here to read an article to help you with blogging, right? So if you're new to blogging, you're probably finding out the way to do it, if you've been blogging for a while now and you're unhappy with the results then you're probably reading this to find out where you are going wrong. I want to start by saying that this is not like the thousand other articles that you'll find on the net about blogging and provide you with a cheat sheet on how to hit the right marks and earn lots of money by publishing articles on the internet, I'm just going to show you how to be a good blogger, and by reading this article you're already 90% of the way there.

There are many reasons to start blogging, and there is only one truly good reason to be a blogger - that is because you enjoy writing and the process of sharing your thoughts with others. Many people want to make money on the internet these days, they hear success stories of how bloggers make a living selling advertising on their blogs, and they are drawn to the idea of blogging because of the potential monetary rewards. These people never had any interest in writing, their sole motivation for starting out in the first place was to make money; if you're one of those people who want to blog for money, then here is a nice piece of advice for you - DON'T. If money is your motivation, trust me, there are plenty of other jobs where you can earn money without putting in effort, try selling your body on the street corner or pushing drugs to junkies instead (please don't take that advice seriously) - Find something you enjoy doing, rather than forcing yourself to make money with something that you have little or no interest in. If you're writing for solely for money, perhaps you will make some cash at first, but eventually the incentive to write will disappear as the money becomes less important, and your writing will reflect that in dull, boring, and uninspired articles. This is something you may end up doing for a long time, do you think that you'll be able to maintain a website, would you want to be stuck doing something you don't enjoy?

For those who do enjoy the process of writing, then you're more likely to succeed as a blogger than the gold diggers (by succeed, I mean create a popular blog). You should concentrate on writing, not visitor count or money, because if you write well, those things will come to you. Patience is key, and it is important to keep writing and publishing those articles, build up a solid blog so that your subscribers know that you are here to stay, you will get the attention you deserve. Stick to writing things that you have a passion for or are knowledgeable about, once you start wandering into subjects that don't interest you, the readers will be able to sense your apathy. Invest in a comfortable keyboard, go to a store and take the time to try the different keyboards, sample the touch and feel of the keys, and buy a keyboard that you'll enjoy and look forward to typing on. A comfortable chair is important to help you relax; your ideas are the most valuable things and if you're uncomfortable then it's going to be harder to focus on your concepts.

Once again, patience is key. Don't quit your day job, keep churning out the articles and try to post frequently so your readers won't think that you're dead. Don't think about making big bucks from your blog, because once you start thinking along those lines, it can be demoralising because you're using income to guage the quality of your writing. You should be fully focused on the task that you have set yourself and that is to write, write what you love because it comes easily, and when you do start earning from your blog you can smile because you are doing something that you love rather than forced - so stick to your style. Also the benefit of writing and posting frequently is that it will quickly help you improve, the more you write, the better you'll get and the easier it will be to express your thoughts and ideas, naturally you'll advance.

This is the best advice I can give you, most of the work is up to you. There are too many blogs designed to make money, hit keywords, and talk without passion. Write about the things that concern and interest you, show off your writing talent, and after all of it, you will have a resource to remember.

Exercise Motivation that Works from the Mind

I cannot stress enough how important it is to maintain good physical fitness and health. Exercise is as important as getting enough sleep or drinking water, but many choose not to do it, in the same way that children don't eat their vegetables. As part of a healthy lifestyle to maintain one's body function at optimum efficiency, exercise is not a choice, but an essential regime.

People do not value their bodies enough until it is too late, and partly the problem is to do with their perception of exercise. Children will not eat greens until the adult explains that their growth will be stunted if they don't eat vegetables. In the same way, adults can delay beginning a healthy exercise routine by creating all kinds of excuses in their heads. Once again, we're dealing with psychology, it has nothing to do with the starting physical condition of the individual, it has nothing to do with willpower, it is all about how one perceives the tasks at hand.

The task of exercising can often be seen as daunting, an enormous vehicle to overcome. People who don't exercise and want to start, generally set their goal too high. The goal exists as an image or phrase within the individual's mind, but when the bar is set too high, then one's morale may start to wane after a few weeks. So the trick is not what the goal is but rather, how one sets the goal. Whether through imagery or linguistically, the goal can be set so it is an easily accessible target for the body and mind to achieve and gain satisfactory results each time. It is common to say, "I want to lose weight", instead this can be rephrased, "I want to become lighter" - the use of the word 'lose' often comes with negative connotations; nobody wants to lose something. So once we begin to apply these newly reworded goals, the tasks magically become easier and more doable.

The other problem is time; in this day and age, with all our modern technology and devices, we're spoilt for instant results, we expect to get trim and fit in just a few weeks rather than thinking in terms of years. Also modern advertising is partly to blame, as many ads for weight loss and gym programs claim big results within a month, but these claims are false, as the companies that produce these adverts often place a disclaimer in small print at the bottom of the screen or poster to say that it won't for everyone. Time and patience is another topic I will cover in more depth later on, but in terms of exercise and fitness, you won't see results very quickly and because of this there is little incentive to keep going or even start. Most people are stuck in the process of preparing for the day when they 'really need to start' but by then it is too late.

Routines are important, and there are many routines that we perform (naturally and unthinking) on a daily basis that don't provide any immediate benefits. A daily routine that most people perform is washing their hands after using the toilet. We cleanse our hands of bacteria invisible to the naked eye, we can't see the bacteria yet we wash with soap and water with the knowledge that it helps remove the germs. We have such confidence in this routine because in our mind, we envision getting some heinous stomach bug and sitting on the toilet with cramp for hours if we were to ignore it. Brushing our teeth is another one, I do not know many people who don't brush their teeth, and the longer we delay to clean our teeth the more we envision our teeth slowly rotting and decaying right inside our mouths - I think it's hard for many people to skip brushing their teeth for long, even after a couple of days, there might not be any sign of visible decay, but the thought and the fear is there, enough so we're willing to take some time out of our daily schedules to take preventative measures. This is something that has been hammered into you from the day you learnt to brush your teeth and learnt about teeth hygiene, and it stays with you because you know that negligence leads to black rotting teeth which you have seen photos of.

So exercise, what are the consequences of not exercising? We already know what they are - weight gain, heart disease, premature ageing, high blood pressure ... the list goes on, but why are they not enough to shock most of us into exercising regularly? The answer is simply that we cannot imagine those things happening to us in the time frame that those things usually occur, we're talking maybe decades. Teeth decay is a different matter, we've all lost teeth, it's a part of growing up, so it is something that we can relate to, thus we continue to perform our teeth brushing, and we're taught that when we aren't brushing our teeth the decay is occurring all the time. Now we should think of exercise in the same terms, people are more motivated to prevent loss than to work towards gain. Someone may be quite reckless in their life, taking risks like drink driving, but if someone pointed a gun at their head, they may view their life differently, most people are not as response to gain as they are to loss. You could tell someone that by exercising, it will improve their looks, but that might not be the type of gain that they're interested in, but if you say instead that they will lose their looks by not exercising, it might be a more persuasive suggestion.

So we learn that in order to motivate ourselves to become better, we should keep in sight the pit that awaits us should we decide to ignore the advice. Think that each day you delay, you are losing your health, the opportunity to preserve your youth, your overall fitness. We do not need to think in terms of years, because you can wake up tomorrow morning with an extra wrinkle, because each day we fall apart, our bodies are continually decaying when we are not servicing them, this is a reason to begin today, for each hour provides an opportunity to preserve what you have, and tomorrow you can be better than without.

iPhone Vs a thing called life

So the new iPhone 4 has been launched and ready for release in stores, are you thinking of getting one even though you know that deep inside that you don't really need it and it is an unnecessary luxury and waste of money. 'I can do whatever I want, it's my money!' you retort, but, are you really doing what you want? Have you like many millions of others been captivated by Apple's clever branding and marketing?

You know, I watch people go crazy when talking about the iPhone, they don't even see it as just an electronic device, to them, it is a solution to all their problems! This is how most modern day advertising works, the products are pitched in such a way that you're made to believe that somehow the product will transform your lifestyle for better. In truth, the only way that this phone (some will go so far to say it is sacrilege to call it as such!) is going to transform people's lives is by putting them into debt. Many are led to believe that by purchasing and owning an iPhone, somehow all their life problems will ebb away and never been seen again - The iPhone is not the answer to all your life problems, in fact, it may well become the opposite!

Firstly, I'd like to do a quick thought experiment. The current competitor for the iPhone 4 is the HTC Evo, which has a faster processor and is capable of multitasking applications. Even though the HTC Evo is a slightly more powerful phone, many will still choose to buy the iPhone for whatever reason they believe or convinced themselves to believe. If we were to take the Apple logo and put it on the Evo, and put the HTC Evo logo on the iPhone, would this change people's perception of the products if they had never seen or heard of either phone before? Most claim that the iPhone is the better looking phone, but with the Evo logo, would it perhaps look slightly less attractive, because in terms of design, what do we use to guage what is better looking than our own biases and what we have been told is good. I imagine, and I hope you will too, if the Apple logo were to be emblazoned on the HTC Evo phone, it would somehow become a different object in many people's eyes.

There are many reasons to own an iPhone, but the reasons for owning one may outweigh them. Out of all the companies, Apple have latched on to the idea that people are embarrassed of owning an older model phone, while most companies have already built in a lifespan for their phones, Apple have gone one step further and made it so once you buy an iPhone, you become invisibly subscribed to Apple's 'upgrade or be embarrassed' money sucking scheme. Because who wants to have last year's iPhone, when the latest iPhone is marketed as the item that only cool kids have? Now think about each iPhone generation, is each successive iPhone really that much better than the previous - essentially it is a phone, and perhaps a bonus if you can access the internet on it, but how much does it contribute to improving your life overall?

I can name a few things that most people might use their iPhone for ... check Facebook, watch YouTube, check Facebook again, and again ... Is it really constructive to be so connected? I've seen groups of friends sitting together, all busy posting their Facebook statuses via their iPhone about how they are hanging out with their friends. How is that productive? Some people will argue that social networking is important in this day and age, and if you don't do it, you'll be left behind - little do they know that most of these claims are sponsored by the very companies that promote them! How strange is that? Not very, all these companies have their own interests to look after, and social networking is another way for companies to administer their advertising to us. It's a multi-billion dollar business, and it is not very hard to understand why they would want us to be staring at advertising wherever we go; the iPhone is in essence, an efficient portable advertising viewer.

Why do people want to make their lives so complicated with electronic gadgets all of a sudden? I believe it all started with the Tamagotchi craze, the electronic pet which needed your attention at all times to feed and clean it, or it will die. The iPhone has become the replacement for that toy, Facebook and Twitter are the virtual pets. We've all become addicted to this new game of trying to keep our friends happy by publishing our statuses to the world every five seconds. Why do people do it? Because they're unhappy or bored. Like I said at the beginning of this post, the iPhone is not the answer to your life's problems, and many people who have problems or are unhappy (and believe me, it seems to be he majority these days) look to these products to fill an emptiness in their lives.

There are other ways to fulfill your life, and it is simply a matter of discovering it, and looking within yourself for the answers. We just have to stop being busy, because to be honest, Facebook is not constructive for our time. We can find other ways to improve our life and ourselves. Maybe think about getting fit? Some will say that the iPhone is an excellent way to pass the time, but time can be passed in other ways, for example if you are waiting for your dental appointment, you could do some exercises in the waiting room, bring a pen with you and do some relaxing doodles, improve your mind by doing a crossword puzzle, most of these alternatives are cheap or free and they provide endless benefits.

So if you don't spend the money on an iPhone, then what to spend it on. Who says you need to spend money? Maybe the need to spend comes from a less answered need within you. Like I said, we look for answers in the wrong places, and we often think that buying something provides the solution, but if only there were such quick fixes to our problems! Some people have never traveled outside of their own country, the price of the latest iPhone may get them a holiday abroad - life is too short to be staring at a tiny screen, the world is to be explored! Invest the money in life experiences, whether it be business, learning, creativity or exploration!