Bread and Circus part 1.

I recently had a discussion with some collegues about sports, and more specificly the wages Football (soccer for the Americans) players get. Now while I do agree that its the market that rules their salaries due to ticket prices, jersey sales and other sources of income. I also maintain that there is no reason why a Football player should make say $40.000.000 a year. I don't care how good they are, how many shirts they sell etc, there is no way that a Football player any football player should be paid more than an AIDS or Cancer researcher, unless that football player can cure cancer or AIDS.
It's an insult to our place in  the world as a species that the Roman Colleseums where gladiators killed each other for freedom, glory and honor, has become a spectacle where 19year olds are offered 10x the salary of a doctor, teacher, police officer, nurse, with 10+ years of experience in their fields.

Now my stance on it is that yes the market dictates what a player is worth, however there is such a thing as the market being wrong. Take the subprime mortage issues, the lawsuit filed against Goldman-Sachs, the criminal behavior of countless analysts and investment banks when it comes to manipulation on the stockexchanges. I still think that we need a stockmarket, we need banks, we even need bankers, but we can regulate them a bit. To a point where if I ask my broker "should I buy X stock" or if my broker calls me and goes "I want to recommend X stock" they should have to be truthful. Lawyers, doctors, etc are not allowed to blantantly lie to their customers, why should banks be allowed to?


We need professional sports to entertain and distract the masses from reality so to speak, but we don't need 19 year olds with salaries of over a million a year. At 19 a gladator prospect would be in "Gladiator School" being beaten the crap out of.  
What people tend to forget though is that in the Roman era of "Bread and Circus"  every other day was a public holiday, most people lived well below the poverty line and relied on state sponsored handouts of grain to feed themselves. The narrow streets of Rome were filled with people in cramped apartments, no jobs since most of the work were done by slaves for free and most of them surviving through some form of dodgy business.

We are not in that society anymore and quite frankly it makes me want to puke to know that in 2008 the National Cancer institute spent about $600 million on Breast cancer research, where the New York Yankee's alone spent about $210 million on their payroll. 
I mean how can anyone justify spending more money on sports than research into cures for diseases? How can anyone justify that a 24 year old who never finished high school makes more in a year than some of the best doctors in the world?
I mean if it was true gladiatorial combat, I'd think the wages were fair, since most gladiators didn't live past their 10th fight, and then you can understand having to take care of a family after you're dead. I've never seen Man-U look to the richboy seats waiting for the signal on whether or not they played well enough to live.

Quite frankly when I used to watch Football, I felt like some of the players did deserve to be punished for being shite.  Look at Gasgoine, he spent his career drunk of his ass and flying high on coke, with some women beating in between and sometimes during, yet he was never truly fired.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, I love a good free market economy, it's just that we haven't seen one yet. We will imprison someone for years if he commits an armed robbery, but if Goldman-Sachs swindles their clients out of billions they are never really convicted for it. I mean if some black ghetto dude robbed someone for 1 million it would be an outrage, when a huge investment bank manipulates the stock market, trick their clients into bad stocks,

To be continued soon.

Religion

A friend linked me this Eddie Izzard clip the other day and it started me thinking. Isn't religion a case of cake or death as well? Think about the Bible for instance, the vengeful wrathful God of the old testament, and his hippie of a son Jesus. Now I say hippie in that he promoted tolerance and love over clear threats of a horrible death like his "father", then there is the Holy spirit but I haven't figured out if he's a messenger/servant for the 2 others or just a weaker distinct personality.

Now before people jump me, I'm not sure if there is a God or not, I'm not sure if I'm a manifestation of a mind within its own consciousness and that everyone else is another manifestation. I don't have all the answers, to be quite honest I have more questions than answers. I'm not arrogant enough to pretend or delude myself into thinking the Bible is the literal word of God or that I have the mental capacity to "understand" a being of such magnitude.
You are aware that if Creation is a reality, then we are talking about a being so powerful and knowledgeable its beyond any human imagination right? We are talking of a being capable of creating something out of nothing, of creating a "biosphere" capable of sustaining life, renew itself, balance itself through what means needed in order to keep the closed system of "Earth" alive.
We are talking about a being that created countless sources of energy for us to tap, countless technologies for us to explore. A being created the human brain, far more advanced than any computer we can currently make.

Of course this being also put the "home" of 3 major religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism) in the same place and then put a large amount of oil beneath it. A being that created a sun that will eventually destroy us all, jealously, hatred, anger, fear, and every negative emotion that exists. So I guess even God has a case of "The Mondays"

Well back to the original intent of this rant. Currently major religion is not really a choice, either paradise or eternal torment, heaven or hell, for good days or for bad days, and its for eternity. I have no doubt in my mind after reading The Bible and Qur'an that God and Allah are both fully capable of this type of organized torture. So if you believe in your heart that there is a God by all means worship him, I would too just to be on the safe side. I'd rather be chilling in heaven with a tumbler of nice single malt and a cuban cigar, than spend eternity nailed to a wall in hell being tortured.

Would you like this piece of cake, or should I stab you in the jugular with this fork?

We are all evil, we are all good. What side we end up walking on is a result of so many things that listing them would be exhausting. We are all victims or beneficiaries of our nature, our surroundings, our dna and our own minds.
Some people are born with urges that makes them do evil acts, some are trained to be evil, some are so evil that they desperately fight to do good regardless of what it costs them. We have laws to protect, to deter, to punish, but our laws are tainted by the people who wrote them.

We allow murders in certain situations, self defense and war comes to mind first, we allow a whole host of evil acts in the name of protecting our communities way of life. Just because we no longer live in little tribes consisting of a few families, doesn't mean that we are not just larger versions of what was.

We have prison's to punish the guilty, yet what does prison do, what does locking criminals up with other criminals accomplish? How many prisoners come out of prison rehabilitated as valued members of society and how many end up right back in prison after a time?

One of the more interesting statements I've heard was that "Your normal soldier will not aim to kill an enemy unless ordered to do so by a superior officer, a sociopath will aim to kill." This means that sociopaths do make better soldiers in wartime purely because of their ability to kill other human beings without facing any psychological or physical backlash from their actions.

This made me take a look back at history, at men and women who are deemed great by history and take a look at their actions. Olaf Haraldson, also known as "Olaf the holy" after his sainthood, the patron saint of Norway was a massmurderer who made Norway a Christian country by force.

"Olaf, a rather stubborn and rash ruler, prone to rough treatment of his enemies, ironically became Norway's patron saint. His canonization was performed only a year after his death by the bishop of Nidaros. The cult of Olaf not only unified the country, it also fulfilled the conversion of the nation, something for which the king had fought so hard." From Wikipedia.

More to follow