Finally, another long-awaited diatribe launched in all its rotten-garbage splendour at the trash heap labeled 'Modern Music'.

I've been 'advised' recently, by a person no less magnaminous than my own Mom, to not refer to mainstream music with words like 'crap'. Apparently it's a facet of people's lives that I have to respect, a choice which they make of their own accord and I have to uphold a positively tolerant demeanour with regards to their discretion. OK, I'll admit I'm a direct, opiniated person who in various moments tends to spill too much milk from the glass. However, I know I'm not overstepping any lines when I refer to most of the modern music as idioyncratic pointless bullshit. My opinion, my right to express it, and seriously, sod all the people who feel their choice has been duly undermined. These are the kinds of people who really don't give a hoot to what they're actually listening to, and will never understand what it means to be brainwashed by an industry into worshipping perverse self-deprecating negativity.

For that is exactly what most mainstream excuses are, totally lifeless, pointless bullcrap that can actually turn a previously happy person into a negative lump of pessimism. Gone are the days of innocent 'I-love-you-you-love-me' teeny-boppism, which really already held less logic than a broken Rubik cube. These days if it's not selling your body for sex, or shameless lusting for sex, it's the angry cigarette afterward, where people sing about how angry they are at the whole state of affairs. What is so shocking to me is how blatantly the singers and 'artists' can hide their negative lyrics beneath a facade of catchy tunes and shameless music videos, meaning most people will be attracted not so much by the lyrical side of the music, but to the tune that they can so readily hum or sing along to.

You see, most people in the world, are of the uncomplicated variety. They aren't prepared to challenge their mind with interpreting the 'subtle' overtones of the music they listen to. For the most part, they are content to mindlessly sing along to this music, without really ever giving any thought to just what the song stands for. It is this brainlessness of society that the trash-sellers aka 'artists' exploit so well. In fact, I really have to hand it to these singers, more specifically, the people who market them. They are the real social engineers, the psychologists of the world today. The sinful manipulation of the society, how they mould entire generations of people to accept the music they produce as somehow being acceptable.

I tell you, Hilary Duff is the best social engineer there is. Starting off with the innocent-enough kid's show, graduating to becoming a 'singer' via the route of making it big as an actress, her tunes are the typically catchy, stick-in-the-head variety. But just delve a little beneath the tinkly tune, and you find her songs are no different to any of the other fish-livers drifting around. Lyrics such as 'Let the rain fall down and wash away my tears....I'm coming clean'. For pants' sakes, how negative do you want to be? What is there to be so sad about? That's just one example. Look at all the songs Miss Duff has churned out and you will expose her as being nothing more than a childish, pointless whinebag who leaves nothing to artistic interpretation, shamelessly manipulating the 'music-lovers' of the world with some cute jingle which belies her front as a teen actress with a face most dirty old men would masturbate to, and that's all people will ever remember. No, I do not think there has been anyone out there who has carefully considered the lyrics of Hilary Duff. Nor have I even gone into the shameless sex-peddling of Britney and Holly Valance or the mind-numbing valueless dead algae that is rap and R&B.

R&B is even worse as a genre. Not only does it, like most pop, reduce people to mindless reasonless negative piles of brain-dead horse shit, it actually as a whole devalues the entire music industry and society. The very fact that these 'artists' [and when it comes to these shit-merchants I use the term really too liberally] can so shamelessly utilise sex and lust to sell their music is just the best proof that people never think about just what they're listening to. I once saw some 16-year old back in Malaysia [no doubt up there amongst the mainstream-worshipping capitals of the world] walking down the street with her earphones on singing out loud "Hey baby I want you to shake your ass, Oh yes I want to shake my ass" or some weird shit like that. I literally wanted to grab that numbskull by the throat, shake her a few times and bang her head against a rough wall whilst screaming "Do you know what the fuck you're singing to?!" It's people like that who piss me off, pointless sludge-for-brains who add no value or intellectual thought to the world and brain-rape-artists are all too eager to manipulate to their wealth-making advantage. To me, rap and R&B is nothing more than brain-blowing shit in 4-4 timing which does nothing for society but encourage children and young people to dress like skanks and invite rape which when it does happen these people will only wonder why. Uncomplicated, pointless music which really is too challenging for most people to try and figure out anyway.

It burns me up inside that people can actually become possessive about mainstream music. I've actually seen people get pissed off when they hear more intellectual people like myself [I am totally NOT ashamed to admit] question the music they listen to, as if it were a trait that was actually worth defending. Not for the first time was I talked down in the public for being some old-fashioned bourgeoisie who thought too much, while in the midst of launching another attack of vitriol against that retarded excuse for music, emo/ punk/whatever they choose to be on the day. Imagine that! I was accused of thinking too much! Does this say something then about the people who think too little? To me, music these days is for soft-minded, brainless, poor decision-makers who will never be able to commit to anything, think through a decision, make any vaguely intellectual insight or ponder any form of valid thought school, their minds fuzzed up by their thoughtless worshipping of mind-numbing brainwash material which carries no message and allows for no mind-building interpretation or artistic consideration.

To all those maintream-worshippers who are reading this, here's a challenge for you. Think of this the next time you see Nelly or Green Day collecting their 1,350th Grammy and hear them being referred to as 'artists'. Wait, I'm sorry, you can't. I win.

Interesting fact: Florent Sinama-Pongolle is now at Recreativo de Huelva, Spain. Cool huh?.........Guess not.

Nineteen today! Actually it was yesterday. But I am nineteen today. I will be nineteen tomorrow, and will be for the subsequent 362 days afterward.

Ever noticed how unremarkable the nineteenth birthday is? I mean, how many people actually remember their nineteenth birthday, unless of course it was marked by a really remarkable and anomalous incident, like a meteorite crashing through the roof and obliterating the stripper halfway through her routine? I'd guess not very many. Maybe it's been dulled by the altogether more riveting eighteenth birthday, or maybe the joy's clouded by the expectation of the twentieth. I don't know. But somehow I decided I wasn't going to allow this birthday to step out of the pattern. Somehow I contrived to wish for the most unexciting, mundane and unremarkable nineteenth birthday ever, and truth be told I came this close to actually getting it.

Too bad my housemates weren't going to allow it. Having contrived to sleep through two-thirds of the day, it didn't seem too difficult to have a plain ordinary day. I did get a couple of well-wishes from meaningful friends, but other than that little deviated form the normal. Come 8pm I actually thought I was going to pull it off. Who knew my housemates would pull together the most pleasant little cake-cutting-and-card combo? As it turned out, it wasn't bad at all. The cake was delicious, the card was humorous and the people were exactly who I wanted to be with come this special day, and none others. In short, this was the perfect birthday for me. Maybe I did sound like I was just a dark-hearted spiteful old killjoy. But you knew I was kidding didn't you?=)

Who was it that said love is a many- splendoured thing? Come on, I should know this one. I've been inclined to say it was William Shakespeare, but I guess it's instinctive to credit any catchy one-liner to the great gay wordy one.

Everyone has their own mushy little candy-floss idea of love [When I mean love, I don't mean the 'love your family and cherish God and all things and love your friends and Jesus loves you'; kind of love. I mean specifically the kind that happens between one person and another person in a purely romantic sense. In fact, sod it, substitute love for romance]. Some will dream of it, some more 'privileged' ones get to enact it in a broad act we term 'romance'. From the realist's point of view, romance is basically nature's way of getting our body of energy to court another body of energy to create another similarly-formed bundle of energy hopefully some way along the line. To most people, it's a thing to enjoy while it is there, to love and cherish the person dearest to their heart, and forever go around with this person by their side, till the day they wrinkle into lovable old people and end their days together as one.

This is, of course, true. If you happen to be living in the 1950s. These days the idea of romance is so blurred one cannot help but disparage it. To me, love romance is the most cynical, unrealistic, in-the-clouds form of human emotion as can be expressed today. I'm not saying this out of spite, I love and have loved before. The thing is with the advent of today's 'millenium culture', there is really very little to be said about the purity of loving romance, other than the fact that it just doesn't exist anymore. It's a purely non-existant thing and it's wishful thinking that any of us who don't exist in Amish-like sequential, disciplined and traditional seclusion could ever maintain it.

The thing is these days there are too many complications. Political correctness has a lot to explain for this. These days a guy can't just sweep a girl off her feet and start a relationship which can idealistically last forever. These days a guy must make 'considerations', emotional physical and mental considerations before he even thinks about going near another girl. A girl must think about 'treasuring her dignity', 'is he the right man', 'can he support me'. In many ways, I think a girl's considerations are a lot more valid. Now I'm all for the treasuring of dignity. Maintaining one's dignity [and let's not confuse it with pride, that's the thing that makes guys with big penises deliberately sit naked in the sauna] is what everybody should live for.

A guy these days, gets nervous around the thought of courtship, so they resort to all sorts of messages, some subliminal, some obvious. And these days, you have to use messages because both sides feel simultaneously insecure. These days a girl has to flirt to 'gauge her man'. A guy has to be a smooth talker. A girl must send all sorts of teasing signals to see how responsive the guy is. A guy must know how to shave and dress and be fashionably astute and always have a cool one-liner ready for all occassions whether it be to liven up the social function or placate the heartbroken female. And the main reason why we are all so insecure about the other person, I feel, is because of the proliferation, of sex.

Say what you will about sex, it's a pure act of ultimate love between a man and a woman, or bringing into consideration homosexuality, between the same gender. The fact is that sex these days is impure, overused, overrated and totally not what we all think it is. Sex these days is girls dressing up in a piece of cloth that leaves nothing to the imagination, gyrating shamelessly to music which more often than regularly only adds to the situation, in the hope some big hulking hunk of muscles will come along, rub his crotch all over her, and drag her off to some God-blessed bed somewhere where he will have his way with her, often repeating the process with assorted guys or assorted girls several times in a single night, every weekend of the month and every month of the year.

It cannot be denied, sex has cheapened, and this is as much the fault of the ideologies of the current generation as it is anything else. For guys, the idea is they just want a place to stick their dicks in. For girls, they want to be that place. I've overheard people boasting they got laid three or four times in a single day. While of course it is naive to think this hasn't actually been happening for a while, it's pretty obvious this advent of sexual 'liberation' has only turned the way it did over the last few years. The music these days for a large part preaches nothing else. Singers, male or female, have to gyrate and swirl their rear ends around and pose in revealing or 'hip' clothes with some weird face which looks half-starved, half-looking to be bashed in and frankly retarded on their album covers if they don't wish to flop on their record sales. Ads don't sell products without some skanky-looking woman [imagine why a young woman would endorse a 4x4 pick-up truck or a men's shaving cream and you get the idea of how pointless this is]. All this does nothing but contribute to the idea that sex is available, is everywhere, and everyone is willing to give it and take it. So while people go about the nightclubs and discos screwing around like jackrabbits, when the time comes for them to get serious about a relationship and drop the slutty shit, they go all insecure and go 'Aaah I need to preserve my dignity. I'd better make sure he/she's actually not half mental in the brain and full-mental in the genitalia'.

When you think about it, of course people are going to fail in relationships. Of course they're going to turn into debacles. Because, really, these days, everyone expects sex. It's that simple. Everyone is so half-crazed on the dope that is fornication few people think of little else underneath the 'nice-sensitive' facade. Because everybody's done nothing but screw around for the last ten years, or expect to screw around, when it comes to the time for people to get serious and stop mucking about, do you really think any person is going to stop? No wonder everybody's minds are twisted with the questions of 'Could I really expect better from this or that person?'. It's because we put ourselves in this situation that we've ended up mistrusting everyone else.

Even more paining, most people just don't give a fuck. Actually, wait, they do. In fact, they do little else. But seriously, so many people just don't care. Guys are content to find cheap holes to stick their wangs in, and girls are content providing. These people are content to drift along, getting laid weekend after weekend, providing no direction in their life whatsoever, and hoping that maybe, just maybe, someone or something might just drift by. This is the hallmark of what I call the 'jellyfish people', people who do nothing but drift along in any form of their life and are content to snare whatever suits them that passes by. These people provide no push or impetus to their lives, and are ruining it for the people who do. It's these types of people who have ruined love, have ruined life, and have put the world in a situation where it is for the most part, pointless, cynical, and without direction. Forgive me, all those out there who actually do love for love itself, but to my mind, there is no valid romance left in the world, there is only cynicism, pointlessness, and people looking to fuck. Bless us.

Lost 5-3 on the weekend, while we were 3-1 up at one stage. But that's not important right now.

It's not difficult to become a hero these days. Maybe you'd sing a crappy song that every dullard and pseudo-intellectual would find humorously endearing and profoundly self-connected to. Perhaps you'd support an outwardly noble cause while using it as a facade for shameless plaudit-grabbing and public self-endorsement. Maybe you just look good. No matter what, you'd always find somebody who'd idolise you and your image, hold you in as high esteem as is humanly possible, can see no wrong in anything you do, and excuse your shortcomings and mistakes as just the errors of another human being. Of course that's wrong. You have no shortcomings. You can do no wrong. To these people, you, are perfect. You are the God-incarnate.

It's funny in an unamusing manner how people never actually pause to think about the people they idolise. People never ask themselves questions like "What's really so great about what so-and-so did anyway?", or "Did they really do that out of the compassion of their own heart?". Caught up in the frenzy of showering these people with gold and plaudits, we tend to forget that ninety-nine percent of the time, these people have had, at most, only one or two moments of real greatness. The thing about today is that image is always the main issue. Everything is about what so-and-so did and how he or she did it, and hype-ing up those moments in a blitz of positive publicity stunt-pulling. In the greater scheme of a personal lifetime, those moments are really only just fleeting moments which may last a year or two, a single sporting season, in most cases even a few seconds.

Maybe it's an unescapable rule of nature, but mankind is obsessed with image. Try as we might, it is impossible to totally deviate from the reality that is today's accepted mainstream and the proponents of that world. Wherever you look, Kylie Minogue stares out at you from every corner. Most every guy either dresses like a rap star or a trashbag, and I'm sorry I'm even making a distinction. Let's not get into what shreds of cloth most girls drag their tepid corpses into. Never do we consider that the person we idolise is really 'just a singer', or 'really only an actor'. We forget that there's very little a rap singer actually contributes to society in his/her profession [and in fact does a lot to make it a whole lot worse]. Like it or not, Pirates of the Carribean is only just a movie, and try as we might we will never pull Johnny Depp out of the screen, and it doesn't really add very much to your life watching 99% of today's flicks anyway.

That's why to me, it's pointless and frankly stupid worshipping the largesse of today's heroes. To me, the trick to being a hero is not to have just some single discrete moment that means nothing practical by any term, but to be able to mark a cause which has a positive impact on the world. Not just an impact, but a legacy. And even more importantly, to constantly and unflinchingly uphold and support that legacy. In upholding this legacy, the person actually adds value to humanity and will actually contribute to making the world better. This to my mind, is a genuine person worthy of being someone's hero. And this is why Steve Irwin is my hero.

I know I have already eulogised Steve Irwin in my previous post, but as his memorial service was held today, I feel it is apt to add to my admiration of who was probably among the few people today we could genuinely call a human being. He lived and died upholding the cause he supported, and left behind a world poorer for the enthusiasm and passion with which he carried out his work. Many people dismiss his approach as petty showmanship, but to my mind, the Steve Irwin approach to nature conservation was probably the most important step undertaken by the world of nature conservation since the formation of national parks.

While certainly never encouraging everyone to perform the same hands-on daredevil stunts as he did, Steve Irwin advocated an even more important underlying message: that we are really so much closer to nature than we'd really ever consider, and as the technologically dominant species have the responsibility to ensure we do not run away with our large minds and wealth, and instead channel a fair proportion towards preserving the dignity of other living creatures. In essence, Steve Irwin was just another nature presenter. He made the animals the superstars. How cynical he might have been, with the realisation that the 'cool-radical' approach was the only way to get today's material-inclined society to pay any attention.

For better or worse, nature preservation has lost it's most valuable PR cornerstone, with few even daring to contemplate themselves magnaminous enough to inherit the mantle. The truth is it'll be impossible to do what Steve Irwin did in the same style as him. It was heartwarming to hear his daughter Bindi pledge to continue his legacy, but she will never be her father. No one in the rest of the world has the same charisma and willingness to work in the same manner as the great man. We can only hope naturalism finds a way on and up in this most depressing of circumstances, and realise that while it is important to mourn, we should never lose sight of the vision laid out by this brave crusader of conservation. Today we laid to rest Steve Irwin, one of the finest naturalists of our time. Long may his legacy live on, in the hearts and minds of equally dedicated individuals. It will be the only way we can give thanks. RIP Steve, you are a great hero.

I hail from a country whose biggest international icons are a suave crooner [no, not you Siti, but then again just how well known is P. Ramlee?], a spiky fruit that smells like 'a sewer with a dash of coal gas' [hail the narrative genius of David Attenborough], and the world's tallest Twin Structures That Are Really Suspiciously Phallic in Design. Oh, and Kitaro played here once. And Manchester United. But that's irrelevant.

Icons are what people build their impression of a country on, and we seem to take them forgranted. So it's hard for us to envisage the time when one of these icons disappear. But imagine Malaysia without its durians. Would the KL skyline be any less memorable without the Twin Towers? And if Big Ben, Buckingham Palace and Manchester United were to inexplicably disappear, would England even be worth talking about anymore?

Usually a loss of such national symbols would be just about impossible. Like it or not, durians will be here to stay forever. Barring a catastrophe, the sensitivities of which are too delicate to mention here, KL [is doomed to?] forever have its skyline dominated by the Petronas Towers. But such talk stems from the mind of a person whose senses have been dulled by the comfort of knowing something would always be there. Most of us can readily associate with this mentalit, so it always comes as a sharp shock when a symbol of pride, an item or person with which we all too readily use to define a place, disappears.

So it happened that Australia-my adopted home- last week lost forever one of its iconic persons, a man who to many defined the Australia they all understood to exist. Steve Irwin died in a manner which strangely befitted him, and with his passing Australia could be said to have lost its international face. Most would relate to Steve Irwin as an ambassador, a conservationist, a larrikin, and a national stereotype. Just as Paul Hogan did in the past, Steve Irwin set the standard by which most around the world measured all Australians, with the laid-back slang, the distinctive accent, his close relationship with the country's natural world and heaven-be-damned hands-on approach to the creatures he loved. Anyone of us who has watched the 'Crocodile Hunter' in action would probably automatically associate his screen-habits with all things Aussie. "Do they all say crikey? Do they all wear bush clothes and widebrim hats? Do they all jump on crocodiles?'' In this manner, Steve Irwin became a true national stereotype of Australia, one which we would poke fun at in pubs, and shamelessly mimic in impromptu comedic moments, and we realise that no matter how anyone tries, no one could ever get it just right.

The fame came to Steve Irwin, and his selflessness and dedication to his line of work meant he knew exactly how to use it. His iconic nature was, to him, the best possible source of feed for his natural passion for wildlife and his flaming desire to protect it. Steve Irwin was a humanist, that rare type of person who actually saw the pride and innate dignity of every living animal, and more importantly, respected the right of that creature to preserve its dignity and its existence. To him, animals striking in self-defense were only reacting in a manner which befitted their nature, and an indication that we, as always, were the antagonists and violators. I imagine if he could give his view on his death, he'd probably say "Fair enough". In a way, someone could say Steve was just about asking for it, and if the dead could offer retrospect, he would probably agree with that view. It was out of this respect for nature and his want to preserve the dignity of every creature that Steve Irwin channelled his fame into increasing worldwide awareness for wildlife. I watched him in an interview in which he said "I love money. I can't get enough money. And I'm going to use it to buy land for national preserves." To his mind, material goods: a big house, a flashy car, were all unnecessary expenditures. Whilst nearly all of us accumulate our wealth out of our desire to obtain expensive luxuries, only a select few do it almost purely for the sake of helping others, and Steve Irwin was one of these people.

There was always something sadistic and morbidly derisive inherent in all of us that make us almost wish we'd see Steve Irwin getting owned by some dangerous animal every time we see him. I guess it was just too easy to take his existence forgranted. To me, this was our form of an impersonal, lackadaisical, respectless and violatory relationship we had with a person we never knew. This is also my regret. We can never bring Steve Irwin back, but it is probably the greatest show of respect we can afford the man by wanting to, or at the least, walk the path he demarcated. Steve Irwin, R.I.P. We will never forget.

I hereby pledge to stop beginning all my posts with 'I'. It's just self-centred.

Now on to more important things. Long have I pined for something I could love. Ever since I left Malaysia, I had long been searching for something which I could devote special attention to, and make feel cherished. Not that it mattered too much in fair judgement, but in hindsight I had been trying to regain some of the little sites of comfort I had taken forgranted before I left for Australia.

The apartment I lived in, the dumb cane on the window sill, even -shudder- a couple of the fairer sex, were all the subject of my heartfelt devotion, but I always failed to find a responsive subject. The room always ended up dirty again. The plant died. Young love always dealt its Card of Death. I ended the year cynical, worn and foully determined to be unreceptive to all forms of given affection. [Childish, in a way. But we are all children...]

The only remedy for such lovelessness is of course, to get something living that actively responds to affection. To most people not of the wholly horticulturally-inclined variety, that would equate to getting a pet. I didn't risk the rent agreements in my old apartment, which was college-run student accommodation. My current house, also rented, forbade pets. Or did it? A quick check with the rent agency revealed the 'No pets' rule applied only to, by most standards, cats and dogs. So I was safe with smaller pets! I had always been a master of maintaining animals at home, now what could I find that would sufficiently sate my lust for affection-giving? It had to be small, it had to be convenient, and it had to be cheap. Plus I had to like it, so no giant West Indian centipedes.

Finally, after much soul-searching [not in the 'look within my heart and conscience' variety, the 'ask-my-vast-and-imperious-general-knowledge' kind] I finally found my answer in a small, heart-wrenchingly adorable [almost], four-dollar package of furball: the common white rat. Now I have a good-looking creature of creation which I can devote time, love and affection to, and for now I am happy. Who needs a girlfriend anyway? ;D

Having checked the previous posts I found that the squad picture of The Offsiders I posted on the second last article failed to appear. I am reattaching it here.


Top row [left to right]: Myself, Reet [India], Teekay(Alex) [Zimbabwe], Lee [China], Firdaus [Singapore], Hide [Japan].
Bottom row: Star Man aka Gabriel [Mexico], Mirko [Peru], Azam [Malaysia], Alan [Peru]

*Mirko and Alan are not officially members of the Offsiders team, but were invited on the day to add depth to the squad in the absence of other squad members.

Other members of the squad: Frankie and Ishmael [Argentina], Tigre [Mexico], Carlos [Colombia], Fahad [Kuwait]


Left to right: Ishmael, Fahad [front], Hide, Frankie, Tigre

I've noticed that all I've been writing about recently is football, so I think for the better of my viewers [are there even any to begin with???] I should start writing about something else.

Have you ever felt joy? Joy so great you couldn't find a word to express it? Well that's just it, there isn't a word to express it. So, like the shortcut loving convenience-assuming beings that we are, fall back on words which describe the infinite: limitless, boundless, and my personal favourite, undescribable. Of course it would be undescribable, we are after all, blinkered by our own limitations as a single species, unable to see or describe what we wish to from the perspective of another species, or even another being.

The reason why I brought that little issue up, was to address something which has strongly compelled me to pen this essay [at the expense of a thousand-word report due in approximately four waking hours]. There exists now, dear readers, a new theory, one which threatens to hurl our scientific understanding back two hundred years and once again expose the glaringly soft underbelly that is our sceintific deficiency. It is the theory of intelligent design, a concept which lamely attempts to bridge the disparity between the divided concepts of evolutionary theory and creationism. The basic idea of intelligent design twins the theories of creationism [God went click and everything plopped out of nowhere] and evolution [in the beginning there was nothing, which exploded. And some of everything became something else] by basically saying life has evolved, although it seems to have followed some predetermined intelligent pathway.

To my mind, this theory holds as much water as a south Queensland dam with broken sluice gates. The creationism vs evolution debate has always been viewed as a clash between faith and reasoning. There is very little correlation between the two, and while a whole lot of good reasoning can lead to a measure of good faith, it is more of an issue of blind insanity when reasoning can spring forth from baseless faith. In all honesty the theory of intelligent design is nothing more than a blatant demonstration of Man's arrogance, such as it is that we have forgotten what it was like to not know something, that there are boundaries to our understanding which will forever conceal sections of 'knowledge' from our gaze.

In a way, gaining knowledge can be akin to looking down from a very high hill to gauge the landscape. A lot of details may be instantly provided. Additional information may be surrendered to the observer under closer scrutiny. However there are inevitable gaps in the knowledge we can obtain, and try as we might, no amount of observation could ever deliver the necessary information in order for us to see the full picture. One cannot, for instance, see the mushrooms growing near a distant haystack. Dark woodland may conceal a rider on his horse. Not only that, what we see may not actually be what it really is. In this analogy a road may actually be a plough line in a field. As much as we would like to, there is no way we could ever see what is hidden unless we change our perspective. In effect this would amount to becoming a whole different being, or for the sake of being analogous, stand on a different hill which affords a different view, and in the real world of humanity simply moving into a different position is impossible.

This is why I think the theory of intelligent design blows. We as humans from our human perspective perceive everything according to our standards and our quantified knowledge. We can only adjudicate a situation as best as we can according to the information our understanding and interpretation can provide us. We couldn't really say what we see is right, or if it even exists in the manner we interpret it to. Proponents of the intelligent design theory interpret evolution as following pathways. Not only that, they see a 'form of intelligence' guiding that pathway. I mean look, let's face it, all we have to support this theory is what we perceive as a pathway, and some intelligent being, God help him, laying it down. Let me make one thing clear, the human mind only sees pathways where its mind interprets it to be so. We only think there is a 'path' because in our minds, we can only see from the human perspective. The human mind likes to see patterns, rhythm and order. We like to think everything is joined, repetitive, and in sync. Thus in our deluded state of comfort, embedded safely in the trenches, we fail to see what is beyond the horizon, and thus distance ourselves from the truth. To my mind, all incidences are discrete, and while one thing may lead to another [the central dogma of energy transfer being about the only thing we've gotten totally right in the last 250 years], it is naive to think that there are actual conscious links between evolutionary forebears and proteges.

Furthermore, we like to feel that there is someone, or something, watching over us, who made us in His image and will love us and care for us and save us from all evil. A sort of cushy comfort figure, whom we interpret from our standards, basing our idea of what we think our loving Father who art in Heaven on what we would like to see. And this isn't just some lame George Carlin rip-off rant, I truly feel that when it comes to God, mankind has truly lost the plot. The conceitedness of the human race, to think itself so superior as to have been the race created by the supposed ruler of the Universe! The very idea of God in itself shows the glaring shortcomings of humanity, and we really are a long way away from the beings we say we are. If you're from a theistic religion, are currently reading this and feeling more than a little violated inside, just ponder to ask yourself the following questions. What is it about us that we need to know we have someone to take care of everything? Can we really only feel better knowing that the great invisible man in the sky loves us? How insecure a race of species do we have to be?

As far as I'm concerned, the concept of intelligent design is nothing more than a small part of a greater psychological agenda, meant to be utilised by the struggling mega-powers of nation and religion to re-curry favour with the national public. It is a selfish concept in which beneath its diabetic sugar-coating evolution is a real oversight and does nothing more than to try and give face to an outfit trying too hard to win back its support from a growing number of people who now only know too well. Already there is growing support for an ideology which at first glance appears to benevolently spread its arms to generously encompass both schools of thought, yet is nothing more than a glazed-over, absurdly politically correct guise of creationism, itself a threadbare product of human arrogance and false pride. To a stubborn many, faith in the lordly father figure will always hold precedence over scientific reasoning, which has done so much more to prove itself with tangible evidence, which though admittedly succumbs to the impurity of human interpretation still seems so much more logical than a conveniently spoonfed and packaged philosophy which in no way illuminates the mind to no other cause but blind worship. It is this writer's hope eventually the triumph of reason will prevail.