Welcome to Mens Pulsus, I Give You Fair Warning That You Probably Don't Want To Be Here
                                                                                &
                                                   The Only Reason I Enter The Lottery

          Welcome to Mens Pulsus, latin for 'Mind Blow'.  I'm going to start off with a warning to any who aren't familiar with my brain and its workings that you almost certainly don't want to read or think about anything I have to say here.  If you have or want children, if you believe in the power of positive thinking, if you have faith in humanity... this is not the place for you.  Leave now.  Unless you actually want to undo your attachment to any of the above.
            I'm serious.  This is a blog for bitter, angry and outraged intelligent people who have no illusions about what's going on in the world.  If American Idol makes you want to shoot the television, if Christmas songs inspire daydreams of going on shooting sprees in malls, if  the concept of The War on Terror makes you slap your head hard enough to leave a bruise (It's insane, when you think about it, what halfway decent nation needs to actually declare that?!  Isn't that a fucking given?  Declaring a War on Terror is like making a huge announcement that 'We Are Not For Bad'), this is a good place for you to be.
           This blog will chronicle a variety of things, ranging from politics, socioeconomics, environmentalism, cultural observation and other worthy intellectual pursuits... to over analyzation of the most trivial, fanboy obsessive aspects of dorkdom regarding movies, video games and comic books.  Overall, it will primarily be things that piss me off, occasionally interspersed by events and people that actually make me think twice about the doomed lot of the human race.
           And that's something else to keep in mind before you check in here now and then:
           The human race is doomed.  Within my lifetime, I expect to witness if not the actual downfall of the species, then at least its beginnings.  This will be a central theme in almost everything I write here.  Occasionally, the human race surprises me and I ponder if maybe there is hope...
           Then I remember that more Americans know who Honey Boo Boo is than Nicola Tesla.
           I should also make it clear, that I am not well versed in the workings of the Interweb.  I imagine that this blog thing looks pretty piss poor to start, and in fact, I'm not even sure how to get back to this little digital corner of cyberspace, so bear with me if this thing isn't up to anyone's visual standards.  But what the hell, it's a free blog service supplied by Google, designed in mind with the ultimate goal of collating market data on myself and whoever reads this while shoving advertisements at us every chance they get.  Maybe if this thing takes off, it'll look better and seem less like an angry rant of a bitter loner and more like an intelligent and entertaining web periodical.
          Which brings me to my final points of information:  Why and when?  The why of this thing comes from the fact that I often comment on a variety of online sites, from facebook to funnyjunk, and quite often, those comments get an enormous amount of 'likes' or 'thumbs up' and spark whole new levels of debate and discourse.  So I figured that I might as well try striking out on my own, why the fuck not?  As to the when/how often I will post on this thing, I'm not really sure.  I have no plan vis a vis that regard, for now I'm just gonna do it when I feel like ranting...(anyone who knows me just rolled their eyes and thought '...so every fucking day, asshole?').
           So we'll see how this goes.  If you read all of this, thanks, and below is some actual food for thought that is an example of the sort of thing I'll be posting on a regular basis.
           Pax Vobiscum,
           Larken Tucker James Harpin Philbin.



                                                 The Only Reason I Enter The Lottery


         A long time ago, when I was a freshman in college a friend of mine described entering the lottery as 'paying the stupid tax', and that has always stuck with me.  It's a brilliant analogy, because believing that you will ever win the sort of money that 'winning the lottery' implies is incredibly stupid.
         It is in fact more likely for you to harness telepathic powers of levitation than it is for you to win millions and millions of dollars.  I'm serious.  Look it up.  According to statistics and the theorems of probability, you literally are more likely to make a small object hover in the air with your mental prowess than choose the winning numbers in a large stakes lottery.
        And yet... it happens.  It has to. Eventually, the numbers involved get so ridiculous that it becomes impossible for some lucky twit somewhere not to have the digits of those free falling balls selected at random on their chit.  (What is the deal with that word, by the way?  It sounds like some horrific parasite that reproduces in your body hair.  As in: 'Did you see that guys' fucking forearms, all those bumps?  He's got a fucking chit infestation, for sure.')
         In fact, I have a good friend who won the lottery (We'll call him Brian... shit.  That really is his name.  Sorry, Brian.  But it's not like anyone's reading this thing yet anyways) .  He won I believe, two (2) million dollars paid out over a fifteen year period or so.  After taxes it came to I think just over a million, and he's been enjoying payments of around $48,000 or so every few months for the past decade and a half.
         Brian will be the first to tell you it ruined his life.  He'll also be the first to tell you that he was idiot about it too.  In addition to his ambition partaking of a Chlorox cocktail, he was overly generous with his friends and women, spending most of the money on becoming one of the most dedicated Allman Brothers fans in existence.  He has followed them for years, spending gobs of money on backstage passes, travel expenses and partying.  His skills on the guitar are quite impressive, as is his guitar collection, but other than that, his winnings have afforded him little more than years and years of regret.
         Now, many will argue that Brian didn't win that much money, and by comparison to some of the mega jackpots spawned by inter-state drawings like Powerball, he won just enough to have a good time, that if he had won hundreds of millions of dollars he'd be all set no matter what he did with it.  Others would say that even a relatively modest regular cash inflow like that should have been used to start a successful business, and he's an idiot.  Brian would simply say he wished he never won it all.
        I offer a different outcome of winning a massive amount of money, and the only reason why I bought a Powerball ticket in today's huge drawing of three hundred plus million dollars:
        Give it all away.  All of it.  Do not spend a single cent on yourself.
         Help your friends and family.  Make sure the ones you care about are taken care of.  The rest?  Give it all away to a charity of your choice.
        Why?  Is it some altruistic sentiment that money is the root of all evil, and that it will only make you as unhappy as Brian often finds himself?  
        Of fucking course not.  This is reality, not a fucking Disney movie.  Suddenly having a shit ton of cash to do whatever you wanted to on this planet would be amazing.
        That mentality is also what's killing this amazing planet.
        You pretty much already can do whatever you want, at least within legal constraints.  You just have to put more effort into it than shelling out your dough for something so improbable that it might as well be impossible.  But you, and we as a culture also have to examine the fantasy of being rich, of having all that money, and what exactly is wrong with it.
       The stagnant economy that still bogs down America and the rest of the world is due to the greed of people who place all value in being rich.  A handful of men and women used the greed of the rest of the populace to make themselves even more rich.  And that's all that comes of this obsession 1st world nations have with wealth and spread to other socioeconomic spheres of our world.
       We tell our children that money isn't what's really important, then heap humongous pressure on them to excel in school or sports, not because we value intelligence or ability, but because we want them to be rich.  Parents say 'I just want my kids to have opportunity', and that's fucking bullshit.  You want your kid to be as successful as possible so you A) Look good to other people, B)Tell yourself that you raised them right, C)Don't have to worry about them being poor themselves and possibly living off you more than you'd like.  
       In every single aspect of life, 1st world nations and cultures subtly emphasis the importance of wealth while pretending they aren't.  That hypocrisy ends up as a psychological discordance that haunts and hounds people throughout their life.  It's why the rich always want more.  Because all of their wealth hasn't made them happy, so clearly they have to get more.  And anything that gets in the way, whether it's oppressing workers, devastating the environment or ripping off huge amounts of people, its all justifiable.
        The mentality that making money is what matters the most is what is killing this planet and the human race.
         When the lottery builds up to some ridiculous level, I do buy a ticket, I am guilty of feeding the machine.  But I tell you here and now, that I only do it in the hopes that I could give every last cent away and hopefully get the chance to go one some talk or news show and repeat what I've said above.
         And given what I said earlier about probability, and the likelihood of actually winning?  By the those same mathematics, I'm not the only one hoping to win for those same reasons.
          Pax Vobiscum,    
          LTJHP, out.