Faith Comes "Bundled" in the Human Consciousness Operating System

I thought this was an amusing read (from various viral emails, recently posted to Facebook):

Professor : You are a Christian, aren’t you, son ?
Student : Yes, sir.
Professor: So, you believe in GOD ?
Student : Absolutely, sir.
Professor : Is GOD good ?
Student : Sure.
Professor: Is GOD all powerful ?
Student : Yes.
Professor: My brother died of cancer even though he prayed to GOD to heal him. Most of us would attempt to help others who are ill. But GOD didn’t. How is this GOD good then? Hmm?
(Student was silent.)
Professor: You can’t answer, can you ? Let’s start again, young fella. Is GOD good?
Student : Yes.
Professor: Is satan good ?
Student : No.
Professor: Where does satan come from ?
Student : From … GOD …
Professor: That’s right. Tell me son, is there evil in this world?
Student : Yes.
Professor: Evil is everywhere, isn’t it ? And GOD did make everything. Correct?
Student : Yes.
Professor: So who created evil ?
(Student did not answer.)
Professor: Is there sickness? Immorality? Hatred? Ugliness? All these terrible things exist in the world, don’t they?
Student : Yes, sir.
Professor: So, who created them ?
(Student had no answer.)
Professor: Science says you have 5 Senses you use to identify and observe the world around you. Tell me, son, have you ever seen GOD?
Student : No, sir.
Professor: Tell us if you have ever heard your GOD?
Student : No , sir.
Professor: Have you ever felt your GOD, tasted your GOD, smelt your GOD? Have you ever had any sensory perception of GOD for that matter?
Student : No, sir. I’m afraid I haven’t.
Professor: Yet you still believe in Him?
Student : Yes.
Professor : According to Empirical, Testable, Demonstrable Protocol, Science says your GOD doesn’t exist. What do you say to that, son?
Student : Nothing. I only have my faith.
Professor: Yes, faith. And that is the problem Science has.
Student : Professor, is there such a thing as heat?
Professor: Yes.
Student : And is there such a thing as cold?
Professor: Yes.
Student : No, sir. There isn’t.
(The lecture theater became very quiet with this turn of events.)
Student : Sir, you can have lots of heat, even more heat, superheat, mega heat, white heat, a little heat or no heat. But we don’t have anything called cold. We can hit 458 degrees below zero which is no heat, but we can’t go any further after that. There is no such thing as cold. Cold is only a word we use to describe the absence of heat. We cannot measure cold. Heat is energy. Cold is not the opposite of heat, sir, just the absence of it.
(There was pin-drop silence in the lecture theater.)
Student : What about darkness, Professor? Is there such a thing as darkness?
Professor: Yes. What is night if there isn’t darkness?
Student : You’re wrong again, sir. Darkness is the absence of something. You can have low light, normal light, bright light, flashing light. But if you have no light constantly, you have nothing and its called darkness, isn’t it? In reality, darkness isn’t. If it is, well you would be able to make darkness darker, wouldn’t you?
Professor: So what is the point you are making, young man ?
Student : Sir, my point is your philosophical premise is flawed.
Professor: Flawed ? Can you explain how?
Student : Sir, you are working on the premise of duality. You argue there is life and then there is death, a good GOD and a bad GOD. You are viewing the concept of GOD as something finite, something we can measure. Sir, Science can’t even explain a thought. It uses electricity and magnetism, but has never seen, much less fully understood either one. To view death as the opposite of life is to be ignorant of the fact that death cannot exist as a substantive thing.
Death is not the opposite of life: just the absence of it. Now tell me, Professor, do you teach your students that they evolved from a monkey?
Professor: If you are referring to the natural evolutionary process, yes, of course, I do.
Student : Have you ever observed evolution with your own eyes, sir?
(The Professor shook his head with a smile, beginning to realize where the argument was going.)
Student : Since no one has ever observed the process of evolution at work and cannot even prove that this process is an on-going endeavor. Are you not teaching your opinion, sir? Are you not a scientist but a preacher?
(The class was in uproar.)
Student : Is there anyone in the class who has ever seen the Professor’s brain?
(The class broke out into laughter. )
Student : Is there anyone here who has ever heard the Professor’s brain, felt it, touched or smelt it? No one appears to have done so. So, according to the established Rules of Empirical, Stable, Demonstrable Protocol, Science says that you have no brain, sir. With all due respect, sir, how do we then trust your lectures, sir?
(The room was silent. The Professor stared at the student, his face unfathomable.)
Professor: I guess you’ll have to take them on faith, son.
Student : That is it sir … Exactly ! The link between man & GOD is FAITH. That is all that keeps things alive and moving. 

P.S.  I believe you have enjoyed the conversation. And if so, you’ll probably want your friends / colleagues to enjoy the same, won’t you?
Forward this to increase their knowledge … or FAITH.
By the way, that student was EINSTEIN.

This old parable is well thought out, but suffers from a desperate need to be reinforced by sticking Einstein's name in at the end. If the argument for blind faith was sufficiently strong in its own right it would not need the entirely false 'stamp of approval' from a well-recognized 'smart science guy'! Ha! (LOL)  To be fair, if it inspires 'faith' in you, then you should also read: http://www.snopes.com/religion/einstein.asp

What science has recently uncovered is that our big brains, of which human consciousness is a unique product, have a couple of built-in 'instincts' that cause religion to be one of our biggest problems. First is an innate tendency to see meaning in things that are merely coincidental, mixed with a brain big enough to allow us to question why things are the way they are (animals don't want to understand why the sun comes up in the east). We have an innate need to invoke our huge capacity for imagination to answer what the nature of human consciousness is, and the latter has proven to be largely unanswerable -- hence religion and 'God' (or 'Gods' a while back).

The second most profound human challange is our instinct to see ourselves as special, including our immediate gene pool, and those who are not just like us as 'other' and therefore people to fear and fight with to protect our gene pool. Our big brains allow us to be both an intensely social species and to invent 'uniqueness' in our societies, hence our tribes' culture is 'special' to our group and other tribes' cultures are 'other' and must be fought. They can only be part of our tribe if they accept our stories, otherwise we have to kill them.

So the danger in taking 'strength' from this parable is that it instinctively reassures us at a very fundamental level that it is OK to 'take things on faith'. So what? Well if we accept that this is OK, that it's OK to stick rigidly to our cherished beliefs in the stories our tribe has invented to explain the inexplicable and reject or ignore evidence that stories are all that our belief system is based upon, then it's OK for us to fear and be angry with others for having a different 'faith' because faith is inviolate and immutable. 

What I'm saying is that if we follow this argument, that our tribe's stories cannot be interpreted merely as guidelines for acceptable social behaviour, but that they must be treated as equal to laws of nature; if faith can't be simply something that we feel individually with various degrees of passion, but rather something we must impose it upon each other, test for adherence and punish those who don't have sufficient faith (in our opinion), then we set up a society in which those who don't share our specific set of stories be treated as outsiders and therefore enemies.  Enemies, by definition, are to be feared, not fraternized with.  Enemies ("other than our tribe") are to be looked down upon, segregated, and either enslaved, or killed off.  Not cool, and not what any one of the major religions actually stand for (the notion of Jihad in the Quran is a gross misinterpretation used by the power hungry to put themselves in a position of power).

What IS cool, is to recognize the core of this debate, that some people have a desperate, inexplicable NEED to believe in a higher power, while others are quite comfortable with not doing so. Further, that all humans share this 'spectrum' of need to believe, regardless of what tribe they were born into, so we're all the same, regardless of 'faith', and we're all the same in our instinct to see others as 'the enemy'.

Once each of us understands this, the intensity with which we argue between conservative and liberal, between one faith and another, between the borders of one area and another (arbitrary 'lines in the sand' based upon language that define 'nationality'), becomes just something to be curious about, to smile about, to marvel at its absurdity. Once we 'get' that it's all just about our selfish, ego-driven need to see each of ourselves as 'special', to see 'our territory' as inviolate, we can stop getting so angry at 'others' that we bury an axe in their craniums for not being just like us.

So go ahead and have 'faith', just don't let your innate tendency to feel 'special' (a member of the chosen tribe) and 'right' drive you to see 'others' as wrong, whether they're athiests or faithful. Their beliefs just make them feel good, so live and let live and don't bring religion into politics and law-making. By definition, government is what is good for ALL the people, and if there's more than one tribe under any given government, then there is absolutely no role for religion or faith in governance.

Modern Day Slavery in Your Neighbourhood

Having lived in Lebanon and witnessed the abuse first hand, and with the recent coverage that Mauritania's slave-class is getting, I thought it might be worthwhile (in the name of human decency) to point out that it really isn't all that difficult to have a slave in ANY country of the world, and though they're carefully hidden, most countries have a lot of them! No, I'm not being a 'bleeding heart liberal' nattering on about the plight of the developed world's poor, I'm talking about actual, real slaves.

If a weirdo in Germany could keep his own daughter as a sex slave for 20 years, or a hobo could enslave Elisabeth Smart, or Jaycee Lee Dugard could be held captive in plain sight for 18 years, then picking up a non-native speaking girl coming in through an international airport on a tourist visa, taking away her passport and keeping her locked up inside a large house or condo isn't all that tough.  And if you were brought up in a culture in which your family always had a maid who was a slave, you'd be predisposed to seeing the practice as perfectly normal.  For many, many cultures, it is.  And when these people emigrate, looking for a better life in the Developed World, the one thing they really miss, as one would, is a slave!  (And think about this fact: Lebanon truly is THE most progressive-thinking country in the Middle East.)

So here's a 'heads up': there's a secret down your street. Some neighbours of yours, who still harbour a fondness for the 'traditions' of the country they emigrated from, have a maid from another country where the citizens are darker skinned who works very hard for them. The secret is she never goes out, doesn't get paid (or is 'paid' only via pitifully small cheques sent directly to her family back home to allay suspicion), she 'entertains' the family's sons and his friends, and they won't give her back her passport. Really.

Modern day slavery is alive and well in every "Western Country" in neighbourhoods just like yours. It's happening TODAY in your city, no matter where you live. Wake up and smell the reality, then take note of that briefly glimpsed, thin shadow of a 'maid' who 'works' down the street and call the authorities (but only if they're 'bribe-proof"!).

VIDEO: Free Enterprise Was Invented in the 1800's - Maybe It's About Time for a Change?

This 3 min. edit of the 6th episode ("Hole in the Ground") of James Burke's illuminating 1985 TV series called "The Day the Universe Changed" begins with him talking about Agricultural Revolution in the 1700's, which paved the way for the Industrial Revolution in the 1800's.  Well worth the watch:

And it does indeed 'beg the question'!

Here's a clip from another episode, this one points the way forward to the approaching irrelevance of national identities and boundaries in the coming century: "The Day The Human Universe Changed".

Fats Don't Make Us Fat, Carbs Do!

From Fast Company (link).  This is truly, mindbogglingly revolutionary!  Really.  What it means is that the 'Olympic Ski Team Diet,' first popularized back in the 70's, was key to not just gradually becoming a more healthy eater, but also to dropping weight without exercise:

Eat as much meat as you want (yes, even fried chicken!), plus vegetables slathered in butter, milk and cheese, but minimize your intake of carbs like pasta, breads and cereal; starch like rice, flour, potatoes and corn; and sugar. 

In other words, fried foods/fat is not the problem, the breaded/flour coatings and potatoes are!  Cut down on the fries and KFC-style coatings and eat as much spicy roast or deep-fried chicken as you want.  

To enlarge click once on each of the 3 images to load, then again to zoom in:

Key to what scientists have learned since the 70's is DO NOT completely cut out carbs, starch and sugar as your body 'thinks' it is being starved of those 'easy-to-digest' calories and starts 'hoarding' what little energy it's getting from these sources, just cut back to a minimal portion of these substances. 

Research into how the human body functions has also proven that 'diets' aren't the way to lose weight permanently, changing eating habits are the way to do it.  What the high protein, fat and fibre, low empty-calorie program offers, however, is the chance to prove to yourself, by sticking to it stringently for just a couple of weeks, that the weight can actually come off without exercise and while eating to satiation at every mealtime!  Trying a 2 week program will prove that sticking to this new selection of proportions will work over the long run.

Including exercise in any obese person's weight loss regimen is completely self-defeating, in my view. 

Doing so is the equivalent of strapping one of those big water-cooler jugs filled to the brim onto an athletic person's back (or belly) and then getting them to do their normal work-out routine.  They'd quit after 2 minutes because it's just too strenuous.  In my opinion, anyone who is obese (not just a bit over-weight) should invest all their energy into changing their eating habits with high protein, high fat and low empty-calories, NOT burning calories.

More recent research has proven that any moderate exercise OVER 30 minutes per day (even as low as 3 x 10 minute walks around the block or shopping mall) does not improve wellness or longevity, but anything LESS than 30 minutes leads to illness and early death (link).

On a related note, if your workouts take up too much of your time, or hurt too much, you won't keep them up!  Here are my thoughts on how to keep motivated: "How to Workout for the Rest of Your LONGER Life! (link)"

If you liked this, you might like my post about how the 'free economy' is gradually killing everyone with obesity (link).

Santorum Beats Romney! (Due to the Votes of a Minority of White Senior Citizens...)

One of the biggest "universal human truths" about democracy, but especially about conservative voters, that no one likes to talk about is the fact that they skew older, whiter and totally averse to change.  When no one else bothers to go to the effort of voting, these old fart members of the 99% determine the winners among the 1%.

What the world is seeing when American states wherein the outcome of a internal Republican party contest means little in the bigger scheme of things, like the Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado wins for Rick Santorum over Mitt Romney, is what happens when democracy is reduced to its lowest common denominator.  When there's really no reason to turn out, the only people who do are the retired people who don't have much to do with their lives, but are REALLY fired up about returning things back to the way they were 50 years ago. 

Average Tea Party Supporters: "Don't change ANYTHING!!!"

Recent brain studies have revealed that men as they age past 65 suffer changes in their frontal lobes that begin to diminish their ability to be objective in their thinking.  They begin to see things in absolutes, black and white instead of shades of grey.  We all see this in older fathers who stop speaking to their kids for not sticking to the old-fashioned, conservative values that they have gradually become polarized about.  These are the guys who are bothering to get out to the voting stations in Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado and who also badger their wives non-stop with their gradually more rigid conservative diatribe.

Read: "Why the Future Does NOT Belong to Narrow-Minded Old Farts"

(Scientists at the University of Iowa has proposed that some older adults experience disproportionate changes in certain areas of the anterior portion of the frontal lobes. 25-33% exhibit a preference for choices that lead to high immediate reward but greater long-term punishment, which both makes them more vulnerable to scams, but also to giving in to the reward of feeling self-righteous while accepting the long-term loss of intimacy with family and friends.  "I don't care if they never speak to me again!  I'm gonna say what has to be said!")

Kind of makes you think twice about taking the results too seriously, yet this is what we continually see happen in these political 'races', the continual swing back and forth between conservative and liberal party dominance.  It's not JUST what the media makes it out to be, a natural, inevitable shift in the general public's desire to maintain a 'centrist' balance in any country's governance, it IS what happens when younger, more open-minded voters get motivated to vote, then lose interest as their needs get met by the politicians they put in power last time around.

This is not simply an interesting side-note to the way democracy tips based upon human nature, especially in the US, it is a very big driver in what makes democracy so flawed in America.  What I mean is that it opens up the machinations of government to blatant manipulation by the politicians.

Think about it.  George W. Bush got into power because the average American's impression was that Bill Clinton (the quintessential politico who made ALL his decisions based upon populist poll results) was kind of a 'lame duck' (not quite true looking back at his record, but the Monica Lewinsky affair didn't help to dilute this impression) and the democratic contenders to Bush were even lamer.  "W." even won a second term on the basis of his brother, the Governor, handling the vote count in Florida and there was really no outcry about this flagrant slap in the face of democracy in America.  Incredible!

In the absence of really strong contenders and big, contentious issues, average Americans lose interest and the voting power swings to the old farts, who vote the way they always do, regardless of the GOP contender's actual platform -- they vote for things to go back to the way they used to be, and Santorum is ALL about turning back the clock!  The Republicans regain control, and in contests like those in Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado the more conservative guy wins! (Whether or not he'll make it further is up for grabs, but the Democrats would prefer a more extreme candidate to run against Obama as he'll be sure to lose in the climate of 2012.)

So what?  Well the 'what' is that the Conservatives (I'm employing the capital "C" intentionally) in ANY country, but especially flagrantly in America, blatantly and baldly manipulate this base of voters.  They pander to them during the race, then smugly work behind the scenes to do whatever benefits them and their family and friends among the 1% most: usually by finding ways to take the US into armed conflicts and increase the value of their stock holdings in the global military-industrial complex.  That's not me being some bleeding heart liberal, it's just a statement of fact.  (The jockeying for position on rationale to get involved in Syria and Iran among the American military cheerleaders is already heating up -- and the wealthiest Democrats have lots of stock, plus voters working in 'the complex' too!)

So-called "Conservative" politicians in every country in the world leverage human nature to take power by inflaming the natural human instincts of the most easily manipulated voters: the ones who get out to vote most often and reliably and are most upset by the notion of change.  As soon as the issues that motivate the younger, more liberally-minded citizens to vote become muddied or less volatile, the Conservative politicians go back to beating the drum about how they are going to 'restore grass root values', and the old farts just show up and vote the way they always do.  What is really happening in the background, however, is that younger voters simply aren't showing up at the polling stations.

How to manipulate older voters by leveraging human nature:

1. Nationalism - Humans have an inherent need to identify themselves by 'tribe', and this phenomenon is 'transferable' - intensely emotional feelings of loyalty can be shifted from one's original nationality to a new one due to the new emotional ties that are laid down by living in a newly adopted country.  People will literally die for their country, so beating the drum about "real Americans" fires off a bunch of unconscious neural connections (i.e. "Anyone who doesn't agree with me supports enemies of America.").
2. Us vs. 'Them' - Sadly we're pre-programmed to also identify with people who are most like us.  Humans feel discomfort and even fear towards those who look (morphology) or act (culturally) differently.  These instincts can be ameliorated through proximity (integration) and familiarity/friendship (getting to know others over time), education and exposure (TV shows), but it remains deeply rooted in our psyches.  If we've had little exposure to 'others', we'll seek out ways to justify these feelings of mistrust and 'otherness', like not believing someone's birth certificate is real.  
3. I am a Chosen One! - Like 'us vs. them' and nationalism', we have built-in brain defences that reassure us whatever we do or think is better than the rest, so when a politician seems to be less pious than we think he should be, or of another 'belief team' than ours, we get a bit uncomfortable with him representing our team. 
4. "Imagine If!" - We're OK with supporting a royal family through our taxes, or movie stars through ticket sales, or Paris Hilton and the Kardashian's through gossip magazine and perfume purchases.  It costs us so little and gives us the entertainment of "Imagine if that was me!"  We can't all rise to those heights, but we can share the spotlight and 'high life' vicariously.  If some rich politician wants to go to all the effort and expense of representing us, more power to him, but at least he's OUR guy!  (And we'll so enjoy seeing him fall from grace if he slips up and we change our allegiances!)  So when he assures us he's 'going to bat' for us, we give him our votes and sit back and enjoy the spectacle.

Following 8 years of George W.'s warmongering and pocket-lining (stocks in Haliburton, oil firms and the arms manufacturers), with a truly different, dynamic, more youthful and liberal champion to rally behind, the fickle and apathetic younger voters got motivated to show up.  Barack Obama came to power.  Sadly he didn't do what he said he was going to do -- instead his ego got involved and told him he was sufficiently smart and all-powerful to be able to play the game in Washington by their rules.  NOT!  He could have continued to embrace 'change' and leverage a highly motivated base of younger Americans to help, but instead he waded into the old fart 1% power broker fray and got stalled.  Sad, really.

If I may be so bold, however, given all the rhetoric and attention that the 'Occupy Movement' has generated (and, to be fair, even that of the "Tea Partiers" -- note I don't give them the credibility of being a political 'party'), I do not think that the Republicans have a hope in toppling Obama for a second term.  They are trapped in a conservative hyperbole prison of their own making, pandering to the old farts in the 99% while using the cash of the 1% to do the pandering.

There's still sufficient "hopey-changey" momentum out there to keep the Democrats in power for another 4 years so average Americans can see what they might be able to do with a practical stretch in power (and the GOP is still far too polarized to look like a reasonable alternative).  It will require a new strategy for the 'second half', however, on the part of the President since trying to prove he could do the impossible and 'hope to make change' from the inside out within Washington's 1% power brokers was a fool's errand.

Trying to Impress a Girl, Concordia Captain Kills 32 People at a Cost of Billions of Dollars

32 lives lost, a ship scrapped and enormous damage to the industry.  Whoops!  The shocking truth is  unbelievable, even as more facts have surfaced since my first posting this.

PR photo in a fake Capt. hat.

You heard it here first, the real story of what really happened aboard that led up to the disaster, actually and factually.  The single largest human disaster ever caused by one married man's desire for the company of a younger woman.

Nothing will change the facts.  At about 9:30 pm, Captain Francesco Schettino came up from dinner with a young woman and, despite having left his eyeglasses in his private cabin, ordered the ship to head closer to shore at high speed (16 knots) for a "sail by salute" while asking another officer to read the charts and radar for him.  He admits he was "navigating by sight", though he doesn't see the apparent irony that he was doing this without his prescription eyeglasses.  At 9:44 they all felt the impact and heard the alarms that the ship had run over a well-marked shoal of rocks and began the desperate task of trying to minimize the upcoming disaster.

What is clear from the girls' Feb. 27, 2012 interview with The Mail is that her account has been severely 'sanitized' by a lawyer who carefully analyzed all the hard evidence anyone had against her (her bags were found in the Captain's quarters, a passenger has a photo of what looks like Dominica time stamped at 8:30 pm, she was on the bridge from just before the collision till the abandon ship was declared).  She agreed to this single interview just days before the official inquiry began, coincidentally.

Dominica, 25, and the Captain, 52, a week prior to the sinking.

With the facts as we now know them, the cause of the Costa Concordia ($569 mn US to build) is fairly clear.  As of Mar. 6, 2012, 25 bodies have been found,  7 are still missing and there's a piece of rock the size of a truck buried in the hull with a 30 meter-long breach in the hull behind it.  Add in all the new holes blown/cut through the hull and it's unlikely that the ship can be put back into service.

This is what happened: during the last week of the previous cruise a 25 year old Moldavian woman, Dominica Cemortan, who had worked on a sister ship, the Magica, as a translator for 3 weeks, got a request to cover another translator's absence on the Concordia.  During that week, she clearly 'got to know' the Captain (see the details in her interview from Feb. 27), as many other crew members took note of and commented upon.

Capt's wife Fabiola Russo, 48

At the end of that one week stint, apparently "spontaneously," she decided to become a passenger for the next week, registering on the Friday morning as she was getting off work and getting back on board as a passenger at 5 pm.  (It's not clear how a ship employee who has only worked for Costa for 4 weeks and is a single mother from Moldavia might have the disposable income to afford such a trip, but she mysteriously got an employee's 50% discount she was not yet entitled to and boarded without an assigned cabin, which 'necessitated' her leaving her things in the Captain's cabin -- must be a crowded cabin with all the luggage from every vacationing crew member in there...)

The white and red to the coral's left are interior walls.

While we may never know what transpired between her boarding at 5 pm, putting her things in the Captain's cabin and getting dressed for dinner in his cabin at 8 pm, but we do know by her own account that after she finished changing they embraced and kissed passionately.  We also know that, after coming up to the bridge together, the Captain diverted the ship from it's normal route to 'grandstand' and bring it close to shore, something he'd done several months before successfully.  This time he was both without his prescription eyeglasses (revealed in the inquiry on Mar. 3, 2012) and apparently otherwise distracted during the 'designed to impress manoeuvre' and ordered turn away from well-mapped rocks too late, causing the momentum of the ship to swing the stern into them and break off an enormous piece of rock in the hull.  (The photo shows white and red painted interior walls of the ship that the collision exposed to the seawater.)

Without his glasses, the Captain had to repeatedly ask an officer to read the chart/radar for him.  What would make a 52 year old man, responsible for all those lives, decide to leave his glasses behind and not retrieve them?  A) Was there someone on the bridge he did not want to take leave of, even for a few minutes, during this 'grandstanding' manoeuvre; and B) he may well have not wanted to 'look like an old man' by having to wear glasses...

Dominica is a single mother with one child.

My cousin-in-law, a veteran sailor on ocean and great lakes vessels, says there's no way the officers on duty would allow the Captain to do something as foolhardy as turn the ship too close to well-marked rocks, but might the group of these men do so in the few minutes between the Captain and his companion arriving on the bridge just after 9:30, his order moments later to take the ship in closer to shore, and the collision at 9:44 IF the Captain's companion looked like and was 'dressed for dinner' like this?

It was a space of time of only a few minutes of distraction and boys will be boys, after all.

Dominica claims the Captain asked her to stay on the bridge to help do emergency announcements for the Russian speaking passengers, but that there were staff on duty who were being paid to do so.  She stayed until the ship drifted into more rocks at 10:50 pm and when at 10:58 the Coast Guard forced the Captain to finally declare an "abandon ship", she apparently went to the Captain's quarters alone, changed from evening dress into jeans and a sweater to evacuate.  She apparently did get into a lifeboat prior to the ship heeling over completely, as did the Captain, who was contacted by the Coast Guard at 12:38 am in a lifeboat from which he refused to return to his ship.  He was arrested at 3:17 am.  She claims she only saw him again after leaving the bridge at 5 am on shore.  The final 80 passengers were air-lifted off the ship after a helicopter was called in at about 4 am.

Click once to open, again to enlarge.

Once everyone was in the process of trying to abandon a ship that was so badly tilted that it was impossible to lower the heavy life rafts down the angled port side of the craft, the Captain claims he 'fell' into a lifeboat and could not get out to direct the evacuation efforts from aboard the cruise ship (the only place he could have 'fallen' off the ship was the bow where there are no life rafts, or off the starboard rail, a side everyone would have been avoiding as it was gradually submerging).  Note that he would have known, from the charts he'd looked at and from their proximity to shore, that there was no way the ship would completely sink, so there should have been no desperate panic on his part to save his own skin.  (He may have been fairly drunk at the time, however...)

What would cause this man, charged with such great responsibility, to be in such a rush to abandon his post and obligations to thousands to get in to a life raft and escape?  Who was actually in that raft with him?  A certain young blond woman, by any chance?  And why did he clearly lie to the Coast Guard Captain who berated him so soundly about returning to the ship?  He seemed determined to give the impression of being a hero AND stay with whoever he was alongside him at the time.  (The truth will come out eventually!)

His 'Disaster Companion' on TV Defending 'Her Captain"

In a mind-boggling twist, the girl went on TV, as a 'former crew member' of the Captain's who happened to had dinner with him, then was on the bridge when he smashed into the first rocks, AND while the ship was going down, to defend her captain for having handled the situation so well, and for "saving countless lives".  Now there's a credible voice!  Perhaps she isn't Moldovian, but from the Isle of Siren...

Further, on Jan. 24 the Captain's wife, 48 year old Fabiola Russo, told the media her hubby "is not a monster", saying: "My husband is at the centre of an unprecedented global media storm," Ms Rossi told Oggi, an Italian weekly magazine. "I cannot think of any other naval or air tragedy in which the responsible party was treated with such violence. This is a manhunt, people are looking for a scapegoat, a monster. It's shameful."  I'm pretty sure she hasn't done the research I did for this post, but her devoted husband is going to be long remembered for his choices on that fateful day!

One thing is abundantly clear from the facts at hand, if the Captain had not been trying to impress Dominica up on the bridge after dinner and had been wearing his glasses, it is unlikely this unprecedented disaster would have happened.  With some wine in his system and a hottie with her bags still down in his quarters, this man was not thinking responsibly.

Ah, passion, it makes us do crazy things, especially when it involves an older married man having a girl 27 years younger showing interest in him...