Ursus Pacificus

OK… Now, the guy’s dead… been dead for 23 years… and the incident I’m going to direct your attention to happened around 25 years ago… There’s a (big) part of me that admires Welles’s frankly expressed disgust with the ad copy he’s charged with reading

Check out this page and listen to the Orson Welles - Frozen Peas Spot.

Having worked in radio and having recorded hundreds of local spots and promos, I can attest to the frustration of trying (and being expected) to read clumsy, awkward copy written by ham-handed hacks. I also sympathize with Welles’s irritation with (what I assume to be) the session’s producer. Sure, the producer had been given a job to do: Have the fat man read the paper. In all likelihood, the producer had no control over the ad’s copy, and had no authority to edit it. Nevertheless, Welles was right. The copy did suck, and there was no way to read it properly. The question is a philosophical one: Does one play the sycophant, or does one tell the emperor that his wedding tackle is hanging out and refuse to compliment him on his new suit? It is, really, a moral issue, and speaks to one’s personal integrity.

Welles can be heard walking out of the session at the end of the clip. Good for him!

This video on YouTube, called “The Good Consumer”, which I found on AdBusters was quite good… and quite disturbing.

While Buy Nothing Day has come and gone, we can still buy nothing. Buy Nothing Day is one of those phenomena where people profess a belief, and demonstrate it powerfully, on one occasion, then go back to their old ways almost immediately afterwards. Why not skip societally-programmed calendar-driven gift-giving, and just reform yourself to be a more generous person all year long?

If you still think a consumption-driven holiday is a good idea, just remember there are people, who, as a result of their enthusiasm for the high-holy consumer holiday, Christmas, won’t see it.

America is a big country. With an average population density of 31 people per square mile. Put another way, there’s enough land for each man woman and child to have an 897,000 square foot (20 acre) buffer zone around them if they were evenly spread out. New York City, on the other hand, with its population of over eight million, and an average population density of around 26,000 per square mile, is certainly an aberration, but it does show that people tend to cluster together in this country. So… there’s a lot of open space out there. Most of the land area of Arizona, New Mexico and Texas are utterly barren. No farms, no nothing. How is it that we have not begun, in earnest, to deploy wind and solar energy collection? Is it the cost?

People in this country bitch ceaselessly about the expense of the space program. Generally, they don’t bitch about spending a trillion dollars over five years on a failed war we started. They hear about social programs that will cost 20 million dollars over 10 years, and they soil themselves with disgust. How does that work, exactly? … and where does the money for the war or the social programs come from, anyway?

Conservatives in the country (and they seem to operate the loudest, most obnoxious and inescapable media outlets) complain about “tax and spend liberals”… as opposed to what?… “print and spend conservatives”? I’m sick to death of people complaining about taxes, and then expecting the government to fix the roads, educate the children, provide health care, cover retirement and prosecute wars. The money has to come from SOMEWHERE… Where does it come from? Mostly taxes. Sorry kids, but if you want to have roads and schools and a standing army, all that costs money, and the money has to come from you.

People are living in a lopsided bizarro fantasy world, where it’s OK for the head of your company to pull a seven- or eight-figure compensation package, while he (or she, but most likely he) drives the company in the ground, but it’s not OK to tax him (or her, but most likely him).

People throw all these economic indicators around like they mean something… like what the “Dow” is at… or what the GDP of the country is… or what the minimum wage is or should be… Most people pull these statistics out and make comparisons over 30 or 50 year periods, but never adjust for inflation. The dollar is worth less than a sixth of what is was when I was born. If you’re making $6.00 an hour now, that’s the equivalent of making $1.00 an hour in 1968 (average inflation rate of 4.66%). Is no one alarmed by this? How does this come to pass? Well, the fact that the government keeps borrowing money to cover expenses that should be covered by taxes doesn’t help. Our leaders borrow to cover expenses… why is anyone surprised that we’re in a financial meltdown, now? The people are following the example set by the leaders… Apparently, it’s perfectly fine to run a 400 billion dollar deficit on a budget of about 3 trillion dollars. What happens to the deficit? it gets piled onto the national debt, which by some estimates is over 10 trillion dollars.

What’s wrong? A few things… People have no sense of scale for numbers in the millions, billions and trillions. It’s just a bunch of zeros at that point. People in this country don’t take a minute, step back and see the big picture. All they know is their taxes are too high, and somewhere, some liberal is performing an abortion. Wake up, people. Our economy is a sham, and no one really knows how the sham works. The people in charge are very strongly motivated to stay there, and at your expense, and it’s not just the folks in Washington, or city hall or the state capital you have to look out for. It’s the captains of industry, too… because they’re the ones pulling the strings in Washington, city hall and the statehouse. Not you. You just get to pick WHICH slimy politician gets to be stroked by the conniving captains of industry. Once they’re in, and they get their first “gift” or “contribution”, they’re pwned… because… well…. look at what a U.S senator or representative gets for a salary…. about $170,000 a year. All the travel and the houses and so on… that doesn’t come cheap. Nor does getting re-elected. Do you figure that Joe Biden spent more than $170,000 getting re-elected last time? I bet he did. Where does THAT money come from? I don’t mean to pick on Joe alone… all of ‘em. They’re all whores, and we’re not paying them what they think they’re worth… GM is paying them what they think they’re worth. I don’t mean to pick on GM… All of ‘em.

Oh, and a thought about Congressional salaries… here’s how out of touch and uninterested these people are. They manage to keep voting in pay raises for themselves… never fear… they won’t go hungry. Somehow, it’s escaped their notice that the minimum wage in this country is not (or was not until very recently) adjusted for inflation, and had no mechanism in place to do anything about it… Now I don’t know where you can live reasonably on $6.55 an hour, especially considering that jobs paying that low have no health coverage and are tenuous at best.

So this year, on November 4, I have one bit of advice: Throw the bums out. Incumbent = Fired. From the zoning board to US representatives and senators and everyone in between.

Have you noticed all these cars now with fake vents on the front fenders? I know they’re supposed to look like either exhaust ports or intake ports… or cooling ports… something… but they’re not.

…and now, apparently, you can go to your local car-bling store and buy them to retrofit your older car.

The thing to me is that they don’t do anything. It’s just an appliqué. So… it’s a little chrome-plated plastic sticker-ey thing that damages the paint on your car, and, eventually, will lose its chrome and just be a crummy looking piece of plastic on your fender, OR…. if you don’t clean the paint properly, the glue won’t stick right, and the thing will just fall off, and leave a gooey residue on your fender that’ll never really come off.

I’ve driven over 5,000 miles in the last 2 weeks. I can’t tell you how many Hyundais, Fords, Saturns, Buicks and so on I’ve seen with the factory-installed variety… and … get this… Ford Tauruses… dozens of them… with the aftermarket ones.

Back in the 50’s Buick Roadmasters had the fake ports…. they were supposed to be reminiscent of the old Deusenbergs, Auburns, Cords and other super-cars of the 30’s, that had the narrow bonnets, and the exhaust exited through the sides bonnet and into the fenders… or inline-engined fighter planes… depending on who you talk to.

Of course, now, almost 80 years later, very few car buyers have any idea what what a Duesenberg was, let alone what the point of the ports is supposed to be.

So… I can certainly understand aesthetics… I have 9 tattoos… but I don’t have any “because it looks cool” tattoos. My tattoos may not age as well as my skin… but barring catastrophic injury or infection, my tats should not peel or fall off. … and then there’s the fact that my tats all mean something.

I also have bumper stickers on my vehicles… 3 on my truck, 2 on my car…. but again… they actually mean something… other than, “I wish my car was a lot cooler than it actually is”

I guess what I’m getting at is that the factory-installed fake port things are… part of the design of the car… they’re unnecessary, and dorky looking… but they’re part of the car. To go to Pep Boys and spend $20 (or whatever) on fake plastic stick-on port-ey things… that (to me) says, “I hope you don’t recognize how lame my car is… are you dazzled by my fake port things?” They’re like the plastic hubcaps with the “spinner” things, to make your 14-inch steel rims look vaguely reminiscent of the 22-inch “DUB” rims with the extra bits that continue spinning after the vehicle has stopped. The plastic spinny bits to spin right… they wig out the balance of the wheels, and in a couple months, they look like crap (that is to say, more like crap than when they were new).

The fake vents, when they’re factory installed, say, “Well… we had to keep the fuel economy up, and tooling costs down… so… to make last year’s model seem new, and more powerful, this year, we tacked on these.”

The fake vents from Pep Boys say, “Well, yes, it’s a 10-year-old Cavalier, and the paint is just jumping off it. Sure, it’s 3 different colors, has 5 different tires (at least it has a spare… I wonder if it has air in it…), Oh, and there’s a crack that goes all the way across the windshield… The glove box doesn’t close… and the upholstery smells like…. mildew… and… catbox…. but … it’s a cool ride, and it deserves a little dressing up.”

… and that’s just sad.

September 19th is National Talk Like A Pirate Day. It’s one of the high holy days for us Pastafarians

Speaking of things holy, I recently was involved in a discussion with some folks about online dating sites. One of my complaints is that some sites, particularly eHarmony, don’t acknowledge atheism as a world view with at least as much merit as, say, Christianity, and they’re perfectly content to lump the “non-religious” or “other” along with the positive, strong atheists. I took exception to this, stating that there is a vast gulf between “non-religious” and atheist.

One of the participants in the discussion (let’s call him “Arlo” for the sake of convenient reference) didn’t understand the distinction. Arlo’s position was that “you have to accept another person’s faith”.

No, I don’t.

If a person’s faith is inconsistent with reality, then it is false. I am under no obligation to accept false things.

I told Arlo that a person can believe whatever he or she likes, but if that belief is inconsistent with reality, then said person is going to be seriously disappointed at some point.

That made Arlo very uncomfortable, and he asked to stop the discussion of religion. I obliged.

My point about the dating thing is that if person A (call him Al) is seriously dating person B (call her Betty), then Al and Betty need to be able to agree on some basic things, in order to reliably agree on more complicated issues. If Betty believes that there are no gods, heavens or hells, and therefore all religions are at least misleading, and Al believes in the Abrahamic god and the inerrancy of the Christian bible, then they’re likely to disagree on a great many issues which ultimately are founded in those beliefs. In a society where the curriculum of public education, the direction of the highest court in the land, and the general mode of discourse are determined (at lease in part) by “the mob”, it is disquieting to Betty that Al is more a part of the problem, than part of the solution. Similarly, Al is aware that Betty votes, and while she is in the minority, the minority she’s in seems to be getting louder every day.

At some point, we all have to live together and cooperate (on some level). That doesn’t mean that Al and Betty need to be at each other’s throats day in and day out over common household decisions. Al’s a Christian and Betty’s an atheist. Neither of them can genuinely accept the other’s world view without being untrue to their own.

I was once involved in an unnecessarily long email conversation with someone I met on Match.com. She was a Christian. She was also a biochemist. To me, this is incongruous. Biochemistry is a science. Religion is not. I asked her (early on) how she reconciles her career and her faith. She said she didn’t think she had to. Uh. Yeah. She told me how tolerant she is, and then asked me if I would sit in a church with her and hold her hand at her father’s funeral. Well, the whole hand-holding thing is predicated on me being in a serious relationship with her, which is highly unlikely based on our differing opinions on science, religion, and death, thus the point is moot. She obviously hung up her lab coat and intellect on adjacent pegs on her way out of the lab at the end of the day.

A big part of dating compatibility, I think, is rooted in the ideas at the foundation of a person’s world view. Certain consequences naturally follow from certain fundamental ideas. Sure, the fine-grained detail might lead one to think that Evangelical Christianity and Fundamentalist Islam are radically different, but… they’re not, if you can view them side-by-side with the appropriate level of abstraction, viz:

• Both believe in an invisible, capricious, all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful god.
• Both believe in the inerrancy of an ancient text purportedly written by one or more people of dubious objective credibility
• Both believe theirs is the one true faith, to the exclusion of all others
• Both believe that heresy and apostasy are punishable sins
• Both believe that their god is directly involved in the day-to-day workings of everything seen and unseen.
• Both believe in eternal reward for the righteous and eternal punishment for the wicked.
• Both believe in the idea that the practice of science is bad and/or wrong, but use the products of that practice to spread and enforce their doctrines and injure or kill their opponents
• Need I go on?

It is conceivable (however highly unlikely) that a Christian and an Muslim could live happily together with minimal friction, provided they proceed from the “different names of god” assumption… that they really believe the same basic ideas, and the details are trivial.

It is so unlikely as to be virtually inconceivable that an atheist and a Christian (or Muslim or Whatever) could live happily together because the atheist discounts the founding premise of the Christian’s (or Muslim’s or Whatever’s) world view.

So, at the end of the day, I still maintain, you can believe whatever you like, but if your beliefs don’t line up with commonly observable objective reality, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.

RAmen

Hurricane Gustav is bearing down on New Orleans, LA. Almost three years to the day after Hurricane Kartina made landfall just Southwest of New Orleans and caused and estimated $82,000,000,000 worth of damage (2005 Dollars).

The storm officially caused 1,836 deaths.

Levee failures in and around New Orleans, together with power failures and an inept Federal response resulted in major parts of New Orleans being flooded for nearly a month and a half.

In the aftermath of Kartina, the Federal Government, through the Army Corps of Engineers, decided to re-build the levees to current Category 3 standards. They were originally built to Category 3 standards. That’s right. Let’s go over that a little… “I got my ass thoroughly kicked… hell, the floor was mopped with my ass… so I’ll recover to the level I was at when I got my ass kicked. That’ll show ‘em I mean business!”

Let’s go over a few important facts:

1. Most of New Orleans, LA is situated below sea level.
2. No one wants to insure real estate in New Orleans now
3. New Orleans is situated at, what is, effectively, the focus of a parabolic antenna for hurricanes.
4. Most of New Orleans, LA is situated below sea level.
5. The primary (read “only useful”) evacuation routes out of New Orleans have been demonstrated to be susceptible to destruction by flooding.
6. The Federal Government is only going to respond to a hurricane or other disaster. It will not take the necessary action to permanently remove the risk of another Katrina-like disaster.
7. Most of New Orleans, LA is situated below sea level.
8. If you do live or operate a business in a flood-prone area of the city, and are able to get insurance, the insurance companies are going to do everything in their power to avoid paying claims.
9. Most of New Orleans, LA is situated below sea level.

Let’s face it: New Orleans, LA is doomed. Even if Gustav doesn’t erase it completely, it will almost certainly cause another tens (or perhaps hundreds, thanks to inflation) of billions of Dollars. Are we to absorb this cost again? The rest of us take the heat, not just in terms of taxes (well, growth of the National Debt, which if we ever get anyone with a modicum of fiscal responsibility in the government who can take charge and start to pay down the debt, will have to translate into higher taxes), higher hydrocarbon fuel prices, higher insurance premiums, and so on. We all have to bear the burden. At what point do we all say enough is enough, and just let the sea take New Orleans. It is inevitable. Why fight it any more? Haven’t we learned that nature will do what it wants, when it wants, how it wants and we are powerless to affect any real short-term change? Certainly, we can throw millions of tons of carbon dioxide and soot in the air, decrease the reflectivity of the surface of the Earth, melt the polar ice caps, and, eventually, raise the temperature of the atmosphere a few degrees over a couple centuries… but I’m talking about real change, like eliminating the hurricane risk for the US Gulf Coast once and for all. Can we realistically accomplish that? Um, no.

What was it Bush said? “Fool me once… shame on… shame on you. Fool me twice… we can’t get fooled again.”

We’ve already been fooled once. New Orleans was effectively plowed under in 2005, and it was decided that it should be rebuilt. That’s not even finished, and Gustav is threatening to plow New Orleans under again.

Let’s cut our losses if New Orleans gets spanked again. Give anyone who wants it six months to get their stuff out, take the whole Mississippi Delta by Eminent Domain, and call it New Prypiat.

… and hey! Here’s a thought… on land *near* New Prypiat (but above sea level), a memorial/interpretive center/adult theme park could be built, and the revenue could be used to pay down the National Debt!

I put up this page to announce my planned month-long cross-country trek.

Now begins the real planning. Eek.

Not surprising, actually. Almost 6 years ago I gave up watching regular television (broadcast, satellite and cable). There were several reasons for this, but the overwhelming reason was that what was on offer between the commercials was mostly crap. This is not a new revelation.

Since giving up television, I’ve been consistently amazed by the reactions of people, to whom I’ve revealed this fact. People are stunned.. floored. Often, the don’t know what to say. People are literally dumbstruck by the news. Yes, I don’t watch television. While it’s true that every once in a while something worth a damn comes up on television. Usually it’ll be available in DVD three to six months later. That’s good enough for me.

Just how bad is television? Well, it’s pretty bad. Back in the 50’s when television was still a novelty, there was concern about the squandered potential of television. In October, 1958, Edward R. Murrow observed, in a speech to the Radio and Television News Directors’ Association:

This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful.

Stonewall Jackson, who knew something about the use of weapons, is reported to have said, “When war comes, you must draw the sword and throw away the scabbard.” The trouble with television is that it is rusting in the scabbard during a battle for survival.

I’m guessing Murrow never anticipated a Prime Time lineup like this! Here’s what’s on offer at the “Big 5″ broadcast networks for tonight (Wednesday, July 30, 2008):

ABC:

• Wife Swap
• Supernanny
• Primetime: Crime

NBC:

• America’s Got Talent
• Baby Borrowers
• Law & Order

CBS:

• America’s Greatest Dog
• Criminal Minds
• SCI: NY

FOX:

• So You Think You Can Dance
• So You Think You Can Dance (Yes, a SECOND episode)
• Local Programming

CW

• America’s Next Top Model
• Pussycat Dolls Present: Girlicious
• Local Programming

Murrow’s “wires and lights in a box” might be a pleasant change. At least that’s benign. Really, what do we have here? Crime. Lots of crime. Crime, crime, crime. Did I mention crime? So, there’s crime. …and vacuous, pointless voyeurism, peppered with something that … looks…. like patriotic exceptionalism… sort of.

Wow.

This is the example we’re to follow? This is what we aspire to? This is how we see ourselves as a nation?

Check, please!

Remember Terri Schiavo? How about Karen Ann Quinlan? How about Baby K?

This “debate” on procon.org presents the “slippery slope” angle on euthanasia. The slippery slope argument generally goes something like this: If you allow “voluntary euthanasia”, then the government will use that allowance as a foot in the door to begin taking the lives of others without their consent.

Um… does anybody know about that thing… Oh, what’s it called?!… CAPITAL PUNISHMENT?!

Isn’t Capital Punishment simply de facto Involuntary Euthanasia? The government already has the power to end the life of a person without his or her consent. It is to be done in a way that is neither cruel, nor unusual, but it does deprive someone of his or her life.

And, don’t forget, we as pet owners have the right to euthanize our pets; that is, to mercifully end their suffering (or our own).

If you can back away from human exceptionalism for a second and look at life in general, you’ll see that we, all of us, kill. Either directly or by proxy, we all kill. Most of us kill plants by proxy with the aid of farmers, lumberjacks, groundskeepers and others. Some of us kill plants directly (ever heard of RoundUp?) If you eat, wear or use anything made from animal carcasses (other than carrion… and who does THAT?!), you’re killing animals, either yourself, or by proxy. As unpleasant a fact as it may be to face, we all kill humans, mostly by proxy (wars and capital punishment leap to mind), but the blood is already on our hands.

Lets face it: Life depends on death. Only the simplest organisms can survive without a supply of nutrients concentrated and modified by other living things (for a pedantic discussion of this, see Disney’s “The Lion King”.

Another unpleasant fact: Whether you believe in Evolution by Natural Selection or not, all you have to do is look around a little to realize that there is a tendency in nature (and among humans) for living things to reproduce more rapidly than their environment can directly support. Rabbits breed like rabbits, after all… and Catholics breed like… well… like rabbits. Rabbits and Catholics (and many other species, breeds, ethnic groups, religious groups and so on), if left to their devices, with no predators (or other mediating forces), eventually overtake the ability of their environment to support them. The good news (although you may have difficulty seeing it) for the rabbits is that there are foxes, coyotes and wolves to pick off the old and weak, and allow the healthy and strong (lest we forget quick) bunnies to go on and, well.. breed like rabbits. (An entertaining, if horrifying, study on this is Mike judge’s 2005 film Idiocracy.)

Human “compassion” (fueled in no small part by religion-induced “morality”) has turned the bulk of us into selfishly “compassionate” “moral” martyrs, emotionally thriving on the sympathy and admiration other like-minded wackos shower us with when we choose to keep a Schiavo or a Quinnlan or a Baby K “alive”. it’s really not all that different, in my estimation, from Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, but with an extra twist of delusional madness.

Of course, there’s also the Futile Medical Care issue.

..oh, and a little matter of Cruelty.

…and here’s the kicker: The bulk of the people fighting voluntary euthanasia seem to be doing so from a position of religious rectitude. Well…. The bulk of religions (at least those practiced by more than 8 individuals in this country) tell of a fabulous afterlife (for the “good ones”, anyway). Now, if your deity of choice landed in a sand trap in his/her attempt to call Terri Schiavo (to take a well know example… anyone in a similar condition would do) to heaven, rescussitating her and putting her on life support is like erecting a tall Plexiglas barrier around the sand trap, so the the deity’s ball can’t advance. This, of course, is interfering with god’s work, and denying the poor woman her greater reward.

Of course, I don’t belive in gods or heavens or hells or angels or devils or unicorns… so… the “greater reward” argument is just a use of the goddy-people’s argument to demolish it from within. Really, tho… I do it out of love.