Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

I haven’t been following the case of MH370, the missing Malaysian plane, as closely as perhaps I should have.  It’s major news, and everybody’s talking about it.  Normally, I  am one who does tend to speculate out loud on these things.  I have very definite opinions on who was behind 9/11 (Cheney, certain members of the Bush family but not George W. – except perhaps after the fact, because why tell the stupid guy – and building owner Larry Silverstein, plus a few others.  Rumsfeld is certainly twisted enough, but might, like W., fall under the “don’t tell the stupid guy” rule), and who killed JFK (all LBJ had to do was let certain people, i.e. Brown and Root, inc.,  know that, as President, he would be friendly to their interests), and who killed Marilyn Monroe (the Kennedys).

This did not happen

But as the plane is still missing there is almost a complete lack of information, so it’s hard to form an opinion.  It could just be a plane crash.  They do, occasionally, happen.  Or there may have been some kind of skullduggery or sabotage involved.  That happens, too.

What I don’t like is when the crazy theories come out, and then it becomes easy to shut down all the more reasonable suspicions just by saying “Oh, another conspiracy theory.  I heard it got sucked into a black hole, ha ha.”  That’s bullshit.  Not all ‘conspiracy theories’ (which is, itself, often a misnomer) are equal.  Here is a quick guide for separating the reasonable ones from the crazy ones.

1.  You can put anything involving the supernatural into the crazy category.   They did not fly through a time portal, re-appearing in WWII.

2.  You can discount any theory with aliens.  While I strongly believe that there are intelligent life forms elsewhere in the galaxy, I doubt very much that they would bother disappearing an aircraft filled with humans.  You can’t rule it out entirely, I suppose, but it falls on the wrong  side of Occam’s Razor.  Mechanical failure is more likely, by a factor of about a thousand.

3.  It was not sucked into a black hole.  Learn something about relative distances, morons.

4.  You can discount any theories about an international Jewish conspiracy.  There are about 15  million Jewish people in the world and, it’s true, some of them are quite wealthy.  But, the wealthy ones are more likely to conspire with other wealthy people, whether they are not of the Hebrew persuasion, than with non-wealthy Jews.  I am half Jewish and nobody’s ever let me in on the conspiracy, I can tell you that much.

5.  It is perfectly reasonable to suspect governments, large business interests, criminal or terrorist organizations, somebody with a grudge, or a suicidal pilot.  Mechanical failure can destroy a plane.  So can people.

My guess is, with regards to this particular flight, we’ll never know.  But, I’d be happy to be proved wrong.

About 6 weeks ago, when the Copenhagen Zoo decided to euthanize a healthy giraffe, because it didn’t fit into their breeding program and they wanted to get in some fresh blood, I defended the zoo.  Lots of people around the world were extremely upset by the decision, particularly the fact that children saw the post-mortem dissection and the meat of the giraffe was ultimately fed to the lions, but those two acts, in my mind, actually spoke in the zoo’s favor.  Education is part of a zoo’s purpose, and lions have to eat.  In the wild, they  eat giraffes all the time.

Bengt Holst, Animal Killer

Now, it’s happening again, and I’m not so sure.  This time it’s the lions’ turn.  The zoo has euthanized 4 lions, two of whom were 10 month old cubs, because they wanted to get a new, better male lion and a zoo spokesperson said the new lion would just kill them anyway, first chance he got.

That’s probably true, I know bears do that, but it seems to me there are at least two good ways around that dilemma.  One, of course, is to pass on getting a new lion.  I understand that they’re trying to breed the best pride they can, but why?  How many zoo visitors know the difference between a blue ribbon, prize winning lion and a crap lion?  The 2nd way would be to keep the new lion in a different place and have two lion exhibits.  Bring the females to him when the time is right.

I am not an animal expert, so I will concede that the zookeepers might have had valid reasons, but I am skeptical.  If it had been a different zoo, I would be saying “Well, this is probably just the kind of thing zoos do and we’re just finding out about it now because the internet is like that and there are a lot of things that are true and we’re just finding out about now, like just what a huge number of vicious, sadistic pricks are working in America’s police departments, and what a staggering number of individuals can look at pictures of cats all day long and never get bored.”

But, it’s the same zoo.  So, you have to wonder why they are doing this repeatedly, and other zoos apparently are not.  Either that, or every other zoo in the world has no employees who are on facebook or are acquainted with any journalists, and I don’t believe that.

I’m guessing that Bengt Holst, scientific director of the Copenhagen  Zoo, views it as a breeding center and, like with dogs or horses, he is trying out his eugenics experiment (breeding program).  I suppose, if he can ride out the wave of public disapproval, he might succeed and in a few years, Copenhagen Zoo will have the handsomest animals in captivity.  The fittest, fiercest lions, the most elegant giraffes, the most energetic monkeys, and the most colorful parrots.

But, I hope he gets sacked before then.  Because that attitude sucks.

Well, I’ve been seeing the name of David Sedaris mentioned a lot lately, and seen ads for his books all over the place, so I was quite pleased when Helena decided to buy one of his books on Kindle, in English even so we can both read it.  I do admire her, I have never completed anything in Czech that wasn’t a children’s book, and don’t imagine I ever will as I’ve been here over 15  years and I don’t think my Czech has improved much over the last 10 years of that span.

I haven’t got to the bit about the owls yet

Also, it’s good that she occasionally purchases books because I am such a cheapskate that I only download whatever is free.  There’s plenty available, but it excludes anybody who’s currently popular.

So, I am reading “Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls.”  So far, I give it a 7, maybe a 7+.  He’s an essayist, like Dave Barry, Bill Bryson, or Robert Fulghum.

I had heard him described as funny, though.  He can be, sporadically, but he’s no Dave Barry in that regard.  I think he might have a bit more depth than my fellow Des Moinesian Bill Bryson, and certainly more than shmaltzy old Robert Fulghum, who basically had one great title.  Not one great book, although it sold a lot of copies, but ‘Everything I Know I Learned in Kindergarten’ (I think that was it) is a great piece of philosophy, and more memorable than the book itself.

Sedaris has his moments of brilliance, especially when he’s not trying to be funny.  If you’re interested in straightforward stories about life, he’s your guy.  If you’re looking for the big yucks, or a brilliant flash of enlightenment, give him a pass.

It began as a thread about how we need to stop raping the environment and start being a bit more eco-conscious because otherwise it will all be gone soon, do you people think the scientists are fucking joking?  They are not joking.  This is dangerous stuff.

But then, somebody popped on to say something along the lines of “Yes, how can we even think about exploring space when we’ve got problems right here” and I’ve got no sympathy whatsoever with that sort of lame-ass moronic thinking.  Did Marco Polo say “Hey, I would go to China but there is money to be made right here in Venice”?  Did Queen Isabela say “Sorry, Chris, we’ve got problems we need to deal with right here in Spain”?  Did Jacques Yves Cousteau say “I would go diving and invent scuba gear and all that, but gosh, there are just so many problems on dry land we have to deal with”?

We’re going. That’s all there is to it.

No, they did not.  It is totally against the grain of human nature, not to mention economically suicidal, to say “I don’t think we’ll bother with this research because we can’t afford it and we’ve got bigger fish to fry.”  Ever since we developed intelligence, and probably somewhat before that, because that’s what intelligence is all  about, we have been moving forward, pursuing all lines of enquiry, moving outward in all directions.

Anyway, he wrote back and said “Hey, it’s big and empty and there’s nothing up there that we want which we can reach in less than a thousand years anyway,” and so I wrote back:

“The first colonists on Mars will be within our lifetimes, and I’m pushing 60. It’s that close. Our children will see colonies in space sprouting up like mushrooms, as the space elevator makes travel to and from more feasible, and mining operations are set up in the asteroid belt, thus relieving a lot of the pressure to dig up our own world and tear its guts out. Our grandchildren, if we are so blessed, will see the beginnings of terraforming Mars. Our great-grandchildren will see the first of the ark ships taking off for deep space. At every step of the way, science will be advanced and, as science is advanced, the chances for the survival of our planet and ourselves as a species are increased.”

I expect I’ve got the time line about right, but even if it takes 3 or 4 times that long, we’re still going to go.  We are homo sapiens.  It’s what we do.

Here is a piece of news which is almost guaranteed to have no effect on your life whatsoever.  Egypt, which is already full of antiquities, has re-erected an ancient statue of Pharaoh Amonhotep the 3rd, which is actually just a huge statue of his leg, some nondescript rock, and a pretty fair carving of his Queen, but it’s really, really big and really, really old.  It’s just been lying, broken, in the desert for the last 3,000 years or so.

Look on these works, ye mighty, and despair

Now, some might wonder why Egypt is making the effort to put ancient statues back up again when millions of their people are unemployed, and it’s not really clear whose in charge of the country or which way it’s going, but economically it makes sense.  Probably no amount of tourism is going to rescue Egypt from poverty, because it’s too large and has no natural resources of any value whatsoever, but tourism  is all they’ve got and every little bit helps.

I think it’s kind of amazing just for the pure symbolism of it.  For the last 6 or 7,000 years, great civilizations have been popping up here and there around the planet,  and many of them have erected magnificent monuments to themselves, and much of that has been lost.  If all that magnificence could be restored, it  would be, to say the least, kind of impressive.  And all it would cost is a bit of money and effort, nobody needs to be killed at all.

Instead of harassing Iraq and treating them like the world’s trailer trash cousin that nobody wants to have anything to do with, there should be an international effort to recreate The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, along the banks of the Tigris river, or the Euphrates, wherever it was.  They get a nice little earner and maybe some affordable middle class housing thrown in, the world gets one more tourist destination, and everybody is happy.

It doesn’t even need to be a real past.  Pretty much any place with a castle in the West of England, or Wales, could declare itself to be the original site of Camelot, and any island in need of some tourist dollars could change it’s name to Mu or Atlantis, put up some monumentally big, impressive looking stuff, sit back and watch the tourist dollars roll in.

It doesn’t need to be gold, it doesn’t even need to be granite.  Styrofoam would work just fine, as long as you get the surfacing right.

With all of the knowledge and technology at our disposal today, we should be able to create a past way cooler than the past actually was.