Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Let’s keep things in perspective.  It is horrifying that, in the 21st century, people still starve to death.  It is horrifying that people in West Virginia cannot drink the water that comes out of the tap.  It is horrifying that people are still serving life sentences for possession of marijuana.  It is horrifying that police in America can kill people in cold blood and stone cold get away with  it.  It is horrifying that elephants are being slaughtered just for their ivory.  (If hungry Africans were looking for elephant steaks, I would not be as bothered, but the body is left to rot.)  It is horrifying that homeless people in American are freezing to death while there are plenty of empty houses  they could be sleeping in, but they belong to the banks and the banks are in the business of making money, not preventing people from freezing to death.  It is horrifying that children around the world, every day, are molested, exploited, mistreated and abused. It is horrifying that people in 3rd world countries have to work in slave-like conditions for pitifully  low wages.  It is horrifying that, if a giant asteroid were to hit the Earth,  there wouldn’t be a darned thing we could do about it, because we haven’t had the vision or intelligence to develop the extraterrestrial infrastructure that would be needed to defend against it.

We don’t need to get all bent out of shape because the zoo in Copenhagen decided to put down one of their giraffes. 

They Are NOT Playing

It wasn’t sick or anything, they just had too many giraffes, there was a risk their giraffe group would become inbred (the poor giraffe probably had lots of brothers and sisters and cousins).

It’s sad, but it’s not a cause for outrage.  If they’d turned it loose in the wild (and it would have been somewhat problematic just to get it to Africa – a  giraffe won’t fit on a plane.)  There was one guy with more money than sense who offered to adopt it, but the poor giraffe probably would have been miserable anyway.

So, they put it down and “animal lovers” all around the world, to the four corners of the internet, went nuts.  Of course, the grim details that people watched the skinning and the meat was fed to the lions made things sound much worse.  But, that wasn’t done out in the open, if people wanted to go in the buchering room they could, and budding young veterinarians (and butchers) probably learned a lot.  Then, the meat went to the lions, who appreciated it tremendously, I’m sure.

After a steady diet of hay and hamburger, I’m sure they were thrilled with a bit of variety.  And killing the giraffe probably let a couple of cows off the hook.  At least for a couple of months.

If they really wanted the zoo to be natural, they should just take down the barriers between the lions and the giraffes and the zebras, maybe throw a few cows into the max, and let the big cats go to town.  This way was actually much more humane.

Save your outrage for something  important.

There is such an awful lot of fuckwittery on facebook that it’s sometimes hard to get to the good stuff.  It needn’t be that way.  The dumb stuff is easily recognizable, so it should be a simple matter to just scroll past it, but far too often I cannot resist the temptation to make a comment.

Good morning! I am 6,000x more intelligent than you. Would you like to talk?

For instance, one that I’ve seen on my page about 3 or 4 hundred times in the past couple of weeks is “The first 3 words you see will mean something to you in 2014,” accompanied by a grid full of letters, like a scrabble board with a tile on every square.  I’ve ignored it each time, but that self-destructive little voice inside my head grabbed control of my fingers today for long enough to type “ANY 3 words are likely to mean SOMETHING to you in 2014.”

I felt I was showing admirable restraint  by leaving out the FFS and the SMDH, but since then I’ve had numerous e-mail notifications like “Peace, Love, Happiness” and  “Intelligence, Win, Sex.”  It’s amazing how almost everybody’s 3 words are positive.  One might be tempted to the uncharitable suspicion that the chart was rigged.  So, I learned my lesson.  If you comment on something, even to comment on how dumb it is, you are going to be in that conversation for more time than you want to be.

On the other hand, I have several people among my friends who generate interesting threads about politics, art, culture, and what’s happening in different corners of the world.  For instance, somebody linked to this today, which I think is kind of a genius idea.  Probably wouldn’t work, though.

The reason for that is that people may have access to the necessary information and still misinterpret it and make the wrong decision.  I know it happens to me.  Almost all of us are stupid some of the time, and some of us are stupid almost all of the time.

Soon, we will develop artificial intelligence.  The inevitability of technological progress, the ever increasing speed of it and the snowball effect virtually guarantee (in the old sense of virtual, like, of course there’s a tiny possibility that I’m wrong) that it will happen.

The weird thing is that we won’t recognize it when we do.  How could we?  An artificial intelligence is almost bound to be way more intelligent than an average human being and in terms of memory and raw data processing capability it will be light years ahead of any of us.  It will be Stephen Hawking, Noam Chomsky and Adrian Monk all rolled into one.

It will be spouting out brilliances a dozen a minute, and nobody will even notice them.  We’ll  all be looking at cats, and talking about the weather.

I don’t eat at Subway very often, but that’s just because I don’t consider it good value for money. I don’t hate them, they’re just not my top choice.

Probably half that other stuff shouldn’t, either

I’m not a food purist.  I eat at McDonald’s plenty, and now and again KFC, and neither one of those is exactly known for the health benefits of their food or the purity of their ingredients.

So, although I’m relieved that Subway has been pressured into giving up azodicarbonamide, I’m not really  surprised or shocked to find out that there is something in their bread which is not actually a food product.  As I understand it, it’s kind of a bleach, to make the bread look whiter.

It’s a bit of a carcinogen, in the same sense that your TV or your mobile phone is a source of radiation, therefore also a carcinogen.  You’d have to have a phone glued to your ear all day long for years and years before it would give you cancer, but there are some people who do that, and there are some people who eat at Subway every day.

The thing is, azodicarbonamide is also in the buns used at McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s and Arby’s, so Subway is getting a bit of a bad rap.  Probably most of the stuff you buy in the grocery store as well.  And I’m sure it’s not the only thing.  If I was going to worry 24/7 about  all the toxins I’m putting in my body, I’d have gone nuts by now.  The way I see it, I’m still alive, so it probably is relatively harmless, trace amounts.

Still, why?  Why should they put anything into the food that is not food?  Our bodies did not evolve with a huge need for chemicals.  It can’t be saving these companies that much money, because by weight it’s negligible.  The bakers of the bread still need to buy roughly the same amount of flour and milk.  Is it that important for the bread to appear whiter than white, the oranges to appear more orange, the tomatoes redder?

If all of these chemicals were banned, every supermarket and every farmer would be impacted equally, and the only downside is that consumers would have a less colorful shopping experience.  Healthier, though.

Then there is the issue of preservatives, but the same logic applies.  Companies only need them to give them an economic edge and if they were banned across the board, then nobody would have an edge through having tomatoes with a longer shelf life.  Instead, supermarkets might have more frequent specials to move produce quicker.  The consumers would benefit and the playing field between them would remain equal.

And, by some small amount, the risk of cancer would be reduced.  That would be a good thing.

The Winter Olympics have barely  begun and so many things are going comically wrong that everyone will soon forget Denver’s Superbowl performance.  That was just one off game.  Sochi is providing a smorgasbord of hilarious failure on many fronts.

The Olympic Games – Promoting Friendship

Some of it’s not so hilarious.  Apparently Sochi had a big problem with packs of stray dogs.  Their solution: poison.  Animal lovers are not happy. 

I am an animal lover but not a sentimentalist.  I can understand that something had to be done.  Stray dogs are mangy, ugly things that probably have fleas and too many can ruin your whole vacation (Bangkok is full of them, but you don’t notice so much because of all the rats). 

Still, they’ve known for a while that the Olympics were going to be there.  If they’d taken care of that little problem 6 months ago, nobody would be saying a thing.

Then, of course, there was the whole controversy about how Putin hates gay people.  That was never a controversy in any previous Olympics because nobody ever admitted to being a gay athlete.  There has been great progress in the gay rights arena, but Putin failed to get the memo.  Really bad timing on their part.

The fact that the snow on the ground is sparse (perhaps they could import some from Chicago, I hear they have a bit of an excess this year) is beyond anyone’s control, but it is one more indicator that Sochi was a bad choice.  If it were being held in the Canadian Rockies or the Swiss Alps, this would not have been a problem.

But, it’s the infrastructure that’s proving to be the biggest headache.  Not only are Russian toilets comically gross (side by side shitters), but there are a lot of structural problems with the new hotels, where the construction  hasn’t been actually completed but they’re open anyway because, by golly, it’s time and the guests have arrived.

Here’s the funny part.  (For the whole quote go to this article in Think Progress.) When Dimitri Kozak, this Olympic’s head honcho, tried to say that reporters were exaggerating the claims to deliberately embarrass Russia, he said this: “We have surveillance video from the hotels that shows people turn on the shower, direct the nozzle at the wall and then leave the room for the whole day.”

That’s right.  They have cameras in the showers.  Let me repeat that: Cameras in the showers.  That’s the most damaging admission since Larry Silverstein said “As for Building 7, we’d already decided to pull it.”  There are Russian police watching reporters take showers.  Probably the athletes, too.  Athletes have hot bodies.

The games have just begun and there is a chance that they will be remembered for the longest ski jump ever, or a spectacularly beautiful figure skating routine, or some tremendously heartwarming example of sportsmanship. 

There is a chance.  But, I’m pretty sure that these games will be remembered as the ones with the cameras in the showers.  That’s a detail that sort of jumps out at you.