Category Archives: society

talents

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It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.

-H.L. Mencken

That is very true. God gives each of us a talent, in the expectation that we’ll know better than to bury it for safekeeping. For some, it’s more subtle than being a genius in poetry or music, and in some of us – like me – it’s just as lopsided as that, but just more dull. By subtle I mean that some people have the talent for being a good listener in times of crisis, a loving parent, or a good neighbor. Some people care for the helpless, voiceless creatures around us.

Those talents are no less important in the Web 2.0 of life than to be a Shakespeare or a Tiger Woods.

Sadly, some people have a great talent for obstruction, for failure, and for abject indifference. I think we should work harder to identify them and move them out of the way. They are vexations to our peace and happiness.

He said, being purposefully obscure.

spoken too soon

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The conscience of the world is so guilty that it always assumes that people who investigate heresies must be heretics; just as if a doctor who studies leprosy must be a leper. Indeed, it is only recently that science has been allowed to study anything without reproach. -Aleister Crowley, author (1875-1947)

Crowley didn’t anticipate the Bush administration, and its manipulative, intolerant, medieval anti-science. They’ve been nothing but obstructionist with even their own climate scientists. And Bush’s stance on stem cell research has more in common with Salem in 1692 than the America of 2008.

meanwhile, back at the political prison …

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Tonight, just hours before the Olympic Games open in Beijing on Friday, PEN American Center will host “Bringing Down the Great Firewall of China: Silenced Writers Speak on the Eve of the Olympics,” an event to honor the work—and call once again for the release—of more than forty writers and journalists imprisoned by the Chinese government for expressing dissenting views.

Poets & Writers

I gotta be honest with you. I haven’t been able to figure out why Beijing was chosen as to host the Olympics. It’s polluted, both literally and figuratively. China’s record of human and civil rights violations, and illegal occupations of sovereign lands, is even worse than America’s. What’s next, Burma?

On the other hand, maybe the Olympics serve a good purpose: to drive the host country toward at least some pretense of compassionate governance and egalitarian co-existence.

let them eat junk

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SACRAMENTO — — California became the first state to require restaurants to cook without artery-clogging trans fats, such as those in many oils and margarines, under restrictions signed into law Friday by the health-conscious governor.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a physical-fitness advocate and crusader against obesity, sided with legislators who said the measure would help get the fat out of Californians who are too dependent on fast food.

Trans fats can preserve flavor and add to the shelf life of foods but have been linked to heart disease, stroke and diabetes.

Los Angeles Times

Look, it’s true: you should be warned that the average restaurant is trying to kill you. Not just by cooking with far too much fat and sugar, but by enormous portions. The average guy, if he’s a normal weight and getting some exercise, needs maybe 2000 calories a day to be well. And most of that should come from fresh fruit and vegetables, not chimichangas. I doubt you could get out of a restaurant anymore with less than 700 – 1000 under your belt, and very little good nutrition from it. But I have a problem with laws like this.

I don’t think The State should be taking it upon itself to raise us like we’re children. I don’t like paternalistic laws, and California is just getting carried away with them lately. Like the stupid cell phone law. We have to use hands-free devices when driving, which is just as distracting as holding a phone to your ear. And the law is too narrowly drawn: They should have strengthened the law against driving while distracted, period. Because people are different; we react differently to stimuli. And whether someone is distracted is a matter of specific circumstances and facts, not generalized situations. But I digress.

We don’t need to fix the restaurants that have been cooking with trans fats. The public should be educated about their homicidal tendencies, so people stop eating there and the restaurants go out of business. Because even after they fix their brand of grease, they’ll still be serving up unhealthy craptastic anti-food. We don’t need those places at all; we need to choose for ourselves a new lifestyle, and teach it to the kids, so they don’t learn to rely on factory fabricated, bio-miodified tummy-fillers in place of nutrition and wellness.

the quickening of madness

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This just in, by e-mail from Senator Barbara Boxer:

Recently, it was discovered that the Environmental Protection Agency appears to have lowered the statistical value of a human life from $7.8 million per life five years ago to $6.9 million today. This recalculation of almost $1 million per life can have grave consequences for a range of environmental analyses and cost/benefit comparisons.

The EPA’s decision to reduce the value of a human life when it considers the benefits of new environmental regulations is outrageous and must be reversed. EPA may not think Americans are worth all that much, but the rest of us believe the value of an American life to our families, our communities, our workplaces and our nation is no less than it has ever been.

This new math has got to go. If these reports are confirmed, I will be introducing legislation to reverse this unconscionable decision at the earliest opportunity because it will lead to far weaker pollution protections for us and our families.

This is pure insanity. That anyone keeps such numbers is bizarre, and that Senator Boxer thinks the issue even merits contemplation is sad.

Money is an abstraction, a contrivance, a mere material means to an end. It is the sand on which the house of society is built. Society is a house of sugar in the path of a squall. A human life, or any number of them, does not exist in the same category of Being as money, or things of any kind. Life is an entirely different realm than stuff.

You can’t put a value on life, any more than you can find God with a telescope. It makes as much sense to say that a nickel is too much to pay for a life, as that a planet is payment too small. Because human life is sacred, standing in the corporeal but reaching for the divine.

Midnight’s Children Wins Third Booker

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Salman Rushdie’s 1981 novel Midnight’s Children (Jonathan Cape) was recently announced winner of the Best of the Booker award, a celebratory honor given to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Man Booker Prize. Rushdie’s novel about the birth of India won the Booker Prize in 1981, and received a second honor, the Booker of Bookers, during the twenty-fifth anniversary of the award in 1993.

Poets & Writers

Salman Rushie, poster child for my long-held maxim, Nobody has the right not to be offended. I wonder if he can go outside yet, without fear of death. I hope so. Meanwhile, practicing a religion still seems to mean having the right to be offended by other people’s thoughts.

So it goes, we make what we made since the world began.

expectations and emergencies

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Back on June 7, I submitted via e-mail a piece of short fiction to the 2008 Noozhawk Fiction Contest. The prize, had my little vignette not succumbed to presumptive failure to thrive, would have been a scholarship to the SB Writer’s Conference, which starts this week. The conference has gotten so prohibitively expensive that I wouldn’t even consider paying to attend.

At this price, if they resurrected Faulkner and Frost to teach at the event, sure. But lesser mortals now holding forth have overestimated their message.

I won’t be attending the conference, and not because my story didn’t win, though it didn’t. It simply disappeared. Poof. Sucked into a void of abject indifference. Not so much came back as a “submission received and deleted, you hack.” Reminds me of a scene in one of the Star Trek movies: the teleporter malfunctions while people are being sent. Their molecules are scrambled horribly. Somebody says to Kirk over the communicator something like, “Sorry Admiral, but what we got back here didn’t live long.” Cracked me up.

I didn’t enter the contest expecting to win. I submitted just because writers write and sometimes you have to move something to the Finished pile. And I wasn’t expecting flowers in consolation when I didn’t. I’m just saying, it’s unprofessional. Inconsiderate. Regardless of their opinion of my story, nobody should be ignored. Besides, I know it’s OK writing, if they don’t. Know what I mean?

A boilerplate response text could be pasted into a reply and sent in seconds, free. I took the time and care to format and submit my humble piece as requested, and kept my covering e-mail brief and polite. Futility.

Any writer will tell you, get ready for rejection. I can handle it, but this isn’t that. And this isn’t my first rodeo, he said, channeling Bush. I have been to town enough times to know you don’t go to the whorehouse lookin’ for true love, and you don’t send your writing to strangers and expect to find it there either.

The weird thing is that I’ve searched the writers’ conference site and I can’t find any indication that judging ever took place or that a winner was selected or announced. Maybe things fell apart. That’s happening lately.

I saw a crazy dangerous possibly drunk driver on the highway the other day, so I dialed 911 on the cell. Nobody answered. Can you believe it? “All operators are busy,” at 911! That was a first for me. I finally gave up; the car was long gone, and I couldn’t have told them where to look anymore. Thank God nobody had stopped breathing or was bleeding to death.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre….

your tax dollars

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I just saw on the TV that the FDA is broken had can’t do produce inspections properly. The FDA claims it needs $275,000,000 to hire 490 new people for its staff, so it can inspect our food and keep it safe.

Excuse me?

That’s almost 600 grand per person. Why would it cost $600,000 to hire a food inspector? Let’s try this:

$60,000 per year salary, two weeks vacation, major medical and dental.

Now you can get 500 people for about 4 million, instead of 275 million.

Why are the inmates running the asylum anyway?

New Age

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If someone had asked me whether we’re in the Industrial Age or the Information Age, I would have said we’ve been deep into information for a while now. Doc Searls points out that we have another leap to make.

I’ve long believed that the crossover from the Industrial Age to the Information Age will be marked by an awakening to the need by customers to control their own selves, rather than to remain subordinated to the controlling interests of companies. Same thing with citizens and governments.

unbewilder me

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One of these days, I’m going to start keeping a daily list of things I don’t understand. Then I’m going to write a book.

I don’t understand why people want meetings to be longer, instead of shorter.

I don’t understand why people are still driving like bats belched from the infernal depths, with gas at four bucks a gallon.

and I don’t understand Facebook.

I got it all set up and did my profile and my fun wall, etc. I have some friends, so I’ve been prodded or needled or something once or twice. But now it’s just sitting there.

Can anyone explain for me what the thing is supposed to do? More to the point, what am I supposed to do with it? I mean, I feel like there was a lot of hype. I heard Facebook mentioned many times. Barack Obama had a Facebook page before I did, and John Edwards, and several of my friends. But now, you know what it reminds me of? The college degree hanging here in my office.

It’s a nice thing, for sure. You’re expected to have one. Took a long time to set it up, and more than a few moments of abyssal bewilderment. Now it just hangs there. Which am I referring to, Facebook or the Bachelor of Arts? Well, both. This is a comparison paragraph.

Now for the contrast: The BA says something on it like, With All The Rights and Privileges Pertaining Thereto. Facebook makes no such grandiose pronouncements. And I remember that I asked: Back at the university, I tried to find out just what Rights and Privileges I was now entitled to. I thought, and suggested, maybe free alumni parking and admission to football games would be nice. But no one could tell me.

That’s where the contrast ends, because no one can tell me what a pragmatist might expect to glean from Facebook either. Somebody needs to come along and give me a better job and show me how all this passive-aggressive networking makes us all happy.