Episode 2: ‘Dances with Rabbis’: Early Semitic Influence in America
Christopher Columbus is one in a long list of people who RE-discovered America.  The Smithsonian and academic dogma have long stifled research into extensive evidence of transatlantic influences on America. 
Guests:  Dr. Donald N. Yates – http://dnaconsultants.com/default.htm

Scene mentioned from Mel Brooks’ “Blazing Saddles”

  Slides

The problem with current current nuclear technology is that we have no idea what to do with the toxic and long lived waste.  Moreover, the any current design of a reactor produces weapons grade nuclear byproducts (or byproducts that can be easily converted to such).

On the plus side, nuclear energy is abundant, relatively cheap (aside from the high cost of power plant production).  Environmentally, it does not produce any CO2 directly, and provided the Uranium is mined cleanly, it produces little CO2 in the complete fuel cycle.

The Fast Sodium Reactor or Sodium-Cooled Fast Reactor (SFR) promises to eliminate the downsides of nuclear power:

“But if I build a different kind of reactor that uses liquid sodium instead of water to slow things down, I can have a higher neutron speed and that [waste] becomes a fuel. You just mix it in the crucible, put in the transuranics [(ie plutonium etc)], put in some uranium, put in some zirconium, and you cast it into thin rods. That technology’s been developed, it’s easy to do, and you do it in a room about this size.”  — Eric Loewen

(Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/best-and-brightest-2009/nuclear-waste-disposal-1209-2#ixzz0XBfAzIQV)

It was my mother who introduced me to the opera “Nelligan” around 1990. We were flipping channels one night when we chanced upon a TFO (the French language public television station in Ontario) airing of the Andre Gagnon – Michel Tremblay operatic rendering of the life of Emile Nelligan. My mother tracked down the CD shortly thereafter.

While the CD contained a full libretto, my rudimentary French (which has since then only marginally improved) couldn’t pull all the meaning out of the text. The opera features an aria which recited Nelligan’s most famous poem: “Le Vaisseau D’or”. I don’t want to violate copyright by posting the mp3, but I’m happy to share it privately with anyone who contacts me directly.

I have finally managed to find a translation. What follows is the original poem and a translation. As for the grander meaning of the poem: Nelligan led a tragic life and this poem is said to be autobiographic in a sense. For more information:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89mile_Nelligan

Le Vaisseau d’Or

C’était un grand Vaisseau taillé dans l’or massif:
Ses mâts touchaient l’azur, sur des mers inconnues;
La Cyprine d’amour, cheveux épars, chairs nues,
S’étalait à sa proue, au soleil excessif.

Mais il vint une nuit frapper le grand écueil
Dans l’Océan trompeur où chantait la Sirène,
Et le naufrage horrible inclina sa carène
Aux profondeurs du Gouffre, immuable cercueil.

Ce fut un Vaisseau d’Or, dont les flancs diaphanes
Révélaient des trésors que les marins profanes,
Dégoût, Haine et Névrose, entre eux ont disputés.

Que reste-t-il de lui dans la tempête brève?
Qu’est devenu mon coeur, navire déserté?
Hélas! Il a sombré dans l’abîme du Rêve!

Translation:

The Golden Ship

There was a fine ship, carved from solid gold
With azure reaching masts, on seas unknown.
Spread-eagled Venus, naked, hair back thrown,
Stood at the prow. The sun blazed uncontrolled.

But on the treacherous ocean in the gloom
She struck the great reef where the Sirens chant.
Appalling shipwreck plunged her keel aslant
To the Gulf’s depths, that unrelenting tomb.

She was a Golden Ship: but there showed through
Translucent sides treasures the blasphemous crew,
Hatred, Disgust and Madness, fought to share.

How much survives after the storm’s brief race?
Where is my heart, that empty ship, oh where?
Alas, in Dream’s abyss sunk without trace.

Selected Titles: Selected Poems of Emile Nelligan; translated by P.F. Widdow, 1960.

http://www.martincwiner.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/primeconstellations.pdf

A longstanding hobby of mine is the pursuit of the twin prime conjecture. That is: are there infinitely many primes which are two apart? My main work can be found at:

http://rankyouragent.com/primes/primes.htm

An summary can be found at:

http://www.rankyouragent.com/primes/primes_simple.htm

And a nice summary of the counting functions for prime constellations (twins, triplets, quadruplets, etc) between a given prime and its square can be found at:

http://www.rankyouragent.com/primes/constellations.txt

“Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr Good Enough”. 

The reviewer suggests that Gottlieb’s “stark message ran directly counter to the neofeminist Sex and the City perpetuated mantra that we should all hold out for The One because we’re worth it.”  Feminisms however is typically anti marriage and against romantic love. 

The phenomenon of un-marrieable females goes well beyond the simple explanation offered above.  I can’t offer a few sentences to summarize what would take a novel to explain except to say that the answer is as involved as my now retired ‘black book’ is full of un-marrieable women I’ve dated over the years.

I think Kierkegaard said it best:

“If you marry, you will regret it.  If you do not marry, you will also regret it.  If you marry or do not marry, you will regret both.  Whether you marry or do not marry, you will regret both."
– Soren Kierkegaard.

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/relationships/article7009556.ece

“George Jr. got drunk, stole Daddy’s keys to the country and went for a joyride which ended in a wreck on Wall St.”

Steven Pinker, in his book “The Blank Slate” offers an interesting comparison of savagery over time.  His contention, indeed that of Prof Lawrence Keeley, is that despite all the wars of the 20th century, the per capita rate of violence is lower than all preceding generations.  That is to say, your likelihood of falling victim to violence was far greater in antiquity than it is today.  This speaks to the axiom that democracies are by and large peaceful.

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2004/01/the_savage_sava.html

GATA (Gold Anti Trust Action Committee : http://www.gata.org/ ) has brought about a story revealing that the CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission : http://www.cftc.gov/) was warned in advance that a massive market manipulation in metals was underway.  The interview contends that 1 ounce of gold exists for every 100 ounces actually sold.

Here is the interview:

Interview courtesy of: http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/Broadcast/Entries/2010/3/31_GATA.html

Excerpt from kingworldnews.com :

In this interview with GATA we continue the saga after just having interviewed Andrew Maguire, the whistleblower out of London. This gives a short and long-term view down the rabbit hole through the eyes of 3 of the GATA board members.  GATA was so heavily involved not only in breaking the news at the CFTC meeting about the the metals manipulation but also at the same time quite possibly uncovering the largest fraud in history. The Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee was organized in January 1999 to advocate and undertake litigation against illegal collusion to control the price and supply of gold and related financial securities. The committee arose from essays by Bill Murphy, a financial commentator, and by Chris Powell, a newspaper editor in Connecticut, published at Murphy’s Internet site, lemetropolecafe.com.  In this GATA Roundtable we will have Bill Murphy, Chris Powell and Adrian Douglas.

http://mwiner.wordpress.com/2008/08/19/whats-wrong-with-the-economy/

This graph shows that the problem started back in 1913, not in 1971 as Beck describes.  Beck is however correct in asserting that it is a problem with the US withdrawing from the Gold Standard.  The US withdrew from the Gold Standard in 1933 domestically, and 1971 internationally.

Even before that, the Federal Reserve was able to manipulate (inflate) the currency to a limited degree from its inception in 1913.  It is the Fed which has and always will be the problem.  The Fed has never and will never be able to offer a solution.

For more information, please see:

http://mwiner.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/the-ancient-roots-of-injustice/

No, we’re not discussing that area of your car where you need to shoulder check before lane changing.  Humans walk around with a fairly significant blind spot on both eyes where the optic nerve channels backwards towards the brain. 

http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/blindspot1.html

Follow the instructions on this page and you’ll be able to see, or rather detect your blindspot.

Any fan of the film The Hunt for Red October will remember a discussion about the ‘Caterpillar Drive’ or Magneto Hydrodynamic Drive (MHD).  It’s sort of a jet engine for the water which electrifies the water (creating ions) and pushes them along using magnets.

You can build a simple MHD using nothing more than a battery, some wire, warm water, salt and pepper.  Here is a video of one I built.

SAFETY:  The bubbles coming off the water are hydrogen and oxygen gas.  Use in a well ventilated area, away from sparks.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-8OoP4pyfc]

Here is another one:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Trvd2XOIeXY]

The optical illusion here:
http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2008/02/what_illusions_tell_us_about_t.php
is very interesting.  Look at the two ‘donuts’.  The centers seems to be flashing out of phase with each other.  In fact, they are flashing in phase with one another and it’s just the distraction of the surrounding ‘doughnut’ which throws off our visual perception system.  It’s also possible to play with certain parameters and see the effects.

(From TVO) For six months, Paris was the capital of the world. The last shots had just been fired in the most devastating war of all time, and the old global order lay in tatters. Delegations from over 30 nations descended upon Paris for the most ambitious peace talks in history. Inspired by Margaret Macmillan’s book, Paris 1919 captures the atmosphere, characters and the dramatic cut-and-thrust of diplomacy and territorial ambition as political leaders redraw the map of the world after the First World War.

Full Video on TVO:
http://www.tvo.org/TVO/WebObjects/TVO.woa?video?Paris1919_Full_20091111_300340_0

Interview of Margaret MacMillan on her book Paris 1919:
http://odeo.com/episodes/24967207-Margaret-MacMillan-on-her-book-Paris-1919

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/24/AR2008012402203.html?hpid=sec-health

Scientists have taken laboratory chemicals and produced synthetic DNA. This DNA should be sufficient to allow a bacteria to live, and reproduce. Shortly, these same scientists will denucleate a bacterium and insert their synthetic DNA and in essence create the first artificial life form. It is akin to cleaning out a computer’s hard-drive and putting in a new operating system.

The molecules are minuscule, but the questions loom large. To a creationist: can the created become creators? To the atheist: in a universe without a creator, can there be creators? Paradoxically, the answer to both would appear to be yes.

I’ve always held that science and religion were approaching the same territory from opposite angles. Today’s finding would appear to suggest that we’re approaching their final destination: meaning.

The media coverage of the AIG crisis is completely off the mark.  The Fed DID NOT bail out AIG.  It did something better and worse.  The fed had two choices, 1) bail out AIG or 2) let it go bankrupt.  The Fed made both choices.  It bailed them out per se with an $85 billion dollar loan, taking 80% of the company in the process.  However, the loan came with an 11% interest rate.  This effectively prevents AIG from ever getting back on its feet.  Instead the company has been given time to arrange for the orderly sale of its assets to repay the loan, but AIG will not survive the process.    So the correct coverage of this story would  be to say that AIG has gone bankrupt and the Fed has stepped in to allow for a slow controlled sale of its assets.

If you starve two patients, and only one develops an infection, one would still typically cite the bacteria and the starvation as (probable) causes of the infection.  Margaret Macmillan looks at this scenario strangely in that she infers that because only one patient developed a bacterial infection, the cause is solely the bacteria and not the starvation.

Margaret Macmillan is not writing about pathology hower, but the history of  international relationships at its greatest defining moment Paris 1919, the Treaty of Versailles. 

It has been commonly held that the harshness of the reparations exacted upon the Germans laid the grounds for Hitler’s rise and WWII.  Macmillan sites other historical examples of harsh reparations — such as those after the Franco-Prussian war – which didn’t lead to despotic reigns.  To my way of thinking her logic is like the smoking lobby gathering together 90 year old smokers to prove that smoking is harmless.

This flaw aside, Paris 1919 – the documentary (based on Macmillan’s book) should be required reading (viewing)  for anyone interested in history, war and peace, or international affairs.

It airs Wed Nov 11 @ 9PM on TVO followed by an interview of Margaret Macmillan by Allan Gregg

Paris 1919 on TVO:
http://www.tvo.org/TVO/WebObjects/TVO.woa?b?3003401257991231000

Margaret MacMillan interviewd by Allen Gregg:
http://www.tvo.org/TVOsites/WebObjects/TvoMicrosite.woa?b?8587281257996911000

Paris 1919 Book:
http://www.randomhouse.ca/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780375760525

My Notes:  http://www.martincwiner.com/ttc-suicide-prevention-barriers/

In “The Good Shepherd” there was a nice quote from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  I managed to track it down at imdb: 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0343737/faq

While dining with the German translator, Matt Damon (Wilson) quotes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamorphoses_(poem). He paraphrases from Book 14, lines 131-153 (http://www.tkline.freeserve.co.uk/Metamorph14.htm):

I grabbed a pile of dust, and holding it up, foolishly asked for as many birthdays as the grains of dust, I forgot to ask that they be years of youth.

I dug up the original here:

http://www.tkline.freeserve.co.uk/Metamorph14.htm#_Toc64108194

Pointing to a pile of dust, that had collected, I foolishly begged to have as many anniversaries of my birth, as were represented by the dust. But I forgot to ask that the years should be accompanied by youth.

http://singularity.com/

Recall that a straight line on a logarithmic curve represents exponential growth.  Key to Kurzweil’s arguments that the ‘singularity’ is near is that technology, or perhaps sentience proceeds in exponential order.

The ‘singularity’ in turn is not a take-over of humanity by machines, but more appropriately, the humanization of machines.  Humanity will not become more mechanized, but technology will become more humanized.  Beyond that point, the ‘singularity’, it is hard to predict what will happen next, but perhaps the perfusion of thinking processes will overwhelm the cold mechanic universe making it alive itself.

In the beginning there was nothing.  Then the Lord said “Let there be light, and there was light.” Genesis 1:1

The Kuzari Proof is a famous proof of the validity of Judaism and is commonly used in outreach programs to convince estranged Jews to return to the fold of observance. (1) It was developed originally by the 11th century poet Yehuda Halevi as a response to the loss of Judaism’s monopoly on monotheism. It was designed specifically to prove that the Jews had a unique theological gift: the direct and public revelation of God to all the ancient Israelites at Mt. Sinai. (2) In recent years, the ‘proof’ has been offered as a proof of many things. Most commonly it attempts to prove: the existence of God, His revelation to the ancient Israelites at Sinai, His authorship of the Torah, and the resulting inerrancy of the Torah. My purpose is not to argue for or against the veracity of any of the above claims, but instead to show why the Kuzari proof is not a proof of any of them. Part of the search for truth entails the culling out of implausible options. It is my hope that the de-legitimization of the Kuzari proof will lead the observant and the secular alike to come closer to the truth.

The Kuzari ‘proof’ has been proffered in several forms and incarnations but the gist is as follows:
1) 3 million Jews witnessed the revelation of God at Sinai. (3)
2) Starting with the witnessing generation, one generation has told the story to the next, leading us, in the current generation, to be inductive witnesses to this event.
3) It is impossible to fake a large public event and its subsequent intergenerational transmission (with inferred acceptance) as described in steps 1 and 2, thus the original event must have happened.
It would seem to be common sense that events with many witnesses cannot be faked. However, history has taught us that many who have invoked ‘common sense’ have been frustrated by how rare indeed a sense it is. Needless to say, I find many problems with this ‘proof’. I will take each in sequential order.

First, I address the ’3 million Jews witnessed the revelation’ claim. In logical discourse, one cannot assume what one is trying to prove. You cannot assume that the Torah is inerrant in order to prove that it is inerrant. The 3 million figure (or 600,000 adult males to be more precise) comes from the Torah. (4) One cannot use this figure then, to prove that there were 3 million witnesses to an event which then makes the Torah inerrant. To do so is to construct a tautological proof, or in lay terms… a self-validating statement. The statement “if it rains, it will be raining” is syntactically valid, but is semantically meaningless, in that it is tautological. The proof of the inerrancy of the Torah cannot be made by using statements that require the Torah to be inerrant. In short, we do not know, independent of the Torah claim, that there were 3 million witnesses at Sinai, hence the proof falls apart right there.

Next we look at the ‘witnessed the revelation of God at Sinai’ part of the first statement. As I can recall from my Hebrew school days, the voice of God at Sinai was so powerful it could ‘tear the soul from your body’. I also remember descriptions of smoke and fire similar to the poor Technicolor animations of the DeMille classic depicting the same. (5) Now Joan Rivers has a voice that in my mind can tear the soul out of my body as she as she squawks and screeches about the stars’ fashions at the Oscars. I am in no particular hurry to worship Joan Rivers nor Cecil B. DeMille. What I mean to get across comedically is that special effects capable of being produced cheaply these days by Industrial Light and Magic and the good folks over at Lucasfilm hardly proves God for me. A simple retort might be “but no one believes the fantastic stories and special effects of today to be true”. Tell that to the people who suffered mass panic and hysteria at the radio transmission of Welles’ “The War of The Worlds” in the 1938. (6) In summation, as we build here, for statement 1, we have 3 million unproved witnesses witnessing something they say was fiery, scary and spoke with a loud voice. If one were to tell a Kuzari adherent of UFO sightings, they would likely start to ask questions as to what other explanations could explain this phenomenon: why not here too? (7)

Now we look at statement 2, specifically at the part which says: starting with the witnessing generation, we have an unbroken chain of transmission. The ‘starting with the witnessing generation’ part is key. It says that it is impossible to get a generation (a large group of people) to accept anything as an accurate account of history which was not known to be an accurate account history. Yet when you poke a Kuzari adherent for proof of the Israelites’ slavery in Egypt you quickly get this response: “The Egyptians did not record their defeats.” (8) Well hang on a second here, does not that suggest that the Egyptians published a history and the greater than 3 million Egyptians that read it accepted it as true even though they knew it was untrue? (9) So can you cause multitudes to accept a false history or not? Which is it? The answer cannot be, if we are to have a sensible conversation, yes in the case of the Egyptians and no in the case of the Israelites. It also cannot be the answer that the Egyptians were embarrassed by defeat and thus motivated to accept the faked history because we cannot know if the Israelites also were not embarrassed by some historical event and thus were motivated to accept a revised history of unique divine revelation. Recall, we cannot assume the Torah as an accurate account of history to prove that the Torah is an accurate account of history. Keeping our eye on the ball, it is NOT the issue here whether or not there were slaves in Egypt, nor is it the issue as to what the actual history of the region was. The issue is that you cannot, at once, claim that you both can and cannot cause a large number of people to accept a false history. The Kuzari proof and discussions of the Kuzari proof are fraught with these sorts of asymmetric applications of explanatory logic. You cannot suck and blow from the same explanatory pipe at the same time.

Next we address statement 3, the inerrancy and incorruptibility of generational transmission of this revelation. Note: this statement is really just a summation of points 1 and 2 where the true Kuzari argument rests. Many people have accused the Torah of suffering from ‘broken telephone’ transmission. The orthodox authorities have correctly retorted that they have proof, archaeological no less, that the Torah has shifted perhaps 2 or 3 letters at most during all of its transmission. Parenthetically, for those keeping score and who just noted an asymmetrical application of explanatory logic, a gold star to you. You correctly noted that all of the sudden archaeology IS an acceptable proof that the Torah has not changed through the generations, yet archaeology IS NOT acceptable as proof that there were not Israelites in Egypt.

If the Torah did not significantly change over they centuries, which is a statement I will accept due to archaeological supporting evidence, the question becomes: why would any people accept the Torah as history, as the ancient Israelites seemed to, if its contents (the description of the revelation at Sinai) were not known to be true? In typical rabbinic style, let me answer a question with a question: Why would the multitudes that accepted the Gospels as gospel, accept them unless they knew somehow that Jesus had indeed miraculously fed the multitudes fish and loaves of bread as the gospels describe? (10) “After the people saw the miraculous sign that Jesus did, they began to say, ‘Surely this is the Prophet who is to come into the world.’ ” (John 6:14) (11) The problem here exists in yet another asymmetrical application of explanatory logic. If you cannot pervert a generational transmission of a miraculous event, then adherents to the Kuzari proof must by definition, accept that Jesus fed the multitudes by miracle. To be clear, I am not saying whether Jesus fed the multitudes or not, nor am I proving or disproving a revelation at Sinai, I am simply saying that the evidence of cultural widespread acceptance of an event as a miracle cannot be the proof of Judaism because it proves antithetical Jewish and Christian miracles at the same time.

In summation we see that the Kuzari proof is a failed proof because of fundamental flaws in logic. The two main fundamental flaws are assuming that which is trying to be proved and asymmetrical uses of explanatory logic at the convenience of the argument. The Kuzari proof is an attempt to prove the divine revelation at Sinai which, in turn, is a cornerstone of Jewish faith. (12) For the orthodox that appear vexed at the decline of Judaism, the message is clear: The rest of us will accept what you have to say when you provide cogent proof. The Kuzari proof is not cogent and the burden of proof is on you.

Further reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuzari

———————————————————
1 http://ohr.edu/special/books/truth-6.htm
2 http://www.talkreason.com/articles/kuzari.cfm
3 Numbers (1:46) There were 600,000 adult males generally leading us to conclude a total population of 3 million.
4 ibid
5 http://www.chabad.org/library/article.asp?AID=2047
6 http://radio.about.com/library/weekly/aa102302a.htm
7 http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9923316/
8 http://ohr.edu/yhiy/article.php/2053
9 The number of Egyptians must have been greater than 3 million if the biblical account is true because it would be impossible to subdue and enslave a population of 3 million Israelites with an equal or smaller number of Egyptians.
10 http://www.gardenofpraise.com/bibl43s.htm
11 http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%206:1-15
12 Aish.Com – Rediscovering The Revelation

For my grade 10 science project, my partner and I set out to hook a generator to an electric motor. The idea was that the motor would drive the generator which would drive the motor again in perpetuity. Now we weren’t so naive as to discount the idea of resistance. When you pass current over a wire, a certain amount of that power is lost to resistance (lost as heat). We were proposing using superconductors instead of the wires we used in our mock-up. We also proposed using magnetically suspended bearings and running our set up in a vacuum to eliminate all friction. Even if it was possible to eliminate all friction, there was still another problem for our design.

In grade 10, we had yet to be introduced to the laws of thermodynamics which strictly forbid such arrangements. A physics teacher came over to grade our project and after a quick glance he said: “background emf.” We stood there trying all permutations in our mind of what ‘emf’ could possibly stand for. He asked: “Background EMF? Have you taken grade 11 physics?” We dejectedly shook our heads to indicate that we hadn’t. He continued while leaving our booth “well you need it!”

Having recovered from our tragic defeat, and some 18 years later, I can explain the ‘travesty’ we had committed against physics. Background EMF stands for background Electromotive Force. What this means is that when you use a current (electrical power) to drive an electric motor, the electric motor as a result of its operation generates an opposing current to the one driving it. In a sense it is a sort of electromagnetic resistance. In short, what it says is that the system we built could never work, even if we used super conductors as wires and ran in a frictionless environment.

For the lay reader, a generator and an electric motor are virtually the same device. One generates electricity from motion and the other converts electricity into motion. In fact if you were to take an electric motor and hook up a volt meter to it and spin it, you’d discover that there voltage was generated just as if it were a generator. At the core of either device lies a loop (or loops) of wire and magnets. Recall that I said if you spin an electric motor, you generate a current. Well that’s exactly what background EMF is. As the motor spins, it also generates a current in the opposing direction to the current driving it.

Now along comes Thane Heins.
http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/article/300042
http://www.thestar.com/Article/300041
Through experimentation, he has come up with an arrangement which theoretically feeds background EMF back into the electric motor in a way which ADDS to the current driving the motor. In so doing he’s (theoretically) created a positive feedback loop which causes the motor, not only to maintain speed, but actually to accelerate.

This flies in the face of physics, specifically the laws of thermodynamics which say that you the amount of energy in the universe is constant and in a closed system, you can’t create energy. Heins’ system is what’s called a closed system, that is there is no external input of energy, hence it should not be able to create any more energy than was inputted: ie, the wheel should never gain speed, if anything it should always slow down.

Claims of perpetual motion on the Internet are about as common as claims of a new fad diet which will slim you with no effort. If you catch my drift, such claims are usually discarded as junk science. In this particular case though, it has appeared to have attracted the attention of several physicists, one of whom from MIT, who haven’t admitted that he’s achieved perpetual motion, but also haven’t been able to point out any obvious error in his experimental setup and claim.

Even if this fails to be perpetual motion, perhaps some of the concepts can be adapted to produce newer and more efficient electric motors. At the very least, the exploration of Heins’ design and concepts should help illuminate us all. To see video and for some further reading, please see:

http://www.g9toengineering.com/backemf/demonstration.htm

My first mistake occurred when I assumed the Federal Reserve was a federal institution of any sort. This is not at all true. It is a private bank enacted by an act of congress in 1913 to oversee the US monetary policy. I offer the following interesting nugget of information for those who are interested: It was passed on Dec 23 1913 when most of congress was on vacation, in absence of a proper quorum. If that tidbit piqued your interest, please see this post: http://mwiner.wordpress.com/2008/01/25/terrific-documentary-explaining-the-economy/

So how then does the Fed manage to control interest rates? First off, when you hear of the Fed lowering or raising the interest rate, it isn’t directly lowering or raising the interest rates, it is changing the target interest rate. At a high level, the Fed accomplishes this by controlling the supply of money. Money, just like any other commodity can respond to supply and demand. If there is a lot of money in the economy, interest rates will drop because banks will have an easier time of procuring money to loan. However, having more money in the economy encourages inflation because the value of the currency is lowered by increased supply.

If you want to understand how the Fed manages to expand or contract the supply of money, we need to first understand a few key concepts. The first is partial reserve banking. It was long ago that banks discovered that not every person needed their cash at any given time. It was thus that banks could loan money that technically they didn’t have on reserve. In the US, banks are required to maintain a 10% reserve which means they can loan out 10 times the amount they have on reserve. (This is often referred to as ‘banker’s reach’.)

Next you need to understand what a treasury bill is. A treasury bill is a promise issued to the buyer by the federal government to give you the maturation price of the bill on the maturation date. The bill is always sold at a discount rate, that is a rate, less than the maturation date. For example, a treasury bill may be sold at a discount rate of $950, a maturity rate of $1000 and a maturity date which is a year from now. This means you can buy the bill at $950 and make $50 dollars profit when it matures in a year.

So we now have enough knowledge to work a simple example of how the system works. Suppose that the interest rate is currently 8%. Suppose too that there are 100 people who have $10 each. These 100 people each put $2 in the bank. The bank thus has $200 in reserves and due to partial reserve banking, they can make ten times that amount, some $2,000 in loans. This means they can make a loan of $20 per person.

People typically want to buy things that are 4 times the amount they have on hand. In housing the standard financing model is you must have 1/4 the purchase price in capital. So people with $10 typically want to make a major life purchase which would be $40, but as we see, the bank can easily lend everyone $20, but $40 would be hard to come by at a reasonable interest rate. Thus, people stop purchasing, the economy stalls and the Fed decides to step in.

The Fed does some research and discovers that if the lending rate reduces to 5%, then most people will be able to make the payments and will take out loans and start spending again. So the Fed set the TARGET rate to 5%. To reach this level, the Fed offers to buy a treasury bill the bank has on hand with a maturity value of $500. The bank accepts and now the bank has $700 in reserves. Recall that the bank is allowed to loan out 10 times the amount it has on reserve. So the bank can make $7000 dollars in loans or $70 dollars per person. Since the amount to loan out is plentiful the bank lowers its lending rate to 5% to entice people to take out loans.

It’s important to keep track of the total amount of money in the economy while all this occurs. We started with 100 people having $10 each. Thus there was $1000 in the economy. When the Fed purchased the treasury bill, it printed money to do so. So now there is another $500 dollars in the economy for a total of $1500. You may be scratching your head over the previous sentence, but this is the second part of the misnomer “Federal Reserve”. The Federal reserve is not federal and it doesn’t have any reserves. It prints money to make purchases. I don’t want this post to become a rant against the Fed so I’ll cut it short here and explain the other side of the coin: how the Fed contracts the supply of money.

So now in our moot world, everyone can take out a $30 loan to get the $40 item they’ve been dreaming of. However, one of the principles of a free market is that prices will rise to the maximum that the market will bear. As a result, since most people can afford the $40 item, the market starts charging $42 or $44. Slowly the price creeps up because the value of money has been decreased by an increased supply. In short we are experiencing inflation.

So the Fed sees this situation and decides to curb inflation by raising the target interest rate. By raising the target interest rate, the Fed makes money harder to get, more scarce and thus the market can’t bear higher prices, slowing spending and curbing inflation. To accomplish this, the Fed sells treasury bills. By selling treasury bills, banks that purchase them are forced to spend their reserves to make the purchase, thus pulling cash out of the economy. Recall that banks can loan 10 times the amount they have on reserve. By lowering the amount of cash banks have on reserve, the Fed restricts the bank’s ability to make loans. Since the bank has less money to loan, it must charge more interest to compensate, and the interest rates rise. The key point here is that the difference between the discount rate and the maturity rate must be paid for at some future rate. When the bank comes to collect on this treasury bill, the Fed must pay the bank the promised maturity price. If you have an eye for catching trends then you may have already guessed that the money to pay the difference comes from, yup, you guessed it, printed money.

In conclusion, the Fed controls the supply of money. It accomplishes this by buying and selling treasury bills on the common market. It’s important to remember that when the Fed buys treasury bills it does so with printed money. Also when the Fed issues treasury notes and those notes are redeemed, the difference owed to the purchaser is paid with printed money. This is called a fiat currency, or a currency based on credit — in this case the credit of the United States. It doesn’t take a Harvard ecomonist to realize that every time the Fed runs through one of these cycles of inflation and contraction, that the amount of money in the economy is increased. It is only a question of time before the Fed destroys the currency it relies upon by making it too common. This process is called devaluation. If you want to see devaluation in action, see this graph of the US dollar vs. the Euro over the past 5 years:

http://finance.yahoo.com/currency/convert?from=USD&to=EUR&amt=1&t=5y

I’ve never had to wonder where my knack for music and poetry comes from.  In the 50′s my Zaydie bought the family a record player and provided a set of records of himself.  Some records tell the story of Hanukkah while others provide a family history.  All are in rhyming couplets some set to music. 

http://www.rankyouragent.com/MaxWiner/MaxWiner.htm

www.goodnewstoronto.ca – Apr 8, 2010
Daniel Hoffmann runs “The Cutting Veg”: an Organic farm in Brampton with abundance for all.
http://www.martincwiner.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/DanielHoffmannArticle.pdf
http://www.goodnewstoronto.ca/heroes.html

I started a regime of recording myself as I treat the condition with herbal remedies because nothing my mainstream doctors have given me seems to work.

Here I take a stab at E Lucevan le Stelle.  By ‘stab’ I likely mean a mortal blow to the beloved piece.  I hope my sinuses improve before I desecrate all music.

E Lucevan le Stelle (Tosca, Puccini) – Martin C. Winer

Some may say this question is as naive as asking why do mosquitoes exist?  Viruses, after all, can be thought of as simple cellular parasites, using our cells to reproduce and spread.  Just the same mosquitoes don’t require an intimate knowledge of the workings of our cells, indeed the very core of our cells, to function.  Given that viruses are able to exploit our cellular processes suggests that they may themselves be part of a cellular process.

If you consider sperm, they are essentially packages of DNA with an outboard motor.  It isn’t a huge stretch of the imagination to imagine that viruses may be a method of information exchange.   In the bacteria world, genomic information exchange (aka sex) occurs via the exchange of ‘plasmids’.  Plasmids are circular bands of DNA which can readily be exchanged and recombined among bacteria.  Plasmids are typically not parasitic but more symbiotic and convey useful traits such as antibiotic resistance.  Viruses can also behave in this way.  Endoviruses, viruses which incorporate themselves back into their hosts DNA, could be used as a method of information exchange and transfer.

I’ve often considered an effective method for wiping human viruses off the planet in one felled swoop.  Viruses hijack cellular factories called ribosomes which manufacture proteins for us.  When infected, our ribosomes execute the viral code which in turn produces more viruses.  To disable all human viruses wouldn’t require much effort at all.  Viruses and ribosomes speak the language of RNA which is a derivative of DNA.  Ribosomes currently have no good way of differentiating between human RNA and viral RNA.  (As an aside, RNA sequences that contain siRNA (small interfering RNA) segments are a good clue that the sequence is viral.  This causes the cell to act to destroy such sequences.  However, we all still get sick, thus it clearly isn’t 100% effective.)  To effectively wipe out all human viruses all we would need do is add some well known key to all human RNA sequences.  The ribosome would then reject all sequences missing this key.  This would instantaneously wipe out all human viruses (which would lack this key).

So why don’t we do this?  First it’s beyond our current technology to alter our DNA in such a fashion, but it won’t be long before it’s within our grasp.  The question is: would we want to?  Elements of our genome already act like viruses.  Genes called transposons effectively jump from one part to another.  Disabling viruses may somehow preclude a vital source of information exchange.  In our oceans, bacteria ‘suffering’ from viral infections work to produce oxygen and sequester carbon dioxide.  Without this viral ‘infection’ it’s likely life as we know it couldn’t exist on earth.

So the next time you’re run down with a virus, consider that you’re merely the victim of a side effect of a process essential to life on earth.  Perhaps this is why we say “Bless you” when someone sneezes?  

                                                          (DNA Methylation)

Our bodies have had long and sordid encounters with viruses over the eons we’ve evolved.  One special class of viruses is called a retrovirus.  A retrovirus incorporates its genetic material back into the host.

HIV and Herpes are good examples of retroviruses.  it’s also commonly thought that retroviruses of various types can cause cancer by introducing lethal mutations. 

Danny Leung, a graduate student at the University of British Columbia (UBC) has discovered a mechanism cells use to fend off the effects of retroviruses.

A protein called ESET is effective in silencing endogenous (incorporated) retroviruses.  The cell also has another weapon in its toolkit called methylation where a small molecule is appended to the DNA chain to mark it as foreign.

It turns out that cancerous cells, have very little methylation.  Thus inhibiting ESET would allow the retroviruses already found in our cells from generations past to flourish, while, healthy cells would still have methylation running to silence these rogue sequences of DNA.  Thus the inhibition of ESET in cancerous cells would allow the retroviruses to flourish either killing the cell, or marking it for the immune system. 

more information can be found here:

http://techvert.com/health/ubc-graduate-student-finds-startstop-switch-for-retroviruses/

Martin C. Winer

“The Don Valley Parkway has reopened following a police investigation that had closed the southbound lanes from Eglinton Avenue to the Bayview Avenue/Bloor Street ramp for several hours.” [i] Those few simple words from the official news report veiled a darker truth.  On the roadway below the Millwood St. bridge a woman lay veiled in a white sheet; dead, nameless and not newsworthy.  Other non-newsworthy witnesses reported scattered pieces of flesh but that isn’t what people wanted to hear during their commute. [ii]

Commuters wanted to hear when the damned highway would open again so that they go to and fro from work and about their business.  After all, the economy is down and a closure of the DVP is the last thing Toronto needs as it tries to emerge from the recession.  The world is on the brink of the next ‘greater’ depression, and we can’t afford to be concerned with human depression.

To prevent any suicide related delays to business, the City of Toronto constructed a multimillion dollar barricade on the Bloor St. viaduct to prevent just this sort of inconvenience.  A cold metal architecture suspiciously rife with crucifixes keeps the depressed from interrupting our workday.

[iii]

Over the years there have been talks of constructing a similar structure on the Millwood bridge which is now the ‘favoured’ bridge of jumpers.  This reasoning is a classic example of detached bureaucratic thinking trying to solve a human problem with technology.

When we look at the problem of suicide from a human perspective, erecting barriers to prevent it is like the allegory of the Dutch boy who sealed a leaking dam by putting his finger in the hole.  A cold, hard crucifix bedecked barrier will never replace the warm compassion of an empathetic human heart.

[ii] http://www.theilliteratescribe.com/2009/08/bits-of-flesh.html

[iii] Photo Credit: http://www.marielugli.com/Viaduct/supportsystem_9.htm

While it is true that the Hasidic fedora and the Mexican sombrero have only an incidental similarity, a recent discovery in the Mexican desert reveals that Jews and Latin Americans share a common history.

One might be only mildly surprised to find a kosher sushi restaurant in the heart of today’s Mexico City.  But, what if one found evidence of a Jewish presence in Latin America in the 8th century?  Dr. Donald Panther Yates believes that a stone found in Los Lunas Mexico is a remnant of the Calalus Roman/Jewish settlement.  The stone, seen here, contains a mildly abridged version of the Decalogue (Ten Commandments) which is written in Phoenician script.

Here is a transliteration of the inscription as provided by http://www.ancient-hebrew.org/15_williamson.html

1.) I YHWH your God who brought you out from the land of Egypt from the house of slavery. This is a letter for letter match with the Mastoretic Text.

2.) Not YHWH to you gods other ones before my face.  Not will you make to you images or any likeness which in the heavens above or which in the earth under or which in the waters under the earth. Not will you bow down to them and not will you serve them for I YHWH your God a jealous (God) bring punishment upon fathers upon children on the third and fourth generations to those that hate me. And doing kindness to thousands to those that love me and keep my commandments. Highlighted portion is omitted.

3.) Not shall you take the name YHWH your God in vain for not will leave unpunished YHWH one who takes His Name in vain. Highlighted portion omitted

4.) Remember the day the Sabbath and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. And day the seventh is Sabbath to YHWH your God, not shall you do any work you and your son and your daughter your male slave and slave girl and your cattle and your stranger who in your gates for six days made YHWH the heavens and the earth the sea and all that is in them and rested he on the day seventh therefore God blessed the day Sabbath and sanctified it. Highlighted portion is omitted.

5.) Honor your father and your mother that may be long your days on the land which YHWH your God is giving to you. Here is a complete match with Masoretic Text, but not the LXX).

6.) Not shall you murder. Word for word match.

7.) Not shall you commit adultery. Perfect match

8.) Not shall you steal Perfect match

9.) Not shall you testify against your neighbor there false. ( Match)

10.) (Not shall you covet house our neighbor) Not shall you covet wife your neighbor or his male slave or slave girl or his ox or his ass or all which is to your neighbor. Highlighted portion is omitted.

Dr. Yates has written a book which I have yet to read on the subject.  Clicking on the image will take you to the amazon.com site.

I’m adding it to my reading list, but in the meantime some appropriate music:

Mexican Classical Guitar – Hava Nagila.mp3 – Marichis

Some have accused the Toronto Sun of sensationalism regarding their request of the Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner, Brian Beamish, to release Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) suicide statistics for coverage by the media.  The very accusation of sensationalism reveals a double standard in the way that media outlets deal with issues of mental health.  This past February of 2009 no one accused any media outlet of sensationalism when they carried the story of a TTC fare collector who nabbed a disturbed individual who had pushed several youths on to the tracks. (http://www.cp24.com/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20090216/090216_ttc_collector/20090216/?hub=CP24Home)  There was no fear of copy cat pushing incidents in their coverage nor was their any need to appeal to the Freedom of Information act to secure information.  If you have the misfortune of being pushed on to the tracks, you can at least derive some solace in the fact that your city and your local news outlets will deem the story newsworthy.

If on the other hand you have the misfortune of being thrown on to the tracks by your own hand, rest assured that when you rest in peace, the story will be buried with you.  Officials of all stripes will claim that, for the good of the community, reports of suicides need to be silenced lest you invite copy cat attempts.  The TTC in its press release cites a Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention Media Guide (http://casp-acps.ca/Publications/MEDIA%20GUIDELINES.doc) which suggests that in order to: "discourage imitative or copycat suicides, it is important to avoid or minimize: Reporting specific details of the method".

Beamish, after having reviewed reams of clinical research, concluded that

"The evidence provided … establishes that news coverage which provides details of methods used, uses the word “suicide” in headlines, romanticizes suicide, or provides prominence to a particular death or attempt could reasonably be expected to result in harm. This is in contrast to the simple publication of suicide statistics which do not focus on the details of a particular death." 

(http://www.ipc.on.ca/images/Findings/MO-2466.pdf)

He went on to cite a Center For Disease Control report which found, conversely, that the

"reporting of suicide can have several direct benefits. Specifically, community efforts to address this problem can be strengthened by news coverage that describes the help and support available in a community, explains how to identify persons at high risk for suicide, or presents information about risk factors for suicide."

(http://www.ipc.on.ca/images/Findings/MO-2466.pdf)

-*-*-*-*-

On August 26th, while driving on the DVP, listening to the traffic news, trying to navigate the infernal Toronto traffic, I heard of an attempted suicide off the Millwood Ave overpass.  Later reporting of that same event would only discuss a ‘police investigation’. (http://cp24.com/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20090826/090826_don_mills/20090826/?hub=CP24Home)  When the reporting changed to a ‘police investigation’ I knew that the attempted suicide was successful and that the media had changed its tune for our protection.  However, it didn’t take a PhD in psychology to know that ‘police investigation’ meant suicide so I wondered who the media were protecting?  The vulnerable?  If so, they only succeeded in protecting the most naive of them. 

Still, you won’t hear of any ‘police investigations’ regarding the Bloor St. Viaduct because a suicide barrier was put in place there in 2003.  As the result of some official sounding reports and official sounding thinking, some City Hall bigwigs decided that suicide was a ‘spur of the moment’ type of thing and their spurious research suggested that barriers would be an effective countermeasure.  Suicide is in its final moment, perhaps, a rash moment, but that ignores the often months and years of prodrome before a person takes their life. 

In the wake of this recent TTC report, there is again discussion of the erection of barriers.  Barriers take a Not In My Backyard-Bridge approach to suicide; simply shunting the problem elsewhere.  The Toronto Sun has acted courageously in their coverage of this taboo topic.  I hope that other media outlets to follow suit with panel discussions of social measures that can help troubled individuals deal with their issues in a respectful and dignified manner.

Gene DiNovi: A Personal Journey
Recorded: Apr. 18, 2008
Venue: Muttart Hall, Alberta College, Edmonton, AB

Gene DiNovi is a true treasure who earned his tenure in the jazz world alongside of such greats as Lester Young, Benny Goodman and Peggy Lee.  He’s featured regularly on Jazz 91.1 FM in the Toronto listening area.
http://www.jazz.fm/index.php 
Benmergui in the Morning, Thursdays 6-10am.

There is finally some online content for Gene DiNovi such that everyone can get a flavour of his tremendous talent.  Here is a link to a concert Gene held in Alberta where he recorded a previous album some 15 years earlier.

http://www.cbc.ca/radio2/cod/concerts/20080418gened

You can click on the individual tracks to the right to listen one by one, or you can click on this link and listen to the whole concert by following this link:
http://www.cbc.ca/radio2/media/20080418gened/all.asx

Riverwalk Jazz had a terrific program on Johnny Mercer, one of my favourite all time lyricists.  You can listen to the entire program and leaf through the bonus materials.

http://www.riverwalkjazz.org/jazznotes/Comerain/

http://www.citycaucus.com/2009/06/letting-the-endangered-cat-out-of-the-plastic-bag

Star Wars Theme Song plays.
Text “Earth Wars :: Arctic Melt – A Lost Hope” grows larger and larger until out of view.

Announcer
Coming soon to an Arctic theatre near you… Earth Wars :: Arctic Melt – A Lost Hope.

Obi-Wan, Al Skywalker and Yoda observe a glacier where water is seen to be streaming on the surface and forming cracks can be seen and heard.

Obi-Wan
I sense a great disturbance in the force… as if thousands seeking the truth were suddenly silenced

Yoda
mmm yes… clouded the force is.

Al Skywalker
I can’t convince the people that they are the cause.

Yoda
Always with you it can not be done.

Frustrated Yoda waves his hands and two bottles appear float out of his smock. One is marked CO2 and the other marked AIR. There are thermometers inside. The thermometer of the CO2 bottle reads significantly higher than the AIR bottle.

Yoda
See you the difference young Skywalker?

Al Skywalker
I see it, but I can’t make them believe it.

Yoda
frowns
That is why you fail…

Cut to the white house. Count Condeleeza, Darth Cheney, and Darth Bush are present. Behind them environmentalist David Suzuki can be seen frozen in carbonite. Count Condeleeza has in her hand a hologram of a planet deluged in water with a mysterious floating sattelite marked USA orbitting it. She is kneeling before Darth Bush and recieving parting orders.

Count Condeleeza
Very well my master. I will take our secret plans and store them safely.

Darth Bush
They must not know what we are planning.

Count Condeleeza turns off the handheld hologram, rises and walks out.

Darth Cheney
I sense Luke Al Skywalker will come to me.

Darth Bush
When he comes to you, bring him before me. Only together can we turn him to the Republican side.

Cut to Air Force One where Al Skywalker is on board in front of Darth Bush and Darth Cheney.
The windows behind reveal an active battle field in Iraq. Al Skywalker is wielding a solar panel as a weapon.

Al Skywalker
I will not turn to the Republican side.

Darth Bush
Witness behind us, all is going to plan. Your puny environmental slideshow and oscar is no match for the United States Empire! Unlimited power!! Once again the Republicans will rule the world and there will be peace!

Darth Cheney
Come my fellow politician, it’s time to join us.

Al Skywalker
Never.

Al Skywalker throws down his solar panel defiantly.

Darth Bush
… then you shall certainly die.

Darth Bush grows enraged as the scene cuts to the Iraq battle and the Star Wars them plays.
Text “Summer 2008″.
Fade to black.

Further Reading:
http://www.rsc.org/education/teachers/learnnet/jesei/co2green/home.htm

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gA1taPWzhCJnHQ79DowKK3VwfqQwD90DNCBO1

There is much debate of late as to who is the patent holder on the term ‘Marriage’. Conservative heterosexual monogamists have put their moral stake in the ground claiming that ‘Marriage’ is their intellectual property. The proponents of a traditional definition can be subdivided into the religious, who claim divine rights to the word, and traditionalists that appeal to the naturalistic fallacy that the definition is as it ought to be, proven and tested by time.

First, let us set things straight. What is the traditional definition of marriage? The short answer is: one woman, one man, for life. Yet, is this the definition that both proponents of the traditional definition truly espouse?

Those religiously minded who claim a divine definition for marriage point you conveniently to the Bible. Yet, weren’t many of the biblical greats polygamists?! Clearly some historical modification of this divine lexicon has occurred.

The traditionalists have also modified matrimonial definitions over time. As recently as 1997, Ireland legalized divorce, reducing the certainty of the ‘for life’ part of the definition. Throughout most of recorded history, divorce was simply, ‘not an option’ yet it seems that societal needs have forced us to alter that definition.

So what the proponents of a traditional definition of marriage present as an immutable and timeless definition, turns out, upon closer inspection to be a shifting definition which is a product of the defining times.

Having knocked the moral ascendancy of the conservatives down a peg, we move on to possible solutions to this problem. Most people believe in homosexual marriage-style rights, leaving the word used to describe this solution as the only sticking point to be debated. They turn to homosexuals and say: what’s in a name? Wouldn’t ‘a marriage by any other name be as sweet?’ They give them the rights but just wish that they’d stay out of their lexical backyard.

Same sex marriage proponents contend this would be tantamount to the tenets ‘different but equal’ and point back to the inequalities such thinking created in civil rights history. While they have a point on this issue, I believe that the semantic battle for the word ‘marriage’ is a bid to gain popular acceptance and I believe that their opponents see it as such. I would like to see advocates for the broadened definitions of marriage speak to why homosexuality should be accepted in general. In dealing with the issues at the core of the debate they have the best chances of evoking understanding, hence change.

The main points at the core of the debate as to whether to accept homosexuality are: 1) is it natural 2) is it evil and 3) is it a choice or endemic? We’ll examine each point in turn.

First what is natural? There are two aspects to natural, first the examples taken from nature around us and next the notion that the way things are, even in the human (not natural) world are the ‘natural’ way they should be. Looking to nature we see some examples of heterosexual monogamy in say, the Bald Eagle. However, more often we see examples of harems (polygamy) and loose monogamy (infidelity, or pair bonding for only a few mating seasons). While the traditional definition of marriage does exist in the animal kingdom, it is a minority player amongst many other definitions of bonding. Further, in nature we see examples of homosexuality amongst, say, male mice who often make female sexual displays in high population densities. Thus to say that heterosexual monogamy is nature’s way is tunnel sighted and uninformed.

Next we look to the idea that homosexual marriage is not natural since the heterosexual definition has been the prevailing one across the centuries. This is a classic example of the naturalistic fallacy which says that the way things are, is the way things ought to be. If we subscribe to the belief that the way things are is the way things they ought to be then we are forced to conclude that the world we currently live in cannot, and/or should not, be improved upon or changed in any way. Imagine if we all had subscribed to this belief, as many did, when it came time to review our ways in the face of slavery. Imagine again telling many suffering couples that they were stuck together for life because the definition of marriage was the way it was meant to be. Yet today we tell homosexuals that marriage is as it ought to be and if you want your rights, well then fine, but go do it on another page of the dictionary please. If we want the rights of deep, fulfilling, long term relationships to be extended to all humanity, heterosexuals must not drink the stupefying elixir of a ‘natural’ definition of marriage, because no such definition exists.

Is homosexuality evil? Well first, what is evil. To the religiously minded, they say evil is what God says is evil as given in the book of absolute truth. I’ve found that people who believe in absolute truths usually do so only because they are absolutely wrong. I admit that I have little respect or patience for those who derive their definitions of evil from a book and thus outsource their thinking. I dismiss them quickly for the same reason I scrape cold peas of my dinner plate, because they are cold and uninteresting. For those who are prepared to think about what good and evil really are, we come to the notion of utility. Good things serve a purpose and bad things do harm. This categorization is relative to a certain frame of consideration.

The ‘packages’ your dog delivers on the neighbourhood park are not good for you to eat, yet are gourmet meals to the community of flies. Thus the truth to the statement: “doggy packages make good eating” is relative to whom is speaking. In a thinking world, to show that homosexuality is evil, we must demonstrate that it is evil in one of two frames. We must prove harm to either homosexual individuals or to society as a whole.

To homosexual individuals, the main harm done to them by being homosexual is the lack of acceptance they receive. Many heterosexuals quickly point to the often ‘sad’ lives some homosexuals end up living. However, to borrow from the poet Andrew Lang, they do this “… like a drunk leans on a lightpost, for support instead of illumination”. The truth is that heterosexual intolerance of homosexuality is the cause of the ‘sadness’ they observe. Still, as acceptance slowly increases, we see many more homosexuals today live productive and successful lives. They do not necessarily live reproductive lives, but either do all heterosexuals.

To our society at large, homosexuality may have a reproductive impact, but on a planet of 6 billion, is this really an issue? If we really would like to have a discussion about harm, let’s talk about the harm of subverting this ‘evil’ impulse to be homosexual, only to have men live in a traditional marriage unhappily, hurting both himself, and his wife and perhaps children. Thus aside from the heterosexual discomfort it causes, there is no harm caused by homosexuality and hence it is not evil.

Finally, is homosexuality a choice? Why ask the question? We ask because if it is a choice, we can ask them to make a different choice. Well, homosexuality is a choice but only in the same way heterosexuality is a choice. Heterosexuals could choose to be homosexual if they really wanted to. What we refer to in common speak as a choice actually has two components, first a pressure and second a pure choice. When faced with an oncoming freight train, we have a tremendous survival pressure to move. Still we have a pure choice as to whether to move or not. Most of us would move. In the case of our sexuality there are pressures given to us by our environment, genetics and evolution and in the case of heterosexuals there are no other pressures which would cause us to use our pure choice to override this strong evolutionary pressure. In the case of homosexuals, societal pressures can cause individuals to use their pure choice to over-rule their evolutionary pressures. The fact that the natural pressure can be overruled does not suggest or imply that it should because most such individuals live lives with the constant stress of juggling conflicting priorities and are never truly at peace.

In order to determine the existence and severity of this pressure to be homosexual, being unable to jump into the minds of others, we need to empirically observe the effects. The empirical proof comes from asking: Why would any person willingly join a historically persecuted group if the pressure wasn’t strong to do so? Throughout history homosexuals have been shunned and forced to lead marginalized lives. This fact is common knowledge, thus it is impossible to state that homosexuals became or become homosexual on a flight of fancy.

So are heterosexual monogamists the patent holders on marriage after all? Why do homosexuals want the word so badly, even if they’ve already got the equivalent rights? Homosexuals want the word for the same reason that heterosexuals want the word, because of its meaning. It represents a deep, long-term, and socially recognized relationship between two people. Heterosexual monogamists claim to be the patent holders on marriage because tradition, the bible and nature have provided immutable and clear definitions of marriage that conveniently agree with them. None of that is true.

This preview rated ‘A’ for anyone not familiar with Star Trek:
A teaser from a good Star Trek movie: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

Khan (Ricardo Montalban)

Khan (Ricardo Montalban) blames Kirk for the death of his wife and the hardships suffered by his crew.  The planet that Kirk had long ago planted the Khan colony on had suffered a major catastrophe, yet no one from came to check up on them.  A Starfleet expedition chances upon Khan who commandeers their ship bent on revenge.

Khan tries repeatedly to kill Kirk but only manages to maroon him.  Khan suddenly realizes that marooning Admiral Kirk serves his purpose better:

Khan: I’ve done far worse than kill you, Admiral. I’ve hurt you. And I wish to go on hurting you. I shall leave you as you left me, as you left her; marooned for all eternity in the center of a dead planet… buried alive! Buried alive…!
(Kirk shakes violently)
Kirk: KHAAANNNN!
[echo]
Kirk: KHAAANNNN!

Khan!

—————————————————————————–

… and now for our feature … a review of J. J. Abrams’ “Star Trek”.

"Felicity": Keri Russell

Prior to the release of Star Trek XI, my only exposure to J. J. Abrams was when I flipped past his series “Felicity” in search of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” reruns.  Now I admit that there were moments when I tuned in to Felicity, specifically when it looked like Keri Russell was about to get naked.  But every time it looked like things were about to get interesting, Felicity went into a long soliloquy ruminating about the morality of it all leaving me with a case of ‘Clothes-off-is Interruptus’.  The rest of the show consisted of contrived plot twists all designed to elicit pouty and extended reaction shots.  In fact the one hour Felicity, stripped of the reaction shots would run around a minute and a half.  Is it any wonder that I desperately flipped channels seeking the scientifically shielded warp speed plot progressions of Star Trek?

When I heard that J. J. Abrams was set to produce and direct the latest installation in my beloved show, all I could think was “uh oh”.  I approached the movie with great trepidation and it only took a few moments into the film to realize that my fears were justified.  The antagonist of the film Nero is a Romulan who watched his entire race destroyed by a supernova.  The Romulans shall hereinafter be referred to as the ‘stock bad guys’ because they bear almost no resemblance to the Romulans of Star Trek lore.  If anything Nero looks more like Vin Diesel than any other character.  Nero decides to take revenge on Spock and the Federation who failed to save his race from extinction.  By analogy, this would be like assaulting a competent doctor whose best efforts had failed to save a loved one suffering from heart failure.  It just doesn’t make sense; there is no motive for Nero to go after Spock and the Federation other than J. J. Abrams’ motive to write a movie.

Vin Diesel XXX

Nero Diesel Star Trex XI

The movie was wrecked for me right there.  The rest of the movie was filled to the brim with other such contrivances.  There was a giant drill which drilled into the planet before planting a device which created a black hole.  Why couldn’t they just create a black hole on the surface of the planet?  Because Abrams needed it to take longer so he could write in more reaction shots.  The black hole was created with mysterious (and convenient) ‘red matter’.  The red matter interacted with the green matter of the given planet producing brown matter which then collapsed into a black hole.  So we have black holes and brown matter.  This single sentence is perhaps the best summary of the entire plot.

Take for example the sword fight with Kirk and Sulu versus the stock bad guys on the deck of this great planetary drill.  This single sequence drearily occupied at least ten minutes of the running time.  What happened to their phasers?  They fell out of reach.  How did they fall out of reach?  Abrams had them written out of reach to foster the sword fight.  What happened to the explosive charges they had brought with them to destroy the drilling platform?  Abrams killed the chief engineer who carried them to make things more interesting.  Why didn’t they all have an explosive charge each?  Abrams wanted a sword fight.  Starting to get the picture?

The Drill that launched a 1000 reaction shots

So Abrams got his sword fight and Kirk and Sulu won.  They then destroyed the drilling platform which existed only for the purpose of the sword fight.  They were too late though and the planet Vulcan was destroyed anyways.  Why didn’t the few surviving Vulcans seek revenge against Kirk and Sulu for failing to save them?  Because that would have ruined Abrams’ movie.  Why did a surviving group of Romulans blame Spock for failing to save their planet despite his best efforts?  Because Abrams needed them to.

The movie was so chock full of similar cheesy contrivances and plot holes that I could swear Abrams was Swiss.  Take this slice of the Swiss cheese plot for example:  Abrams again has Kirk brandish his sword this time wielding it on a scantily clad Starfleet cadet.  Abrams fails in trying to play up on the Kirk-lothario theme of Star Trek.  Kirk of classic Trek was a man of many women because his heart only had room for his first love, his ship.  While it’s true that the Kirk’s bed welcomed the United Colours of the constellation Benetton, classic Trek did it all with style.  Abrams’ Kirk was nothing more than a man-whore frat boy on a teen series (say Felicity) as follows:

Like, okay.  So there they were in the dorm room with nudity on the horizon and in walks Uhura, her roommate.  Like, oh my God!  So like Kirk totally jumps under the bed while Uhura starts to like undress.  Like thank God the dorm monitor had been binge drinking Romulan ale or it would have been all their asses!  Uhura is down to her undies and bra before she catches wind of Kirk in the room.  She is like sooo embarrassed but she plays it cool and pouts proudly as Kirk like hops out of the room.  Is it like any wonder Uhura went on to be Communications Officer.  That girl is like built.  She could raise any admiral in Starfleet, totally!

I was furious: Abrams had turned Star Trek into Felicity Trek, The Next Reaction Shot.  Sure this ‘new’ star trek (sic) was set in an alternate timeline leaving the original timeline intact, but I was offended by its very existence.  I couldn’t figure out why I was so angry, given that Abram’s hadn’t killed Star Trek.  But it occurred to me that Abrams had done far worse than killing Star Trek:  He’d hurt it.  I feared that in spin offs he’d go on hurting it.  Abrams was set to leave Star Trek as he’d left so many other shows, marooned for all eternity in the center of dead plot lines, buried alive.  Buried alive.  My fists shook and I stared at the ceiling of the movie theater and screamed: “Abrams!”.

Dick Hyman presents his analysis of Garner’s style in his Century of Jazz Piano CD-Rom – Encyclopedia (1999).  Hyman succeeds in explaining the basics of Garners style inasmuch as he reveals correctly describes the elements.  However, Garner took those elements and combined them in ways which were hard to classify and uniquely Garner.

Here is Garner playing April in Paris from Concert By the Sea – perhaps the best selling jazz album of all time, certainly one of the most precious.

Here is Hymans analysis of Garner’s style:

(For those politically minded) Why Men Don’t Like Female Centric Films

(For those with a penchant for subtlety) Why Men Don’t like Baby Bird Films A Case Study : ‘Notting Hill’

1) Plot inconsistencies. The plot in all female centric movies seems to center around prolonging a certain romantic uncertainty. This is usually done at the expense of logic. There are two good examples of this in Notting Hill:

i) William (Hugh Grant) goes out in the morning to find a frenzy of Paparazzi outside his door. He knows this will upset his actress girlfriend Anna (Julia Roberts) but only mentions ‘don’t ask’ when she asks him what’s going on outside. He lets her walk outside and be confronted by the same Paparazzi. This, of course, upsets Anna who wrongly accuses him of summoning the Paparazzi and causes a ‘break up’. This, in turn, provides Hugh Grant a grand opportunity to apologize (despite his innocence), setting the female audience swooning and the male audience hurling.

ii) William goes on a movie set where Anna is being filmed where she greets him warmly and intimates that she’d consider getting back together. Unfortunately, she’s just in the middle of a shoot so she walks off to film a scene and William is provided with a headset to hear what is going on unbeknownst to Anna. While casually preparing for the scene, a fellow actor asks Anna: ‘Who was that rather difficult chap (referring to Grant) you were talking to on the way up?’ Anna replies: ‘Oh… no one… no one. Just some… guy from the past. I don’t know what he’s doing here. Bit of an awkward situation.’ Grant reacts negatively and leaves. When Grant asks her later as to why she would say such a thing, she dismisses it as: ‘You expect me to tell the truth about my life to the most indiscreet man in England?’ This is an example of terrible writing where the writers dig themselves out of a whole by floating to the top in syrup. Why didn’t she just answer the fellow actor with ‘He’s a friend’ and leave it at that? Why does Grant have to put up with such behaviour and accept such lame excuses? Of course, in tradition with all Grant films, he accepts the explanation and leads up to:

2) The grand apology. It seems a new trend in the effeminized America to have the leading male prancing around apologizing. In every Grant movie there is a huge apology where he apologizes to some horribly behaved woman to get her love. Watching Grant wince his eyes and beg forgiveness having committed no wrong, aside from his selection in screenplays, is like fingernails on the chalkboard for the male audience. Ross (from Friends) and Grant (in every movie) always apologize for no apparent reason, and in fact, often apologize for not apologizing. Perhaps the only real apology in such films should be an on screen cameo by the screenplay writers apologizing for overly syrupy content. Looking at the movie script: http://www.juliaroberts.de/script2.htm, Men apologize some 23 times compared to 8 times for their female counterparts. The male lead Grant apologizes some 12 times, compared to Julia Roberts apologizing a mere 3 times. Somewhere around the 10th apology, women in the audience are becoming enraptured while their male counterparts are wondering when the next episode in the Star Wars saga will premier so they can watch a movie where men can proudly wield their light sabers and offer no apology in so doing.

Walter Kirn on The Colbert Report (Canadian Link): http://watch.thecomedynetwork.ca/the-colbert-report/full-episodes/#clip174780

Walter Kirn on The Colbert Report (USA Link):  http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/228190/may-19-2009/walter-kirn

Notes and Excerpts:

“Marine’s [Marine, Minnesota] elementary school was on a hill.  It was the largest man-made structure in town, one of the newest, and by far the ugliest.  Shape: rectangular.  Material: beige brick.  Constructed with tax money, it looked like tax money, a fiscal line item come to joyless life.  Even the playground equipment seemed bureaucratic: a stainless-steel slide and a set of iron monkey bars on which one could picture army recruits glumly sweating their way through basic training.  From the moment I entered the building’s long tiled hallway, its colorless walls inadequately brightened with red-and-yellow construction-paper maple leaves, I wanted out.  But out, I know, meant through. ” p.25

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“Certain questions which grown-ups deem unanswerable begin as answers which children find unquestionable.  For example: what is Death?  To me at eight years old, death was the signal for a person’s loved ones to cry and look stricken for a while and then begin dividing up his stuff.  What is Beauty?  The thing that made me like things when nobody was pushing me to like them. ” p.30

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On losing a debate…
“I’d harmed myself the night before the match by staying up till dawn trying to walk off and bathe away the phosphorescent curlicues of dread lossed in my brain by a drugged cupcake I’d eaten with a teammate in her motel room.  I hadn’t fully recovered when I found myself battling a girl with close-set eyes and the excessively brushed straight hair of a virginal prodigy.  Here was a force I’d never faced before: the supercharged purity of postponed puberty augmented by early viola training.” p.62

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In an early computer class, no one seemed able to use the computer yet it was promised to revolutionize the future:

“That’s when we stopped touching the device and chose to regard it as an icon or a totem.  Our classes turned into speculative chats about the wonders the object might perform if instead of addressing it in COBOL or FORTRAN, we could interact with it in English.  To heighten the atmosphere of possibility, we kept the thing plugged in.  This warmed its obscurely coiled and bundled insides, releasing unappetizing chemical vapors. ” p.66

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Upon watching a younger talented computer whiz work the computer…

“The exhibition unveiled no technical mysteries, but it did help me understand the term “conservative” as I’d once heard it used by a friend’s father while he was watching the TV news.  A conservative was a person who stopped adjusting once adjustment brought him no vital benefits.  The commandment to us from kindergarten on had been to grow, to expand ourselves, to stretch, but there was another option too, I saw.  Once could let others cope with the novelty and concentrate on the familiar.”  p.68

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On a graduation night romp with two exchange students:

Skirts came up, pants slipped off, and legs made V’s that turned into X’s and shifted on complex axes that allowed for wonders of sidelong friction that brought forth fetching squeaks and grunty purrs and primordially bridged all language gaps.  Some new bond was being stirred in that car, some fresh form of international understanding that the Rotary Club, or whichever organizations sponsored the exchange program, might not have planned on but shouldn’t have been displeased by, so intimately did it shrink our globe. p. 73

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Kirn feeling he was a fraud while mourning the passing of John Lennon:

“”All the lonely people,” he began [singing].

The choice was a magical piece of luck for me.  Afterwards, spent, having sung with my whole rib cage and fully emoted on every memorized word, I felt the urge to cry for real — from gratitude.  Thanks to my gloomy second-grade music teacher, I’d managed to respond convincingly, in the company of a well-credentialed witness, to a historic cultural tragedy that would be revisited for decades.  My genuine tears flowed along with my false tears, as they did the distinction between them blurred.  I wasn’t ashamed of this.  My fraudulence, I was coming to understand, was in a way the truest thing about me.  It represented ambition, longing, need.  It sprung from the deepest chambers of my soul.” p.77

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Drug use was rampant, even for the lighting guy during the performance of one of Kirn’s plays:

“The lighting guy, who’d eaten a hash brownie which he’d sworn would wear off before the show, toggled at random between clashing colors, turning the stage into a cruise-ship disco…” p.91

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Discussing a conversation Kirn had about  ‘the divided brain’.  Kirn may be a victim of this divided brain, leading to the impostor syndrome which he suffers from greatly:

“The best conversation of my life ensued — one I could never have had in Minnesota and one that helped me forget my recent troubles by occupying me with cosmic issues of just the sort a place like Princeton should raise but so far hadn’t, at least when I’d been listening.  Julian taught psychology, he said, despite having no diploma in the subject, only a book he’d written as an amateur.  It had ground out of his reading of ancient literature and concerned, he said, “the history of consciousness.”  I asked him to explain but keep it simple.  He told me that he’d try.  The modern human brain, he said, was actually two brains functioning as one brain, but there had been a time, long, long, ago, when man’s double brain had operated differently.  It’s parts, its halves, had been separate then, divided.  In fact, they’d been virtual strangers to each other.  When a thought arose in one of them, the other one, acting as a receiver, processed the thought as a voice, an actual voice.  This voice seemed to come from another being, really.  But who was this being?  Who were these secret speakers?  Man had answered these questions in many ways.  He’d conceived of gods and spirits, angels and demons, trolls and fairies.  Muses.

“Back when, before the Breakdown,” said Julian, “before the gods and voices fell silent, writers truly believed in inspiration.  They experienced inspiration.  It was real to them. Tell me: did you ever feel, during the composition of your script, that someone else, not you, was in control?”

“Honestly?”

“Of course.”

“Honestly, I feel that way a lot.  Down deep, in a quiet way, I feel it constantly.  And sometimes it shakes me up a little.  Should it?”

Julian shook his head, but not as vigorously as I would have liked.

“What was the ‘Breakdown’?” I asked him.  I had to know.  I had to know everything he did, suddenly.  Julian was a genius, I’d decided, even if everything he’d said was crazy.  And it probably was.  Because I understood it.” pps 93-94

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Jaynes

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_Syndrome

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Kirn is brought before the Honor Committee accused of cheating on his Spanish mid-term:

“Guilty or innocent? Yes or no,” Rob said.

I ate a pretzel and let Rob’s anger hang there.  I thought he should have to feel it in the air.  I thought it might force him to face his ugliness.  Then I said, “I heard this from a senior.  In France, there’s a critic, I forget his name, who teaches that antonyms, words that mean the opposite, don’t really mean the opposite at all.  They aren’t the only alternatives, that is.  There are other words between them.  And all around them.”

“Fascinating except this isn’t France.”

“You tell me to choose, but the words I’m meant to choose from — ‘innocent and ‘guilty’ — aren’t my only choices.  I chose another one.  ‘Uncovictable’. p.109

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Kirn discusses the ‘critical assumptions’ he’d made in reading.  Unfortunately, Kirn had done very little reading at all.

“With virtually no stored literary material about which to harbor critical assumptions, I relied on my gift for mimicking authority figures and playing back to them their own ideas as though they were conclusions I’d reached myself. I’d honed these skills on the speech team back in high school, and l didn’t regard them as sins against the Honor Code. Indeed, they embodied an honor code: my own “Be honored” it stated. “Or be damned.” To me, imitation and education were different words for the same thing, anyway.  What was learning but a form of borrowing? And what was intelligence but borrowing slyly?” pg119

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On the unreadability of some of the supposed ‘Greats’:

“This suffocating sensation often came over me ‘whenever I opened Deconstruction and Criticism, a. collection of essays by leading theory people that l spotted everywhere that year and knew to be one of the richest sources around for words that could turn a modest midterm essay into an A-plus tour de force.  Here is a sentence (or what I took to be one because it ended with a period) from the contribution by the Frenchman Jacques Derrida, the volume’s most prestigious name. “He speaks his mother tongue as the language of the other and deprives himself of all reappropriation, all specularization in it.” On the same page I encountered windpipe-blocking ”heteronomous’ and ”invagination.” When I turned the page I came across- tucked in a footnote –”unreadability.”
That word I understood of course.” p.120

See: http://books.google.ca/books?id=igP67FXXQCEC

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction

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Kirn discusses the literary catchphrases for ‘hard’: ‘ semiotically unstable’ (referring to TS Elliot’s The Waste Land), hermeneutical, gestural, recursive, incommensurable. pps 120-122

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Kirn discusses his use of literary catchphrases to mask his ignorance of literature.

“The need to finesse my ignorance through such trickery — honorable trickery to my mind, but not to other minds, perhaps — left me feeling hollow and vaguely haunted.  Seeking security in numbers, I sought out the company of other frauds.  We recognized one another instantly.  … We spoke of “playfullness” and “textuality” and concluded before we’d read even a hundredth of it that Western canon was “illegitimate,” a veiled expression of powerful group interests that it was our duty to subvert.  In our rush to adopt the latest attitudes and please the younger and hipper of our instructors, … we skipped straight from ignorance to revisionism, deconstructing a body of literary knowledge that we’d never constructed in the first place.”  p.121

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Kirn discusses how he used his confusion to his advantage:

“I was a confused young opportunist trying to turn his confusion to his advantage by sucking up to scholars of confusion.  The literary works they prized — the ones best suited to their project of refining and hallowing confusion — were, quite naturally, knotty and oblique.  The poems of Wallace Stevens, for example.  My classmates and I found them maddeningly elusive, like collections of backward answers to hidden riddles, but luckily we could say “recursive” by then.  We could say “incommensurable”.  p.122

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On feeling a fraud for learning to regurgitate professors opinions rather than truly appreciating the classics:

I grew to suspect that certain professors were on to us, and I wondered if they too, were fakes. In classrooms discussions and even when grading essays, they seemed to favor us over the hard workers, whose patient, sedentary study habits, and sense that confusion was something to be avoided rather than celebrated, appeared unsuited to the new attitude of antic post-modernisn – that I had mastered almost without effort.  To thinkers of this school, great literature was an incoherent con, and I — a born con man who knew little about great literature had every reason to agree with them In the land of nonreadability the nonreader was king it seemed.   Long  live the king.  p.122

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On page 122, Kirn holds a play of planters on a stage.  He watches in amazement as the audience waits for something to happen, which never does.  The play is titled: Planters and Waiters.  Double-entendre on “waiters”.

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On drug use at Ivy League schools:

“There is no drug scene like an Ivy League drug scene.  Kids can’t just get high; they have to seek epiphanies.  They have to ground their mischief in manifestos.  The most popular one around the veggie house held that drugs, especially psychedelic drugs — especially plant based psychedelic drugs — helped to break down the rigid inner partitions that restricted one’s full humanity.” p.124

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Kirn expresses a unique view on the relationship between literature and war:

“Literature had torn Tessa and me apart, or prevented us from merging in the first place.  That was its role in the world, I’d started to fear: to conjure up disagreements that didn’t matter and inspire people to act on them as though they mattered more than anything.  Without literature, humans would all be one.  Warfare was simply literature in arms.  The pen was the reason man invented the sword.”  p.145

This may not be as outlandish a suggestion as it may first seem.  If literature is based on pretence instead of substance, as it was in the case of Kirn’s education, then pretence needs to be defended by violence of all forms, military and otherwise.  Further if the great written works upon which the great religions of the world are based turn out to be not the writ word of God, they are then by exclusion, works of literature.  The swords that have been raised in the name of these literary works are well documented.

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More evidence of the theme of detachment.  Kirn seems detached from his inspiration.

“Tessa’s poems focused on harrowing emotions grief, self-loathing, panic while mine were concerned with grander matters Such as the creeping loss of ”personhood” in an era of technological change. How I’d hit on this theme I wasn’t sure, but the more time I spent on it the more convinced l grew that I’d borrowed it.   I invented an alter ego, ”Bittman,” and in my poems I stretched him on the rack of   mechanization and macroeconomics In class, Tessa praised my poems as “Kafkaesque” but I could tell she didn’t like them.” p.140

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More on the impostor/fraud theme:

“Out of shame for this hypothetical failure and hoping to break through to intimacy, I confessed that my poems were all a sham and that Bittman was a hybrid version of Elliot’s Prufrock and Berryman’s Henry, two famously beleaguered characters from the North anthologies.” p.144

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Kirn had ongoing conversations with “V.” – an exchange student who “represented the best of the best of [his] entire country”.

“I felt in his company, as in no one else’s, that my bullshitting was a defensible activity, a circular approach to enlightenment.  And I felt flattered when he listened to me.  Here was a young man who represented the best of the best of an entire country — of an entire people, as I saw it — and I was holding his attention.” p.168

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The pains Kirn went to in order to write collegiate essays after he’d lost his fulfillment in so doing.

“For a few weeks I was still able to write, but it was a punishing, grind, self-conscious labor. l began most of my sentences with ”the.” Then I went looking for a noun. “The book” was often the result. Next, I seemed to remember, should come a verb. “Is” is a verb. It because my favorite verb. I liked it for its open-endedness — the way it allowed for a wide range of next moves. ”The book is always . . .”  “The book is thought to . . .”  “The book is green and . . .” Impermissible. Yes, a book might be a certain color, but starting an essay with the fact wasn’t what college was all about. What was it all about? It was about making statements that weren’t obvious for people who made such statements professionally. “The book is a gestural construct possessed of telos.”

There I could rest.  I’d done it.  An hour’s work.” p.178

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Kirn develops a regime for deprogramming him self from his college ‘undereducation’ and pulling himself out of a resulting depression.

“My alarm clock woke me every morning at five, and for the next three hours I’d lie in bed, with my reference books propped open on my stomach, and repeat aloud, in alphabetical order, every word on every single page, along with its definitions and major synonyms. The ritual was humbling but soothing, and for she first time in my academic career I found myself making measurable strides, however minuscule. “Militate.” “Militia.” “Milk.”  I spent as much energy on the easy words as I did on the hard ones — my way of showing contrition for squandering my high-percentile promise. And in truth, they were all hard words for me by then.” p.183

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Reflections on having been awarded a post at Oxford.

“I’d soon be off to Oxford as a result.  “result” was not exactly the right word, though, because it suggested that logic governs destiny.  But now I knew otherwise.  Imagination does.  And though part of me had always suspected as much and certain teachers had coached me in the notion (“Image that you can be anything you want”), what I hadn’t understood at all was that our imaginations don’t act alone.  One’s own imagination is powerless until it starts dancing with another’s.

Imagine having been imagined.  Imagine.” p.205

Kirn’s summation of the book:

“… I discovered the truth — of words like “truth” mean anything.  Ad even if they don’t perhaps.

Pause in your knowing to be known.  Quit pushing — let yourself be pulled.  Stop searching, frantic child, and be found.

Some call this Grace.

I called it Marguerite.”  (Margerite Keasbey established the Keasbey Prize which Kirn received (enabling him to go on to Oxford)  after being denied a Rhode’s Scholarship). p 205

See: http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2008/02/08/19971/

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Towards the end of the book, it is revealed that Kirn’s Uncle Admiral — a childhood mentor — was Robert W. Knox RADM USC & GS (Ret.).  Here is a brief biography:

http://www.history.noaa.gov/cgsbios/biok4.html

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Kirn’s second, broader conclusion:  Reflecting on a friend Karl who was self-taught and well read and wanted to meet up with after Kirn graduated Princeton.

“We had a great deal in common, Karl said.

But we didn’t, in fact, or much less than he assumed, and I didn’t know how to tell him this. To begin with, I couldn’t quote the transcendentalists as accurately and effortlessly as he could. I couldn’t quote anyone, reliably. I’d honed other skills: for flattering those in power without appearing to, for rating artistic reputations according to academic fashions, for matching my intonations and vocabulary to the backgrounds of my listeners, for placing certain words in smirking quotation marks and rolling my eyes when someone spoke too earnestly about some “classic” or masterpiece,”       for veering left when the conventional wisdom went right and then doubling back if it looked like it was changing.

Flexibility, irony, self-consciousness, contrarianism. They’d gotten me through Princeton, they hadn’t quite kept me out of Oxford, and these, I was about to tell my friend, were the ways to get ahead now–not by memorizing old Ralph Waldo. I’d found out a lot since I’d aced the SATs, about the system, about myself and about the new class that the system had created, which I was now part of, for better or for worse. The class that runs things.” p.210

Martin C. Winer

The City of Toronto has undertaken a goal of 70% waste diversion from landfill.  In order to achieve this goal, City Council asked staff to prepare a report [1] which considers plastic bags along with several other ‘target materials’.  Insofar as plastic bags are concerned, both the preliminary research and the resulting plastic bag tax by-law are full of holes.  One hopes that they are printed on recycled paper because that is likely the only good either will do for the environment.

Legal Foundation:

City staff typically requests legal counsel in preparing their reports.  The October 2008 report concluded that the City of Toronto did not have the authority to impose a plastic bag tax based on the powers afforded it under the City of Toronto Act.  The City of Toronto Act (Section 8(2)) gives the city the right to issue by laws pertaining to the “Economic, social and environmental well-being of the City.” [2] The city staff believed that a plastic bag tax which would appeal to this provision “is not possible under the current City of Toronto Act, which only permits a sales tax to be applied to alcohol, tobacco and admission on places of amusement.” [3] The word ‘plastic’ is not only a noun but also an adjective meaning capable of being molded.  Evidently the legal eagles in City Council were able to use the latter meaning of ‘plastic’ to mold the blunt instrument of “environmental well-being” into a targeted attack on plastic bags.

Staff recommended a discount to incentivize reduction, not a punitive surtax

“A tax or fee on plastic retail shopping bags is not feasible under the City of Toronto Act, but the waste reduction benefit of a financial incentive is apparent.” [4] The city staff thus recommended that the City incentivize reduction via mandating a discount for using reusable bags.  “Staff recommends a per-bag discount of $0.10 to effectively drive source reduction behaviour by providing a reasonable financial incentive to reduce plastic retail shopping bag use.” [5] If City staff recommended a per bag discount, why does the resulting by-law impose a per bag tax?  Galen Weston, CEO of the Loblaws chain, caught wind of the impending legislation and paid Mayor Miller a visit.  He suggested that offering a 10 cent discount would be “prohibitive” and negotiated a 5 cent surtax instead. [6] Bearing in mind the ‘hard bargain’ Mayor Miller drove in resolving the garbage strike, it’s likely that Mayor Miller let Weston finish his plea and then in a ‘Jerry Maguire moment’ told him: “You had me at ‘hello’.”

Plastic Bags Levy has the luck of the Irish

In March 2002 the Irish government introduced a levy on plastic bags (colloquially referred to as the “PlasTax”).  The report to council claims that the Irish program was a huge success with: “a 94% reduction in the use of plastic bags (from 328 bags per capita to 21 bags per capita) in three years.” [7] As is often the case with political speak, the devil is in the details.  ‘A 94% reduction’ where?  Perhaps the supermarkets realized a 94% reduction in demand, but are we to believe that the Irish suddenly stopped lining their kitchen bins with plastic?  Charlie Mayfield chairman of UK retailer John Lewis remarked that the Irish tax “had reduced [retail] plastic bag usage, but sales of bin liners had increased 400 per cent.” [8] With regards to a meaningful reduction in plastic bags making it to the landfill, diminishing the supply at the supermarket ‘borrows from Peter to pay Paul’.

Why 5 cents?

Staff’s report also suggests that the Irish PlasTax “charged 15 Euro cents ($0.24 CAN) starting in 2002 and was raised to 22 Euro cents ($0.35 CAN) in 2007.” [9] The fee needed to be raised because “The use of bags increased to 33 bags per capita in early 2007, prompting officials to raise the levy.” [10] Staff’s further research revealed that: “a per-bag fee of $0.10 to $0.35 [(CAN)] would significantly reduce the consumer use of retail plastic shopping bags.” [11] Thus it’s a mystery how City Council arrived at a 5 cent levy in the face of their own research which suggests the amount is too low to be effective.

What about Paper Bags?

There is a conspicuous absence of paper bags in the staff report.  Recall that, historically, plastic bags were brought in to replace paper bags which were considered deleterious to the environment.  Conversely the final by-law states: “Persons carrying on a retail business in a retail business establishment who do not offer or provide plastic retail shopping bags to customers shall offer or provide alternatives, such as cardboard boxes or paper bags, at no charge to the customer.” [12] In fact, in Taiwan where a plastic bag levy was imposed, it was subsequently lifted in the case of fast food venues because too many were offering free paper bags, thus increasing overall pollution.

In Manhattan Beach, California the ‘Save the Plastic Bag Coalition’ launched a successful action against the municipality which had banned the sale of plastic bags.  In his ruling, The Honorable David P. Yaffe wrote: “The basis for challenge is that the adoption of the ordinance violates the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) because the City did not adopt an Environmental Impact Report that compares plastic bags and paper bags and determines which of the two has a greater negative impact on the environment.” [13] Ruling in favour of the challenge he continues: “The Administrative Record in this case contains substantial evidence to support a fair argument that the prohibition of the distribution of plastic bags to customers will result in a net increase, rather than a net decrease, in damage to the environment.” [14]

Misleading Statistics

A philosopher, a mathematician and a statistician are all asked “what is 2 + 2”.  The philosopher ruminates for several days and eventually asks “what do you mean by 2 + 2?”  The mathematician quickly says “4” and then proceeds to issue a 400 page proof thereof.  The statistician draws the blinds and closes the door and asks “what do you want the answer to be?”  There are evidently many statisticians at work in the city staff:

“Conclusions from Stewardship Ontario audit data (2005), presented to the In-Store Packaging Waste Diversion Working group, estimate an average of 8.8 plastic retail shopping bags generated, per household, per week in Toronto. This represents a total generation in Toronto of 457.6 million plastic retail shopping bags per year and, with each bag weighing 6 grams, 2745.6 tonnes per year, which is approximately 6,900 cubic meters of landfill capacity per year. Plastic bags do not degrade significantly over time and therefore this volume of plastic bags will persist if landfilled.” [15]

These statistics are meaningless in that they neglect to mention how many of the plastic bags are recycled or reused.  The plastic bags of concern are the ones which are the surplus bags which are thrown out empty.  These statistics make no attempt to distinguish between the source and use of the plastic bags.

The City of Toronto currently accepts plastic bags for recycling in their Blue Box Program.  How many of the 8.8 plastic bags per week are thus recycled?  Plastic bags are frequently reused as trash bin liners, indeed green box liners.  How many of the 8.8 plastic bags were used as garbage bags?  Succinctly, don’t judge a pile of trash simply by its cover.

While the City of Toronto decries plastic’s inability to degrade, they are talking out of both sides of their legislative mouths when they then forbid retailers from offering compostable plastic bags: “Retail business[es] … are prohibited from offering or providing … non-compatible plastic bags,” (City of Toronto By-law No. 356-2009, 604-4)  Non-compatible bags in turn are those “that are not compatible with the City’s blue bin recycling program and includ[ing] … biodegradable plastic bags or compostable plastic bags…” (City of Toronto By-law No. 356-2009, 604-1) [16] The use of compostable bags is prohibited because they interfere with the recycling of regular plastic bags!

Further, the staff report fails to mention how much 6,900 cubic meters of landfill capacity is as a proportion of the total.  The 2005 Solid Waste Multiyear Business Plan mentions that in “2003, about 1 million tones of material were collected from 1,000,000 units.” [17] So if we take 2745.6 tonnes per year and divide through by 1,000,000 tonnes per year, we get 0.2%.  So after all the fuss and commotion, City Council has managed to achieve 0.2% of its 70% goal.  There is an old Greek idiom which runs “the mills of the Gods grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small.  If this be virtue, then Mayor Miller’s environmental stewardship is saintly in that his millstones have ground both very slowly and with exceedingly small results.

[2] http://www.canlii.ca/en/on/laws/stat/so-2006-c-11-sch-a/latest/so-2006-c-11-sch-a.html Section 8(2)

[3] http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2008/pw/bgrd/backgroundfile-17097.pdf (p. 12)

[4] http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2008/pw/bgrd/backgroundfile-17097.pdf (p. 12)

[5] http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2008/pw/bgrd/backgroundfile-17097.pdf (p. 12)

[6] http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/toronto/archive/2009/06/01/5-cent-bag-tax-now-in-effect.aspx

[7] http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2008/pw/bgrd/backgroundfile-17097.pdf (p. 11)

[8] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article3508263.ece

[9] http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2008/pw/bgrd/backgroundfile-17097.pdf (pps. 11-12)

[10] ibid

[11] ibid

[12] http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/By-laws/2009/law0356.pdf (604, 3C)

[13] http://www.savetheplasticbag.com/UploadedFiles/Manhattan Beach ruling.pdf

[14] ibid

[15] http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2008/pw/bgrd/backgroundfile-17097.pdf (p.
[16] http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/By-laws/2009/law0356.pdf

[17] http://www.toronto.ca/garbage/pdf/2005_plan.pdf (p.28)

Many of us are lactose intolerant.  It turns out that most animals are lactose intolerant in their adult stage.  This stands to reason given that most animals are weaned off of milk early in life.  Thus the gene coding for the production of lactase becomes dormant. 

Dr Katherine Pollard gives an insightful precis of her work in this area:

Original Link:
http://fora.tv/2009/10/03/Dr_Katherine_Pollard_What_Makes_Us_Human#Lactose_Intolerance_and_the_Evolution_of_Human_Digestion

I was driving in to work recently, mentally preparing for the day as I normally do, when I was distracted by a program on our local jazz station. I was listening to ‘Benmergui in the Morning ‘ and he had on a pianist Gene DiNovi. I was completely mesmerized by his playing and discussion of Rodgers and Hart and Rodgers and Hammerstein.

According to one synopsis:

“Gene DiNovi was a promising jazz pianist during the heart of the bop era who chose the security of working in Hollywood and backing pop singers to provide a stable income to support his family. Following his move to Toronto, he sought to rebuild his jazz career and this 1993 studio session with Canadians Dave Young on bass and drummer Terry Clarke clearly signals that time hasn’t stood still for this keyboardist.” — Ken Dryden (not of hockey fame)

In this sense, he’s sort of a renaissance man. His story is inspirational to me as I hope to one day advance my music career. I’m not in DiNovi’s league, but you never know what could happen given enough time.

My music can be found here.

Here are some samples of DiNovi’s recordings:

‘Laura’:
http://www.artistdirect.com/nad/window/media/page/0,,319166-2707183-WMLO,00.html

‘My Old Flame’:
http://www.emusic.com/samples/m3u/song/10961396/14515384.m3u

‘Bill’:
http://www.emusic.com/samples/m3u/song/10961396/14515380.m3u

For anyone in the Toronto listening area, he’ll be on again, Thursday Feb 22nd 2008 from 6am to 10am on 91.1 Jazz FM.

In the past few months we’ve witnessed remarkeable events in the market. First we have the Fed bail out of Bear Stearns. What wasn’t widely covered or discussed was that this was effectively a result of a run on a bank.

Modern banking practices partial reserve banking. That is to say that the bank relies on the fact that not every customer requires their funds in cash at any one time. As a result the bank invests your funds during the intervals where you don’t need the cash in your hands. Banks in the US are required to maintain only 10% reserves. A banker can then invest 90% of the banks funds to turn a profit. This is called banker’s reach.

A run on the bank occurs when customers or investors lose confidence in your banking facility and demand their cash back. If enough customers demand their cash, the bank exhausts its reserve and enters a liquidity crisis. This is exactly the fate that befell Bear Stearns. It is interesting to note that Bear Stearns was a financial institution which survived the Great Depression of the 30′s. Had the Fed not acted as it did to bail out Bear Stearns, we may well have been in a greater depression at this very moment.

Please don’t infer from the previous sentence that I agree with the Fed. I think they served to cure the disease by killing the patient. They’ve borrowed excessively from the taxpayers and the US currency to temporarily asuage the bleeding, but haven’t sutured the severed arteries. The Fed’s own actions of forever creating bubbles and taking hindsight corrective half-measures is the very cause of our current problems, not in any way a solution.

There is no doubt that we live in ‘interesting times’ intended in the confucian sense. Just this week we’ve witnessed a second run on the bank in as many months.  This time we’re witnessing a run on the food bank.  Reports are coming in of rationing at Costco stores of rice, flour and cooking oil.  We’re not talking about Costco stores in third world countries.  We’re talking about the continental United States.

What has happened is that large commercial bakeries and other such chains have panicked at the rapidly increasing price of these staples and snapped up local supply.  Yes, eventually this will all work itself out, but the question is, why is this happening in the first place.  There are a few answers:

• The price of oil.  The price of oil affects the food supply in two ways. First it increases the shipping costs which are passed on to the consumer.  Next, it creates a surplus of money in the Middle East which then funnels its way back into the US economy as speculation.  Hedge funds use this money to invest in grain futures which artificially drives up their price.
• Biofuels.  Biofuels are a useless ‘environmentally friendly’ measure which were put in place by politicians to placate the populace.  Corn and other staples are diverted to be converted into biofuels taking food out of the food supply and putting it into our gas tanks.  There has been worldwide rioting especially in regions where food constitutes a large percentage of the general publics’ expenditure.
• Loss of farmland.  Farmland is being lost to urban sprawl and to environmental measures whereby farmers are being subsidized not to plant crops.  Sure environmentalism is great, but it turns out that humans are animals too, and our suffering should figure into environmental equations.
• Malthus.  Malthus famously argued that populations grow geometrically (2,4,8,16, …) while the food supply grows arithmetically (1,2,3,4,5,..) .  We live in a world of approximately 6 billion which is expected to rise to 9 billion by 2050.  Further the billions of China and India are no longer content to eat simple rice and vegetables but also want cars, beef and the more excessive lifestyle of their North American Counterparts.  As a result, we can expect more shortages of gas and food until we learn to live within our means.

It may seem at first counterintuitive, but being a member of the Jewish clergy can be a most diverse and exciting career.  The star of a Jewish clergy member can chart many courses, only some of which land him or her on the bima (worship platform).  Jackie Mason interspersed so many jokes in his sermons that he eventually went on to charge “a cover and a minimum“.  Then there is the story of the “Jazz Singer” starring Al Jolson in 1928 and Neil Diamond in 1980 remake which tells the mildly fictionalized story of a young boy Jolson, then Asa Yoelson, who must defy his father’s cantorial dreams for his son to achieve stardom.

The May 21st 2009: “Cantors Do Broadway” concert hosted by Cantor Ben Sharpe skillfully fa-mish’d (mixed) together all the aforementioned components into a well received, beautifully performed production.  The concert featured Cantors Ben Sharpe, Eric Moses, Ben Silverberg,  Marshall Loomer, and Laura Wolfson.  Many of the cantors were given to bouts of stand up comedy in their introductions.  There was a jocular banter between the cantors reminiscent of the “Three Tenors” Concerts.  Comedy again showed up in a parody of Irving Berlin’s “Anything I can do” which Judaically morphed lyrics like:  “I can get a sparrow with a bow and arrow” into “I can bake a challah, while singing the havdallah”.

The concert featured pieces showcasing pure chazzanut (Jewish liturgical singing) as well as more modern Hebrew songs such as “Hamilchamah Hachrona” (The Last War) — touchingly delivered by Cantor Ben Sharpe — which is a soldier’s promise to his little girl that there would be no more war.  The staple of the concert were the songs of Broadway which were all sung with great talent and occasional peppering of cantorial coloratura.  The cantorial peppering was not out of place in the Broadway tunes as many of the composers were themselves Jewish.  In fact, when gentile Cole Porter set out to write show tunes in a field dominated by Jewish composers, Richards Rogers, of composing fame, asked Porter how he planned to achieve success.  Porter replied simply, “I’ll write Jewish tunes“.

The concert was hosted by the Beth Jacob in Hamilton and had a warm hometown feeling.  Hamilton, it turns out, is not only famous for steel but has also forged many a fine Chazzan (Hebrew/Yiddish for Cantor).  Most of the cantors had ties to and origins in Hamilton and extended heartfelt appreciation to the city which had given so many of them their start.  Notably, Cantor Ben Silverberg, now of the Shaar Shalom Synagogue in Toronto, had his first tenure at the Beth Jacob.  The cantors recalled audience members who had given them a home on a Shabbat (sabbath) night, offered them a delicious meat loaf meal, or who had a friendly  Werther’s candy on hand whenever needed.  Love for Hamilton poured out from the cantors who had come to love the city that had come to love them.

The love was reciprocated by congregants who had taken these cantors into their hearts.  Entre-act there was a ‘Secondary Audio Program’ provided by the audience members behind me discussing how cute and adorable the given cantors were.  They provided running biographical commentary:  This one was married, that one was single, one just had twins, but I never found out which one because, just then, the cantors burst back into song.

This love of cantors comes from their greatest charm:  Despite some notable exceptions, most cantors are not national celebrities, but instead local heros.  The can have an almost celebrity status yet they remain accessible.  As such, they are not judged merely on their musical talent but also upon their ‘menschlachkeit’ (being of upright moral composition).  The standing ovation at the end of the concert was an expression of both these sentiments for the assembled cantors with emphasis directed at host Cantor Ben Sharpe who concludes his tenure at Beth Jacob this summer.

But first a word about how this article was written:  This article was the result of a ‘cluster’ or a free-word association.  This is an exercise which is meant to use the ‘right brain’ to spur creativity and generate writing topics.  You can create your own clusters or bubbles here: http://www.bubbl.us/ but it’s best to do them with pen and paper since one tends to self edit when typing.  Each word you see italicized below is from the cluster.  Usually, the idea is to take one theme from the cluster and write about it.  I thought it would be a challenge to include ALL the words and still have the article tell a cohesive story.   Read the article, taking note of the italicized words.  Then see the cluster below.

I have been worried about the state of the world as of late.  Being recently unemployed with no meaningful job on the horizon, I was wondering when I’d be returning to the 9-5 lifestyle.  It’s not that I ravish 9-5, as Dolly Parton’s famous song correctly puts it, 9-5 is all “takin and no giving” but it beats aimlessly strolling on sidewalks waiting for a direction to unfold.  Up until recently I was a member of the over 30 and unmarried class.  Fortune changes quickly and I now find myself suddenly being married with children.  The responsibilities are understandably far different.  Curious as to what direction my life would take over the next months and years, I turned on the familiar glowing oracle fitted in every living room, the television.

While I waited for my big screen TV, a vestige of my former employed self, to come to life, I recalled that a comic had mentioned that Dolly Parton had insured her breasts.  I wondered if the comic was putting us on, as he was apt to do.  Would an insurance company take premiums for such a ridiculous item?  What was the counterparty risk?  Were her breasts in good hands with Allstate (TM)?  The TV came to life with the evening news reporting of another hemorrhage on Wall Street of 213 ethereal points, with AIG requesting more bailout money.  Evidently, indeed, insurance companies would take premiums on just about anything and the only boobs in the interaction were the policy holders who actually thought the policy was worth something.  Bored with the evening news I changed the channel.

Dick Cheney was on “State of the Union” with John King on CNN.  Cheney, a bastion of the old guard was set to be ‘grilled’ by King as to the sins of his administration.  I flipped right past the interview because I knew it could not yield the satisfaction I was seeking.  Waterboarding and assassination squads would be second nature to a man like Cheney who shot his hunting partner in the face.  Waterboarding I imagined was just his technique for cleaning his felled game, human or otherwise.  I wasn’t interested in the past, I was curious to know what my future held.

There was an infomercial on with 90 year old Jack Lalanne sporting his leisure suit and his juicer.  I am a late night TV watcher and infomercials plague the airwaves from dusk ‘til dawn.  Jack Lalanne was born in 1914 and looked to be in better health than myself all thanks to his 1/2 horsepower juicer.  In went an orange, apple, and every other healthy fruit your mother tried to get you to eat as a child.  Out poured a fountain of youth which had purportedly kept Lalanne in such great shape over these many years, yet somehow, it hadn’t managed to save his fashion sense.  The leisure suit was last popular when the juice on everyone’s lips was Juice Newton, “Grease” was the new movie and disco was still in style.  I was intrigued with the notion of extended life and wondered if indeed Lalanne’s juicer could provide it.  Even if it could, what would my life be like, aged 90+ years drinking fruit and vegetables all day?  Would my life be fulfilling?  I changed the channel seeking an answer from the glowing oracle of TV.

The next infomercial was for Extenz tablets; an all natural ‘Male Enhancement’.  Well this held some promise now didn’t it?  At least my latter years could be herbally augmented with extra length and girth.  But just what were these pills I thought to myself?  “An all natural male enhancement?” I wondered to myself.  Didn’t we already have such a thing in Dolly Parton?  What were these herbs and how were they discovered?  Did someone eat a salad with wild herbs one night with shocking results in the bedroom?  How did they then suspect the salad and not anything else?  My mind was awash with questions and I wasn’t much in the thinking mood.  I wanted answers, not questions.  Come on oracle of television, what would my life be like?  The only effort I was willing to exert was in flipping channels.

Yet as I flipped there were a plethora of Viagra and its new copy Cialis ads.  Was the television intimating that my future would need these?  A Viagra ad promised that at age 50 I could trade in my sedan for a Harley Davidson and with one pill have the vigor of a 20 year old.  A Cialis ad promised 36 hour or daily dosing options to make sure I would be able to respond when the mood was right.  If I was as old as Jack Lalanne, would my wife still be ready for me?  I’d be worried about breaking bones at that age.  Another flip would quell that fear.

Once a month Boniva would rebuild my wife’s bones without the need to remember a weekly pill.  There would be no need to take those chalky calcium pills once a day.  Of course memory at that age will be compromised so the once a month dosing is ideal.  Side effects could include liver and kidney disease but at least you would only have to endure them once a month.  God bless Big Pharma.  I could have a once a day boner and my wife could have healthy bones all month.  I was comforted that the future would be bright.  My comfort was not long lasting, at least not as long lasting as 36 hour Cialis promised to be, when it occurred to me that Big Pharma was suffering from a horrible case of misplaced priorities.  With all of their attention focused on bones and boners, they had dropped the two big balls of cancer and heart disease.  I curiously imagined a big Pharma strategizing kick off meeting with people brainstorming on new drug targets and somehow bones and boners getting to the top of the list over cancer and heart disease.  I only hoped that Jack Lalanne’s fountain of youth Juice could get my wife and I past those two roadblocks.

I calmed myself thinking that my 90th year was well off, I being only 35 now.  Big Pharma had time to readjust their priorities.  I continued my flipping to discover yet another Big Pharma commercial for Requip, a medication for Restless Leg Syndrome (RLS).  My legs were perfectly atrophied into their TV watching position.  I didn’t believe that such a condition could occur.  “My doctor said ‘Requip’” said the announcer as a television doctor mouthed “Requip”.  I imagined that the doctor mouthed “bullsh*t” in response to the patients complaint.  [0u92R90U R ‘ jixz-]0039;ffaS980059-09ATRE MT3.  Oops, I’m ever so sorry about that previous mess, you see my arms tend to spontaneously move uncontrollably every so often…  Oh my, could it be I have Restless Arms Syndrome (RAS)?  Well at least I know that Big Pharma is on the case.  Perhaps if I ingest Requip while standing on my head, the medication will settle in the appropriate appendages?  Parenthetically I wonder if all Requip contains is a bottle of gel caps filled with Brandy?  All it seemed Big Pharma could do for me in my latter years was give calm legs and arms and a rock hard erection.  The Viagra commercial warned that any erection lasting over 4 hours constituted a medical risk and thus I knew my fulfillment from Big Pharma would leave me with 20 remaining hours in the day to fill with what?  What would I do?  I looked to the financial stations to see if I had any prospect of finding a job.

CNBC was heralding the success of the latest Apple Computer quarterly results.  The IPhone and the IPod were unrelenting successes.  The host discussed the failing health of Steve Jobs as a concern for the future of the company and since we now know all that Big Pharma is good for, the concern is justified.  I myself am not a gadget freak.  I often mockingly eye people walking down the street sweaty palmed typing at lunatic speeds on their Palm, Blackberry or blueberry or whatever the latest berry is.  I have no need to be so totally connected, but evidently there is a huge market for these devices.  Just the same I was delighted to see the success of Apple whose Macintosh computer was, in my mind, the superior computer in 1985.  Bill Gates was the smarter CEO, not the better innovator.  Steve Jobs didn’t allow clones of Macintosh’s while Gates allowed clones of the PC.  As a result Apple’s market share fell like Newton’s apple under newly discovered gravity.  With all the discussion of executive compensation these days, I think Steve Jobs deserves the lion’s share of the reward when it comes to innovation.  The IPod is simple to use media device which takes advantage of the recent wave of music piracy and MP3’s that puts the tale of the Maersk Alabama to shame.  Now don’t get me wrong, copyright infringement was not created by Jobs, he only capitalized on it.  The IPhone is the next logical extension of a handheld computing device incorporating maps, navigation and a whole host of other useful features we come to expect from Apple.  The Macintosh, the IMac as it’s now called, is gaining market share in leaps and bounds.  I guessed that I had attained some inspiration from the glowing oracle;  perseverance, like that of Steve Jobs in the face of constant opposition and I too could one day go on to innovate a pile of handheld devices – or something like that.  Of course this special was being aired on CNBC the so called financial news network that managed to complete miss any predictions of the financial collapse which had claimed my job.  I wasn’t about to take any advice from them.  No, the Corruption National Broadcasting System as I had renamed them would have to find another mark. I dismissed them with a flip of the channel.

The Cheney Interview was over on CNN and now Anderson Cooper on A.C. 360 was sporting a pie chart showing the distributions of the American reinvestment Plan.  There were huge allotments for infrastructure building projects.  A clip revealed workers building bridges all over the country.  Wasn’t it another Democratic president who wanted to build a bridge to the 21st century?  Now are we building bridges out of Chapter 11?  There was discussion of incentives to homeowners to renovate and rejuvenate their properties.  I thought of stopping in at Home Depot but immediately balked because the 27 minute hand waving discussion with 17 year old ‘Skippy’ who works there never seems to get me the results I want.  For all the talk of hope and economic plans CNN was pushing out, I knew that the recession was receding faster than Dick Cheney’s hairline.

Rembrant - Raising of Lazarus

Then they aired a clip of the master of hope: President Obama.  “America has been great and shall rise to be great again” he prophesized.  I thought this had a familiar tone.  I quickly switched to the Catholic Television Service and the pastor proudly boomed “and the phoenix shall rise out of the ashes just as Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead.”  The pastor went on to solicit donations for a new building project.  This also had familiar overtones and I flipped back quickly to CNN.  “It will take considerable investment from us all but we shall rebuild and come back stronger” proudly acclaimed Obama.  It then occurred to me that Obama was more than just a President, he was our primary minister.  He then intimated at his plan to remove toxic assets from the books of the banks without providing the necessary details I was looking for; undoubtedly he would turn water into wine.  The rhetoric of hope was overflowing my ears and I needed a counter position to ground myself again.  Luckily there was the FOX network who was lambasting Obama as the bane of humanity whose short stint in office had already thrown the economy into apocalypse from which only a miracle could now save us.

Putin and other former Soviet interviewees were quoted as saying that the end of capitalism has finally come.  A commentator remarked: “the American dream of picket fences has been replaced by picket lines” as the video showed protesting auto workers.  Am auto worker protested: “The companies are trying to divide and conquer us, taking advantage of this downturn to cut our benefits and pay.  I say enough taxing the middle class!”  Cheers and hurrahs followed.  My brain was like a pair of Levi’s jeans iconically being pulled by these two polarized stations in opposite directions, at the risk of ripping.  There had to be some truth on the glowing oracle of television.  PBS I thought to myself quickly.  That will save me.

Jim Lehrer

(Ed. Note: Actually it’s IOWA that is ok with Gay Rights, not Oklahoma.  In my cluster, I confused the two, but I went with it because the challenge was to write an article using all the clustered words.  I was only off by a 10 hour drive anyways.    )

Public Broadcasting, publicly funded and publicly ignored in favour of watching MTV to hear if Britney Spears of Lindsay Lohan were wearing underwear today.  Today Jim Lehrer was discussing the state of Gay Rights.  Evidently in Ahnold’s (sic) California the rights of gays have been ‘terminated’.   Ironically, Oklahoma seems “Ok” with gay marriage.  Is that what the song “Oklahoma, OK” is about from the musical Oklahoma?  The world seemed upside down.  Had I inverted myself such that Requip went to my arms and forgot about it?  Oklahoma was a place where I expected politicians to spout the bible about ‘being Fruitful and multiplying’ and how homosexuality was unnatural.  In liberal California, I expect them to say anything goes, from Gay Rights to cloning dolly the sheep.  After all doesn’t Hotel California by the Eagles promise “Plenty of room at the Hotel California / Any time of year, you can find it here”?  I couldn’t make sense of my world.  I was about as comfortable as a man swimming in itchy wool trunks.  I needed to flip the channel quickly.

Kim Kardashian

Chicks Who Love Guns

Up next was a documentary “American Justice” revisiting the O.J. Simpson trial.  It brought back names like Mezza Luna, Nicole Brown, Robert Kardashian, Kim Kardashian… whoops my mind wandered.  Robert Kardashian had helped set a murderer free but brought us Kim Kardashian.  Now they say justice should be blind, but have you seen Kim Kardashian?  He was off the hook in my books but the rest of the characters who let O.J. go were open to attack in my imagination.  I recast the events of that fateful night as a Quentin Tarantino movie.  I’d have my justice, if only in my imagination.  Nicole Brown would now be Jackie Brown.  She would seductively seduce O.J. by dancing for him like Salma Hayek in Tarantino’s “From Dusk ‘Til Dawn”.  She’d then immediately turn into a vampire and eat him alive.  Next, Travolta and Samuel Jackson from Pulp Fiction would show up and after quoting Ezekiel 25:17 would lace into the O.J. lawyers.  Finally the women from “Chicks who love Guns” as seen in Jackie Brown, armed with the AK-47 and they would deal with every “mother [t]ucker” in the jury room.  Returning from my daydream I realized that 10 years had passed and there was no justice to be spoken of.  The only thing I had learned from the episode was that justice is a function of wealth and that O.J. stood for Orenthall James, not Orange Juice.  I’m not admitting I was that stupid however, I’m about to write another article: “If I was that stupid, here’s how I’d admit it.”

I knew how the O.J. saga ended so I flipped again to see what else was on the glowing oracle.  John Sebastian crooned “Welcome Back, to the same old place where you started from…”  It was a rerun of Welcome Back Kotter.  Truly, I was basically back where I had started from, only an hour of flipping elapsed.  I knew nothing more of the future than when I started.  Sure I knew that my bones and boners would be safe, boobs could be insured, and that if I worked very hard, I might find a job.  But I was looking for important answers to important questions like, what would justice be like in the future?  What would the economy be like?  I was sure that Kotter’s Vinni Barbarino wasn’t going to be able to answer my questions.  With that, I turned off the glowing oracle for the night.

‘Apple’ cluster which generated the article.

This is the free word association (or cluster, or bubble) which generated the article.  Again, each italicized above came from the cluster below.