Everything is Shit

Immortality: its the one thing you want to take with you.

Zima is kinda like me: it was cool for about thirty seconds. Zima, though an icon of the 1990s, is actually studied as the paragon of the product cycle, because it rocketed to popularity, collapsed into obscurity, then hung on for over a decade, trying to reinvent itself (usually with unfortunate results.) Zima finally met an unremarked fate recently, when Coors Brewing Company (or Miller, can’t remember which) decided that while it was still a moderately profitable product, it really wasn’t worth their time or trouble. Most people didn’t notice, and of those who did, most said “Good riddance”. For the rest, Zima’s demise is a bit of a minor cause: people are actually coming out of the closet and telling the world they want their Zima back — or at least they did, before their website went under too, probably from a lack of hits (before it was canceled, Zima was like a Moped: fun, but they wouldn’t want to be seen doing it.)

Babylon 5 fans are in a bit of a quandary, because Zima exists in the Babylon 5 universe. If you ever watch B5 look above the bar in some of the drinking scenes and you will see a Zima sign somewhere. Product placement? Probably. Zima came out right when Babylon 5 — another ’90s icon — hit the now defunct Prime Time Entertainment Network, and both were popular topics on and early users of the Internet (which also exploded in popularity at the same time.) More to the point, my friends and I used to play a drinking game that involved watching Babylon 5 while drinking copious quantities of Zima. Those were good times, and I still drink a (single) Zima when watching reruns of the first season of B5 (or at least I used to.)

Yes, you read correctly. I admit it. I am a (mostly) macho guy who drinks Zima. And I like it (well, I like ONE Zima: the second Zima isn’t quite so good, and the third is kinda nasty, so if I’m determined to get plowed I usually switch to wine after that single Zima. Also I never drink it unless I’m watching B5, its a retro thing.) I know its not cool to like Zima, but nobody has called me cool since college and I’m old enough now that I don’t care any more.

So, when I saw the last three six packs of Zima on clearance sale at the local grocery store, I bought them. They are taking up space in my fridge and probably will for some time. The question is, if Zima was still profitable on a small scale and it still has its fans, would it not make a decent business for someone interested in serving a niche market? Hmmm . . . maybe I could be my own boss? Zima, anyone?

Republicans use MicroSoft
and hate anyone who doesn’t

Liberals use Macs
and pity anyone who doesn’t

Libertarians use Linux
and understand it
but not anyone who doesn’t

I recently wrote about listening to a radio talk show in New York where the host would call his former teachers and pull a gag on them. I don’t remember what the show was (I’m not from that part of the country) but a few months later I was listening to the same show where they stirred up a debate about a kid who used his extraordinary I.Q. to finish school early and begin his career young, with the goal of curing a major disease and retiring while he was still young.

I don’t think I ever heard quite so much reaction to any other radio talk show. One after another, the listeners mounted an impromptu guilt campaign to bully the child and his parents to repent and allow the child to, “Be a kid”, or he would never “fit in” and would likely grow up to be an “evil genius”. You would not believe how many times I heard that phrase: “evil genius”, over and over, I had to wonder where had these people — each of them remarkably average — absorbed their fear of intelligence? It was as if forcing the child to be less than what he obviously was could ameliorate the caller’s fear that somewhere, someone might outwit them at pinochle.

The problem of course, is that a child like this will never fit into a world designed for the average. Look at a child who has an I.Q. of 60, which is 40 points below the mean (average) of 100. The difference is obvious — fair or unfair, they stand out. The same is true of children with I.Q.s 40 points above the norm: they stand out from the crowd and serve as targets for violence, at least until they can find their way into a world of people like themselves, and be among people who can understand what they are talking about, people who don’t fear them.

The child on the radio show had an I.Q. over 70 points above the norm. How can anyone expect him to fit in? If you put him on a construction site do you think he would be just one of the guys? There are some things even the best actors can’t fake day in and day out, and this kid was no actor.

You want to make an evil genius? You want something to really be afraid of? Take a kid like that, a kid with a seething intellectual curiosity, and force him to learn something he already knows — far better than his teachers ever will — day after day, year after year, for twelve years. Do this to him while excluding him from all social interaction, all while being insulted and getting the tar beaten out of him, and knowing he will have to work years later in life than he otherwise would have just to achieve the same goals he could have many years earlier. Do you really think he will feel any loyalty to the home team team after such abuse?

Let that kid go, let him become what he can be, let him populate the intellectual world he was meant for, and be kind to him and teach him to be kind in return — free him to cure cancer and ease the suffering of the people he will remember, long after they have forgotten him.

Its not just the vile dishonesty that I despise, its the banal stupidity I encounter everywhere. It’s as if I live in a medieval global village filled with illiterate knaves who know nothing. Nothing! Nothing at all!

Within the last two years I have been challenged by no less than three people who objected to my “theory” that the Earth goes around the Sun. Two of these geocentric advocates were certain I had been led astray by my odd views and would therefore burn in Hell. The other simply didn’t know where the Sun went after dark. I encountered these people in America, where each had spent at least eight years of their lives in a “school”, ostensibly receiving an “education”.

Any institution that takes your parents money and eight to twelve years of your life — at gunpoint — and then releases you to the world fit only to be feasted upon by the corrupt, the cruel and the criminal, is an institution that needs to come to an end. Yet all people can talk about is school reform. Fix this, fix that — NO! END IT! End school, bring it down and stop this mass stupidity machine now. How anyone can think an institution this destructive needs to fixed, bolstered, reconstructed and otherwise assisted is beyond me. Its wicked, so stop doing this to our children.

The only thing I ever learned in school was how to roll a, ah, cigarette, and how to respond like a Pavlovian automaton when a bell rang. I also learned the most important lesson school is intended to teach: that stupid, artificial status structures that exclude most people are normal and natural — and that we are expected to defend them, and to be grateful for the privilege.

I say this as someone who got to share in the benefits of being part of the included group, so I’m not just bitching about what I couldn’t have. So why am I not more grateful for the pleasant experience high school admittedly was? Because popularity is a trap. To fit in, you shape yourself to someone else’s mold, you must become someone else’s idea of a life well lived, you must become something alien to what you were meant to be. School is a soul eater, as much for those who loved it as those who didn’t.

Worse, after all the years of your life that they take from you, they leave you helpless, ripe to fall victim to everything from simple con men, to murderous ideologies, to churches that have whored themselves and teach their flock to be unthinking, unknowledgeable, and downright vicious.

My Mom made me skip school to take care of my grandmother, and in turn I got to learn history at the knee of a master — and how to care for the weak. My friends wound up skipping school to help. I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything (and most of us went to college and turned out fine.)

One of those friends was a cheerleader I admired from afar. One day when she left my Grandmother said, “You like her, don’t you?” When I blushed she started telling me how to wage a virtual campaign of romance on the girl of my dreams — and it worked!

When my little brother got out of school he and his friends took over and I went to work. My mom would fix up her house (my mom knew plumbing — go figure.) None of this has much to do with convenience or go getting, but it was a much richer life, in my opinion, than watching “different strokes” or football on tv — or making money.

As long as I’m bitching about the shitty state of the American mind, lets not let the press get a free pass, eh?

Ever heard of Mars Direct? Mars Direct is a plan that NASA put together in the early 1990s which could have not only sent people to Mars, but would have built a permanent settlement as well, and could have been accomplished for the same amount of money NASA is already getting (0.5% of the total government budget.) It was the safest plan ever devised for getting to Mars, it would have allowed the longest visits of any mission plan proposed to date, and it could have been done with a combination of 1960s and 1840s technology. It could have been put together and flown in six years. Nothing had to be invented.

The press refused to talk about it. The questions that were asked by the press ignored Mars Direct (or for that matter any plan that cost less than 700 billion.)

Its as if every discussion on the news was a measured, scholarly, informed and respectable debate about whether or not the Moon is made of blue, rather than green cheese. In this environment a suggestion of lunar regolith made of silica and aluminum oxides would earn you an embarrassed silence. You could spend hours — no weeks — explaining the chemical composition of the lunar regolith, its geological origin, the role the solar wind plays as a depositor of helium 3 . . . the list of fascinating topics on this one subject is endless. When you were done the person you spent precious moments of your life trying to persuade would look at you as if you were mad and say, “No bro, its not green cheese, its blue, I saw it on TV!”

The most highly paid broadcasters are no better. I watched Chris Matthews of MSNBC sneeringly ask whether or not there were any “useful minerals” on Mars — nobody mentioned helium3 — only to watch the question get dodged by a female commentator, who said that the whole thing was a silly male fantasy and that today’s young people had no real interest in non-terrestrial matters (I’m pretty sure limitless clean energy might qualify as a “terrestrial matter”, but hey, that’s just me.)

I could almost subscribe to conspiracy theories were not for the question asked at one of the Mars “Spirit” conferences by a reporter from KTLA: “Sir, are the radio signals you uploaded to your rover traveling at the speed of light, or some other speed?”

Why do we allow ourselves to be informed by anyone this uninformed? Why do we tolerate this level of stupidity in our opinion makers? What the hell is wrong with us? Why don’t we just ignore these overpaid parasites and leave them to rot? How long will we allow these no nothings to fill our minds with shit?

Here is what Bertrand Russell had to say on the subject:

Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.

I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology…. Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called ‘education.’ Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one; the press, the cinema, and the radio play an increasing part…. It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment.

Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.

- Bertrand Russell, ”The Impact of Science on Society”, 1953

Whatever you do, don’t put the email address Info@bulk-mail.org on your website. It is the email address of a spam vendor and if you put it on your website it will be picked up by automated applications designed to pick up email addresses and spam them, and thus spam the poor spam vendor who owns this email address — and we certainly wouldn’t want THAT to happen, would we?

Remember, the email you don’t want to put up in any place that can be seen on any public website is Info@bulk-mail.org

Again, its Info@bulk-mail.org

Why do girls think they own the toilet? This week I was in a public bathroom — a public MENS bathroom — and two girls walked in while I was at the urinal. They laughed at my discomfort, and then loudly demanded that the man in one of the stalls “Hurry the fuck up.” Unfortunately for the young ladies I was just finishing, so as I zipped myself up I confronted them. Briefly, I promised them that if they wanted to play in the men’s room, I was more than willing to treat them as if they were the sex who were supposed to be in that room in the first place (and needed a lesson in manners.) I was bluffing of course — I don’t beat women — but I still can’t forget the look of shock and terror on their faces. What else on earth could they possibly have expected?

I once worked at a theater in Hollywood that had four bathrooms, two for the men, two for the ladies. On big events we had to turn one of the men’s bathrooms into a ladies because the girls would not only use the men’s bathroom anyway, but they would cut in front of the men in line to do it. The men would stoically endure and say nothing. Despite the unwarranted privileges we granted the women, ten to twelve times a night each of the employees would be still screamed at by some woman for giving all the bathrooms to the men.

I know a guy whose wife threw a bucket of water on him while he was asleep because he left the seat up. I know this because she boasted about it to an entire group of people while we were eating at a raucous pizza parlor. I asked her why she got so upset, because I just don’t understand the anger. She laughed and said, “Wait till you fall into the toilet in the middle of the night because some inconsiderate jerk left the seat up.”

I asked why she didn’t look where she put her bottom, and she looked at me like I was from Neptune and replied, “Because it was dark — DUH!”

“Why was it dark?” I asked, and just looked at her.

“You mean why didn’t I turn on the light, don’t you Mr. Professor?” she sneared, “because I woke up in the middle of the night and I wanted to go back to sleep and I didn’t want the light to wake me up.”

I thought about that for a second, and said, “OK . . . so if your husband wakes up in the middle of the night, chooses to leave the light off so he will remain sleepy, and assumes you left the seat up, then you are responsible for him whizzing all over the toilet?”

(If at this point you can imagine a group of henpecked husbands begin to laugh and cheer, while the wives, suddenly forced to do an impromtu balancing act on formerly sacred terra firma, begin to yell and try to shout me down, you have a good mental image of the scene.)

I waited for them to finish or at least quiet down some, so I could get a cogent argument out of them, but all they had to offer to the conversation was. “You don’t know what its like!”

To which I replied, “Thank God, your husbands are pretty hairy.”

This allowed a bit of laughter, and the conversation got back on track, so I was able to ask, “Why, what is it about being a woman that makes you not responsible for your actions? Are you not the equal of a man?”

This predictably brought more wailing and gnashing of teeth, but the response that got my attention was by an usually quiet young lady at the end of the table who peevishly said, “You try raising a child and then talk to me about responsibility.”

Rather than point out that I was probably just as good at changing diapers — the old kind, with pins — and testing to make sure the milk isn’t too hot, and had long ago proven myself more than capable of meeting all the other demands a young child imposes on it’s parents, I simply asked, “So you only teach your sons they are responsible for watching where they are going? Even when they are climbing trees, or learning to drive?”

You get the idea of how this conversation went, and the point is not to put down the ladies. The point of bringing this conversation up is say how much fun I had challenging received consensus and forcing a rethinking of an issue by people who think they have a religious mandate to dominate a physical thing by virtue of their place in society.

As you can imagine, none of the ladies were convinced of anything, but the men certainly began to look at the issue in a new light. I don’t know if that will keep my friend dry in his sleep, but at least I won’t have to hear some inconsiderate screech brag about bullying her husband. Sorry to tread on what you thought was your territory ladies, but either you are equal, or not.

ADDENDUM: I’ve since learned that each of the ladies present at the above encounter — all four of them — have decided that I am no longer welcome at any of their gatherings, that their husbands should no longer be my friends, and that one of the women insisted on it. I wasn’t surprised, I’ve had more than a few ex girlfriends try that ultimatum on me too, but I was surprised that all four men could be such slobbering dogs to their women. Perhaps they deserve to be bullied in their own homes, perhaps not. I certainly don’t claim to have all the answers, but I wish them all good luck: God knows they will need it.

A decade ago I was pulling my big rig out of Long Island, headed for San Francisco, while listening to a local radio talk show. The hosts of the show had a good schtick, they were calling their elementary school teachers and acting as if they were old friends. Eventually the perplexed, long retired teacher would be asked if they remembered their student from long ago. When the teacher said “No” the host would act as if his world crumbled, weeping bitterly at being forgotten by the one person who had molded his entire life, while being comforted by a befuddled ex teacher who wasn’t sure what to do.

The comedy in this gag is obvious: what teacher could be expected to remember every student over the course of a twenty year career, when each year they very likely had to teach hundreds? Yet the assumption of the government (and most people) is that this teacher, this person, who could not remember and would not have noticed if one of her former students ceased breathing, is better suited to raise your children than you, the parents, the very people who would be devastated — forever — were something horrible to happen to that same child. In short, the assumption is that people who don’t care about children are better suited to raise them than people who do.

If a child spends most of its life with you, you raise it. If a child spends most of its life with a teacher, they raise it. If you conceive a child, bring it to term, provide for its needs, are responsible for its welfare (and to some degree for its actions), love it, dream about its future, and are willing to die to keep it safe, how on earth can anyone say they care as much for that child and are more qualified to raise it?

Notice I say “raise” the child, not “educate” it. Children are not being educated in school today, and though you, dear reader, may object viscerally to that assertion, deep down you know its true (more on that in another post); however, in this post I’m not so much interested in education as upbringing. What values are  being taught in school, and by whom?

I just brought up values, and I’ll wager a fair number of people recoiled. The liberals reading my words probably cursed the right wing Christian wackos, and the conservatives swore at the commie pinkos. My question to all of you is, if you think teaching values to your children is so important, why are you letting someone who does not love your child mold your child’s character? Is it so important that you win control of the debate that you are willing to sacrifice your child’s future to that victory?

Why are we having this debate? Because you want something for nothing. You think you can get a free education for your kids and a free babysitter — and then tell the providers how you want those services served to you, like a steak. I’ve got news for you: beggars can’t be choosers. Either suck it up — all of you — and quit your bitching, or pay for a decent education, either with your own money (or for home schoolers, with your time.)

Take the time to raise your own kids, and give them a real education while you are at it. After all, you do love them more than some state appointed educator, don’t you?

Don’t you?

You just gotta love the strong ones . . .

The El Camino. Is it a car, or is it a truck? The mystery deepens . . .