On Beardless Ron Paul

Today Ron Paul came to the State House. I didn't know anything about Ron Paul other than that he's a Republican that doesn't really act like one, and he wants to abolish the IRS. And I think I found a flyer of his in a public restroom the other week that ominously spoke of the imminent fusion of Mexico, the US, and Canada, and declared that we must stand against such horrendous horrors!

I took a stroll downstairs on the pretext of acquiring some peanut M&Ms and got a look at the odd Libertarian/Republican/Politically Confused man, and got an eyeful of his adoring crowd. I have to admit, it was funny seeing a bunch of "hippies" and "granola people" raising the roof for a registered Republican, even if he is certifiably insane (er, eccentric).

After doing a bit more research (a tiny bit), I'm now a little afraid of Ron Paul. He seems to be advocating a political viewpoint that, while not necessarily anarchist in presentation, would probably lead to governmental changes that would result in anarchy. He favors the abolition of income tax, the dismantling of most Federal agencies, breaking with NATO and the UN, and increased rights for gun owners. So, in my grossly politically ignorant reduction: get rid of the government, blow off the rest of the world, and give people more guns. Sweet! Throw in some global warming, and Waterworld starts to look eerily prescient.

And, despite his extreme advocation of individual rights, he's staunchly pro-life (which is an interesting paradox: is he supporting the individual rights of the embryo or oppressing the individual rights of the mother?). He's also largely against any regulation of the internet, which leads to another contradiction. The internet is arguably one of the largest factors in the "globalization" of the planet, something that is directly at odds with Paul's "seal off the borders and locks us all in" super-US-sovereignty stance.

He also touches women in their no-no spots (which may or may not have to do with his being a gynecologist, but seriously...he's probably a creep).

On another presidential note: We have not had a president with facial hair for 95 years (and it was a stupid mustache). 95! That's just pathetic and dangerous. To just what extent can a wimpy, baby-faced man take charge of this nation? What level of respect and formidableness does a smooth-cheeked man command? What sort of bald, juvenile cajones are being harbored in that beardless candidate's slacks?

Just ask somebody: who was the greatest president? I bet you'll find the answer for the majority of your subjects to be damned handsomely-bearded.

On Naughty Satellites

Today it was announced that a large U.S. spy satellite has lost power and will be plummeting to the Earth in a matter of weeks. The satellite may or may not contain hazardous material (read: it does). No one is quite sure where it will land. The whole situation is "top secret," and we are assured that "appropriate government agencies are monitoring the situation."

But what is an appropriate agency in this situation? The one that originally launched the satellite? What (or who) exactly was this spy satellite spying on? How hazardous can the hazardous materials in a satellite be, and why are we zipping them around the planet if they're harmful enough to warrant mention? The whole situation is being reported as quickly mentioned, "just so you know" news, when the reality is, this satellite could kill people. Maybe lots of people.

How much responsibility is the US willing to pony up for carnage caused by a satellite no one was supposed to know existed? Does a non-existent satellite make a sound when it crashes into suburbia? Can we as citizens be expected to respect the "top secret business" front that's currently being displayed if it turns out the satellite does cause damage? If this situation blooms into a tragedy, are we to settle with never knowing why this satellite was placed in orbit to eventually plummet to the earth one day? This could become an ethical nightmare: this country faces having to take responsibility for damage caused by a potentially naughty satellite, and possibly having to take responsibility for the reasons that naughty satellite was doing something it shouldn't have been, and the information it gleaned. What's being passed off as not-such-a-big-deal has the potential to take another large chunk out of our already-low global approval rating.

As always, time will tell, and in the mean time, we thrive on such drama. So long as it doesn't come crashing through our roofs, that is.

On Life After People

Yesterday, I offered brief commentary on a show a co-worker was speaking about over lunch. Luckily, I had the opportunity to watch the encore presentation of that show last night. It's called Life After People, and aired on the History Channel. The two hour special details how, if all humans were to suddenly disappear, natural flora and fauna would adapt and repopulate and how human constructions would degrade and disappear. The show begins with the immediate effects of a human extinction, moving into the future in increments of approximately 25 years before ultimately winding up 10,000 years past the date of the last human beings.

Having seen the show, I don't retract my initial reaction, which is that it is a decidedly narcissistic undertaking. Narcissism doesn't overtly dominate the special, but it permeates the ideas it is founded upon and, at times, its presentation. This is doubtlessly unintentional, as this implicit, mostly unconscious human-centrism is unfortunately the foundation for a lot of our species’ thinking.

I'll preface this discussion with a disclaimer and an extended quote from hyperbolist extraordinaire Friedrich Nietzsche. Disclaimer first: I am in no way a bleeding-heart, human-hating hippie that wishes for the basis of this show to become a reality for the sake of the rest of nature, and I am in no way writing this with the intention of proving the show is not entertaining or worth watching. This is simply an exploration of a line of thought that was instigated by the show. I rather enjoyed watching it, and my writings here are merely the consideration of new, related avenues of thought. And now Nietzsche:

In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the haughtiest and most mendacious minute of "world history"--yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.

This largely sums up the idea of the show. The premise is founded upon morbid curiosity. What would the world be like if we all disappeared? The question seems innocuous enough at first glance, but it is based upon the relatively egotistical (although true) claim that we dominate the earth to a large enough extent that our activities and accomplishments are actually planet-defining. It is nearly impossible to separate the "Earth" from the "Earth as affected by human activity." At its most basic, the show acts to remind us of how much power we wield over our home by illustrating how long and arduous a planetary recovery would be in our absence.

Though it could be easily argued that the overall message of the show would be impossible without its central device, it is still pretty drastic to be willing to entertain the eradication of oneself as the ultimate means of reaffirming how real and influential one is. While there is some discussion of the repopulation of plants and animals, the show mostly deals with how human structures will degrade without people around to maintain them. The mechanics of these sorts of breakdowns are certainly interesting, but the extent to which the show focuses on them makes it fairly inane. If no one is around, who the hell cares how long it will take for your house to fall down? Presumably, of all of the things in the Earth's natural environment that would drastically change in our absence, the longevity of our now-worthless buildings seems like the least interesting or essential to the history (and future) of the planet.

The emphasis on human architecture is the result of a somewhat pathetic undertone in the show, which is actually articulated at one point: "Can there be any hope that a permanent mark of our civilization will remain?" The agenda is thus revealed: the show isn't so much a celebration of the incredible natural phenomena and mechanics that contribute to the staying power of the Earth's ecosystem; it's a worried, desperate attempt at a gauge of our legacy.

The show somewhat redeems itself by being careful not lean too far towards either "purely hypothetical" or "inevitable," thereby avoiding a needless, haughty tone that makes the assumption that "no humans" is a largely unthinkable venture, but also avoiding falling into cliché doomsday trappings. But at its core, the show is based heavily on the all-to-human presupposition that human greatness matters to anything other than humans (read: it doesn’t). Now, I realize this isn’t necessarily the strongest argument as far as discrediting the show (if I were actively trying to discredit it), because the same underlying belief is present in many, many things humans undertake. In this way, the show can be used as an illustrative example of how this misconception is manifested in ways we don’t always consider at first glance. Nietzsche sums it up nicely:

One might invent such a fable [the one quoted above] and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no further mission that would lead beyond human life. It is human, rather, and only its owner and producer give it such importance, as if the world pivoted around it.

The last sentence serves well to call out Life After People: the embedded notion that the world “revolves around” human activity is what allows looking at a hypothetical world without us to seem so novel and entertaining. A world without people seems alien and depressing, because people view themselves as the one thing that is central to the planet. This is why the producers of the show couldn’t even part with humanity when the whole premise was the absence of it: the show remained focused on how long our achievements would remain standing, rather than on how the planet would flourish despite them. Even many of the discussions of animal adaptation and repopulation are colored through humanity’s remaining influence, focusing on how these creatures might utilize the buildings and creations we left behind. The show is really rather paradoxical: even when we no longer exist, we can’t help but think of how awesome we were when we did. And for that reason, were an alien to land somewhere on the planet, tune in to cable television, and watch Life After People, it would probably find its subtle self-importance laughable and maybe even a little sad.

The show concludes with the narrator stating: "There was life before people. There will be life after people," as if such a statement was somehow profound, or at the very least, not painfully obvious. It serves as a fitting end cap for the mentality the show represents. Sure, people are great.

But only to people.

On Buying More Time

Hopefully tomorrow will be updated with the extended discussion of Life After People, which currently exists in draft form. Here, to act as a placeholder, a stupid exchange from my day:

Today, after Clyde, age 80, passed out paychecks:

Ron: Clyde, did you pay yourself?
Clyde: Yes. I peed myself, too.
Ron: Well, I guess that's not too surprising considering your age.
Clyde: Eh, depends.

Pun most likely intended.

On Global Narcissism

Tonight I'm tired. Tonight, I'd like to just record a thought that I had been considering today, and maybe tomorrow I can return to the topic and explore it with a little more depth.

At work this morning, one of my co-workers was talking about a show she was watching last night, which showed what the Earth would be like if humans disappeared. Apparently it showed the immediate result of mass human extinction, moving further and further into the future and showing the changes as the world existed longer and longer without human influence.

I got thinking about what the appeal of this sort of exercise is to us. Imagining our nonexistence is fairly nihilistic, but it becomes profoundly narcissistic when we do it simply to see just how drastically things would be changed, thereby affirming our immense and overarching global influence. It takes a lot of gall to be willing to entertain your complete eradication merely as a means remind yourself of how much raw power you possess. I'll return to these points tomorrow.

Side-note: On the blog homepage, the title of the blog is cut down such that a new word is coined: Inconsequentia. One could say that each entry in the blog is a piece of inconsequentia. Or is the state of being inconsequential simply a quale of each entry, instead of its defining point? Maybe we're just dealing with inconsequalia, worthless properties that can't constitute the whole of an entry, being merely one of its comprised parts. Maybe these entries have some intrinsic worth despite their inconsequalia.

Maybe I really need sleep.

On Vehicular Mourning

I got a new car today. The plow truck driver's insurance company deemed my Civic a total loss, and then paid me almost twice what it was worth for it. We thought long and hard about the situation, but could see no sinister intentions in the insurance company's actions. I won't pretend to understand their logic, but it works for me now. I'm sure they just intend to fix the Civic and auction it off as a salvaged vehicle, but at least the now-worthless vehicle is off of my hands.

I drove home this afternoon in a 2003 Mazda Protege5. I spent most of the day really excited about this development, and I'm not going to lie, it's a badass car. It's much better than my Civic, and currently has 130,000 less miles than my Honda did. It's nice to be in an updated vehicle.

But I couldn't help but notice my excitement had given away to a low-key sort of sorrow this evening. I'll miss my Civic. I'd been through a lot over the course of the five years I owned that car, and it was well lived-in. This is not to say that I physically lived in my vehicle, but that it was gently worn in a way unique to myself. I put a lot of money into the car, some quite recently, but I don't feel ripped off. I don't feel angry that I spent $600 on new axles not three months ago, and now that money is gone because I don't even have the car to show for it, let alone the axles. Instead, I feel bad that I had to give up on the Civic. I feel bad that I got it nice new axles and couldn't stick around to make use of them together. Maybe I'm making my car seem to much like a living being, but I can't deny that it treated me well. I can now understand why my mother was so angry years ago when someone hit and totaled her Suzuki Vitara. All she could say to justify her rage was "I loved that car." My Civic will be missed, and I hope it will forgive me for essentially selling it down the river.

I think it will. I'd like to think it was getting tired and old, satisfied with the roads it had romanced and the people it taxied.

Now is a new chapter, the Protege chapter, and I can only hope it will be as storied and lengthy as that of the Civic.

On Three or Four Stupid Things

Since starting this blog, I've yet to come across any real trouble posting on a daily basis. While there are parts of every day where I worry whether I'll be able to come up with anything for my evening writing session, I inadvertently end up thinking about all kinds of stupid things.

Here are three stupid things I thought about today:

1) The commercial for WebMD.com that's been airing on basic cable channels.
Every so often when watching television, there's a commercial for WebMD.com that has a bunch of random people stating the various injuries and ailments that they've looked up on the website. At one point near the end of the commercial, a teenage boy rapidly lists off a bunch of medical issues (mostly related to his feet, if I remember correctly) and then exclaims "I visited WebMD so much I got carpal tunnel syndrome!" I was struck by the image of some frantic hypochondriac endlessly attempting to validate their anxiety, literally logging on to WebMD with such frequency that they inadvertently cause a serious real health problem (carpal tunnel is good, but what about irreversible eye damage or a broken coccyx from sitting too far on the edge of their seat and causing the whole thing to topple). I went to the website this afternoon and typed "hypochondriac" into the search box, but only one article was returned on the subject. I was hoping for a page that lists the symptoms of hypochondria, so that hypochondriacs could nervously review them and then be thrown into an all-new state of panic when they realized they suffered from yet another malady! In any case, I'm not sure about a medical website whose proponents gleefully exclaim that using the site brought them medical harm. "Carpal tunnel syndrome" is a lot to type in the search box when your wrist feels like it's chewing itself off of your arm.

2) The breath of football players.
Tonight's NFC Championship game between the Giants and the Packers found the players duking it out in subzero temperatures. When the cameras zoomed in on the line of scrimmage, the empty air between the two teams was riddled with fierce blasts of hot football breath, making the players appear even more primal and animalized than they usually do. It was like watching musk oxen prepare to butt heads or angry bulls readying themselves to gore the crap out of a moronic matador. Or maybe it was more akin to each football player's head being a piping-hot piston, churning rapidly within the team engine, revving up for some demolition derby carnage. Or maybe I'm just mildly retarded.

3) The teen pregnancy paradox.
I was talking to my dad over lunch today about the bad decisions some people have made in their lives. One of the worst decisions a person can make is to get pregnant (or do the baby-making act in such an unprotected manner so as to make pregnancy possible) as a teenager (this even goes for some in their early 20s). When you have children too young, you become locked inside a quality-of-life-ruining paradox. Because you now have a dependent human being to care for, it is important that you secure a decent job and a respectable place to live so as to give the child the sort of resources and environment they need in order to thrive. However, the very fact that the child is so utterly dependent actually prevents the mother from acquiring the ideal life-position to adequately address that dependency. The act of caring for the kid makes acquiring the resources to care for the kid extremely difficult. When you're young, this utterly screws up your life, because you never really get a chance to start out, and by the time your kids are old enough to look out for themselves, the better part of your life as passed you by, and your kids are probably all frigged up anyway. Sadly, this vicious cycle often extends beyond a single individual's lifetime and into multiple generations, endlessly propagating until someone gets lucky or everyone gets dead.

Ok, I lied. There's one more stupid thing I thought about, and it also has to do with WebMD. I came across a list of the "12 Most Embarrassing Body Problems." They were:

1. Foot odor
2. Bad breath
3. Excessive sweating
4. Bikini-line razor burn
5. Spider veins
6. Bumps on the butt/backs of the arms
7. Toenail fungus
8. Dingy teeth
9. Stretch marks
10. Excessive facial hair on women
11. Having a shiny face (???)
12. Hand warts

These just don't seem like they should qualify as the most embarrassing body problems one could potentially experience. Here are 12 things off the top of my head that I'd argue are even more embarrassing:

1. Loud, random, uncontrollable flatulence
2. The above flatulence, coupled with the fact that you shit yourself every time it happens.
3. Genital warts that are visibly outlined against your clothing.
4. Possessing an eyeball that actually behaves like those googly-eyes you use in art projects.
5. Getting a violently bloody nose every time you sneeze.
6. Severe chapped lips in which the skin sloughs off in one giant piece that resembles those wax lips candies.
7. Excessive sweating that stains your clothing green and/or a burnt orange hue.
8. Acne that extends down the insides of your forearms.
9. Rough, dry skin on your elbows that makes other people bleed if they accidentally brush up against it.
10. Premature ejaculation incited by the mere chaffing of your pants.
11. Severe balding that exposes the bone.
12. Having a penis and/or vagina where one's nose should be.

Whoop! There it is!