I enjoy the Syfy show, "Eureka."
Not-quite-random aside: remember when the channel's name was "Sci-Fi?" They're leaning away from the name so they can run stuff that isn't SF. Too bad. SF shows work hard to get their story across, and generally they're pretty smart fare. But moving on!
"Eureka" is set in a fictional town, called Eureka (no state specified, but you get the feeling they're implying that it's in Oregon), that is entirely a government think tank and skunk works. Filled chockablock with geniuses and gee-whiz scientific gimcrackery, it's a special effects and visual effects director's dream/nightmare. Things fly or hover that shouldn't, cars drive themselves (or at least comment on your driving), the sheriff's gun shoots plasma bolts, et cetera.
Actually, the sheriff's gun doesn't shoot plasma bolts. The deputy's gun does.
The sheriff is Jack Carter (please note the tip o' the cap to Burroughs' famous character John Carter), an otherwise ordinary guy who, through a few happy accidents, becomes the head lawman in this unusual town. One of the defining characteristics of Jack Carter is that in Eureka, he's not just average. In the regular world where his 111 IQ would be merely average, he is in fact at the very bottom of Eureka's barrel. His own daughter's 157 IQ places her squarely in the middle of the pack among Eureka's brainy populace.
You would think that, lacking as much mental horsepower as the rest of the folks, Jack would be sorely outgunned at just about everything that goes on in Eureka. This being a fictional TV show of course, that isn't the case, but it brings to light many truths in the real world, too.
Very often in the show Jack is faced with a stupefying array of jargon and concepts that go way beyond his experience, and which stress his ability to even understand the problem at hand. But you don't get to be a US Marshal, and then recommended to be a sheriff for such a place as highly advanced as Eureka, by being stupid. He has an innate ability to cut directly to the underlying foundations of the problems at hand. The technologies and concepts are actually secondary - address the problem itself, using whatever technology and concept necessary while disregarding the complexities of those elements themselves, and the problem is fixed. It's a highly pragmatic, very effective approach to problem solving. I think any cop in the world could see the basic truth of this, and it stands to reason that, as a cop, Jack does exactly that.
I was watching video earlier today of the crewmen aboard the ISS entering the Spacex Dragon capsule once it had been mated to the Station. Flight Engineer Pettit can be seen, in the video, clicking a pen and writing (he's a lefty) on a pad, and it reminded me of the old "Space Pens."
Note: as a lefty, Space Pens are my kryptonite. The ink rubs right off the paper, directly onto my hand as it drags along the page behind the pen. This was a much greater problem with the so-called "erasable pens," and it's a truism of pens and indeed pencils in any case with lefties, but as a direct result of my handedness I never consider Space Pens to be much of a muchness.
The legend that NASA spent a huge sum of money to develop a pen for use in space is false. It was independently developed and the inventor invited NASA to try it out. They tried it, and used several.
Where does Eureka and Jack Carter's practicality come into this? Another show - I forget which - portrayed a disgusted Russian engineer pooh-poohing the Space Pen. "You spend meeelions of American dollars inventing fancy pen. We fly with pencil. Ten cents!"
NASA stuck with the pen - and Russia adopted it too - because of the assorted and demonstrable dangers associated with wood shavings aloft in a pure oxygen atmosphere aboard the spacecraft, dust and graphite bits from broken leads getting into electronics and machinery (not to mention lungs). The pen is actually a much better solution in a free fall environment. But on the face of it, if there weren't a free fall environment, the pencil would be even better.
What other places is there such a thing as being too smart? I recently watched a video of a 12-year-old Canadian girl holding the banking industry to task for running her country's debt into the billions of dollars for no demonstrable purpose other than to generate profits. She appears to be right, and her solution is not only simple but doable. Regardless of how old the kid is, when she lays it all out it's so simple it appears to be a crime, how the country's debt is handled. If she can figure it out, why couldn't somebody else, somebody ostensibly smarter, more experienced, better informed?
It would appear that they're too smart. This also starts to get into the neighborhood of "sacred cows," elements that have been in place for so long that nobody knows exactly why they're there, but they're treated as if they cannot be altered for any reason.
This is like when we were stuck with a disabled car on vacation. We rented a car to get around while we waited for our van to be repaired, but dismayed at how much time we were losing. Finally Son #2 said, "I wish we could just keep the rental, and keep going." Wish, indeed. We proceeded on our vacation with the rental car, having lost only a day. We got it back by paring off a long sightseeing leg of the trip.
How much of our economy's inflation is generated by activity that doesn't really have to be there? What are, exactly, commodities futures? When an investor buys commodities futures, he does so knowing that he has no use for the commodities themselves. He's purchasing their value, gambling on the possibility of being able to sell them at a profit. He does this by buying them now at a low price and hoping to sell them at a high price in the future, or he does it by guaranteeing to buy in the future while paying now, hoping that their value in the future will have increased against his original purchase price. Some of it is valid, like farmers buying insurance against their own harvests...but some is just capitalists gambling on the market, trying to make money out of thin air.
How productive is that? Not a bit. All it is, is shuffling numbers back and forth. I fail to see how commodities futures does anything useful for the economy, except drive up prices. Driving up prices doesn't necessarily drive up value, it only means that somebody has somehow managed to make the pie bigger so he can cut an extra slice out for himself...and we, the actual consumers, have to pay for this new, bigger pie that doesn't have any extra food in it. Eliminate artificial pie inflation and you eliminate a portion of inflation in general.
Is inflation necessary for a healthy economy? I don't think so. But I'm not that good at economics so I don't have many bullets in my gun where that's concerned. But I think the world's producer economy is rapidly approaching a cliff. There are only so many material goods you can have before you have enough and don't want any more. I have enough cars, enough houses, enough refrigerators and MP3 players. I buy food and that's about all. Other things I buy tend to be used or old - which is to say, they're already made and the only way they add to the economic machine is that I pay the person who found it for selling it to me. No wages, no taxes, no production.
We're looking for new ways to house the world's burgeoning population, new ways to power their many many cars and homes and feed their teeming masses. The new ways are brilliant, just staggering concepts vividly imagined and carefully considered. It's the work of geniuses.
Wouldn't it be better to stop having so many babies? Then we don't need gigantic cities that can house 20 million people in a space no larger than Manhattan. We don't have to come up with ways to feed a world population of 12 billion people.
I know it sounds kind of a simplistic answer. That doesn't mean it isn't a smart answer. It cuts to the foundation of the problem at hand. It doesn't gamble.
More on this later.
Thursday, August 2, 2012
Saturday, July 21, 2012
Chick-Fil-A Isn't Wrong, But Isn't Right Either
It's become a news item - why the hell does it have to be a news item? - that Chick-Fil-A, a fast food establishment that focuses on chicken-based dishes, has an anti-gay stance.
So what? So do lots of churches, individuals, and assorted other organizations. What's the big deal?
Well, the big deal is the Chick-Fil-A is a service company. They provide a service, but they propound a philosophy that alienates a segment of the population. That's just bad business. More on that in a moment.
What other organizations have an anti-gay stance? The Boy Scouts of America, for one thing. Never mind that evidence exists that Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, himself might have had a homosexual pedophilic inclination of his own, they are a privately held organization with a deeply religious foundation. As such, their philosophy isn't something that can be regulated by government. They are their own deal, and should be. And how to deal with their anti-gay stance is simple:
If you find that objectionable, don't join the Boy Scouts. I did join the Scouts, but shouldn't have. I didn't enjoy it very much, though there were a few lessons that stick to this day. The most useful ones have had to do with how to tie assorted knots, but I picked some of those up from my dad, and Dad was never inclined to recommend anything as harebrained as a winter campout, so on balance Dad wins out as a more trustworthy former of young minds than the BSA.
So, back to Chick-Fil-A. I'm going to be completely honest, I love Chick-Fil-A. The food is very good and did you know that if you asked them nicely, they'll make a lunch sandwich for your breakfast? It takes a few minutes extra, but it's no problem at all. Anywhere else you go, the lunchtime menu is simply not available and won't be until 11:00 or so; Chick-Fil-A's people (in my admittedly limited experience of exactly ONE store on Clinton Highway in Knoxville, TN) are extremely pleasant, accommodating, and efficient. You want the chicken club sandwich for breakfast? "Just take a seat and we'll bring it to you when it's ready." Table service at a fast-food joint, no less. The quality of service at CFA blows everyone else out of the water.
But now here's this other matter: CFA's anti-gay stance, or to be more precise, anti-gay marriage stance. Well, that bugs me a little - it's kind of like being bitten by a dog you like. I like CFA and that isn't going to change, but I stand firmly in approval of gay marriage rights. I don't think that's a right that should be withheld from anyone for any reason.
As comedian Denis Leary says, "Gay people should absolutely have the right to marry each other. Then they too can harbor years of resentment, bicker about bills and be generally miserable just like everyone else."
I never understand where comedians are coming from when they say stuff like that. I don't harbor resentments or bicker with my wife. If I did, we wouldn't have gotten married.
The Bible-based argument against gay marriage is right there in black and white, and since CFA is both privately owned and operated by a devout Southern Baptist who takes his denomination seriously, he's totally within his rights to use his company as a bully pulpit, if he wants, to make his convictions known. I hope he backs away from them just a bit, however: as I said, alienating a portion of your market is just bad business. If it bites you on the ass, you have no one to blame but yourself. But again since it's a privately held company, no one else will be blaming you, either.
One of the arguments I keep hearing against gay marriage is this: that it somehow dilutes straight people's marriages. How is that, exactly? I only married the one person, the only dilution my marriage can experience is going to come from exactly two people: her or me. No sign of that yet.
No, if you really want to prevent the devaluation of marriage, don't get divorced. Make the commitment and stick to it. I think it's asking too much to do something as crazy as outlaw divorce, people change over the course of years and undisclosed preexisting issues can come to light that cause intolerable interpersonal strain. Divorce has to exist as an option. But the fact that it does exist, in my mind, is one of those things that makes marriage even stronger. If I've been married for forty years when I could've gotten divorced at any time, doesn't that simply point up the depth of my commitment? Not lashed to each other by laws or religious tenets, our marriage is what the Bible intended for it to be in the first place: a permanent, voluntary union of souls, not an artificially enforced union of government assets or religious practitioners.
My point, at the end of all this verbiage, is the Chick-Fil-A is actually doing marriage no favors. Not in my opinion.
And on an aside, it's absolutely stupid of Boston (yes, the city) to disallow Chick-Fil-A to open any locations because of their professional convictions. They're many of the same convictions espoused by churches of many different denominations; have they disallowed any churches?
So what? So do lots of churches, individuals, and assorted other organizations. What's the big deal?
Well, the big deal is the Chick-Fil-A is a service company. They provide a service, but they propound a philosophy that alienates a segment of the population. That's just bad business. More on that in a moment.
What other organizations have an anti-gay stance? The Boy Scouts of America, for one thing. Never mind that evidence exists that Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, himself might have had a homosexual pedophilic inclination of his own, they are a privately held organization with a deeply religious foundation. As such, their philosophy isn't something that can be regulated by government. They are their own deal, and should be. And how to deal with their anti-gay stance is simple:
If you find that objectionable, don't join the Boy Scouts. I did join the Scouts, but shouldn't have. I didn't enjoy it very much, though there were a few lessons that stick to this day. The most useful ones have had to do with how to tie assorted knots, but I picked some of those up from my dad, and Dad was never inclined to recommend anything as harebrained as a winter campout, so on balance Dad wins out as a more trustworthy former of young minds than the BSA.
So, back to Chick-Fil-A. I'm going to be completely honest, I love Chick-Fil-A. The food is very good and did you know that if you asked them nicely, they'll make a lunch sandwich for your breakfast? It takes a few minutes extra, but it's no problem at all. Anywhere else you go, the lunchtime menu is simply not available and won't be until 11:00 or so; Chick-Fil-A's people (in my admittedly limited experience of exactly ONE store on Clinton Highway in Knoxville, TN) are extremely pleasant, accommodating, and efficient. You want the chicken club sandwich for breakfast? "Just take a seat and we'll bring it to you when it's ready." Table service at a fast-food joint, no less. The quality of service at CFA blows everyone else out of the water.
But now here's this other matter: CFA's anti-gay stance, or to be more precise, anti-gay marriage stance. Well, that bugs me a little - it's kind of like being bitten by a dog you like. I like CFA and that isn't going to change, but I stand firmly in approval of gay marriage rights. I don't think that's a right that should be withheld from anyone for any reason.
As comedian Denis Leary says, "Gay people should absolutely have the right to marry each other. Then they too can harbor years of resentment, bicker about bills and be generally miserable just like everyone else."
I never understand where comedians are coming from when they say stuff like that. I don't harbor resentments or bicker with my wife. If I did, we wouldn't have gotten married.
The Bible-based argument against gay marriage is right there in black and white, and since CFA is both privately owned and operated by a devout Southern Baptist who takes his denomination seriously, he's totally within his rights to use his company as a bully pulpit, if he wants, to make his convictions known. I hope he backs away from them just a bit, however: as I said, alienating a portion of your market is just bad business. If it bites you on the ass, you have no one to blame but yourself. But again since it's a privately held company, no one else will be blaming you, either.
One of the arguments I keep hearing against gay marriage is this: that it somehow dilutes straight people's marriages. How is that, exactly? I only married the one person, the only dilution my marriage can experience is going to come from exactly two people: her or me. No sign of that yet.
No, if you really want to prevent the devaluation of marriage, don't get divorced. Make the commitment and stick to it. I think it's asking too much to do something as crazy as outlaw divorce, people change over the course of years and undisclosed preexisting issues can come to light that cause intolerable interpersonal strain. Divorce has to exist as an option. But the fact that it does exist, in my mind, is one of those things that makes marriage even stronger. If I've been married for forty years when I could've gotten divorced at any time, doesn't that simply point up the depth of my commitment? Not lashed to each other by laws or religious tenets, our marriage is what the Bible intended for it to be in the first place: a permanent, voluntary union of souls, not an artificially enforced union of government assets or religious practitioners.
My point, at the end of all this verbiage, is the Chick-Fil-A is actually doing marriage no favors. Not in my opinion.
And on an aside, it's absolutely stupid of Boston (yes, the city) to disallow Chick-Fil-A to open any locations because of their professional convictions. They're many of the same convictions espoused by churches of many different denominations; have they disallowed any churches?
Thursday, July 5, 2012
Stay Fired, Lopez
Tomas Lopez is a lifeguard with a conscience.
Monday, July 02, Lopez was alerted by beachgoers that a man was in distress and needed his assistance. Lopez immediately arranged for other lifeguards to cover his station and ran to help.
Typical everyday drama, right? Handsome young fellow pelting across the sand to provide CPR or first aid. Except there's a twist to this story: Lopez got fired for doing his job.
These things don't happen in a vacuum, of course. Lopez wouldn't get canned just for saving somebody. It turns out that two pertinent things happened in conjunction with this event: the man in distress was way outside his zone - completely outside the zone that is covered by the company that provides the lifeguard services and is Lopez' employer - and Lopez had to leave his station to provide the assistance.
It's one thing that he had to leave his station. Ideally, there's two lifeguards at every station: one to provide assistance when needed, the other to continue watching the water while one is away. Lopez says his station was covered while he was away.
But Lopez wasn't just outside his zone. He sprinted a full quarter-mile to go aid the victim. The victim had already been brought up to the beach by the time Lopez arrived, but Lopez, along with the assistance of an off-duty nurse, stabilized the victim and monitored his condition until an ambulance arrived. Then he returned to his duty station, filled out an incident report, and was fired.
According to the company's spokesman, it was because he had violated company rules against leaving his station. Lopez, in his own defense, is unrepentant. He's quoted in a Miami Herald article as saying, "...someone needed my help. I wasn't going to say no." Good on you, Lopez. That's the right attitude.
The company's defense that Lopez' actions opened them up to liabilities because of the unguarded station is weak. Lopez says other lifeguards watched his station while he went to assist the swimmer who was swimming in an unprotected area. Here's where the relationship breaks down.
Lopez is hired as a lifeguard. Thankfully this young man - he's only 21 - has ironclad principles and stands by them. He's a lifeguard, someone's in trouble, he's helping out. That's the equation he works under. Not exactly in his area? Okay - he's going after the trouble regardless. But the company's policy of punishing workers who deliver above and beyond the sharply delineated boundaries of its service area is caddish to the extreme.
There are three ways this could have played out. Let's look at them:
Lopez does nothing
Imagine the PR nightmare for both the company and Lopez if, suffering and drowning a mere fifty yards beyond the service boundaries, Lopez had adhered to company policy and not moved to provide assistance to a drowning victim? He would be covered by company policy, but would suffer dreadfully in the public eye...and the company would, too. It's slightly less damning if it happens a solid quarter-mile away, but still not great.
Lopez acts and is punished
This is where we are now. Lopez is a hero but Jeff Ellis and Associates is coming out of this looking like some serious beancounting, coldhearted bastards. Sorry guys, that's just how it looks. And turning around in the heat of public scrutiny to offer Lopez his job back doesn't make it better.
Lopez acts and is lauded
The best bet would have been if someone at JEllis had given Lopez an "Over The Top" gift card for dinner somewhere. He leapt into action, overdelivering and generally saving the day like a hero. Open the company up to liability, maybe - but there were other workers on hand to continue protecting the service area. Add a sound bite to any interviews, something like "Well, we don't actually police that part of the beach. Mr. X got crazy lucky that Lopez was able to help in a timely fashion. Violate company policy? Well, in a word, yes. It is a violation. But he helped save a man's life, so I think we can let that slide."
As you can see, the best option would be for Lopez to act - which he did, thus holding up his end of the social contract - and to not be punished for saving someone's life. That that action stands in violation of an arbitrary company policy is beside the point and should not come into play, not in this instance. You don't take disciplinary action against people who are helping other people, not when the actions the helpers take aren't in violation of any law. Go ahead and make it clear that policy exists, policy whose intent is to protect the company from ill intent, but don't let it be what defines your company's culture.
And that brings us to the current conundrum. JEllis is offering Lopez his job back. I don't think he should take it.
"And why not?" You might ask. "It's a tough job market, you know." Indeed it is, but there are some jobs you just shouldn't take. If the company's kneejerk reaction to delivering far in excess of the company's promised coverage is to fire the individual who actually did the delivery, he should stay the hell away. They don't deserve him.
Will he be inundated with job offers? I don't know, but I certainly hope so. If this young man's instinct is to bust his ass to save mine, regardless of whether it's his job to do so, that's somebody I'd definitely want to keep around, and put on the payroll. I should think that any company that has any kind of customer service would be extremely fortunate to have Lopez on its side.
Good luck to you, Tomas Lopez. You've earned it.
Monday, July 02, Lopez was alerted by beachgoers that a man was in distress and needed his assistance. Lopez immediately arranged for other lifeguards to cover his station and ran to help.
Typical everyday drama, right? Handsome young fellow pelting across the sand to provide CPR or first aid. Except there's a twist to this story: Lopez got fired for doing his job.
These things don't happen in a vacuum, of course. Lopez wouldn't get canned just for saving somebody. It turns out that two pertinent things happened in conjunction with this event: the man in distress was way outside his zone - completely outside the zone that is covered by the company that provides the lifeguard services and is Lopez' employer - and Lopez had to leave his station to provide the assistance.
It's one thing that he had to leave his station. Ideally, there's two lifeguards at every station: one to provide assistance when needed, the other to continue watching the water while one is away. Lopez says his station was covered while he was away.
But Lopez wasn't just outside his zone. He sprinted a full quarter-mile to go aid the victim. The victim had already been brought up to the beach by the time Lopez arrived, but Lopez, along with the assistance of an off-duty nurse, stabilized the victim and monitored his condition until an ambulance arrived. Then he returned to his duty station, filled out an incident report, and was fired.
According to the company's spokesman, it was because he had violated company rules against leaving his station. Lopez, in his own defense, is unrepentant. He's quoted in a Miami Herald article as saying, "...someone needed my help. I wasn't going to say no." Good on you, Lopez. That's the right attitude.
The company's defense that Lopez' actions opened them up to liabilities because of the unguarded station is weak. Lopez says other lifeguards watched his station while he went to assist the swimmer who was swimming in an unprotected area. Here's where the relationship breaks down.
Lopez is hired as a lifeguard. Thankfully this young man - he's only 21 - has ironclad principles and stands by them. He's a lifeguard, someone's in trouble, he's helping out. That's the equation he works under. Not exactly in his area? Okay - he's going after the trouble regardless. But the company's policy of punishing workers who deliver above and beyond the sharply delineated boundaries of its service area is caddish to the extreme.
There are three ways this could have played out. Let's look at them:
Lopez does nothing
Imagine the PR nightmare for both the company and Lopez if, suffering and drowning a mere fifty yards beyond the service boundaries, Lopez had adhered to company policy and not moved to provide assistance to a drowning victim? He would be covered by company policy, but would suffer dreadfully in the public eye...and the company would, too. It's slightly less damning if it happens a solid quarter-mile away, but still not great.
Lopez acts and is punished
This is where we are now. Lopez is a hero but Jeff Ellis and Associates is coming out of this looking like some serious beancounting, coldhearted bastards. Sorry guys, that's just how it looks. And turning around in the heat of public scrutiny to offer Lopez his job back doesn't make it better.
Lopez acts and is lauded
The best bet would have been if someone at JEllis had given Lopez an "Over The Top" gift card for dinner somewhere. He leapt into action, overdelivering and generally saving the day like a hero. Open the company up to liability, maybe - but there were other workers on hand to continue protecting the service area. Add a sound bite to any interviews, something like "Well, we don't actually police that part of the beach. Mr. X got crazy lucky that Lopez was able to help in a timely fashion. Violate company policy? Well, in a word, yes. It is a violation. But he helped save a man's life, so I think we can let that slide."
As you can see, the best option would be for Lopez to act - which he did, thus holding up his end of the social contract - and to not be punished for saving someone's life. That that action stands in violation of an arbitrary company policy is beside the point and should not come into play, not in this instance. You don't take disciplinary action against people who are helping other people, not when the actions the helpers take aren't in violation of any law. Go ahead and make it clear that policy exists, policy whose intent is to protect the company from ill intent, but don't let it be what defines your company's culture.
And that brings us to the current conundrum. JEllis is offering Lopez his job back. I don't think he should take it.
"And why not?" You might ask. "It's a tough job market, you know." Indeed it is, but there are some jobs you just shouldn't take. If the company's kneejerk reaction to delivering far in excess of the company's promised coverage is to fire the individual who actually did the delivery, he should stay the hell away. They don't deserve him.
Will he be inundated with job offers? I don't know, but I certainly hope so. If this young man's instinct is to bust his ass to save mine, regardless of whether it's his job to do so, that's somebody I'd definitely want to keep around, and put on the payroll. I should think that any company that has any kind of customer service would be extremely fortunate to have Lopez on its side.
Good luck to you, Tomas Lopez. You've earned it.
Monday, June 25, 2012
Tastes like 'Possum
There's a line in the movie The Matrix where one character, Mouse, suggests that the machine overlords that run the Matrix couldn't figure out what chicken actually tasted like. So to compensate, the machine overlords made chicken taste like a lot of other stuff. And since we eat chicken more than we do, say, rattlesnake, chicken becomes the yardstick we measure against instead of those other things. Alligator tastes like chicken, frog legs taste like chicken.
There is no Matrix of course, but it does raise a few questions along the way to its unsatisfying conclusion. I'm going to step off the topic of the Matrix and step over to chicken. Chicken...and precedence.
Chicken is delicious. Some resources describe it as bland, some describe it as "so okay it's average." It's a very democratic kind of meat. It's not a mammal with large, sad-looking eyes and a personality you can relate to. Even some vegetarians will bend their rules for chicken. You can have a fabulously fancy meal that features chicken as the main protein, or you can have the lowest-common-denominator kind of dish that is Kentucky Fried Chicken, hot, cheap and fast.
I don't consider it bland at all. Add a dash of soy sauce while it's cooking and even otherwise unadorned chicken is excellent food. But what does it taste like?
It tastes like chicken. But why do we say it tastes like chicken? We don't we say it tastes like rattlesnake?
Domestication of chickens may go back as far as 6000 BC, a goodly long time by any measure. That's not as far back as, say, cows and dogs, but it's plenty long. And chickens are almost entirely derived from Red Junglefowl and share some traits in common with them, traits that make them excellent for domestication:
1) Chickens are flocking birds. They prefer to stay together.
2) They'll eat anything: bugs, worms, plant material, small mice, whatever. If you have something around that you can't eat, that cannot help you survive, let the chicken eat it. Then whatever it is stops competing with YOUR food, and actually helps grow your food. That's a double bonus.
3) Eggs are a great way to eat the same chicken for a good long time. And then when the chicken stops laying eggs, eat the chicken anyway.
With these facts in mind, it's easy to see that chickens would become a staple in the field of agriculture pretty early. Not requiring a lot of space or attention, they make it easy for people to feed themselves. If you can feed yourself on chicken easily, it becomes a large part of your diet. So large a part, something you get often enough that you don't think that everything tastes only like itself; now you have something to compare other tastes to. Something that both you and to whomever you might be describing some new flavor are likely to have in common. So when you eat something that other people aren't familiar with, you can tell them whether or not it tastes like chicken, since it's likely that you both have experience with chicken.
A couple of years ago I was driving Son #1 to a friend's house so he could check on the friend's pets. On the way, an opossum ran across the road right in front of me. *thump* "Dang it!" I wasn't driving fast and I saw the silly thing zip out across the road at the last possible moment, and though I swerved mightily, it managed to fling itself under my wheels all the same. I was very annoyed at it, and very sorry for it too.
We pulled over, and stepped over to look at it. Sure enough, it was dead. It looked okay, no obvious deformation, just...dead.
Son #1 is kind of into skulls and animal bones. Go hiking with him someday, he'll find a bone. It's pretty weird. "Can I have the skull?"
Still feeling bad for the animal, I said, "Sure."
He goggled at me. "Wow. I didn't expect you to say that."
We went on and checked on the pets, changed their water and added to their food bowls. And on the way home, we paused the truck, tossed the dead 'possum in the back and went on our way.
The next day, we set up the fire pit and and placed a large stock pot on it.
"Why are we cooking it?"
"Just in case of rabies. If it were an old dry skull, I wouldn't worry. But this is fresh. We'll cook it up real good and that'll kill any virus left in the tissues, if there was any virus."
"Okay." And Son #2 built an excellent fire and kept it going, and Son #1 placed the entire body, fur and all, in the stock pot and covered it with water. Let me point out at this time, this stock pot is not used for anything else. I'm kind of freewheeling about some things I eat, but not that freewheeling.
After it had been boiling vigorously for about half an hour, we took the cover off the pot.
Son #1 sniffed. "That smells ... really good."
I smelled it and did what I always do: I thought about everything else I've ever smelled and compared it to a known quantity. "Wow. That smells just like hot dogs." And it did. Really good hot dogs. Not chicken, though the phrase did go through my mind very clearly in light of the situation.
Son #2 leaned in for a sniff and put things into perspective. "I think you've got it backwards. Hot dogs smell like 'possum."
Of all of us, he was the rightest. Opossum have been around rather longer than hot dogs. To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a hot dog found in the fossil record. If I am wrong, someone please write in and let me know! Because that would be awesome.
We didn't eat the 'possum. Not having field dressed it, it wasn't suitable for eating. But the skull was lovingly cleaned and polished and now occupies a space on a shelf in Son #1's bedroom...along with many other bones.
And I can't eat hot dogs without thinking about opossums, chicken, and which came first: the possum or the hot dog. At least in this case it isn't a debate of any kind: possums came first, which means I can say that while hot dogs do not taste like chicken, I have a sneaking suspicion that they do in fact taste like 'possum.
There is no Matrix of course, but it does raise a few questions along the way to its unsatisfying conclusion. I'm going to step off the topic of the Matrix and step over to chicken. Chicken...and precedence.
Chicken is delicious. Some resources describe it as bland, some describe it as "so okay it's average." It's a very democratic kind of meat. It's not a mammal with large, sad-looking eyes and a personality you can relate to. Even some vegetarians will bend their rules for chicken. You can have a fabulously fancy meal that features chicken as the main protein, or you can have the lowest-common-denominator kind of dish that is Kentucky Fried Chicken, hot, cheap and fast.
I don't consider it bland at all. Add a dash of soy sauce while it's cooking and even otherwise unadorned chicken is excellent food. But what does it taste like?
It tastes like chicken. But why do we say it tastes like chicken? We don't we say it tastes like rattlesnake?
Domestication of chickens may go back as far as 6000 BC, a goodly long time by any measure. That's not as far back as, say, cows and dogs, but it's plenty long. And chickens are almost entirely derived from Red Junglefowl and share some traits in common with them, traits that make them excellent for domestication:
1) Chickens are flocking birds. They prefer to stay together.
2) They'll eat anything: bugs, worms, plant material, small mice, whatever. If you have something around that you can't eat, that cannot help you survive, let the chicken eat it. Then whatever it is stops competing with YOUR food, and actually helps grow your food. That's a double bonus.
3) Eggs are a great way to eat the same chicken for a good long time. And then when the chicken stops laying eggs, eat the chicken anyway.
With these facts in mind, it's easy to see that chickens would become a staple in the field of agriculture pretty early. Not requiring a lot of space or attention, they make it easy for people to feed themselves. If you can feed yourself on chicken easily, it becomes a large part of your diet. So large a part, something you get often enough that you don't think that everything tastes only like itself; now you have something to compare other tastes to. Something that both you and to whomever you might be describing some new flavor are likely to have in common. So when you eat something that other people aren't familiar with, you can tell them whether or not it tastes like chicken, since it's likely that you both have experience with chicken.
A couple of years ago I was driving Son #1 to a friend's house so he could check on the friend's pets. On the way, an opossum ran across the road right in front of me. *thump* "Dang it!" I wasn't driving fast and I saw the silly thing zip out across the road at the last possible moment, and though I swerved mightily, it managed to fling itself under my wheels all the same. I was very annoyed at it, and very sorry for it too.
We pulled over, and stepped over to look at it. Sure enough, it was dead. It looked okay, no obvious deformation, just...dead.
Son #1 is kind of into skulls and animal bones. Go hiking with him someday, he'll find a bone. It's pretty weird. "Can I have the skull?"
Still feeling bad for the animal, I said, "Sure."
He goggled at me. "Wow. I didn't expect you to say that."
We went on and checked on the pets, changed their water and added to their food bowls. And on the way home, we paused the truck, tossed the dead 'possum in the back and went on our way.
The next day, we set up the fire pit and and placed a large stock pot on it.
"Why are we cooking it?"
"Just in case of rabies. If it were an old dry skull, I wouldn't worry. But this is fresh. We'll cook it up real good and that'll kill any virus left in the tissues, if there was any virus."
"Okay." And Son #2 built an excellent fire and kept it going, and Son #1 placed the entire body, fur and all, in the stock pot and covered it with water. Let me point out at this time, this stock pot is not used for anything else. I'm kind of freewheeling about some things I eat, but not that freewheeling.
After it had been boiling vigorously for about half an hour, we took the cover off the pot.
Son #1 sniffed. "That smells ... really good."
I smelled it and did what I always do: I thought about everything else I've ever smelled and compared it to a known quantity. "Wow. That smells just like hot dogs." And it did. Really good hot dogs. Not chicken, though the phrase did go through my mind very clearly in light of the situation.
Son #2 leaned in for a sniff and put things into perspective. "I think you've got it backwards. Hot dogs smell like 'possum."
Of all of us, he was the rightest. Opossum have been around rather longer than hot dogs. To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a hot dog found in the fossil record. If I am wrong, someone please write in and let me know! Because that would be awesome.
We didn't eat the 'possum. Not having field dressed it, it wasn't suitable for eating. But the skull was lovingly cleaned and polished and now occupies a space on a shelf in Son #1's bedroom...along with many other bones.
And I can't eat hot dogs without thinking about opossums, chicken, and which came first: the possum or the hot dog. At least in this case it isn't a debate of any kind: possums came first, which means I can say that while hot dogs do not taste like chicken, I have a sneaking suspicion that they do in fact taste like 'possum.
Thursday, May 10, 2012
...and it's about time! Obama on Gay Marriage
President Barack Obama has finally landed on one side of the debate. It's about time, and I'm glad he went the way he did.
In my humble opinion - there is no such thing as a humble opinion, but that's how the phrase goes - this should never have been a debate in the first place.
There are recorded instances of people marrying strange things: their dogs, a llama, what have you. I've never been certain whether these instances were publicity stunts or not, because the people doing them were usually rich and charitably described as "eccentric." They were uncommon and a little strange, and viewed as entertaining and essentially harmless.
But now, with the greater coming-out of the nation's homosexual population, there are more and more people who, having come to grips with the fact that they're gay, are wondering why they aren't entitled to the same rights as other people. It's strange we can look quizzically but without rancor on some dotty old rich lady marrying her prize Schnauzer, but get all up in arms when two perfectly normal, younger people want to commit themselves to each other. Both people being the same species, you'd think it wouldn't be that big a deal.
Take note of those words: "entitled," and "rights." We'll dig more into those in a moment. Another word that's pretty important is "marriage."
For the longest time, the word "marriage" wasn't defined in a sex-specific way. The word simply meant the legal union of two people in an ongoing commitment. It doesn't speak to emotions or sentiment. It only describes a legal state. Genders of participants aren't discussed. Biological prerequisites aren't part of the marriage terms. It's more of a economic definition than anything else.
What comes with the legal recognition of marriage? Well, not much. A different taxation scheme for starters, certain advantages when shopping for insurance. It doesn't add up to a lot, but it's real. There are certain privileges under law that married couples enjoy, which are not extended to unmarried couples. I say unmarried couples, regardless of orientation.
Here's where things get hairy.
As soon as you start to try to legally define marriage as a one-man-one-woman thing, it starts to smack of sexism and unequal rights. That's hard to defend. If you try to back it up by bringing the Bible or any other religious text into the mix, that starts to look like mixing a little church in with your state. Can't do that either.
Well, you can - Islamic countries do it all the time. There's a model we're all just dying to emulate, right? Okay, maybe not.
Here's where I come down on this whole silly issue: who are gay people? They're Americans, right? Sure, they pay taxes, join the military (don't tell anyone!), vote...all the stuff other citizens do. They shop and read newspapers and go to church or don't bother. They're people.
I thought people who were citizens of this country had equal rights under the law. All of them. Women can vote, gays can serve in the armed forces, et cetera. So where, exactly, do we draw a line saying gay people can't get married?
Either give them every right they're entitled to - entitled under the law, the law that applied to them as soon as they were born - or tell them to their faces they aren't actually people. Because the law and the rights apply to people. Not gay people, not black people, not chosen people. ALL people. All the rights apply to all the people, or none of the rights are worth anything. They're either rights, or they're privileges arbitrarily awarded by the government.
And you sure as hell don't want the government to start thinking our rights are actually privileges.
In my humble opinion - there is no such thing as a humble opinion, but that's how the phrase goes - this should never have been a debate in the first place.
There are recorded instances of people marrying strange things: their dogs, a llama, what have you. I've never been certain whether these instances were publicity stunts or not, because the people doing them were usually rich and charitably described as "eccentric." They were uncommon and a little strange, and viewed as entertaining and essentially harmless.
But now, with the greater coming-out of the nation's homosexual population, there are more and more people who, having come to grips with the fact that they're gay, are wondering why they aren't entitled to the same rights as other people. It's strange we can look quizzically but without rancor on some dotty old rich lady marrying her prize Schnauzer, but get all up in arms when two perfectly normal, younger people want to commit themselves to each other. Both people being the same species, you'd think it wouldn't be that big a deal.
Take note of those words: "entitled," and "rights." We'll dig more into those in a moment. Another word that's pretty important is "marriage."
For the longest time, the word "marriage" wasn't defined in a sex-specific way. The word simply meant the legal union of two people in an ongoing commitment. It doesn't speak to emotions or sentiment. It only describes a legal state. Genders of participants aren't discussed. Biological prerequisites aren't part of the marriage terms. It's more of a economic definition than anything else.
What comes with the legal recognition of marriage? Well, not much. A different taxation scheme for starters, certain advantages when shopping for insurance. It doesn't add up to a lot, but it's real. There are certain privileges under law that married couples enjoy, which are not extended to unmarried couples. I say unmarried couples, regardless of orientation.
Here's where things get hairy.
As soon as you start to try to legally define marriage as a one-man-one-woman thing, it starts to smack of sexism and unequal rights. That's hard to defend. If you try to back it up by bringing the Bible or any other religious text into the mix, that starts to look like mixing a little church in with your state. Can't do that either.
Well, you can - Islamic countries do it all the time. There's a model we're all just dying to emulate, right? Okay, maybe not.
Here's where I come down on this whole silly issue: who are gay people? They're Americans, right? Sure, they pay taxes, join the military (don't tell anyone!), vote...all the stuff other citizens do. They shop and read newspapers and go to church or don't bother. They're people.
I thought people who were citizens of this country had equal rights under the law. All of them. Women can vote, gays can serve in the armed forces, et cetera. So where, exactly, do we draw a line saying gay people can't get married?
Either give them every right they're entitled to - entitled under the law, the law that applied to them as soon as they were born - or tell them to their faces they aren't actually people. Because the law and the rights apply to people. Not gay people, not black people, not chosen people. ALL people. All the rights apply to all the people, or none of the rights are worth anything. They're either rights, or they're privileges arbitrarily awarded by the government.
And you sure as hell don't want the government to start thinking our rights are actually privileges.
Monday, March 19, 2012
Solar Pants Almost On Fire, and the Smart Power Grid
It's not a big news item, but it's an item just the same, and one that caught my eye in particular for this one guy's quote.
Santago Arias, technical director of Torresol Energy in Spain, said "It is the first station in the world that works 24 hours a day, a solar power station that works day and night!" He's right in the details - it is indeed the first solar power station that works 'round the clock. But the first solar power station that could keep working beyond sunset was right here in the US: Solar Two, converted from its predecessor Solar One.
Mr. Arias is talking about the Gemasolar station, a huge (about 3/4 of a square mile of collecting area) installation that bounces sunlight from a tremendous array of flat mirrors, up to a single receiving collector on a tower in the center of the array. Needless to say, the temperatures generated at the receiving station are tremendous. The receiver dumps all that heat into circulating heat transfer fluid (maybe water, not sure), which in turn heats water to generate steam to operate power generating turbines.
But how does it operate during the night?
Easy. You can't store AC electricity. You CAN store heat. In this case, the excess heat from the system is dumped into gigantic vats of molten salts. The salts absorb a staggering amount of heat energy by melting from a solid to a liquid state - the change of phase in itself absorbs a lot of energy, and releases it right back again when it changes back from a liquid to a solid. And after the sun goes down the heat collector in the middle of the mirror field is out of the loop; the transfer loop that was dumping heat into the salt vats earlier is now picking up heat from the salt vats, and conveying it to the steam turbines. The steam turbines just keep working. Stored heat, generated heat, it's all the same to them. They just work.
But it's not entirely the first of its kind. Let's talk about Solar Two.
Solar Two was Solar One for a while, but was expanded and added storage capacity and an integer to its name. By adding storage capacity - the same molten salt scheme as Gemasolar is using - Solar Two in Barstow CA was able to keep operating as much as three hours after sundown. The salt tanks also kept the plant operating at full capacity through periods of cloudiness, a big boon to be sure.
Now let's talk a little about why that's such a big boon. The national electrical grid is kind of fragile. It's designed to do one thing: deliver power from the generators to the consumers. One thing it doesn't do is respond quickly to changes. California has discovered just how difficult that makes things, having suffered the brunt of manufactured shortages via Enron, and discovered that the existing grid cannot easily handle added loads. That's why it makes you such a popular customer in California if you sign up with the utility's "smart" or "responsive" grid program, which gives the utility the capacity to reduce or even turn your power off during high-usage periods. You get a nicer rate on your bill for being willing to be in the dark for a while when the temperature spikes.
That responsive grid is part of what the issue is. Solar and wind, they're a little sketchy. They come and go. The sun's output is at least predictable in that we know to the minute when the sun will come up, and we have a good idea of what the weather will be. But wind, well. That's even less reliable than the sun. It might blow, it might not. You might have years of data saying that there's an average wind speed of thus-and-such many miles per hour per day at one location, but that doesn't tell you anything about today.
The storage-enhanced solar plant is everything you could hope it would be. It's power 'round the clock. Where I live there's a big coal-fired plant down the road that's running 'round the clock, and a medium-small hydroelectric dam running 'round the clock. But the coal plant contributes to acid rain, which is Bad. The dam is continually drawing down on the lake, which for every extra foot of depth generates about an extra million dollars per week in revenue. Losing the depth is Bad. How then, if we could have a gigantic structure somewhere that reaped the sunlight and converted that into energy and also set some aside for use all night long? Then we could close the dam's gates for a few hours and gain some depth. We could leave the coal plant off for a few hours, just ticking over, ready to fire up to full power to generate a surge of power if needed. How about we make the renewable, freely falling sunlight the steady-state power source, and have the dirty or detractive technologies on standby?
Or we have big enough solar storage that the storage is the standby, and we can close the coal plant entirely? That would be cool.
It wouldn't even have to put all those coal plant workers out of business. The technology on the turbine side is exactly the same, half those guys working at the coal plant could be lifted out of the coal plant, dropped into the solar plant, and know exactly what was what, and work effectively with minimal retraining, if any.
The coal miners might complain. They could get work reconstructing all those mountaintops back to where they belong. Then they could get jobs levelling landfills and whatnot into solar reflector fields.
Just a few thoughts. A big solar plant like Spain's takes up almost a square mile, but what if you don't make it contiguous? What if there's a patch of reflectors here and a few more over there and another batch on top of the new Wal-Mart? Give up a few percentage points of efficiency, but you put the power close to where it's going to be used.
Santago Arias, technical director of Torresol Energy in Spain, said "It is the first station in the world that works 24 hours a day, a solar power station that works day and night!" He's right in the details - it is indeed the first solar power station that works 'round the clock. But the first solar power station that could keep working beyond sunset was right here in the US: Solar Two, converted from its predecessor Solar One.
Mr. Arias is talking about the Gemasolar station, a huge (about 3/4 of a square mile of collecting area) installation that bounces sunlight from a tremendous array of flat mirrors, up to a single receiving collector on a tower in the center of the array. Needless to say, the temperatures generated at the receiving station are tremendous. The receiver dumps all that heat into circulating heat transfer fluid (maybe water, not sure), which in turn heats water to generate steam to operate power generating turbines.
But how does it operate during the night?
Easy. You can't store AC electricity. You CAN store heat. In this case, the excess heat from the system is dumped into gigantic vats of molten salts. The salts absorb a staggering amount of heat energy by melting from a solid to a liquid state - the change of phase in itself absorbs a lot of energy, and releases it right back again when it changes back from a liquid to a solid. And after the sun goes down the heat collector in the middle of the mirror field is out of the loop; the transfer loop that was dumping heat into the salt vats earlier is now picking up heat from the salt vats, and conveying it to the steam turbines. The steam turbines just keep working. Stored heat, generated heat, it's all the same to them. They just work.
But it's not entirely the first of its kind. Let's talk about Solar Two.
Solar Two was Solar One for a while, but was expanded and added storage capacity and an integer to its name. By adding storage capacity - the same molten salt scheme as Gemasolar is using - Solar Two in Barstow CA was able to keep operating as much as three hours after sundown. The salt tanks also kept the plant operating at full capacity through periods of cloudiness, a big boon to be sure.
Now let's talk a little about why that's such a big boon. The national electrical grid is kind of fragile. It's designed to do one thing: deliver power from the generators to the consumers. One thing it doesn't do is respond quickly to changes. California has discovered just how difficult that makes things, having suffered the brunt of manufactured shortages via Enron, and discovered that the existing grid cannot easily handle added loads. That's why it makes you such a popular customer in California if you sign up with the utility's "smart" or "responsive" grid program, which gives the utility the capacity to reduce or even turn your power off during high-usage periods. You get a nicer rate on your bill for being willing to be in the dark for a while when the temperature spikes.
That responsive grid is part of what the issue is. Solar and wind, they're a little sketchy. They come and go. The sun's output is at least predictable in that we know to the minute when the sun will come up, and we have a good idea of what the weather will be. But wind, well. That's even less reliable than the sun. It might blow, it might not. You might have years of data saying that there's an average wind speed of thus-and-such many miles per hour per day at one location, but that doesn't tell you anything about today.
The storage-enhanced solar plant is everything you could hope it would be. It's power 'round the clock. Where I live there's a big coal-fired plant down the road that's running 'round the clock, and a medium-small hydroelectric dam running 'round the clock. But the coal plant contributes to acid rain, which is Bad. The dam is continually drawing down on the lake, which for every extra foot of depth generates about an extra million dollars per week in revenue. Losing the depth is Bad. How then, if we could have a gigantic structure somewhere that reaped the sunlight and converted that into energy and also set some aside for use all night long? Then we could close the dam's gates for a few hours and gain some depth. We could leave the coal plant off for a few hours, just ticking over, ready to fire up to full power to generate a surge of power if needed. How about we make the renewable, freely falling sunlight the steady-state power source, and have the dirty or detractive technologies on standby?
Or we have big enough solar storage that the storage is the standby, and we can close the coal plant entirely? That would be cool.
It wouldn't even have to put all those coal plant workers out of business. The technology on the turbine side is exactly the same, half those guys working at the coal plant could be lifted out of the coal plant, dropped into the solar plant, and know exactly what was what, and work effectively with minimal retraining, if any.
The coal miners might complain. They could get work reconstructing all those mountaintops back to where they belong. Then they could get jobs levelling landfills and whatnot into solar reflector fields.
Just a few thoughts. A big solar plant like Spain's takes up almost a square mile, but what if you don't make it contiguous? What if there's a patch of reflectors here and a few more over there and another batch on top of the new Wal-Mart? Give up a few percentage points of efficiency, but you put the power close to where it's going to be used.
Monday, March 12, 2012
Rush Limbaugh: Shut Him Up, Or Not?
Limbaugh's big mouth is in the news again. We must assume that all of Rush is in the news, because we must assume that his mouth is in fact under his brain's direction, but if it weren't that might explain some things.
The most recent flap is that Rush called law student Sandra Fluke a slut and prostitute. He did this in a contextually iffy way, equating her with a slut or prostitute because, by wanting her insurance provider to also cover contraceptives, she essentially wanted to be paid to have sex.
There are several places you can go to get the whole transcript of what was said. At first I thought, by the tone of all the news reaction, that he must be raving mad, eyes rolling in their sockets, spraying spittle at the microphone and slamming the desk with a big hammy hand. Well, not so. Unfortunately, Rush sounds perfectly rational and reasonable when he says these terrible things.
Ms. Fluke was invited by Democratic members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to speak at a hearing discussing whether the Obama administration was failing to maintain the separation of church and state. Committee chairman Darrell Issa (R. Calif.) disallowed her attendance on the grounds that she was not a member of clergy, but a speech she delivered at another event was included in the record on the grounds of its relevance to the topic at hand.
At this moment I would like to point out that out of the 40 members on this committee, four are women.
Let's write that really big: only four women on that committee.
From the outset, you can't easily expect that issues of especial concern to women will get a fair shake. Even when Congress has only approximately a 17% female makeup, it barely tops half that on this committee. Talk about oversight. This is an oversight if I ever saw one.
Why is it that Congress's makeup is only 17% female? That's ridiculous. The country is more than 50% female, let's get a few more ladies in here making some decisions. The representation is off by two-thirds.
Anyway, here's where Rush starts to weigh in. Being Rush, he weighs in a lot. Read into that what you will.
Here's the real fly in the ointment: Rush has a point. Fluke undermines her own argument pretty deeply at the outset, stating that many women have to stop using birth control because they can't afford it. Well, having sex is optional. You won't die if you don't have it. And no one should be obligated to help subsidize your sex life: either you can afford to have sex, or you can't. It's up to you to know the difference. Fluke never points these facts out, she mentions the fact that these people are having sex, and points out that their financial situation has indeed caused them to change their behavior, but their change of behavior hasn't been to stop having sex. No, their recourse is the most irresponsible option of all: keep having sex, but now they're also at risk for unintended pregnancies! I'm not going to say anyone who does that is a slut or a prostitute, but I will freely say out loud and in print, they're stupid!
Fluke goes on to describe situations, not all that rare, where contraceptives have medical benefits besides just contraception. That's a perfectly valid defense of expecting contraceptive coverage regardless of religious exhortation. It's not for the purpose of contraception, it's for the health of the women. That's the point where she finds all the bullets in her gun and starts firing for effect.
Rush doesn't mention that part. No, he jumps on her sex statement. Like I said, he's got a point: no one should be expected to subsidize your nooky. You want to play, you got to pay: condoms, sponges, hormone patches, whatever. That, or learn to respond to "mommy" and "daddy." That's how these things work. And if you can't afford any of those things, well, everybody just keep your hands to yourselves and all of your clothes on. That's how these things are prevented from working.
But there's no need to resort to calling names. Especially not insulting, demeaning names. "Slut" is an ugly word no matter how you look at it. It's not something you say to someone you hope to be able to speak nicely to later. "Prostitute" isn't quite so bad but it isn't friendly either. There are no positive connotations associated with "prostitute."
This was the part where Rush shook all the bullets out of his gun and threw it away. It's one thing to be opinionated, it's one thing to be a highly conservative mouthpiece. It's one thing to be considered a brilliant commentator.
And it's a whole 'nother thing to be a jerk. I'm not actually calling Rush a jerk, notice. I'm just saying that it's just awful to display jerk-like behavior. One would hope that the whole thing could be blamed on being blitzed on Oxycodone. But since he keeps submitting clean samples at his random tests, I guess that's not a viable excuse.
So while Rush may have had a point, he went way, way over the line with his commentary. He went from attacking the stance, attacking the issue and its validity, attacking the Obama admiinistration's demand for universal contraception coverage, to attacking the person. Failing to notice that Ms. Fluke never said she herself was having more sex than she could afford, Rush called her names that were entirely unwarranted and unsupportable. Calling insulting names in the first place is immature at best, but when it comes from someone who's supposed to be thinking stuff like this through, it's frankly startling.
He gets even more insulting by suggesting that Ms. Fluke should "give something back" to the American people for subsidizing her sex life: he suggests she become a porn actress. As if his scorn weren't enough, he has to become lewdly ludicrous.
In the wake of this indefensible vitriol, Rush has been losing advertisers left and right, to the point that some segments of his show are even closing with dead air: there are no advertisers at all to fill the slot. There's just silence.
Now the question comes up: should Rush be muzzled? They're asking this very question at such outlets as The Huffington Post and CNN.com - both representatives of the so-called "liberal media" that such conservative mouthpieces as Rush constantly rail against - and defending him. Make no mistake, they call him out as an arrogant bully, but they defend his right to say what he thinks.
And so do I. He has the right to say whatever he wants, no matter how big of a jerk it makes him.
But that doesn't mean anybody has to pay him to say it. Jane Fonda says he should be pulled off the air. She's dead wrong of course, it's not up to her to say that. It's up to everyone, and for the radio network that pays him those big checks to say, "all right, that's enough of you," and can him. Rush shouldn't be fired because of what he said - but if there were something you should be fired for saying, I'd suggest this as a good example - he should be fired for alienating his audience and chasing off the advertisers. That is to say, he's costing his network listeners and revenue. That's the bottom line. When you cost more than you're worth, you're done.
Don't worry, he's both rich and old. He'll be dead before he's poor.
The most recent flap is that Rush called law student Sandra Fluke a slut and prostitute. He did this in a contextually iffy way, equating her with a slut or prostitute because, by wanting her insurance provider to also cover contraceptives, she essentially wanted to be paid to have sex.
There are several places you can go to get the whole transcript of what was said. At first I thought, by the tone of all the news reaction, that he must be raving mad, eyes rolling in their sockets, spraying spittle at the microphone and slamming the desk with a big hammy hand. Well, not so. Unfortunately, Rush sounds perfectly rational and reasonable when he says these terrible things.
Ms. Fluke was invited by Democratic members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to speak at a hearing discussing whether the Obama administration was failing to maintain the separation of church and state. Committee chairman Darrell Issa (R. Calif.) disallowed her attendance on the grounds that she was not a member of clergy, but a speech she delivered at another event was included in the record on the grounds of its relevance to the topic at hand.
At this moment I would like to point out that out of the 40 members on this committee, four are women.
Let's write that really big: only four women on that committee.
From the outset, you can't easily expect that issues of especial concern to women will get a fair shake. Even when Congress has only approximately a 17% female makeup, it barely tops half that on this committee. Talk about oversight. This is an oversight if I ever saw one.
Why is it that Congress's makeup is only 17% female? That's ridiculous. The country is more than 50% female, let's get a few more ladies in here making some decisions. The representation is off by two-thirds.
Anyway, here's where Rush starts to weigh in. Being Rush, he weighs in a lot. Read into that what you will.
Here's the real fly in the ointment: Rush has a point. Fluke undermines her own argument pretty deeply at the outset, stating that many women have to stop using birth control because they can't afford it. Well, having sex is optional. You won't die if you don't have it. And no one should be obligated to help subsidize your sex life: either you can afford to have sex, or you can't. It's up to you to know the difference. Fluke never points these facts out, she mentions the fact that these people are having sex, and points out that their financial situation has indeed caused them to change their behavior, but their change of behavior hasn't been to stop having sex. No, their recourse is the most irresponsible option of all: keep having sex, but now they're also at risk for unintended pregnancies! I'm not going to say anyone who does that is a slut or a prostitute, but I will freely say out loud and in print, they're stupid!
Fluke goes on to describe situations, not all that rare, where contraceptives have medical benefits besides just contraception. That's a perfectly valid defense of expecting contraceptive coverage regardless of religious exhortation. It's not for the purpose of contraception, it's for the health of the women. That's the point where she finds all the bullets in her gun and starts firing for effect.
Rush doesn't mention that part. No, he jumps on her sex statement. Like I said, he's got a point: no one should be expected to subsidize your nooky. You want to play, you got to pay: condoms, sponges, hormone patches, whatever. That, or learn to respond to "mommy" and "daddy." That's how these things work. And if you can't afford any of those things, well, everybody just keep your hands to yourselves and all of your clothes on. That's how these things are prevented from working.
But there's no need to resort to calling names. Especially not insulting, demeaning names. "Slut" is an ugly word no matter how you look at it. It's not something you say to someone you hope to be able to speak nicely to later. "Prostitute" isn't quite so bad but it isn't friendly either. There are no positive connotations associated with "prostitute."
This was the part where Rush shook all the bullets out of his gun and threw it away. It's one thing to be opinionated, it's one thing to be a highly conservative mouthpiece. It's one thing to be considered a brilliant commentator.
And it's a whole 'nother thing to be a jerk. I'm not actually calling Rush a jerk, notice. I'm just saying that it's just awful to display jerk-like behavior. One would hope that the whole thing could be blamed on being blitzed on Oxycodone. But since he keeps submitting clean samples at his random tests, I guess that's not a viable excuse.
So while Rush may have had a point, he went way, way over the line with his commentary. He went from attacking the stance, attacking the issue and its validity, attacking the Obama admiinistration's demand for universal contraception coverage, to attacking the person. Failing to notice that Ms. Fluke never said she herself was having more sex than she could afford, Rush called her names that were entirely unwarranted and unsupportable. Calling insulting names in the first place is immature at best, but when it comes from someone who's supposed to be thinking stuff like this through, it's frankly startling.
He gets even more insulting by suggesting that Ms. Fluke should "give something back" to the American people for subsidizing her sex life: he suggests she become a porn actress. As if his scorn weren't enough, he has to become lewdly ludicrous.
In the wake of this indefensible vitriol, Rush has been losing advertisers left and right, to the point that some segments of his show are even closing with dead air: there are no advertisers at all to fill the slot. There's just silence.
Now the question comes up: should Rush be muzzled? They're asking this very question at such outlets as The Huffington Post and CNN.com - both representatives of the so-called "liberal media" that such conservative mouthpieces as Rush constantly rail against - and defending him. Make no mistake, they call him out as an arrogant bully, but they defend his right to say what he thinks.
And so do I. He has the right to say whatever he wants, no matter how big of a jerk it makes him.
But that doesn't mean anybody has to pay him to say it. Jane Fonda says he should be pulled off the air. She's dead wrong of course, it's not up to her to say that. It's up to everyone, and for the radio network that pays him those big checks to say, "all right, that's enough of you," and can him. Rush shouldn't be fired because of what he said - but if there were something you should be fired for saying, I'd suggest this as a good example - he should be fired for alienating his audience and chasing off the advertisers. That is to say, he's costing his network listeners and revenue. That's the bottom line. When you cost more than you're worth, you're done.
Don't worry, he's both rich and old. He'll be dead before he's poor.
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