Is it any wonder that I find this mentality….lacking? No one who knows me is surprised, I’m sure. I hate everything, I’m told.

What is the world, though, when the completion of tasks is more important than the task’s purpose? As usual, I can’t help but ask, “why?” Naturally, this goes over like a lead balloon in the harried, “efficiency-driven”-yet-woefully-inefficient corporate bureaucracy that is my workplace. Where the motto is “I need it yesterday no matter how impossible and no matter how completely I botched the process before handing it off to you.”

As new crises and “challenges” trickle into my inbox, I’m struck with a deep-seeded need to find the root problem. I can’t help but stare into the mountains of miscalculations that led to the inevitable crisis we now face and ask why those errors were made. I can’t help but suggest ways to avoid those errors. And yet, I’m faced with “git ‘er done.” There is never time to address the root cause, because we are so harried with a need to resolve the issues caused by the root cause. It’s frustrating, is all.

It’s like Superman arriving upon a disaster scene and being told to work crowd control. “Or I could make the earth spin backwards and prevent this disaster from ever happening.”

“…just make sure these folks don’t go under the tape, hot shot!”

Would a little introspection be remiss in the modern world? Would it hurt if, instead of asking what we are going to do, we instead asked why we are doing what we do? To what end? For what purpose? And for what need? Albert Einstein said that “bureaucracy is the death of all sound work.” It’s possibly true for a creative process, but I can’t help but think an efficient bureaucracy is the last defense against the failings of any non-creative process necessarily involving humans.  And efficiency is achieved, not by doing without question in order to “git ‘er done,” but by evaluating each action for it’s value before acting.

Unfortunately, my bosses don’t agree.

                          

THEY LIVE!

All this builds up to my skepticism in viewing this article in the Telegraph, which basically states that a poll showed that 20% of respondents believed that aliens existed and were walking among us right here on our very own planet Earth. I mean, come on! One in FIVE?!?! The first thing I checked was the sample size…it might be tiny.  Turns out it’s 23,000. That’s a pretty robust poll. But there the data on this poll ends. The article gives no information about who conducted the poll, or the methodology.

Google reveals a scant few articles about this poll, with most simply dropping the 20% number in a quick blurb along with a sensationalist headline and moving on to other things. I finally discovered that it was Reuters which commissioned the poll, and found their initial article about it. They also don’t reveal the methodology. The polling firm, Ipsos, has a little blurb about it but says nothing about the nature of the poll or how data was gathered.

So, bottom line? The information is interesting. If the responses correlate with the actual public opinion, then the findings are downright scary. Frankly, I don’t find them that hard to believe. People believe weird stuff. If accurate, then nearly 45% of Indians and Chinese think aliens are among us! They Live!! Additionally it says something interesting about relatively secular and socialist countries like Belgium, Sweden, and The Netherlands. Only about 8% of them put any stock in the idea. But all this is pointless if the poll was biased or flawed. Where is the careful reporting on this subject?

Now that I’ve blathered on about how silly polls can be, here’s one for you. Have at it….what’s your take?

View This Poll

                          

But I don't WANNA have healthcare!!

There is an art to getting what you want. Children are masters of it intuitively, and invoke a special set of rules when faced with parents asking them to do something they don’t want to do (like bathing). First there’s the bargaining, seeing if maybe we can wait a little longer…delay, delay, delay. That’s not working, so then we escalate to simple refusal. This usually takes the form of saying “NONONONONONO” as a sort of prayer of warding.  Not working…Mommy still wants to make me eat my vegetables!  Now the child escalates to screaming, crying, and other general noise-making (protests?) in the hopes that maybe the parent will be persuaded to just appease the child to shut them up. These may take the form of hyperbole about how the parent is oppressing them (“you hate me”, “you’re ruining my life”, “you’re killing America”). This doesn’t work either, for the resolute parent, they know that eventually, children must take their medicine for their own good, and persist despite their angry cries. What is the final tantrum tactic? Combine all of the above with plain old body weight. Drop to the ground, and make the parent either carry or drag you to where they want you to go.

Is this the state of US Government? Apparently so, at least for a part of it. Apparently the GOP is exploiting a routinely ignored rule of Senate Committee ops, and withholding consent to allow committee meetings to proceed past 2 o’clock in the afternoon. They are lying on the proverbial ground and kicking their feet in the air to prevent further forward movement. Amazing.

Here’s a video, in which testimony in a Senate hearing on transparency in government (HA HA HA) must be interrupted due to this new tactic:

Does somebody need a time out?

                          

Texas Caught in Time?

The answer, of course, is about money. The beauty of free-market capitalism is that money walks, even if it means that the only ones walking are the ones dragging their knuckles on the ground. Texas, it seems, has tremendous buying power in the textbook world. Due to their high population, their standards drive publishers to pander to their every whim in order to get their business. So, when they dumb down their own textbooks, they also dumb down the textbooks of other districts in the US who don’t have the “purchasing power” (read “money”) to get custom-made texts.

It’s not as bad as it seems. As someone working in the educational publishing industry, I can tell you that both New York City School Districts and Los Angeles School Districts also have a major influence in the textbook market. Still, if Texas pushes standards to (what shall we call it?) the intellectual right, it can affect many other districts that aren’t looking for content that’s geared toward NYC and LA’s urban populations.

The obvious question is, why isn’t there just a Federal Textbook Standard? Wouldn’t that solve everything? Not gonna happen. I can already hear the pundits crying “nanny state” at the top of their lungs. So, my question is: If money talks, then why aren’t the saner states combining purchasing power to make Texas into small potatoes? Hey, New England! Combine your individual district and state standards into one New England Textbook Standard that makes you all able to purchase as a unit! It seems such a simple solution, I wonder why no one does it? And while you’re at it, combine your standard with NY State, NYC, and Pennsylvania standards to create the Northeast Textbook Standard!! Get North Carolina and Maryland and Virginia to adopt the same standard and turn it into the Atlantic Seaboard Textbook Standard!! And as soon as everyone agrees on the history, the science, and the health curriculum, maybe THEN we can have a Federal Standard.

Of course, it’s not this easy. Politics will get in the way, and everyone will want to do it their own way. “We want to educate our children the way we want! Freedom to learn our own version of the truth!” But people wanted to know what could be done….there you have it. Or maybe nobody really wants a solution.  I have to admit, it is fun to just rip on Texas.

                          

The process is as follows: the prosecutor for a certain set of charges presents whatever evidence they have, the jurors are allowed to ask questions of witnesses (through the prosecutor), the charges are read by the prosecutor, and then the jury deliberates and decides if there is “legally sufficient evidence, and reasonable cause to believe” that the defendant can be indicted for those charges. It should be a very straightforward process… since the laws (as is the nature of laws) are very clear on what is required to charge an individual. Where the system falters is with the jurors, funnily enough.

The first thing I noticed is that most people don’t seem to have any grasp of relevance when it comes to what evidence is being presented. The question period, where the witness leaves the court and the jurors are allowed to ask the prosecutor any questions they want put to the witness, is particularly painful! Fortunately, the prosecutor acts as a legal advisor to the jury, telling them what questions are legally proper. In one case, an undercover officer was describing taking part in a drug bust at a certain location. He described the deal taking place at two cross streets (say 95th and Atlantic, as a hypothetical) and explained the rest of the process, such as the exchange of money and the search of the suspect resulting in the finding of 500 pills in separate baggies (narcotics). After the witness left, we were asked if there were any questions. Several members of the jury seemed concerned that 95th street didn’t intersect Atlantic, and the prosecutor was forced to call the witness back and clarify. Yep, he misspoke, it was 93rd or something. Totally irrelevant. The witness had testified that the bust took place in Kings County, and that was all that really mattered, as far as the law was concerned.

On to reading us the charges. One of the charges was possession of a controlled substance with the intent to sell. Well, no one seemed convinced that these 500 pills were intended to be sold! WHAT!?!?! “Well, maybe it was a prescription,” said one juror. I had to argue with her to convince her that pharmacists don’t hand out 500 pills at a time….particularly not of a narcotic drug! Furthermore, they don’t dispense drugs in little plastic baggies. The charge was hotly debated, since most didn’t think it constituted “proof” that the individual was planning to sell the drugs. A bunch of Law & Order fans, no doubt. We don’t have to have proof, just “legally sufficient evidence, and reasonable cause to believe.” This was lost on most, and the charge was dismissed. Yikes.

Another juror decided to excuse herself from the voting process on all charges, because “you guys are throwing these kids in jail! That’s someone’s SON!” Excuse me, but I’m pretty sure that every criminal on the planet (and every non-criminal, for that matter) is someone’s son (or daughter). Not to mention that the Grand Jury doesn’t throw anyone in jail, they are simply indicting them on charges, which will bring them to trial. And all these weird happenings are taken entirely in stride by the system! No one monitors the proceedings (they have to be conducted in secret, with only the jury in the room), and charges are held and dismissed on the whim of a group of people that seem to have no grasp of logic or reason, let alone law.

Well….they do day that justice is blind.

                          

What I wondered about then, and indeed now, is about the slow influence of natural selection on species with longer life cycles…namely humanity itself. Is it possible… that natural selection would be brought to a standstill by modern science? I mean, if we no longer die (or, more accurately, cease to reproduce) because of mutations, how would humanity ever select for those without certain traits? Being nearsighted brings this to mind. Much of human kind is nearsighted, and given true natural evolutionary pressures, a species would not have this problem, because subjects with such a disadvantage in the wild would doubtless die before reaching reproductive maturity. Of course, with modern science and healthcare, there is nothing life threatening about nearsightedness, so many go on to reproduce. The result is that nearly 30% of the population is nearsighted.

These were simple, vague wonderings from years ago, and nothing I took very seriously. Of course, bringing us to the “On Cinema” portion of this post, now I wonder if maybe natural selection could have a more sinister course in mind for humanity after seeing the film Idiocracy, by (ironically) Beavis & Butthead creator Mike Judge.

The film is a comedy, ostensibly, but watches more like a horror film to me, depicting what happens when an “average” human specimen from 2005 is frozen and awakes in the year 2505 to find he is the smartest man alive. The world is overrun with stupid reality TV, corporate consumerism, and an over-sexed, dumbed-down populace. Nothing works, the infrastructure is rotting, and the president is a former American Gladiator-type TV star. There is a new “dust bowl” scale crop failure, since the Brawndo Corporation has decreed that it’s Gatoradesque drink should be used to water the nations crops (“it has the electrolytes that plants crave”), and has purchased the FDA in order to rewrite the food pyramid. Hospitals have stoner doctors, that prescribe treatments using an oversimplified push button screen with pictures of people vomiting and giving birth to select from. People seen trying to read words are labeled “fags,” and anyone speaking with any sense of eloquence is seen as femmy. Everyone loves the sight of someone being kicked in the balls (the most popular TV show is entitled “Ow! My Balls!!”), and the winner for Best Screenplay is a movie that simply shows an ass farting on the screen.

Yes, it’s silly. Yes, it’s funny. Yes, it’s hyperbole. But I’ll be damned if the depiction, at the start of the film, of how natural selection could lead to just such an occurrence didn’t bring shivers to my spine. The flow chart, comparing the reproductive rates of two intelligent persons with the rates and subsequent genetic spread of the trailer trash couple, was one of the most horrifying calculations I have ever seen depicted on the silver screen! Soylent Green? Ha! If only the future was such a rosey picture!

Damn you all to hell! You’ve finally done it!!

                          

No, gentle reader, the mindless masses do exactly what they are told, and rent everything that was released in the last 6 months! What is UP with that?!?! Top 5 are as follows:

1. Crash
2. The Departed
3. Mr. and Mrs. Smith
4. Walk the Line
5. Little Miss Sunshine

Okay, I’m not saying that these aren’t fine films (well, maybe I’m saying that about ‘Mr. & Mrs. Smith’) but why must the populace confine themselves to the same films that line Blockbuster Video shelves by the score? Simple brainwashing, I’m guessing. TV advertising at work. And for putting ‘Mr. & Mrs. Smith’ up there in lights, I’m awarding Netflix users the first ever GOLDEN SHEEP AWARD!!! (proudly displayed to the left) This award celebrates the grazing herds of this world…shear yourselves bare, Netflix Top 100 voters, you deserve it!

Okay, so since I’m so much better than everyone else, I’m going to recommend 10 movies you absolutely better have seen before you can rent garbage like ‘Mr. & Mrs. Smith’!!

1. Citizen Kane (snobby but good)
2. Rushmore
3. This is Spinal Tap
4. Clue
5. Blade Runner
6. Shine
7. Grave of the Fireflies
8. Shaun of the Dead
9. Rear Window (and it better be the Hitchcock version)
10. Brazil

Not necessarily in that order, are some of the best films available on DVD. Not all of them are serious films, but all are exceptional for different reasons. Once you can see those reasons, and appreciate them, you graduate to being able to give an honest opinion of most new releases. Bottom line….new is not necessarily improved.