A View Askew
(Or: Did the Dinosaurs See the Comet?)
Jan 2014 Issue 7
Dear Leader's Dog,
Prudence
(Upon discovering she was Dear
Leaders Dog)
Short Takes
If We Didn’t Have the Weather to Talk About . . .
Sooo I understand
it was little cold that first full week of January when I just happened to be
in FL. Well, you know it got chilly down there too; one day I actually had to put on a jacket and just go to a movie instead of play golf – thank you feeling my pain. I will
share a very descriptive map that I think really sums up everyone’s sentiments
about the polar vortex at end of the post. (It appears that I wasn't so smart after all - look out below!)
The
Time Machine
Yet more on my recent sojourn to St Pete (Can't wait to get back in Feb.) I can’t help but ponder the remarkable similarity this might be to
a journey to the future – my personal palm tree-lined time machine! Let me give
you some examples.
They say St Pete is God's waiting room - could be true. Every grocery store is overrun with old people.
(Where else can they go?) Stores cater to them, too, with large displays of
soft foods and large pharmacies - can you get a deal on stool softeners!
Walking on the beach, on the sidewalks, in the movies? Yup, gray beards
everywhere.
What all this suggests to me is a vision of what
all of America will look like in ten to fifteen years. Florida is just sort of a mini version of
what the age wave will be as it washes over the country. Think about it.
Everyone will be driving Lincoln Town Cars so parking lots will be danger
zones, not to mention crowded. A flood of Little Rascals will cause huge traffic
jams at grocery stores. There will be overwhelming demand for those personal
oxygen tanks that old folks carry around. Red lights will really be just a
suggestion. Restaurants will have to start the early bird specials at 2PM to
accommodate all the geezers. And there is certain to be a run on black socks
and sandals.
I don’t wish to paint a totally dyspeptic vision of
the future, there might be some positives. For example, they may make bikini
bottom Depends for the old girls.
Speeding tickets will be a thing of the past. Right turns from the left
lane will become legal. Best of all, handsome 75 year old men will have their
pick of 80 year old widows – and there will be lots of both. In fact, any man
that has a pulse will have their pick of the widows (some things never
change). Which reminds me; we are
certain to have a lot more and better erectile dysfunction drugs so we’ve got
that going for us. Also, it occurs to me that Florida might actually be a good
place to go to in the winter since old people tend not to travel as much. Oh, that’s right, I’ll be an old person too, never
mind.
So as I gazed on this sea of wrinkly skin – and at
the location on my body formerly occupied by my chest – it occurred to me that
we just might become such a burden on society that “Soylent Green” may not be such
a farfetched solution. Are you familiar with that 1973 classic movie starring
Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson?
I think you should Google it – and start planning on “going home.”
Things That I Think
About
Eating
Healthy
You know, for Christmas I, like many people I suppose,
bought a couple of healthy eating diet books as gifts, Eat to Live and The
Paleo Diet. The gist of them is, of course, to eat foods that are better for us
and make us healthier. It’s not important what these particular diets call for
(although the paleo thing is fascinating – where did they find a 15,000 yr old
cook book?!) The point is that it made me wonder about the whole idea of
“eating healthy.”
We’ve had this organic and natural food kick for a long time
and on the surface it makes a lot of sense – on an individual level.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t make a lot of sense on a larger scale.
First, healthy food – fresh fruit and vegetables, organic
eggs and meat, etc. – clearly seems like a good thing. (Although with Americans
it’s hard to tell – we love our fads.) However, anyone who has been to a
grocery store knows that eating healthy is ex – pen –sive! Simply stated, if
you are a person of limited income and you have ten dollars to feed your family
do you, A) buy 3 apples and a pound of chicken or, B) go to McDonalds and get
four crappy but filling meals? Duh.
Now you could say – and probably should say – the decision
goes further than that. For example, that same family maybe has cable TV and $150/mo
cell plan. So why not forego some of those things in order to eat healthier? I
don’t know but I suppose it’s because that’s not how people make personal
choices i.e. we don’t always make GOOD choices (and I include myself in that
group.) As an aside, do you know how economists define the word “rational?” Are
you thinking, Thoughtful? Logical? Ha! Nope, it means "wanting
more rather than less of a good." Doesn’t mean thoughtful or best
long term solution, just basically
something we think will make us most happy- period. So deciding if I can
eat – eat crappy maybe - but eat AND keep my smart phone and cable TV, many
people will choose that option. Health be damned! (hmmm sounds like regular exercise too,
doesn’t it!?)
There is a second and maybe more important reason why eating
“healthy” probably doesn’t work on global scale (assuming you could get people
like me to eat broccoli and stuff like that anyway.) According to experts there ain’t no way of
growing enough organic, hormone free, non-GMO food for everyone. There are 7
billion people on earth right now on the way to 9 billion in 2050. There
probably isn’t any way to even grow enough crappy food for that many people.
There is only so much fresh water and tillable soil on earth, so much
fertilizer that the ground can handle, so much energy that can be put into food
production before things go pop. And that’s not all.
From what I’ve learned thinking about this is: location,
location, location; the even bigger issue is food distribution. We are blessed
in this country with having a little over million farmers produce more than
enough food for us. There is plenty of food in world today yet huge numbers of
people are starving. There are many parts of the world that don’t produce
anywhere near the food they need for a number of reasons and/or can’t get
access to any excess food that is available. You could say, “tough shit” but
that won’t really solve the problem (Assuming you don’t go all Darwin on me.)
People eat or they starve – as they are doing all over the world today while we
actually have this surplus of food. What’s going to happen in 35 years? Dunno.
Separate but related, it’s bad enough that there are a lot
poor people who can’t get enough food. Now we also have the issue that many
people are pulling themselves up in to the middle class in other countries
(irony noted regarding the declining middle class here) who are competing for food. These folks look at us
and European countries and say “Hey, I want to eat like that too.” Again, there
is no way to raise enough beef, chicken and wheat – organic or otherwise - for
everyone to eat like us. (In an aside to my aside, I read once that if everyone on
earth lived like us – and why shouldn’t they? You know big houses, big cars, big boats, big snow mobiles, big guts – we would need something like four planet Earth’s resources. Oddly there seems to be plenty of room for more golf courses though!) Should
be interesting.
Soooo, back to the diet books. I’m not ready give up on as
many good, healthy meals as I can eat (not cauliflower or fish though, please)
but I have a little more sympathy for those that make “dumb” decisions about
what they eat.
“You want fries with that?”
Critical
Thought Corner
I
see that the Minnesota Orchestra finally has finally settled their contract –
with pay cuts, of course. I don’t really have a dog in this hunt but I find the
difference in treatment between world class musicians and world class athletes,
professional and otherwise, very interesting. (Joe Mauer, 23 mill a year, top
musician something like $150k – before cuts.) Even at the high school level,
what’s the first thing to go with cuts? The arts including music. Last thing? Yup, football.
On
the other hand, as one person in the paper noted, the audience for symphonies
and for touchdowns is very different in both numbers and type and, after all,
these are still businesses. Anyway, what do you think? Should there have been
some way for the public to help the musicians and the arts, as we regularly do
for sports, or are these two things totally different? Hmmmmm
Stupidity,
Ignorance and Intentional Ignorance
Ignorance: Ability to have but lack of, knowledge Stupidity:
dumb or unable to gain knowledge. Big difference between these two!
Agnotology: “Culturally constructed ignorance, purposefully created by special interest groups working hard to create confusion and suppress the truth.”
Barry’s word for the day is Agnotology. Read on.
Fascinating discussion via Wired’s Clive Thompson, and Stanford historian of science
Robert Proctor, on Agnotology:
“When it comes to many contentious
subjects, our usual relationship to information is reversed: Ignorance
increases.[Proctor] has developed a word inspired by this trend: agnotology. Derived from the Greek root agnosis,
it is “the study of culturally constructed ignorance.”
“People always assume that if someone
doesn’t know something, it’s because they haven’t paid attention or haven’t yet
figured it out,” Proctor says. “But ignorance also comes from people literally suppressing truth—or drowning it out—or trying to make
it so confusing that people stop caring about what’s true and what’s
not.” (emphasis added)
Fairly amazing, and when it comes to
certain issues, its dead on.”
It’s anti-truth, anti-science and anti-democracy - is it any wonder we can’t make any progress as a country?
Agnotology. A great word and all the more reason to follow my usual closing advice!
Perfect Weather Map
Okay as advertised the map below the sign off is
both hilarious and accurate depiction not only of the polar vortex but just
about every winter here in the lovely theater of seasons we call Minnesota.
WARNING: It contains many very bad words (never said this newsletter was G
rated.) If you are the sensitive type
you may want to skip it.
Buenos Noches to All
Thanks for reading and hope you share my site so I can build
a huge audience and TAKE OVER THE WORLD! Ooops, sorry, might have had a minor
stroke there. In any event, stay warm and in the mean time . . .
“Be a good citizen of your world . . .” and
avoid agnotology!
Quote Du Jour
“Anti-intellectualism has
been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life,
nurtured by the false
notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your
knowledge.’” — Isaac Asimov
Perfect Description of Winter
A View Askew is the sole property of D
Roger Pederson, Mpls MN. You may forward without special permission but if you
want to use anything here for your own purposes please send me a request at dpeders2002@gmail.com.
A View Askew
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