I’ve been struck recently by the realization that, in fact, there is nothing new under the sun. Even thinking such a thought is unoriginal.
Ecclesiastes 1:9 (NIV) What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun
This latest round of retrospection/nostalgia was brought on after I read this article in the NY Times about nutrition and watched the following video on YouTube about the fitness routine undertaken by the actors in the movie 300
The common theme that I drew from both of these things is that the old ways still have value, more so in fact than many of our new ways. Compressing the NY Times article to its essence, the point there is to say that moderate amounts of whole, unprocessed foods of great diversity and high quality are the most compatible with human health. That’s old school, as people had to change their diet seasonally, ate foods that were nearer their original form, ate smaller quantities of those foods and so forth. Our new school has reduced the diversity of our intake (80% of our calories come from the products of 4 grains), reduced quality through selective breeding and the denuding of soils, increased portion sizes, and processed many foods beyond recognition.
Similarly, the video shows that physical training emphasizing real activity scenarios results in a body that is highly functional while simultaneously resulting in a sculpted physique. Interestingly, the exercises being done by the actors in the video are exercises that have been traditionally performed from antiquity to recent history.
Only in the last 30 or 40 years have we thought that we could eat better by eating processed foods or become more fit by using machines to isolate and enhance individual muscles. Incidentally, the last 30 years have seen a radical alteration of our American physiques and lifestyles to the point where more than 65% of our population is overweight. That number is expected to exceed 70% by 2008.
I won’t assert that we need to regress our society wholesale – there are lots of things that we have moved beyond that deserve to stay in the past. But I say let us be humble enough to recognize when our solutions aren’t really solving their problems. The need of corporations to push new products isn’t greater than our need to be healthy.
It never ceases to amaze me that there are those who would, without shame, expect something for nothing. I can’t fathom a sense of entitlement to things that are the property of others. Yet these children (encouraged by their adult anarchist rabble rouser handlers), without irony, demanded that the government provide them another building, free of charge, to compensate them for the building that they didn’t own and were evicted from. Which is hugely consistent with their ideology given, you know, that they’re anarchists. Which means they don’t want intrusion from government.
Unbelievable. And Denmark is one of the most generous socialist nations on Earth. When will people learn that the greedy “entitlists” will never be satisfied? Their goal isn’t greater development or prosperity for society – prosperity after all is one of the cornerstone problems of society. The destruction of prosperity is the aim of the anarchists, though they will hide this fact behind slogans like “freedom” and “expression”.
Why do we tolerate this garbage? Are we really doing ourselves any favors allowing divisive elements to act and exist openly within our societies? Could a society be said to have an obligation to reject the nihilists and the anarchists who are solely bent on the destruction of society?
Do you think you have a right to a job? Workers for Airbus think they do. This despite the fact that without some layoffs Airbus is doomed.
That, of course, is of no concern to the unions representing the threatened workers. Airbus is too important to the governments of France, Germany and Britain to actually fail – union leaders can safely expect that Airbus will be bailed out by those governments long before they are forced to loose their death grip on the throat of their employer.
The moral of the story is that, if you want to be a burden on society, join a union in an important vocation. This way you’ll be able to make unreasonable demands and be immune from any sort of consequences. If your vocation is important enough you’ll be able to force your bosses to seek government aid to sustain you.
Our modern society, so advanced and impressive, is brittle. We rely on a thousand separate systems of increasing complexity and specialization to function smoothly, every day, rarely thinking about what those systems do or what happens when they fail.
One of the more obscure systems that we rely on, in this case for the proper functioning of the agricultural industry, is beekeeping for the pollination of crops. Bees are responsible for $14 billion of agricultural activity a year, pollinating everything from almonds to avocados. In fact, bees don’t earn their keep through honey any more – China and Argentina undercut domestic honey in price, leaving pollination as the big money maker. Though alternatives to bees have been sought for pollination, nothing has really emerged that works quite as well.
So what happens when the bees all die? The NY Times has an article about a bee crisis that has stricken the nation. Entire bee colonies are simply disappearing, and bee keepers are reporting losses from 40-70%.
Initial signs appear to point to overly selective breeding of the bees, resulting in bee strains that aren’t tolerant of the stresses placed on them. This should be a relatively easy problem to fix, given time – finding ways to stress the bees less or breeding better stock is certainly conceivable but won’t happen over night.
So bees are disappearing and it might be because they’ve been bred into such a specialized role that they no longer have the healthy robustness that comes from millions of years of natural selection. This selective breeding program has then, in its failure, threatened agriculture, itself affecting what you and I are able to put on our tables, and for how much.
Is this a surprising outcome to large-scale specialization and over-utilization of an important resource? What other fundamental resources and systems will drag down our economy and our society in their collapse? How many smaller scale systems need to fail before the larger system is destroyed?
I don’t think anybody will disagree that teachers have a tough job. I don’t think anybody will disagree that teachers who work hard deserve respect fair compensation. Unionization is a means to achieve this but the CFT set its sites a bit higher than that - the union leaders who make the biggest promises to their members, after all, are the ones who get voted into office.
As it now stands the union has engineered a system wherein under-performing teachers are immune from any sort of action by school administrators. This includes firing. I suppose a teacher could get fired if they really tried hard, but it doesn’t happen nearly as often as it needs to.
My favorite part of this whole article is that nowhere in this scrum do any leaders attempt to defend the benefits that unions have gained for their members. These benefits are indefensible. Rather, union leaders try to distract, using emotional ad hominem attacks to divert attention. I particularly like this phrase:
he is encouraged to speak with the people who educate California’s children and hear from them what the situation is like.
What is the situation like? Too many pesky standards? Too little funding? Too many teachers retiring, eroding the unions power base? I’m curious to know just what the “situation” is like. Further, I want to know what the teachers union is doing about the “situation”. My understanding of the “situation” needs some help. Anybody care to clue me in?
Given that there are situations and all, maybe the teachers union should be working on addressing the situations rather than making up new awards to give to (liberal) executives that think more accountability and oversight might be a good thing.
I’m going to let the competition… sing? for themselves:
I’m seriously not comfortable with the idea that American popular culture is how the world sees us. Yet it’s easy to see why this is the case when most of the media that the rest of the world produces is little better than what you see above - who wouldn’t want to watch “Real World” instead of this Kazakh garbage?
So American culture now counts as its main ambassadors Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears and Angelina Jolie. This is not an optimal situation but fear not, I have a solution.
My solution doesn’t fix American popular culture, but rather brings the rest of the planet up/down to our “level”. The idea here is that we hold “Kazakhstani Idol” and “Burmese Idol” contests and secretly fund, through secret CIA accounts, the costs foreign performers incur while creating indigenous media. This way we’ll have kDzjay-Zee of Nepal doing ridiculous things with his/her life and making a fool of himself and reflecting poorly on his/her own people. Given enough wealth for nothing, foreign pop icons are bound to self destruct in spectacular fashion and the all those foreigners will be so busy watching “Peoples Revolutionary Entertainment Tonight” that they won’t have time to care that Britney and Kfed are split or whatever.
America wins when nobody pays attention to our celebrities.
Many of us have asked, or been asked, what we’d do if we knew we had six months to live (or a year or whatever). What’s your answer?
The fact is, we’re all going to die but we don’t like to think about it in a personal sort of context. We give ourselves some longish horizon within which to work, to fulfill all our expectations for ourselves, so that when we don’t succeed we can always think to ourselves, “I’ve still got time.”
The German in this video was diagnosed with terminal leukemia and had one year to live. What he chose to make of the rest of his life is contrary to what most would do. He chose to risk his life by riding on the outside of a bullet train.
In a way I respect him. Rather than clinging to a fading hope he embraced his fate and lived a life without fear. In what other context could somebody ride on the outside of a 330km/h bullet train other than when their own life is no longer something they’re seeking to protect? People talk about facing death with dignity. This is more like facing death with chutzpah, with attitude.
The boys and I like to look at train videos on YouTube from time to time. Trainspotters the world over have taken hold of YouTube for the distribution of their work and dads with young boys are benefiting hugely.
Anyway, that’s not what this post is about. Browsing around YouTube (it’s impossible not to), I saw quite a lot of people posting “responses” to original content videos. This is not a facility provided by YouTube but rather something that seems to be springing up organically from the user community. People are making response videos to whatever they see and posting “Re: Flying Cheese Monster Hits Light Pole” wherein the virtues and failings of the Cheese Monster are discussed.
I watched a few of the responses. They’re all horrible, horrible rubbish, without exception. Anybody who’s made one of these things should be ashamed. This garbage adds nothing of value to my YouTubing and frankly I want that bit of my life back that I wasted watching them. Oh, and I’ll just say that when you’re making a video of yourself, people, look into the camera. The whole watching yourself on the computer screen while you’re filming yourself annoys the snot out of me. But I digress.
My assessment of the worthlessness of this content doesn’t mean that it’s not worth-ish-y. I’m not quite the best when it comes to spotting trends and value on the Internet because I still don’t see the point of MySpace, but it seems to me that this could be the next big thing. What’s more Internet than monotonic emo children preening and complaining about something they just watched on YouTube? Nothing! It’s MySpace redux.
So that’s what this looks to be becoming, a form of video MySpace. YouTube’s next big challenge (and a gauge of how sharp they are or aren’t) will be to provide new and innovative bits of functionality to handle their becoming MechaMySpace, like built in response handling. If they succeed in doing this, they win. Again. If they don’t they could lose out big to the next up and comer that makes socializing in this more bi-directional manner a core part of the product.
