The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
All the cool kids are doing it, so here’s mine.
For Father’s Day, 1996 my wife bought me a Ruger 10/22 – the standard carbine with the pencil barrel and the youth-sized stock. “Oh my love,” I told her, “you don’t know what you’ve started.”
Within three weeks I had converted it to this:
I don’t even want to know how much money I’ve got tied up in that thing. The only original parts are the receiver and the bolt assembly.
This time from Ian Banks’ Matter:
“Perhaps it is different for humans, dear prince,” she said, sounding sad, “but we have found that the underdisciplined child will bump up against life eventually and learn their lesson that way – albeit all the harder for their parents’ earlier lack of courage and concern. The overdisciplined child lives all its life in a self-made cage, or bursts from it so wild and profligate with untutored energy they harm all about them, and always themselves. We prefer to underdiscipline, reckoning it better in the long drift, though it may seem harsher at the time.”
“To do nothing is always easy.” Ferbin did not try to keep the bitterness out of his voice.
“To do nothing when you are so tempted to do something and entirely have the means to do so, is harder. It grows easier only when you know you do nothing for the active betterment of others.”
I was reminded by this passage of a quote from an earlier piece, I Guess I’m Not… HUMAN. Former Representative Adam Putnam has said,
Government does only two things well: nothing, and overreact.
In current times government has been likened to a parent to the people, with the Republicans being the “daddy party” and the Democrats being the “mommy party,” but as someone else said:
This guy is our uncle and that’s as close as I want the fucker.
I don’t need the government to be my big brother, my parent, my nanny, or my caretaker. It needs to maintain public services (roads, etc.), maintain foreign relations and the military, keep the states from squabbling, and stay the fuck out of my life.
Perhaps someday our putative “leaders” will learn enough to do nothing, rather than overreact.
(Who am I kidding?)
I’m watching TLC’s replay of the CBS show Undercover Boss. This week’s episode follows the CEO of the Baja Fresh restaurant chain as he goes to several stores as a prospective management candidate. The stores he goes to are ones performing exceptionally well, and he wants to find out what makes these stores different from the average franchise.
At the first, the manager is a young Mexican immigrant, only in the country for two years, who is busting his ass. At the second, a young man from the Phillipines – ditto. The third, a young man recently immigrated from Jordan with his parents. At the fourth, a young woman who is not a recent immigrant, but she has a two year-old daughter. Her husband works nights, and she works days. All of them are busting their asses and running their stores with dedication and enthusiasm.
At two of the stores the managers said outright that they were living the American Dream, working hard to create a better future for themselves and their families. All of them understand the American work ethic, and are doing what it takes to make their stores the successes that have drawn the attention of corporate management.
It makes me all warm and fuzzy inside.
An ex-coworker emailed me this morning with one of those “pass it around the internet” emails and this note: “For some reason, this reminded us of you.”
So, I’m getting moved into my new office. The furniture was installed last week, but as of Friday, no chairs. Installation of cable broadband was going on Friday evening when I left, but when I dropped by Saturday to leave some boxes of stuff, still nothing to sit on but the desks.
Bright and early this morning, though…
However, I’m afraid my authority might have been overstepped:
This is the box it came in:
Still, I’ve escaped the fabric-covered box paradigm!
Found on the “Occupy a Job” facebook page:
Click to embiggen
My favorite is “I can’t hear the TV while I’m eating crunchy snacks.”
The current rage on the intarweb blogs is the “What was your first car?” meme.
Well, nobody asked me, but I’ll answer anyway. I’ve done this post before, but here it is again:
My first car at age 16 was my dad’s hand-me-down. He’d bought it for something like $700 in 1974, put another couple-hundred in parts into it so it would run, and drove it until 1978 when he went down to the Ford dealership and placed an order for his very first brand-new automobile, an F-150 pickup truck.
That was the year I turned 16. Our insurance agent told him, “Don, you have a new driver in the house. The insurance company sees ‘new driver’ and ‘new vehicle’ and they put two-and-two together and come up with a 60% increase in your insurance premium. Put the old car in your son’s name and insure it for the minimum you can.” So he did. Which is how I, out of three children, was the only one who got a car from my parents.
Pissed my brother off.
But the car in question was no particular prize. It was a 1969 Simca 1118:
Only mine didn’t look that good. It was originally silver, but the sun had faded that right through to the gray primer underneath. The interior was sun-rotted so the front seatbacks got reupholstered with T-shirts stretched over them. I got some scrap carpet from a friend – brown shag, no less – and carpeted the floor with that. Door panels, too. No radio, so my dad had mounted a 12V-powered AM-FM under the dash and wired it into the harness.
Rear-engine, rear-wheel drive, 1118cc, water-cooled, 56Hp. Zero-to-sixty? Take a lunch and eat it when you get there.
But it was a car, and it took me anywhere I wanted to go.
I always wondered what that car would be like with an engine transplant out of a Honda CBX.
Thirty years ago, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene, a book dedicated to the idea that the purpose of life was, essentially, reproduction – survival of the molecules of life. Or, as Robert Heinlein put it,
A zygote is a gamete’s way of producing more gametes. This may be the purpose of the universe.
This is expressed as “Birds do it, bees do it, why don’t we do it?” All species have a drive to reproduce, and we’re told that women have a “biological clock” that ticks down constantly. Bonnie Raitt’s 1990 song Nick of Time speaks to this:
A friend of mine, she cries at night
And she calls me on the phone
Sees babies everywhere she goes
And she wants one of her ownShe’s waited long enough she says
And still he can’t decide
Pretty soon she’ll have to choose
And it tears her up insideShe’s scared,
Scared to run out of time
It’s an old idea.
Remember this scene from The Matrix?
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpKphB4w9ME&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3&w=640&h=360]
Here’s what Agent Smith was talking about, Monty Python style:
http://static.photobucket.com/player.swf
Well, Agent Smith is wrong – on a number of levels – but the one I’m concerned with here is the part about humans multiplying “until every natural resource is consumed.” Not so. In fact, one of the problems the “West” is experiencing right now is the exact opposite. We’re not “multiplying” enough. We’re not even replacing ourselves. It’s a problem that has attracted a lot of attention. Mark Steyn’s 2006 phillipic America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It concerns itself almost exclusively with the demographics of Europe, and the fact that Europeans aren’t reproducing. Here’s another recent example, Forbes Magazine, Declining Birthrates, Expanded Bureaucracy: Is U.S. Going European?
One hopes that the current crisis gripping the E.U. will give even the most devoted Europhiles pause about the wisdom of such mimicry. Yet the deadliest European disease the U.S. must avoid is that of persistent demographic decline.
The gravity of Europe’s demographic situation became clear at a conference I attended in Singapore last year. Dieter Salomon, the green mayor of the environmentally correct Freiburg, Germany, was speaking about the future of cities. When asked what Germany’s future would be like in 30 years, he answered, with a little smile, “There won’t be a future.”
We’re not giving birth, but we’re not dying as fast either. From Foreign Policy, The World Will Be More Crowded – With Old People:
(W)hat demography tells us is this: The human population will continue to grow, though in a very different way from in the past. The United Nations’ most recent “mid-range” projection calls for an increase to 8 billion people by 2025 and to 10.1 billion by century’s end.Until quite recently, such population growth always came primarily from increases in the numbers of young people. Between 1950 and 1990, for example, increases in the number of people under 30 accounted for more than half of the growth of the world’s population, while only 12 percent came from increases in the ranks of those over 60.But in the future it will be the exact opposite. The U.N. now projects that over the next 40 years, more than half (58 percent) of the world’s population growth will come from increases in the number of people over 60, while only 6 percent will come from people under 30. Indeed, the U.N. projects that by 2025, the population of children under 5, already in steep decline in most developed countries, will be falling globally — and that’s even after assuming a substantial rebound in birth rates in the developing world. A gray tsunami will be sweeping the planet.
So we’re not reproducing, but we’re living longer.
The 2006 “comedy” film Idiocracy considered the idea that population growth occurred among people not intelligent enough to control their reproductive habits, while intelligent people just put it off:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXRjmyJFzrU?rel=0]
But that doesn’t seem to be the case, either. Intelligence isn’t the dividing line on reproduction rates. If anything, it appears to be wealth – wealthier nations tend to have lower reproduction rates than poorer ones. But is it only an economic decision? Do poorer nations squirt out kids at a higher rate than richer ones because intercourse is the best, cheapest entertainment going? Or is there something else, some other influence that affects human reproduction rates?
Mark Steyn noted in America Alone another interesting thing: America, along with maintaining at least a replacement reproduction rate is also one of the last Western nations still nominally Christian.
A while back, I wrote Why I am an Atheist. The gist of that post is the question What’s religion for? I think I have a better understanding now. Let’s watch the rest of that clip from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life:
http://static.photobucket.com/player.swf
Every version of Christianity follows Genesis 1:28
And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
I’m not a student of comparative religion, but I’d be willing to bet that the major religions out there have some similar form of entreaty to their adherents.
It would appear that in humans, the “selfish gene” expresses itself as personal selfishness. Cultures achieve material wealth, lose religion, and stop reproducing. Something other than “the selfish gene” is required to keep gametes making more gametes, and religion fills that need. The rites, rituals, rules and ramifications of religion act to produce social pressures to reproduce, and to do it along societal norms. Lose those, and demographic suicide threatens.
That is, unless we really do reach Raymond Kurzweil’s technological Singularity and achieve near-as-dammit human immortality. Of course, if we do cross that particular event horizon, what it means to be human will be redefined.
Anyway, this multimedia essay is the result of a lot of windshield time over the last three weeks. I found the idea intriguing. Discuss amongst yourselves.
In a continuation of posting other people’s content, here’s Bill Whittle’s latest Afterburner:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAOrT0OcHh0?rel=0]
