Buttons

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When you find a button, push it.

I celebrated a birthday this year. While I still have my whole life in front of me, it no longer seems as infinite as it did forty years ago today. I’m thinking I should decide what I want to do when I grow up.

Or not.

Although I am indeed more than 50 and less than 100, this is the Internoodle™ and probably not a good place to publicize the actual day or month or year of one’s birth.

Writer, actor, and Shaq-twin in the cable ads Ben Stein spoke about the happiness that “comes to those who pursue careers that define their passions.” He delivered part of the commencement address he didn’t give at UVM on CBS Sunday Morning and I pulled a quote for an article about an early morning apartment house explosion last month. The resulting fire left one man in the hospital with severe burns and several families homeless. The other six residents of the four apartments, including Jimmy Branca’s family, escaped without injuries.

Despite the fire, despite playing the blues for a living, despite the fact that he says he is “one flat hat away from being an Amish guy,” Mr. Branca is a pretty happy fellow.

“What about the happy people,” Mr. Stein asked in his address. “What did they do?

“They made a decision to live.

“They decided to do what their hearts told them to do, to do what was in them to do. They took risks and they took chances, and they tried a lot of different things until they got to where they wanted to be.”

I’ve been working on my tan.

I rebuilt, extended, added an angled entry and reshingled the back porches here almost 30 years ago. The one-by tongue-and-groove lumber that sheathed the original porches could have been 100 years old then. Time and shingles that had developed some leaks have taken their toll. It is time for plywood. And shingles. And some redesign. The new porches will have a nice roof deck, a much better entry, and a garbin.

It gives me a certain amount of pleasure when Rufus, a guy two years younger than I, tells me, “You are out of your mind. After helping you with your porch roof in New Jersey, I swore I would NEVER do roofing again. I was… what?…. 25 years old?

“You are totally out of your f-ing mind. I wish you luck. Seriously.”

And I’m doing it by myself. At my age.

I can almost guarantee I won’t do this again but I enjoy planning a job and really like seeing the physical results. Improving my tan in the process is a nice side benefit.

Happiness ain’t overrated.

After our concert last night, I helped the Fire Department Auxiliary take down their folding tent. We didn’t know how it worked until I found a big button hidden in a plastic bracket on each leg.

“Push the button,” I said.

We each did and the canopy collapsed magically into its carry bag.

I have pursued my own passions but I wonder if I’ve pursued them enough.

Over the years, I have built fine furniture, milked a cow barehanded, raced at Watkins Glen, designed and built a 30′ boat in my barn, taught college, founded a health center, hosted a television program, invented machinery, touched lion cubs and sharks, learned how to make stained glass windows, had dinner at the Tavern On The Green, published more than a half-million words in newspapers, shaved my head, sold and donated photographs, lived on an island, and made two great friends, one via the Interwhatsit™ although she lives thousands of miles away. Recently, thanks to this blog and the same Intertoob™, I’ve convinced all of my rug chewing right handed friends — including the bikers — that I am the devil spawn of Leo Trotsky and all of my loony left handed friends — including the Far Green true believers — that I am the consummate mouthpiece of Genghis Khan. Lots of buttons pushed.

It is time to find some more buttons. I don’t know yet if I’ll write the Great American novel. I don’t particularly want to learn to belly dance but I wouldn’t mind learning to juggle. I want not to worry about bills and taxes and appointments but I may sell my business. I do know I will work to keep my two friends.

You can’t leap over a canyon in two small jumps. And when you find a button, push it.

Gulf. Seawater. Explodes.

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A friend posted a news clip on Facebook, to wit:

Recently, a News 5 investigation collected samples from multiple beaches in and around the Gulf region. Samples were taken in areas where kids were playing and swimming. The results were absolutely terrifying.

Good thing she didn’t test for arsenic. Also a good thing she didn’t read any actual scientific papers, I replied.

It sure would be refreshing to find a local news anchor who had even the remotest clue about science.

Another Facebook buddy commented on the link.

“@Dick: Did you actually watch the clip? If you had, you would know that the comment about the sample came from an analytical chemist (a “he”), and you’d also know that the sample was being tested for oil concentration, and underwent a surprisingly violent reaction that destroyed its Erlenmeyer flask because it contained an unknown component (dispersant? methane? they didn’t know).”

Pfui. He was trolling, right? Surely he must have been trolling. If he has heard the word Erlenmeyer flask somewhere, then he has enough technical knowledge to understand that (a) the reporter had no idea what she was talking about, (b) the report was full of scare stuff and devoid of much science stuff, and © Erlenmeyer flasks have flat bottoms. Jessica Taloney (the “she” I referenced) was the reporter. I don’t know if she has a flat bottom.

Robert Naman, the chemist “she” interviewed, told us that sea water typically has about 5 ppm of oil. The reporter scared us by saying “from 16 ppm to 221 ppm, our results are concerning.” Why? She didn’t tell us if 221 gallons of oil in a million gallons of sea water is fatal to humans or if it is only a problem when she needs ratings. She didn’t tell us if the oil in the marina (the highest concentration she measured) was from Deepwater Horizon or from a leak on the boat she used to dip the water. Marinas usually have higher concentration of oil in the water than beaches. SHE DIDN’T TELL US BECAUSE SHE DIDN’T KNOW. And neither did my Facebook buddy.

But the comment about the sample came from an analytical chemist.

Woo hoo. I Googled. Didn’t find anything about Robert Naman in the ACS rolls. The exploded flask did “contain an unknown component” so they speculated on how bad it was but SHE DIDN’T TELL US WHAT BLEW UP BECAUSE SHE DIDN’T KNOW. And neither did my Facebook buddy.

“News 5 will test that water for chemicals, specifically chemicals linked to the dispersant being used in the Gulf, Corexit,” Ms. Taloney reported alarmingly.

Well, isn’t that special. Mr. Naman doesn’t know what caused the explosion but Ms. Taloney will make sure they hang it on a chemical she knows nothing about.

I’m not a chemist nor do I play one on TV. I have no idea, based on the “WKRG News” report, whether the amount of oil they found is a reasonable average for the areas they sampled, is toxic in the concentrations they did find, or even if it came from Deepwater Horizon. I have no idea because the reporter did such a lousy job. SHE DIDN’T TELL US BECAUSE SHE DIDN’T KNOW. And neither did my Facebook buddy.

Unfortunately, my Facebook buddy (and WKRG “News”) want to make it into something that keeps us scared.

Gulf. Seawater. Explodes. And that, dear reader, is how the media deceives us.

Pravda

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My friend Dean “Dino” Russell is a roofer in the middle Keys. Dancing about on roofs all his life has made him the most physically fit man in the Home Depot; it also gives him an overview of life. He is the third-most conservative man I know.

This morning, Dino emailed me a copy of the CyberAlert compilation of news items reported in the daily BiasAlert. Calling itself “America’s Media Watchdog,” the Media Research Center News Analysis Division “document(s), expose(s) and neutralize(s) liberal media bias.”

The following examples aren’t very exciting but they lead to an important discovery about the “news.”

Tuesday July 13, 2010

1. Matthews to Democrat: What Percentage of Republicans Would You Put In the ‘Nut Bag’?
Chris Matthews, on Monday’s Hardball, brought on his own personal Congressman, Maryland Democrat Chris Van Hollen, to review how his party was going to distinguish themselves from the GOP in the midterms with Matthews asking the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee head if they were focusing on all the “crazy” Republicans, or in other words “nut collecting.” Matthews, after playing a clip of Barack Obama singling out Republicans Joe Barton, John Boehner and Roy Blunt, also reminded Van Hollen the President missed another “crazy” person with “B” name as he proclaimed: “If you’re going out looking for nuts, it would seem like you’d put [Michele Bachmann] in your basket.” Matthews even tried to pin down Van Hollen by demanding: “What percentage of the Republican Party would you put in the nut bag right now?”

Yawn. Chris Matthews is a syndicated “commentator,” not a reporter. Beck probably asked a guest “What percentage of Dumbocrats would you put in the ‘nut bag’?” yesterday, too.

2. CBS’s Schieffer Interviews Eric Holder, Ignores Black Panther Case
While devoting all of Sunday’s Face the Nation to an interview with Attorney General Eric Holder, CBS host Bob Schieffer failed to ask a single question about the Obama Justice Department dropping a voter intimidation case against the Black Panthers or allegations that the department has adopted a policy of ignoring such cases. At the end of the interview, Schieffer even asked about Holder’s infamous comment that the United States was a “nation of cowards” when it came to discussing race. However, the Face the Nation host failed to use that comment as a transition to the Black Panthers case, despite the fact that former DOJ attorney Christian Adams recently testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, accusing the department of adopting a policy of refusing to pursue voter intimidation cases that involved black defendants and white victims.

Yawn again. I watched FTN and included some of it in Sunday’s commentary. Bob Schieffer didn’t ask General Holder about a lot of things. He didn’t ask about U.S. v. Microsoft. He didn’t ask about Goldman Sachs. He didn’t ask about ACORN. He didn’t ask about the voter intimidation accusation made by Christian Adams.

Some of his questions were softish but they weren’t bad.

3. No Balance Required? MSNBC Features Only Pro-Gay Side of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Debate
MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer on Monday appeared baffled as to why more U.S. politicians weren’t ‘standing up’ to demand the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” touting it as “a civil rights issue.” In the span of two hours, the cable network featured a gay member of the military and a conservative to discuss the issue. However, both guests favored allowing homosexuals to serve openly.

That is the most troubling of these examples, although not surprising. Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) criticized Brewer live on the air; he said she was “absurd”, “fundamentally dishonest”, “irresponsible” and lacked “integrity” for her handling of interviews. She’s allegedly a news anchor, not a commentator and did her time as general assignment reporter. We should expect better.

None of this should worry us but for one terrible truth: the American news audience — including Dino and Rufus — has come to believe that Brewer and Colbert and Matthews and Beck and Limbaugh and O’Reilly are reporters and what they do is news.

Paranoia

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My friend Rufus is not paranoid. “Besides,” he said, “Even paranoiacs can have enemies.”

Rufus has stated that a Korean torpedo may have taken out Deepwater Horizon, that the ObamaNation tried to destroy the entire banking and insurance industry in order to nationalize health care, and that the ObamaNation did deliberately crash the entire economy in order to steal General Motors from its owners.

I don’t believe the latter theory.

“Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel said in an interview quoted in the NYTimes. “They are opportunities to do big things.”

I do believe the ObamaNation took advantage of the crashed economy to steal General Motors from its owners simply because they could.

Conspiracy theorists espouse clandestine liberal plans against the common citizens, extravagant murder plots, and other schemes that explain major political and historical events.

Some conspiracy theories have been advanced by government insiders themselves including the Vast International Communist Conspiracy (McCarthy’s right wing accusations of disloyalty, subversion, and treason during the Second Red Scare) and the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (Hillary Clinton’s left wing defense of Bill during the Lewinsky scandal when she called Monica’s claims the “latest in a long, organized, collaborative series of charges by Clinton’s political enemies.”)

We now know all of those charges were false, and yet …

Rufus makes a good argument linking North Korea’s torpedo attack on a South Korean warship to a possible torpedo attack on Trans Ocean’s Korean ties (Hyundai built the Deepwater Horizon).

Rufus and I both made a good argument showing that when governments drive insurers out of the business, only the government is left to supply the need. Whoda thunk a Chicago pol could understand supply and demand?

And there are plenty of examples of government overstepping its bounds. The City of St. Albans here told a local store owner he couldn’t paint his building yellow. President Barack Obama ordered General Motors boss Rick Wagoner to resign (and that was a year before he ordered Carl-Henric Svanberg to suspend BP’s dividends).

“Look at that Vermont man charged with downloading child porn,” Rufus said. 23 year old Michael Liberty pleaded not guilty to three charges in Burlington last week. Police say they found several images of child pornography on his computer after tracking his downloads; Liberty said he had deleted any child porn he had accidentally downloaded.

“Did you ever wonder how the cops found Liberty?” Rufus asked. “NSA does keyword searches on every U.S. phone call, and Comcast examines every byte that goes over its Internet system to decide whether to throttle its customer usage.

“What’s to keep Comcast from looking at the content you download?” From there, he thinks, it is a short step to slowing competitor’s content or tattling to the very regulators who will approve the NBC deal.

Comcast, the largest U.S. cable company on its way to world domination, is buying control of NBC Universal for $13 billion.

“Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence,” Napoleon Bonaparte warned us.

Supermarket ID cards. ISPs seeing our mail. Local governments telling us what to paint. The nation’s highest official telling us what to think.

Whether malice on the part of the Washington ruling class or incompetence on the part of the voters, we Americans have given up our strong, independent, problem-solving ways in favor of temporary … comfort.

And it doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to notice that.