WHY DID THE SEA TURTLE CROSS THE FLORIDA KEYS?

To go to the doctor! That is the opening sentence of Miami News article that can be found HERE.

A 73 pound loggerhead sea turtle showed up at the Turtle Hospital, the only licensed veterinary facility in the world that solely treats sea turtles. The loggerhead was suffering from a bacterial infection and has been treated with meds and is recovering in a hospital tank.

While the hospital staff are mystified by the turtle’s behavior, I have a sneaking suspicion our own (O)CT(O)PUS may have had a ummm, hand (tentacle?) in steering the turtle to medical help.

HIT AND RUN POLITICS

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has released this video blaming Republicans and the previous administration for the current economic crisis.  My question: Is this fair criticism? While I may agree in part, is it reasonable to blame everything on Republicans? After all, the repeal of Glass-Steagall was signed into law by former President Clinton on November 12, 1999.



What does this video hope to accomplish? Will shaming Republicans result in more cooperation, or inflame and further polarize our body politic?  Is this a way to make friends and win votes?  Your thoughts ...

A NOTE OF THANKS FROM CANADA

Not that we deserve a note of thanks … considering the Fox News smugly sarcastic "new clear" bomb that offended our neighbors, sullied our reputation, and reinforced our Ugly American image in the eyes of the world.

But sometimes our voices do carry. Voices like our esteemed Captain Fogg and your peevish Octopus who have spoken out against our number one national export - Yankee dumbness. Today, I received this heartwarming note of thanks from friends in Canada who read our blog:

Give [ ... ] a big Canadian hug from us. We (our country) have been in this war going on seven years and maintain peacekeeping missions in long-forgotten places of conflict for decades without any fanfare. That is the Canadian way and why we are known as the ‘gentle and caring nation' by most countries. All of my American friends were outraged by the Fox news-comedy hour segment and fully know that our brave soldiers and their families are doing their all to help the good people of Afghanistan take-out the insurgents while working side by side with our US allies.

Not all Yankees fully comprehend the depth of hurt caused by Fox News. It seems our country is too preoccupied with itself to see how the rest of the world sees us.  Today's Sunday editorial from the OTTAWA CITIZEN explains far better than I possibly can (reproduced in full):

Talking aboot our American cousins

by JANICE KENNEDY

Excruciating, wasn’t it? That Fox News program clip we all watched last week with the guffawing buffoons parading their ignorance? That clip about Canada, the “ridiculous” country with the effete, inactive military and the policemen in red jackets riding horses?

Not that I generally watch Fox News, understand. (Why would I? I don’t consider myself a) a redneck, b) a right-wing fanatic, or c) dumb.) But, like the rest of Canada, I did see this morsel of televised moronism. And all I could think was, yikes, how embarrassing. Do they have any clue how dim-witted they sound?

Judging by their knowledge vacuum, you might conclude that the Fox characters (who also dismissed Mexico as the land of the siesta) were merely simpletons who had crawled out of some backcountry swamp. But that’s the terrible thing. Extreme and tacky, they were nonetheless not unique. In fact, they summed up a chunk of the prevailing American mindset.

Profound American ignorance about Canada is neither new (“I don’t even know what street Canada is on,” said Al Capone) nor confined to Fox. Nor is it the exclusive purview of the right wing or the uneducated. It’s simply an absence in the culture, an empty space where knowledge should be.  And not only about Canada.

When American commentators or comics need a punchline, no matter what their political orientation, they dig into their big bag of international clichés and come up with ready tags for everyone from the Mexicans (siestas), to the French (baguettes and retreating armies), to Canadians — frozen yokels who say “aboot” and are borrrrring. (Unless the bag of clichés belongs to Rush Limbaugh and company. Then we’re Soviet Canuckistan, buncha socialists.)

Besides the recent Fox embarrassment, we’ve also been treated lately to conservative Matthew Vadum’s American Spectator blog, which says Natasha Richardson may have been killed by Canada’s “socialist, government-run healthcare system — similar to the kind that President Obama wants to ram down the throats of Americans.”

At the time of the Iraq invasion, Conan O’Brien noted that “the prime minister of Canada said he’d like to help, but he’s pretty sure that last time he checked, Canada had no army.” Jon Stewart, having been to Canada, has “always gotten the impression that I could take the country over in about two days.” See? It comes from all sides. Nor should we overlook the touching earnestness of Britney Spears, who gushed that one of the coolest things about being famous was the travelling. “I have always wanted to travel across seas, like to Canada and stuff.”

On TV last week, there was a curiously telling line on the sitcom How I Met Your Mother, which includes the running gag of a character with a Canadian past (i.e., endless comic fodder involving hickness, maple syrup, Mounties and snow). When one of her reminiscences makes even sex up here seem boring, another character wails, “Canada … Why? Why do we let you be a country?”

Interesting choice of words, right? Not to get all Freudian or anything, but the joke does reveal something about the American soul — its Americentric worldview, its Manifest Destiny belief that the U.S. is the sun around which all other nations orbit. Or are permitted to orbit.

Only a fool would deny that our superpowerful American cousins are anything other than mighty and crucial to the future of the planet. But the sun? Americans too often are blinded by their own rays, and that’s where the problem lies.

When you can’t see beyond yourselves, you assume there’s not much out there worth seeing anyway. You rely for your knowledge on hoary and absurd stereotypes, recklessly uninformed opinion and gut prejudices based on nothing more substantial than wisps of misunderstood information.

That is ignorance. And that, my American friends, is the core constituent of your collective worldview.

(All you Americans who actually know things about both Canada and the rest of the world? Yes, I know you exist. But you’re a minuscule minority, and your perspective is not what gets airtime, at home or abroad.)

To those of us who live reasonably decent lives without the benefit of citizenship that is starred, striped and stamped with bald eagles, it’s all a bit alarming. Here we have the gigantor of nations, an incredible global hulk capable of alarming rampages, and it doesn’t seem to care what’s out there, and what might get trampled.

I can’t speak for other nations, but I can speak as a Canadian reduced to Made-inAmerica stereotype. Would it help to point out to Americans that a lot of us hate winter? That real socialists would laugh themselves silly at the notion that Canada is socialist? That most Canadians don’t buy real maple syrup because it’s too darned expensive? That health care here may be flawed but does actually work? That many Canadians don’t give a hoot about hockey? That we actually have a fairly lively culture up here in the hinterland? That not one 9/11 hijacker crossed over from Canada? Oh, and that 116 Canadian soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan?

It would not. That’s because Americans, hubristically, just don’t want to know.

Introducing a segment on the public-radio program This American Life, writer-broadcaster Sarah Vowell once observed, “Like most Americans, I don’t particularly care about Canada.”  Or any place else, apparently. That’s the American tragic flaw in a nutshell.

One final word from 8pus:  Ahh hope mahh fella Ahhmerikans finally get the point.

THE FIRST LADY DOING TOO MUCH?

There is an article over at Politico discussing the possibility that First Lady, Michelle Obama may be taking on too much and “spreading herself too thin.”

“Obama’s approach so far is decidedly different from the usual model of the modern first lady — pick a platform of two or three issues and stick to it, by and large, for four years.”

The article goes on:

“She’s become the spokeswoman for all sorts of issues and topics — from fitness, parenting, the environment and women’s rights, to redefining images of black women in American culture and promoting self-esteem for young girls."

Yet in the midst of all those themes, it isn’t yet clear whether her self-described core messages — about military families, volunteerism, and helping working women balance work and family life – are truly breaking through. Some wonder if she’s spreading herself too thin to emerge in the public mind as a leading voice on those topics.”

Then they present these two opposing views:

“I think when she thinks about work-life balance, it’s really broader than simply work and family in the general sense,” said Jocelyn Frye, her policy director. “It’s really thinking about how we make sure our families are healthy, how do we make sure that people eat right and take care of themselves and educate themselves about making good choices.”

“I think it’s fragmented. She stands for so many things right now, she’s doing so many things. She’s in the kitchen at the White House, she’s building houses, she’s digging in the garden. It’s all very nice, but I thought to myself, ‘Why is she planting herbs?’” said Mindy Sabella, director of marketing at Siegel+Gale, which specializes in strategic branding.”

I’m going to go out on a limb here and bet anyone that Mindy has never been a mother. When my four children were young, I worked two jobs, kept the house, did the grocery shopping, was a Cub Scout den mother and volunteered for several different community groups. And then every Sunday, I got everyone out of bed and dressed and the whole tribe went to church where I taught Sunday school.

Did I spread myself too thin? Sometimes, I probably did, but I believed that each of these endeavors were important so I treated them all with the same degree of care, making sure I was prepared and competent.

I believe what we are seeing from Mrs. Obama is just her natural energy and passionate commitment to topics that matter to her, much like the rest of us. But, could Mindy be right? Is our First Lady too fragmented to make a difference?

“Obama’s early moves have shown the topics where her interests run the deepest. During her visit to a struggling high school in a poor D.C. neighborhood she talked about being teased as a young girl by people who said she talked “like a white girl,” but ignoring the taunt and striving for excellence anyhow.”

“I really wanted to write it off as another school visit but I heard the snippets and it was like listening to a woman’s leadership conference. She genuinely wanted to put lift under every chair in that room, and to leave each of them with a picture of possibility that they may or may not have had when they came into that session,” said Sue Hodgkinson, who heads The Personal Brand Company. “She is clear that she has the ability in every exchange to leave that signature behind her, and I was in fact taken by that. She was not just showing up.”

Mrs. Obama has made a believer out of Sue Hodgkinson and she’s made a believer out of me. And I’d say, in the next ten years or so, we’ll be seeing just how many believers she's made out of the children in that classroom.

Mrs. Obama is beautiful, fit, young, active, passionate and intelligent. She is her own woman with her own style and I, for one, think she is doing a great job in her new role and to her detractors…

READING THIS POST WILL SEND YOU TO PRISON

Last week, our venerable Captain Fogg posted this article, Flori-DUH, about proposed legislation making it illegal in the Sunshine State to watch animals having sex. As our esteemed Captain explains here:

Every bit of legislation needs a scare story to justify it and this one demands our immediate attention because -- you guessed it -- someone says if you screw the pooch, you might become a pederast and sexual predator. Correlations are a dangerous thing, of course.

Last month, your wayward Octopus inked the aquarium with this post, CURSES, about proposed legislation in the State of South Chinalina making the use of "bad language" illegal. Last time, I managed to avoid self-incrimination.  Not this time!  I double-dare you:


Why is it legal to read this but forbidden to watch our revered law makers doing this?

Gotcha!  Your devious Octopus has entrapped you ... turned you into a felon in the Sunshine State.  Do we need more dumb laws written by ignorant, impotent sub-primate castrati still messing with their missing parts?

Would you like to see how cephalopods DO IT?

The "Disease" of Aging

I found this post on Digg today. It describes the enormous technological and medical progress being made in the field of aging. The article quotes a Cambridge geneticist, Aubrey de Grey, who says people who are alive today will be able to live to up to 1,000 years of age. Let’s just let that sink in a minute. One thousand…years of age. This man believes that, in the future, there will be 1,000 year old people. A millennium is the length of time this man says people will be able to live for.

While the article notes that Grey’s vision may be a little over the top, there is “a growing number of scientists, doctors, geneticists and nanotech experts” who believe that aging can be significantly slowed or even all-together halted.

Robert Freitas, a nanotech expert at a Palo Alto non-profit, was also quoted as saying, “…in the near future, say the next two to four decades, the disease of ageing [sic] will be cured [emphasis mine].”

A couple of points on this: first, while advancements in genetics and other technology and medicine will undoubtedly lead to longer life-expectancies, I can’t help but think that scientists have a tendency to get ahead of themselves. Human beings are immensely complex, and the likelihood of anti-aging advancements related to each and every aspect of our being progressing such that people are able to live limitlessly – without other, perhaps more substantial, health problems occurring as a result of that immortality – seems slim.

Second, and more importantly, why in the name of all that is holy would we want this? There is a frustrating, even unnerving, belief in our culture that aging is bad. Botox abounds, elders are disrespected, and young people like myself are constantly told that these are the best years of our lives. Freitas’ reference to aging as a “disease” perfectly encapsulates this notion.

But aging is, of course, part of life. Death is part of life. We must be careful that we do not become consumed by our obsession with youth.

This is also not to mention the many other problems with the idea of such drastically extended living. Having people live that long would be an impossible-to-sustain drain on our resources, including space (The Earth is only so big.).

And I for one don’t want to live to be 1,000. Life should be exciting, it should be engaging. If we live long enough, we will very quickly become bored. How many fewer risks would we take if we knew we had centuries to make up for lost time? This all amounts to a sad and, quite frankly, pathetic future.

To the article’s credit, it does recognize some of these latter points (The author quotes one bioethicist as saying, “There is no known social good coming from the conquest of death.”). And the science behind these advancements – and I hesitate to call them “advancements” – is impressive, even thrilling.

But a world desperate for panaceas and ever-lasting youth should be careful what it wishes for.

War with the Newt

"Prophets are always disappointed, dear Nostradamus. That's why new ones are always in the wings updating the catastrophes."

-Andre Codrescu-

One of the reasons that I changed my major away from Psychology many years ago had to do with some films showing real mental patients, including schizophrenics, in the days of straight jackets and padded cells. The mental state of these poor people wasn't what I wanted to be immersed in for the rest of my life. Little did I know. I haven't thought about it for 45 years, but recently, listening to the barking of Newt, St. Rush, Ann, Michelle and Laura, the wild-eyed ravings of hysterical madmen come to mind again.

The latest is from the would-be-relevant Newt Gingrich, who is seeking to fill the power vacuum caused by the collapse of the Bush administration by issuing vacuous proclamations with reckless disregard to what his words mean. Seeking the authority of amplitude, Newt squeals out that Barak Obama, currently disappointing his most liberal supporters by being a centrist and a pragmatist, is leading us toward a dictatorship and "Liberal Fascism."

Analyzing such speech is probably pointless, since only those in a true fugue state need to have the ironic irrationality explained. Of course Newt isn't really schizophrenic and so isn't deserving of sympathy. He's just a witch hunter and like all of them, he invents the witches he uses to elevate himself to the powers he attributes to them.

Of course he'd like to make you think it's all about those vaunted "conservative principles" he pays lip service to while supporting bloated authoritarian government in the pocket of industry, (fascism) but as I've said many times, "principles" are what we call our most unworkable ideas. In the case of Newt, they're not even ideas he believes in. What he does believe in is the Big Lie and the oft repeated lie, knowing that the more outrageous his claim, the more it will be believed and that nothing is too ridiculous, unfounded, impossible or meaningless to be claimed. Hence terms like "liberal fascist" that combine contradictory words, yet even more ridiculous coming from a source that has more successfully promoted incestuous collusion between a military industrial complex and news media using false data, fabricated scenarios, illegal surveillance and other infractions against liberty and the law to promote their goals.

We will most likely hear more sirens wailing and more Newts and Cheneys and Limbaughs pumping up the volume and trying to convince us to re-elect the party that has robbed and raped us and left us lying in the ditch. The longer doom eludes us, the more prophets thereof will howl.

CANADA MOURNS - FOX SCORNS

Here is a follow-up to Captain Fog's article, Fox and Hounds, posted earlier this week. What U.S. audiences have not seen thus far are reactions from Canada, specifically how our neighbors to the north feel about this Fox insult.

How low did Fox go?  In the same week Canada mourned four dead soldiers killed in Afganistan on a single day, Fox News belittled and mocked the Canadian military.  Did other cable news channels cover this Fox abomination?  Did Fox News apologize for this outrage?  A begrudging but not widely publicized apology in Canada; nothing broadcast to a U.S. audience.

What a narcissistic, egocentric country we have become to have one of our major cable news networks so dishonor and disrespect Canada’s war dead and not even give more than a half-assed mea culpa.

The Here and the Now of the Land of the Space of Today

Thought I might post a few Jurassic thoughts on our current Finnegans Wake-like national situation....

I think we're all liable now and then to point out the flaws in both political parties – one thing to consider, though, from a somewhat Aristotelian classificatory principle, is that all forms of government have problems "proper" to them. In the case of a republic like ours, certain amounts of short-sightedness, jockeying for position and influence, demagogic nonsense, and insider corruption are part of the beast. We might as well remind ourselves that there's no point in demanding that our pols adhere to impossible ideals of pure and disinterested government. It's good and even necessary to have ideals, but nobody is likely to live up to them anytime soon, if ever. (Wilde said that a map without utopia isn't worth looking at. As usual, "the Oscar" was right.)

It might be prudent to look at our form of government, then, somewhat in the manner of a biologist studying a wild animal – the critter may have some health issues (old wounds, pathologies, and such), but the question is, can said critter function well enough to get by and even thrive? If so, it's doing just fine. What many people seem to find frightening about the present is the possibility that we have indeed come close to the point of our form's demise. The near collapse of the financial system is a potential death blow to democratic rule. You can't have capitalism or democracy without a fair amount of stability, and we have been looking shaky in recent months.

Anyhow, I believe we can remain viable if we begin to deal with the simple facts that 1) we have been acting as if capitalism were a god-sent system rather than an imperfect vehicle for the satisfaction of unending human desire and 2) we want to denounce government and yet receive all sorts of good things from it, for which we expect to pay little or nothing. I'd like to keep the good things and add health care and improved education to their number, but we can't do all of it by borrowing trillions from China and elsewhere for unending decades. The only reason we get away with it, I suspect, is that everybody else is too afraid of us to let us suffer the consequences of our foolishness. (And of course those consequences would hit them, too.) And now we end up having to shell out astonishing amounts to the players in our broken financial sector. It's daunting, but we have tremendous potential and can get through this mess. President Obama's insistence on moving forward with some "big-ticket" initiatives makes a lot of sense: it's part of setting our house in order, arranging our priorities. We need to make our decision for Christ, so to speak, and figure out what really matters to us. If we can do that, the politicians will – after their messy fashion – follow suit.

Those who say that spending our way out of a depression/recession is irresponsible make a little point and miss a much larger one. We are already "through the looking-glass." To suppose that fiscal restraint will spur a return to normalcy is to suppose too much: if "the market" rights itself by its own means, it may do so in a fashion that does fundamental, unsustainable violence to those who are subject to its operations. Systems can be fiendishly viable while millions who depend on them go without: think "private health insurance." Allowing the economy to go into free-fall could yet render all talk about "returning to normalcy" pointless. Evidently, the ultra-conservatives who keep prating about fiscal restraint can't wrap their minds around this danger, mostly because they think whatever the market dictates must be right.

Fox and Hounds

The Impolitic, one of my favorite blogs, asks us why "conservative" humor isn't funny and little more than gleeful gloating at the misfortune of people we secretly feel inferior to: empty mockery based on ignorance or false information. I can't really answer that, but Red Eye, Fox's "Me Too" attempt at cashing in on the trenchant, cynical and wildly popular comedy of Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert, is a cornucopia of examples. Red Eye is little more than a Punch and Judy show for the kind of "conservatives" who at an earlier time attended public whippings and executions in order to enjoy the plight of others being more humiliated than themselves.

In the eyes of Fox Fans, the supply of whipping boys and scapegoats they desire can't fill a Colosseum as large as Fox's and so they have invented and exploited domestic "Liberals" and "elitists" and have tailored cardboard images of foreigners as liberal elitist fodder for wild beasts comedians to tear apart.

Fox, the primary cheerleader for every dubious battle and misbegotten military enterprise needs cardboard cowards and so we have the Fox French and the Fox Canadians to pillory along with any other "surrender Monkeys" who doubted the long disproved reasons for our Iraq war.

The Canadians are easy targets for Greg Gutfeld and his creepy chorus. They're almost French after all. To those who don't know that the Canadians are in fact fighting in Afghanistan, Gutfeld and his monkey house mob must be as funny as a chimpanzee ripping off someones face. But of course the Canadians are there and have lost well over a hundred soldiers. In fact on March 17th, as Gutfeld was calling Canada "a ridiculous country" and another of his "comedians" was saying

"I didn't even know they were in the war. I thought that's where you go when you don't want to fight. Go chill in Canada"

4 more of Canada's brave youth were being brought home in boxes. It's funny - so very funny.
As funny as a bunch of apes sitting on a comfortable couch pretending to be mighty warriors and mocking the brave and the dead.

Of course it caught up with Gutfeld as these things so often do. Of course he gave a sneering "apology" and said, as people like him usually do, that he'd been "misunderstood" which is no apology at all, but an attempt to tell us that the people who misunderstood him need more of his mockery.

Of course Red Eye is a failure in progress. It isn't funny as much as it is creepy, embarrassing and to those with some awareness of reality, infuriating. If there is any humor in it at all, it's only the low and inadvertent humor involved in watching people grasping and gasping and drowning in ignorance and failure and too damned stupid to realize it.

See for yourself: