The Scourge of Triviality

Ever have an experience where you're just so disgusted with humanity's obsession with triviality that you wanna hop on a rocket and go personally lead the search for intelligent life in space? Yeah, I had one of those today.

Ladan's car needed some service done so I took it to the Volkswagen dealership in the sickeningly affluent Scottsdale area. VW shares the complex with BMW, so as I arrive, the service entrance is overflowing with trendy suburbanites dropping off their $100,000 cars.

I spent the next three-and-a-half hours in the BMW waiting room, sharing the space with assorted tools and toolettes. All of them were glued to the TV, which was on MSNBC. The entire time I was there, I kid you not, they only presented three news stories:

1. The Anna Nicole Smith trial, and the controversy surrounding who the real father is;
2. The 13-yr-old boy abducted in Florida and then found safe by himself a few hours later, and the subsequent manhunt for the abductor;
3. Live coverage of a construction worker trapped in a trench collapse at a new house being built north of Atlanta.

And at least half of the commercials, I might add, were either terribly corny weight-loss ads or depressingly sad and surprisingly alarmist ads for LifeLine, an emergency phone service for elderly people who live alone.

At one point the woman next to me, who gave one of the dealership employees such an unnecessary attitude that I wanted to slap her, called her girlfriend and spent 20 minutes talking about the Smith baby's father issue and then this season's American Idol contestants.

Meanwhile, I sat reading Stephen Kinzer's Blood of Brothers, a book he wrote fifteen years ago about his experiences over a number of years as the Nicaragua bureau chief for The New York Times during the '80's, trying desperately to block out all the pointless drivel around me.

Once in a while I would take a stroll around the showroom, checking out cars, just to stretch my legs, and I was continually dumbfounded by what could possibly make a car be worth $130,000. What kind of person needs such a car? Isn't it clear that a person with such a car is making too much money? How many people could that money feed, or give medical treatment to, or provide housing for?

So by the time I was allowed to escape at 1:30, I had pretty much had my fill of this race of idiots called humans. It's times like these where I want to just move away into the jungle, or a cave, or a mountaintop, and just be done with it.

The Pot And Kettle Game

Oh now this is really something: as protesters demonstrate against his even being there, Dick Cheney gave a speech yesterday in Australia voicing concerns about China's growing military threatening stability. It's amazing to me that this guy is given any legitimacy at all; his words are about as reliable as those of Pat Robertson. The article doesn't mention any specifics other than Washington's displeasure with the recent anti-satellite missile test China conducted, so let's compile the evidence ourselves, shall we?

- China said it spent $36 billion on its military in 2006. We spent that amount in a month - and that doesn't even include any of the money spent on the wars (yes wars, we're still fighting in Afghanistan). According to the CIA World Factbook, both of our military budgets comprise roughly 4% of GDP.

- Since 2001, we've invaded two sovereign nations, the first time with much world support, but ended up botching the planning both before and after the actual invasion, letting the main bad guys get away; the second time with hardly any real international support, against the ruling of the UN, and with evidence that turned out to be 100% incorrect or just plain fabricated, resulting in a post-invasion situation that is many times worse than what it was beforehand. And now we are starting to cast an aggressive glance toward Iran. In that time China has ... made a few intimidating comments about Taiwan.

Hmmm, yes, yes ... definitely, China is becoming a threat again, is acting aggressively, and needs to be put in check. Yes, it's all clear now, thank you, Dick.

First Intelligent Design, Now This

About a year and a half ago I discovered The Flying Spaghetti Monster and immediately became a believer. Ladan and I even preached to the heathen masses in San Francisco's Castro section on Halloween two years ago, distributing flyers and informing people that the FSM loved them.

I found the entire intelligent design debate ridiculous, because as an atheist, I just don't understand embracing faith over science, especially when taking it to the point of insisting that the principles of Darwin's evolution cannot sufficiently explain the development of life on this planet. Lots of people confuse atheism with an absolute rejection of everything spiritual or so-called supernatural - which is just not true; the two are not equivalent. I definitely believe in realities beyond our own and the existence of things that cannot be explained in normal terms; I just firmly reject the notion that there is a single or multiple god(s) who created and now watch over all of humanity, and I reject all of the religious belief and lore that ensues.

The intelligent design debate, to me, was an embarassing testament to the state of our educational system. However, last night, in a sociology class that Ladan is taking, a new low standard was set, making intelligent design seem trivial.

Her professor, who has a master's degree in sociology, was attempting to make the point that the population of the United States uses a disproportionate amount of the world's resources. When beginning the discussion, she made the comment that the population of the US comprises 25% of the world population yet uses approximately 75% of the total resources.

Twenty-five percent of the world's population.

Now, it was my impression that most people of at least average mental ability and experience over the age of say 10 would intuitively know, even if they don't know the actual population numbers, that the US's percentage of world population could not possibly be 25%, a full quarter of the total. However, clearly this was a blindly optimistic assumption on my part, because not only did the professor believe this, but no one in the class objected to the statement.

Seeing this, Ladan raised her hand and pointed out that the world population is roughly 6 billion, and that the US does not contain even close to a quarter of that. The professor's response? "Well, there's been a lot of immigration in the recent past, and it's significantly increased the total population."

WHAT? Are you kidding me?! Surely you are joking, right?

As Ladan continued to debate this, it was clear that the professor was just not going to get it. She ended the discussion by saying that "I'll have to track down the references I came across years ago that gave that figure." This is a sociology professor - aren't they supposed to know about, uh, percentages, and populations and stuff? At least rough numbers? Instead, she went on with the example, using 25% as the percentage.

When Ladan got home, she found the US Census Bureau's World Population Clock and e-mailed her professor the link, including an explanation of how the US population of 301 million represents only a mere 4.5% of the world's 6.578 billion. Surely, seeing this, the professor would understand that her figures were wrong and that getting this number correct, the US population as a percentage of world population, was critical to the point she was making, right?

Wrong. Her response: "let's not dwell on the number alone", and instead focus on the point she was trying to make, as [paraphrasing] "even if that number is correct, you'll probably see that it still provides evidence of my point." Um, that number is absolutely essential to the point you're trying to make! Clearly, she has no idea what's going on here. If the real percentage of population is five times lower than what you're saying it is, then is there any doubt about whether that will reinforce or repudiate your point? And why do you not immediately understand that 3 out of 65 is not 25%? I mean really, come on!

Incredulous, Ladan told me this story last night and I've been disturbed by it since. I've observed some amazing lack of elementary knowledge and logic in my fellow economics students so far (the topic of a future post) but I can't say I've ever seen such awe-inspiring ignorance in an academic environment, especially on the part of a professor, in my entire life.

Is evidence of shocking and almost unchallenged ignorance being promulgated in our educational system a sign of The Apocalypse? If not .... maybe it oughta be. Who do I talk to about that?

Warmth Is Good

I've always loved heat, even extreme heat, and abhorred cold. Tonight as I was leaving my macroeconomics class at 10, it was frigid as I stepped outside. The always-optimistic thermometer on my car read 55 degrees. I realize all you non-Californians scoff at complaining about such temperatures, what with the snow and severe cold you've seen this winter (I'll admit it though, I'm jealous and would love to see some snow). But having adjusted to the year-round moderate temperatures in Northern California, I find my tolerance for cold has gone way down.

And that's exactly what worries me as I contemplate moving back to DC. It gets damn cold there! Over the past two years I've gotten used to never, ever wearing a heavy jacket (been wearing a light windbreaker all winter, if anything). This past Saturday, after my Mammoth fiasco, I spent the afternoon hiking - it was 80 degrees outside! I love the weather here - if it's cool outside, it's a comfortable crisp cool, not the biting cold I endured in upstate New York and then Maryland (although, again, I really miss the hot humid summers). And the air here has a certain smell - a clean scent of Douglas fir trees, among others, that are so common here. And it seems like the sun is always shining here; none of those long, dreary winter months of cloudiness. A quick online search turned up that San Jose has 257 days of sun and 62 of precipitation, compared to DC's 203 and 114, respectively.

So I just don't know how I'm going to react to being back in a place that gets really cold in the winter. Sure I'd like the greater variation in seasons that living in such a place would bring, but I've found that my mood and energy levels vary in direct proportion to the amount of warmth and sun I get, and in a way I feel I've become 'soft' out here. Not to mention the time I've spent in Arizona, where, when it dips below 70 you feel cold.

It's not enough of an issue to change my immediate plans, but somewhere down the road, I definitely see never living in a cold place again. At least until I answer my life's calling and become a bodhisattva at the Potala Palace in Lhasa.

Well That Was Fun

I had planned to join Bharath and some of his friends at Mammoth Mountain yesterday for snowboarding, my second outing, and I was looking forward to it. They were driving up from Orange County, and I east from San Jose. According to Google Maps, the directions were really simple - after going north up to Dublin, just go east for 200 miles. Near the end of the route was a 40-mile stretch straight across Yosemite National Park.

Leaving my house around 6:30 Friday evening, I get stuck in two whole hours of rush hour traffic and make about 50 miles of progress. Once I clear Tracy, traffic lightens up. It's dark now and I start to pass through lots of small, quiet towns, and for some reason it's getting creepy. At one point I pass a bar called The Whiskey River Saloon, and if you have an idea in your head about what such a place would look like, let me tell you, you're exactly right - that's what it looked like. I start seeing signs that say "Yosemite National Park - Tioga Pass Closed". I don't know what the Tioga Pass is, I just know that I need to take State Route 120 across the park.

As I get closer to the park, I'm seeing more signs. Suddenly it dawns on me, if there are this many signs, it must be a popular route. Taking a close look at my map (for the first time, thanks to my blind allegiance to Google Maps), I see the fine print on SR-120: "Tioga Pass - Closed During Winter". D'oh! Now what do I do? The map seems to show that if I just head south, I can circle around the bottom of the park and come back up the other side to Mammoth - but I have to go all the way down to Fresno, which is 60 miles further south. Unbelievable! So south I go.

The road that I'm on gets narrower and narrower and really quiet. For 45 minutes I don't see a single other car. The road narrows to one lane in each direction and it's on the side of a mountain, twisting and turning as it follows the canyon. It's pitch black out here, no lights anywhere, and I can't tell what's just a few feet away on my right: could be a thousand foot drop down to a lake, could be a five foot drop down to grass and trees, could be an abyss the size of the Grand Canyon - I don't know. What I do know is that the edge of the road has a steep rolloff, and there are no guardrails.

After about two hours of this, I emerge roughly at the bottom of the park and get back onto a straight, level road that heads toward Fresno. A few miles outside of the city, I take a look at the map to figure out which road I can take to loop back up around to Mammoth. It's at that point that I realize, oh my god, there is no road that goes from Fresno to Mammoth, because the Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks cut off access to the east. To reach Mammoth, my only choice is to drive another hundred miles south to Bakersfield (which would now put me only a hundred miles north of LA - keep in mind that Mammoth is 250 miles due east of where I live, which itself is 350 miles north of LA; I shouldn't be anywhere the hell near LA!) then reverse direction and go another 270 miles north! At this point it's already 1 AM - hell no I ain't drivin' another 400 miles!

Tired and angry, and realizing that San Jose is only 150 miles away, I give up and decide to just go home. By 3:15 AM, I'm in bed. After 400 miles and almost 9 hours of driving, I've accomplished exactly nothing. It was all a complete waste.

I still thought that maybe going north around the park might work, so I planned to check that out when I woke up Saturday morning. But when I woke up and checked the California highways website, I found that all the highways that cross the Sierra Nevada mountains in that area are closed during the winter, so there is no way to reach Mammoth without going north 200 miles to Lake Tahoe, then reversing direction and going another 140 miles to Mammoth. At that point, the idea of driving 350 miles up there on Saturday and 350 miles back on Sunday after a day of snowboarding did not appeal to me - to put it mildly - and I gave the idea up.

To top it all off, the bastards at Mammoth refuse to refund any money without 2 days advance notice, so, for the moment, I'm out $110 for the lift ticket and rental that I reserved. After all this, let me tell you, I'm not letting that one go easily and plan to fight it.

All in all, it was one hell of a great time, and it left me in a really great mood. One of these days I'ma Fall Down, Michael Douglas-style ...