Tidbits From The Web #34

Commercials that didn't make the cut...
Now there are some phat cars...
Flight 1549 towed through the streets in NJ...
The outsourcing of our fast food...
Get high naturally...make sure to view full screen...
For the skydivers out there...what would you do?
Celebrating Groundhog Day...
The definition of irony...
The mothership has arrived...
Get your $10 laptop here...
And the $2.5M phone...
We are infinite awareness...
The most amazing tech improvement this year...
Comet Lulin approaches...
Can your favorite colors determine your job?
Keep yourself healthy this winter...
You can be a hero too...
Google Earth now reaches Mars...and the bottom of our oceans...
You may think twice about using hotel safes...
Have you kept that diet and fitness resolution?
Confusing message from the cops...
Beware Satan returns...
Ladies...please only wear these when invited to masquerade parties...
Star Wars fans can only dream...
Why the chicken crossed the bridge?
Year One...
Tracking where the bailouts are going...
And so the conflict begins...
Make me a star...





GIGA-USA: GIGA for Quotes and Folks

GIGA USA houses a 'broad collection of 100,000+ ancient and modern quotations, aphorisms, maxims, proverbs, sayings, truisms, mottoes, book excerpts, poems and the like browsable by 6,000+ authors or 3,500+ cross-referenced topics.' There is also a Biographical Index, a 'directory of 13,000+ biographical names of historical figures, world leaders, noted authors, famous celebrities and the like including nationality, occupation, and years of birth and death.' The Reading List is a 'selective list of 3,000+ classical, notable and best-selling books and other significant literature including 2,300+ first line excerpts from those works.' As you can see, this site should be bookmarked with your other reference sites for easy access to that particular saying, author, book or other literary fact that you might need on a moment's notice!

Deal With The Devil...

There were two evil brothers. They were rich and used their money to keep their ways from the public eye. They even attended the same church and looked to be perfect Christians.

Then, their pastor retired and a new one was hired.

Not only could this new pastor see right through the brothers' deception, but he also spoke well and true, and the church started to swell in numbers. A fund-raising campaign was started to build a new assembly.

All of a sudden, one of the brothers died.

The remaining brother sought out the new pastor the day before the funeral and handed him a check for the amount needed to finish paying for the new building. "I have only one condition," he said. "At his funeral, you must say my brother was a saint." The pastor gave his word and deposited the check.

The next day at the funeral, the pastor did not hold back. "He was an evil man," he said. "He cheated on his wife and abused his family." After going on in this way for a small time, he concluded with:

"But, compared to his brother, he was a saint."

Super, Super, Super Bowl...

Three quarterbacks, Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, and Ben Roethlisberger go to Heaven to visit God and watch a Celtics game. God decides who will sit next to him by asking the boys a question.

God asks Peyton Manning first: "What do you believe?" Manning thinks long and hard, looks God in the eye, and says "I believe in hard work, and in staying true to family and friends. I believe in giving. I was lucky, but I've always tried to do right by my fans." God can't help but see the essential goodness of Manning, and offers him a seat to his left.

Then God turns to Tom Brady and says "What do you believe?" Tom says "I believe passion, discipline, goodness and honor are the fundamentals of life. I too have been lucky, but win or lose, I have always tried to be a true sportsman, both on and off the playing fields. God is moved by Tom's sincere eloquence, and offers him a seat to his right.

Finally God turns to Big Ben Roethlisberger, "And you, Ben, what do you believe?"

Ben replies "I believe you're in my seat."

Whiskey & Gunpowder
By Byron W. King
February 3, 2009
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.

Unwinding Complexity

I was in New York City recently for some meetings. I was walking around Lower Manhattan and — in a city that large — by chance bumped into an old Navy buddy who now works for the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). The NTSB ball cap gave him away. He was investigating the “splashdown” of the US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River. It was an unbelievable coincidence to see this fellow after many years.

My NTSB friend was good enough to get me past the security and near the aircraft as it floated in the water. It was nighttime. The weather was very cold and windy, so all the physical work was just plain tough. (Pity the frigid divers, placing slings under the fuselage and wings.) The giant cranes were just getting ready to lift the aircraft hulk out of the river and onto a barge. I was taken in by all the personnel and equipment at the scene of the crash — and this was a nonfatal crash, thank God!

There were New York police and firefighters. There were Port Authority cops. There were New York Dept. of Environmental Conservation people and folks from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. There were New York City Hazmat people, the Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Coast Guard and the Federal Aviation Administration. There were people from the State University of New York scanning the river bottom with sonar.

There were reps from a multitude of private entities like U.S. Airways (naturally), Airbus (ditto), the crane company employees, diving and salvage people, insurance carriers, environmental testing firms and many others. There were lots of news media there as well. There was even a Salvation Army truck on-site, with pots of hot coffee and sandwiches for the many people who were part of the effort.

And then there were lots of spectators, including people working out behind the glass at a gym inside an adjacent building. They were watching the whole scene from the comfort of their StairMasters and Lifecycles.

My take-away thought about this was how complex our society has become. There are layers upon layers of complexity and astonishing levels of technical expertise. There are so many different organizations, agencies, groupings of people and assemblages of equipment. It all costs a lot of money and consumes a lot of energy. When something dramatic happens, like an airplane crash, it all mobilizes and comes on-site. That’s OK when major disasters are one-off incidents. But what if several incidents occur in short order or close proximity? What happens when money, if not energy, gets scarce? The whole process could get overwhelmed.

Dealing with Modern Complexity

Of course, New York knows something about dealing with disasters. After all, we were about three blocks from the site of the former World Trade Center. Still, it takes years to hire and train all of these experts. And more years to acquire all this sophisticated gear. It’s a very laborious and expensive process. Just keeping this level of capability on a standby basis requires a massive commitment of resources. When you need it, you need it now. If you don’t have it, you can’t build it up quickly. And when you have it (like New York has some of everything), you don’t want to get rid of it in some frenzy of so-called cost cutting. But still, it makes me wonder.

Societies develop layers of complexity to solve problems. The thing to keep in mind, however, is the historical fact that every complex civilization that has ever lived on this world has collapsed. Bar none. All societies have come to an end. Cultural anthropologist Joseph Tainter documented this in 1988 in his astonishing book The Collapse of Complex Societies.

That is, as societies become more complex, the costs of meeting new challenges increase. Eventually, every society arrives at a point at which devoting extra resources to meeting new challenges produces diminishing returns. Then negative returns. Along comes a systemic shock. The shock might be internal (resource exhaustion, for example) or external (foreign war, for another example). And the shock triggers collapse. When collapse occurs, it almost always occurs rapidly. Things fall apart and quickly decay to a much lower state of complexity. Societies become less complex by collapsing into smaller, much less complex subgroups.

The Western world — certainly, the U.S. — has spent the past century engaged in an arms race of social complexity. And from where we now stand, there’s no gentle “build-down.” The more people who understand that, the better.

“ARE the ‘government’ that you rail against, since we elect the people who tax us and spend our money. Yes, big bucks for TV ads and clever sloganeering can delude the electorate, but ignorance is no excuse for sloppy citizenship. The tools for educating oneself are available for all who seek them. And the Obama election proves that real ‘grass roots’ organizing and hard work will win, despite prodigious odds. “So, no more complaining about ‘the government’ taking away your rights or your money. If you had wanted Ron Paul, or someone like him, to win control of the White House, you should have put in the time and money, and organized your supporters, to get him elected. Like so many others, you were willing to sit back and let those who were more dedicated dictate the choice of candidates — unless you knew that Ron Paul’s views were so ‘way out’ that a majority of voters would never support him (in which case, your complaints should be directed at the majority of American voters, not to ‘the government’). “The fact of the matter is that you only have yourself (or yourselves, to include the rest of Agora’s commentators) to blame for what ‘the government’ does. In 2008, enough people were fed up with the Bush/Cheney policies to get out and work for change, and to contribute their precious dollars to the cause of change — and that resulted in getting a black man elected President, something I never thought could be done in my lifetime! So, if you and your colleagues want a different sort of change, put together a program, find a candidate, and get it done. Don’t sit there feeding us complaints based on the flawed assumption that ‘the government’ is some sort of ruling class usurping our rights.” Is there a greater sham, a greater mass delusion than democracy? People conflate democracy with freedom and they confuse majority opinion with wisdom or with what is right…and they will blame you when your side doesn’t win and you are forced to do things which you morally oppose. A democrat is merely a communist just before he gets a few drinks in him and pulls out a gun. Obama proved the power of media and celebrity. The redistributive and destructive theft of taxation and the stealthier theft of inflation continue apace even as the faces we worship shift…and even as they grow browner. Congratulate the nation all you want on its symbolic act of maturity and tolerance. The comic tragedy continues… But it won’t continue forever. Societies increase in size and complexity…until they collapse under the weight of their size and complexity. Some of us may actually outlive our current Leviathan. Maybe we’ll actually wind up breathing the sweet air of a small, local republic. You know…a republic…the kind of thing that protects your rights from the whims and avarice of majority rule.

Peace, love and happiness...until next time...