Reasonable Outrage

This stuff is too hard to predict.  It is a complex system and environmentalists have hurt themselves for years.  They think that crisis is the only way to get attention .

Here is a small list of predictions that didn’t happen

• overpopulation
• acid rain
• dead oceans via Ted Dansen
• food shortage – 4 billion to die between 1980 -1989

Let’s add another.  Gore and the global warming movement have said that hurricanes are going to increase and a couple of prominent weather/meterological heads have been fired for disagreeing.  Again this year it was low storm season. But they keep saying it will happen.
Any movement or group should finally take heed of this.  They are being discredited every year by laying their bets on the hurricanes.  My guess is that they only jumped on it because of Katrina and it has backfired like it should for trying to take advantage of a situation like that.

With the overpopulation problem it wasn’t understood that people might stop having babies at the same pace.  Exactly the point.  Some things take care of themselves. If they keep pinning their hopes on these rolls of the dice and miss, their cause could become a dead fad like Beanie Babies.  Our attention span is short and we move on to the next crisis of the day.

Here are some classic predictions that didn’t work out.

So what should you do to get lasting attention to your cause?  Truth based in science.  It is slow but works.  Cigarettes are a prime example.  Took awhile but California has went as far as to ban smoking in apartments, which is a bit too far but that is the pendulum of action.

There are plenty of holes in the current global warming theory including that CO2 levels seem to follow increasing temperatures  and that there seems to be evidence of the sun’s cycle flowing with warming.  Mar’s may even be heating up.

We don’t litter like we did in the 70’s, or at least my dad doesn’t.  We don’t have leaded gas.  Recycling programs are everywhere.  In my area where they recycle paint, they actually mix it into colors which they sell back to the public for $7 a gallon and $30 for buckets.

Good things are happening but freaking out and giving false timetables lose people and ultimately hurt your cause if your roll of dice comes up snake eyes.

The only thing I hate more than people’s hypocrisy, is when I catch myself being a hypocrite.  But I don’t think I could miss being this big of a hypocrite as this politician.

Senator Kennedy says this on his website,

“The federal government must do a much better job of protecting consumers and businesses burdened by today’s high energy prices. It’s time to end our country’s dangerous dependence on foreign oil. With leadership and vision, we can create new sources of energy that will improve America’s security, reduce the heavy burden on the nation’s families, and protect our environment. ”

“Our dependence on foreign oil not only creates a national security risk, but also harms the environment by contributing to global climate change. We can reduce our dependence on international sources of oil, and promote a cleaner environment by investing in energy-efficient technologies and domestic clean-energy alternatives.”

From another site he shows his position more clearly on the environment while he takes a stab at the other party.

Understanding his position on the environment makes this odd for anyone reasonable. There was a proposal for a wind farm off the coast of Cape Cod that could power 75% of that area including Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.  Kennedy said of the wind farm,  “But don’t you realize — that’s where I sail!” may stand as Kennedy’s most self-incriminating quote.

Kennedy did much of the dirty work in Washington, but he had considerable help. In 2004, Sen. John Warner, the Virginia Republican, added a last-minute rider to an urgent Iraq War funding bill that forbade the Army Corps of Engineers to spend money permitting offshore wind projects.

Why did Warner care so deeply about a wind-energy project inMassachusetts? Some of his fabulously wealthy relatives own choice waterfront property on Cape Cod. That’s why.

Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander also took an unusual interest in a venture far from his home state of Tennessee. Complaining that wind farms threaten “the wholesale destruction of the American landscape,” Alexander introduced legislation that would have banned virtually all offshore wind projects in America. It turns out that Alexander owns a fancy piece of real estate on Nantucket Island.

If that doesn’t smell of entitlement and ego than I don’t know what does. From NPR Kennedy is quote as saying,

“We should stop the non-scientific… nonsense emanating from the right wing and start demanding immediate action to reduce global warming and prevent the catastrophic climate change that may be on our horizon now,”

The Wind Farm does have critics from environmentalists.  If they are the ones who believe that the earth is doomed from global warming then the wind turbines will be a piece in the puzzle.  Reducing energy consumption from coal and oil by 75% would seem to be helpful to their cause.

I give the the organizers credit for having the balls to try such an elitist area as Cape Cod for the project.  Or I laugh at them for overestimating the conviction of the residents behind their words.  As always it is much easier to say what you or others should do than it is to actually do it

Though I have to give Kennedy credit.  As this site shows, he is truly a politician.  To be able to ignore the cognitive dissonance is either genius or retarded in it’s scope. Kennedy isn’t the only one apparently guilty in the hypocrisy but he seems to be deeper in to it based on him living there, his stance on the environment and his incriminating quotes.

I absolutely hate it when people jump to conclusions.  This is probably a running theme inside most of my posts and I have a great example today.

A radio show host was reported mugged and a colleague of the same network said she was attacked. I don’t care about the politics but the colleague said that people of the other party were to blame for the deed and then railed on them.  Now, this network is failing and has a small percentage of the market.  I will jump to my conclusion that this person is only trying to get attention by falsely reporting what happened to someone else and hoping everyone else would back his story up.  That didn’t happen.

The story was changed later in the day to say that the host had actually been tripped by her dog and lost several teeth, ugh, when she fell.  I would be surprised if she lied to the colleague because she would be backing him up.

The site that reports on their brand of talk went from having a high of 14 comments on their posts on the main page to over 1148 comments (which were mainly partisan rants) for the post regarding the attack.

It goes to show how people are so entrenched in their ideology that they can’t weigh information.  Oddly enough this is dangerous and safe at the same time.  It creates a balance, as long as you have jumpers on both sides.  

We obviously can’t fall for any idea such as the Breatharians.  They believe that you can live like a plant essentially.  But if we took information with a little more thought there would be a lot less social problems.  Our coding is that we had to judge quickly in the past to know if the sabre-tooth tiger would eat us.  

We all should exercise more but jumping to conclusions ain’t going to do it.

I do hate most pedestrians, except for you of course.  I hate lack of planning and basic creativity in cities.  Anytime I drive into the city I am reminded of all of the nuisances that screw up my travel.   I will wail on bicyclists another day.

This is a simple and reasonable solution to many intersections. I find myself stopped behind cars trying to make turns with only 1 or 2 getting through for each light.  A pedestrian scramble has all lights turn red and then people can walk anyway they want through the intersection, yes that means diagonally as well.  Then they have to wait until the light changes for them.

And now that all of sudden everyone cares about global warming, think of the cars and flowing traffic that we will have! Tokyo has 300 of these intersections, we have a handful.  Apparently engineers think it is unsafe.  We protect too many stupid people and it is hurting our country.  In Mexico it is walker beware.  The way it should be.  On a side note, I saw more accidents in my city than I did in a total of 4 months of different vacations in Mexico that included me drive from the Pacific Coast to the Atlantic Coast

Whatever, I just want traffic moving and not to be blocked by the guy who finally finds some power in life by walking as slow as he can.  Yes I see you.  I still think you are a douche and even more than I did when I saw you standing on the corner.

Oh and all of those people who do the I-am-looking-like-I-am-running-but-it-is-just-as-slow-as-my-walk “Walk,” that’s just insulting.  It is like you are trying to insult my intelligence.

I think it is a power thing.  These people are stuck in an office all day with other idiots and this is the one place they do have power.  I will say that some are polite and try to cross quickly but you only need 30% to be slow asses to mess it up reminding me of dodging swinging blades in The Pit and The Pebdulum.

So just give these a thought.

• Think
• Move with some energy
• When it is yellow, hurry and don’t stare at the driver who wants to go on GREEN!
• When you get confused and go the wrong way, don’t run back the other way, you might get hit
• And the runner coming up behind me on the sidewalk?  That is my blindside! You might get hit too.

Another creative idea is to have a no crossings on the turn side of a street on to a one way.   No one is blocking a single on one side and everyone is blocking all of the cars on the other.  I saw this situation near a university and it was one car per light.  Simple.

90% of success is showing up as they say and I believe that 90% of life is luck. You “happen” to leave work late and miss a huge accident that you should have been in. The boss “happens” to see you working late and labels you a hard worker.

I don’t know of anyone who has completely manufactured their life exactly the way it is and I don’t know if that would be as fun. Realizing the luck involved takes the sting out of the bad and humbles our egos with the good.What really made this hit home was an article in Best Life magazine on extending your life. There apparently is a newly released study that points to plastic bottles as a culprit in obesity. They believe that the chemicals affect our hormones causing the health issues.

Eggs are bad. Now they aren’t. Vitamins are the answer. Now it seems they aren’t. They believe the is an interaction with the other vitamins and minerals that help the vitamins get absorbed from real food.

There are always people who don’t listen to some type of helpful advice. If we find out that the advice was wrong

We all want to be considered geniuses. So if George Hamilton never gets skin cancer was he smarter than the doctors or took certain information, made a decision and got lucky?After all of the years of saying the sun was bad, now they are saying the the Vitamin D from the sun is possibly the best inhibitor of cancer. They have shown that skin cancer rates have grown and come up with plausible reasoning though I don’t know if I believe it. They say that the use of sunscreen has led us to stay outside more countering the effect.

I think it is a case of people are inside more and the sun more easily damages us. Our lives were much more outside as compared to now.

Peering into examples of luck(mainly good luck)

• After getting a good following, he went to Nashville and got turned down by everyone. On the way out of town he decided to stop at a bar that by chance sat one of his “biggest” fans from before. He caught her up and she took his tape to her boss who signed him.
• Richard Marx got turned down 20+ times. A chance encounter with Kenny Rodgers sparked his career.

• During the Portland Blazers training camp, a player failed a physical and they picked up Ime Udoka, a player who had only played in 12 NBA games previously. He went on to start 75 games in 2006-2007 for the Blazers

• My cousin was in 4 wrecks in 2 years.

• How many times have you heard about an injury where, “Another 2 cm and he would be dead

• Many two time lottery winners

• Most model stories involve a “chance” meeting.

• Josh Duhammel got the part in Transformers because of an episode of “Las Vegas” that Spiellberg saw one night.

• UPDATED - A woman returned to Portland Oregon with a friend who is working on a new Jennifer Anniston movie.  She had hiked before but on a lark took a new trail on a whim and found another woman who had been stuck at the bottom of a ravine for 16 hours.

Sales is my other job and I have gotten or missed opportunities by mere moments. I made a sale on my 7th call of my first day. Unheard of by anyone in my profession.

So listening or ignoring the advice in the end will be luck. Don’t beat yourself up over failures or break your arm patting yourself on the back for success.

I am surprised it took me this long to write about this.

I hate that they make these beautiful pictures and give us atrocious food.  With fast food it isn’t horrible though because we usually leave the wrapper on and roll it down as we eat.  This site has some pictures of the crap they put out though.   This other site it starting a forum for all of the bad food, though I don’t see the returning factor to complain. We will see.

My real issue is with frozen food in the grocery store.  They are the worst especially when it comes to pizza.  If I recall correctly, the pictures fast food use actually contain plastic pieces.

The most recent one that almost caused me to return the food was Quizno’s Sammies.  That thing is so far from matching the picture and they must have used child’s hands to model with the sandwich. That was the worst.  If there wasn’t a line I probably would have returned it.

Some bored person should do a lawsuit like the fat people did against McDonald’s. It won’t work but it would get the restaurants thinking.

I am getting a little tired of all of the Pink products for The Race For The Cure Susan G Komen Foundation.  It is a worthy cause just like there are a lot of good causes.  Here is a list of the Breast Cancer Charities out there with rankings.  Some really have poor efficiency.

The foundation brings in about 25% of all donations for breast cancer topping $1 Billion.  i just have a problem with all of these products slapping pink on themselves and saying they will donate to charity.  I don’t trust the companies and I think they play on our sympathies to sell their product. I don’t blame the Foundation, they want all of the donations they can get.

But as you see on the list that some charities waste a lot of money, I have to imagine the the Foundation is not getting a great deal of money.  Just like my Dad doesn’t buy the candy bars kids sell for schools because only about 25% of that $2 goes to their organization. What he does, and others should do, is just donate the money.  Skip the middle man.

“A new survey has warned serious issues are getting drowned out with a staggering 74 awareness days, weeks or months crammed into October.”  And that is just for Scotland.  I can’t imagine what it would be for America.

“Mike Pickard, head of risk at insurance firm Esure, which conducted the survey, said: “The number of awareness weeks is almost out of control and many of the most important causes or serious issues to bring to the forefront of people’s minds are buried amongst a raft of gimmicky weeks that do nothing more than promote a company or a product.”

Eventually with all of these “Awareness” events it will be overloaded and the causes will be back to being unknown as they are buried.  Just as the big three channels once had 20+ million viewers for an average show now with all of the cable channels, 8 million viewers make a hit.

This isn’t anything outrageous just a good idea.