… a significant part of the population is willing to accept a glib soundbite as truth, in preference to a long catalogue of facts that happens to represent the truth …

Jeff Masters, Ph.D., cofounder of the Weather Underground website, has an excellent blog post detailing what Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba considers to be an alarming development in the Global Warming Wars:

A television advertisement proclaiming that more atmospheric carbon dioxide is good for the Earth.

Really. They should have come up with this ad thirty-five years ago, so that Woody Allen could have worked it into his movie Sleeper. The one that proclaims french fries and hot fudge sundaes to be health foods, and tobacco smoking the best thing you can do for your lungs.

The movie, in case you haven’t seen it (it is ancient history for you twentysomethings out there), is a farce.

So’s that ad. Or it would be, if the matter it addresses weren’t so deadly serious.

Briefly (and Masters does, um, a masterful job of explaining the details), the ad’s premise is that carbon dioxide is essential for plant life, and therefore more carbon dioxide means more plant life. Which is such a good and wonderful thing that We the People should be pumping all the profits into the fossil fuel industry carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that we can.

Only two problems with this scenario. The first (which Masters does not happen to mention) is that, if more carbon dioxide begets more plant life, then that ‘more plant life’ should suck up that extra carbon dioxide. Which should slow or stop the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. No such slowing has been observed. In fact, some scientists argue that humans have been dumping planet-changing levels of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, not since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution two hundred years ago, but since the dawn of agriculture, eight thousand years ago. And the plant life hasn’t caught up yet.

(This scenario, by the way, is consistent with the one that attributes most of the oxygen in the atmosphere, and the ecological calamity that oxygen pollution amounted to in Earth’s early history, to a thin layer of pond scum.)

The second, which Masters does discuss, is that recent increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide have been responsible for measured decreases in plant crop yields.

Still more alarming than the existence of the ad itself is the catalogue of concealed interests and outright dirty tricks that is associated with the production of the ad and its predecessors, the peddling of this public relations exercise to the world, and its acceptance by many, including those at the highest level of government. Dissing the real findings of science, and the scientists (often via attacks on persons rather than data) that have published these findings.

But then, the scientists (including Masters) are easy to diss. Their reasoning is hard to follow, and their message is bleak: we cannot continue as we are, and we cannot change things without giving up large chunks of what we see as inalienable rights, such as freedom of consumption, freedom of property, freedom of reproduction. From the mass of scientists, no Kirk has arisen to pull our Kobayashi Maru out of this Neutral Zone of our own making – and if one were to appear, she probably wouldn’t be able to afford the public relations firm that could effectively promote her discovery.

That makes We the People – we who, most of us, have been trained since birth to limit our attention spans to the length of a television commercial – susceptible to the soundbite. To the glib, pretty, and above all short message that our Kobayashi Maru can and will be saved, if we will only do as the message tells us. Without any evidence that the message’s sponsor has a starship to effect the rescue, never mind one with a tractor beam, warp drive, and photon torpedoes.

And with, in fact, compelling evidence that the fossil fuels industry is using the tactics of the tobacco industry. The tobacco industry, you’ll recall, used disinformation tactics to discredit scientific evidence that smoking and chewing are bad for you.

Maybe if we linked fossil fuels to smoking …

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

“So, dude, how’s the house hunting?”

“How should I know, dude? I ain’t never seen a house in camouflage going after big game, and I’m not sure I’d want to.”

“No, dude. The big game’s in the house, on the big screen in the living room. Or it would be, if we had a house to put it in.”

“Riiight, dude. And just how many decades of Payperblaug do you reckon it’ll take you to make the $570 grand you need to buy a doll house in Honolulu?“

“Doll house, schmal house, dude. Luxury box for me, thanks. Hell, I’ll take the whole stadium. Speaking of big screens. Gnarly!“

“Dude. I hate to admit this, but I’m impressed. When you go off the deep end, you don’t just jump, you tie weights to your ankles. A stadium?!?“

“Same money as your doll house, dude. Even has a roof. Here. Read.“

“‘Pontiac Silverdome sells for $583,000 …’ But, dude, the yearly electric bill for that place is probably bigger than that!”

“Well, we’d probably have to be a little careful, that’s all. Turn off the lights when we left a room, no watching soap operas on the Jumbotron, stuff like that. At least until we got the solar panels installed.”

“Man. I’d heard that Michigan was in tough shape, but I never reckoned it was this bad.”

“Well, dude, that’s what happens when you have one money-maker in your economy, and it goes belly up.”

“Like cars, dude?”

“Yeah. Or tourists.”

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

“Like wow, dude. I wonder what the prize was.”

“Prize for what, dude?”

“For winning the New Word of the Year Award, dude!”

“They’re giving out awards for new words? Who is?”

“The, um, New Oxford American Dictionary, says here.”

“Somebody’s sales projections are down, I see. So what’s the word?”

“Unfriend.”

“That’s a new word? I don’t think so, dude. Tolkien used it in his writings, like, three decades ago. And it says here that the word was first used in Scotland in like 1275 CE.”

“Tolkien, schmolkien, dude. Facebook’s where it’s at these days. Some dude gets obnoxious, and you wanna kick him outa your space, you click a button and unfriend him. It’s new, and it’s gnarly.”

“I thought that was defriend, dude, not unfriend.”

“But, dude, I want to have a D friend.”

“Only if she comes by it naturally, dude. And she doesn’t keep her personality where you appear to be keeping your brains.”

“Dude, that’s unfriendly!“

“Go ahead, dude. You think you can push that button faster than I can, you got another think coming!”

“Yeah?“

“Yeah!“

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

“Hey dude! Get a load of this!“

“What?”

“President Obama’s coming back to Hawai‘i! And he’s bringing a pack of his friends!”

“I should think he’s got friends, the way he’s been throwing money around …”

“Not those friends. These are real economic summit-type friends. From 21 countries, no less. Says he wants to show that Hawai‘i is a place to do business. And …”

“He gonna muzzle all the dudes who’ve gone bust over crippling taxes and strangling regulations before they get here?”

” … he says he’s looking forward to seeing them all in flowered shirts and …”

“Flowered shirts, dude? He said flowered shirts? Not aloha shirts? In the Aloha State? He tryin’ not to mention aloha ’cause he knows damned well there ain’t any around here any more? And what about the chicks, dude?”

“Grass skirts, dude.”

“Grass skirts?!? He said he wanted to see these high-powered executive-type chicks in grass skirts?? That’s going to go over well. Not. When are we supposed to receive this beneficence, huh?”

“Waitaminute, let me check … says here, sometime in 2011.”

“Right. Two years from now. Wonderful. Way the economy’s going, Obama’s going to be entertaining them business people in grass shacks, on account of because there won’t be anything else open by then. I can hardly wait, dude.”

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Clarke’s Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguisable from magic.
Amoeba’s Corollary: Sooner or later, someone will proclaim that all such magic is black.

In my previous post, Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba poked and prodded at the disconnect between the high level of official public concern over the current outbreak of 2009 H1N1 influenza and its actual impact on human health in these Untied States.

(The official public concern, I’m guessing, has some part of its basis in history: the influenza epidemic of 1918, also caused by a strain of H1N1 virus, came in waves, with later waves more deadly than the first.)

I was chagrined, to say the least, to discover a link to this post on a virulently anti-vaccination website. A clear case of foot in mouth pseudopod in cytostome disease. Fortunately:

A. The link was short-lived.
B. With all due respect, gentle readers, there aren’t enough of you for whatever happens here to make much of an impact. (I can only hope that the same is true for that other website.)

Wikipedia has what I consider to be an excellent page on the history, dynamics, and negative social impacts of vaccine controversies. It points out that vaccines have been, in human health terms, the best thing since sliced bread – and that, for one reason or another, various persons have had issues with sliced bread.

Including the English theologian Rev. Edward Massey, who argued, in 1772 (yes, the anti-vaccinationists have been around for awhile) that smallpox vaccinations represented diabolically-influenced defiance against the will of God.

No wonder Richard Dawkins considers God to be a delusion.

My principal concern is that, now as then, a significant part of the population is willing to accept a glib soundbite as truth, in preference to a long catalogue of facts that happen to represent the truth but don’t fit conveniently on a protest sign.

Even more worrying to me is the idea, implicit in the thoughts and actions of the conspiracy theorists, that the findings of science, like so many of the practitioners of magic in the current blitz of popular novels, are for sale to the highest bidder.

Such a view is consistent with the deconstructionist view of the world (all viewpoints are utterly dependent on the self-interest of the originator) that is now predominant.

But I think that, if science actually does devolve in this way, we are lost.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba has just found out that, since April 2009 in the Untied States of America, about 4,000 people have died, and about 98,000 have been hospitalized, from influenza virus 2009 H1N1 (“swine flu”) and related illnesses.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released the figures, I read, at least partly out of concern that too few of We the People are seeking to be vaccinated against this flu virus. Of course, a lot of those people aren’t seeking to be vaccinated because they’ve already tried, discovered that there was no vaccine to be had, and have given up …

Yo. People. Don’t quit on us, OK? We’ve got to keep a certain level of hysteria going on this swine flu business, or we’re going to lose the vaccine makers we’ve got to more lucrative pursuits, like making Viagra knockoffs, and we won’t have any vaccine for anybody. You gotta help us out here, gotta keep standing in line for this stuff.

Well, folks, I hate to be quoting fairy tales at you, but this swine flu story has been at the top of the news for, like, a year now, and while there’s nothing pleasant about 4,000 dead, there’s something of a gap between that figure and the decimation of the population that was forecast in the first reports.

After all, in that same time period (extrapolating from 2005 figures), approximately 27,000 people lost their lives on the nation’s highways, and another 1.4 million were injured.

And I have seen no calls from the CDC for a vaccine against stupid drivers.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Let’s see now. If Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba is missing something here, please chime in.

Last time I looked, there was an economic downturn going on, in Hawai‘i as in just about everyplace else in the world. People, businesses, and governments are going broke, left, right, and moderate. Even Warren Buffett doesn’t see a recovery any time soon … and, in case you’ve forgotten, Buffett and Bill Gates share a foundation, the assets of which still are sufficient to (pick one):

A. End global hunger
B. Pick up the option year on Kobe Bryant’s contract

In Hawai‘i, about one person in ten is out of work; on O‘ahu, by far the most heavily populated island, the figure is something like one person in nineteen – better, but still not good, and you can imagine just how bad things must be in the rest of the state.

A perfect storm of declining tax receipts, administrative turnover, and political pigheadedness has left the Government of Hawai‘i with massive fiscal deficits (by itself, the University of Hawai‘i is reported to be $98 million in the hole), and with a war between the State and its own employees. Mostly over how many of those employees are going to remain employees.

Which, in a state where Roger Miller’s four-bit room rents for $1000 a month and up, is a nontrivial argument. There are already plenty of people on O‘ahu who have no bedroom ceiling but the stars. And any calculation that doesn’t involve the copious ingestion of illicit substances projects that there will soon be more such people.

What compassionate and/or pragmatic steps is the Honolulu City Council considering to deal with this situation? Well, here’s the news.

A mere two weeks after the City Council earned international attention – and ridicule – with its attempt to ban body odor, it has mooted a bill that would make it illegal to pass out on the sidewalk.

So. If you’ve been living from paycheck to paycheck in the Aloha State, as most of us do wherever we may be living, and you get laid off, you’re going to find it difficult to bathe and wash clothes. Because you can’t afford a place with a shower and washing machines. But you aren’t allowed to stink.

You’re going to have a devil of a time getting any sleep. You won’t find anyplace on private property – hell, even the churches lock their doors, because, well, these people make a mess, and besides, they steal stuff. The public parks are closed off. So are the beaches. And, if the current bill passes, so will the streets.

I guess you’re just supposed to keep moving, walking around from place to place until you finally pass out on the sidewalk … but you won’t be allowed to pass out on the sidewalk!

Wait … I have it! We’ll teach all the homeless people Indian meditation, have them all master yogic flying. Then they’ll all just float above Honolulu – out of the parks, off the beaches, off the streets. Problem solved! Now if we could just find enough Indian gurus …

Naturally, the bill has an economic justification attached to it. I can do no better than to quote its sponsor, City Council member Charles Djou, verbatim:

I think [homeless people sleeping on the sidewalks] is a particularly acute problem in Waikiki … If there’s one part of this state that’s open 24 hours it’s Waikiki. But … Waikiki is the heart of our tourism industry and tourism is the heart of our economy. If we don’t take care of this and we don’t take care of Waikiki, we’re not going to be taking care of our economy and this is going to hurt all of us.

Thus we blame the tourism crisis in Hawai‘i on homeless people. Overcrowding, outrageous prices, shoddy service, and a growing reputation for phoniness, have nothing to do with it. Neither does the absence of any sort of sensible forward planning. Planning that would set funds aside during good tourism seasons to provide for the inevitable bad seasons. Planning that would allow the development of a diversified income base for the state, instead of its contraction to tourism and the military as at present – on the islands that used to produce significant percentages of the world’s sugar cane and pineapple crops, practically no agriculture remains, even for domestic use.

Ah, Hawai‘i, the tropical paradise. Come at your own risk. Unless you’ve already mastered the art of levitation.

LAND, n. A part of the earth’s surface, considered as property. The theory that land is property, subject to [...] ownership and control is the foundation of modern society, and is eminently worthy of the superstructure. Carried to its logical conclusion, it means that some have the right to prevent others from living; for the right to own implies the right exclusively to occupy; and in fact laws of trespass are enacted wherever property in land is recognized. It follows that if the whole area of terra firma is owned by A, B and C, there will be no place for D, E, F and G to be born, or, born as trespassers, to exist. – Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

She: Have you heard about the campaign?

He: The campaign? Sarah Palin’s started running already?

She: Not that campaign. This one. The one to take back the beep!

He: You’re not telling me that the coyote actually caught the Road Runner?!?

She: Will you be serious a minute?

He: I’ll try. But stand back. You might get burned.

She: Oh, stellar. Don’t you care that this is costing us money?

He: Tell it to get in line. We’re back in Hawai‘i, dear, if you’ll recall. The only thing that doesn’t cost an outrageous amount of money is the air we breathe. And I’m sure they’re working on that.

She: They’ve done it. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.

He: OK …

She: You know, when you leave a message on your cell phone …

He: Unless it’s absolutely necessary, I don’t. I call back later. But go on …

She: Well, when you do leave a message, you have to wait forever and listen to all this meaningless dialogue before you can actually leave the message. And you know who pays?

He: If you both have cell phones, the caller and the recipient. Just like everything else that happens on cell phones.

She: Do you have any idea how much the companies make while we’re waiting for those messages?

He: I’m sure I could run my lab for the rest of my career on a day’s worth. And we won’t even talk about the one-fifth of us who survive on a dollar a day.

She: That’s about right. The take for just one company is estimated to be about US$620 million a year. Which is why this New York Times fellow wants us to tell the phone companies to stop with the unnecessary, time-wasting messages already. Wants us to take back the beep.

He: Right. So the agent of one megacorporation is egging us on to volunteer our time so that we’ll take megaprofits out of some other megacorporation’s pockets and deposit them in his own? Sounds like it’s working, too. I’m not impressed.

She: You’re not?

He: Look. The whole cell phone thing has been a scam from the very beginning. The ridiculously high rates and charges. The extortionate long-term contracts. The poor sound quality. The dropped calls. The wide stretches of country where you still can’t get calls. Did We the People tell the scammers to stop gouging us, or they could stick their Nokias where the sun doesn’t shine? No, of course not. And now we’re complaining about a few seconds here and there? It’s a little damned little, and a lot damned late. You remember POTS?

She: You mean the ones I finally got out of storage for the kitchen?

He: Not those pots. These POTS. Plain Old Telephone Service. Universally available, efficient, and above all cheap. Unless you needed to call Egypt or something. The regulators pretty much made sure that We the People could afford to talk on the phone. There’s no reason why cell phones couldn’t have been developed under this system. Except one.

She: Which was?

He: What else? The moguls declared that they wouldn’t pursue technologies like cell phones unless they could make enough money off them to finance their yachts. Deregulate or else, they said. And we, like fools, said OK.

She: We’re getting some of this back now, aren’t we?

He: Y’think? This Pogue fellow got one thing absolutely right. ARPU. Average Revenue Per User. The “leave a message” trick is just one sneaky way that the companies have to get us to spend more money on our phones. You don’t think they’ve got a million more up their sleeves? So many that they could afford to let Pogue beat down on this one? “Hey, we beat the phone companies! Yay!” And meanwhile they’re implementing ARPU plans J, Q, and ZZ. They don’t get their money this way, they’ll get it some other way. They’ll have to.

She: They’ll have to?

He: Yeah. Because otherwise, We the People who own their stocks will dump them faster than you can say “dropped call”. And the moguls will all have to sell the yachts that we shouldn’t have let them have in the first place to the Sheik of Araby.

She: But what do we do now?

He: We should have thought about that a long time ago. Now, all we can do is the best we can.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

In December 1919, after a series of on- and off-the-field incidents that had to make you wonder what the reform-school orphan was taking, the Boston Red Sox professional baseball club sold pitcher/outfielder George Herman Ruth to the New York Yankees. As every citizen of Red Sox Nation knows, Babe Ruth led the then-moribund Yankees to fame and fortune, while the Red Sox pinballed from “hard luck” to disaster. Thanks to the notorious “Curse of the Bambino“, the Red Sox wouldn’t win a [gasp, choke, wheeze] “World” Series until 2004 – 85 years after Ruth was dealt to New York (and 86 years after their previous Series win).

In July 2008, after a series of on- and off-the-field incidents that had to make you wonder what the Dominican superstar was taking (vide infra), the Red Sox traded outfielder Manuel Aristides Ramírez Onelcida to the Los Angeles Dodgers. As every citizen of Red Sox Nation knows, Manny Ramírez is part of a newly-minted baseball juggernaut in Los Angeles, while the Red Sox struggle to score runs, and appear to be headed for a new Slough of Despond, a new Curse – The Curse of the Mannino.

But this new Curse threatens to take away, not only the future, but also the past. The past that, so the city of Boston used to think, had finally exorcised the Bambino’s curse. The past that includes two World Series wins – wins that were, it now appears, made possible only by illegal injection.

In a poignant – and prescient – article back in May 2009, sports columnist Bill Simmons (of ESPN) imagined the agonies of having to explain to his son how it was OK for the Red Sox to win the 2004 Series when at least two of the team’s headline stars (Ramírez, David Ortiz, Pedro Martínez) were cheating. In May, Simmons was speculating, based on the 50-game suspension for substance abuse that Ramírez was then serving. Today (30 July 2009), what Simmons entitled “his worst nightmare” seems to be coming true.

Or maybe it’s his second worst nightmare.

After all, the son, instead of peppering his father with barbed questions, could have shrugged his shoulders and said, “So what?”

That’s what a lot of folk who write in to the sports websites have been saying about this revelation, indeed the whole “steroids in sports” topic. At least, those folk whose comments the sports websites will let you see. “So what? Who cares what these guys are shooting, so long as we get to see the home runs on SportsCenter. Bring on the homers!”

A horrible attitude, you say? Careful that what you say matches what you do.

Do you go to professional baseball games? Do you watch them on television, follow their websites online, sign up for Red Sox Nation? You’re saying “So what?” to the steroid issue. Along with the millions of people who have been hearing all about it and have still been packing the stands and driving the TV ratings up. Unless you live in New York, where the damned gall of the stadium owners finally got to be too much for even you to swallow.

Do you wring your hands with the preacher at church about the plight of sweatshop workers, and shop at Wal-Mart and Target anyway? You’re saying “So what?” to those $1 a day sneaker makers.

The professionals in business are professionals for a reason. They know how to make money. They know that a million pious words are instantly negated by one swipe of the magic plastic. They will sell you that balloon mortgage because they know they can.

And it’s not their fault. Because, not only can they, they have to. Or the people who own stock in their company will sniff an infinitesimal drop in the company’s profits (read their dividends), and drop those stocks like primed grenades. Bring on those homers, baseball guys, or we’re watching football gridiron. Or American Idol.

There is, has been, and will be a lot of pious folk blaming The Big Cheeses for steroids in baseball, the economic downturn, all that stuff. It’s not their fault.

It’s ours.

And, your friendly neighborhood Amoeba suggests, it will continue to be our fault. Unless and until the day comes that sports owners field teams in which the players are clean of drug cheaters, rapists, racketeers, etc. etc. Because crime doesn’t sell.

Until the day comes that supermarket checkout stands stock Scientific American because that magazine sells, and Cosmopolitan doesn’t.

Until the day comes that television news programs actually report the news, because in-depth reporting of the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict sells, and fourth-hand rumors of possible child molestation by a priest who was 90 years old in 1956 do not.

As it is, we now have the world that we have made for ourselves. A world of baseball players who have learned that the ka-CHINGs of the cash registers easily drown out the screams of agony from parents whose children have died from steroid abuse. That it is how it is, is no one’s fault but our own.

And we can all go to hell in it together.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

“Yo!”

“Yo ho!”

“Yo ho ho …”

“And a beer. What’s got you so jolly, Roger?”

“Have you heard about the swine flu?”

“The swine what?“

“The swine flu!“

“Did not.”

“Did!“

“Did not!“

“Did … what the hell are you talking about?!?“

“Whatever it is you’ve got in that bottle. It’s supposed to be pink elephants, not flying pigs.”

“Of course pigs fly. Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of Pigs In Space?“

“Omygawd. Gimme shelter from pigs on the wing.”

“You need shelter from the ones on the ground, too. That’s what I’m trying to tell you!”

“They landed already? We’re being invaded?“

“Yeah. By pig germs. Influenza germs.”

“Oh! That flu! Why didn’t you say so in the first place? I knew a guy once, he was immune or something, and everybody was mad at him because of it.”

“How come?”

“They said he couldn’t get a grippe.”

“Friend of yours?”

“No. Your first cousin. Last I heard, everybody was worried about chicken flu. How come we’re sweatin’ pigs all of a sudden?”

“Well, I got an idea …”

“Alert the media!!“

“I’m going to save your life and ignore that. But only ’cause my story needs an audience. You remember this guy Jesus, right? How this sicko comes up to him one day, and Jesus yanks a pack of demons out of him and dumps them in a herd of pigs? And then the pigs all run off a cliff and drown themselves?”

“Yeah?”

“Those demons are getting their revenge …”

“Well, you go ahead and waste your time on your conspiracy theories. I’m more worried about Porky Pig.”

“Porky Pig?”

“Yeah. You know what happens if he gets the swine flu, don’t you?”

“What?”

“Abadeah-badeah-badeah-badeah-ba-That’s all, folks!”

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

When we first arrived in Hawai‘i, nearly two years ago now, there was lots of talk about ferries. The big one (indeed, they called it Super) that ran between the islands – well, two of them, anyway – and the little one (which they quaintly called TheBoat), which ran between West O‘ahu and Honolulu.

They’re both gone now. The good people of C.A.V.E. evicted the big one a month ago. And today (14 April 2009), the Honolulu City Council sank the little one.

Now, if it seems odd to you that Hawai‘i should have such a hard time with ferries, your Amoeba is with you. After all (in case you missed the memo), Hawai‘i is a chain of little islands smack in the middle of the biggest body of water on Earth. Dozens if not hundreds of miles separate each island from all the other ones, and hundreds, nay thousands, of miles separate the chain from anything else with a vague concept of “dry”. For those of us who haven’t mastered yogic flying, travel from your island to anywhere else requires either a boat or a plane. Swimming, shark fans, is definitely not recommended.

Despite this, Hawai‘i, I’m learning, has a history of chewing up ferry services and spitting them out as bundles of Chapter 7 documents. And I can’t confess to having been overfond of the newly-cancelled theBoat service. On the occasions when I rode TheBoat, it took me a full hour longer, each way, to get to my destination than by either bus or car – and this is allowing for the gridlock on O‘ahu’s roads that TheBoat was supposed to be alleviating. Furthermore, there were no passenger services at either ferry dock; the dock at the western end was miles from nowhere and had a postage stamp for a parking lot. And, as I learned after it was too late, TheBoat’s boats were designed for use on Puget Sound. Lovely, calm, flat, glassy Puget Sound. Which the waters off southern O‘ahu most definitely are not. The ocean swells tossed those boats around like the proverbial corks. And the passengers with them. Every seat was well provisioned with barf bags, and the odor of disinfectant.

In other words, the TheBoat operation was woefully undercapitalized. One of the principal reasons, Business 101 students, why (from memory) 90% of all startups fail within the first year.

But I was impressed with the media’s reporting of the TheBoat closure, because, in the first case I can recall in this season of economic distress, the true costs of a service under discussion were published. And those costs are such that TheBoat would have had to charge $124 per round-trip ticket in order to break even financially. Remember, this is for a service with no dock facilities, and with vessels unsuited to the conditions.

The City and County of Honolulu was charging $4 round trip. Not much math to do, is there?

But what about the idea of using TheBoat to get cars off of Honolulu’s roads? Well, let’s assume that a would-be TheBoat passenger owns a car for which he paid $30,000 new, and which he will drive for 10 years and 150,000 miles. Factoring in insurance, gas, and maintenance, and figuring that our man paid cash for the car, or got one of those 0% APR loans (mainly ’cause I’m too lazy to calculate compound interest, and too scared of what the numbers would be if I did), that car costs about $14 a day if it never leaves the driveway, and around $19 a day (figuring gas at $3 a gallon) if it’s driven the full 150,000 miles.

I make that out to mean that the ferry rider saved a whole dollar a day to take TheBoat into work instead of his car. Not counting the cost of his lost time – which, even if Our Hero’s making the $7.50 Federally-mandated minimum wage, blows off that dollar like it wasn’t even there.

So, even at $4 a trip, it makes no economic sense for most people to take TheBoat.

Now, I reckon, if everyone who is yelling about protecting my pot of funds from the budget-paring knives would submit to this sort of analysis, then there would be less yelling, or any yelling that remained would be exposed for the special-interest power play that it is.

There is a problem, though. Those of us who haven’t been brainwashed by the likes of Rush Limbaugh realize that our use of automobiles, and other fossil-fuel-burning devices, is materially affecting the ecology of the planet. No scientifically-credible model exists that projects anything but dire consequences if we continue to use fossil fuels at current rates.

But what do you do when, in the short term and to the individual citizen, no alternative is economically feasible? Nor can be made feasible without asking citizens in a democracy to vote against their short-term interest? To pay for a $125 round-trip ferry ticket when they’ve already invested in a $20-per-trip automobile?

The animals who do not reason would simply carry on following their short-term interests. And when the crash came, they would stand around wondering what the hell hit them. Until it did hit them and exempt them from all cares.

Humans who do reason have the opportunity to forecast the consequences of blindly following short-term interests and acting accordingly. Or proving myths of special human creation wrong, once and for all, by following the lemmings over the cliff and into the sea.

We can start taking advantage of our opportunity by demanding that our information sources provide facts of the type provided in the TheBoat story, not soundbites that merely confirm or ignite our prejudices. And by dispassionately paying attention to those facts when they are provided.

Even if it winds up coming out of our pockets.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

As if We the People of these Untied States of America didn’t have enough to worry about, what with the global economic meltdown, financiers absconding with taxpayer-funded bonuses, and our President playing Baracketology on the four-letter sports network. (You think I’m kidding?!?)

Now We are getting told we’re not getting enough vitamin D.

The news has been (ahem) all over the news today (24 March 2009). Even the staid Morning Edition program on National Public Radio ran a story, including interviews with the authors of the study that set off all the reporting.

That study contained some remarkable information that (naturally) didn’t always make its way into the press reports.

First of all, it’s paired with another study, the point of which is that vitamin D insufficiency matters – older people who get adequate amounts have much reduced risk of brittle bones.

Second, this wasn’t exactly one of those “seven out of ten doctors preferred” studies. The authors had access to medical records from some 33,000 people who, as part of a larger health survey, had been assessed for their vitamin D levels over two periods of time, 1988-1994 and 2001-2004. That’s a lot of data.

Which is why it took five years, from when the last subject’s blood was drawn, to get the study written up and published. Crunching those numbers takes time, especially if you’re going to crunch them to the satisfaction of a jury of your peers, who get to decide whether your work is good enough to be published. And the people doing the work had other things to do with their time. Like, um, saving lives – they are medical doctors after all.

It’s as well that the authors had patience as well as patients, because crunching these numbers also takes money. And it’s not like these medical doctors were building cruise missiles or anything important like that.

That “1988-1994″ time period caught Your Amoeba’s, er, pseudopod. Because that’s about when UV-blocking sunscreens started hitting the market big time.

Before then, y’see, the complex problem of vitamin D deficiency had a simple, easy-to-understand answer. Go outside. Live human skin + sunshine = vitamin D production. Twenty minutes a day keeps the rickets away.

Of course, if a little is good, more must be better, right? Beautiful people who were deprived, by accident of birth, of the skin-tone blessings of humans reared for millennia in tropical climes, sought to compensate by engaging in quests for “the perfect tan”. And in the process discovered the phenomena of premature aging, which has the drawback of being socially awkward, and melanoma, which has the drawback of being fatal.

Once tanning came to be associated with a quick and painful death, tanning itself suffered the same fate. This was bad news for Waikiki. In fact, it was bad news for everybody who was not a shareholder in the companies that were selling Dungeons and Dragons and video games. People didn’t limit their sun exposure, they eliminated it. This could not be borne.

Enter the sunscreens. The diet cola principle extended to the great outdoors. Sunscreen makers exploded into the marketplace with big promises and bigger profits. “All the sun you can stand, and no damage to your waistline skin”.

But no vitamin D production either. What? Oh. Yeah. Right. So what?

Brittle bones, that’s what. And in children, rickets. Especially since milk makes you fat (we’re told), so kids aren’t drinking their vitamin D, either.

So, authors of the vitamin D studies. What’s the answer to the conundrum? Moderate sun exposure?

Please. Where are the profits in that? We’re supposed to be stimulating the economy here.

The word of the day is supplements, dear readers. Probably brought to you by your local nutrition center, who might be supporting this class of research (because there haven’t been public funds for this sort of thing for years now; see “cruise missiles”, supra) without telling anybody. That way, in order to go out into the sun, you buy a superpowered sunscreen to block the sunshine you’re supposed to be enjoying, and then you buy pills to replace the vitamin D that your own body would have made from the sunshine if you hadn’t lathered your body with sunscreen to block the sunshine out.

‘Course, if you really wish to go down this yellow brick road, you don’t have to wait for Field Marshall Nutrition to put out vitamin D pills at a price that would embarrass Viagra. All you really need to do is hop on down to the breakfast cereal aisle at your local grocers. The cereal people have been dosing their cardboard calories with supplements for decades …

Wait. Did I say “hop”? Sigh. Silly rabbit …

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

He: So you’re going out to the Leeward side of O‘ahu today?

She: I was. But I might have trouble getting there.

He: For why?

She: The road’s closed. There’s been an accident. A bad one. And you know what that means.

He: Yeah. Tragedies for families. And nobody else out there is moving an inch.

She: Well, maybe it’s not so bad. The crash happened near this bridge to nowhere, which they opened, so traffic is moving.

He: You mean the one they show in the news story? Using your pictures?

She: WHAT?!?

He: They used your pictures of the bridge!

She: I thought they looked familiar …

He: Well, now you’ve got a story to tell your photography class. Quill Pen Photos Make Local News. At least the TV station gave you a credit. But I’m sure your instructor will be using this little episode to tell you all about something even better.

She: What?

He: A check.

PS (11 PM HST, 24 Jan.): Quilly’s pictures were only up on the KGMB News site for a few hours. So if you haven’t gone looking yet, don’t bother. If you have and wondered what happened, well, now you know. Presumably, as soon as the TV station got their own news people on the scene, they got and used their own photos. I just hope the word check didn’t scare them away from dear Q …

The air in our house looks like fog.  Smells much worse and is none too easy to breathe.  OC and I are monitoring my asthma closely.  IF I didn’t sleep with a CPAP we probably couldn’t have stayed here last night.

From the Honolulu Advertizer, online:

Fire in Makaha Valley continues to burn

By Dave Dondoneau
Advertiser Staff Writer

MAKAHA VALLEY — About 30 firefighters were playing the waiting game here over night, watching a fire burn below their post and awaiting first light so they could tackle the stubborn brushfire that has continued to burn through the valley since Friday. “There are parts of the fire in the back of the valley that are tough to get to because of the steep terrain so we’re going to need some helicopter support in the morning,” Fire Department spokesman Capt. Earle Kealoha said shortly after 2:30 a.m. “The fire below us, we should be able to tackle with our ground forces.”

Kealoha and the rest of the firefighters watched the fire from inside the gated community Mauna Olu, which is on a ridge perched above the fire.

“If you look at how the fire has burned it’s almost made a circle around this area going back and forth shifting with the wind since it started on Friday,” Kealoha said, estimating more than 1,000 acres has burned since Friday.

So far, no evacuations have been needed, but a heavy cloud of smoke is covering the Makaha Valley Towers and other residents in the area this morning.

As long as the mauka winds continue to blow, smoke inhalation could be a problem for residents in the area even though the closest the blaze has come to a residence so far is about a half-mile. Kealoha said no smoke inhalation reports had reached the command post as of 3 a.m., however.

HFD had two towers, four engines and two tankers monitoring the blaze most of the night and was joined by another tanker after 4 a.m.

From the HFD command post you could see the fire stretching across a large part of the valley and the original blaze in the back of the valley, which started Friday afternoon, was illuminating over the mountains.

Firefighters had only one helicopter at their disposal yesterday. Kealoha said they’re hoping today to get some additional helicopter support from the military as well as department of forestry to tackle the fire in the back of the valley.

Around midnight, one farmer in the valley self-evacuated some horses and was concerned for some birds and goats that were on the property. Kealoha said around 1 a.m. an engine was sent to guard the farm residence in case the fire inched closer to his home.

From the Mauna Olu fire post, the fire was highly visible and appeared to be burning as if it were a picket fence, covering a thin but long stretch of land. The pocket in the back of the valley, however, couldn’t directly be seen but illuminated over the mountains as a full moon helped light up the sky.