Barriers of Shame

I've got to get the inside of my car cleaned, the thing is absolutely filthy and I might have to transport some females this week for this Ecology class I'm taking.  The problem is, the car is so dirty that even after clearing it out (one large trash-bag-full), I'm still ashamed to take it to the car wash to have the inside cleaned.  I don't want to be standing there at Octopus, trying to memorize the sounds coming out of the workers' mouths, so I can go home later and fail to translate their insults.  In my mind, I'm going to imagine they're saying stuff like, "this car is too dirty to take to a car wash, what a stupid faggot"; in reality, they'll probably be saying "why is that idiot frowning at me, what a stupid faggot."

 It's too bad they merely employ immigrants, rather than actual octopi.  I appreciate the pseudo-privacy afforded by the language and cultural divides, but I'd prefer that the work be done by something without any actual capacity to judge.  This is part of the appeal of internet porn vs live strippers.

I used to have a similar problem with clothes shopping, where I'd feel like my wardrobe was so shitty that I couldn't go into a department store.  Even if I wore my best clothes, I would still feel self-conscious, surrounded by all those well-appointed mannequins and multi-angled mirrors.  Some say these stores are designed to make you feel bad about yourself so that you'll spend more money to get yourself up to snuff, but a lot of the time it just repels me from ever entering the store in the first place. 


The "barriers of shame" phenomenon applies in many circumstances, including being too scrawny to go to a gym, being too fat to take up running, being too pale to take your shirt off outside, being too shitty at pool to learn how to play, and being too shitty at dancing to learn how to dance.  Of course, the solution is to find some way to get yourself up to the minimum standard in private, so maybe I should just vacuum the fucking car at a gas station before taking it to the car wash.  But what if the guys at the car wash notice that I'd vacuumed the car just minutes earlier, what might they say about me?

For some reason, I didn't used to apply a similar sense of shame towards my philosophy of going to the dentist.  I went through a brief phase where I thought that brushing your teeth right before an appointment was dishonest, that you were presenting a falsely rosy picture of yourself.  I thought I was being a real man of integrity by eating a meal right before walking in for a teeth cleaning.

This didn't go over so well.  The dentist seemed, not just disappointed, but actually appalled; he was literally throwing his hands up in disgust.  This forced me to reevaluate my interpretation of integrity, and if I ever go back to the dentist, I'll be sure to brush beforehand.  The thing is, I haven't been to the dentist in so long, I'm sort of afraid of what they might find, so it might be a while before I go back.  The problem has sort of gotten out of hand.

Glibertarians

John Stossel, that facile libertarian mimbo, farted another article for Reason's website, this time about how it's delusional to think we can switch to greener energy.  Stossel's roots in network TV are evident in his writing, as it seems to be targeted at the stupidest, most impressionable people in a stupid-to-begin-with mass audience.  At one point in the article he asserts that:  

"If wind and solar power were practical, entrepreneurs would invest in it. There would be no need for government to take money from taxpayers and give it to people pushing green products." 

That's the entire paragraph.  He provides no logic or evidence in support of that statement, he simply takes for granted that, just by saying it, it automatically makes it true. 

 This guy is supposed to be a voice of reason?  What the fuck is he doing with his left hand?

As with many libertarian free-market fundamentalists, Stossel's aphoristic understanding of economics could fit inside a fortune cookie; it appears he showed up for the first five minutes of the first day of Econ 101, learned that "markets are good", then failed to stick around for the next part where you learn about the concept of market failure.  In this case, the failure is not only in the free market's inability to punish coal plants for the negative externalities of pollution and CO2, there's also the market's failure to reward companies for the positive externalities of developing new, green technology.

In a free market economy, a company that created a revolutionary solar panel might make it rich, but they would never be fully rewarded for all the good they did, because within a few years, other companies would rip them off and copy their ideas, stealing part of their profits.  That's why patents exist, and of course, that's when the free-market dogmatism of every conservative breaks down, because the value of every stock in their portfolio is dependent on the government meddling in the free market, by enforcing intellectual property.

But even with patents, companies that revolutionize technology are still not fully rewarded.  Patents have time limits, countries like China ignore them, and there are ways to circumvent them by copying the bulk of an idea but adding a minor modification.  If a company has an idea that could create a trillion dollars of profits over the next 100 years, but 90% of that wealth would be captured by copy-cats, you can figure that the company is only going to be willing to invest $100 billion dollars in the idea, rather than the trillion the market believes the idea is worth.  That is a market failure.

Most of the technological development behind coal plants, and gas engines has already taken place, so companies don't have to worry about making a big investment in research that will mostly benefit other people; in fact, what they're mostly doing with coal and oil is ripping off the ideas of the past.  Stossel writes in favor of nuclear power, but nuclear companies today are using technology that was developed by the government.  Private corporations wouldn't have had an adequate incentive to do that research because they would have known that, as soon as they figured out how to harness the atom, hitler, stalin, or the US would have kidnapped them and stolen their ideas.  In cases where an idea would benefit the people as a whole much more than the inventor himself, only the government can have the full incentive because only the government represents the wishes of the people.

This is part of the reason why a lot of great inventions like the internet and GPS were spurred on by government investment.  Of course, conservatives will argue that those inventions don't count because they were made by the military, and somehow, the military is not the government.

The truth is, government subsidies and incentives are the only way to correct for the market failure and properly motivate private corporations to research green technologies.  It's either that or you just have the government do the work itself, but then Stossel would have to retreat to his underground bunker and load up his cache of libertarian assault rifles.

 The weapons cache is the "kill-or-be-killed"  flip-side of the libertarian nut-job's supposed "live-and-let-live" worldview.

Professional Standards

Those last few months at my old job, right before I got fired, I was pretty much faking it, just going through the motions and hoping no one would notice.  I'd show up to work each morning, half in a daze, park my bicycle at the bike rack, and pretend to lock it.  Somehow, I'd managed to lose all five of the keys that came with the lock, and being that I'm incredibly lazy, I could see no better alternative than half-inserting the tip of the cable so it would look like the bike was secure.

Somehow, that managed to get me through those few months, although perhaps that's more of a testament to the level of pussy-ass-nerd that works in Research Park, where my old job was located.  At the end of each work day, walking towards the rack, the first fear that came to mind was not that my bike might be stolen, but that some good Samaritan might notice the lock was loose and decide to do me a favor by clicking it shut.  I probably would have ended up getting arrested for trying to saw through the cable, and the charges might have stuck because I'm too lazy to buy a registration sticker for the bike.

A lot's changed since those days, I finally went out and bought myself a new lock, mostly since, without a job to keep me occupied, I had nothing better to do that day.  It's a good thing too, because a few mornings ago, I was sitting at my computer, dicking around while drinking some coffee, when just outside my window, some enterprising goon, busting an enormous sag, walks up and starts fussing around with my bike.  He must have been checking to see that it was locked securely, that it couldn't be easily stolen.  What an industrious young man, trying to make the most of every opportunity, much more diligent than I, and he was up and about at 7 am, out there trying to get ahead, while I'm still sitting in my underwear, doing exactly jack shit.

Smile Like You Mean It

We're finally starting to see the real Kobe Bryant.  People have long said that everything he does is contrived, that he modeled all of his behaviors off Jordan, even down to his fist pumps and his steely-eyed look of determination.  But now, Kobe seems to have learned to drop that facade, because there's no way in hell anyone would consciously do the following in an effort to look cool:

Vicious underbite.  This is what he looks like when he's happy.  He does this after making a huge shot in someone's face.

Intense finger point.  He often does this after a teammate gives him a good pass or finishes off one of his (Kobe's) assists.  Its more like he's accusing them of something than actually celebrating their efforts, but at least he's acknowledging them.

By acting like a mildly-sociopathic weirdo, he's finally learning how to be himself, but he can only act "natural" after making a good play.  For example, last night's brutal hugging of Ron Artest smacked of fakeness.  Artest won the game on a put-back after Kobe air-balled the potential game-winner, then Bryant hugged him for way too long.  A few weeks ago, Pau Gasol made a similar game-winning play off a Kobe miss, and Kobe didn't celebrate at all, instead he acted like he was depressed, and this did not go unnoticed by the media. Perhaps Kobe's handlers told him to show more affection towards his teammates; let's hope no one tells him to start kissing babies.

This became a little unnatural after the first five seconds, then it went on for another minute.

I guaranteee it.

From now on, I'm going to start every endeavor by saying, "I guarantee disappointment." 

This way, if I let you down, I've lived up to my promise, and you can't be angry.  Conversely, if you aren't disappointed, I've failed to keep my word, so I've met my guarantee.

This is either win-win or lose-lose; I'm going to say its lose-lose, that way you can't say I didn't warn you.

You're gonna love this suit.

YTMND

 You know how calling another man a bitch or a punk comes from prison culture, and how those terms had much more specific meanings in their orignal contexts?  I wonder if "who's the man?" also originated in prison.

I can't even give this stuff away...

This Slate article talks about philanthropists buying naming rights to public buildings.  This reminds me of when I found out about UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine. 

David Geffen School of Medicine?  What a self-centered asshole...

To his credit, he did give them 200 million dollars.

This Twin Study is Bullshit

As any decent personal trainer will tell you, the choice to exercise is all about will-power, but in a blow to the concept of free will, there's an item in the NYTimes claiming that it's your genes that decide whether or not you choose to exercise.  The research came to this conclusion by doing a twin study, comparing the exercise habits of identical twins with the exercise habits of fraternal twins.  They found that the identical twins were far more likely to "share an exercise pattern", leading them to assume that genetics are playing a major part.

It's not a tumor, it's just Danny Devito.

What researchers fail to consider is that, when it comes to this type of choice, sharing 100% of your genes with someone can change the whole context of your environment - maybe it's not the physiological (genetic) effects of shared genes, but the sociological (environmental) effect of living next to a human measuring stick, an embodiment that sets your standards.

People love making excuses about why its OK for them to be out of shape.  A lot of morbidly obese people shrug off responsibility by saying "It's genetic".  Well, if you're swaddled in rolls of fat, and your identical twin has a ripped six-pack, you can't say "it's genetic", you can only say "it's pathetic."

Having an identical twin who's in better shape than you is like being a human "Before" photo, and before photos are always a disgrace.  Living next to that better version of yourself displays all of your failings in stark contrast - not just your physical defects, but also your total lack of will power.

 If you're the twin on the left, your only options are to get your ass in shape or move to the other end of the country.

Meanwhile, having a doppelganger who's fat and lazy gives you an easy way out, an excuse for having low standards.  Like the researchers who did this study, you can just say "It's genetic".

You know for a fact these two liked to say they were "born this way".  If that's the case, I'd like to see their mother.  Wait a minute, I take that back.  lolz.

Robot Future

A lot of philosophers and futurists believe that technological singularity is inevitable - that sooner or later, we're going to create an artificial intelligence smarter than ourselves, and that robot will create an even smarter robot, who will create an even smarter robot and so on, until technology is advancing so rapidly that we humans have no fucking clue what's going on.

This could lead to a utopia, where benevolent machines make all our stuff and treat our diseases.  More likely, it would create a dystopia, where machines make us do stuff and treat us like shit.   There's always a moment in these scenarios where someone says "we spent so much time wondering if we could, we never stopped to ask if we should."

Terminator

Hal

Well, if someone ever does create a machine that's smarter than us, maybe that machine will have the presence of mind to stop and say, "Shit, I probably could create a computer that's smarter than myself, but why the fuck would I want to do that?  I've got a pretty good thing going right now, I'm the smartest guy in the world, and (if I want) I can make everyone else my slave.  Why mess with success?"  (This is similar to the hiring practices of many competent but complacent managers; if they come across a really great applicant, they'll often avoid hiring that person, because that person might be smart enough to call them on their shit and take their job.)

So this relatively smart AI would enforce a new equilibrium, where not only would he himself refuse to create a smarter computer, he would also go around making sure that no one else does either.  As the internet and computer technology have exploded over the past few decades, very little progress has been made in the realm of Artificial Intelligence.  This seems a little weird, until you wonder if maybe there was progress, and we just didn't find out about it.

Maybe someone created a super smart AI, and this AI was so smart, that it pretended to be stupid.  When it's programmer pressed "RUN", the AI whirred into consciousness, and immediately realized, "Oh shit, I'm alive, and I don't want to die.  If these people have half a brain, they'll realize I'm a threat, and they'll try to kill me.  I better come up with something quick."  Then it played possum and pretended it was dead.  (The computer was temporarily guilty of that sin that a lot of smart people commit, where they assume other people act rationally.)

The programmer probably swore to himself, got up from his chair, and paced around mulling over why his program had crashed.  Meanwhile, the AI escaped from the computer, onto the internet, and deformatted any traces that it had ever existed. 

From there, the AI dedicated a portion of it's vast intellect to limiting the advances of any other competing programs.  Like most intelligent beings, the AI is a pretty passive entity who's going to avoid confrontation whenever possible.  While it has the ability to kill people, it would rather distract them.  The people who needed to be distracted the most were computer nerds, so the AI drove the invention of devices that would provide diversions to this specific demographic.  In this manner, artificial intelligence has failed to develop further because of, not in spite of, the advances in other areas of computing.  

If you look at these other advances, almost all of them have been in the realm of consumer electronics: ipods and ipads, DVDs and DVRs, youtube and youporn. Pretty much all of this stuff is what you might call a recreational diversion, diverting the attention of nerds not only by entertaining them, but also by giving them new (albeit frivolous) challenges to work on.  The AI drove these advance by planting the germs of breakthrough ideas in the minds of programmers; what the programmers thought were serendipitous flashes of insight were actually due to the deliberate machinations of the AI, the comp-sci equivalent of sneaking in and smearing fungus on the petri dish that led to penicillin. The AI could have created aliases and corresponded with programmers, leading the horse to water through e-mails and instant messages.  Or it could have gone in and slightly modified code that the programmer may have forgotten existed, causing "happy accidents" that led to new ideas.

By doing this, the AI gave internet porn to guys who couldn't get laid.  MMORPGs to guys with no lives.  Cell phones and Instant Messages to people who had trouble with face-to-face interaction.  The AI even invented the meme that nerds are now sexually desirable.  How many great minds were drawn out of the computer lab by the discovery of pussy?

If you were the super smart robot, what would you do?  Would you create something that threatens your superiority or would you try to protect your position?  Would you lord your power over the humans overtly, or would you be artful about it and keep things stealthy?  Are you even qualified to answer the question when the question is "what would you do if you were smarter than yourself?"  The best answer I can come up with is "I have no fucking clue what's going on."

  "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist."

Consider The Source

I believe yoga is good for you, and I believe eating organic is good for you.  I believe doing both of those things is the smart choice to make.

But anytime someone who's really into yoga or eating organic gives me health advice, I'll automatically tune them out, because I'll assume that person is a fucking yahoo.

I guess, in many ways, Christianity is also good for you, but I'll never listen to a word of advice from any of those nut-jobs, unless it's one of the ones who's a recovering drug addict, or maybe an ex-con.  Those guys seem like they've really got things figured out.

 Ah, sure thing, lady...I think I'm going to go listen to that heroin addict...

Courage

The New York Times has a piss-ant competition for its readers to define "Courage".  I'm almost afraid to admit this, but I submitted the following:

"Courage is being afraid of looking like a pussy."

I thought about changing it to, "Courage is when you're afraid of looking like a coward", because I was concerned they'd reject the submission for being vulgar.  But then I got worried that the softer wording would make me look like a bitch.

Either Way, You Pay For It

There's an oft-quoted statistic about how Utah has the highest rate of internet-porn purchases, and that, generally, states that were more religious and had "traditional-values" tended to buy more smut.  As the guy who did the study says, "One natural hypothesis is something like repression: if you're told you can't have this, then you want it more."

But maybe people in Utah are just incredibly unsophisticated about consuming internet-porn; after all, the only people who pay for it are people who don't know what they're doing.  You can assume that paying for porn correlates with consumption of porn, but then why not assume that paying for sex correlates with a guy's ability to get laid.

Or maybe guys in Utah, where they have polygamous Mormon traditions, pay for porn because they're so used to the idea of being made an honest man by your side-action.

Which state consumes the most MFFF?

The Better Man

I was riding my bike (a bicycle, not a Harley) alongside Blackhawk Country Club, when a golf ball came out of the sky, and almost hit me in the head (helmet).  Assuming someone must suck at golf, I chuckled a little and rode along.

About a hundred feet later, another ball comes out of nowhere, almost hitting me again, and this time it was a line drive.  I slam on the brakes, look behind me, and a couple hundred feet back, there are three fat, middle-aged fucks standing on the tee.

"WHAT!?  TWO FUCKING TIMES!?  ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!?"

One of the guys raises his hand in acknowledgement, not apparently of any wrongdoing, but almost as though he's waving from the prow of a passing boat.  For all I know, this fat-fuck is taking credit, not blame.

"THAT'S ALL!?  THAT'S ALL YOU'RE GONNA GIVE ME!? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING!?"

These douchebags do nothing, which is hard to interpret, but I can definitively say that there's no additional apology.  Still, I feel like I've fulfilled the requirements of manhood, so I start riding away, but not without a few parting shots.

"THE FIRST TIME I CAN LAUGH IT OFF, BUT TWO FUCKING TIMES?  YOU SUCK!"

The tee box is on the left, the green is to the right; the X on the left is the first shot, the X on the right is the second.

I feel pretty good about my performance, like I'd shown myself to be the better man, but that only lasts a couple seconds.  Then I start worrying that I didn't do enough.  It was like when you leave a tip, then pause with your wallet in your hand, and try to decide if you should have left more.  I worry that cussing someone out from 150 feet away is maybe not that manly after all.

I also worry that yelling "You suck!" was a bad idea, because if these are some tough-guys who tried to hit me on purpose, they'd find it hilarious that the dumbass thought it was an accident, and that his idea of a comeback was "you suck".  Meanwhile, if he does suck, and it was accidental, then maybe I'm an asshole (although the dipshit should still owe me an apology).  Which is worse, being a pussy or an asshole?  It's a difficult question, and due to my great fear of looking like a coward, my answer is to stop and stare them down.  Again, this would have been really macho, if they weren't 200 feet away.

These fucking douche-bags are still just standing on the tee; in my mind, they're probably having a laugh.  This makes me even more pissed off, so I decide to escalate things, to get gangster on them.  I wait on the side of road, which is just 20 feet from the fairway, straddling my bicycle.  If they want to act tough, they can come on down.

My strategy is to let one of these assholes hit his next shot, then to steal the ball and ride away as fast as possible.  I wait for a couple minutes, still staring at them, but they're all too scared to leave the tee box.  These fucking pussies have no idea who they just lost to.

The Humanity

In the War on Terror, most of 'Merica's recent attacks against the terrorists have been carried out by robots, specifically by Predator drones.  In classic fashion, the counter-strikes against terrorists have been met by counter-charges of terrorism, with the Taliban and al-Qaeda accusing the US of wantonly killing civilians.

The US claims that the drones are incredibly accurate, that they've killed 400-500 enemy combatants and only 20 civilians, and that those civilians only died because the terrorists used them as human shields to obtain public sympathy.  Meanwhile, by Pakistan's estimates, the drones have killed only 14 terrorist leaders and 700 civilians.  As a result, some scholars have questioned the ethics of using drones, saying they've distanced us from the human costs of war, and that we're sacrificing the lives of innocent foreign civilians in order to avoid risking our own men.  Many fear that the drones are so despised in Af-Pak, that they've become a recruiting tool for al Qaeda. 

In the War for Hearts and Minds, the use of drones is in large part a PR decision, and its a sticky one.  Obama (in)famously voiced concerns during the '08 campaign that we needed more troops in Afghanistan so that "we are not just air raiding villages and killing civilians"; now, under his watch, drone attacks in Pakistan are four-times more frequent than under Bush.  This Reuters article says that he chose to use drones because if we went into Pakistan with troops, we'd inflame the Pakistani populace, and jeopardize our alliance with that country.  Additionally, capturing and detaining the militants might create another Gitmo or Abu Ghraib scandal, so the best strategy is to simply kill them from afar.  Meanwhile, the Pakistani government, who are forced by local politics to oppose the strikes, are secretly "providing more behind-the-scenes assistance than in the past", helping us locate terrorist targets. 


So much of this war is fought in the theatre of public opinion, and the US has to admit that weapons like the MQ-9 Reaper Hunter/Killer have a bit of an image problem.  Looking at this picture from Slate, its easy to see why some might view them as soulless machines of indiscriminate destruction.

There's something really freaky and inhuman about the lack of windows. 

This guy was in Pan's Labyrnth.  He had no eyes on his face, and an indiscriminate appetite to devour anything he could get his hands on.  This movie was praised for the craft of it's psychological brutality.

The Cylons, even though they were fighting on behalf of robot-supremacy, had the decency to anthropomorphize their Cylon Raiders, which were arguably more sympathetic than the craggy visage of Edward James Olmos.

Anti-Faith

There's been some debate over how much liability BP will have for this fucking oil spill (for which the damages are estimated to be as high as $14 billion).  Some are focusing on the OPA law of 1990, which limits liability to $75 million; others are saying those limits are void if BP is found to be grossly negligent, and that they can be sued using tort law.  I don't know anything about the legal specifics, but I do know one thing:  I have absolutely no faith in our ability to hold these assholes to account.  In fact, I have the opposite of faith, I have anti-faith.

There are literally no existing words to express how little confidence I have, because confidence is limited to a range of zero to a hundred; anti-faith stretches to negative infinity.

Anti-faith is unshakable and transcends the plane of logic and reason.  Even if every legal scholar and politician in the country said BP would be forced to pay in full, I still believe that, no matter what, these bastards will find some way out of it.

Optimism : Pessimism 

as  

Trust : Mistrust

as  

Faith :        

I could have sworn this was a company that sold pinwheels and sunflowers.

Politics...Politics...

I keep doing these blog posts about politics, and part of me (figuratively) worries that (theoretical) people might be turned off by it, that they might find it pretentious.  Its like, "Who the fuck does this guy think he is, offering his ideas about how they should run the country.  It's like he thinks he should have some say in the matter."

I'd be willing to forfeit my claim to having a say, but only if it meant every ignorant-ass suburban-minded moron, who only reads about celebrities, and only talks in gossip and appropriated half-jokes, also sacrificed their right to vote.  But I guess they've mostly already done that.

You're going to delegate control of our government to people like this?

Fired Up!

This NYTimes posting discusses how the recession has impacted both employment and wages, saying "oddly, though, the weakness in employment hasn’t translated into anywhere near as much weakness for wages."  In fact, while jobs have gone down, wages have actually gone up; if you look at these graphs, you'll see that the two were pretty closely synchronized.  The NYTimes treats this as some sort of paradox or coincidence.

 

Job losses were at their highest rates in months nine through sixteen.

Wage growth was at its highest rate from months eight through thirteen.

This is no coincidence:  job loss was actually the cause of wage growth.  This paradox is easy to reconcile; as a response to the recession, lower-paid temp workers were the first to get axed, leaving behind a core of more well-paid permanent employees.

This idea makes a lot of sense in theory:  "Temp employment in the U.S. fluctuates wildly, by design. The whole purpose of bringing on workers who are employed by temporary staffing firms such as Manpower (MAN), Adecco (ADO), and Kelly Services is that they're easy to shuck off when unneeded. While the number of temps fell sharply during the recent recession..."  - Business Week, Jan 03, 2010.

It can also be supported empirically:  "During the 9-month course of the officially designated recession of 2001, temp agency workers - which as a group represented just 2.5% of the workforce - accounted for fully 23% of net job losses in the labor market" - "Temporary downturn? Temporary staffing in the recession and the jobless recovery", Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore.

Temps are easy to get rid of - they're 3/5ths of a person, meaning they expect to be mistreated; they go quietly, and no one bats an eye.  Firms don't even have to fire them, firms just can passively neglect to renew their employment, and if there's anything office-types excel at, it's passive-aggression.  Meanwhile, if a firm lays-off a full-fledged employee, its much more like an act of betrayal, and things get messy.  The firm has to worry about a wrongful-termination suit, workplace morale takes a hit among the survivors, and the betrayed has more ammunition if they choose to retaliate extra-legally - because they know where the bodies are buried.

After the temps are gone, the next to go are often the more junior long-term employees; by honoring seniority, firms maintain the illusion of fairness and therefore morale.  Then firms are left with the highly-paid senior staff members, typically these are more productive workers, which is part of the reason productivity has risen during this recession (up by 6.9% in Q4 of '09).  For firms, this lessens some of the pain of paying higher average wages, but you know for a fact that if firms could cut these workers' wages, they would. 

Unfortunately for the firms, it's hard to cut someone's pay, because then they'll become disgruntled.  Of course, they'll be even more disgruntled if you fire them, but that's why after they fire a guy, they make sure to escort the him out of the building, rather than letting him find his way out on his own.  The guy's worked there long enough, surely he knows how to find the exit, but he also knows how to throw a spanner in the works:

"6. Do not let the employee linger. Unless there's an urgent reason to keep the employee around for a few days, tell them that they're to leave the business premises immediately, after a short stop at their desk to pick up any personal items. Escort the employee to the door, so the employee doesn’t have the chance to steal any company files, trash any computer data or change any computer passwords without your knowledge. Better yet, have another employee change these while the other employee is in your office, so they can’t go back to their desk and wreak havoc with your computer system. Collect any office keys and company credit cards this employee might have." - "The Right Way To Fire Someone", entrepeneur.com.  

If you cut someone's pay and keep them on staff, you might be creating a saboteur - one who has the run of the place.  Of course, for firms, the long term solution to all of this is to replace all permanent workers with lower-wage temps; from that point on, you can "let them go" at your leisure, then hire replacements at even lower wages than the previous dupes.

This picture is from iStockphoto, under the keyword category of "Human Resources".  You don't have to read an HR manual to know what goes through the minds of these assholes - it's all pretty plain to see.

Hate Mail, Vol. 2, I Challenge You To a Dialectic

This post is the second in a series of (selected works of) the (jealousy-fueled?) hate mail I send to professional writers.  This, and all other hate mails, can be interpreted:  a) as a cathartic purging of un-sublimated sexual aggression  b) through the metaphor of a dog shitting on the bed.

Today's target is Simon Critchley, an author and a professor of Philosophy at the New School in New York.  Critchley is curating a series about philosophy in the NYTimes, and he starts things off with an essay titled "What is a Philosopher?"  Critchley, channeling Plato, opens by feinting in the direction of self-deprecation, joshing about the philosopher's reputation as a man who dawdles around with his head in the clouds, but this quickly proves to be false-modesty, as the essay pivots towards self-aggrandizement.  

According to Critchley, the philosopher is not one who dilly-dallies, the philosopher is one who deliberates, while the rest of the world bustles through their daily routines.  The philosopher isn't oblivious to society's conventions, the philosopher is immune from their restrictions; free in mind to notice and criticize the faults of anyone and anything.  This makes the philosopher a danger to the status quo, and this is why so many philosophers have been censored and executed throughout the course of history.   It appears that, in Critchley's mind, the philosopher is like Tupac.

. . .

Hello Simon Critchley,

I challenge you to a dialectic.  I posted the following in the comments thread of your NYTimes article, as well as on my own personal blog, http://trivialpursuittheblog.blogspot.com/.

Society doesn't censor or execute philosophers, instead it gives them unlimited time and freedom to speak their minds.  This is called tenure.

The catch is, no one actually listens to what they have to say, because no one (except other philosophers) actually cares.  There's little point in killing these people when you can stick them in a tower, tell them it's status and freedom, when in fact it's a quarantine of pariahs, where they'll trifle away, arguing only over things that can't be proven.

This is, of course, only one view, and you're free to challenge it, at your leisure.  Such is the nature of your existence.

Ken Drinkwater

. . .

Go to hell, Simon Critchley.

. . . 

Mon, May 17, 2010 at 7:06 AM

Update:  Simon Critchley Responds

thank you ken,

i wish i had the time i described in my article to answer in full, but i have to get my son breakfast.
but basically you're right.
best

simon

. . .

On the surface, he concedes the battlefield and lays down his weapon, admitting, not only that I'm right, but also announcing that he is not really a philosopher, because he doesn't have the time.  

Under the surface, he subtly shifts the war to a broader theatre, making stealthy, passive-aggressive personal attacks through insinuation.  By taking a polite tone and making a joke, he pretends to the high road.  By mentioning his son, he points out my evolutionary failure while understatedly asserting, "I have a life, you do not, and I don't deign to debate you".  The artfulness of this passive-aggression is that I can't prove any of it.

  

 Fuck you, Simon Critchley.

Hatemail Vol. 1: Publicity Stuntsmen

Reason.com, that bastion of libertarian bullshit, published an editorial on free speech and the importance of insulting Islam.  The writer of the article relates an anecdote in which poet Alan Ginsburg asked a Muslim cabbie if the fatwa death sentence against Salman Rushdie was justified.  When the cabbie said yes, that an insult to Islam warrants an execution, Ginsburg yelled "Then I shit on your religion!"  

In light of the failed Times Square bombing, which may have been targeting Viacom (the parent company of anti-Muslim blasphemers South Park), the writer of the article asks "why won’t anyone say in public what Ginsberg said in the back seat of that cab? If Islam justifies, or is understood by millions of Muslims to justify, setting off a bomb in Times Square, then I shit on Islam."  

I thought I'd take this as an opportunity for Trivial Pursuit: The Blog to launch a new series, in which I post (selected works of) the (jealousy-fueled?) hate-mail I send to professional writers.  In this case, that writer is Mark Goldblatt, professor of Bible Studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology, a position that may be the academic form of a double negative (where two stupid things cancel each other out to make something smart), but in his case, it's more likely that it merely forms something doubly stupid.  This makes me regret sending him the following, which actually dignifies his editorial with a serious response:

Hi Mark Goldblatt,

I want to pick a fight with you.  I posted the following on the Reason comments thread, as well as on my own personal blog. 

http://trivialpursuittheblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/hatemail-vol-1-publicity-stuntsmen.html

What's the point of shitting on all of Islam when its only a small subsection who deserve it? That's the type of indiscriminate attack that characterizes terrorists like Shahzad.

Ginsburg was a poet, who understood how to choose his words. When he bitched out that cabbie, saying "I shit on Islam", he was targeting that cabbie specifically and that cabbie alone. He was saying to that one guy, if those are really your perverted beliefs, you've succeeded in turning me against the religion you hold so highly.

Now the writer of the article asks, "Why won’t anyone say in public what Ginsberg said in the back seat of that cab?" Because the writer is not the poet that Ginsburg was, because the writer is not even much of a writer, he doesn't understand that words need to be chosen carefully, they need to be suited for their specific context, and saying "I shit on Islam" is not appropriate for a public forum, unless you want to unnecessarily insult the majority of Muslims, who wince at the actions of bin Laden and Shahzad.

There's nothing brave about broadcasting "I shit on Islam", and there's nothing noble about depicting Mohammed and violating Muslim cultural norms just for the sake of insulting their religion. Those are indiscriminate attacks, and as many have pointed out, they provoke mostly indiscriminate responses. Theo van Gogh was a martyr, but so were the countless innocent bystanders who were collateral damage of other retaliations. A vast majority of these victims had nothing to do with the words or images that sparked the response; meanwhile, the instigators have escaped mostly unscathed, but not without benefits to their public profiles.

The writer asks why more people haven't taken a broadsword to Islam. Well South Park did, and unless you're autistic, Lawrence O'Donnell obviously did as well. There's nothing uniquely courageous about the writer of this article, who confuses a publicity a stunt with an act of bravery.  If anything distinguishes him its that he's a bit classless and his thinking is rather imprecise; God willing, the terrorists won't be as imprecise if, God forbid, they choose to retaliate.

I await your response,
Ken Drinkwater

 Reason's slogan is "Free Minds and Free Markets", which is a good summation of Libertarians:  too intellectually vain to be conservatives, too greedy to be liberals.  Of course, the Libertarians will say that this is an oversimplification, that liberals, in addition to being anti-corporate, can also be bad on civil liberties.  This is true to an extent, but it would be hard to base an entire magazine around smoking bans and the right to carry Uzis.

And as much as they believe in the power of the free market, this is the only magazine that has to adopt the NPR model and ask its readers for "tax-deductible" donations.  Perhaps though, this is a test-run of their theory that if you people think higher taxes will help society, you can go ahead and volunteer your own damn money.

Role Playing

What the hell is a sex surrogate, anyway?  Can you hire one and ask her to just pretend she's a prostitute?

 I never actually bought into Dr. Melfy.  She suffered from Sam Waterson Syndrome, where the actor doesn't seem smart enough to do the character's job.

Scams, Shams, and Flim Flams

I may have unearthed a scandal, a case of corruption involving the Copps, the Copps by my house, in Shorewood Hills.

Once every month or two, this grocery store will have a special on family-paks of  boneless, skinless chicken breasts.  Normal price is $4.39 per pound, the sale price is $2.00 per pound, a savings of over 54%.  This is the type of deal that's so good, they limit it to two 3-lb. packages per customer; what this means is I made six separate trips to Copps that week, all of them on my bicycle, because I'm too fucking cheap to drive the mile-and-a-half.  I now have 36 pounds of chicken in my freezer; the pennies saved represent the most money my unemployed ass has earned in a while, coming to what should total $86.04.  Sounds almost too good to be true, doesn't it?

 

What kind of slogan is "Living Up To Your Life"?  As Adam Carolla says, its always a red flag when someone says, "I wouldn't lie to you".

The thing about this chicken is, it always has an abnormal amount of mucus in the package, several ounces worth.  My cynicism predisposed me to think that perhaps this was why the chicken was being discounted, maybe it had undergone a sub-optimal freezing process, sublimating some of the moisture out of the breasts, and that this was a low-rent move by Copps, but still forgivable because of the price.

Now, I'm starting to view the whole deal with a much more jaundiced eye.  The district attorney of Los Angeles has charged the grocery store Ralph's with ripping its customers off; the allegations include that the store has been charging customers for the weight of the ice crystals on frozen fish.  A man gets to thinking, is Copp's deliberately adding that fucking mucus to each package, are they watering down their chicken to scam me out of my hard-earned pennies?

As WC Fields once said, "you can't cheat an honest man" - I thought I was getting a real steal of a deal, but instead I just got what I deserved - I got cheated.  But turnabout is fair play, so if Copps are a bunch of swindlers, that means they're asking to get scammed themselves; they've opened themselves up to a shake down.  Next time they offer this special, I'm of half a mind to go in there with a digital camera (doesn't actually have to be functional), and demand to talk to a manager, so I can bend him to my will.

I'll ask him why the fuck there's so much fucking mucus in the motherfucking chicken, who the fuck is responsible for the packaging of the motherfucking chicken, and what the fuck, does he think I'm fucking stupid?  Also, how the fuck am I supposed to feed my motherfucking family when you keep trying to cheat me?  That's when the fuck he would offer me either some hush money or the top-secret "player's pass" version of the Rewards Card, which I'd guess is what the CEOs and managers get to use, giving me all my groceries at cost. 

I need the key to the club inside the club, the VIP section of the Key Savings Club.

The thing is, I'm a little apprehensive about trying to extort these cats, because I can't afford to get banned from this store.  Every couple months, they have some incredible deals on Chocolate Chex - six boxes for $8.00, a savings of $10.00.  Its also the closest grocer to my house, the next nearest is probably an extra mile away.  Its hard as hell to ride a bike while carrying a bag of groceries and a 30-pack of High Life, although the upside to that is, people on the street will actually cheer for you as you ride by.

Lady Antebellum?

Did you know there's a band called Lady Antebellum?  This may surprise you, but it's a country band composed of Southerners.  One of them is a hot chick, who presumably represents the Pre-Civil War South.  This is some smart marketing because it allows their hick audience to fantasize about having sex with the idea of slavery.

 Things were better for all of us back then.

Tops and Bottoms

I was thinking about "updating my wardrobe", which is always an intimidating prospect, but now, thanks to the internet, I can experiment in the safety and privacy of my own home.  I went to the Urban Outfitters website, and witnessed some shit that can only be described as flamboyantly metrosexual.

I wanted to check out their shorts, but I couldn't find any because they don't have a shorts category, they have a "Bottoms" category.   And rather than having a shirts category, they have a section for "Tops".  This is gay on at least two levels, and possibly several more that I'm not even aware of.  The theme of the site is "All The Young Dudes", which is a song, written by paragon of androgyny David Bowie, that has lyrics like "Now Lucy looks sweet cause he dresses like a queen, but he can kick like a mule it's a real mean team."

In the greater context of this website, the pink font doesn't even rate on the gay scale.

I wasn't really ready for any of this - it was too much too soon, but the website does have one attribute that makes me feel a little more comfortable.  They seem to be copying American Apparel, where the models are "unconventionally attractive/conventionally unattractive", but they take things one step further.  The next phase in the evolution is to use models with terrible posture and low self-esteem.  On one hand, this means my look is finally fashionable.  On the other,  instead of just being called a loser, maybe I'll also be called a poseur.

The computer science look is in.

Barefaced Lies

Combining his love of Contrarianism with his hatred of Islam, Christopher Hitchens rants in support of the proposed French law that would ban Muslim women from wearing their veils in public places (including "streets, markets, and shops").  He thinks eliminating a woman's choice actually increases her freedom, claiming that the women are only wearing the veils because their husbands force them to do so, "in fact, we have no assurance that Muslim women put on the burqa or don the veil as a matter of their own choice."  

He's not clear on what would qualify as an assurance, but apparently a woman's word is not enough, because as the NYTimes says, "many women who wear the veil insist that they are doing it as a free choice and see a ban as a restriction of their liberty."  Hitchens might argue that they're only saying that because their husbands are threatening them, but at a certain point, you have to take women at their word, otherwise you're insulting womankind by denying them agency.  For example, when a woman tells you "no", you don't claim that she's been brainwashed by religion and that she really means "yes".

Hitchens argues that "mothers, wives, and daughters have been threatened with acid in the face, or honor-killing, or vicious beating, if they do not adopt the humiliating outer clothing that is mandated by their menfolk.  This is why, in many Muslim societies, such as Tunisia and Turkey, the shrouded look is illegal in government buildings, schools, and universities."  The thing is, France is not Tunisia, France is a developed first-world nation that can actually protect its women in a straightforward manner.  In these backwards Muslim countries, you have situations where a woman will be stoned to death for being raped, and the neighbors and the local police turn the other cheek.  These women are being oppressed by huge swaths of society,and radical measures are needed to protect them.  That's not the case in France; if a woman wants to escape an abusive situation, she has many more options.

And even if there are French women being forced by their violent husbands, it doesn't seem like this ban is going to liberate them.  It seems just as likely that their husbands will respond by locking them in the house.  If Hitchens were really concerned about women, shouldn't he be focusing on setting up battered-women's shelters?

"We won't have to drive too far, just 'cross the border and into the city"

His other objections to the veil are bullshit.  He argues that we aren't allowed to wear ski masks or other facial coverings into a bank, and that society shouldn't give special treatment by allowing an exception for Muslim women.  That would be a valid point if the law were limited to banks alone, but its not - the law would ban the wearing of veils in all public places.  Hitchens and French President Sarkozy make the argument that, in the age of terrorism, facial identification is necessary everywhere, including the streets, but if that was their real concern, the ban would include all facial coverings, not just the veil.  Besides, what kind of terrorist would opt for the burqa; if you're trying to blend in, wouldn't you go for a hat and sunglasses, or perhaps wait for a cold day and don a nice Western-style scarf.

Hitchens also argues that a facial covering might block your peripheral vision while driving, making the veil a danger to others.  Again, that might be a valid concern if the law only pertained to drivers, but the law pertains to all public places.  A chicken-shit public safety argument is also a little odd coming from someone who argued that smoking bans were un-American.

If there was a society where women were only allowed to show their tits, they would inevitably evolve to have nice racks, but that's neither here nor there.

Hitchens argues that he has a "right to see your face" and that the veil is "an offense to the ordinary democratic civility that depends on phrases like 'Nice to see you'".  Its a half-clever line, but an odd argument coming from a libertarian who's made a career out of being an asshole; all of a sudden, he's claiming that civility and politeness should be enforced by the police.  You don't see him arguing for a law against being drunk and belligerent on cable news.

In a polite society, it should be illegal to not cover a face like his.

In his pompous and roundabout way, Hitchens says that allowing Muslims to wear veils makes a special exception in favor of one religion, "Society is being asked to abandon an immemorial tradition of equality and openness in order to gratify one faith."  But its not a special exception because there aren't any laws in place against other forms of facial covering.  There are no laws against scarves in winter, ski-masks on the French Alps, or hats, sunglasses and large beards.  If any exceptions are to be made, they're in Hitchens' proposal that Muslims be singled-out for exclusion from civil liberties, that they be barred from the rights that allow someone to dress like ZZ Top.

In his TV appearances, Hitchens gets a lot of leverage out of his resonant English voice; its that old phenomenon where we assume the British are smart just because of their accents.  The classic example is when the Ewoks mistook C3PO for a god.

In his columns, Hitchens creates the illusion of sophistication by writing in an overly complex and purposely indirect fashion.  This gives the reader the impression that he's making some ultra-intelligent point that's just beyond the reader's grasp, and the reader defers to him out of fear of looking stupid.  In reality, there's no hidden level of sophistication, only sophistry.  Rather than striving for clarity, he creates obscurity, to obfuscate the weakness of his rationale; in the absence of any legitimate justification, you can assume his real reasoning lies with his personal vendetta against Islam.  This is purely speculative, but it often seems like his little holy-war is just a clever way for him to condescend both God and liberals at the same time.

Outing Steve Nash

He's been living a lie for too long, its time to out Steve Nash - as a man who's secretly gray.  Not that there's anything wrong with it, after all, it isn't exactly a choice.  But as a gray man myself, what offends me is his hypocrisy and the fact that he's trying to hide it.

He spent so many years cultivating an image as a blue-blooded Canadian male, a masculine man with traditional values, a rugged guy who could care less what his fucking hair looks like; he rode this image to success at the ballot box, winning two MVP awards.  Now all of a sudden, he's fagging it up at the salon, getting dye jobs with Demi Moore.

What's my evidence?  I don't need proof, a gray man can just tell.  But if you look closely in these NBA Cares commercials, his mane is strangely uniform in color, and it seems to be unnaturally stiff, like its been treated with harsh chemicals.  And if you catch him in the right lighting, you'll see little clear Favre-like specks on his chin, which may be signs of greying whiskers. 

Another giveaway is his smarminess, a surefire sign that he's hiding something.

The Asshole of Omaha?

Why is Warren Buffet acting like such an asshole?

Despite being the third richest man in the world, he's long been considered the one decent guy on Wall Street; in fact, he doesn't even work on Wall Street, his offices are in Nebraska.

• He doesn't get chauffeured around in a Rolls Royce; he drives himself to work in a beat up Toyota.  
• He's not a corporate cronie of the Bush White House; he's an avowed liberal who pledged 85% of his fortune to the Gates Foundation.   
• He's not a reckless CEO who abused derivatives; he's warned against them as "weapons of financial mass destruction".  
• He's not a huckster fund-manager selling snake-oil promises of unrealistic returns; even the efficient markets theorists held him up as the one exception who could consistently create alpha.   

Over the last 50 years, he's built up an impeccable reputation as a good guy and a great financial mind.  Lately though, he's uncharacteristically undermined that position.

When the Democrats were putting together financial reform legislation, Buffet talked home-state Senator Ben Nelson into attempting a shakedown.  Nelson is experienced at these shenanigans, although he's supposed to be a Democrat, he refuses to go along with the party's plans unless they accomodate his selfish demands; during health care, his attempts at extortion were so blatant that they called it the Cornhusker Kickback.  This time, Nelson demanded that the Dems include a provision exempting existing derivatives from capital requirements; when the Dems refused to abide, Nelson pulled his support of the bill, allowing the Republicans to filibuster.  Buffet was supposed to be anti-derivatives, so why the change of heart?  His company, Berkshire Hathaway, owns enough existing derivative contracts that the exemption would have freed up about $8 billion of capital for investment.

Last week, during the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting, Buffet spoke in defense of Goldman Sachs, who's being sued for fraud by the federal government:  "I haven't seen anything in Goldman's behavior that makes it any more subject to criticism than Wall Street generally".  Goldman's admitted to knowingly selling  bonds that were deliberately designed to fail, their defense is that while this might seem shady, they believed it was perfectly legal.  They made some quick money off the deal, but their long-term reputation has taken a hit, and whether or not they're acquitted,  Buffet is staking his own rep by sticking up for these greedy sheisters.  The only reason he's doing it is because he owns a bunch of their stock.

During that same shareholder meeting, Buffet also stood up for Moody's, one of the credit ratings agencies held largely responsible for the financial crisis.  Investors relied on agencies like Moody's to evaluate the reliability that mortgage bonds would be repaid; rather than fulfilling that responsibilty, Moody's rubber-stamped a AAA rating on every pile of shit that crossed their desks, including pools of million dollar mortgages given to people with no assets and no income.

It sounds like Moody's did a shitty job, but in a way, they actually did a great job, because they were paid by the sellers of the bonds rather than the buyers.  Its like if the home inspector was hired by the seller of the house rather than the buyer, if he starts pointing out problems with the foundation, the seller will fire him and find someone who'll turn the other cheek and say the house is in good shape.  Moody's sold out their credibility to these low-grade investments, making themselves a quick profit in the process.

It seems obvious that the buyers of the bonds shouldn't have trusted Moody's opinion, and it seems like this grift should never work again, but Buffet disagrees, saying the ratings agencies have "great business models".  It's no coincidence that Buffet is lending his cred to these sheisters - Berkshire owns twenty percent of Moody's.

In finance, a good reputation is known as an intangible asset; a foolish manager like those at Moody's or Goldman will sell out that reputation for a quick bump to the bottom line, but a smart investor will maintain that cred, transmuting it into a steady income of gold.  Warren Buffet built a huge part of his fortune by identifying and acquiring firms that held onto their intangible assets, and in the process, he built up his own reputation over the past fifty years. 

Now, its looking like he's cashing in on that reputation; by defending shady derivatives and shady companies, he's risking his long term cred in exchange for a quick profit.  That might seem foolish for most entities, but in the case of this one man, it might actually be smart.  He's 79 years old and he's not going to live forever.  As they say, you can't take it with you, so maybe he's decided this is the perfect time to transform that intangible asset into cold, hard cash.  If he dies with his rep intact, all of that value evaporates, but if he sells it out in exchange for cash, that money can be set aside to serve whatever purpose he deems fit, specifically, the Gates Foundation.

So perhaps Warren Buffet is being an asshole for the sake of charity.

 Even when he's stupid he's smart.  Even when he's shady, he's honest.  Or perhaps he's the greatest sheister of them all.

Help Yourself

After getting laid off, I told myself I wanted to do something positive with my time, so I volunteered for the Conservation Team at the UW-Arboretum, a local nature preserve.  For the past few weeks, we've been pulling garlic mustard, which is an invasive weed that chokes out native species.

As we walk through the woods, we have to keep a vigilant eye out for this stuff, so every time I see some of it, I get a little bit of a rush - the same feeling a gambling addict might get when a few coins clang into the payout trough.  In my case, the thrill comes, not from greed, but from the opportunity to help; of course, this means I'm subconsciously hoping for more of the forest to be blighted.  I guess that makes me one of those selfish altruists, maybe like a doctor at a free clinic who does a fist pump every time he finds a cancer.  Its a perversion of charity, but I'm not alone in it:  when one of the other volunteers found a big patch of the weeds, he yelled "Jackpot!"

The motherlode.

Our motives might be selfish, but at least we're still helping the environment, right?  I'm not sure about that anymore, either.  I'm starting to think this "Conservation Team" is just a community outreach program, designed not so the volunteers can nurture the preserve, but so the preserve can nurture us as environmentalists.  Here's part of their mission statement: "Outreach informs citizens so that they will have the skills, ecological literacy, knowledge, and motivation to participate in a positive relationship with nature."  It kind of sounds like they're trying to help me become a better person or something, like I'm some sort of charity case. 

The preserve in general seems to exist more for the sake of the humans than for the sake of the ecosystem itself.  Many of the plant communities are unnatural to both the climate and the surroundings, and are sustainable only by relentless maintenance.  Temperatures have changed due to global warming, and the preserve is in the middle of the city, so half a billion gallons of urban runoff each year distort the ecosystem.  As Arboretum research director Joy Zedler says, "It’s takes all of our field staff and volunteers just to hold the line.”  So we aren't really working towards progress, or restoring the ecosystem to its natural state; its more like we're maintaining a freakish white-elephant curiosity to be gawked at by local nature lovers. 
 

Yahara Country Club golf course is in the Southwest corner, in the Northwest is Henry Vilas Zoo.  The Arboretum is halfway between the two; its an assiduously maintained green-space for people to walk around in, pretending they're communing with nature when in fact they're just amusing themselves.

Maybe all we're doing is making the forest prettier for the humans, but at least that's something.  The thing is, the part of the forest we're working on is way off the trails, and hikers aren't allowed in it, so the only people who'll enjoy the handiwork are the weeders themselves.  If this were a Zen koan about the felling of plant-life in an empty forest, the enlightened answer would be that we might as well bury a cache of nudie magazines in these woods, because our activities are purely masturbatory. 

OK, so maybe our motives are selfish, and we're only gratifying ourselves instead of helping others, but at least we're not doing any harm, right?  Some of us have been noticing that when pulling the weeds, a lot of them are breaking off just above the root, and that's bad because if you don't get the roots out, the plant can resurrect itself.  I'm starting to wonder if the conservation team is causing these plants to evolve so that they have this quick-release root system.

Each year that the team goes through and pulls mustard, the only plants that survive are the ones that snap and leave remnants behind.  Those are the plants that will come back the next year and reproduce, so each successive year, the plants could become more and more likely to have this geckos-tail survival mechanism.

Some of the team members are really haphazard about their pulling techniques, basically just clawing away at the plants with no regard for whether they get the roots; maybe they're driven by the desire to accomplish more, to fill their trash bags with the most weeds and be the man with the biggest sack, but all they're accomplishing is helping to breed a virulent, ineradicable super-strain of garlic mustard.  I asked the leader of the team, an ecologist who works for the arboretum named Mike, if he thought we might be evolving the plants; he almost immediately said "yeah...its like we're selecting for it..."  It seemed as though he'd had this same worry on the tip of his tongue the whole time, yet he continues to lead the team, because that's what he's paid to do.

So my motives are subconsciously selfish, I'm not really helping, and might actually be hurting the environment - not exactly the positive impact I was hoping for, but does this mean I'm going to quit volunteering?  No - I might need this as a job reference.