Synchronic-- A Movie Review

 

Ever since Netflix began dropping its own movies on the streaming service, its customers have had to put up with a multitude of unadulterated crap. This holds true especially in the science fiction genre where some of their movies apparently had middle school-aged kids develop the premise and write the dialog. 

On second thought, that's not a really fair comment to make about middle school kids, I feel confident that some of them would have a done a far better job. Some middle school kids are scary smart and I sincerely hope most of them stay on the side of good.

Last night though, I caught a Netflix movie that I felt was almost at the level of a Christopher Nolan film. Entitled “Synchronic” set in New Orleans, it stars Anthony Mackie as paramedic Steve Denube and Jamie Dornan as his paramedic cowoker and best friend, Dennis Dannelly.

The characters of Denube and Dannelly don't work the ritzy part of New Orleans with Antebellum houses and old money families. They spend their nights chasing down the victims on the seedier side of town. You, know the usual like gang violence, drug crimes, rape, murder, and lately a bizarre series of deaths involving a new synthetic drug called Synchronic that has just hit the streets.

The opening scene has the viewer in a second-rate motel room where an unnamed woman and her male friend are laying in bed and taking Synchronic. Both go through the beginning motions of entering an euphoric bliss before they diverge into their individual drug-induced alternate realities. Right after taking the drug, the guy gets out of bed, grabs the ice bucket and leaves the room looking for the ice machine. But first we have the woman staying in bed and looking around in bewilderment as her surroundings turn into a swamp, complete a huge rattlesnake crawling up her leg. The snake is clearly agitated rattling away with all its might while naturally the drug-hazed woman screams. This impromptu meeting does not go well for the woman.

Now with switch to her male companion who has stepped into an elevator going to another floor in search of the ice machine. The drug hits him while in the elevator, it dissolves to be replaced with him fall from a pretty high altitude onto a desert floor. The guy impacts the sandy surface and everything fades to black with the movie's opening credits beginning.

For me this was not an auspicious beginning, I'm sitting in one of the uncomfortable stuffed chairs my wife bought from the local fancy furniture store thinking we have another brain dead Netflix movie. No it wasn't things ramp up as the beginning credits fade away.

Denube and Dannelly come into the motel room with a stretcher and their medical supplies to see the woman still laying on the bed, alive but nursing a huge snake bite on her leg. Yeah, at first we somehow have to accept the idea that a psychedelic drug allowed the woman to manifest an actual snake bite. Because also on the scene is a New Orlean's animal control guy saying she was bitten and that it's the worse one he's ever seen. Oh, her male, ice machine hunting companion is dead. They found him when blood started dripping from the ceiling of the motel elevator. He somehow fell out of the elevator and impacted on the roof of the cab.

Okay, this is pretty much the point the movie pulled me in and didn't let go.

There are a few more strange, Twilight Zone deaths, all related to people taking Synchronic. Something

Denube and Dannelly both notice but they each have their own personal problems that they are trying to deal with.

We learn that Anthony Mackie's character, Denube, has a brain tumor that is so serious the doctor arranging him to have immediate radiation treatments. After the first treatment, Denube learn a curious fact from the doctor that his pineal gland acts much younger than it should for him being an adult. Hold on, because this stray, unusual fact plays an important part in the movie.

Dannelly's personal problems generally relate to the fact that he is a whiner. He's married to a beautiful woman, they have a new baby but he's feels unfulfilled. Yeah, it's a drag but Anthony Mackie is the lead in this movie so the character of Dannelly and his problems have to be the pivot point. Dannelly does have a legitimate problem, a troubled daughter who's somehow eighteen years-old. No, the movie makes its clear that Dannelly's current wife is not her step-mother. The character of Dannelly and his wife don't look older than forty, a small flaw in the movie I'll blame on the casting director.

This eighteen year-old daughter, named Brianna, is chaffing at parental units and is known to take recreational drugs. See where this is going? But wait I say like some late night infomercial salesman so high on coke there's white dust on my nose, there's more.

Denube starts seeing packets of Synchronic being sold in convenience stores. When he does he buys the entire supply in anger and preaches to the clerk, who never has any say in what the owners put on the shelves, what this drug does to people. During one of Denube's rage-filled purchases another individual in the store tries to buy them off him once outside. That person is the drug's creator, a young but brilliant chemical engineer who is also trying to get Synchronic off the streets.

Denube learns from this guy that Synchronic tickles certain areas of the brain, including young pineal glands to the point it actually sends a person back in time. Yes, time travel and while you might scoff in contrivance, various stories and movies have used brain power and/or unusual drugs to allow people to travel in time. The best example was when the late Chris Reeves was in a movie called Somewhere in Time with Jane Seymour where he used his brain to go back to the early twentieth century just to get a date with Jane.

So while Denube is home feeling pretty crappy he eventually experiments with the drug, and yes he goes back in time. His experiments progress to the point where he drops in on a Spanish conquistador going through the New Orleans swamps around the 1500's, and ice age hunter tracking a woolly mammoth. Best of all a near-term visit to his own house somewhere during the high-point of of the KKK, where that bastard chases Denube with a gun before the effects wear off and he slides back to the twenty-first century.

Just because I love explaining this shit, Synchronic sends you back in time, not space. The user always appears in the same location but temporally anything possible. But another catch with this drug is that a small movement in location in your present is what sends you to different eras. Just Denube moving from one end of his couch to the other was the difference needed to switch from a conquistador chasing you with a sword to a Klan asshole chasing you with a pistol.

See, this is fun shit.

Well, things get serious when Dannelly's daughter, Brianna disappears. Yes, it involves Synchronic and because her pineal gland is fresh and young she somehow gets stuck in the time she traveled. This is one of the last things Denube learns from the drug's creator before he is mysteriously killed.

By this time Denube has either destroyed most of the Synchronic in his possession or used it in his experiments. A couple of pills remain and after convincing Dannelly he's not crazy by showing his video recordings of the experiments, Denube goes after Brianna to rescue her. I could spoil the ending, which is what I usually do but not this time.

I really enjoyed Synchronic and highly recommend it. I'm a big fan of Anthony Mackie, and his performance in this movie was great. After years of playing the superhero in Marvel movies, he comes across as a sad but normal guy who goes the extra mile for his friend. As for his costar, Jamie Dornan, playing Dannelly I can't say such good things. To have such a young adult daughter as Brianna, he simply look old enough for that to be plausible. But I feel even his acting was under cooked, probably, like he's just on set to collect another check after the Fifty Shades disaster hurt his career.

Once again, watch this movie, it takes time to be pulled in but it's worth the effort.

Hoping for Better Days

 

Okay, yesterday was a great day! Pennsylvania finally turned blue, sending Biden over 270 electoral votes needed and mostly ending the nightmare we've been living with since November 2016. Yeah, President-elect Biden's inauguration isn't until January 20^th but we've made it this far. I'm hoping the White House staff has enough backbone and sense to begin limiting the Orange Buffoon's power.

My hope and good humor has its limits though. We didn't take the senate and lost seats in the House. This probably means next to no major reforms or programs are going to be approved. That means no extra judges for the Supreme Court, nor bringing the Green New Deal to life.

There is already noise from the radical Progressives about “being left out to dry” by the mainstream Democrats. I agree with a lot of their ideas but getting them enacted is going to require a lot of time and work.

And even funnier, Mitt Romney was on NBC's Meet the Press this morning mouthing off about how this election proved most Americans are actually quite conservative. So in other words, they're going to be bitching about the federal deficit right after Biden takes the oath of office. Not a single word from them about the deficit the entire time OB is in office destroying the country and siding with our enemies. But with a President Biden in office all those roaches will be scurrying about on every news show and ranting about fiscal doom.

Still though, the tumor will be removed and maybe a President Biden will be able to build some political bridges. One can hope and dream for better, saner days.

I'm Back, Hopefully

Realizing uncertainty is one of the few universal constants, I'm taking this moment to write that I should be returning to regular posts by this weekend. Yes, my cardiac adventures have continued with two trips to the emergency room and another ablation procedure, which occurred last Thursday. This last one had the benefit of not seeming like total Hell. The whole story of my last two emergency room visits and the latest cardiac ablation are far to long and complicated to write about in the time I have right now.

Unfortunately, what I can relate is that while the good doctors and nurses did nail down several more trouble spots on my heart, there was one they couldn't zap and destroy. In fact, I was told it would take open heart surgery at another hospital in Chicago. Everyone involved, which naturally includes me most of all, hopes that my medicine can keep that bad boy under control. Yes, there are other options like implantable pacemakers and defibrillators but I really do not want to go there.

If brevity is the soul of wit I'll stop now because it actually looks like I summed up the situation pretty tightly without all the awkward social oversharing. Here's hoping that I am no longer living in medical interesting times to paraphrase what I think is an ancient Chinese curse.         

Pondering Human Intelligence

That dot is Earth!

One of the ideas that I have toyed around with for years is the philosophical question as to whether Homo sapiens are a true intelligent species. My overall point being that most animals have enough sense not to crap in their homes, fight to the death, or practice fanatical or fantastical beliefs when there is no evidence to support them. Yes, I know some exceptions exist, such as chimps who have shown disturbing human-like behavior such as organized group warfare and murder.

If humans were truly intelligent it seems to me that we wouldn't totally trash the planet for resources nor destroy whole ecosystems for short term gain. But yet we are still doing both of those things all in the name of capitalistic profit even though we have ample information that those practices cannot go on for much longer. For Americans, water shortages are a relative minor pain in the ass that stop us from washing our cars or filling the backyard pools. In many regions of the world there is a real possibility that countries might have to go to war in the decades ahead to secure enough water for basic existence. And as for ecosystems, the world's oceans were once thought to be inexhaustible, but some species of fish are now commercially extinct because of decades of industrial scale fishing.

Nor would humans instinctively divide the planet into competing ant hills. Yes, world government is foolish wish given that our species can't really shed our primitive tribalist tendencies. That being my whole point, evolution has forced us to cooperate for the benefit of our individual groups but we can't seem to connect the dots and realize our species is just one big tribe. We gleefully divide each other into countless groups for the benefit of economic exploitation or outright genocide. If a starship full of intrepid alien explorers discovered our planet and after some observations realized we had divided the planet into over two-hundred omnipotent, self-serving nation-states the best thing they could do would be to quietly get the hell out of Dodge before we notice them.

On the matters of faith, while numerous religions have promoted the ideas of serving the greater good and that all men and women are brothers and sisters, you can't ignore the fact that many people believe that only they know the will of God. That delusion has brought about some of the bloodiest wars in history. Even now fanatical and self-serving devotion to various invisible friends causes otherwise decent people to commit monstrous actions. You would think that an intelligent species might be able to realize that if some A-hole religious leader commands his followers to kill their neighbors because that is what God commands, they wound just find a new holy man. 

I was raised Christian, but the idea that God would only let the followers of Jesus into heaven while truly saint-like Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and countless others have to burn in Hell because they practice a different faith is ridiculous. While officially agnostic, I still follow what I was taught in Sunday School as a young kid. As long as people treat each other decency and respect and don't trash the planet, they should get their Heavenly ticket punched. Yes, I believe that would even allows atheists and sorry ass agnostics like me through the Pearly Gates. Screw it, not to insult anyone but given the hypocritical and even monstrous behaviors of supposed “holy” men and women in all faiths, if all they have to do to wipe the slate clean is whisper a halfhearted prayer of forgiveness to get into Heaven, otherwise decent idjits like myself should be in like Flint.

Given my criteria on what it means to be an intelligent species Homo sapiens pretty much fails across the board. Yes, there are personal exceptions, but overall I tend to agree with a character from a science fiction movie, humans are more like viruses than mammals. No, this isn't some John Lennon-like lament over an imagined Utopian society, our species will never achieve such perfection.

On a personal level, what supports my idea is that we live in a wondrous universe filled with mysteries and intriguing possibilities but can't stop our squabbling for very long to explore it. There are questions that beg to be answered but we seem content to continue to crap in our home, fight to the death over stupid shit like who has the better ant hill, and obey the commands of delude psychopaths who believe they and God have one-on-one conversations. 

Mudskippers, humans are little removed from their behavior

This is sad to write, but my one of my few hopes is that Elon Musk succeeds in getting his dream of a permanent human colony on Mars established. I firmly believe that in such an alien and hostile environment where survival is the primary concern the age-old human sins that have kept us bickering like little mudskippers will be burned away. That over time humans would evolve into an intelligent species, not gods by any means, but a species that could look beyond their primitive desires and delusions and find a worthy purpose for our existence.

Well shit, after rereading this it did get a little John Lennon-like. Frak it, I'm getting a beer.

Building Hope and Waging Peace

The Carter Center--An actually reason to be proud.

It seems incredible, maybe even highly unlikely given their current practices, but I vaguely remember a time when the big three American television networks—ABC, CBS, and NBC—made a real effort to inform their viewers of not only significant events but of the struggles other human beings around the world have to endure to survive. Sure, ABC's David Muir, CBS's Scott Pelley, and NBC's Lester Holt will occasionally delve into a story not myopically centered around Americans or how the world and its people effect us but it is rare. In many ways it is not entirely the major anchors fault. Their corporate masters don't want the American public too informed or upset. If the former happens the status quo might become threatened and as for the latter, a disturbed population will not be inclined to go out and buy all the neat stuff we see in the commercials between the fluffy, feel good stories.

Now to be fair there is one bright spot, the Public Broadcasting Service in this country does an outstanding job of television journalism even though most Americans will not make the effort to watch in depth stories. The reasons run from the understandable, like a family making dinner to a stressed out parent trying to help their child with homework, but truthfully the short American attention span and willful ignorance are always high probabilities.

Still though, if someone is attentive and widens their perspective a little it is easy to learn about what is going on in the world and that there some reasons to be hopeful. Just today I was listening to Neil deGrasse Tyson's “Star Talk”podcast and learned that former President Jimmy Carter and his foundation have almost eliminated one of the most horrific diseases on the planet.

Called guinea worm disease or Dracunculiasis you contract this illness by drinking water containing water fleas that carry the guinea worm larvae. After the water fleas are ingested and die the guinea worm larvae penetrate the host's stomach or intestinal wall and then enter the abdominal cavity where they take up residence to grow. After a three month maturation, mating takes place and the male worm then dies and is absorbed by the host's body.

A year late with no signs of the parasitic infection showing in the host, the female worms migrate down the body to tissues along long bones or joints and move close to the surface forming a blister on the skin. The blister causes a painful burning sensation as the worm emerges and the host will often immerse the affected area into water to relieve the agony. It is during this time the adult female worm emerges from the body that it releases hundreds of thousands of her offspring in the water completing its life cycle and contaminating the water. As the adult worm leaves the host it will be difficult, if not impossible for him or her, to walk or work. It is not uncommon for the host to die in the end. Another diabolical aspect of this disease is that a person can easily be reinfected since the host develops no immunity like in the case of chicken pox.

This disease has been around for literally thousands of years with historians saying it was mentioned in the Old Testament as Moses lead the Israelites out of Egypt. The traditional method to remove the worm is to slowly wind it around a small stick, a process that in itself is very painful and can take weeks since the organism can reach the length of 60 to 100 centimeters long. (For the Metric illiterate that's about 23 to 39 inches.) 

While the Wikipedia article says this illness can infect canines as well as humans the doctor Neil deGrasse Tyson interviewed on his show to fill in the technical details of the disease clearly and repeatedly said only humans can carry this disease. He further states that since humans were the only vector, if we could prevent the transmission of the larvae through drinking water not would we stop the disease in its tracks but the end result would be the complete elimination of the worm itself.

Since the “worst president in the history of the United States” and his foundation became involved in the eradication of the disease the number of people inflicted has gone from 3.5 million in 1986 to just 126 cases in 2014! This could well be the first parasitic disease that we wipe off the face of the planet! In a better and wiser world this is a story all the major networks should be running instead of the usual celebrity-related crap and mindless human fluff pieces they can't stop running.

There is no cure or preventative vaccine for guinea worm. This disease is fought through the use of education, the establishment of local health care systems to prevent its spread, and the simple filtration of drinking water. While there are many other agencies and non-governmental organizations working to fight Guinea worm, President Carter has uses his honorable reputation to influence local leaders from national to village levels to combat this disease.

This should say a lot about Jimmy Carter who, instead of charging huge sums to speak at a homeless veteran's charity, is going out into a dangerous world in an attempt to better the lives of the forgotten and abandoned. Although, I've got to admit it takes some brass balls or major obliviousness to go out and charge a fee to charity that helps veterans who are overwhelmingly suffering from a war you sent them fight that was based on lies and propaganda. 

 This should also say something about our major news sources and their dereliction of duty along with the general ignorance and apathy of a people whose narcissistic tendencies precludes them from giving a damn about anyone but themselves. The little dirty secret is that a great many people in the world don't hate us Americans because of our supposed “freedoms,” no their major issue is often because we're just a bunch of assholes.

The Best Part of Being Human

Humans have always been wanderers, even before our particular species appeared on the scene to follow our predecessors out of Africa. However, for better or worse we Homo sapiens, pulled along by some innate curiosity probably coded in our genes, eventually left Africa behind like the others. But whereas all our ancestors like Homo hablis and the Neanderthals faded away, we came to dominate the planet. Giving our overall stupidity its hard to find a reason why Homo sapiens won out over the others. We find it extremely difficult to work in large groups for any length of time and our myriad beliefs, while colorful and imaginative, are often myopic and destructive.

But after five-thousand years of what can euphemistically be called civilization we have reached a huge crossroads in our existence on this small and delicate planet. Our numbers and technology have grown so much that we now endanger all life on Earth, not an accomplishment to be proud of when you consider the fact we know of no other place in the universe like our home.

What is worse, deep down we know our destructive habits threatens the survival of our children but yet we still center our attention on those we know directly like family and friends that live close to us. Homo sapiens can't seem to realize that the plight of the starving child in Africa or Asia will eventually affect how your own children will live at some point. Especially now with the environment and resources stressed to the breaking point because there is over seven billion of us alive at this moment.

We have reached the limits of our home can stand and if we don't change our ways quickly every good thing we have built over the centuries will be lost. It is that simple, but most ignore the warnings and continue with their blind pursuits. Hate and fear are the dominate forces in all human life right now, people scared of everything from their neighbor next door to the people living on the other side of the planet.

Some of us do see something far grander for our species that could uplift us all and take us places beyond our imaginations. All we have to do is look up and dream about something greater than the conquest of some patch of soil, hording wealth while many go hungry, or fretting over tired rituals designed to appease some invisible deity.

We can become wanderers again:

  Wanderers - a short film by Erik Wernquist from Erik Wernquist on Vimeo.

In Praise of the Radical Space Visionary-Elon Musk

UPDATE- APRIL 4th, 2025 FUCK THAT BASTARD! ELMO MUSK WAS OKAY WHEN HE JUST 

WANTED TO COLONIZE MARS. YES, IT'S A CRAZY IDEA BUT WHEN COMPARED TO WHAT OTHERS HAVE SUGGESTED, FAIRLY HARMLESS.

BUT ELMO HAS NOW COMPLETELY LOST HIS MIND AND IS NOT ONLY A EVIL MONSTER BUT A DANGER TO THE CONTINUED EXISTENCE OF THE UNITED STATES AS A FUNCTIONAL NATION.

I DESPISE ELMO MUSK!

 As someone who grew up an enthusiastic supporter of the manned space program and survived the various forms of derision generously shoveled out by those folks beholding to the conventional wisdom that such efforts were silly, I take a great deal of satisfaction in the efforts of Elon Musk. For those who don't know, Elon Musk is damn near a real life Tony (Iron Man ) Stark who has literally built several high tech firms out of nothing and made billions in the process.

His crowning achievement, in the opinion of this humble space cadet, is founding SpaceX. This company has already developed a reliable launch system to send supplies to the International Space Station but it is now competing with the aerospace giant Boeing to develop privately operated vehicles that will send people into low Earth orbit. The very fact that Musk's company SpaceX didn't exist until 2002 and is now on par with Boeing impresses the hell out of this tree hugging, liberal generally suspicious of all things capitalistic. Yeah, go ahead and smirk, I admit capitalism can be a good thing, especially when someone with a curious thing like long range vision uses it for the betterment of humanity. See Mr. Musk not only wants to make a buck but is working diligently to establish a human colony on Mars. 

‘I think there is a strong humanitarian argument for making life multi-planetary,’ he told me, ‘in order to safeguard the existence of humanity in the event that something catastrophic were to happen, in which case being poor or having a disease would be irrelevant, because humanity would be extinct. It would be like, “Good news, the problems of poverty and disease have been solved, but the bad news is there aren’t any humans left.”’

The great question that continues to puzzles the assorted rabble of manned space program enthusiasts like me is what the hell happened as we entered the 1970's. We had walked on the moon and sent out the first wave of robotic explorers to orbit Venus and Mars and were in the process of building the Pioneer and Voyager probes that would give us our first look at the gas giants of the outer solar system. Sure the space shuttle was going to be built but it was at best an afterthought by a nation that was showing the first signs of a collective nervous breakdown.

Yes, the civil rights movement was still a force rippling through the country trying to overthrow the ninetieth century mentality and, of course, there was the Vietnam War, and a little further down the road the first OPEC-engineered oil crisis. Throw in a persistent Cold War and then Watergate and even a semi-delusional cultural infidel like me can cut the Americans of that era some significant slack.

The problem is that, with a few exceptions, the United States has never really regained its psychological, failure-is-not-an-option, edge. Instead of rationally discussing the issues, we have divided everything along arthritic political lines that have not just devolved beyond simple absurdity but crossed the border into the surreal. All the while the greater mass of the American people happily graze the cable channels in a mind numb state believing their existence is perfectly natural and ordained by God himself and will continue on forever.

This is where Mr. Musk comes into the fray offering up his vision saying we need to look beyond the here and now to something incredible. Yeah, the idea of having people living on another planet is still a far out idea generally reserved for kooks and others with nothing better to do with their lives. The exception here is that Elon Musk has played the accepted capitalistic game with the established big boys, always ready to protecting their realms at all costs, and came out of it the winner.

Why in heaven's name would anyone want to live on a cold dead rock that makes Antarctica look like Key West? Great question and the number one reason is to protect the human race from some extinction level event. We're not just talking about a massive comet or asteroid coming out of the abyss to smack the Earth but some power mad political or religious idiot unleashing a nuclear war or genetically-engineered pandemic. There are numerous other Doomsday scenarios but in my book those two seem the most likely. A human colony on Mars would ensure something of the human race would go on, to me a more than worthy endeavor.

Of course I realize both the Jesus freaks and psychotic back to nature crowd will object since the former believes were just seconds away from the Rapture and the latter views Humanity as a ravaging horde of locusts that should go the way of the dinosaurs. I don't debate either group because the former are truly insane with only their large numbers protecting them from being instituted and the latter suffers from unrealistic expectations for a species that barely a geologic second or two ago was living in trees. Homo sapiens are a brutal and barely sentient primate with a strong predisposition to superstition but it is my belief that we can grow and evolve to something better. It would be a damn cosmic shame to allow our collective psychosis or guilt to condemn us all.

The second reason is something I alluded to earlier, we're fifteen years into the twenty-first century and the entire world, not just Americans, have a mindset not too different from our ancestors a hundred or more years ago. We kill each other over petty nationalistic and religious ideals believing that our small spot on the planet or who we believe is God makes us better than everyone else. Those like me have this unreasonable hope that knowing humans live on an entirely different planet might just be the kick we need to wake all of us up from our primitive and irrational urges and grow the hell up. And if that fails, which in all probability it would, we have a species insurance policy on Mars to ensure something can continue. Any fledgling human colony on Mars would be populated by highly educated types determined to survive, which would require a high degree of cooperation and rational thought, not pleas to an uncaring god nor ridiculous observance to stunted and outdated nationalism.  

Colonizing Mars would in no way be easy, the first thing Elon Musk is working hard to overcome is the cost of sending materials and people into space. After that is a whole host of technical issues with some quite daunting, but I would rather try and fail rather than just look on as our primitive and outmoded attitudes and superstitions condemn us all to oblivion.

Okay, just to be fair, here is an opposing viewpoint from another hero of mine, Neil deGrass Tyson.

It's not just Musk who entertains this crazy dream:

The Extended Family

All through my childhood the scene played itself out countless times. The location was the small Nazarene church in Georgetown, South Carolina my grandparents belonged. Up on the pulpit was more than likely a middle aged man or someone slightly older, although there were occasions when it was a young and up and coming minister, giving an impassioned sermon filled with hellfire and brimstone. Such sermons always hit on eternal damnation for sinners and how only in accepting Jesus could any person win salvation. The other subjects usually hit upon was the imminent Rapture, who was the Antichrist, and just how bad was the seven years of tribulation going to be for those left behind.

The congregation, would be a collection of properly dressed ladies waving fans to keep cool with the printed image of a caring, white Jesus on the cheap paper. From my observations over those long ago years, these ladies of the highest virtue would look at the various ministers with a combination of fear, respect, and believe it or not, outright lust.

The menfolk, well there were three options when it came to them. The first being the tired, Georgetown was a mill town with many of the men in attendance either just coming off shift or about to go on. The second were the bored, these guys would spend most of the service dreaming of being in a deer stand or on Winyah Bay fishing. The final segment were the true believers who hung on every word the minister spoke and often quietly looked down on the the other two groups since they figured their attitudes made them God's favorite.

Depending on the type of sermon being preached science in general was always a handy issue to get the good folks worked up about. But what could really inflame the religious masses was the subject of evolution. There was just something, dare I say genetic, in the outright rejection that humans, God's most special creation, could ever have descended from the ignorant apes. For those not raised in the American South, there is another aspect of this rejection of evolution and it had to do with the dark skinned nature of gorillas and chimpanzees, but that is not something I will touch on here.

To the congregation, the idea that humans came from what they often mistakenly called “monkeys” was something akin to an adult believing in the Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. I have to be fair here, this belief was not limited to my hometown and as anyone with current knowledge of the religious situation in this country this idea is very much alive even now.

So you can imagine the utter surprise when a visiting minister ascended to the pulpit one Sunday to tell the surprised people before him that scientists were now claiming that humans not only came from apes but lizards and fish. Yeah, the concept of evolution was so alien and misunderstood that they somehow limited it to just what effected them and the animals they closely resembled. Of course, whenever these types of sermons were preached so was the bogus idea that as Charles Darwin lay on his deathbed he either recanted his theory of evolution while praying to God for forgiveness, or went into spasms proclaiming the devil had already begun torturing him before he even expelled his last breath.

Numerous people have wondered about how some can utterly reject the theory of evolution despite a constantly growing fossil record along with DNA research that literally links humanity with every other living creature on the planet. For many this rejection has to do with what they perceive as their place in the universe, if they are not in some fashion God's special creation then life itself has lost all meaning. I can somewhat understand and excuse this idea for all those uncounted souls who suffered and toiled all through history and before for some king, emperor, tribal chief, or some other asshole with delusions of grandeur and the weapons and muscle to back it up.

Back when vast majority of people spent their entire lives scrapping by a meager existence the belief that all the crap they have to put up with in this life would be rewarded in the next was the only thing that allowed them to continue. To paraphrase a line I once heard in a time travel movie, the only thing worse than dying during a Dark Age was having to live through one. So they penned all their hopes on whatever paradise was suppose to lay beyond the Pearly Gates.

Another aspect of this rejection was the obscure passage in the Bible about how God created us in his image. Somehow this was taken to mean that the creator of the entire universe actually had a need for a human body with arms, legs, fingers, and toes. Even as a kid I could never understand how people took this to have a literal meaning. One word of advice to give to any overly curious kid whose grandparents send them to Sunday school, tell them never to suggest that maybe God looks like a gorilla.

Now I was always a bit of a problem child when it came to religious dogma, but it wasn't until I was much older and learned how all life on this planet is related genetically. That you can trace the ancestry of life all the way back to some mysterious age when the oceans of the early Earth was a caldron of mixing primitive proteins. Yes, how that unaided chemistry experiment eventually crossed the line to life is still unknown but I'm going hazard a guess that we will one day find a scientific answer.

Understand I'm agnostic, but I find nothing more spiritual than the FACT that I, along with the rest of the human race is tried to everything other living thing down to the bacteria living thousands of meters in the dark and cold bottom of the ocean. If anything does suggests a universal creator, it is that undeniable concept.

Of course, in my mind this cancels out the other strange passage in the Bible that God gave us dominion over the Earth. Since we are a part of the whole instead of something that stands outside it this means we have to care for and protect what is in essence, our extended family. It will surprise some but there is a trend in some Christian churches to view humanity's relationship with the rest of the planet in just that manner. If one there one thing that will save our misbegotten species it is my hope that attitude will spread. 

Bastions of Hope and Reason in the Vast Wasteland

As anyone who has ever worked the night shift knows you simply do not come home and go to bed after getting cleaned up. There has to be a certain period where you decompress, or unwind. For me this usually involves about an hour sitting in front of the television. Yes, I could read, and sometimes I do, but if I am tired I have a hard time enjoying it and often cannot remember whatever happened.

The problem with watching television in the morning specifically and anytime in general is that it is dominated by what at best can be described as lowest common dominator programming. I have Dish Network as a satellite provider and there are times I can surf the scores of channels they offer and find absolutely nothing worth watching. Cable networks like the History Channel, Discover, and several others which were formed to provide a higher level of broadcast entertainment, or even dare I say intellectual stimulation, are in fact bastions of near moronic reality shows that never stray from a simplistic formula involving an equally dimwitted cast of reoccurring personalities.  

Way back in 1961 the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, a Newton M. Minow called old fashioned broadcast television a vast wasteland. I can only imagine what he might think of if he saw Honey Boo Boo, Chumlee, or any of the myriad of other reality show characters that suggest American culture is an empty intellectual husk about to collapse under the weight of its own banality.

Before anyone starts flinging hateful emails at me saying I am a delusional elitist snob let me state that I am all for mindless escapism, I have my own shows that allow me to leave this crappy reality behind and reboot my mind. It is just that it seems a line has long been crossed where escapism is not only the norm but that the producers of such shows are in competition to reach the very bottom of idiotic and banal behavior.

The one oasis in all this is the various categories of TED Talks the internet video streaming company Netflix offers. TED Talks are conferences where various experts on such subjects as science, culture, politics, and just about anything else give short speeches in an attempt to spread ideas or information. Always insightful and very often profound these videos open brand new worlds to anyone who can access them through Netflix or free from the TED Talks website.

In an blatant attempt to induce anyone I can to these videos I offer three of my recent favorites. The first is Isabel Allende speaking on passion, not the sexual kind but how women from around the world stand up and make a difference for their families and others. If you do not come away from this video wanting to do more for the world you have no soul.






The second is by a man named John Hunter. He is a teacher who engages his elementary school students to think in ways that are simply astounding. One such very young student quotes Sun Tzu about war and appears to have a grasp on human's favorite pastime that far exceeds the vast majority of our glorious elected leaders.

  

The last is by Richard Preston who speaks on the giant redwoods of California whose complexities have been overlooked until very recently.





Be very careful, after viewing these videos you could actually come away thinking that if we had more of these outstanding people involved in public life the human race might have a chance at surviving.  

A Hopeful Close Encounter

“No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.” ― Aesop

Years ago while surfing off Pawleys Island, South Carolina I had an incredible encounter with a wild dolphin. While the meeting was brief I nevertheless came away with the idea that something more had gone on than a just a lazy semi-naked primate and a curious cetacean bumping into each other on the edge of the ocean. I have no real evidence to prove this but I have never been able to shake the feeling that we both wanted to say something to the other but our extremely different methods of communications made that impossible.

When the video below came to my attention, you cannot imagine how happy I was to see how other humans and an injured dolphin were able to bridge the gap my cetacean friend and I could not. I do my best to keep a scientific frame of mind on the world and universe, but to see a wild dolphin swim out of the darkness clearly seeking help so a hook and fishing line that it had become entangled with could be cut away suggests a level of intelligence far beyond what we have come to expect. You cannot imagine how happy I am that everything worked out for the best this time for both species.

Why I am Thankful.

This is going to seem remarkably petty and for many misguided to say the least but the thing I am most thankful for when you eliminate the current good health and safety of my family is that I do not have to utter the words “President Romney”.  If I did, it would be in the form of “We sure dodged a bullet not having a…” or  if he won, “That damn pompous bastard (insert that name here) is a complete idiot.” Yeah, I know millions on the right feel far different but I simply do not give a damn.

In fact, I am sorely tempted to call certain members of my family and gloat knowing that several might be even now preparing their Doomsday redoubts since to varying degrees they believed Obama’s reelection would mean the end of the world. But of course, the better angels of nature will stop me from doing anything like that. I will content myself with a good meal and afterwards several beers as my family and I watch some football and later, assorted movies.

I send out my sincerest best wishes to everyone, both on the left and right of the political spectrum realizing that our problems will not be solved from strictly Democratic or Republican ideas but from a combination of both. My purely American prayer is that the opposition party comes to their senses and actually compromises for the betterment of the country and not act like a petulant and moronic child. 

The basic need for all life.

I hope you check out the Water Mission International website.

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In some ways Americans are a very perplexing people. After centuries of being for both good and bad the most dynamic and creative people on the planet we seem to have settled, at least for now, into some sort of middle aged-like induced lethargy. Often we seem all too eager just to ignore what is going on here in the forgotten corners of our country and around the world when it threatens to disturb our placid middle-class stupor.
Many of us have willingly sacrificed the responsibilities and duties of American citizenship for the curious title of American consumer and the frivolous nature of living life beyond our means on easy credit ignoring the near serf-like terms in the fine print on the bills we never read. Safely tucked away in our suburban homes surrounded by chemically maintained green lawns we watch the news of the day and see how many of our leaders dance on the head of an Orwellian pin about “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” assuring us that they have kept us safe but yet can’t tell us the details. Even as something as basic to the maintenance of life itself, drinkable water, is wasted with oblivious abandon on the washing of cars, private pools, and taking care of those all so precious green lawns so we can in miniature copy stately English manors. Americans have even succumbed to the lower slimy denizens of Madison Avenue by taking to buying water in expensive stores with only a pretty exotic picture stuck to the cheap non-biodegradable plastic bottle ignoring the same thing that flows from their taps at home. If only much of the rest of the world had the advantage to do the same thing.
Despite the basic need for water that all human beings require, for much of the rest of the world the struggle for something so vital is often a totally consuming struggle leaving time for little beyond basic existence. More than a billion people worldwide simply do not have access to drinkable water and two billion people do not have adequate sanitation opening the door for a whole range of diseases. These conditions contribute largely to perpetuating the poverty cycle in developing countries leaving adults unable to work and children unable to attain school. Without work or education there is little hope of breaking the cycle of poverty.



I could sit all day typing away on facts and figures concerning how the lack of clean water affects people around the world. That the on-going water crisis kills nine million people each year. That every fifteen seconds a child dies from a water related illness involving diarrheal diseases, parasitic diseases, or water washed diseases such as Trachoma that causes blindness. However, for many such facts would fly over their heads as they pursue their daily lives shuttling kids to soccer matches, making the next big deal over the cell phone, or working towards that newer house with the bigger kitchen. There is nothing wrong with any of that and honestly no matter how comfortable the lives of others may seem we all have our own heavy burdens. Its just that some hide them better than other, even to themselves.



Despite this we can do better, there are groups out there working hard to enable the less fortunate to supply themselves that most basic of need, clean water. Even with our burdens every moral, religious and ethical framework around the world calls for those with more to help those who struggle with so little. Such help can be supplied through charities both secular and religious in nature. One that I have to recommend is Water Missions International located in Charleston, South Carolina. This organization was brought to my attention by the extra lovely and super intelligent Ms. Joan Perry at the blog “Charleston Daily Photo”. Before someone goes off scoffing at my rantings in no way do I set myself above anyone else as some tower of moral virtue. Its just that I have become increasingly uneasy at my own advantages and wish to change my ways. In the end that is all any of us can hope to achieve.

Veteran's Day 2008

In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot. ~Mark Twain, Notebook, 1935

Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.
- Otto von Bismarck, 1815 - 1898

Lord, bid war's trumpet cease;
Fold the whole earth in peace.
~Oliver Wendell Holmes

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again. Who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause. Who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. - Theodore Roosevelt, The Man in the Arena

A meme for my friend

Utah Savage has tagged me again with a meme that I found very interesting just for the fact I’ve never really thought about most of this stuff.

Where do I buy my clothes?

The simple answer to that would be from Target or Wal-Mart. Now I understand that both of the places I just mentioned are not kind to their employees and families; buy almost all of what they stock from overseas where it is made by what is close to slave labor, and have pushed many locally owned businesses into extinction. The main reasons I have to buy stuff from them are availability, cost, and size. The clothes I wear are fairly simple: t-shirts, cargo shorts, jeans, sneakers or my hippy sandals, and if it gets cold a sweat shirt or hoody. I can be found pretty much year round in those items and if I do have to dress up in a shirt and tie someone has either died or is getting married which for me is pretty much the same thing. The availability angle in this is that I can drive three miles in just about any direction and have to deal with traffic going into or out of those stores. The cost angle is while there are other stores in my area selling this stuff they get their stock under just about the same conditions and just charge the customer more. Simply put in this blood red section of an already very red state there just isn’t any union, environment, or international worker friendly stores. The final insult in all this is that I am six foot, five inches tall. While Dragonwife and I have hit consignment shops for clothes for her and the kids they just don’t have anything that fits me.

Where did my furniture come from?

First and foremost let me state that I own nothing in the house I live in except my camera, any pictures I have taken, my exploited worker made clothes, and my ACME lonely guy blow up doll (her name is Ashley). I sort of pride myself in thinking that if I ever had to unass this place on a moment’s notice if hordes of raging zombie Republicans ever declared martial law all I would have to do would be to grab my camera, backpack with a few clothes, and wipe down and deflate Ashley so I could be out and gone real quick. So I don’t really want to be saddled with a lot of material processions. But anyway Dragonwife has bought all the furniture in the house from any number of different stores and put the salespeople and delivery guys through utter Hell on any number of occasions.

One time it was about 1997 and Dragonwife decided that the couch she had bought after we had gotten married needed to be replaced. Now I must admit that when she came to this conclusion I was laying on said couch and the way she worded her statement at first along with the look in her eyes left a great deal of room about what she actually wanted to replace. I actually liked the couch having laid on it enough that it had long since been molded to the shape of my body. In addition, it was the site of the most sexually active period of our marriage having been both a cushion to rest on and a platform for our more adventurous positions. In fact in the first house our garage had been made into a den with three rather large window panels and door segment taking the place of the garage door. Late one night after some movie we had been watching had the male, female leads begin a rather physical discussion about the birds and the bees, we ourselves were moved to do the same thing. After our discussion came to a climatic conclusion we then noticed that we had left the blinds on those window panels and the door up giving any neighbors who happen to be having a late night stroll a rather good show on and next that couch. Therefore, I was rather reluctant to get rid of the thing just for the memories.

But we did eventually go to one of the local furniture stores with Dragonwife having the salesperson pull out all the big fabric samples books so she could decide which “style” we would get. At the time Darth Spoilboy was two and he and I just wandered over to the kid’s section which had a television and VCR showing Barney the Purple Dinosaur. While being a sort of torture in itself I at least had a happy kid in a stroller watching television and a very comfortable recliner for me. At this point I began judging time by how many times I had to put a new tape in the VCR with Spoilboy calling for “dada” after Barney sang that insidious “I love you, you love me…” song. It was a good thing that we had entered the furniture store late in the afternoon since I had to rewind the two different Barney tapes twice and we were suppose to have dinner at a nearby restaurant once the new couch was ordered. Looking over at Dragonwife and the saleslady at the beginning both were deep in conversation about the various fabrics and shapes of couches that could be ordered. At the end the prim and courteous saleslady had devolved to a tired, ruffled mess who looked up at me with a clear desperate plea in her eyes for some relief. I’m sure from all the fabric sample books scattered across the showroom floor that in the two hours I had napped while Spoilboy had watched Barney every possible combination of color, shape, and texture for couches had been explored twice at least. Dragonwife, approaching something close to rapture, showed me a fabric sample close to hunter green and that would be used to cover a particular type of couch that to my plebeian style looked just like all the other ones but the differences were enough to come back and haunt me.

Several weeks later a delivery truck backed up to the door to bring us the new couch. I was the only one home and since it looked for all the world like the proper color I thanked the guys as they brought it in the house. Dragonwife came home a few hours later and quickly entered an unqualified state of panic bringing the fabric sample out saying the couch was the wrong color. After being thoroughly censured for accepting such a flawed product she called the store and had the couch picked back up that day. A couple of months later another couch was delivered but Dragonwife was at the house to intercept any errors and sure enough to her the color wasn’t right. Furious phone calls resulted to both store and the district office by Dragonwife as the delivery guys and I sipped cokes outside, but they brought her no sympathy. After taking the old couch they brought the new couch in and she signed for it even though she swore up and down that it was the wrong color. Needless to say to my untrained eye I saw no difference between the fabric sample and the new couch. I soon learned that the unpleasant experience she had with the whole ordering process along with small but for significant differences in the length, width, height, and bounciness of the new couch spoiled the physical fun we use to have in the den. So in a way I blame an off color fabric sample for a large part of any marital problems I have but Ashley doesn’t seem to mind.

Where do I live? You will have to deal with where I live in my mind and want to return in body.

For many people South Carolina is the butt of many jokes about the South and Southerners. Yes, with an education system that lets far too many kids leave school without the basics for life in the 21^st century we do spend a god awful lot of time fighting over stupid stuff like a Confederate flag on the state house grounds. Not that I support the people wanting to keep it there who ignore the basic history of that flag which is hopelessly tangled with the institution of slavery then the tyranny after the end of the Civil War. It’s just I'd rather solve more important problems that affect us right now.

With that I have to admit there is no place in the world that I feel more connected to than the coast of South Carolina. The smell of the marsh at low tide, listening to the surf as it competes with an evening thunderstorm in a dueling symphony, the feel and taste of the ocean as I surf or play with my kids in the waves, and watching an osprey fly in the evening as the sunsets. For all its faults that is place I take comfort in during the bad times, that magnify my joy during the good times, and the place I come back home to every time I get the chance.

Favorite Books? I’ll list just two.

My favorites range far and wide being very different from each other. “Beach Music” by Pat Conroy brought to me a fascination with the city of Rome that I hope to visit before I die. As the book progresses though the novel returns the main character back to the Lowcountry of South Carolina in a series of events that can find its roots in the horrors of the Holocaust during World War Two. Out of all the characters I have ever read about the tragic story of his wife Shyla touched me to a point that I feel an actual pain reading about her suicide every time I pick the book up.

The only novel I know of by Carl Sagan, “Contact” brought the wonder of the universe to me and shaped to a great deal my belief that the universe is far stranger than we can fathom and full of unexpected surprises for our species if only we could abandon our ridiculous preoccupations with war and domination.

Favorite Movies?

The Lord of the Rings trilogy- for the human struggle to overcome the worst aspects of ourselves and the acknowledgment that despite our flaws that we do have the capacity to move beyond them.

Favorite Music?

Are you kidding me? Jimmy Buffett. But I do also dig all beach music, John Denver, Tom T. Hall, Charlie Rich, Charlie Pride, George Jones, and just about anything that makes me completely uncool to anyone younger than thirty.

Favorite Television Show?

Good damn question since while I really don’t have one I do like several. Battlestar Galactica, Stargate SG-1, Lost, and probably a few others I can’t think of right now.

Who gets hit?

Colonel Colonel

Mike at Tongue in Check

Zombieslayer

Lime

Keshi at Viva Forever