Dissenters' Corner

I hope you realize that you will mired in interminable genealogical and historical research that no one else will care about but is highly important for a reason that only Einstein could appreciate. You will notice that people tend to go to sleep when you tell your latest ancestral tale. I was lucky, I transmitted the sickness to my son, who as a tenured mathematician actually emulated  and invented original techniques, one of which was to interview everyone on his mother's side and write a huge professional genealogical narrative for posterity. Actually, for me, the value of genealogy is encapsulated by the notion of identity.  Just as when we identify with fictional literary or media characters, I identify with each ancestor and then study the historical context of the person. Unfortunately, when I discover their deaths it makes me sad. I persuaded a history teacher that he should have his students do their genealogy, for example, and relate to the times. I muse that I am my great  grandfather Lt. Andrew Jackson Grayson marching up the banks of the Tennessee River at the Battle of Shiloh or my great grandfather Ephraim Hambujer who I boast had 5 wives and 11 children. I tell this to guys asking for GU/sterilization referrals to try to talk them out of it. And I ponder whether I am burdened or blessed with myths and traditions or cerebral disturbances that I don't recognize.  Is there a universal unconscious? Are there archetypal universal myths? What  about instincts? The neurologists say that all is in the neurons and neurotransmitters.  Really? Oh well, I will lean back and be Fiddler on the Roof for a while, I think

Viewpoint: Real Preventive Medicine is Around the Corner

“DALLAS--(Business Wire)--

U.S. Preventive Medicine®, the leader in disease prevention services, today

applauded U.S. President Barack Obama’s call for modernizing the health care

system by investing in prevention initiatives aimed at controlling costs and

improving the health of Americans.” (24 March 2009)

What a marvelous idea! All we have to do is to prevent sickness, injury, and death, 
and the cost of medical care will go down. The economy will be saved. I don’t know 
why I didn’t think of this sometime during the last 61 years of my medical practice 
since I escaped from the University of Illinois Medical School.

I must admit, I have been a spectacular failure at curing chronic alcoholism, binge 
drinking, illegal drug usage, bungee jumping, cigarette smoking, chronic obesity, 
gang banging, motorcycle riding without helmets, and promoting the use of automobile 
seat belts, the use of heavy, safe cars with multiple air bags, and the prevention of all
 types of metastatic cancer.

If the President would instruct us old-timers on these matters, maybe the overcharging by 
the medical profession would stop and the national debt would be cured. 
Now that would be what I call preventive medicine.

Jensen: You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it!! Is that clear?! You think you've merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance!

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels.

It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!

Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?

You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state -- Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality -- one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.

And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel.

Beale: But why me?

Jensen: Because you're on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.

Program Director: Take 2, cue Howard.

Beale: I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth; banks are going bust; shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter; punks are running wild in the street, and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it.

We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat. And we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be!

We all know things are bad -- worse than bad -- they're crazy.

It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials, and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone."

Well, I'm not going to leave you alone.

I want you to get mad!

I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot. I don't want you to write to your Congressman, because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street.

All I know is that first, you've got to get mad.

You've gotta say, "I'm a human being, goddammit! My life has value!"

So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell,

"I'm as mad as hell,

and I'm not going to take this anymore!!"

"While many people believe that lemmings commit mass suicide when they migrate, this is not the case. Driven by strong biological urges, they will migrate in large groups when population density becomes too great. Lemmings can and do swim and may choose to cross a body of water in search of a new habitat^[5]. On occasion, and particularly in the case of the Norway lemmings in Scandinavia, large migrating groups will reach a cliff overlooking the ocean. They will stop until the urge to press on causes them to jump off the cliff and start swimming, sometimes to exhaustion and death. Lemmings are also often pushed into the sea as more and more lemmings arrive at the shore. ^[6]

The myth of lemming mass suicide is long-standing and has been popularized by a number of factors. In 1955, Carl Barks drew an Uncle Scrooge adventure comic with the title "The Lemming with the Locket". This comic, which was inspired by a 1954 National Geographic article, showed massive numbers of lemmings jumping over Norwegian cliffs.^[7] Even more influential was the 1958 Disney film White Wilderness in which footage was shown that seems to show the mass suicide of lemmings. The film won an Academy Award for Documentary Feature.^[8]"

Due to their association with this odd behaviour, lemming suicide is a frequently-used metaphor in reference to people who go along unquestioningly with popular opinion, with potentially dangerous or fatal consequences. This is the theme of the video game Lemmings, where the player attempts to save the mindlessly marching rodents from walking to their deaths."

You know what is really bizarre?  It's us.  Can you imagine taking a ball of

molten rock in empty space and then later on we are born here like seeds

that suddenly sprouted and then we later disappear never knowing how or why

we got here and then never being seen again?  Now, THAT'S unbelievable.

Jesus! Holy Moses! Holy Zeus! Naw, that can't in your wildest nightmares

ever happen.

Well let's see, if you have 48 chromosomes with 3 billion genes and 5,000

errors of metabolism, mostly without actual names, what do you think anybody

knows about anything anyway?  We've been separated from the apes for about

minute of time, and had civilization only after the last ice age, and

electricity only since my grandparents, were born, and you want perfection?

Ha. The real miracle is the so called normal person, what with all the

cosmic rays and neutrinos whomping through all your sperm and ova all the time. That's

why religion. It's all unbelievable. Incredible. Impossible.  I don't even

believe any part of this fable. The only thing true was Santa because he

came round every year.