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If you were an android and lost your memory and everyone treated you as if you were human, would you be a human?

I’ve been watching the Carmen and Dave: Til Death do we Part show and I had to laugh during the scene where they are giving each other shots.

Now Mr. Navarro has quite a drug history, including a fairly lengthy history with heroin. As such, the irony of his future-wife implying that he would be incapable of giving her a B12 shot in her lipidous derriere is not lost on our goateed guru of guitar acrobatics.

“I could find a vein in the dark” Dave wryly comments, leaving off the implied you think I couldn’t shoot B12 into your petite rump???

They’re pleasantly colourful in a certain Romantic sensibility. I hope they do well.

Too much data in one day has me updating the blog like a madman.

Stephen Jay Gould

If genius has any common denominator, I would propose breadth of interest and the ability to construct fruitful analogies between fields.

‘Darwin’s Middle Road’

I’ve seen many of these fulfilled…

Christian Maronite from Lebanon, Kahlil Gibran:

Pity The Nation ?Pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion.

?Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave, eats a bread it does not harvest, and drinks a wine that flows not from its own winepress.

?Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero, and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful.

?Pity the nation that despises a passion in its dream, yet submits in its awakening.

?Pity the nation that raises not its voice save when it walks in a funeral, boasts not except among its ruins, and will rebel not save when its neck is laid between the sword and the block.

?Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox, whose philosopher is a juggler, and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking.

?Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpetings and farewells him with hootings, only to welcome another with trumpetings once again.

?Pity the nation whose sages are dumb with years and whose strong men are yet in the cradle.

?Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation.?

Kahlil Gibran The Garden Of The Prophet

It’s amazing, but recently on Fresh Air ‘twas opined by entertainment critic David Bianculli that the Trump-related reality show “The Apprentice” will be the most bought “complete season” DVD set in this interview.

Why?

Trump, to paraphrase Bianculli, is everything Trump is when he is at his best: instinctively hot, mercurial, impeccably dressed, preening, and equipped with a laser-eye beam that spots defaults and excellences in leadership with a supernatural accuracy.

Bianculli has gotten me thinking though, it is clear that some reality shows teach us something and others show what people will eat while wearing skimpy bathing suits.

Another show which teaches the power of flexibility, adaptability, and the shifting mantle of leadership is Discovery’s Monster House in which goatee’d and gravel-voiced Steve Watson (who has a career doing “Behind the Music voice-overs should this deal go south) acts as a foreman to convert a plain ‘ol house into a house with a crazy theme around it.

To accomplish this, Steve contracts a series of 5 helpers from disparate backgrounds. Some are “art guys” big into paint and foam and textiles. Others are the salt of the construction earth, guys who drive nails into wood. In any case Steve, a quintessential LA guy (yes, even so quintessential he, like most LA people, is not from there), leads these designers into executing a vision.

Time and time again we see the wood-and-nail guys give the bleach hi-lited Steve with this designer coffee the hairy eyeball that in the international language of all workers says: “What the hell?” or “What an idiot”.

Oftentimes we see Steve cheerlead, and receive the same reaction. Other times we see Steve give up leadership dramatically, so that someone else, that the crew trusts can help them get the house done in their thin 5 day timeline. Perhaps that quality makes him a far better leader than many.

In any case, watching these shows provides great object lessons in a lot of the highlights - and lowlights - in Organizational behavior. Work shirkers, people who ride sex appeal (The Donald said that was “cheap”), innovators without backing, geniuses in the wilderness, messiah-complex holders, they’re all there for the public to see - it’s the Harvard Business Journal coming to you sponsored by Chrysler and GE.

In short, we’re giving the MBA education to the world - for free. Arguably some are profiting from this education. It will be remarked in the future how much this trend changed American business.

But why stop there?

Let’s follow this trend to its logical conclusion. As these shows become more powerful master narratives for Americans understanding their own lives, we will come to behave in a more strategic fashion - all of us. We will start to accept justifications based on good business sense. We will accept justifications of intervention that appeal to “efficiency” and “human rights” - even when they don’t.

Chicken little? Where are those WMDs Mr. Bush? Where’s that al-Qaeda connection? When all else failed the war became a concern about “human rights” or the “liberation” of the people. The US’s enemy, the UN, is portrayed as lumbering, slow, and inefficient, clinging to outmoded models of democracy.

In short, it’s the same argument we heard in 1999, the brick-and-mortars will be assassinated by the .com, your outmoded model of ligitimation and action is like a dinosaur, and us.com, lead by “the CEO president” is guaranteed to do Democracy like it should be done (if this be Democracy, The Republic is looking better and better { yes, that is meant to be funny } ).

But just like a business, GWB’s White House tends to make up its moral compass as it goes along. If the war in Iraq is not about WMDs and an al-Qaeda connection (as we are being told we should believe given that the GWB administration can’t substantiate either) and is about GWB’s moral commitment to the ending of tyranny, how do we explain this?

Bush said he had given the US Coast Guard strict orders to “turn back any refugee” fleeing violence between loyalists to Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide and foes seeking his ouster.

— From Channel News Asia

Clearly, our CEO president’s moral compass is not so firmly fix’d, nay?

As the cubicle mentality becomes writ large, those corporate pirates, that know how the pull the strings in such organizations will be increasingly able to use the weaponry of the corporation to achieve ther will: for ill or good.

The appeals to efficiency and “human rights” are the selfsame appeals that Alasdair McIntyre spotted as the signs of an atrophying culture, a culture rotting from within, a country that, according to Gibran, is to be pitied for while it has belief it has not faith.

Again we are back to the cave in Tora Bora, the war of the Luddites, the resurgence of Fundamentalists, and Joerg Haider.

Perhaps our instinctive collective tribal barometer of fear index is why “The Passion” has so charged society?

OK kids, now let’s go to my current problem, is capitalism compatible with conservatism? Once you acculturate 100% of society to thinking like enterpreneurs, 5% will always push against the boundary of taboo for the profits that hide therebehind. 85% will be jealous of those 5% and 5% will be contientious moral objectors - who, by virtue of losing the means to obtain the tools of communication, will fade away.

I believe that the man who’s favorite philosopher is Christ will come to realize his administration directly helped hollow out the heart of actual faith - even if religious ceremony attendance goes up.

?Pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion. - Gibran

I’m not sure just yet, but I’m thinking it’s increasingly difficult, possibly impossible, to reconcile the twain.

Bobby Brown was arrested again today according to CNN.

Full story here.

It’s his perogative.

Just look at this face, does that not express contrition?

George Bush would like us to believe that the threats against America are the collusion of Saddam Hussein and al-Quada (unsubstantiated) or the ready-to-go WMDs in Iraq (not found) or the moral anarchy inspired same-sex marriage (riiiight), but his own Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld’s playground, is reporting that the number-one likely cause of an imbalance in world stability will be attributed to neither homosexuals or botched war justifications. It will be…

Global Warming

That’s right, the Republican administration who withdrew the US from the Kyoto protocol in a fit of long-sighted stewardship of the global ecosystem but a few short years ago, has now been hit by a surprise of its own, the number one threat to US security, the thing most likely to spike the number of red days according to the Department of homeland security is Global Warming.

This report is being supressed at the moment, so original sources are unavailable. The British paper, The Observer, has nevertheless obtained a copy.

Actually, GWB is having quite a battle with “science” of late, the Union of Concerned Scientists recently issued a scathing report describing Bush’s misportrayals of scientific fact to advance his political goals.

Oddly, Bush is more steadily sure about matters of his relationship with the supernatural than his relationship with that which the methods of science demonstrates.

The miserable failure continues?

First things first let me say that I am an ardent supporter of the separation of church and state. This is one of the most fundamental beliefs I hold about the world around me.

It cheapens religion to put it in the State and the State has no business commenting or being involved with people’s faith.

The intermingling of the two caused some of the most bitter wars in Europe that the West has ever known and even today this lack of partition is responsible for making sure that the mortars keep falling in Kashmir.

So, to address what my title speaks of.

“Marriage”, the term gets tossed around cavalierly as if we al agree as to what it is and in which context we are speaking. Marriage as far as the church is concerned should be something about a mythical spiritual union between a man and a woman. Yes there is another use of the word marriage which specifies a legal or tax-related status between two citizens, this is civic marriage - the sole provenance of the secular, no religion before any other, Establishment clause and all that State.

For example if X and Y are civicly wed (i.e. obtained a marriage license) if X dies the property will automatically be given to Y sans much difficulty, X and Y can apply to own property in common, etc.

Now in the absence of civic unions being available in all states, access to this bundle of contracts and understandings is only availble to a man and woman who wish to engage in this covenant. A whole class of individuals are banned from these legal advantages and tax burdens.

This is wrong, in the eyes of the state, all people should have right to enter this covenant.

At the end of the day, however, if all states were to create ‘civic unions’ and we were to enumerate the rights and duties associated therewith and we were to compare the enumerated rights and duties associated with marriage, our only difference would be the sex of the parties involved.

It seems philosophically untenable that one would apply separate terms for the same enumerated list of duties and advantages.

That’s not to say it isn’t politically necssary, the Christian Right of course wants to make sure that their muddying of the partition between Church and State continues and will demand something like a constitutional amendment.

I also think that it is shameful that the President is using the Constitution as a wedge between the population. Shameful. I also think that it’s shameful that the Constitution is being used to define marriage.

This is also the take of Gavin Newsom, mayor of SF. Gavin’s not doing bad for himself on the political capital front either - getting his smooth as silk rhetoric (better than ol’ Marblemouth in the White House) and Marina-District good looks blasted out on national media.

Funny, Republicans carry the state’s rights flag most of the time, except when they want to push their own moral agenda.

The rest of the apartment looks like a zoo — but my sleeping sanctuary is complete.

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