Decline of the Empire

Heaven And Earth — Guts • Glory • Ram

I happened to see a TV commercial for Dodge Ram trucks with a voiceover by actor Sam Elliott. I wasn't able to find that spot on the internet, but I did find a sixty-second spot just like it. I thought it might be worthwhile to analyze this advertisement in a disinterested way from a psychological distance.

Americans are drowning in bullshit. Although we are constantly bombarded with bullshit, few stop to deconstruct this bullshit. Think of it as a learning experience

First, you've got to watch it. Then I will go through it line by line.

 

These advertisements are meant to work directly on the unconscious of the viewer. To that end, the music, the CGI visuals and the voiceover all work together. It's too much work to hook all three up in great detail, so I will focus mostly on the voiceover. After I'm done, you can look at how all three elements sync up.

Remember, the design of this commercial was not an accident. A team of highly paid, highly skilled marketers conspired to craft this bullshit. Numbers are line numbers. I have divided the 12 lines into 7 parts.

slow, emotionally-laden music, dark night visuals, the music builds as the spot goes on, the voiceover begins...

1.  to take it all head on ...

The set-up line, showing the truck at night. Lines 1-9 form a single sentence.

2.  channel the Universe ...
3.  shorten the distances ...
4.  push beyond the possible ...

Let the bullshit begin! Channel the Universe? What the fuck does that mean? Shorten the distances? That line coincides with a CGI visual of two sides of a giant fissure (crack) in the Earth closing to "shorten" the distances. The truck jumps the crack. Push beyond the possible? That's contradictory, grandiose nonsense. However, these lines are not meant to appeal to the "logical" mind (the conscious Ego). These messages are meant to bypass the Ego and speak directly to the vast unconscious sea which lies beneath it. Now they've got your "full attention"

5.  roar past convention ...

OK, this is the pivotal line and lie which will take us to the main message. The music goes uptempo. Nothing could be more conventional than a Dodge Ram truck, of course.

6.  shift every course ...
7.  defy the elements ...

If you're driving a Dodge Ram, you are in charge. Nature imposes no constraints on you. Go for it, nothing can stop you now! The music is louder, with a faster tempo, building to a crescendo coinciding with the main message.

8.  and bring the world to its knees ...
9.  it takes the new 2013 Ram 1500, engineered to move Heaven and Earth

Finally, the main bullshit (ah, ... message). And what is it? The promise of omnipotence, for it takes a new 2013 Ram 1500 to move Heaven and Earth. Mountains crumble when confronted with this truck. There's nothing subtle about this message. All the subtlety came before the main message to prepare you for it. Sam Elliott appears on camera.

10. the world doesn't end here,
11. this is only the beginning.

These lines reinforce the main message and introduce a temporal aspect—the promise of omnipotence forever, for this is only the beginning of the God-like status you assume once you own a Dodge Ram 1500.

12.  Guts • Glory • Ram

The Ram brand logo. More reinforcement. The end.

I hope you found that interesting.

Remember, we're talking about a fucking pick-up truck here. If we get carried away, we might even regard this commercial as a microcosm of the world we live in—technology can solve any problem, human ingenuity and the power it bequeaths are boundless, Nature doesn't limit us, and so on. The promise of omnipotence forever.

Think back to 20,000 or 50,000 years before the present. You sure wouldn't have been able to see this coming had you lived in the Paleolithic.

OK, now watch the commercial again.

Well, I've got to end this post right now because I've suddenly been overwhelmed by a mysterious and unexpected urge to go out and buy a 2013 Dodge Ram 1500...

The Experiment That Hasn't Been Tried

I wonder if the editors at Science Daily understand just how priceless their seemingly innocuous reprint Oysters Could Rebound More Quickly With Limited Fishing and Improved Habitat truly is. Even if they don't, you will understand it in a few moments. We're dealing with the dwindling oyster populations of Chesapeake Bay.

June 13, 2013 — A new study shows that combining improved oyster restoration methods with limits on fishing in the upper Chesapeake could bring the oyster population back to the Bay in a much shorter period of time. The study led by Michael Wilberg of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science's Chesapeake Biological Laboratory assessed a range of management and restoration options to see which ones would have the most likelihood success.

[Image source]

"This new model we developed suggests that oysters should be able to come back if we help them out by reducing fishing pressure and improving their habitat," said Wilberg.

Eastern oysters in the Chesapeake Bay have undergone a drastic decrease in abundance over the past century due to overfishing and disease.

The population is currently estimated to be less than one percent of its historic high, making substantial restoration efforts necessary if the population is to recover.

The team's study shows that if oysters were allowed to reproduce naturally and fishing were halted, it would take between 50 to 100 years for oyster abundance to reach as high a level as could be supported by the Bay. If fishing were reduced to about half its current level, it would take as many as 200 to 500 years to see a healthy population restored to the Bay.

The current oyster population is less than 1% of the original stock. Here we have established the time frame for full restoration of oyster populations in Chesapeake Bay—50 to 100 years if fishing is halted, and 200-500 years if oystering continues at half its current rate.

"The fishery as it has been practiced hasn't been sustainable, and our model helps explain why," said Wilberg. "Oysters just can't replace the shell that has been removed fast enough to keep up."

Oysters are called ecosystem engineers because they build habitat for themselves and other creatures. Oyster harvesting methods, such as dredging and tonging, chip away at the oyster reef and knock it down, spreading the shells over the bottom and making the remaining oysters prone to being covered by silt or moving them to a soft surface where oysters cannot grow.

Since reefs are the place where oysters are born and reproduce, fishing not only removes adults from the population, but also removes habitat essential to their survival.

Here is the quote which makes this article priceless.

"Oysters should be able to rebuild their reefs if we leave them alone," said Wilberg.

"It's an experiment that hasn't been tried yet."

In yesterday's post, we saw that the costs of coping with climate change are going up as the Earth warms. Over the longer term, those mounting costs are bound to negatively affect economic growth, which will affect the amount of CO₂ which goes into the atmosphere. For example, the IEA recently reported that "global emissions of carbon dioxide from energy use rose 1.4 percent to 31.6 gigatons in 2012, setting a record..." What the IEA did not emphasize was that the growth rate of CO₂ emissions in 2012 was much smaller than it had been in prior years, which indicates that the growth rate of the global economy slowed considerably last year.

This was not due to the costs of coping with global warming—at least, not yet. In fact, building infrastructure to cope with climate change will initially increase nominal economic growth! Jobs will be created, resources brought to bear, and so on.

Let us now consider the lowly oyster of Chesapeake Bay. If we were to leave the oysters alone, the population would rebound to historic levels in 50 to 100 years. But that experiment hasn't been tried yet, presumably because the cost (to some) is considered too high. If there were no cost associated with leaving the oysters alone, then presumably we would do so, for isn't it better to have a thriving ecosystem in Chesapeake Bay than to have the infertile wasteland we have created?

Now let us extend that thought to the oceans generally. I often write about the overfishing and destruction of marine ecosystems, a trend which is truly global in scale. If we were to leave the oceans alone, the health of those ecosystems might be restored to a state last seen 500 years ago (to pick a date) in something like the time frame the oysters of Chesapeake Bay require.

Now let us consider the costs of leaving the oceans alone. On a grander scale, this is the experiment that hasn't been tried. The costs would be mind-bogglingly large. The direct cost of leaving the oceans alone is zero because doing nothing costs nothing.

But the opportunity costs and the general human costs—the indirect costs, the consequences—are literally unthinkable to humans, and therefore far beyond prohibitive as far as they're concerned. The world's fishing industries would be shut down. That's about 150-200 million people. How would all those people stay alive? What about the one billion people whose main source of protein is fish, crustaceans and mollusks?

Now we see why the experiment that hasn't been tried yet has not only not been tried, it will never be tried. If humans can't even leave the oysters of Chesapeake Bay alone, they are certainly not going to be able to leave the world's marine ecosystems alone. Humans have locked themselves in. These terrible dependencies only become stronger as human populations, consumption and wealth grow.

As you think about how the human future will go, carefully consider what I have said here.

Managing The Unavoidable

It is interesting in a morbid sort of way to watch the non-Progress of humankind with regard to anthropogenic climate change. The Associated Press science writer Seth Borenstein chronicles the next step in our collective failure in Climate Talk Shifts From Curbing CO2 to Adapting.

Efforts to curb global warming have quietly shifted as greenhouse gases inexorably rise.

The conversation is no longer solely about how to save the planet by cutting carbon emissions. It's becoming more about how to save ourselves from the warming planet's wild weather.

It was Mayor Michael Bloomberg's announcement last week of an ambitious plan to stave off New York City's rising seas with flood gates, levees and more that brought this transition into full focus.

After years of losing the fight against rising global emissions of heat-trapping gases, governments around the world are emphasizing what a U.N. Foundation scientific report calls "managing the unavoidable."

It's called adaptation and it's about as sexy but as necessary as insurance, experts say.

It's also a message that once was taboo among climate activists such as former Vice President Al Gore.

In his 1992 book "Earth in the Balance," Gore compared talk of adapting to climate change to laziness that would distract from necessary efforts.

But in his 2013 book "The Future," Gore writes bluntly: "I was wrong." He talks about how coping with rising seas and temperatures is just as important as trying to prevent global warming by cutting emissions.

Like Gore, governmental officials across the globe aren't saying everyone should just give up on efforts to reduce pollution. They're saying that as they work on curbing carbon, they also have to deal with a reality that's already here.

In March, President Barack Obama's science advisers sent him a list of recommendations on climate change. No. 1 on the list: "Focus on national preparedness for climate change."

"I was wrong," says Al Gore. Back in 1992, Al thought we were going to lick this global warming problem and move on to a glorious future. Now, Al believes that coping is just as important as cutting emissions.

The full title of the U.N. report is Confronting Climate Change: Avoiding The Unmanageable and Managing the Unavoidable. There is a double emphasis. Humans will try to cut emissions while managing the effects of the warming we've already got (0.8° C) and the warming we will undoubtedly get unless we cut emissions to zero immediately (in the range 0.8-3.0° C).

In ten years, after the failure of the next round of climate talks has become manifest, the U.N. will drop "avoiding the unmanageable." Ten years after that, the final (?) U.N. scientific report on climate change will be called Shake Your Booty — Let's Party Like It's 1999!

For decades, scientists referenced average temperatures when they talked about global warming. Only recently have they focused intensely on extreme and costly weather, encouraged by the insurance industry which has suffered high losses, [Michigan professor Regina] Bierbaum said.

In 2012, weather disasters — not necessarily all tied to climate change — caused $110 billion in damage to the United States, which was the second highest total since 1980, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said last week.

Now officials are merging efforts by emergency managers to prepare for natural disasters with those of officials focused on climate change. That greatly lessens the political debate about human-caused global warming, said University of Colorado science and disaster policy professor Roger Pielke Jr.

It also makes the issue more local than national or international.

"If you keep the discussion focused on impacts ... I think it's pretty easy to get people from all political persuasions," said Pielke, who often has clashed with environmentalists over global warming. "It's insurance. The good news is that we know insurance is going to pay off again."

If you keep the discussion focused on impacts, even if not everyone agrees on causes, humans will come together. On the other hand, if you focus on severe longer term impacts which will occur over decades, humans will run around like a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off, achieving precisely nothing until they drop dead.

That is one reason why I believe that the human response to global warming is a window into Human Nature, a window which gives us insights not fully available in the past.

Describing these measures as resiliency and changing the way people talk about it make it more palatable than calling it climate change, said Hadi Dowlatabadi, a University of British Columbia climate scientist.

"It's called a no-regrets strategy," Dowlatabadi said. "It's all branding."

All that, experts say, is essentially taking some of the heat out of the global warming debate.

"It's all branding," says Hadi Dowlatabadi. No regrets! God-damned right. 

Long ago the U.N. issued its final report on global warming ... I was dreaming when I wrote this ...

The sky was all purple
There were people runnin' everywhere
Tryin' to run from the destruction
You know I didn't even care

... tonight I'm gonna party like it's 1999

Justin Is Going Into Outer Space — But Paris Hates Him!

If I want readers, I've got to cover the right stuff. Unlike some people, I learn from my mistakes

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Like everybody else, we were thrilled to learn that Justin Bieber has booked a ticket to go to outer space. And it only put him and his manager Scooter out $250,000. Each!

Jenny Depper of Oh My God! has got the scoop in The Sky Is the Limit: Justin Bieber Books Ticket to Space With Virgin Galactic.

As if he isn't already a big star, now Justin Bieber wants to go to the stars!

Justin Bieber already looks dressed for space!

The 19-year-old crooner and his manager, Scooter Braun, 31, have signed up for an intergalactic adventure with Virgin Galactic, according to Virgin's billionaire founder, Richard Branson. 

The British entrepreneur tweeted the exciting news,

Great to hear @justinbieber & @scooterbraun are latest @virgingalactic future astronauts. Congrats, see you up there!

— richardbranson (@richardbranson) June 5, 2013

And followed up with an idea for the showstopper ...

.@justinbieber @scooterbraun @virgingalactic music video in space? Now that's what I call music! virg.in/bie

— richardbranson (@richardbranson) June 6, 2013

Both stars retweeted Branson's message, but Scooter officially confirmed the exciting news via his own Twitter account.

im going to space momma!! cc @virgingalactic @richardbranson @dcgalactic

— Scooter Braun (@scooterbraun) June 5, 2013

For those of you ITK, multi-gazillionaire Richard Branson knows that global warming is real and he wants to do something about it.  Maybe Richard will get Justin to climb aboard that climate "change" train!

But not all is sunshine for the Biebs. The suicidal daughter of Michael "I never molested children" Jackson hates Justin! MSN Now! has the story, which they cribbed from TMZ. His crimes?

Paris Jackson is no fan of her neighbor Justin Bieber. Wait, let's rephrase that. Paris Jackson HATES Justin Bieber, apparently because he won't speak up about teen girls cutting themselves, according to TMZ sources.

Jackson, who lives in the same gated Calabasas, Calif., enclave as the Biebs, is ensconced at UCLA Medical Center after allegedly slicing herself and consuming 20 Motrin in a reported suicide attempt.

Apparently, young female fans of Bieber have tweeted about cutting themselves to demonstrate their passion for the teen singer, and Jackson is irate at his silence on the issue. Jackson is also said to be irked at Biebs' alleged marijuana use revealed recently in photos posted online, making him a lousy role model for devoted followers. [Source]

Lousy role model? Sounds like the pot called the kettle black to us!

We don't want the Bieb's "young female fans" taking a shitload of MOTRIN^® and slicing themselves up like Paris did.

But give him a break—he's smoking doobees blunts! (Is he a wake and bake man?) That's no reason to hate him! Maybe Justin will load a fat one in outer space. Check it out—there's no gravity up there!

We sincerely hope these Calabasas neighbors can kiss and make up.

And careful with those knives, girrrrrl!

 

Remedy du Jour -- June 15, 2013

Bob Seger popped into my head yesterday and stuck with me, so here we are. Here's something Bob wrote in 1980 which may be the truest and saddest thing I've ever read.

Wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then

It seems like yesterday, but it was long ago. Here's to you, Bob.

• Night Moves
• We've Got Tonight
• Main Street
• Turn The Page
• Against The Wind