As IF Times

link Giant shrimp raises big concern as it invades the Gulf – Houston Chronicle.

A little while back, I wrote about a similar circumstance regarding the proliferation of king crabs in the Antarctica, http://www.asiftimes.com/2011/04/30/head-to-the-nearest-red-lobster/   Now, a bountiful bevy of jumbo shrimp has appeared in the Gulf of Mexico and people are wringing their hands over it.  These people have obviously never had juicy jumbo shrimp served in a spicy garlic sauce.  Why do people look pessimistically on everything?  In the old days, if a farmer had a bumper crop of something, it would be a reason to celebrate.  If a fisherman had a bounteous haul from the sea, he’d be thrilled.  Even monkeys would be excited to find excess bananas.

But not certain humans these days.  Anything out of the ‘normal’ means just another sign of the apocalypse.  It seems to me that pessimism has become high art in our present culture.  Even as man has evolved to the point that there really is no shortage of food anywhere in the world, especially not in western cultures, the professional doomsayers always have some spin on making eating a thing of angst.  These people would complain that water is not as wet as it used to be before industrialization.  They warn against eating too much of this, or drinking too much of that.  This is all fine if they kept to themselves, except that these professional pessimists find their way into government and their moaning finds its way into laws that affect the rest of us.

Just today, in the New York Times, an article was published warning of the dangers of excessive sodium intake.  The article goes on to champion the idea of legislating sodium inputs for food makers and providers.   Unless there are those who need birdcage liner, I attach the link here so no one has to spend money on buying the paper,  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/27/health/high-sodium-to-potassium-ratio-in-diet-is-a-major-heart-risk.html?_r=1

No one sees the irony of people pushing to make drugs like marijuana legal, which has little redeeming value and lots of socially undesirable ones, versus trying to regulate salt which does have redeeming social value, ie; making food taste good.

So here’s some advice to the pessimists and those that heed them as we wind up the end of 2011.  There’s a good chance we’re all going to die, eventually.  You may as well enjoy the time you have here in case the next place is not so fun.  I close with a quote sent to me by a friend, author unknown, which summarizes this best:

“Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate and wine in one hand, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming “WOO HOO what a ride!!”

Take the plastic off the couch, live a little.

link AFP: Kims 11-ace debut round recalled on Twitter.

This is all about lack of respect.  A guy scores 11 holes-in-one, on the very first time playing golf and yet the world is largely indifferent.  This feat was witnessed by no less than 17 of his personal bodyguards, so it must be true.  While other so called pros manage to finish perhaps 1 or 2 under par in any given tournament,  their exploits are considered heroic.  I don’t recall any kind of coverage of Kim’s feat on the Golf Channel and certainly no pro to my knowledge has paid any respect to this accomplishment.  Makes you wonder about the bias of the western media.

As we know by now, “Dear Leader” as Kim Jong Il was referred to by his subjects, passed away at the too young age of 69 just the other day.  The importance of Kim to his people as the spiritual and political leader was clearly demonstrated by televised footage of massive demonstrations of inconsolable grief by scores of women broadcast  for the outside world to see.  It’s possible that similar outpourings of grief may also be found in the golfing community, but video just hasn’t surfaced.  Nevertheless, to his faithful and his community, the 5 foot-nothing leader was a giant in his exploits and his life.

But Kim was not just a capable golfer, that was just one of his sideline pursuits.  Kim was much too busy doing important nation building things such as, subjugating his own people, exposing them to starvation and random torture and detention.  There was also the delicate task of sabre rattling in order to make sure everyone paid attention to his latest rants.  There were missiles to be fired off to the south, nuclear weapons to build and people to enslave.  Oddly, these kinds of activities are admired by many, even outside of his own culture.

In other parts of the world, many lesser types were doing exactly the same thing, except that they were getting all kinds of attention and adulation.  Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and even Hugo Chavez have managed to draw as their ardent admirers, prominent actors, writers and journalists breathlessly and romantically describing their struggles for their people.  Kim had the misfortune of being short, pudgy and comical looking whereas guys like Guevara and Castro had beards and looked the part of the valiant revolutionary.  It’s hard to portray an Asian Elmer Fudd as a romantic hero I guess.  At least Cuba had the respect to fly their flags at half mast in respect of their kindred dictator.  It was Kim’s unfortunate fate to be physically unimposing and not have as his native tongue, a classic romantic language.

In the USA,  a backbench senator arrives from nowhere and vaults into the highest position in the world.  Before even passing one piece of policy during his first few months  in office, he is awarded the Nobel prize for peace!  Now that’s impressive.  Not 11 holes in one impressive, but impressive.   As of now, he’s even staking the claim to be among the top 4 presidents in history, sounding like the kind of claim Kim would have made, if only he had the support of a fawning press.  It’s possible that all this swooning over Obama drove Kim mad and may have even caused his heart failure.  Obama takes up golf and plays like Urkel whereas Kim gets 11 holes-in-one on his first outing, but Obama gets the Nobel!?  Obviously, everyone else had a better media team than departed Dear Leader.  Did I mention he was also a bowler?

link Hertz to fight Muslim workers suit over prayer breaks | Reuters.

When you read the article, you will notice a standard legal line which we see on a regular basis but which we mostly accept as background noise.

As restitution for the despicable and unreasonable demands of the Hertz company, the aggrieved workers want as part of their settlement, back pay plus damages for emotional pain and suffering.  This little phrase has worked its way into western culture over the past few generations as one of the standard reparation demands in any grievance lawsuit.  In doing some cursory research, there is no definitive record of how this standard restitution came to become part of most damages actions today.  If anyone out there knows, by all means please enlighten me.

Being an evolved and sophisticated society, we no longer practice the eye for an eye stuff stipulated in the Bible and which practice is still adhered to even to this day in numerous Muslim cultures.  The closest western cultures come to retributive justice is the death penalty for certain heinous crimes, but because of the lengthy appeals process, is actually more like the possibility of an eye for an eye, but first,  30 years on death row while we talk about it.

Instead, we substitute the notion that to alleviate whatever mental anguish was suffered by party A as a result of actions by party B, that a transfer of money from the aggriever to the aggrieved would be satisfactory compensation for the insult.  It’s easy to see how this makes sense at some level and in fact every year,  grotesque amounts of money changes hands in furtherance of this principle via tort lawyers, insurance companies, aided by all and sundry types of experts in damages lawsuits.

In many cases, such as the one referred to in the article, the ability to place a dollar value on the extent of the insult is iffy at best.  If the folks described in the article are wanting compensation for the time they were not allowed to pray, divide the hourly rate of pay by the minutes lost to praying and voila, it’s done.  I’d hazard $10 tops.  Any more than that and a case could be made that there was more time spent praying than driving cars around…in which case, Hertz should really hire legitimate workers.

In many other cases, the notion of making someone pay as compensation for some aggrievance, real or imagined has become an end in of itself.  The spectre of having to battle lawyers in both the courts of public opinion as well as the legal courts that are staffed with learned but misguided jurists has contributed mightily to the costs of mostly everything that people consume today from aspirins to x-boxes.

One of the more transparently greedy schemes to extort money in the guise of compensation came recently in a headline from the Durban climate talks.  There was a proposal that the U.N. was to be granted the power to tax or fine nations that exceeded some fanciful metric of climate transgression.  This body is to be named (in an orotund voice) The International Climate Court of Justice, not to be confused with the old Justice League of America. This body would have the power to enforce nations to pay ‘climate debt’.

The lack of logic of this proposal is stupefyingly obvious.  If the climate transgressions are as imminently fatal to the earth as they all claim, what good will transferring money to the U.N. do?  Presumably, this money will go towards alleviating emotional pain and suffering for…well, someone.   If we’re all gonna die because of flatulent cows and aerosol hairspray, why bother moving money around from one pocket to another?  How is having some extra cash going to help you if the seas rise and the atmosphere turns into a solid?  If on the other hand, there were some guarantee that this proposed pool of fine money were to be spent on spaceships to send Global Warming alarmists off to another planet, then I’d be all in favour of the idea.

However, like the Hertz employees, the end game for the Global Warming crowd is the same; it’s just extortion at a larger scale. At the moment at least, the chances of such an outcome are low.  At least I pray it is.