why beagles kan't spel

Your spelling looked a bit odd to me, but I thought what the hell, surely Beagles must know, so I used your version and sure enough that little red underline told me that I couldn’t do that, and as I recall even spellcheck wouldn’t help me out because it was too far off base. What I do in these situations is just google the word, and google has that thing where if you start out the word it will complete it for you.

But how much nicer it would be if we spoke some reasonable language instead of English? I remember maybe the first day in Spanish class when Senor Chadwick said everything in Spanish is spelled just the way it is written, and I was floored, what a concept? Do the other languages know about this?

And of course they do, and I believe most, if not all of them are, let’s call it phonetically spelled. So what’s the deal with English?

Well of course it is a mishmash of Latin and Germanic, but it seems to me that it goes beyond that. There are things like eight and ate, there are all these different sets of rules on how to make sounds applied willy nilly.

Then there is this thing where words are borrowed from other languages. But if you notice when other languages borrow words from English they respell them to make them phonetic in their language. We should be calling it lazay fair, maybe lahzay fare. Ah hell we need to rethink our rules on how to make sounds. Why should there be two different rules for making the same sounds, both rules I might add which are sometimes enforced and sometimes not for no particular reason.

Back when I was subbing and a kid asked why is two plus two four, I could pull four pennies from my pocket and divide them into two groups of two, and say, ‘See.” But if he asked how come eating was ate and the number was eight, I had to shrug my shoulders.

Well instead of blaming the internet and tv, I am going to blame education. Back in the days before the printing press, everybody knew how to speak the language, but only an elect few knew how to write it and since they were all educated they had learned the rules and they spelled well. And if they ever weren’t sure they could look at what some other guy had written and do it his way, and since the other guy was educated they could be pretty sure that he was right.

I’m kind of pulling this out of my ass, but I think England became literate sooner than the rest of Europe, because they were more industrialized and democratic, more people learned to write then in Europe at the time. But the problem with this is, that they weren’t all that educated so they didn’t really know the rules, so they just kind of made them up, spelled the word the way they figured it ought to be spelled, and other people saw how they spelled it and they followed them.

In the rest of Europe literacy came slower and more from the top down so the rules of spelling were more often obeyed.

That’s my theory as to why English is less phonetic than other languages. A lot of holes in it I noticed as I was writing it out, but that’s why you should write out the things that you believe, to see if they make any sense. I’m sure you agree.

Maybe we can get onto this instead of why don’t we invent this and why don’t we invent that, because inventing is not like building a road where all you need is some paving stones and some strong backs. Why don’t we just invent a machine that will keep the world clean and make it so that we never get sick and we never grow old?

I think generally people use climate change to mean global warming, it’s just a gentler, slightly deceptive, phrase, like the way a pol will call himself a progressive rather than a liberal, a word which the right has thoroughly trashed, even though they both pretty much mean the same thing.

I think the gov has sold off it’s GM stock, but I am going to leave it to you to figure it out, because why do I have to be the guy that always goes to wiki?

So that's how you spell it!

The spell checker said that I had it wrong, and I thought the reason I couldn't find it in my dictionary was because it's a French word. I was trying to spell it the way it's pronounced, but my high school French has gotten rusty over the years. Anyway, you're right, they don't really believe in it, they just use it to manipulate the rest of us. They suck!

When you say that the money never existed in the first place, you're right if you define money as currency. Only about 10% to 20% of the money in existence is represented by actual currency. The rest of it is just on paper, but it's money nevertheless. When money is pulled out of the U.S stock market, it doesn't cease to exist, it just goes somewhere else. It's kind of like the conservation of matter and/or energy, it never really goes away but, for our practical purposes, it might as well have because it is no longer available for our use.

That's also how all that carbon gets into the atmosphere. All the carbon that was ever on the planet is still there, it's just been changed into another state of being that is of no practical use to us. Green plants take carbon out of the atmosphere and use it to build plant tissue. Then when the plant dies, or sheds it's leaves, the decomposition process sequesters most of the carbon in the ground, although some of it does escape back into the atmosphere. Green plants get the energy to perform photosynthesis from sunlight, so why can't our carbon sucking machine get it's energy from the same source? Essentially, what I am proposing is a mechanical plant. Maybe we would be further ahead to just nurture more natural plant life on the planet, although I don't know where we would put it. Most of the land that is capable of supporting plant life already is.

Water and temperature are the primary limiting factors to plant growth. There's lots of water on the oceans, but it's salt water. Of course there are plants that thrive in salt water, so maybe that's where we need to apply our efforts. Come to think of it, I read somewhere that most of the photosynthesis actually happens in the oceans as it is. You might not think so because the oceans don't appear to have a lot of plants in them. That's because most of the plant life in the ocean consists of plankton, which is kind of hard to see with the naked eye. I don't know how much more plankton the oceans can support, but I'm sure that increasing the temperature would help increase their capacity. Land based plants also grow faster when it's warmer, so maybe this global warming thing will solve itself. I wonder if anybody else has thought of this. Maybe that's why they quit calling it "global warming" and started calling it "climate change". That way, whatever happens to the climate, they can say "I told you so!"

General Motors did indeed go bankrupt. It used to be that, when a company went bankrupt, they went out of business but, now a days, they just weasel out of their debts and keep right on operating. In GM's case, they invalidated all the existing shares of their stock and issued new shares, much of which ended up being owned by the federal government. They said they were planning to sell it to the public when the market improved. Well. the market has improved, but I haven't heard anything about the government selling their GM stock. Maybe they've done it and I just haven't heard about it. Have you heard anything about that?

guns and butter

Maybe we could call them undocumented aliens and spend quadrillions on a space fence to keep them out, because surely they will want to wipe us out before the next television season.

This laissez faire capitalism is something the fat cats use to bamboozle middle and lower class Republican voters like there is this ideal system that we dare not tamper with lest we destroy its holy mission, while they themselves tamper with it all the time by buying politicians and making any competition against them impossible.

And I would love to see them stewing in their own juice, but as I said before not if it meant that I would have to stew along with them. The thing about money is that most of it doesn’t really exist, it’s just there because people think it’s there. When people wonder where all the money went when the stock market plunges, the correct reply is that it was never really there, and I don’t see who is going to step in and bring it back once it’s gone. Well truth be told, I don’t understand any of it. I took a economics course a long time ago, but all I remember about it is that it had something to do with guns and butter.

Actually I don’t think the economy went down the tubes at all. The crash stopped, the bailed out companies didn’t go bankrupt, GM didn’t go bankrupt, the stock market has never been better. Jobs suck, and the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, but that has been going on for some time now. The workers are caught between automation and the global economy and the rich just figure out new ways to fiddle with money to keep more of it themselves.

I think it would be very hard to shove carbon back into something, and the problem is that it would take a lot of energy to do it, and where are we going to get that energy? Are we going to burn coal to make coal?

Earthlings

I never thought of it before but, now that you mention it, I don't know why we are called "Earthlings". It means, "children of the Earth", which is kind of cool, but that doesn't explain why none of the extraterrestrials are called "lings". Maybe it's because, as far as we know, there are no extraterrestrials. If there were, I'm sure they would have complained by now that we call them "extraterrestrials", seeing as it expresses a terrestrially centered bias, which can't be politically correct. "Space aliens" is even more offensive because, to them, we are the space aliens. Of course, nobody cares if they say something offensive about us, as long as we don't say anything offensive about them. 

The thing about the bailouts is that they go against the ideology of lassez faire capitalism, which all those fat cats claim to believe in. "Lassez faire" is a French term that means "let them go", or "let them be", or something like that. So why don't we just let them stew in their own juice? If there is a demand for the service they provide, somebody will step in and fill it. Maybe we should get some nice Japanese or Chinese businessmen to come over here and show them how it's done. They said that, if we don't bail those companies out, the economy will go down the tubes. So we bailed them out, and the economy went down the tubes anyway. There is no way of knowing if it would have been better or worse without the bailouts because there are no "do overs" in real life like there are in video games.

The same can be said about Russian Communism. If it hadn't crashed and burned, who knows what it might have evolved into by now? It was already a far cry from the days of Lenin and Stalin. They still have it in Red China, but if Mao could see what they have done with it, he would turn over in his grave. To be fair, I suppose you could say the same thing about American Capitalism. I think it was Mark Twain who said, "Things sure ain't what they used to be but, in a manner of speaking, they never was."

Okay, here's another pie for the sky: What they need is a machine that sucks carbon out of the atmosphere and makes something useful out of it. Green plants already do that, but it seems like they can't keep up with the current situation. Coal is mostly made out of carbon to begin with. How hard could it be to pick stray carbon atoms out the air and turn them back into coal? I understand that diamonds are also made out of carbon, and the world can always use more diamonds. Space Age problems call for Space Age solutions. Somebody should get on that right away.

 

you talking to me, earthling?

I was going to begin by saying what makes you think those Martians wouldn’t rebel against a multinational corporation, but then I had to ask myself, what the hell are we talking about?

But the whole conversation got me to thinking, why are we Earthlings? Venusians are Venusians, Martians are Martians, Jovians are Jovians, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, and Mercury are some kind of ‘ians’ I am sure, why are we ‘lings’ like in ducklings or something? How are we to hold our heads up in the solar system when we go to those Star Wars bars? You know everybody will be picking on us.

Moon Men get to be Moon Men and that is pretty cool, and now that I think about it I have heard us referred to as Earthmen which is not bad, but what of our dogs and cats? And you know the ladies are not going to go for that.

Speaking of those bailouts I am just not sure. I was vaguely for them at the time. Those economy guys had me bamboozled, or maybe they were telling me the right stuff, how do I know? The reason this guy Geithner, who has just wrote a book (That’s how these guys get in the papers and on tv writing a book and going on book tours. Maybe if we edited out the best of our blog and called it “How Beaglesonianism Can Save the World,” (Seems like saving the world boosts your sales) we could be sitting in interview room of some podunk local tv station in our marryin and buryin suits and being all witty and perceptive and all), gives for the bailout is that if us Joe Sixpacks had let the super rich go down the tubes, we would have gone down the tubes even further.

You know me Beagles, I am as big a fan of soaking the rich as anybody, but what if I got all soaked too? If I got kicked out of my condo it would no comfort to me at all to see the fatcats get booted from their mansions on the hill.

That’s the problem with the rich, they have all the money, they go to those fancy schools and talk that high-toned talk, and bamboozle even a guy like me who thinks he’s pretty smart. Maybe we need to bring back communism. How much better off are we now that it is extinct except for some questionable little island in the Caribbean?

Another Pie in the Sky

Wikipedia has lots of information about proposed manned missions to Mars, but I couldn't find anything that indicates that anybody has concrete plans to actually do it. I read two articles, one is titled "Manned Mission to Mars", and the other is called "Mars to Stay". It seems there are a number of clubs or organizations that have been promoting this thing for decades. At least some of them appear to be run by legitimate scientists who really believe in what they're doing, but I don't think that any of them has the means to actually pull it off themselves. They have done all the research, and now they want the government or somebody else to do the actual work.

When Bush II was president, he initiated a program to establish a permanent base on the Moon, with the intention that it would be used as a stepping stone to Mars someday, but congress has since defunded the program.  Former Moon walker Buzz Aldrin believes that it would be a waste of time and resources to go back to the Moon. He says that there's nothing there that would be of any use to a Mars mission, or of any use for any purpose for that matter. I suppose he ought to know. Aldrin is a firm believer in the "Mars to Stay" concept, and has been lobbying for it for years.

You brought up a good point that I hadn't previously considered: Any successful colony on Mars would be bound to declare its independence sooner or later. Maybe that's why it's so hard to get the government interested in this sort of thing. It might be better if somebody from the private sector did it instead, and maybe they will some day. All those multinational corporations have no loyalty to any particular government anyway. They will go anywhere and do anything if they think there's money in it. Or course, if they get into trouble, they want the government to bail them out at taxpayer expense.

What we need is a constitutional amendment that says no more bailouts, including interplanetary ones. Take the money saved thereby and apply it to stopping climate change. Not more research on climate change, doing some physical thing that actually works to stop it. There I go again, launching another pie into the sky!

Mars needs steaks and women

There’s a scene early on in The Right Stuff, where one of the astronauts, John Glenn I think, balks when he sees the plans for the space flight are for it to mostly be controlled by NASA and the astronauts will basically just be passengers, like on a ride at an amusement park, and it pisses him off and he says no, the astronauts want to drive, and the engineers give in to him, I guess because he has so much charisma. Not likely such a scene ever took place but it is probably blown up by some incident that might illustrate two different trends in space travel.

One is exemplified by these voyagers that we have roaming the universe, which I think are great, traveling way beyond where any human could have ever survived and sending back these fantastic photos of planets and moons. The thing that surprises me the most is how different every moon and planet is from each othe. You kind of think, bunch of rocks, how interesting can they be, but they are very. The other kind is manned spaceflight where the hand of man actually puts its foot down somewhere. The fans of this are more into the adventure and the achievement of man, and not that interested in finding out scientific facts.

I did go to NASA’s page and I couldn’t find anything about a manned mission from Mars, but I do remember a story about people volunteering for the flight, so somebody is talking about it. I’m dubious about the whole thing because, well it’s just so damn hard and expensive and not likely to be worth it. Even if the hills there are full of gold or platinum or whatever by the time they pack them up and send them back to earth their cost will be way more than they are worth.

I suppose those dilithium crystals would be worth it, but likely when they discover them they will be saying to each other, hey we’re not Earthlings anymore, we’re Martians. Why are we sending our dilithium to those Earthling despots? In fact now that we have the crystals why don’t we build our own warships and send them to earth so that we can bring back real steaks instead of this soy crap, and how about some celebrities while we are at it?

Did you see Cosmos last night.  The topic was global warming and they made a persuasive case. But I have to say they were a bit heavy-handed about it.  They always are, with the ominous music and the scenes of fish gasping for air and all.  Well the fate of mankind does hang in the balance, but still they could be a little less strident about it.