Scribbles and Tunes

I’m sure most people have already heard about the ice cream stand in Massachusetts that got shut down due to not having a permit for a building addition. I would like to say that Massachusetts leads the country in government foolishness, as, among other things, they also recently sought to ban bake sales at schools in order to keep kids healthy. However, my home state of California takes the prize, far and away, for government stupidity. In my state, you pretty much need a permit to do anything with your house, your land, your…actually, that’s the problem. Your land or your house isn’t yours anymore. Over the years, the government has infringed on private property rights, more and more, until the working definition of “private property rights” no longer resembles the original definition. The government does this constant nibbling in the name of the environment, in the name of public safety, in the name of your safety, in the name of social justice. You name it, and they’ll find a way to use it to take things away from people.

As far as the poor guy trying to sell ice cream in Massachusetts, it might be easier to just close up shop and get some other kind of job. Maybe a job working for the government. That’s the only kind of job that’s safe these days.

I don’t know who wrote this originally. If you do know, drop me a line so I can attribute this properly. Anyway, even though this was obviously written to be humorous, it is uncannily and unnervingly true. True, in the deeper sense of what true is. I’ve edited the story in order to bring it up to technological and grammatical speed.

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Bud the Cowboy

An old cowboy named Bud was overseeing his livestock in a remote mountainous pasture in Montana when suddenly a brand-new BMW came racing toward him out of a cloud of dust. The driver, a young man in an expensive suit, leaned out the window and asked the cowboy, “If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?”

Bud looked at the man, who obviously is from the city, and then looked at his peacefully grazing herd.

“Sure,” he said calmly. “Why not?”

The young man parked his car, whipped out his smartphone and surfed to a NASA page on the Internet. There, he called up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location which he then fed to another NASA satellite with long-range imaging capabilities. The NASA satellite took a photo of their location and sent it via high-speed microburst to a server in North Carolina. The young man then downloaded the file to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany. Within seconds, he received an email on his smartphone that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then created an Excel spreadsheet and printed out a full-color, 150-page report on his miniaturized HP LaserJet printer. Finally, the young man turned to the cowboy and said, “You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves.”

“That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves,” said Bud.

He watched the young man select one of the animals and looked on with amusement as the young man stuffed it into the trunk of his car.

Then Bud said to the young man, “Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?”

The young man thought about it for a second and then said, “Okay, why not?”

“You’re a Congressman with the U.S. Government”, said Bud.

“Wow! That’s correct,” said the young man. “How did you guess that?”

“No guessing required,” answered the old cowboy. “You showed up here even though nobody called you. You want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. You used millions of dollars worth of equipment trying to show me how much smarter than me you are; and you don’t know a thing about how working people make a living – or about cows, for that matter. This is a flock of sheep. Now give me back my dog.”

Those are the four big questions, aren’t they? Any philosopher worth his salt has taken a stab at one or more of those questions. Where did we come from? Why are we here? Is there such a thing as good and its converse, evil? Where are we going?

Meaning is the big question for me. When I lose my grip on that one, the colors start to fade.

Lately, I’ve noticed some interesting threads on the Amazon forums about what people believe. There are quite a few self-declared atheists and agnostics in those threads. What I always wonder, in conjunction with atheism, is, where do you derive meaning if you’re an atheist? Seriously. Where do you derive meaning for your own life? If you are the result of random chemical interactions, where do you get your meaning? I’ve heard some people trot out answers having to do with continuation of the gene pool, improving society, fulfilling one’s self, but those are basically all meaningless horse manure answers.

I’d love to hear Richard Dawkins answer that question. And I mean answer it without ducking and jumping all over the place like a greased pig. Where do you get your meaning for life? Why should life have any meaning at all? I don’t see how random interactions of chemical processes can generate meaning.

Hmm. I guess I’m in a pretty grumpy mood. I wonder if Lady Gaga thinks about the meaning of her life?