Human Achievement Hour

This Saturday during Earth Hour various people around the world will shut their lights off for sixty minutes as a symbolic gesture to raise awareness about climate change. Hopefully if enough people do so they will scare the bejeezus out of unsuspecting astronauts. Watching Houston inexplicably pretend to be Pyongyang for forty-five minutes is surely an off-putting sight from the stratosphere.

Alternately, folks over at the Competitive Enterprise Institute will be celebrating Human Achievement Hour. An event which applauds mankind’s innovations that have made life livable. Electricity, indoor plumbing and laser tag come to mind. It is a celebration of capitalism and technology. I plan to merrily flip my own lights on and, if I’m feeling festive, toss some confetti in the dryer.

This behavior may strike some readers as deranged. Am I one of these science deniers who thinks climate change is an Al Gore conspiracy? Hasn’t consumption led us into this mess? Actually I think climate change is real, and I also think we’re contributing to it. That’s why we need to hold onto capitalism for dear life. Guilt isn’t going to get us out of this mess, but IBM might.

A popular response to climate change is to suggest that if we cap our emissions and mandate everyone to tighten their belts, play less Angry Birds, and join carpools, we can ease back on the nastier gasses and save the ice caps from melting. This is nonsense. Here’s why:

As P. J. O’Rourke put it, “There are 1.3 billion people in China, and they all want a Buick.” As the bottom two to five billion folks living on our rock climb out of poverty and start living like Iowans, they will guzzle electricity, drive cars, and eat methane-farting cows. There’s not much we can do about that.

To put things in perspective for you, if every residential light bulb on the planet were turned off for an hour, the carbon saved would equal about four minutes of China’s carbon footprint. A footprint which grows fatter every year. Add the rest of the developing world to that, and their carbon footprints turn into a sooty foxtrot.

We can wreck the global economy to slow this process down (Congress is trying its darndest), but eventually India or Westeros or another developing country will catch up when we’re not looking. So the idea that we can save the planet by legislating away our exhaust fumes simply won’t work. We can’t control two billion other people, and we shouldn’t ask them to wallow in poverty indefinitely, either.

When I was a kid we had this stuff called “paper.” Every year millions upon millions of squids were hunted and squeezed to death for their ink to produce physical books. Publishing a book on forestry required leveling a small forest. Yet, despite a larger population, we have not run out of trees. Arbor Day didn’t save them. Private enterprise did—it invented USB flash drives, Kindles, and enough addictive video games to permanently dissuade children from ever touching a book.

Earth’s best hope is human innovation. We have to think our way out of this mess, not go on a diet. It is incumbent upon the developed world to invent cheaper, cleaner and smarter forms of energy, so that populous developing nations don’t resort to powering their homes with coal or whale blubber. A vibrant free market is the engine which funds innovation.

I respect that so many concerned people want to stop global warming. I hate sweating. For now, I’m glad that private enterprise has come up with air conditioners. We can’t stop half the planet from polluting its brains out, so we had better hope the free market keeps on innovating.

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How to Sail Through Line at the Bank

If you’re looking to expedite your time at the bank, frame your future requests in such a way that the tellers think you’re a psychopath. Their barely-concealed fear that you’ll go nuts will compel them to prioritize you above coffee breaks and other customers.

Now, before you go rushing off to the nearest vault with your ski mask and a Nerf gun, note that this technique calls for panache. Fortunately I have already pioneered the method.

When I attended college my bank only had three ATM locations throughout town. You could use ATM’s from other banks if you wanted to, however they charged a fee and sometimes slipped in Monopoly money. A lot of places didn’t charge anything, but you had to throw a brick through their window and run away really fast.

On one occasion I visited my bank only to find that the ATM machine was broken. I had to resort to using a foreign machine, which charged me $3.00.

The following day I showed up at my bank to request that they refund the $3.00. This is the first step which indicated that I might be crazy. Why would anyone waste precious, precious gasoline to obtain a $3.00 refund? For the forty minutes that trip took, I could have just as easily earned $10 dancing for money on a street corner. Better yet, I could have forgotten about it entirely and watched another episode of Newsradio.

When I asked for my $3.00 refund they looked at me quizzically. When I insisted on it, the branch manager had to come over to personally sign the check for $3.00. Afterwards he asked me if I wanted anything else.

This was the crucial moment. If I had said, “No, we’re done here,” I would have merely been the annoying guy who made everyone waste their time on a $3.00 refund. But I didn’t stop there.

As you know, $2 bills are rare in the United States. Generally the Bureau of Printing & Graving only hands over fresh $2 bills to grandparents so that they can use them as gifts. The rest are kept in a giant vault controlled by the Fed, which constantly taunts Ron Paul by leaving the door open and then slamming it shut whenever he walks by.

Most people only stumble upon one $2 bill per decade. But not me. I had my bank call up the regional office and put in a monthly request for “several buckets” of $2 bills. (Note: a “bucket” is a standard unit of measurement in banking lingo. The next biggest unit is a “briefcase of unmarked bills,” followed by “a whole trashcan full of money.” Using any of these terms will help increase your bank’s sentiments that you’re deranged.)

Of course this only made me more charmingly eccentric and interesting than I already was. When I took girls out on dates, they were enthralled when I paid for my half of the tab in such unique denominations. Or when I always tipped a single $2 bill, no matter how expensive the tab was. Or when I paid my friends back by folding up dozens of $2 bills into tiny paper airplanes.

But the main thing was that, whenever I visited my bank, the tellers immediately beckoned me to the front of the line. Because all of them thought I was insane.

A little bit of crazy greases the wheel. It works for Greece and it can work for you.

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“Tapping the Admiral”

Today we learn about Lord Nelson, a British maritime hero whose body was preserved on the way back to London by pickling it in a barrel of brandy. Fair warning: Lord Nelson’s death is heroic, but the mortuary practice which followed it is gross and may even stop you from drinking for a few hours. However it is a part of this week’s Corpses of Interest segment, celebrating the recent discovery of King Richard III buried underneath a parking lot.

Lord Nelson, as you’ll recall, is the admiral who defeated Napoleon Bonaparte at the Battle of Trafalgar. The victory provided all sorts of good material for plucky British operettas about eating limes and wearing powdered wigs and such. More specifically, Trafalgar stopped Napoleon from invading Britain, thus sparing us from the prospect of palatable English cuisine.

Back then the military didn’t have drones, so Lord Nelson actually had to show up on the deck of his ship to survey the battle personally. Unfortunately for him a French sniper managed to plug him, affording perhaps the most British death in all of history. When the captain of his flagship noticed that the admiral wasn’t around, he found Lord Nelson kneeling on the deck and bleeding profusely. Nelson told Captain Hardy, “I do believe they have done it at last… my backbone is shot through.”

That anyone could refer to a musket ball shattering his spinal column and lodging in his gut with such eloquence and politeness is astounding. One time I bent over to pick up a bottle cap and threw my back out, and I could barely even swear coherently. I did manage to swear, profusely in fact, but it took a lot of effort. If I got shot in the back with a musket I would not say things like, “I do believe.” I would say, “AAAAAAAAH! AAAAAAAAAH! BURN FRANCE TO THE GROUND! EVEN PETS!”

Captain Hardy ordered men to take the bleeding admiral below the decks, but on the way Lord Nelson paused the sailors carrying him so he could instruct a midshipman on how to properly handle a tiller. After relaying these helpful marine instructions despite having a steel marble lodged in his spine, Nelson draped a handkerchief over his face so that he would not cause alarm in the crew. Quite the team player. And again, almost obscenely British in his polite and orderly demeanor.

Lord Nelson died a few minutes later, on the eve of his greatest military achievement. Recognizing that the admiral constituted a great war hero, his men sealed his body in a barrel of brandy they had on hand to pickle it on the return voyage to England.

In Portugal they swapped the brandy out for wine. According to crew hearsay, the level of brandy had dropped precipitously from when they had plopped Lord Nelson in. Made of stout stuff and very likely raging alcoholics, the crew of the HMS Victory went ahead and drank the brandy knowing that it had an admiral stewing in it.

To this day the phrase “tapping the admiral” is a colloquial expression for grabbing a drink, particularly in the British Navy. A macabre reference to Lord Nelson’s final voyage, when nasty seamen helped themselves to the brandy they pickled him in.

Cheers!

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We Have Reason for Optimism

Most every article about our future is gloomy. There are all these old people, for instance. When the herds of Baby Boomers retire and our nation is awash in codgers, will we be able to make fat free soylent green? And our education levels are abysmal. What if tomorrow’s youth are too bad at math to design evil robot overlords? We’ll have to import robot overlords from China, and that’ll put a bunch of factory workers our of jobs. So our economy will tank.

When pundits wallow in depressing forecasts they often fall prey to a major fallacy. Namely, to project problems we have today onto the future without the ability to foresee their solutions.

Imagine how horrified a bureaucrat from 1880 would be if we traveled back in time and told him present-day America has over 300 million people. For starters, how could the Pony Express possibly keep up with that much junk mail? We’d have to cordon off Kansas as one giant grazing lot. By 19^th century standards there wouldn’t be enough arable farmland in the entire country to support 300 million people. Everyone would be chronically malnourished!

So his vision of the future would be a horrible dystopia, with mass starvation and hordes of Pony Express riders spitting chewing tobacco all over the place. Instead of our current horrible dystopia of mass obesity and not one but three Kardashians.

Our hypothetical number cruncher is capable of projecting then-present shortfalls and the technology of that era, but he is not capable of factoring in future inventions and solutions. He cannot foresee tractors radically improving agricultural efficiency, automobiles replacing horses, Segways replacing automobiles, hover tractors replacing Segways, the Internet replacing brothels, or MTV2 replacing MTV.

Between now and 2050 there will be game changers. That makes forecasting an exercise in futility. So keep your spirits up: we may well perfect delicious, fat free soylent green before Social Security taps out.

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The Inauguration

This week Americans will come in droves to Washington DC to stand around in very cold temperatures and watch the president get sworn in. This quaint tradition dates back to the founding of the republic, when nobody actually wanted to be president, and we would drag a general or governor or some such, kicking and screaming, to the marble steps of the Capitol. Citizens would stand around peer pressuring the poor sap into begrudgingly accepting the post of Commander-in-Chief for four years.

Nowadays most of the people running for president actually want the job. Presumably they are looking to put something neato on their resumé, so that they can work for Google or something. Consequently, the Inauguration has less to do with peer pressure and has become a celebration in its own right.

Many Americans are excited about patriotism and a chance to show off multicolored hats. Democrats are pleased that their guy won. Visiting Europeans are relieved that George W. Bush did not. Republicans, of course, have mixed feelings about the whole thing, but GOP leaders will show up because of persistent Facebook invites.

Beyoncé is slated to sing the National Anthem. This is a shrewd choice, as Kanye West might well have snatched the microphone away from the president during the swearing-in ceremony to announce that Romney ran the best campaign music video of all time. James Taylor will sing “America the Beautiful”, his first time performing at an Inauguration since the embarrassing “wardrobe malfunction” that exposed one of his breasts on live television in 2004.

A dark cloud will hang over this year’s festivities due to ongoing complaints against the Judiciary. Reports indicate that there is a correlation between depression and repeated concussions sustained by Supreme Court Justices when tackling. Justice Scalia has firmly opposed any changes, such as implementing “flag constructionism,” insisting that the helmets issued offer sufficient protection to judges.

Many pundits were fearful that Congress would not be able to attend the Inauguration in an official capacity due to its ongoing strike over collective bargaining, which resulted in a number of canceled games throughout 2012 and early 2013. (Matters were exacerbated at the end of the year when Democrats unsuccessfully challenged Congress’s ability to lock out players from the Canadian teams—The Edmondton Oilers, Calgary Flames and Alberta.)

Fortunately Gary Bettman agreed to a Memorandum of Understanding between Republicans and Democrats, and Congress and the rest of our government can once again sally forth to take on additional debt.

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Andrew Heaton’s Standup Comedy Show

Join ClotureClub.com’s Andrew Heaton as he hosts his Standup Comedy Show Saturday, September 15.

Get your tickets here!

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