Tonight Denice and I watch the documentary, The Cove. My stomach is still turning from watching the horrific violence that is done every year to the dolphins in Taiji, Japan. They are herded from their home in the ocean into a tiny cove, where they are brutally slaughtered by the thousands. They are butchered live common livestock. In once scene a baby dolphin desperately tries to fling itself onto the rocks, to escape the fishermen’s spears. This is so wrong! These creature should not be treated like this. I’m sorry, but dolphins are beautiful creatures, and they don’t deserve this. The future will judge this generation for allowing such barbarism to go on.

The few “lucky” dolphins that are chosen to escape the bloodbath are the ones that are sold into virtual slavery. They are the ones that are forced to perform for us at Sea World, or places where people go to ‘swim with the dolphins.’ I had no idea this is how these dolphins were obtained. Denice and I had ‘swimming with the dolphins’ on our unwritten bucket lists, but after watching this I WILL NEVER TAKE PART in this sick industry. If I ever get to see a dolphin or be close to one it will be on their turf, where we are both free, or not at all!

Our cellphone technology is at a place where they could easily be reprogrammed to simply not work, or at least not text when they are traveling faster than a certain speed. The GPS technology that can allow a phone or other mobile device to know exactly how fast it is moving is already there. All it would take is a download of a modified firmware, and wallah… your phone won’t send or received texts while you are driving. If you want to use it, then you will have to pull over. Or, even better, cars could be engineered to drive themselves, then you could talk or text all you wanted. If you take the human being out of the equation, then you take human error out of the equation.

People are going to keep texting while drive regardless of how many laws are passed against the practice. Laws get broken. This problem could be completely eliminated overnight with the intelligent application of existing technology. But, I know you’re probably thing, “That sound Orwellian. What about freedom!” Ah, freedom… I love it. Freedom is a wonderful thing, but like all good things it has a dark side. If freedom is absolute, then your neighbor has the freedom to not properly maintain his vehicle. One day he’s out driving his beater and the brakes fail. Guess what… his freedom to not maintain his shit mean you die. Does that sound like freedom? It sounds like stupidity to me. Let’s face it, there are some things that we suck at, and following vital safety practices is one of them. If we engineer our machines so that it is impossible to abuse them and endanger ourselves, then things will be better, not worse.

Ideally, I would love to live in a world where personal vehicle travel would be greatly reduced. Having machines cart us around everywhere is not healthy. It’s one of the big reasons why so many people are out of shape and unhealthy. You have two legs, use them every once in a while. Trust me, you’ll feel better.

Today at work we had our yearly Angel Tree event. The Angel Tree is a Christmas tree that has a lot of cards attached to it with the names and wishes of local underprivileged children. People take a card, and buy whatever the child wants for Christmas. Seems good enough. However, as I stood there and marveled at the mountains of Walmart bags, it suddenly dawned on me… most of this stuff (if not all of it) was made in China by people who work at near slave labor wages. Hell, a lot of these little plastic trinkets were probably manufactured by children working in sweatshops. We purchase this stuff with little thought of where it comes from, and certainly no thought of where it will ultimately end up. Not only are these “toys” the fruits of suffering on the other side of the planet, but they are also going to be completely wasted in the end, and be added to the unfathomable hoards of trash in a landfill somewhere. No one recycles this shit… no one.

When I was a kid, I begged my parents for whatever useless piece of shit that the marketing industry was pushing at the time. GI Joes, Tonka Trucks, and Transformers were all the rage when I was growing up. I begged and pleaded, and I even wrote letters to the fat man at the North Pole. In the end, I usually got what I wanted, but did I every really want it? Looking back on this time in my life I can honestly say that I don’t think the desire to have this junk every really originated with me. I was programmed. I was a little purchasing machine… a tool that could easily be programmed to drive my parents crazy until they gave in and got me what I was crying for, but I never really ‘wanted’ the stuff. I played with the toys for a short season, grew tired of them, and now they are sitting in a landfill somewhere – poisoning the earth.

We are all trapped in this twisted game of cyclical consumption. We work and slave to buy things that we don’t need and don’t even really want. We only want the stuff because the marketing industry tells us that we have to have it. So, we but it, but it doesn’t last. Nothing can actually ‘last’ in this system. If it lasts, then we won’t need to buy the next useless piece of junk that is pumped out by the Chinese junk machine. No, it must fall apart (usually by design) or be made obsolete. It has to be this way because if it isn’t then the whole system would collapse. We have made our dwelling on top of a house of cards that is trembling beneath us.

I’m not saying don’t celebrate Christmas. Do what you want to do. I just want you to be aware of the true cost of all this mindless consumerism. I want you to know that while you are trampling over people to get your copy of Call of Duty 3 at Walmart… about a billion of your fellow human beings are on the brink of starvation, and are going to go to bed tonight without the basic necessities of life. If you want to get the Christmas spirit and really get into the giving moode… then we have some real work that needs to be done.

Bah Humbug! (Just kidding)