What the F%^& happened to National Geographic?

Remember when George Bailey thought this magazine was the Cat's Meow? How it filled him with dreams of seeing the world... would that happen today to a young kid growing up in Wappengers Falls (check out the Capra film It's A Wonderful Life, if you have never lived through an event called Christmas in America)?
Hell no, the F-ing kid would end up a graphic designer, because all we get from National Geographic anymore is Graphics, as if there is nothing left to explore in the world without some robot or animated creature doing it for us.. what the F happened to you guys?
I used to work across the street from the Nat Geo foundation, and I should have realized back then what was going on. Somehow they have lost their principals.Instead of being a scholarly organization, contributing to depth, they have joined the jingoistic idiots society, contributed to the shortening of our attention span, and reveal less and less about the world if it can't be summed up in a graphic that a 5 year old would understand.. what happened to you guys? When I read it now, I resign myself to more idiocy about the latest in aerospace technology or the fight against Al Queda, the same shit they are chasing The History Channel down the tubes to do (Discovery, you're OK, somehow you never pretended to be much else,and your stuff is somehow pretty honest still), conspiracy theory bull shit and all the rest, when back int he day the thing was an extension of the Field Museum of Chicago or Natural History in New York, filled with anthropology and History and cool Archeology.. those of us who dream Indiana Jones style weren't disappointed.. now it's some combo of Tron and Air & Space. Maybe it's being stuck in DC.. like Smithsonian, they think everything has to have mass appeal, it has to be glitzy and some sad compromise that will never offend a Mormon in the Utah Valley, even if it tastes like white bread to anyone with a brain. America wants articles about cute kittens playing with Gorillas.. well hell, serve it up.. we'll find a way to make it pseudo scientific... the concerned housewives who have CNN in the background want to hear more about some pseudo scientific news topic.. here it is on a Yellow Platter, wrapped in 'you'll sound smart at dinner' conventional wisdom.
For a while you guys were loosing me because you were so stuck on global warming,and I ain't denying it, but it got old, and after a while, it felt like you were insulting my intelligence by telling the same story about guys on a glacier taking measurements again and again.. I got friends who do this work, quit making it exotic for the people in Sheboygan when there are still truly exotic things happening in the world. You are getting scooped by Discovery Magazine, where the intelligent but nomenclature illiterate can still go to actually learn about science, so how out some geography for a change, or how bout showing me a beautiful world it actually still takes balls to get to, not some place regurgitated from '1001 Places To Go Before Your Yuppie Boss Fires You'.. And I am not even taking on here what the heck happened to the weird conspiracy theory End of Mayan Calendar garbage that their TV channel put's out on more than occasionally.
I feel like this all started with Ballard, or maybe the board of directors got stuck in some Georgetown or Tacoma Park Chatterbox where they just like to hear how smart they are, but this isn't what the magazine was originally about. I feel like ever since they covered Titanic and Ballard (and incidentally swallowed a huge cover story, not that I am complaining about secretly recovering nuclear material) or maybe it was the Hologram Issue when I was a kid, somehow they fell for whiz bang when the resigned themselves to the fact that the world is getting smaller, but the world keeps changing,and in it's recesses as well there are some pretty cool things still growing in the cracks, that aren't endangered..maybe I am selling them short, maybe I don't know what it's like to be in their editorial meetings, but I feel like it must be like working for Lucas Films with the Chinese plush toy manufacturer on speed dial.. this was a Society, not a network.. get did of Nat Geo Travel and Kids, and all the stupid idiots who grew up obsessed with watch commercials trying to figure out how to spend their inherited millions, and are reliving the latest micro event on Everest, and show me the world again.. please.. so I have someplace to dream about going from Wappinger Falls again. Get some reporters with balls, like from Vice Magazine or that guy who danced all over the world, (Where the Hell is Matt? At least it was beautiful!) and get back to what made us dream, not just stroking our national pride in some mad chase of the latest editorial trend.. for God's sake, you guys were part of our national dignity, our intellectual purview of the world, and I feel like it just washed down the Mayan Calendar drain..

In Mexico...

I often times find myself pondering who knows more about life, virgin's or whores.
It feels as if the precipice from innocence to jadedness is most profound in this culture where currently all manner of vice and violence is as closely available as the corner store, Mexico. In America, we see Los Angeles this way, as a place you go to lose your innocence, but not only does it pale in comparison to mostly Urban Mexico in terms of cheaply decadent emotional wreckage, the new ploy in LA has been Kardashianized, 'The Virgin Whore'. Few Mexicans would endeavor to be both... the point of combining the two is lost on them (and on me to some degree...).. somehow women, and I guess men here as well, go from something childish and content to something desperate and in search of satisfaction in an instant in the barrios of the United States of Mexico, or perhaps it is two Mexico's living side by side ignoring each other's ploy.. one heading to school each day dreaming of braces, a new f-150, and a baptismal party for their children, complete with Pinata, and the other roams the streets at night searching for the next fix at any price, but somehow content in some way that it lives the more honest life of the two...
If I find anything compelling about Mexico it is that confidence. I have seen it from Tapachula to Tijuana, and it's proven to me that poverty isn't a dusty finca and a flea covered mule, it's this urban stuff that is the true lowest rung, and they know how to look you in the eye..
That willingness to toy with traditional life, but abandon it for true darkness at any price.. the confidence that comes from some odd notion that they are drinking the purest nectar of wisdom from the darkest bottom of the world's deepest barrel.
This notion has spread somewhat south through Central America but somehow been stopped by the Darien Gap, somewhat stopped in Nicaragua to be accurate.. Only in places will you find such consumptive desperation in South America, but it is rarely so individual.. that is why one has to go to Mexico to find the deepest wisdom of the whore, it appears.. for all else in Latin America the gig is some combination of innocence or indifference, although the mentality of the whore is spreading south as I said.. Buddha might say for better, the Pope would say for worse..
Perhaps therein lies the essential problem of a modern Latin America, the languor that settles in outside of these pits of Mexican depravity, for no role models exist for the post addictive lifestyle, only the two old options of indulgent ones drunk and singing on the doorstop at night, and the simplified myth of the self denial  of Christ. Unlike Asia where innocence is a myth deflated, and most seem to spend their time deciding what 'mistake' to make next, or Europe, where enlightenment has made such questions a point of mockery over glasses of wine, in Latin America, Argentina and Brazil perhaps excepted, no one validates the hungers and the lusts as a normal part of life except for those selling it, and there is no 'French Model' for trying a little and getting used to it... so the polarity of virgin whiteness and diving into the deep end persist, with it's life lessons coming fast, nowhere so fast as in Mexico...

How Yuppies Think

You have likely heard the term.. A lyricised acronym for Young Urban Professional, basically people who have, well, professions, they were the also-rans in college, the guys you always had a running joke with but never felt like baring your soul to... you were kind of underwhelmed with what they did with their life, knew they came from a nice enough family, but always kind of worried about what they really had to give.. They became famous in movies from the 80's, the decade when America made a clean break from it's working and rural class pasts, and created a shiny new world separate from practical realities other than economics. Movies like Working Girl, and like Melanie Griffith, they seemed prey to appetites that others would find a little pedestrian, like Antonio Banderas. They seemed to live a fantasy deferred, and talked about the future and what they would have and do someday. And that fantasy always seemed a bit sad, like something to please their father, but you would never tell them you felt so... They eventually became the but of jokes, and moved into a weird bubble that seemed artificial. After a while, it became harder and harder to give a shit about them... this is how they think:

• Yuppies like the path of least resistance. This makes them by definition mediocre, and on some level unprincipled.
• Yuppies get their ideals from their friends and family, not from learning about historical figures of role models
• Yuppies need approval
• Yuppies will mouth any platitude, but deep down inside they are in it for #1
• Yuppies rarely have a legitimate connection to their surroundings, which they usually view as inferior to some other place they abstractly dream of being. it makes it easier to live with a consumer mentality that they are rewarding themselves for some perceived suffering or deferred satisfaction in a place they are too good for.. if they took the time to realize what was really going on around them, the construct would fall apart, and they would have to divert from the path of least resistance which is usually a well paying job, and a perception of a compromised existence that 4/5 of the world would kill for...
• Yuppies would have no problem seeing others suffer to make their life or the lives of those they think they love safer...
• Yuppies equate money with all the rewards that are worth having in life.. They crave financial security at the behest of all else.
• When yuppies are in charge.. They stack the deck.
• Yuppies like to drink... They think it is a reward, and they only way they can have fun.
• Yuppies like safe edgy, and are afraid to venture into true fetish or pleasure seeking at the behest of security. In other words, Yuppies Love Vegas, but if they loved Tijuana, they would stop being yuppies and become something all together more sordid but human... Which might be their greatest fear.
• Yuppies always claim to want silence and peace and a chance to think, some beach vacation where nothing happens, but in fact, it is the thing they are most afraid of.
• Yuppies, no matter how much they claim to love rebellion and spontaneity, will judge you and discount you if you have not constantly made the same financially self advancing rational and logical decisions they have made.
• Yuppies believe they set the standards for normalcy in behavior, and that doing so is a virtue.
• They judge things outside them by the distance they deviate from that norm
• Yuppies are obsessed with Cancer. Since they play it safe in almost all regards, they feel like Cancer is the one thing that can sneak up on them and ruin the fun they are having being the norm. They mourn people who die of cancer as victims, and they love to mourn victims, since being a victim implies innocence, and they love to see innocence as a virtue. Innocence is usually defined by doing what is socially acceptable, and expecting to not be singled out or mistreated as a result.
• Yuppies love Coldplay, U2, and Wilco. These bands make their money preying upon the emotions of people who are fulfilling other's versions or fantasies of happiness, but are unwilling to stop doing so because they feel it makes them 'virtuous' and 'selfless'.

New York

People move to New York City to kill their inner child...there is something they don't like about it, something vulnerable, undeveloped.. naive, which is perhaps the greatest kiss of death explanation they can give you... I say 'they' because I grew up in NYC, and these days I love to act naive.. it feels... well.. childish. You see, growing up there being a child had it's detractors, it was beaten out of you for a number of reasons, so I went elsewhere to be a kid, to find what they had all left behind in their rush to be BCC, Big City Cool... I wanted to see where all these pretentious honor students from the Midwest were coming from, what they left behind, what embarrassment, what ruined by insufficient status high school relationship had so crushed them that the only solution was to run to the sunless canyons where they would never believe I walked as a toddler petting dogs and riding bikes, in search of endless rejection and edge, perfection or masochistic pleasure but never both.. endless consumption of culture so rare as to be endemic only to such a place as this, a seething sea of voracious minds frail and gaunt from the endless high that is 'the' city..
The reasons for stamping out childhood in the Jungle were many, and came from different people in different ways, but it was one thing that all New Yorkers seemed to agree on..
The Old School guys would remind you that you had responsibilities.. that being a child of such a city gave you a mantle of authority not to be shirked... you had responsibilities to somehow lead, to not just be any old kid searching for fun around the corner. You had a job to do.. you come from New York, and the world will look to you for leadership.. this was the Noblis Oblige of the classicists, don't you realize how lucky you are kid, who needs trees when you got Broadway... where would the next Julius Ceasar come from if not from Rome?!
Then there were the 'Almost Made It's', who realized how, in sad hindsight, they were only hanging out with kids because they hadn't somehow started 'it' soon enough, that special skill they game to hawk but found out that 200 could hawk it better and only 50 could pay the bills with it in the worlds greatest meritocracy.. they would teach you that now was not the time to play with toys and idly away opportunity... you must refine while the clay is still fit to be molded.. then there are the seekers, come to the city with no particular ambition but with a bold desire to never go back from where they came from, to never imbibe the filtered and derivative.. for them, childishness is Disney and Disney is commercial and therefore of a place other than New York, a luxury of those who truly will take what they are given instead of deciding what they want, so no, you can stuff your fairy tales, since the world is a dangerous place, and why pretend otherwise, because in some sad way they are afraid to ever again indulge that part of them that would want comfort over truth, kid, since what a false hope it will turn out to be, so they impose upon you the endless indignities of their life in a 400 sq ft walk up miles from anything and call it virtue...
and last but not least your buddies will teach you, brother to brother, the perils of looking vulnerable. They will teach you to sound like a man as a boy, to keep your money in your sock or underwear, a practice you never questioned until you were a teenager, and they will teach you to 'hold your own', but they will neglect to remind you to be yourself( and potentially for the best.. Who they hell could you be with all this weight on you?).
I know how good you are, or how you will never be good enough (and that you secretly love that fact..), now can I please go back to playing with my blocks and throwing Wet Soggies out the window...!? This is just one more place for god's sake, don't let it get to you.. One more... Really good place..
Some guy wrote a song called New York I Love You, but You Are Bringing Me Down..
He's voicing the attitude.. sigh, of group two, but somehow the tone says the same thing I want to say.. Take it away Kermit, perhaps perfectly, one contribution of NYC to a pretty well rounded childhood..a creature of the Mississippi Delta though Hensen might have been, he came too...
http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=-eohHwsplvY&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D-eohHwsplvY
Oh, and..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKYChph3meg&sns=em

Sentimentality and it's failures..

It has been something I notice more an more that the more sentimental a people are prone to be, the less they tend to their surroundings..
The sad paradox of this is that the nicer the surroundings, often the less sentimental the people, the less they seem to be enjoying it. They are either too busy trying to improve it, or have a hard time feeling that way... Thus the Scottish farmer lives in a virtual paradise of green while the Latin Intellectual usually lives in a cement tomb of imagination... and both come across as discontent..

Who's Zooming Who?: Libertarianism and Corporatism

One thing I have learned is that any genuine Libertarian doesn't like at all the charge of Corporatism, and is ready to quickly argue that their theories mean a level playing field for all, and I take that at face value, as libertarianism is a philosophy, in so much as anyone should give a shit about politics, that I do appreciate. I have seen the benefits of it in some of the wilder places on earth.. but the world is a crowded place these days, and our action can have deep impact in unseen ways, and it's hard to just turn and set a course for libertarian utopia from a lot of the places we are right now as modern nations. I love that New Zealand deregulated and de-incentivized it's agriculture, and after about 5 years was flying high, but New Zealand is a small and prosperous place.
My appreciation stated, I want to offer a link to this PBS episode, which I could back up with personal insight into one of these mentioned Libertarian Organizations, 80% of which they say I would nod some sort of agreement to, but want to just let speak for it's self. Some of the best info is at the very end, so if you have patience, follow it through what might seem like a kind of Liberal introduction, and a lazy middle, as there is some compelling honesty here:
http://m.video.pbs.org/video/2296684923/
The Thesis that a libertarian can take away might be that they are being used, not to state the obvious, but it doesn't necessarily make them wrong.. but it is also hard for many people to see defiant Selfishness as a virtue if you are still going to drive the Queen's Roads..

Little Toe's

My Little Toe's seem to hang off and be kind of superfluous... The part of me that is German sometimes wants to cut them off because carrying them around seems like a waste. I wonder how many generations it will be before they fall off?
Seriously!