As IF Times

link Director James Cameron says BP turned down help offer – Yahoo! News.

Why doesn’t someone just listen to this guy?  He’s obviously convinced that his ability to create fake characters and make believe worlds has also conferred upon him  the powers to do real life things.  In fact, if I may be so bold, I can suggest a way in which Cameron can easily fix the Gulf leak.  Invent an avatar that can swim to depths of a mile underwater and bring along numerous rolls of Mighty Fix It, that silicon product that’s being hawked on network TV.  Once the cartoon, oops, the avatar wraps up the opening in the pipe, tada!

Of course, this wouldn’t be interesting entertainment.  You’d have to script a love interest as well, so other cartoons would have to be written in before the actual fix can occur. In line with what happens in the movies, this should all be resolved in about two and half hours.

At sea level, pressure on a body is about 14 psi.  In water, according to calculations, pressure at about 1 mile beneath the ocean’s surface is about 2400 psi, enough to crush any human being without sufficient body fat to withstand the enormous forces, except perhaps Michael Moore.  Cameron would have to design an especially rigorous cartoon in order to survive these great depths.  This may not be as easy as it sounds, since there are logistics involved.  Will the cartoon be a male or a female character? Will it be a white, blue, or some indistinguishable amalgam of ethnic make up?  Will they have 4 fingers or only 3 as per most cartoons? Would they be able to handle the rolls of Mighty Fix It with only 3 fingers?

Another possibility is to employ creatures that are already capable of moving at those depths.  Why not enlist  whales or giant squids to help plug the pipeline ala Flipper?  If only serving to give rides down to the leak site for the cartoons, or at least to hold the flashlights, these creatures can be of great help.  All of this may be moot however, because the ultimate solution is to create a time machine which would allow us to go back and cancel the leak in the first place.  All these solutions are possible…in his fermenting head. 

Sadly for us, Cameron happens to live in the real world, not the make believe planet that he seems to inhabit with many of the Hollywood delusional set.  For many of these people, reality is something the regular folk have to deal with.  They live in a world of fawning agents and adoring fans, leading their fantasy lives  in the fake worlds they populate.  And that’s all fine.  In order for these people to be ‘good’ at pretending to be other people, I suppose they have to buy into the fantasy completely.  For most of them however, having to deal with the realities of a world where things don’t get tied up neatly in 2 hours is a huge shock and they are probably wholly unprepared for those results. 

The only person who came out of the hollywood miasma with any vision was Ronald Reagan and he was successful because his ideas were rooted in reality and common sense, ideas  which stood him far apart from the elitist Hollywood crowd.  However, for every one of him you have an ocean of fantasy life entertainers who purport to have solutions to society’s ills, people with no real life experience.   The truly sad part is, they can actually convince some of the public to believe them.  The first few lines of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody sums this up for me:

Is this the real life?

Is this just fantasy?

Caught in a landslide

No escape from reality…..

These people are entertainers.  They have decided to sidestep an education in hard sciences, math, physics or  engineering in order to capitalize on their skills at make believe.  Can you imagine in any other culture or time when the rulers would take the advice of the court jesters for military or economic guidance? Picture the scene circa 1491 or so in Spain.  Chris Columbus is asking for dough to explore for a path to the west indies by ship.  “Oh wait”, the Queen exclaims, “let me consult with my juggler.”  Or imagine if you wound up at a bar in the seedy side of town surrounded by hostiles.  Would you want 120 pound  Henry Winkler, aka the Fonz to come in and “heyyy” the thugs away?  As if.

Getting back to Cameron, talented as he is and with intents that are undoubtedly sincere, let’s just keep his fantasies on the screen and away from real life before he makes us all blue.

link The Associated Press: Obama pledges changes to avert future spills.

Future students of history and civilization will study this last half century period in America and will no doubt be fascinated by the various official responses to national calamities.  In addition to the linked story above is the news that the present Attorney General, Eric Holder is making a personal appearance in the Gulf region presumably to ascertain what legal actions can be taken in the wake of this big oil leak.  The administration has also let it be known that a commission will be organized to investigate what to do and to make more laws.  This makes sense to whom?  A massive engineering problem arises requiring experts from all kinds of technical disciplines to try to resolve and the government sends in…. lawyers???

As if every ailment that affects society has a legal solution. Western society has been conditioned to think that somehow, legal resolutions are the ultimate cure all.  The first instinct for most when some misfortune befalls them is to call a lawyer and why not? This seems to be the civilized way to act in a decent society.  Except that what will ultimately happen is people will tire of the inanity of this mindset and will revolt.  As the current raging rancor over Arizona’s immigration laws demonstrate, people will flout laws anyway if no one is going to enforce them.  Why go to the trouble of engaging shiploads of lawyers to create laws if no one bothers to enforce them?  Is this not just a massive make-work program for lawyers?

The tragically flawed delusion inflicted upon society that somehow lawyers and laws are the salvation of all has reached comical proportions.  Massive oil leak? Send in lawyers. Gas pedal sticking in your Toyota? Call in the lawyers.  A business like Microsoft too succesful? You guessed it, get lawyers involved. As I mentioned in a previous post, just wait for the lawsuits from college graduates who can’t find jobs after spending a small fortune in tuition. 

In direct contradiction to a society that supposedly nurtures self determination and initiative, byzantine and nuisance laws actually discourage human development and impedes the progress of people.  Just today, there is the news story of a woman who is suing Google for giving her map directions which placed her in the middle of a highway where she was injured by traffic, see here: http://www.nydailynews.com/tech_guide/2010/05/31/2010-05-31_lauren_rosenberg_sues_google_blames_faulty_google_maps_directions_after_being_hi.html  Not surprisingly, this woman is from California where the altered state is the preferred state.

This state of delusion has formed a society in which finger pointing is the default response for all events affecting our individual lives.  The gulf oil leak as covered by the media is focused upon legal heads arguing over who’s at fault for the catastrophe.  Apparently the blame reaches all the way to the first Bush administration.  In line with legal tactics, everyone involved with the leak can expect to be found somewhat culpable for the fiasco.  British Petroleum certainly, but what of all the suppliers to the rig site?  What of the providers of steel, of the manufacturers of the drilling machinery?  What of the State or Federal bodies that granted permits for the drilling?  What about the financial institutions that financed the project?  What about the people who provided food to the workers on the rig?  Will they be roped in as well since they ‘enabled’ the drilling to take place?

It appears that we’re well past the point where reams of laws and more importantly, the mentality of the legal system  can be seen to be protecting the people.  We are now well into the stage where the legal requirements governing people’s everyday lives behave more like sand in the gears than the lubricant they should be.  Years ago, a book by a former Jurist, Catherine Crier wrote a book entitled The Case Against Lawyers, which described the many ways in which the law profession was undermining society by creating an unfair legal system.  Onerous laws and regulations are in large part responsible for migration of many core industries to other emerging nations.   Businesses would recoil at the thought of having the Mafia extort protection money from them as a cost of doing business.  Onerous laws and regulations are exactly the same thing, except….who protects us from the lawyers?

The worst part of what has happened is that entire generations of bright minds have been sucked into the lure of the law racket because it  continues to be a lucrative profession regardless of economic cycles.  The consequence is that bright minds have been diverted from doing things that can actually benefit society, in areas of medical research and engineering for example.  As long as people can succeed in life by pointing fingers for a living, that’s unlikely to change.