We'd better get moving if we want to stay ahead of the weather

Good afternoon! Today is the darkest, most brutal storm of the century here in Chicago. They say that this storm is gonna have more of some kind of barometric pressure than the one that sank the old Edmund Fitzgerald all those years ago and subsequently gave birth to that terrible Gordon Lightfoot song (ed. Note: does it seem strange to anyone else that ‘lightfoot’ is recognized by my spellcheck [but in a SHOCKING twist ‘spellcheck’ is not!] Seems like someone over at the software-making place has some highly dynamic taste in shitty music).

Well, I’m in the thick of it right now. I’m watching some trees whip around and checking out some dude bringing kegs into a bar. Seems downright terrifying out there. I mean, fuck. The traffic cones are threatening to blow over. There are clouds covering almost half the sky! OOOOOOOOH. I battened down the hatches at my house for this shit, people. Took in all the shit off my porch, boarded up the windows, got some whiskey and some toilet paper and some drinking water and the last coke on earth and buried it in an underground bunker and for what? The Edmund Fitzgerald was obviously a total pussy of a boat. There. I said it. I mean, I wouldn’t want to be walking around all elderly and wearing a sail right by the highway or anything, but I’m hardly terrified by the weather today.

Frankly, it’s a bunch of hooey; the climactic equivalent of the 24 hour punditry that derails important news and makes (for example) some Yosimite Sam looking Koran burning hick, or a rehabbed Burlington coat factory a front page story. The weather people finally got their own Terry Jones in this storm with the catchy trappings of a famous boat and song and the thrills of almost unheard of barometric readings (hold onto your seats!) and they’re off! Only problem is that shit’s not all that devastating and well…the whole thing is easily debunked by, you know, looking out the window.

This kind of sensationalism, however, gets harder when you’re talking about things that you can’t just walk outside and stand in, like say, when people started saying that getting your kids vaccinated would lead to autism. Never mind that on one side was the whole medical community, doctors, nurses, researchers: you know, the people who know what the fuck is going on, saying things like “um, this is not true, and in fact, it’s gonna lead to shit like whooping cough and measles and so on having a resurgence (which is happening as we speak, actually), so seriously, please PLEASE vaccinate your child” and on the other side was respected iconoclastic medical personality Jenny McCarthy. I mean, um…

This should have not even been an issue. Jenny was parroting the ideas of a UK doctor who has since admitted that his claims had no basis in research results or any other sort of fact, and who has subsequently been thrown in jail for peddling his pseudoscience. There’s no point where the quack and the former host of Singled Out (look it up, kids) should have been given an equal platform alongside all the Rest of the Medical Professionals in the World, but a funny thing has happened in our 24 hour media cycle of a universe. Suddenly, two opposing viewpoints can be presented as THE two sides of an argument (see: should we build a mosque right on Ground Zero or not? Which side are you on [notice there’s no room for the {highly logical} ‘um, this isn’t a mosque and it’s not at ground zero’ viewpoint])? and voila! We’ve got people not vaccinating their kids because some dipshit with a communications degree and 24 hours to fill decided that putting the skanky wingnut and highly dangerous fringe up against the entirety of rational thought, pragmatic and responsible discourse and general sanity would be a great idea because it’ll play and create follow up stories that can fill subsequent 24 hour cycles ad infinitum.

In a way, it reminds me of religion. And here’s what I mean: There’s no inherent difference between hardass atheists and fundamental religious people. They’re both arrogant and cocksure and refuse to listen to any opposing viewpoints and they’re both pretty much talking out of their asses when it comes to their ideologies, because the ‘big questions’ of the universe don’t have answers, so no: you’re not right, atheist prick, and no, you’re not right, fundamentalist religious nutjob. You’re just both arrogant deesh that don’t really know what you’re talking about and won’t listen to reason.

BUT, the thing that happens all too often is that the smug atheist is placed up against a person from a specific faith, and at that point, the game becomes totally skewed. I mean, there’s a legit debate in “is there a higher power/something more than science and dirt and recycled energy and entropy” but when it comes down to “Is Jesus the son of god, or is there no god,” well, come on…if those are my choices, I’d be an idiot not to side with the atheists. The bible, as we all know, is full of recycled stories from Egyptian, greek and other various mythologies and well, (spoiler alert!) it’s all a bunch of bullshit. You’d have to be kind of retarded to really, truly in your soul think that the bible is anything more than a haphazard handbook, hastily amended and rewritten hundreds of thousands of times that’s kind of oriented towards a general idea of how to deal with the possibility of something greater existing out there. To think of it in terms of any specifics at all is just dumb. A guy who was living in the middle east 2000 years ago wasn’t friends with people named John and Matthew and Paul, for starters. It’s just not an accurate document. BUT, for whatever reason, people insist on giving this one highly wacky perspective a fifty percent share in the entire talk of cosmic perspective.

That’s why, if you get your news from talking head tv, you’re likely kind of stupid. It’s not your fault, and it’s not to say that you’re not educated, but you’ve been ingesting a dumb dualistic view of a highly polyglot world that can’t be easily reduced to for/against arguments, and the idea of the entire perspective is based in no small part on the programming ideas of dumb people that work for TV and have to fill up time in schedules.

Anyway, long story short: this storm ain’t shit.