Tron: Best In Show, appearing now in an arena near you

Wherein I propose that the Tron films can be read as a metaphor for dog culture and a criticism of the kennel club system.

If there was one day of the year that parents would not have to take the kids to the movies to entertain them, you’d think it’d be Christmas day where weeks of planning and big budgets would keep the rugrats busy playing with their haul of new toys.  But apparently parents suck at picking gifts or the toys the kids want never live up to the hype and a movie is the perfect way to shut them up from all the complaining.

So if you didn’t want to watch Patton, Valkyrie, or Inglourious Basterds on cable (what’s with the Nazi theme on Christmas?), you might have seen Tron: Legacy this holiday.

Although you might miss it if you don’t have dogs on the brain, I can’t help but see the plot as a critique on the same issue that is plaguing the culture of canine kennel clubs: the pursuit of perfection via genetic purity.

In the original film, Kevin Flynn is a laid off programmer trying to prove that his intellectual property is the code behind ENCOM corporation’s business success and revolutionary new virtual world.  The evil CEO of the company has not only kicked Flynn out but has installed an oppressive new “Master Control Program” which has so far prevented Flynn from accessing his original files and proving his authorship.

So instead of filing a lawsuit, Flynn attempts to hack the ENCOM computers with successive generations of a program he has written and which he tries to improve to a level that will finally overcome the MCP.  He names this program Clu, and it’s an expression of Flynn’s talent and ego in digital form, and “hacking” is represented by various gaming simulations that are reminiscent of Pong and  Battle Tanks.

When Clu fails, Flynn retools the program and sends him into the ring again.

Besides fending off attempts to reveal the charade, the MCP also seeks to improve itself and the virtual world by determining which programs are optimal and which are deficient.  Deficient  programs are discarded in a form of blood sport where they are pitted against each other in gladiatorial combat.

All programs in the world have their vital information stored in a data disc which they wear on their backs.  This is both a weapon and a shield from attacks.  When a program loses their data disc, they don’t die but they are prevented from meaningful interaction with the world.

When Clu proves ineffective in vanquishing the MCP, Flynn himself is accidentally digitized and sucked into the virtual world, taking over for Clu in the fight against the MCP.  Flynn succeeds and the movie ends with him in control of ENCOM.

ENCOM’s MCP is the kennel club. It is large, oppressive, and seeks to gain control of all the individual types of programs that it can.  It thinks that the more programs it appropriates, the smarter and more powerful it is.  It also believes that it is smarter due to this monopoly than the individual programs are: it inexplicably knows more about actuarial science than the actuarial program does.  Rebels are cast out and good ideas are appropriated and promptly botched in execution.

The Master Control Program’s goal is the collection of breed standards.  It dictates the Platonic ideal of what a program should be.  The competitive methods used to test programs against the ideal don’t really make sense at all, but since the MCP is already large and growing it bull dozes over any who would rebel against it.

The gladiatorial games are the breed ring.  This is where the actuarial program fights the tax software in a game of digital Jai Alai or Frisbee Tag to prove which one is worthy of further existence.  Never mind that one could easily test the actuarial program against real data or test the tax software against the real work it’s supposed to do… Dodge Ball is deemed a perfectly good test to measure which programs get to propogate their code and which are stripped of their data discs.

The data discs are the pedigrees: the record of past success, current ability, and the ticket into the game.  No pedigree, no entry.  In many cases, the disc is more valuable than the program itself.  Some programs use their disc to knock the ground out from under other programs, not defeating the programs themselves but slanting the environment in their favor.

The programs are the dogs.  They are the genetic code rewritten over generations from previous iterations by the “user” sent out to compete for the user’s benefit.  Real functional programs don’t have to bother with the games, they actually get work done, but the programs that once worked but no longer do get to play games in the ring and pretend that it’s a good measure of their worth.  We never actually see the programs that win in the games go back and do real work.  In fact, we don’t see much work being done at all and the going religion is that the “users” who ask the programs to work, are actually a myth.

The victory of the Jeff Bridge’s character in the game and out signals that it’s really all about the “users” anyway, the programs are just a side show.

Although dogs certainly weren’t featured in the original Tron, I think the analogy is pretty solid.

Tron Dog: User's Best Friend

In the sequel, this extended metaphor becomes even more blatant and critical of dog culture.  Not only do we have the addition of a literal rescue dog to the story, we also have dialog which links the dog to one of the main characters in a relevant manner.

After wrestling control of the virtual world from the MCP, Kevin Flynn resurrects his Clu program and promises it that together they shall build a “perfect” virtual utopia.  This is our hero’s tragic fault: the quest for perfection.  In his desire to perfect Clu (his breeding program) and perfect the virtual world (the kennel club), Flynn fails to appreciate that perfection is unattainable and subjective but computer programs are deterministic and objective.  Minor flaws in human understanding can become critical flaws in the code (genetic or otherwise).  In the original film Flynn beats the MCP by having it try to solve an unsolvable problem.  This confuses and slows the machine and gives Flynn the crucial advantage.

What’s novel about the sequel is that it also deals with new genetic variations.  Whereas all the original programs are the products of human “users” and later programs arise from this first generation of programs, and at some point new code manifests itself in the virtual world ab nihilo in the form of “isomorphic algorithms.”

Isomorphism has a specific meaning in science: literally “same form” in Greek, the term is applied to objects that have the same fundamental properties.  The two sides of an equation are isomorphic, as you can apply rule to both sides to change their appearance but the relationship is maintained.  Isomorphisms also connect symbols with their real world counterparts, and as such they represent the meaning we find between reality and abstraction.

Analogizing the content of the movie to represent the real world kennel club is a proposed isomorphism.  The more similarities we find between the symbols in the movie and the reality of dog culture, the more meaning the analogy has.

This concept is detailed in Gödel, Escher, Bach where Douglas Hofstadter discusses how isomorphisms bring meaning to systems composed of otherwise meaningless elements.

In Legacy, the isomorphic algorithms (ISOs) are viewed by Kevin Flynn as keys to expanding knowledge and finding truth, but Clu determines that they are imperfect and without merit.  He’s jealous of the attention and value that Flynn places on these organic programs.

The ISOs are the dogs that exist outside of the kennel club system: purpose built dogs, dogs of unknown pedigree, land races, hybrids, mutts, and new mutations.  As isomorphs, they have meaning not in seeking perfection but in existential value, rational value.

One hot Isomorphic Algorithm, Quorra. That dog can hunt.

Clu sees Flynn’s appreciation of the ISOs as a flaw, an imperfection, and so humans are imperfect.  Thus, humans and ISOs must be removed from the equation.  Clu believes that perfection is real and attainable and he institutes policies to achieve it.  Like humans who have tried to construct utopias, this results in a massive Draconian bureaucracy.  Clu overthrows Flynn, who becomes trapped within the virtual world and left marginalized hiding “off the grid” while Clu institutionalizes “perfection” and plots to bring his vision out into the real human world as well.

He carries out a genocide of the ISOs and only one ISO survives in the form of the delicious Quorra who is protected and shepherded by Flynn in his secret home off the grid.  Despite Clu’s repeated attempts to kill her, Quorra is superior to his perfect programs.  Clu tries to capture and use Flynn’s biological son, Sam, to bridge the gap into the imperfect human world where he can not only attain absolute power over the virtual realm to destroy both Kevin Flynn and Quorra, he can also cleanse the human world of imperfect humans.  The key to bridge the worlds is Kevin Flynn’s data disc (the perfect Platonic form).  If Clu can capture that disc, he can literally know the mind of god and escape the virtual realm.

The resolution of the plot speaks harshly against the kennel club culture:

• The pursuit of perfection above all is the villain’s tragic flaw.
• The villain installs a Draconian bureaucracy to enforce this “perfection.”
• This heartless world is thus governed by a rigid and unthinking document instead of rational but imperfect human beings.
• The arbitrary games eventually destroy almost all those who enter the ring.
• The imperfect humans prove superior at every turn to the examples of programmed perfection.  The programs only succeed because they have a situational advantage.
• Choosing to resolve problems in the artificial world instead of the real world is the flaw which launches the drama in the first film.
• Neglecting his own biological son in favor of his virtual clone Clu is the sin which launches the drama in the second film.
• The humans defeat the programs at their own game by choosing not to play the game at all.
• The downfall of both the MCP and Clu comes about when they outgrow their original purpose and seize too much power.
• Both villains suffer from logical absolutisms: MCP seeking absolute power through acquiring all programs of merit and Clu seeking absolute perfection through purging of the imperfect.
• The hero of the first film finds but a temporary victory from conquering the MCP from within; it’s only after the distorted philosophy is conquered and the virtual world itself is abandoned that the threat is abated.  A corrupt philosophy even freed from the initial despotism inevitably lead to a new and destructive despotism.
• The happy ending of both films involves breaking free and living outside of the oppressive system.  To live in the real world governed by nature’s laws not in the carefully constructed but artificial utopia.
• Flynn’s biological son, not his ideal clone-like program proves not only superior but the fitting legacy to his life and values.
• Interaction with the “perfect algorithms” damages Quorra’s body, making her lame.  They repair her by fixing her corrupted digital DNA.  The system can’t do this, only the user who is not bound by the system’s rules can.
• The biological son and Quorra find their happy ending not in the ideal utopia where they can play gods, but in the dirty and imperfect real world.
• Sam Flynn’s initial attack on the blind corporatism of ENCOM was represented by an image of his “rescue dog,” a virus that negated ENCOM’s monopoly on operating system software.
• Later, Quorra refers to herself as a “rescue” like Sam’s dog; saved from the genocide carried out against the imperfect ISOs by Kevin Flynn.
• The older, organic technics in the film prove superior to the newer models built for perfection and aesthetic appeal, especially when piloted by the biological son Sam and the “new blood” ISO Quorra.  The LightCar in particular proves to be more adaptable and contain more reserve code that can be applied to varied terrain and challenges versus the new LightBikes which are only of value on-grid.
• It’s only Sam and Quorra who are valuable enough to save in the end.  Kevin, for his sins, must pay the ultimate price and the MCP and Clu are destroyed.

Rewatch Tron: Legacy with dogs on the brain and you’ll appreciate how it’s a pretty strong indictment of not only the folly of seeking Platonic ideals but of the rejection of the organic, the imperfect, and the complex.  No meaning, only suffering, is found in the pursuit of the ideal.  Meaning comes only from connecting symbols with reality.  It’s also not enough to change a regime from within if you maintain the bogus philosophy which constructed it in the first place.  Even with the best intentions, corrupt thought leads to tragedy.

It was always a privilege to speak before our Veterans and in some small way say thank you for their service and sacrifice.

Christopher Paul Landauer
Cherry Creek High School
Grade 12
Given on several occasions in 1999

Sacred Honor

In the last words of the Declaration of Independence, the signers made a solemn promise to the cause of freedom:  ”With a firm Reliance on the Protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”  To the English king these words were high treason.  In the War of Independence that followed, all the signers became hunted men.  Five of them paid with their lives.  Seventeen lost everything they owned.  But in the end, they kept their promise of freedom and independence to all Americans who followed them.

Our Constitution is the fulfillment of their sacred promise.  It stands as a flaming torch above the tidal waves of tyranny that have swept country after country into oceans of despair.  It is an elegant, simple document based on a profound principle: that common men can govern themselves, turnover power peaceably, and become great nations—without kings, without dictators, and without privileged classes.

The endurance of our Constitution lies in the first three words:  ”We the people.”  Every citizen is included in all three branches of our government.  All citizens influence these branches by direct vote, by representative vote, and by direct participation.  We the people decide who will be chief executive, we the people decide who will make our laws.  We the people sit on juries that decide justice and we the people vote for who will judge us.  These are the rights of all free men.  And these are the duties of each American citizen.

The Constitution forged a mighty chain made up of American citizens that stretches from you and me, across two centuries of time, to Washington and Jefferson.  The chains of our Constitution have endured the searing red flames of invasion, civil war, world wars, economic depressions, and a succession of evil ideologies that would rob us of our freedoms.  But will the chains of our Constitution survive the rust and corrosion of our own apathy, cynicism, and laziness?

It is ominous that in 1999 many Americans demand more rights, but reject their duties.  The centuries have dimmed their understanding that every one of our hard-earned rights comes with a duty.  A duty that cannot be ignored, or avoided, or shunted aside.

Before all other duties, we owe our country the duty to defend it from our enemies.  To serve when called.  If need be, to give up our lives.  As Thomas Jefferson foresaw, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”  Our Constitution is written in the blood of a million patriots.  In every generation, thousands of Americans have paid with their lives so that the rest of us can enjoy the blessings of liberty.  Yet, many of my generation reject this duty to serve and defend our country just as many did in the generation before mine, sitting out the Vietnam War in Canada or Sweden. When the war ended, they returned home to enjoy all of the same rights as those who had served.

Look next at our sacred duty to vote.  In the presidential election of 1896, 79% of eligible Americans voted.  One hundred years later in 1996, only 54% voted.  In its original form, the Constitution allowed only free white men over the age of twenty-one to vote.   After five hundred thousand Americans died in the Civil War, Congress passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, freeing the slaves, making them citizens and giving them the right to vote.  In 1996, only 50% of African Americans voted, and only 27% of Hispanics voted.  In 1920 the 19th Amendment was passed by Congress giving women the right to vote.  In 1996, only 55% of women voted.  In 1971, the 26th Amendment lowered the voting age to eighteen from twenty-one.  In 1996, only 31% of the eighteen to twenty year olds voted.  31%.  The trivial reasons for not voting would make Washington and Jefferson and all patriots weep.

Our government is made up of imperfect men.  When our government fails, the cause is not the Constitution.  The cause is the failure of the electorate to vote for honorable leaders.  Millions of Americans have cast aside their sacred right to vote, the one and only weapon that can drive out of our government the morally bankrupt, the incompetent, and the tyrants to be.  The deadly silence of the electorate allows a minority of voters to elect presidents, special interests to dictate our agenda, and a handful of men to squander our tax dollars.  Our founders saw in a majority of common men the collective wisdom to see through lies, false promises and blind ambition.  Surely, we have among us men and women with noble hearts and with fine minds willing to lead.

The judicial branch defines the scope of our morality as a people, our tolerance, and our commitment to equality under the law.  This duty has become sorely abused and twisted.  Our best-educated citizens shun jury duty.  We have allowed lawyers to pervert the system by demanding only jurors with little education and little experience.  We allow politicians to appoint more judges and take from us the right to elect them.  There can only be justice when we all participate.

We deserve better.  Our founders deserve better.   Our future demands better.  49% of our high school seniors do not know that our right to freedom of religion comes from the Constitution.   It is clear that we must restore our Constitution in the minds of each of our citizens, our school children, and our immigrants.  We must teach this generation that knows only peace, the price of that peace and the duties that keep us strong.  In every classroom, in every newspaper, on every television we should demand that our living Constitution be taught, explained, and understood.  We must insist that all citizens learn the Constitution, unvarnished and untainted.

Throughout the land we must restore and renew all the duties upon which our Constitutional rights depend.  We must vote.  We must serve on juries.  We must pay taxes.  We must reject fanatics that despise all government and see only conspiracy and evil wherever they look.  We must flog with disgust the cowards who mock us for loving our country while they desecrate our flag.

Our Constitution is the envy of the world.  It is the bane of tyrants.  It is a bastion of hope for the oppressed of Earth.  We must protect it from those who fear greatness, worship weakness and preach hopelessness.  We cannot let our precious inheritance to be stolen away by the dark and silent thieves, ignorance and indifference.

We must each of us, take upon ourselves the duties of free men.  To read our Constitution, to understand it, and to live the Constitution.  To insist that our lawmakers and judges follow it.  In an imperfect world, governed by the imperfect, our Constitution is the safe broad path between the claws of tyranny and the teeth of anarchy.  On our journey from a glorious past to a noble and glorious future, let no man drop the torch!  Let no man throw away our fire!

It is often said in dog breeding that ‘form follows function.’  While this sort of attention is usually focused on the dogs, I can’t help but notice that the same wisdom applies to the methods of their production.  If we can attempt to construct the ideal form of the dog by analyzing its function, certainly we can reconstruct the ideology behind their breeding by deconstructing the form of the typical kennel.

It’s not a large leap to compare dog breeding to factory farm production, given the obvious parallels between domestic animals produced for food and those produced for companionship; and although most legislation currently treats large scale dog breeding like small time farming, the ethical paradigm of raising pets is incompatible with the efficiencies of factory farming.

Breeders who create puppies using the factory farming paradigm are called puppy mills.  The informed consumer doesn’t want their dog produced in the same manner as their chicken nuggets, and puppy mills are one of the few things the vast majority of the dog world is aligned against.  Still, the larger the breeder, the more their facilities and methods emulate the trappings of factory farming.

The dog kennel, the kibbutz and the concentration camp share several fundamental qualities.  All three are engineered to keep large numbers of living beings in close proximity but still provide a means to isolate them when necessary.  The concentration and segregation is for the explicit benefit of the warden, not the inmates; and the walls and wire fences are the tools which keep the inmates where the warden wants them.

Keeping them close makes inspection, feeding, breeding, culling, and other maintenance tasks easier.  Segregation prevents unwanted interactions and promotes pacification of the subjects.  The kibbutz stands apart from the other two in that participation is voluntary, and there are more cultural and social barriers than physical ones.

All three communal paradigms are tools by which people can achieve their Utopian ideals of creating or maintaining an exemplary future population.  The goal of the kennel is to produce purebred dogs following a Eugenic model using directed selection of mating pairs.  So too is the kibbutz designed to facilitate the mating of Jews with Jews, just as the Lebensborn was designed to facilitate birthing and raising Aryan children.

One aspect which has thrived in kennels but is a contributing factor to the limitation of the efficacy of kibbutzim is inbreeding.  Whereas the inbreeding ethic thrives in the kennel environment, it has been observed that the communal raising of children from a young age with the intent to create future marriages and reinforce the culture and genetics of the community from within largely failed because children reared together from infancy are predisposed against sexual attraction to their siblings/peers.

Whereas the kennel and kibbutz overlap in their function to advance the propagation of genetically pure offspring, the kennel also aligns with the death camp’s suppression of undesirable genetics–and undesirable is defined solely by the warden.  To bring about the Eugenic Utopia, it is insufficient to merely promote preferable mating pairs, one must actively remove deleterious specimens from the breeding pool.  The weak are killed, the questionable are sterilized, and the refugees are slaughtered en masse.  In this regard, the animal shelter is a particular subgroup of kennels much like the death camp is a subgroup of concentration camps, both performing essentially the same function via the same means.

The chart I made above is a rather conservative list of commonalities between the kennel and the konzentrationslager, as many more shared elements exist: wood, wire, and steel cages for confinement; tattoos, ear tags, patches or microchips for easy identification; warehouse-style communal sleeping quarters to pack the most bodies in the least amount of space; mud strewn runs and yards for minimal exercise; concrete, water hoses, and tiled isolation rooms for hygiene; and finally gas chambers and cremation ovens for the “final solution.”

The Konzentrationslager seeks to suppress fertility and the Kibbutz seeks to promote it, so many of the most horrific aspects of the former are absent from the later. But the kennel does both, although not always at the same location.

All three are bound by adhering to fundamentalist Eugenics taken to a scale which necessitates engineering and infrastructure more akin to the factory than the family.

I was out running some errands today and there were a handful of protesters at a busy intersection waving home-made signs like “honk for peace” and “no war for oil.” I laugh at the naieve banality of such idealists. First, that waving signs makes any difference, and second the sheer amount of hypocrisy it takes to bring about such a half-assed roadside protest.

Every component of that sign is made from oil. The foam core, the plastic handle, the paints, the glues: all petroleum based products. The price of any one of those doubles and you won’t see too many out of work “students” waving those signs.

The fact that the protesters’ umbrella awning was made from oil, their ice chest was made from oil, the ice in the ice chest was created using refrigerants made from oil, the plastic bottles holding the water in the ice chest were made from oil, and all the filters, hoses, gaskets, and pumps required to get the water into the bottles are made from oil.

But the hypocrisy doesn’t end there. Some of the protesters decided to have their quarterly bath on the day of the protest so their fellow wack-jobs wouldn’t gag from rancid body oil and human stink. So throw in these necessary oil derived products: shampoo, glycerin soap, hair comb, hair curlers, hair dryer, hair dye, cosmetics and lip stick, deodorant, garden hose with plastic faucet washer, hand lotion, shaving cream, toothpaste and tooth brush.

A fresh change of clothes would require the following oil derived products: man-made fibers in the cloth, dye, detergents, acid wash, politically charged silk screening, and oil saturated Birkenstock shoes with oil tanned leather glued to oil derived rubber soles. The artistically knotted ankle bracelet is also made from oil derived yarns.

Accessorize with posh mylar layered plastic housed sunglasses, plastic cell phone, plastic tongue stud, elastic wrist band and a nature tattoo, all derived from oil.

Most protesters actually choose to wear clothing during their demonstrations of stupidity, but for those who don’t, you’ll also need: sunscreen, cortisone cream for that nasty rash, four colors of body paint, solvent to wash the paint off, insect repellent, and a petroleum encapsulated Extenz dietary supplement so you don’t embarrass yourself any more than you have to.

Your retard friend will need an oil derived bicycle (the rubber tube, the rubber tire, the plastic encased wires, the greased up chain, and the entirely oil made grad student helmet) and an oil derived camera to capture the moment forever.

Oh, and don’t forget the antihistamines for your patchouli allergy, and a molded plastic first aid kit with antiseptic, aspirin, anesthetic, and rubbing alcohol for when the police rough you up…. all made from oil.

And for the socialist love-fest after-party, be sure to bring some condoms, dental dams, and personal lubricant, all brought to you through the magic of oil. After all, protest chicks put out.

This illustration shows a young woman, “Golden Eyes,” dressed in a khaki-colored dress and cap standing with a collie dog named Uncle Sam who holds a “Liberty bond” in his mouth. A nude kewpie-like figure bangs a drum lower left. Their act of patriotism supported American soldiers during World War I.

From Donald McCaig’s The Dog Wars, you’d swear that there were too few working dogs and too much work to do, thus the dire need to “save” the entire breed (all 35,000 new puppies per year) to preserve the working ability only.

But it’s not really so, McCaig admits. In fact, it’s the opposite.

Donald McCaig sings a different tune when he’s talking to fellow sheeple than when he’s pleading the case for his cadre’s supremacy. This is not a new tactic, one story to the ignorant public, another for the in-the-know hobbyists. Notice how his Dog Wars book talks all about the evils of conformation vs. sheep trials, since it’s easy to belittle the pageantry of conformation and it’s clearly not work. But he fails to demonize dog sport in the same manner (at least in the book). Dismiss, yes; belittle, certainly; demonize, no.

Why? Because it’s a hard case to make that Agility is not work. It requires smarts, training, and drive, the only thing missing is the sheep…. and that’s not a bad thing for 99% of us. But with fellow sheeple he talks all about dog sport being THE “Clear and Present” danger to the breed. It’s also hard to make the case that sheep trials are work, not sport. They are sport.

In this interesting passage, McCaig admits that he has too many dogs and too little real work for them. Well, why did he breed them then? Why did he go to Scotland to get a real working dog? That sounds like a waste of money if you’re always pleading poverty and only have a hundred and some sheep as McCaig does. Couldn’t he find a good enough dog here?

Posted: Sat Aug 25, 2007 1:02 pm

Dear Fellow Handlers,

I’ve had a sheep farm (100-150 ewes) for 30 years until three years ago when health made us sell all bhut (sic) twenty five. We had sheep before we had sheepdogs. Now, like many on this list, I rarely work dogs, often train. I do get my dogs out and about which helps a little but I’ve no doubt that John Helle’s dogs (5000 ewes/western Montana) get more experience than mine do. John has never trialed but buys his dogs from trial stock.

Even a farm flock, like ours was doesn’t provide the experience a big spread does. Except for accidents or sickness, 150 ewes only need one dog and excepting shearing, breeding and lambing, most days he could stay in the kennel.

So we must make do – as Beverly Lambert has, for one example – with training and shifting venues.

Yesterday I was driving home when I spotted a neighbor with four full grown rams in a fence corner, unable to bring them to the barn where one would go on the truck. Four people: no movement.

I stopped and jumped Luke out of my car. He wriggled through the wire and, a few minutes later, the rams were on their way to the barn.

No. It wasn’t pretty. The 300 + pound rams had never seen a sheepdog before and Luke only had a few feet to maneuver in that corner.

Wool flew. I rapped the most aggressive ram with the owner’s stock stick, Luke hated it. But he came at them until, finally, they turned and went to the barn.

Luke is a six year old trial dog. Most of his experience has been trials and unfamiliar venues and training.

I wish he’d had the opportunity to learn more on his own, but today, when I have a bit of farm work to do I take out one of my young dogs.

That’s the reality most of us are faced with: too many dogs/too little work.

They adapt, as we do.

Donald McCaig

You adapt? Not so, Donald, not so. You’re stuck in the past trying to hold back the winds of change. You’ve chosen to be an anachronism, giving up a big city job in marketing to go become a small time sheep farmer, and you’ve bought into the romantic history of border collies. That’s your right and it’s a swell thing to do. But when you start wagging your finger at those youngin’s who are supposedly messing it all up, you fail to realize that we moved out of the old neighborhood before you even moved in.

When you choose to be an anachronism, you just sound silly when you curse the change that is already here and was before you went retro.

Agility is an adaptation. Frisbee is an adaptation. Dog Dancing is an adaptation. The dogs do adapt, and so do the owners and trainers. We find new and fun things to do with them, to keep them active, healthy, and well adjusted. New things to test their merit and new things to determine which of them we want to breed.

You’re welcome to keep your platonic vision of the ideal rural life with the ideal rural dog, but don’t spit “you’re ruining the breed” at me when you’ve got more dogs than you need, less work than you claim, and a horrible case of mission creep. You want control of the entire breed when you can’t even find enough work for your own household of dogs?

Welcome home, Airman, welcome home.

Every component of that sign is made from oil. The foam core, the plastic handle, the paints, the glues: all petroleum based products. The price of any one of those doubles and you won’t see too many out of work “students” waving those signs.

The fact that the protesters’ umbrella awning was made from oil, their ice chest was made from oil, the ice in the ice chest was created using refrigerants made from oil, the plastic bottles holding the water in the ice chest were made from oil, and all the filters, hoses, gaskets, and pumps required to get the water into the bottles are made from oil.

But the hypocrisy doesn’t end there. Some of the protesters decided to have their quarterly bath on the day of the protest so their fellow wack-jobs wouldn’t gag from rancid body oil and human stink. So throw in these necessary oil derived products: shampoo, glycerin soap, hair comb, hair curlers, hair dryer, hair dye, cosmetics and lip stick, deodorant, garden hose with plastic faucet washer, hand lotion, shaving cream, toothpaste and tooth brush.

A fresh change of clothes would require the following oil derived products: man-made fibers in the cloth, dye, detergents, acid wash, politically charged silk screening, and oil saturated Birkenstock shoes with oil tanned leather glued to oil derived rubber soles. The artistically knotted ankle bracelet is also made from oil derived yarns.

Accessorize with posh mylar layered plastic housed sunglasses, plastic cell phone, plastic tongue stud, elastic wrist band and a nature tattoo, all derived from oil.

Most protesters actually choose to wear clothing during their demonstrations of stupidity, but for those who don’t, you’ll also need: sunscreen, cortisone cream for that nasty rash, four colors of body paint, solvent to wash the paint off, insect repellent, and a petroleum encapsulated Extenz dietary supplement so you don’t embarrass yourself any more than you have to.

Your retard friend will need an oil derived bicycle (the rubber tube, the rubber tire, the plastic encased wires, the greased up chain, and the entirely oil made grad student helmet) and an oil derived camera to capture the moment forever.

Oh, and don’t forget the antihistamines for your patchouli allergy, and a molded plastic first aid kit with antiseptic, aspirin, anesthetic, and rubbing alcohol for when the police rough you up…. all made from oil.

And for the socialist love-fest after-party, be sure to bring some condoms, dental dams, and personal lubricant, all brought to you through the magic of oil. After all, protest chicks put out.

Few of us think of such things and even fewer prepare. Hardly anyone (less than 30%) has a Last Will and Testament, and just twice that many (about 60%) have some form of Life [should be called Death] Insurance.

I’ve pointed your attention in the direction of one such forward thinker before. Randy Pausch who is dying of terminal pancreatic cancer and whose eloquence and advice given in his last lecture are certainly worth an hour of your time. Randy is still alive, Major Randy Olmstead is not.

Professor Pausch speaks quite eloquently on how to achieve goals in life, and Major Olmstead speaks passionately about how to achieve goals in death.

His final post is worth a moment of your time and consideration.

There are too many people in the world who believe that they know best how people should live their lives, and many of them are more than willing to use force to impose those beliefs on others. A world without government simply wouldn’t last very long; as soon as it was established, strongmen would immediately spring up to establish their fiefdoms. So there is a need for government to protect the people’s rights. And one of the fundamental tools to do that is an army that can prevent outside agencies from imposing their rules on a society.

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A notable example of effective extended metaphor is Charles Grinnel’s “Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdogs” letter which I have written about before. Grinnel makes a strong case that our armed services are like the sheepdogs that protect the ignorant and apathetic flock, day in and day out. Most of us choose to be the flock, happily unaware of the dangers at the edge of our pasture, but a select few choose to be guard dogs. To keep the flock together and to keep predators away.

The Amused Cynic picks up this metaphor and applies it ever so effectively to the sound and fury over waterboarding. Here’s the start of the insightful “Waterboarding Our Border Collies” article:

This waterboarding controversy is really getting on my nerves. Look, I’ve never had the pleasure, but I know some who have. I often refer to members of our military as the sheepdogs. When you get into the special operations command, you’re talking about special sheepdogs, such as Border Collies. The ones who absolutely under any circumstances will accomplish the mission–or die in the attempt. When it absolutely, positively has to be destroyed–or saved– overnight…..to borrow from the great FedEx ad campaign. We waterboard our own special operations soldiers as part of their training to contravene their own opinion that they are invincible.

I love Border Collies–they fascinate me. They will take any mission, from something as seemingly pointless as gathering up all the branches in your yard and putting them in a neat pile—-to something as important as herding your little children away from the car traffic–a job that they will intuitively see and take on. Even saving little Bobby from being trapped in the old mine for the 10th time. They accomplish the mission, and it is impossible to divert them from the mission once undertaken. If you want to be cruel to a Border Collie, prevent it from accomplishing its mission.

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