The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious (DOPOTO) has had an easy time of it lately. Not that there has been a flood of good news or anything else so unusual, it’s just that the job of The Department is merely to point out the obvious, whether there is good news, bad news or neutral news. Our function is merely to point out the emperor’s new clothes.

The dominant story in the news lately, the massive oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, is for the most part a transparent and readily obvious tale, in little need of pointing out the obvious. Everybody with a marginally functional brain knows that this is a disaster of global proportions since the Gulf Stream circles the world and regulates Earth’s climate, that the executives at British Petroleum are a bunch of lying sacks of shit and that the United States Government is reaping the dubious rewards of a policy of deregulation started in the 1970’s.

The only shock about all this is that it comes as a shock to many people. Why? Everything described above is a matter of public record, with the slide into deregulation having already resulted in hundreds of serious economic scandals, culminating in the Economic Disaster of 2008, The Gulf Spill of Economics that saw $7 trillion in wealth and millions of jobs and retirement incomes disappear, and threw the housing market into the disarray of fraudulent practices, widespread foreclosures and property abandonment.

There are still many dangerous criminal cowboys disguised as bankers running roughshod (and unregulated) over the world’s money supply. In a world where every convenience store has a security camera trained on the cash register to prevent theft, the idea that the honor system was just fine when it comes to the people handling all the money in the world seems pretty foolish in retrospect. Since the Era of Deregulation began, the financial industries have attracted a small army of thieves, gamblers and con artists whose crimes have made history’s biggest bank heists nickel and dime affairs by comparison.

Similarly, oil companies are led no longer by self-made wild cat entrepreneurs, engineers and energy specialists, but by corporate thugs with no conscience. There are over 3,500 off-shore oil rigs operating off the coastlines of America, 3,000 in the Gulf of Mexico, each with the potential to blow and spew just like the BP rig. Every one of them operates almost regulation-free, and the only surprise about the BP Spill is that it didn’t happen sooner, in spite of the almost comic assurance of Big Oil press agents.

Few are fooled by the posturing of Big Oil executives or the politicians that are in their pocket. One picture of a greasy pelican trying to lift itself out of the black sludge that used to be the blue sea like some dinosaur in the La Brea Tar Pits puts the whole thing in its proper perspective. This could happen 3,000 more times in the Gulf of Mexico alone, never mind the rest of the world.

An obvious conclusion to be drawn here is that regulation is a fact of life for everybody everywhere. They are called laws and individuals are punished for breaking them, whether the charge is jaywalking or murder. The average person would be punished for putting raw garbage onto public streets or pumping their sewage into a river that supplies their town drinking water.

The head of the household would be held personally responsible and forced to clean up their act and make reparations to those they had harmed and/or face a jail sentence. They would not be permitted to blame their child or the family dog, or convince the town elders to clean up their mess. Then again, the average person has not spent billions corrupting the political process so that they don’t have to answer for their crimes, whether it’s stealing your money or polluting your children’s future.

One other obvious conclusion (our specialty!) to be drawn from all this is that there is no viable technology in existence to deal with catastrophic undersea oil spills. That was apparent the moment BP started to solicit high school students for ideas (We’re wide open!) on how to cap the well, and even tried stuffing it with (!) golf balls and garbage at one point. Rumor has it that they are even in secret negotiations with Vince the Sham Wow! guy to sop up the oil and wring it out into tanker ships.

That’s like Henry Ford deciding to install brakes and steering wheels in his cars only after selling thousands and thousands of them, something that should have occurred to him before letting all those people put the pedal to the metal. Building mechanized vehicles that can operate at high speeds, just like the feat of sucking that vehicle’s fuel from a mile below the ocean’s surface with giant machines, is very impressive technology, but not that impressive unless you can stop the damned things and operate them safely. Sometimes the obvious is the most elusive solution of all.

This was a report from The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious.

The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious (DOPOTO), the world’s foremost organization for not interpreting anything, has been as busy as ever keeping track of reality. Our job is simple, to observe and report. Not so simple, however, is sifting through attempts to explain away reality with “alternate explanations,” in effect telling people that what we think we see is not what we see, but what we are told to see. Big difference. There are no alternate explanations to truth. For example, water is wet, and nothing anyone says makes it any less wet. It is water, and nothing else. With this in mind, researchers and analysts here at DOPOTO have come up with a useful guide to people and words to beware of when trying to identify the obvious the news.

Corporate Spokesperson: Professional liar. Once called press agents, corporate spokepeople are individuals hired for several unique abilities; the capacity to lie with a straight face, the art of speaking while saying nothing and the ability to make even the biggest bonehead error seem like a stroke of genius. There is no reason to hire a press agent if you wish to announce what is actually going on (the truth) as opposed to what you want people to think is going on (lies). Always consider who is doing the announcing before accepting what they say at face value.

Lawyer: See above

Politician: See above:

Cable TV Analyst: These people generally analyze nothing and use carefully selected and misleadingly edited news stories along with out-of-context quotes to bolster whatever political view they are selling. In other words, attempting to redefine reality to conform with their views, even if their opinion is that water is a dry substance.

Words and Phrases That Sound Like Something But Are Nothing: The following are commonly used words and phrases often brilliantly employed by the above-listed individuals that do the opposite of what language is designed for – to communicate clearly. The beauty of some of these things is that they look like something, or sound like something, but are not.

Unseen Market Forces At Work: The phrase “unseen market forces at work” is often used by business executives (or their press agents) to assign blame for their latest dismal failure, citing the economy as a whole rather than themselves as individuals as the culprit. It also implies that the speaker is in possession of some special knowledge or secret code that ordinary people do not possess, complex formulas like literacy and simple mathematics. When used by corporate CEOs and politicians attempting to explain why the economy is a runaway train with the gold robbed from its safe by desperadoes in Brooks Brothers suits and everyone else got fired from their jobs, it means: “we have no idea how any of this works either.”

Free Markets: This phrase simply means a desire on the part of wealthy individuals and corporations to have no rules or regulations to obey or taxes to pay. Researchers here at The Department have confirmed that most people wouldn’t mind having any rules or taxes either but still see the wisdom of three-strikes-and-you’re-out and other laws and regulations we have formulated to assure a relatively smooth-running society. In a world where cashiers at McDonald’s have cameras trained on the cash register to discourage theft, senior analysts at DOPOTO have concluded that it is not a bad idea to scrupulously regulate the people handling many billions of dollars more of other people’s money than the average McDonald’s cashier.

Alternate explanation: This means anything you want it to mean, which generally adds up to meaning nothing at all. It was invented by a defense attorney desperately trying to convince a jury of sane people that there was an alternate explanation for the 27 dismembered bodies buried in his client’s basement and his set of human skull soup bowls. Most alternate explanations work about as well as that one did.

Right Thinking American: Invented a week after America was invented, this meaningless phrase all at once covers the speaker in the American flag while identifying anyone who disagrees with them as a puppy-drowning traitor. Right Thinking Americans would do well to skip this phrase and concentrate on whatever it is that this person is demanding you agree with. It just might be the opposite of what you really believe.

Foreign Policy: In a nation where foreign policy changes every 4 or 8 years, this is another elastic phrase that can mean whatever the current administration wishes, whether explaining away invading another country by mistake, trying to slap tariffs on China to prevent our last remaining factory from relocating there or to justify our dear friendships with misogynistic tyrants in gowns whose sandbox nations just happen to be floating on a sea of petroleum. Foreign Policy often means whatever foreign misadventure the current president is up to at the expense of everyone else.

Underperformance: Not a real word, but one made up by executives in relation to their company’s dismal stock price in an attempt to blame their colossal failures on “unforeseen market forces.” Think of it this way: when a trapeze artist misses the trapeze and plunges 50 feet to the ground, he has seriously underperformed. Unlike elite corporate princes, however, the trapeze artist doesn’t get to console himself by awarding himself and his fellow trapeze artists billions of dollars of other people’s money as a bonus.

Performance Bonus: Grand theft on a monumental scale. A simple concept, earning a reward for outstanding performance, the bonus is as old as commerce itself. In corporate circles, however, the bonus has become a tool for stealing other people’s money, the stockholders’ in most cases, no matter what sort of performance is turned in, with corporate executives feeling entitled to a huge bonus on top of their already obscene salaries. Until recent years the highest paid executives earned 20 to 30 times more than the average worker. These days, the average CEO earns 200 times the median wage, and collects a bonus even if they fail. When greedy people answer to no one, there is only one possible outcome, the results are predictable and yes, blatantly obvious.

The Liberal (or Conservative) Agenda: This phrase implies that all conservatives, or liberals, or Democrats or Republicans or any other large group of people, have identical goals. Usually this “agenda” is referred to by opposition groups to suggest that there is some sort of vast conspiracy afoot. In reality, an elite team of researchers in The Department assigned to uncovering these mysterious “hidden agendas” have found that these groups are often in sharp disagreement within their own ranks and can barely reach a consensus on what kind of donuts to serve at their meetings, never mind planning global domination. See: Right Thinking American (above).

This was report from The Department of Pointing Out The Obvious.

The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious (DOPOTO), in our only capacity, that of drawing attention to what should need no explanation, cannot help but notice that the nation of Canada has emerged briefly from its self-imposed exile to host the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. For two weeks, Canada will occupy a most unaccustomed position, the world spotlight. While many people were under the impression that Canada had entered some sort of International Witness Protection Program, in fact they are alive and, while not exactly kicking, which would be unseemly for a Canadian, breathing.

Senior Department Analysts have long been aware of Canada, even if much of the rest of world has not, and that seems to be just the way Canadians prefer it. For the second-largest nation on Earth, Canada has been remarkably anonymous, even to the point of insisting that their most talented and ambitious citizens leave the country to gain fame and success. The fact that they share a 3,000-mile border with the squeakiest wheel on the planet, The United States, has only served to strengthen their xenophobia and made them more determined to isolate themselves, even though their nation is the mirror image of America.

A dull, awkward and shy mirror image, to be sure, as if America consisted only of Minnesota and Wisconsin, but nearly identical in culture, architecture, political structure, language and diet. At least Minnesota gave the world Prince and Jesse Ventura, and Wisconsin… well, there’s Liberace and lots of cheese… but the point is made. They gave us, who, Celine Dion? Canada, for all it’s interesting history, breathtaking landscapes and potentially fascinating internal conflicts between French-speakers and Anglophiles, has been for over a century the dullest place on earth. DOPOTO researchers and analysts have confirmed this through extensive studies of the place, and have filed the requisite reports, that is when they could keep their eyes open.

So it seems that hosting the Winter Olympics would be a natural for Canada to gain her place on the world stage, being that much of that nation enjoys perpetual winter. Two staples of the Winter Games are sports invented by ice-bound Canadians, hockey and curling. Unfortunately, hockey has been assimilated and dominated by the United States and Russia, and curling is a bunch of people (!) pushing a stone around a sheet of ice with a broom. Very few people on Earth, including the participants in Curling, have any idea what the object of the game is other than to generate enough body heat to avoid freezing to death.

To add insult to tedium, a Canadian Olympic team hasn’t dominated the Winter Olympics for decades. That would be like Australia getting soundly defeated in Australian Rules Football again and again. Well, this year, the Canadian Olympic Committee has vowed to try to win more gold medals than any other nation. Unfortunately for them, however, no one on the Olympic Committee gets to compete, and most winter sports experts deem this an impossibility, and Canada is not even expected to medal in Curling. The games also opened with a tragedy, the death of a luge sledder practicing on a Luge Run designed by someone unfamiliar with the sport.

While the opening ceremonies were conducted under flags flown at half mast, technicians were earnestly duct-taping wresting mats from a local high school to the sharp steel columns that line the Luge Run. And so the “quiet competence” that Canadians were so proud of turns out to be another illusion on their part. At least they can go back to their “prosperous anonymity,” somewhat of a national motto, when the games are over and Canada once again enters the International Witness Protection Program and the rest of the world goes back to conjuring up fuzzy images of Canada involving maple syrup, mackinaws, moose, Royal Canadian Mounted Police and pictures of another country’s queen on their currency. Then, The Country That Wasn’t There will return to their accustomed place – out of sight, out of mind, and quietly shivering.

This was a report from The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious

The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious (DOPOTO), in the course of performing our our only function, pointing out the emperor’s new clothes, has been perusing the various sensational news reports concerning the election of a single senator in Massachusetts. The Senate seat in question had belonged to the late Senator Teddy Kennedy for 47 years but was won by a Republican  candidate, a former naked male model named Scott Brown. Republicans are boasting that this is a strong rebuke to President Obama, while Democrats are panicking that they’ve lost their Senate “super-majority” and have to rethink their thinking.

What operatives from both political parties fail to remember is that the Democratic candidate, interim Senator Martha Coakley, completely misread her Massachusetts constituency by being completely out of touch with how they feel about the Boston Red Sox, going so far as to claim that ex-Boston World Series hero Curt Schilling was a Yankee fan. Almost every human being in America realizes how grave an error that is and that Red Sox fans are basically a few million potentially violent psychopaths. That is the only reason Ms. Coakley lost the election. You simply do not open your mouth about the Boston Red Sox anywhere in New England with inaccurate information, especially concerning the hated New York Yankees, who they watched win 26 World Championships in the 86 years from 1918 until 2004, when Boston finally won the World Series again.

The government was not toppled by the election of Mr. Brown, their overwhelming Democratic majority remains intact. Nobody is longing for the return of Bush The Younger and Shotgun Dick Cheney. As far as President Obama is concerned, what America is seeing is a young president learning on the job, by no means an unprecedented state of affairs. All our young presidents, Clinton, Kennedy and Theodore Roosevelt, went through the same tough initiation to the halls of power, suffering some initial setbacks and disappointments. Hopefully Mr. Obama will come out of these experiences the wiser and like his fellow young presidents become an effective and memorable leader.

Certainly Kennedy and Roosevelt left their indelible stamps on America, and Bill Clinton won two terms and presided over a time of peace and prosperity, no small achievement in this wicked world. The Scott Browns of this world pose no threat to President Obama or the Democratic agenda, and odds are that his will be a short time in the Senate when Massachusetts Democrats wake up and run a properly Red Sox-sensitive candidate next time around. This election represents no snowballing trend, no sea change in American politics, merely a bonehead move by Massachusetts Democrats who assumed that Kennedy’s Senate seat was theirs by default. Complacency is to blame, and the Boston Red Sox factor. A slap in the face to complacency is never a bad thing. Nor is reminding politicians that their hometown baseball teams mean more to Americans than their Senators.

This was a report from The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious

The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious (DOPOTO), at the risk of rendering ourselves obsolete, has prepared this report to show the public exactly what it is we do. What we do, as our title so blatantly announces, is point out what is readily apparent in this world, in spite of the very many earnest efforts to obscure the facts and explain them in ways that make no sense at all. For example, if you think it is true that the real reason that President Bush The Younger invaded Iraq was that Iraq posed a danger to America, you have not been paying attention to reality, but instead have been  listening to people who rely on you to ignore what your own senses tell you.

Which is odd, since when it is very cold outside, few of us wear bermuda sorts and a tank top when we go about our business simply because some people insist it is a hot day and that we are very much mistaken about what we are experiencing. Our eyes inform us of the foot of snow on the ground, our ears register the howling wind and our sense of touch reminds us it freezing cold, and so we bow to the painfully obvious and dress warmly, or remain indoors if possible. Perhaps we wonder what those people were thinking when they insisted the day was a balmy one, since you are certain that they would not send their own children out into a blizzard dressed for the beach. Now you wonder their angle is.

Unless they are mentally ill people who lie just for the practice or for no reason at all, your senses tell you that they have an ulterior motive. Whether or not you are curious enough to discover that motive, you dismiss their convoluted arguments from your mind as ridiculous and completely contradictory to what is plain as day. Researchers here at DOPOTO have established that most human beings are very intelligent and quite adept at responding to external stimuli, in other words, recognizing the obvious. On the other hand, we are also capable of abstract thought and complex problem solving, and too often give liars the benefit of the doubt when they are lying very sincerely. We figure they are engaged in teaching us a more subtle truth, an abstract concept that has somehow escaped us, and that our senses have fooled us somehow.

Senior Department analysts, however, have determined that 99 times out of 100, what seems to be true is true and no alternate explanation exists. Our senses and our advanced brains are not lying to us, playing tricks on us or trying to fool us. That would be others attempting to do that, to circumvent our intelligence, and for want of better terms, to short-circuit our bullshit detectors. There are many areas of human endeavor dedicated wholly to lying, not all of them dishonorable. The arts of fiction writing, storytelling, music, painting, creative photography, sculpture, drama, comedy and acting, for example, are sophisticated ventures designed to use illusion, fiction, exaggeration and abstraction as vehicles to entertain, to challenge, to explore and to gain valuable human insights.

A fine illustration of this deception is that  famous painting of a tobacco pipe by Rene Magritte with the caption below it stating: “This is not a pipe.” In this Department’s opinion this a masterful illustration of the nature of art and a perfect example of stating the obvious. Many of mankind’s best minds have been dedicated to these fine arts of illusion and deception, but the deception and illusion are always accepted as part and parcel of the experience by patrons of these various arts. No one looks at a Picasso for anatomy lessons, or expect ducks to talk to us because they do in cartoons. For art we suspend disbelief, a two-way street beneficial to both audience and artist.

As to the other people who dedicate themselves to lying and obscuring what is obvious? Theirs is a less-than-honorable calling and the reason that The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious was founded. When the public relations professionals hired by industrialists carefully explain how wonderfully beneficial it will be to working Americans to eliminate their jobs in order to maximize profits for the already extremely wealthy, no one is under any obligation to treat their words with anything but scorn. When politicians wax eloquent about the necessity of traveling to exotic locations at the expense of corporate lobbyists to play golf and sail in yachts while studying poverty, why would anyone accept this as anything other than what it so plainly appears to be: bribery? An examination of this particular legislator’s voting record in regard to laws beneficial to the corporation that paid for the trip would be an educational insight to the art of noting the obvious.

When someone starts a war, there is almost always an underlying profit motive involved, and all the rhetoric, the nationalistic blathering about pride and righteousness or the punishment of evildoers is only a smokescreen to make us feel better about burying our children in the cause of profits for the very wealthy who do not send themselves or their own children into harm’s way. And when we are told that poverty, illiteracy, genocide, hatred and starvation are only regrettable but inevitable consequences of human civilization, what is that but an attempt to assuage our own consciences?

When you look outside your window and there is a foot of snow in the ground, you know instantly that it is a very cold day and traveling will be dangerous. This cannot be reasoned away or explained in a different light by anyone. We here at The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious urges everyone to apply these lessons to all they they see, hear, smell, touch and taste. Your intelligent mind and your keen senses are not wrong, nor are they playing games with you. There’s no shortage of people attempting to convince you otherwise.

This was a report form The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious.

The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious (DOPOTO), in our continuing mission to go where everyone has gone before, has been perusing the news reports for kernels of truth and obvious conclusions. On Wall Street, banking executives whose corporations have repaid their federal bailout money are applying for gun permits in record numbers. It seems that this is the time of year when they traditionally collect tremendous bonuses, only this year they feel that the general public will strongly resent this practice. It seems that the deep recession the nation’s banks caused is only over for bankers, with the rest of the nation still in dire financial straits.

The bank executives rely on these multi-million dollar helpings of other people’s money in order to continue being proper bank executives, which in their eyes entails having mounds and mounds of money, enough to last several dozen lifetimes. While some say this is an unrealistic expectation in today’s terrible economy, the executives disagree. Hence the guns, so they can continue to flaunt their fabulous wealth in an increasing poor world of their making, perhaps a drop over-optimistically figuring they can get the drop on the more experienced desperadoes. On a related note, DOPOTO researchers have determined that in general, only two types of people carry guns; cops and robbers. The Department notes that bank executives are not cops.

Speaking of guns, it seems that President Obama is sending 30,000 more people who carry guns everywhere they go into Afghanistan. Those would be American soldiers, and they are on a dual mission; to kill Taliban rebels and to train a new Afghanistan Army. Afghanistan needs a new army because American soldiers destroyed their old one. Senior analysts at DOPOTO actually declared the war over when that happened, since one army annihilating another army is the dictionary definition of winning a war. When U.S. forces took the next step and dismantled the Afghani government, that was declared an even more decisive victory.

While we cannot be certain what the thinking is in Washington, it seems that America, in a new twist in the annals of warfare, refused to accept victory. And so 8 years later we remain in Afghanistan, training the replacements to the army we destroyed, in order to fight the insurgency movement our continued presence in their country has created. A decidely odd state of affairs, especially considering that we invaded Afghanistan only to kill or capture Osma bin Laden and his al Qaeda gang, who have since moved next door to Pakistan, leaving America with a destroyed Medieval nation on its hands, not really sure what to do with it.

Scientists point out that 99% of species that have ever lived have gone extinct, the obvious conclusion (our specialty) being that life is a difficult and precarious proposition on this planet. Our own species is the only species to know that, and so we hope that the old saying about being forewarned is being forearmed helps us avoid becoming just another footnote in the fossil record. And now some people are starting to give serious credence to the Mayan civilization’s prediction that the end of mankind and the world itself will come in the year 2012. Department researchers cannot help but point out that the Mayans came to an end a very long time ago, and if they were any good at predicting the future they would have foresaw the Spaniards, who ushered Maya into extinction in a big hurry.

End of Days scenarios are also popular with some born-again Christians, who are fond of recounting their version of that almost indecipherable and hallucinogenic book of the Bible, Revelations. Somehow they are looking forward to “The Rapture,” the trumpet-blaring gathering of saints, angels and Jesus after the world is completely destroyed in a battle with the Anti-Christ, seven-headed beasts and other highly imaginative horrors, none of which are actually mentioned specifically in the manual that supposedly contains all their religious beliefs, The Bible. It seems that the Bible leaves much to the imagination, and that is one area where human beings excel; making stuff up. Nothing like augmenting an already convoluted story with our own personal touches to really confuse people.

What DOPOTO analysts have concluded about this phenomenon is that simply, some people enjoy this sort of thing. While most people feel it is a bit silly, the general consensus is that it’s a harmless enough hobby, not really much different than bowling, stamp collecting or building model airplanes, and will have the same impact as these endeavors on how and when the world ends. None at all.

This was a report from the Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious

The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious (DOPOTO) has been keeping busy, as usual, performing our only function: observing events and pointing out the obvious. It is often a thankless task, since many humans enjoy interpreting reality to suit their own philosophies, even though the truth has been getting severe sprains from all the contortions it has been forced to bend itself into. Naturally the Department’s frowns on this sort of activity, but also notes that it is fairly harmless. The sky is no less blue than it was yesterday when someone emphatically insists it is green.

Be that as it may, researchers at DOPOTO have been noticing a few trends of late; good, bad and strange. The good development is that several United States Senators have suddenly remembered their job description and have decided to vote on potential laws before them in the Senate according the their merits and for no other consideration. A thorough scan of Department archives confirms that this has not happened within recent memory, with even the rescue monies for the 9/11 attacks and the Hurricane Katrina disaster having been loaded with “earmarks,” a polite euphemism for political patronage and earnest treasury-looting.

The law in question is the Health Care Reform Bill, which was subject to a great deal of overloading with pork in the House of Representatives. This reassuringly sleazy behavior of the Representatives was fully expected to be repeated in The Senate. Several Senators have instead thrown a monkey wrench into the process of political observation by acting ethically and responsibly, one even going so far as to question the wisdom of political action committees spending $3 million on advertisements in her state opposing the health care bill.

She wisely noted that the debate is in Congress, not Arkansas, where lawmakers actually review the proposed legislation and speak to one another face to face, negating the need for media advertising campaigns to familiarize themselves with the facts. The advertising campaigns reflect what the Department considers a bad trend, with various organizations spending untold millions of dollars in media and print ads to attempt to make voters feel that they have some input into running the government beyond casting their votes for the candidates of their choice.

This is how representative government works; the actual elected representatives get to do the legislating. In other words, doing the job they were hired to do for their terms in office. If the voters are displeased with their representatives’ job performance, they can always fire them at the next election, but meanwhile must live with their choices. If they feel that their Senator or Representative isn’t doing their job properly, contributing money to lobbying organizations to formulate advertising campaigns designed to benefit only those lobbying organizations doesn’t help their cause.

Other than enflaming the sizable segment of society that is easily enflamed by just about anything, the ad campaigns are basicaly exercises in “alternate reality,” which is something that does not exist. But once one accepts the possibility of alternate realities, then it is but a short leap into bald lying and slander, and then calling lies and slander something else. The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious cannot refrain from pointing out that calling a hyena a lamb has never made a single hyena anything but a hyena.

While we welcome these several Senators into the realm of seeing the forest for the trees, long observation by DOPOTO cannot help but wonder how long this burst of integrity will last. Traditionally, when asked to behave morally and ethically, most elected officials are willing to give it a shot as long as there is something in it for them. As a class, they are deservedly famous for “not getting it,” and have earned their nation’s mistrust. Senators deviating from this norm are worth noting. The Department will keep a keen eye on these anomalous developments.

In the Strange Trends category, DOPOTO researchers and senior observers have noticed that the campaign for the living deification of Sarah Palin is quickly losing steam, well before the usual expiration date of these sorts of things. Apparently the American public has seen enough of her and has decided that she really is a dim bulb not worth wasting any more time over. Always a person of below-average intelligence, Ms. Palin swiftly rose to iconic status in the minds of many when she was picked to be the Vice Presidential candidate in the 2008 election.

When she did the unprecedented by becoming the first defeated vice-presidential candidate to remain a viable political presence, America’s disgraced right wing politicians believed they had found their savior and their ticket back into national power. While veteran observers of the obvious could only note what a lightweight and bizarre individual they had chosen as their poster girl, the woman was catapulted into even greater national fame by quitting the job of Governor of Alaska, essentially telling the people who elected her that they do not matter in the grand scheme of things.

Her lack of intelligence, her sleazy behavior and her dedication to alternate reality made her a natural in the Perverse Idol Worshipping Sweepstakes that has become a hallmark of American right wing politics since the curious elevation of the amiable but dim B-movie actor Ronald Reagan into the Pantheon of Great Statesmen, all reality be damned. And it worked splendidly, even to the point where they succeeded in getting George Bush the Younger elected president twice, even though he was so dumb he once attacked the wrong country.

Which leaves the Department wondering what went wrong with the Sarah Palin juggernaut. She is at least as dumb as Reagan and smarter than Bush The Younger (who isn’t?), so it is curious to observe that this natural for Right Wing Sainthood is seeing her star dim before its time. While DOPOTO would like to claim credit for people being able to see the obvious, senior analysts here feel that Ms. Palin has simply derailed her own train by actually speaking candidly once too often, revealing the painfully obvious even to those who scrupulously shun the truth.

Which, in a sense, is too bad. There was still a lot of mileage left in the pure entertainment value of Ms. Palin’s ascendancy, and the potential for a huge and embarrassing flameout. We here at The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious feel that she is cheating the American public by simply petering out into being an odd footnote in American politics before she had a chance to do anything truly bizarre. This is what it must feel like to be a voter in Alaska.

This was a report from The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious.

The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious (DOPOTO) has been observing with interest the various Green Campaigns, those scientific, and less-than-scientific efforts to reduce mankind’s carbon footprint, cut down on unhealthy pollution, reverse global warming or all of the above. The efforts to exploit non-combustible sources of energy like wind, solar and tidal power have thus far been fairly ineffectual, producing only a fraction of the vast amounts of energy required to power human society, while the “dirty” sources of energy continue to perform spectacularly. This is not to say this will always be the case, but for the present time it is the obvious (our specialty) truth.

Some concerned Green campaigners focus their efforts on making human beings feel guilty about living their lives in the only system they know, an odd approach at best and one not likely to solve the very real energy-related problems faced by humanity. Others champion low-energy light bulbs, which have indeed reduced energy consumption but also contain enough mercury in each of these bulbs to poison several gallons of water, thus creating another potential ecological disaster to go with the many other potential ecological disasters we face. As in so many other endeavors, science giveth and science taketh away.

Still others berate their fellow humans for eating meat, the substance proven to be most responsible for the evolution of our large brains, which DOPOTO researchers have indicated might explain the odd behavior of many of these “grazing” advocates. Further studies show that meat-eating animals have eyes in front of their heads, and possess far greater intelligence than the vegetarian animals with eyes at the side of their heads, the better to watch out for predators. Human beings fall into the former category; intelligent predators with eyes mounted front and center to keep our eyes on the prize, a juicy steak. This is no judgement on anyone’s preferred eating habits, merely a reiteration of the blatantly obvious, which is pretty much all that this Department does.

As far as finding a replacement for carbon-based petroleum, coal and natural gas, there is already a proven and readily available power source of even greater potential; nuclear power. Nuclear power, however, scares the bejabbers out of most of mankind, filling our heads with images of Hiroshima, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. Even though there are a great many safe and efficient nuclear power plants in use worldwide, there is always the problem of what to do with the radioactive waste products of this process, a nuclear slag that will be highly dangerous for thousands of years, and no one wants glow-in-the-dark children, even if that proves to be a handy alternative to the mercury-filled light bulbs in their bedside night lights. Hardly seems a desirable trade-off to most parents.

So scientists continue their study, experimentation and field-testing of alternative energy sources, while activists remind us to conserve our limited energy resources. While corn was once thought to be the answer, growing our own gasoline, most experts say this will be just as dirty and expensive as fossil fuel, to say nothing of depriving our booming population of thousands of square miles of productive farmland. Renewable and sustainable as this might be, there are already 36,000 starvation deaths daily on earth, and another 10 to 20,000 deaths from impure water-related disease that will only be exacerbated by our continuing pollution. Few activists factor in the deaths of 20 million people a year (whose lives are every bit as precious to them as anyone else’s, perhaps even more so given the fact that they see them slipping away) in their Green Solutions.

While it is not for The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious to suggest how anything should be run or to influence how any person conducts their life,  we here at DOPOTO respectfully suggest that the answers to these problems will most likely come from the scientific community, utilizing the very power sources they seek to replace. Towards that end perhaps the American government (the same organization that put a man on the moon 40 years ago) invests in scientific education and research on a far larger scale than it already does. A coordinated effort can be commissioned similar to the Apollo Project that not only put a man on the moon, but launched the Information Age with the byproducts of that effort.

Researchers here at DOPOTO have determined yet another obvious fact: that wishing for a greener, cleaner earth is a whole lot easier than the science required to make it so. Our studies indicate that human beings will not in any great numbers volunteer to scale back on their consumption of the only available energy sources and surrender even an inch of the progress that humanity has painstakingly won through the widespread use of carbon-based fuels. Our lengthened life spans, our more robust health, our lowered infant mortality rates and our enhanced access to information and communication are the modern realities of life in the 21st century.

We have found that people are more than willing to use these historically unprecedented advantages to seek solutions, but are not willing to surrender to fear and turn out the lights, kill the engines and unplug the computers. Most humans feel it is better to use the scientific and technological advantages petroleum has given us to seek its replacement than to abandon it before we find an alternative and just hope for the best. DOPOTO has discovered that humans love a challenge, but see no wisdom in discarding the tools they have at hand that will enable them to meet that challenge.

This is a report from The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious.

The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious (DOPOTO), in our only capacity, that of pointing out the readily apparent, has been following with interest the No-Impact movement. It is an environmental initiative, a Green thing if you will. People are encouraged to turn off their electric lights, stop using their cars, produce as little trash as possible and eat only locally produced foods. In short, to live as one would in a very poor and backward nation. Why insisting that a reverse cultural move helps the planet is anyone’s guess, as even a short glance at history informs us that the greatest benefits to mankind were obtained through the application of technology, and the failure and human misery of today’s poorest nations is due to their severe lack of modern technology.

Low Impact adherents have submitted the argument to DOPOTO that eating only locally produced food is what mankind did for 99% of our history, an obvious fact of the sort this Department can relish. Also obvious is that throughout 99% of mankind’s history, life expectancy was around 40 years, relatively mild diseases were fatal, childbirth was a leading cause of death in women, many children died before reaching maturity and malnutrition was an ever-present hazard. Illiteracy, superstition and tribalism stunted man’s social development and inbreeding harmed his genetic chances of producing successful, vibrant offspring during this 99% of our history. Sanitary conditions were abominable and primitive medical practices caused almost as much death as the pervasive filth. Would these Low-Impact campaigners care for humanity to revisit those aspects of our history as well as living in the dark, walking to every destination and barely subsisting on a meager diet of whatever scrawny specimens are native to the immediate vicinity?

The Department is all for cleaning up our environment and ceasing the waste of valuable resources. We also admire the earnest activism and unbounded energy of Green Movement participants. We would only respectfully suggest that perhaps these keen minds would be best put to better uses, like finding a replacement for the greasy remains of dinosaurs that we set on fire to make our engines go. If one can dream that first-world citizens would willingly give up the amenities so painstakingly won from this hard and unforgiving world because Green activists say it is wrong to be comfortable and well-fed, then could not those same minds dream a more practical dream of creating a fuel that does not pollute our water, earth and sky? That would be the easier task, by far.

The only way they will get people to reduce their carbon footprints is to replace carbon-based fuels like petroleum, natural gas and coal. Long observation of humanity has convinced DOPOTO that once humans have attained a certain level of progress, success and comfort, they will fight tooth and nail to keep it. Human memory is long, and oral and written histories even longer. Hard evidence (one of the Department’s favorite things) also tells us that the way to solve a serious a problem is unstinting study, research, experimentation and application of one’s findings, all very modern notions developed in the past 1% of mankind’s history. Such methods have improved our diets and general health, doubled our life spans, eliminated many deadly diseases, created automobiles and aircraft that eventually led to putting a man on the moon, all things once considered impossible.

None of these exciting breakthroughs were wrought by encouraging humanity to live as our ancestors did, who, by the way, did a great deal of polluting and left very large carbon footprints during their short lives with all their wood burning, forest clearing, destruction of fragile eco-systems, wasteful agricultural methods and species eliminating. While modern humanity is far from perfect and a lot of our technology is unnecessarily dirty and hazardous to our health, it is far less dirty and hazardous than the technology of 50 years ago. Many of the improvements were due to the scientific response to the work of environmental activists, so the Department has a great respect for those who would safeguard the only home humanity has, Planet Earth. Which is not to say that every idea they come up with is astounding. The eat-only-local-food idea, for example, has been just as big a monumental waste as some of the waste the Green Movement rails against. DOPOTO urges them to take human nature into account when formulating human solutions.

Another curious development that has caught the eye of the Department is the current Democratic administration’s inertia when it comes to enacting what was announced to be an ambitious social and political agenda. President Obama was handed an almost unprecedented majority in both Houses of Congress, an obvious advantage when one wishes to pass a law. Yet for some unexplained reason, this Administration and Congress acts as if it has all the time in the world to do their work. DOPOTO’s long experience in observing humans and reporting the obvious tells us otherwise. It is approaching a year since they took power, leaving only another year before the mid-term elections could possibly erase their overwhelming Democratic Congressional majority, making it a precarious enterprise to pass even the most innocuous bill if it has been sponsored by a Democrat.

Recent history is plain (obvious!) when it informs us that few Republicans will consider any idea on its merits, only its source. If the Democrats lose their majority, one of them could introduce a bill simply declaring that every American citizen is allowed to breathe, and a dozen Republicans will denounce the idea as a communist left-wing conspiracy to hire Devil-worshipping transvestite cannibals to teach every kindergarten class. Researchers here at the Department have concluded that if the Republicans held this electoral trifecta, that not a day would pass without another law being enacted designed to bestow the last bit of America’s remaining wealth on the richest 1% of Americans and to rename The Bill of Rights “The Bill of Suggestions.”

So, what are the obvious conclusions to draw from the recent activities (or non-activity) of these two groups of political activists, one set elected and one set self-appointed? That, when dealing with humanity and its most pressing problems, it is always best to take reality into consideration and to heed the obvious always. The most difficult problems to overcome are generally not the physical realities confronting us, but the human realities. After all, man has stood on the surface of moon, but mankind has never embraced the view of Planet Earth as seen from the moon; a beautiful, tranquil blue sphere with no borders visible and no sign of strife or animosity of any sort. Sometimes the obvious is hiding in plain sight. The forest for the trees…

This has been a report from The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious

The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious (DOPOTO), as part of our ongoing mission to (what else?) point out the obvious, has stumbled across various small news tidbits that bear closer examination. One would be the closing down of an ambitious solar energy project in the State of California for its potential negative environmental impact. The location of this supposedly harmful installation? Downtown Los Angeles or on the outskirts of San Diego, two populous regions? No, the location was in the middle of The Mojave Desert, as sun drenched a locale as one could hope for when engaged in collecting the sun’s energy. The human population of the site is zero, thus exposing no human beings to whatever risks are inherent in collecting sunlight, even though those risks are so low as to allow solar panels to be installed on the roofs or in the gardens of human homes, to say nothing of the fact that people walk in sunlight pretty frequently.

So, why the cancellation of a project designed to alleviate California’s dependence on foreign oil, the state most dependent upon internal combustion? It seems that the site is to be declared a national monument. To exactly what is anyone’s guess. Perhaps a monument to vast wastelands sitting idle? A scorpion refuge? And if the national monument were declared to be the piece of broiling desert right next door to the solar energy collection apparatus, would anyone have noticed? The 5,130 acres that the solar collection farm occupies closely resembles the remaining 22,000 square miles of the Mojave. Could it just be possible that the environmental groups that succeeded in killing this important project were funded in large part by corporations whose interest in maintaining the energy status quo were threatened by solar power? To reject this possibility outright would be to ignore the obvious, a cardinal sin in The Department’s view.

Another series of political criticisms aimed at trade unions has caught DOPOTO’s attention. Conservative commentators cannot attribute enough evil to these organizations designed to protect workers. Unions are blamed for the de-industrialization of America and the prohibitively high prices of American goods and services, as well as the lowering of standards for certain jobs like teachers, police officers and other civil servants. Never in these observations is it reported exactly why unions were formed in the first place. It was certainly not because workers desired to pay union dues on top of all their other monthly expenses.

It was a natural reaction to the callous treatment they received at the hands of greedy employers who would have gladly worked them to death at poor wages and discarded them to poverty and suffering when their backs were too bent or broken to work anymore. Sweat shops, unsafe conditions and poor wages in exchange for skilled labor were not the workers’ ideas, but those of ownership and management. Collective bargaining was the only tool available to workers, and the union movement is responsible for today’s 40-hour work week, overtime pay, safety rules, pensions, medical coverage and countless other benefits enjoyed by every working American, whether or not they are union members.

These benefits were hard won by suffering and an actual war that was fought on American soil when ownership hired private armies of goons to beat and kill striking union workers. In other cases the industrialists prevailed on various state governments to attack American workers with National Guardsmen and State Militias. Blood was shed on both sides and the war was fought to an uneasy standstill. These things actually happened and are hard history, too often ignored or made light of by glib revisionists. Like all history, however, these facts are written down and can be easily accessed by anyone more interested in truth than in general impressions.

General impressions are soft and malleable, but facts are hard and immovable, which is why few demagogues have extensive backgrounds in fact checking and honest assessment. When truth is at odds with theory, an honest man will alter his theory. That is how science works, and no theory gets to be declared a fact until proven beyond any doubt, reasonable or otherwise. Politics and business are not branches of science, however, and as such rely heavily on false assumptions. The spotty results of political and business history bear this out, with no shortage of calamities on both fronts resulting from wishful thinking and false assumptions being championed as hard truth. This is as obvious and the name of this Department. The recommendation here is research and study, or as a sign in an obscure but beloved Brooklyn candy store once sagely advised: “Be sure brain is engaged before putting mouth in gear.”

This has been a report from The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious.