Invention and Waste

Invention for invention's sake is sufficient reward. It's a bonus when it pranks the human imagination by kicking it into overdrive.

Sooner or later, a practical use for every inconceivable invention will be created.  An "aha" moment will eventually make us wonder how we ever coped without it for a thousand generations.  

When our explorations are inspired and directed by science, we never know our destination until we arrive there.  

But it is a transitory base camp, because we become immediately restless for breakthroughs and apocalypses.  Every spawn of human fantasy has the potential to be patented or copyrighted.

The future is clogged with fatuous epiphanies.  

We never know when the greatest inventions and discoveries of the past will be upended by the latest cohort of iconoclastic geniuses.  They extract new ephemeral truths from what should have remained permanent fiction. 

Truth hates a vacuum.  It is often infinitely more fruitless, but funnier than fiction. 

That axiom is illustrated by a story that is neither an April Fool's Day joke nor a Babylon Bee satire. It relates to a tactical deployment of innovative technology in the Grand Old Opry state.

The structure of DNA has been probed for a long time. The double-helix polymer and genome engineering have been a charm at solving cold cases through advances in forensic pathology and prognosticating diseases , so that doctors could advise us it's time to get our final papers in order.

Thanks to the genome sequences of excrement, DNA analysis has recently revealed what an ice age wolf's last meal was. 

The horizons of science are challenged by the unlikeliest sources. In this case, it's a New Jersey condo complex with spectacular views of the Hudson River. Residents there are flush and rolling in the panoply of their class's guilty pleasures.

Accordingly, these folks, who have earned and some cases expropriated the finest things in life, are resolved not to brook the sporadic presence of dog poop on their entitled manicured lawns.

The byproducts of digestion that dogs leave is normally anonymous, unless witnessed in the act of their relieving.  The well-heeled dwellers of Edgewater believe the theory that ignoring minor crimes invites major ones.  Look away at the feces today and face a felon tomorrow. 

So, they took some deep breaths, gathered their thoughts, and took matters in their own hands.  

Due diligence led them to a DNA lab in Tennessee, that was so state of the art, that it could make positive identification of any specific dog from which stool samples sent to them was expelled.  They have a genetic data file for canine crap, based on submissions by fee-paying property owners.

The property manager has the task of actually recovering the waste from the sod. Probably not a pompous individual.  Sometimes compensation packages are made up of more than wages.

It is admirable how a community which pays almost a half-million dollars for a one-bedroom residential unit can police itself. Perhaps we strivers for affordable housing should emulate them.

Indignity is in the eyes of the beholder and sometimes the nose. 

Pity the 16th century civil servant in King Henry the VIII's court whose designated mission was to wipe His Majesty's butt.  This was no per diem assignment.  The guy who never feared getting his hands dirty performing public service, had an actual title.  Look it up.

Maybe the Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS) would be interested.

The four scientists who co-discovered the DNA structure would be gobsmacked if they knew the quirky gain of function to which their wondrous findings would be subjected.  Being gobsmacked while rolling in one's grave is asking a bit much of multitasking, however.

Three of the four, James Watson (who died fairly recently), Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins were awarded a Nobel Prize in 1962, but the fourth, Rosalind Franklin was omitted, though her contributions were comparable.  She is never noted, even during Women's History month, and died at 37 in obscurity.

Prodigious savants tend to be limited to the hard sciences.

Nobel Prizes have fallen into some disrepute lately, having lost their luster to sometimes mean-spirited controversy.  Instead of a green 24 karat gold medal, laureates, especially for peace, should instead be given a pyrite-plated political football.

Yasser Arafat and Barack Obama stand out. One was unseemly, the other unsuitable. 

And now President Trump possesses it physically like an opulent trinket. Its rightful owner, even if she pawned it, opposition leader Maria Machado, gratefully donated it to him for having captured former Venezuelan President Maduro. 

Nobel prizes are not real estate with transferable titles.

The question is not whether President Trump deserved it in the first place. In athletic competition, champions cannot surrender their trophies to contenders without loss of both their and the trophy's legitimacy.

When I was a kid, long-playing "records" were still around. I was a wannabe great pianist. 

At the time, there was a midtown recording studio available to the public for rental.  I got an extra blank label from them, typed the names of a renowned symphony orchestra and conductor with myself as soloist, and superimposed it on a recording  with authentic maestros, and passed it off as my own performance to impress some gullible friends.

I knew all along it was not truly my own achievement. Can the same be said for President Trump?  It is even more treacherous to be fooled by oneself than by others. 

No joke. 

Neither is the tug-of-war over Greenland.  No cable news soothsayer saw it coming.

The population of Greenland approximates the combined student rosters of around a dozen public high schools. And the square mileage of the world's largest island approaches that of the world's richest man's ego.  

The justification for annexing Greenland makes sense, albeit shaky, if measured by the yardsticks that ascendant roguish and sometimes decent but misguided nations,  have trotted out over the annals: natural resources, strategic location, etc.  Certainly the residents would be better off under the U.S. than  under China or Russia, both of whom have predilections for imperial keepsakes.

The souvenir of a polar icecap would be a climactic piece of adventurism and give a new meaning to the word polarization. 

Greenland is an autonomous territory within the kingdom of Denmark, which sounds like a contradiction. Although Denmark always ranks among the "happiest" countries of the world, it has left Greenlanders out of the happiness loop.

The population of 57,000 is economically badly off, and its indigenous people were, for many years until not too long ago, subjugated and given forced contraception.  Still, the use of pretexts to coercively annex foreign territories is always wrong and will be perpetually replicated if tolerated. 

Threatening military force as an "on the table" option if business model negotiations fail, is indefensible as doctrine or international law, and an insult to the spirit of what major parties view, when it suits their convenience,  as the holy writ and shibboleths of the Constitution as related to national security.

Under that worn and torn "national security" umbrella, are the problems of fraud and immigration, according to eight Republican U.S. senators, who have proposed a bill that should ignite bipartisan panic.

It would make convictions for felony fraud, which would be redefined to include less than the current floor of $10,000 and be retroactive for several decades, punishable by revocation of naturalized citizenship. It's easy to see the potential for aggravated abuse of this implicitly abusive set up. 

Though a response to the allegations of corruption in Minneapolis, chiefly among the Somali community, it might eventually be weaponized locally from Brighton Beach to Flushing.

It would not be a law, slumbering in the books, awakened for ad hoc application under narrow and specialized circumstances.  It could become a retributive flamethrower by the government against even innocent people who have crossed or frustrated it in some legal way.

The stage is being set to potentially re-classify and expel anybody living in the US on generic grounds of "parasitism," especially groups that are pegged as consumers of social welfare programs.

 It would lend itself to being a made-to-order, custom-tailored statute of vindictiveness and intimidation. That would be an affront to our imperishable DNA as a nation.