Stuart Cudlitz (? - 2015)

My friend Stuart Cudlitz has passed away after a long illness. I know of Stuart through my friend Sally Syberg as she had worked at Colossal Pictures in SF for many years, and so had Stuart. Stuart had the misfortune of working on several interesting visual effects projects and formed the incorrect belief that this was a creative way to work in the motion picture industry (the belief is incorrect, because the two pictures were exceptional, which is one of the reasons their visual effects were sent to Colossal to begin with).

At one point his significant other got a good job with Nickelodeon in NYC and he moved there, perhaps a little over a decade ago, and we spent some time together. He told me how difficult it was to have a beautiful wife who loved him and supported him in Manhattan where all he had to do was paint fine art or whatever else he wanted to do. It seems funny in retrospect, at the time I was bitterly jealous, of course.

My friend Stuart was a complete character and he will be missed.

Please go enjoy your day while you still can.

A biography of Stuart as taken from his website (see below)

Stuart Cudlitz is an artist, writer, filmmaker and educator. As an exhibiting multi-media studio artist and a published illustrator, writer and composer he has applied these legacy skills to the design and direction for his work many credits on commercial and independent films and interactive media employing emerging technologies. As a guest lecturer and adjunct faculty Cudlitz utilizes a professional studio approach to teach curriculum in both MFA and BFA programs with emphasis on techniques in visual thinking, interdisciplinary animation methodology and the integration of traditional arts and narrative techniques across all media. He is currently writing a book on the relationships between the legacy of traditional art methodology and digital media creation and distribution while continuing to provide creative direction and design solutions for the media, communications and electronics industries. Recent accomplishments include co-invention of a proprietary patented technology for the storage, retrieval and exchange of personal profile data enabling consistent interpretation across multiple device, applications and data services based on a social networking model.  Professional Associations include ASCAP, ACM and IEEE.

Stuart's Website

http://www.stuartink.com/

Pictures of Stuart and Lili
http://www.yogile.com/xwfu9n5c#51m

Countermeasures Once You Have Been Spoofed

Several months ago, my friend Ken Cope reported that my name was being used on Facebook to sell some horrible weight reduction product. That was weird but I did nothing about it. I now think I know how it happened and I am writing it up so that you can possibly avoid these things.

For a variety of reasons, I run Windows on one of my laptops. This is the device I use to read books in bed and on the train so it needs to have a Kindle reader which means it can not be Linux/Unix but must be Windows or Mac OS. It came installed with Windows 8 which is, IMHO, a disaster but I installed classic menu and tried using some apps from the Microsoft store including a world clock. Well, one of these apps had a virus.

Or possibly the virus came with a plugin for Google Chrome.

In any case, Google Chrome started behaving obnoxiously bring up billions of advertisements, so I reverted to Firefox and the problems mostly went away.

But then all of a sudden when I tried to edit my Kindle parameters, it brought up a window to Amazon but unbeknownst to me it was really a hacked non-Amazon window with a questionnaire. I foolishly filled it out and it contained no information of value. I have no idea what the point of that was. But it was clear to me that somehow my browser had been hacked and that it had whatever my browser knew, which included passwords.

I brainwiped the computer and went and changed all sites that had passwords that the browser on the computer knew. You must never use these passwords again because it now has it in its database and it will make use of them on another account of yours should you reuse it.

Probably you should not have your browser ever remember a password. Once a program is infected, delete it. Once a password is compromised, never use it again. Never load applications from the Microsoft store.

The Genre of the Short Weapons Film

draft

As we endure the vast explosion of creativity enabled by the long-coming, often heralded, and deeply regretted democratization of the filmmaking and film distribution processes, we would expect, and we are told to expect, the emergence of new genre of film, in particular, of short film. These genre have exploded in number and, almost unnoticed, are embedded in our consciousness and evoke all the human emotions of humor, boredom, disgust, fear, envy, awe and hatred in varying amounts.

Oscar Wilde supposedly said, in a quote I have never been able to find, that “thank God not everyone writes plays, because if they did we would have to see them and that would be tedious.” Or words to that effect. 

One problem with being sarcastic is that every once in a while one is sincere and it can be difficult for one's readers or audience to catch the transition from overt sarcasm to sincere admiration, especially if one has a sense of humor that can be misunderstood. So be warned, this essay, about half way through, will turn sincere in admiration, as we talk about the genre of our nominal topic, the short weapons film.

Ah, the short weapons film! Lost among billions of short films about cute pets, fitness, how to fix your toilet, the prodigal grandchild, sex, young women in their underclothes, young men in their underclothes, narratives about crossing the border, self-hypnosis, TED talks, political or other character assassination, lists of things found in movies (10 best sexist jokes, 10 best science fiction movies that fail), films about the weather, machinima with voice over delivering narratives on how to exterminate aliens in your new synthetic Corvette, among all of these we also have the subgenre of the “short weapons film”.

The “short weapons film” comes in primarily two forms, the professional and the amateur.

The lesser form is the professional sales film that accompanies each new and proposed weapon system. Be it a missile, or a sidearm, or a new French small submarine for special forces insertion and “exfiltration”, these short films are professional (that is, people are being paid to make them) and contain certain standard elements in a predictable fashion. They are less than 10 minutes long and narrate how new technology and ideas solve a problem in conflict resolution whether that means seeing in the dark, blowing something up, travelling fast or what have you.  The film moves on to describe the particular solution incorporating live footage and synthetic imagery to show how this technology can solve this problem.  Story structure is straightforward and leads to the "obligatory" scenes, such as a solid set of time lapse photography of a missile launch or a target being hit.  Audio is typical for the genre of the short industrial film.  Often just voice over with a theme or inspirational music at certain times.  Occasionally a few seconds of an interview with a key weapons designer or customer.  Each subgenre of weapons film has its own conventions.  For example, few films about submarines can resist using that famous sonar ping at least once or twice in their film.

These films are boring  but they may have interesting elements if you happen to be interested in the technology.  

But there is another genre of short weapons film that is enthusiastic, exciting, fun, unfunded, amateur and occasionally completely drop dead brilliant.

This is the short film that is made by the sailors or soldiers themselves to describe their work, or demonstrate their esprit de corps or just show how much fun it can be to pilot an A-10 close support aircraft, or fly a modern air superiority fighter next to its brethren from WW 2, or the gorgeous choreography and jaw-dropping danger of flying from a carrier, or landing a helicopter at night in the desert. These are edited raw footage with a rock & roll background theme, generally speaking, and natural sounds from the activity from the point of view of the observer, the pilot, the ground crew, the control tower. The technical quality of the imagery varies from excellent to extreme low resolution and quantized night footage, but the authenticity of the imagery is never in doubt. The sense of presence, of being there, in Iraq, on the aircraft carrier, what have you, is genuine and completely sincere. These are young people flying jets, jumping out of airplanes and blowing things up.

Here is an example of an Airborne exercise in which people jump out of perfectly good helicopters when in the air:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=od79V-gndfw

This art form is transient and perishable.  The issue of the music copyright for small art films continues to come up.   The classic in this case is the short film about U2 spy plane practice landings and take off.  The U2 is known as the "Dragon Lady" for a variety of reasons.  Among other things it does not have normal landing gear to save weight.  So it discards its gear when it takes off and then basically does a modified crash landing when it lands with the pilot being unable to see much of anything.

The original film was brilliant, but the music was not their's.  So they substituted another track, which is of course not as good.   But if you wish, you can watch the video with the sound off, and then play the real track in the BG with some manual synchronization.  Its really good.   The music is "She Hates Me" by Puddle of Mudd.

U2 being chased by the cops

U2 Dragon Lady: She fucking hates me (the video, turn the audio off)

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=063_1404845846

She Hates Me by Puddle of Mudd (the music)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYE4CVhVkhw

For those of you who want to sing along, the words to She Hate Me are here:

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/puddleofmudd/shehatesme.html

Yes, they got one of their chase cars to pretend to pull the U2 pilot off the plane and check him for drunk driving.

Not all these films are this brilliant of course.   But they are generally quite fun in a certain way.

Note: This post will be updated if I can find better versions of the video, or even the video with the original music track. Trust me, this is worth it.

_______________________________________________

France will Build World's Most Advanced Submarine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqwkjOnJy78

Scopene Class Submarine

http://www.naval-technology.com/projects/scorpene/

What is this Cancer Thing All of a Sudden

As you read this, I have four friends who have been diagnosed with cancer that has metastasized and are under various courses of treatment, usually radiation and chemo.  They range in age from 30 to 60.  None of them have particularly evil habits so far as I know, e.g. no heavy drinkers or smokers or obesity, etc.   Furthermore, 3 of the 4 are close friends of mine, people who I collaborate and interact with.  People I will miss should anything happen to them.  (The other one is a more distant friend, but still a friend).

Of the four, three of the individuals are walking around, and one of them is in a hospice and unable to speak. 

When you were growing up, did your parents, or school, or other institution (church, synagogue, community center, whatever), did anyone happen to mention that your life could be cut short at any time and that you could have your body ripped apart by a legion of vicious and deadly diseases?

Did they mention that you could be of any age when this happens, and that while there are a variety of things you can do to avoid this fate at least in terms of the odds, that ultimately it is up to chance and how your genes feel like mutating.

Also, if you catch it early, in other words, if you worry about things like this all your life and get tested regularly, then you can probably, but not necessarily, extend your life, i.e. increase survivability. But if you fail to worry about these things then it is possible even likely that you will not notice the problems until it is far too late.

It seems to me that this sucks.

I also have two friends who are HIV positive and have been under treatment for years, perhaps a decade. But they seem to be out and about and doing well.

I have also noticed that my friends who leave this world early all seem to be the nicer ones.  The evil people seem to go on forever.   What is going on here?

The Anomaly of Enjoying Jupiter Ascendant

George Lucas has famously said that movies are binary: they either work for you or they don't. If they do, then you ignore any little flaw. But if they do not, then every flaw or potential flaw is noticed and used against it. I do not know if Mr. Lucas was original in this observation, I doubt it, but ever since I read that I have noticed that he seems to be correct. All movies have flaws of course, but when you are caught up in a film, one is happy to ignore the problems and issues that in other circumstances would be seen as deadly.

The question then becomes, what leads a member of the audience to lean one way or the other? From acceptance and enjoyment to rejection and boredom or worse? One aspect of this choice may be what is called the “cockroach in the salad” effect. Lets say you are eating out at a fancy restaurant and you have ordered a salad and when it arrives the first thing you see is a disgusting cockroach on top wiggling its antennae at you. You call the waiter over and he removes the offending cockroach and salad but the damage has already been done. It will be hard to get beyond that terrible first impression. On the other hand, let us say you are at a restaurant and see nothing that you particularly want, but you order something and to your amazement, it is really good. From that point on, everything works for you.

So my argument here is that the basis of cultivating a positive impression of a creative work is a mashup of “first impressions” with “low expectations”. If you did not expect much, then getting something really good is likely to push you over the edge to a positive impression. And vice versa. Until you get that push, whether positive or negative, then you are in a state of uncertainty. Is this film any good or not?  

I don't have any other way of explaining the apparent anomaly of enjoying “Jupiter Ascendant” (JA) a film I was born to hate. What could have caused this odd reversal of expectations such that I actually enjoyed watching this film? Can Science explain this or must it always remain a mystery?

Consider the following:

First, we have a dinner sequence in which our plain jane heroine introduces us to her Russian extended family in America. Its actually very funny. You mean the Wachowski brothers actually have a sense of humor? How would we have known?

 Jupiter's sister before and after a special bath.  Ah, refreshing !

Second, we have a classic theme in fantasy fiction, the “person of noble birth who does not realize that she is of royal blood and possibly the heir to the throne”. In this sub-genre, the kids are separated from the adults by the manner in which it is revealed that our average neighborhood girl is actually “her majesty”. In JA this is actually done quite well and unexpectedly. A fight sequence between two alpha males upsets a hive or three of bees which scares the shit out of our female lead, but no need to worry, the bees have been genetically programmed to treat “royals” differently and so our two fighting alpha males break off their sparring to recognize that something quite odd has happened. The babe has been revealed as a member of a royal family of some sort.

Bees show the way

Third, after our plain jane babe has had her butt saved by our hero, she tries to encourage him to ignore her royal birth and kiss her. He refuses, revealing that he is not really a man, but closer to a dog, or a wolf. She comes back with a splendidly stupid response: she has always gotten along well with dogs. Its does not persuade. This is funny.   It occurs to me that in certain ways this incident is itself a flaw in the movie. If our hero was really descended from a dog, then he would have no trouble taking advantage of the situation.  But I digress.

Fourth, the sequence with the candles and certain aspects of the wedding sequence are lush and clearly represent the director's desire to have a big wedding one day.

Fifth, the two brothers of this royal family are monumentally fucked up.   Parents, take note, do not name your child "Titus", it never seems to work out.

What a creepy asshole this guy is.

But most of all, who could not like a movie where the lead babe keeps having to remind people that "I am not your damn mother"?

So what we have here is an overdone, weird movie in the same genre of, for example, the original Dune novel: a space opera with exotic economies, insane royal familes and fight scenes between things bred to be good at fighting.

Overblown, a misfire, there is no doubt that it is a miscalculation on a galactic scale, truly a stupid movie.

Nevertheless, as a 12 year old, emotionally and psychologically, I found it often to be an entertaining movie and was willing to overlook its tragic flaws.   I also have a tendency to hunt and peck at my movies.  I am not bound, like so many are, to watch a film from beginning to end.  I prefer to "sample", sometimes with the sound off, in order to better appreciate its higher values.   When properly used, this technique can improve most movies.

Postscript

It did not hurt that the uber-schmuck, John Gaeta, was somehow deposed from his role as visual effects supervisor on this semi-epic. I shudder to think what manner of ego-swine must have replaced him/it. I am sure that Mr. Gaeta will enjoy a new career in the food service industry or some other profession worthy of his talents.

American Cockroaches Lunge for Freedom in Communist China

In a daring escape from slavery, a million cockroaches escaped from a Chinese farm where they were being raised by cockroach slavers. Their escape was aided by an unknown “Friend of Cockroaches Everywhere” who destroyed the integrity of the horrible slave chambers that the cockroaches were contained within.

The cockroaches were being raised as a commercial venture to provide critical components of Chinese folk medicine which is based in part on pieces of cockroaches torn from their still living bodies.  Thus these innocent victims of Communist oppression were headed for certain death had they not made their escape.

In a heartening moment of cultural diversity and American Exceptionalism, the freedom loving cockroaches were American cockroaches, imported from N. America where there is said to be no shortage of free-range cockroaches.

Freedom loving cockroach making a dash

“This is one tiny step for a cockroach, one giant leap for cockroaches everywhere,” said an anonymous cockroach-loving organization in China. “We hope that this will be just the beginning.”

The oppressive Communist Chinese dictatorship was working to destroy the escapees by any means possible, reported sources.

http://phys.org/news/2013-08-million-cockroaches-china-farm.html#nRlv

The Cost of Retraining Workers in the 3D Industry

draft

[In this post, we discuss what I am calling Strategy 2, which is that the disenfranchised worker attempts to leave the industry he has trained for and worked in by retraining him or her self by getting an advanced degree in a different subject at the university.   In a previous post, we discussed the out-of-pocket costs of Strategy 1, which is to try to persevere in the field he or she has worked in by staying current and attending various conferences.  You can find that discussion here.]

Lets examine the real costs to society of unemployment, especially unemployment that is caused by foreign subsidies that damage industries in other countries particularly our country, since that is what we have in the train wreck that is computer animation, that foreign subsidy thing.

A friend who believes in the free market says that those who got screwed by foreign government subsidies are worthless garbage who lost out on the “free market” and deserved what they got.  How an industry that has been devastated by foreign subsidies could be confused with a free market, I do not know. Besides, we have never really had much of a free market in this country, at least not for the rich. You know what they say, its socialism for the rich but the free market for the rest of us.  

Since employment in this industry in this country was severely impacted by these subsidies, and since our government failed to act, presumably at the request of the studios although again no one really knows, nevertheless we can calculate what it will cost to retrain these workers into another field.

But how many workers were displaced?   No one knows the numbers, so far as I know, and no one cares to know as far as I can tell.   But we can look at a few indicators and make our own rough estimates.   I am going to guess that the peak employment in this country for computer animation in the service of visual effects and animation was roughly in the years 1997 - 2004 or so.   If we look at employment then and compare it to now we will get a rough estimate of the change.

R&H goes from 600-1000 people to zero, Sony Pictures Imageworks which used to have over 1,000 people working has moved production to Vancouver.   Digital Domain which used to also be over 1,000 people I think are down to a few hundred.   ILM which was over 2,000 at one point is now about 500 according to one estimate of someone currently working there.    Dreamworks Feature Animation laid off 1,000 people in S. California and then closed their N. California office.   At this point we are nearing 5,000 people.

Now some of these people have in fact found employment overseas.   And some of these people, I do not know how many, will be able to slide into other careers with only some disruption.   Some will be able to work for Google, some for Facebook, and some will get married and have families while their spouse works. I think that it is mostly the mid-level and senior people who have specialized in computer animation and spent over a decade in that field who will especially suffer.  I do not know the numbers but I am going to guess here for the purposes of this post, 2,500 people.  I hope this number is conservative.

Unfortunately most of these people live in California which is very expensive, and many of them have significant others or families that they are supporting.   I estimate a minimum monthly expense of roughly $4,000 which breaks down to $2,000 for rent, $1,000 for utilities and food, $1,000 for car payment, insurance and everything else.  I realize that outside of California these rates might seem exorbitant.  But it costs a lot of money to rent in LA and SF and you don't get much for your money.  At least in NYC, you are living in NY, goddamnit, but not in LA and SF where it is merely expensive without returning any value that I can see.  And you need a car out here.  Those who do not drive will not be permitted to play.

There are several paths one might take to create a new career, but one of them, and the only one I am going to price here is to go to a university and get an advanced degree.   That will take 3-5 years and cost roughly $30,000 per year.  One might get a masters degree in computer science, or get an MFA in Art and look at teaching.

Thus if we estimate 2,500 people for three years getting an advanced degree then we get 2,500 * (48,000 + 30,000) = 195 million per year for three years or just under 600 million in total, adjusted for interest, net present value and what have you.

It goes without saying that the family goes off health insurance unless the school provides some, and I am not sure what the policy is for students with families.  It goes without saying that the kids get the substandard public education we give to our worker-swine, they don't deserve the elite education of private schools. Also that unemployment insurance, should they receive any and I never have in spite of what the law says or what is taken from my salary, is a pathetic joke and does not amount to much.

Now you may not care about these people and you may object to retraining them on theoretical grounds. You may believe that these people deserve to have their lives destroyed. But I disagree, I do not think they deserve to have their lives destroyed. I think that the society that failed to protect their jobs through greed or malfeasance has the duty to retrain them. That is what I think.

But even if you do not agree with me, then at least I hope we can agree that the people who made a commitment to this field, many of them at the urging of respectable organizations like SIGGRAPH, will now have costs they must bear in order to get into a different field in mid-career.  And those costs, paid for by the individuals affected, come to not less than $600 million over three years.  At least. My point is that there are real costs to society of failing to deal with this issue and of training too many people (or whatever we did) for this field.

The good news is that this money is easy to get. The studios have made much more money than this using the subsidies and making product based on the technology which we invented and was then shipped overseas to take advantage of slave labor and subsidies. So they have plenty of money. Have them pay. That would be only fair and I am sure that they will be happy to do so.

Cities Skylines Covered with Dead Bodies and Trash

This is a mini-review of Cities: Skylines or is it Skylines: Cities.

I have been playing whatever it is called now since the day it came out. Most computer games hold no interest for me, but games based on the simulation of society or the simulation of conflict at the strategic level are interesting. I have my own ideas on such things which I may prototype one day, although only if I can stay out of the madness, greed and hypocrisy of the game industry.

Unfortunately, Cities Skylines just wasnt tested before release. About the time you reach the population of 10-15,000 people, your city starts getting mired in trash and dead bodies. The stupid tweety bird that tells you about it is useless. All you can do is put trash heaps every two feet and the same with crematoriums and pray.

Just as annoying is the bug in the model such that it is impossible to have enough workers of the right type around. Nothing you do will make a difference, you are just fucked. Maybe the developers just ran out of time or money?  Who knows.

Games such as this do not have to be realistic in order to be interesting. Nevertheless, this game, whatever it is called, will have lots of semi-realistic features and challenges to recommend it to those who enjoy such things, when, that is, they have fixed some of the problems.

We see by this example one of the problems with individuals, or small teams, modestly financed groups doing games: they may simply not have the resources to debug the problems that are caused by interesting internal simulations. Cities Skylines is a good effort, and shows promise, but is frustrating as hell in its current form once you get beyond the baby cities.

And then there is the bug whereby you can not save your game.  Lets not go there, its too frustrating to think about.  Presumably that one will be fixed sooner than later.

Save your money and your time and wait for them to fix the bugs. When these bugs are fixed, perhaps others will be revealed.  But nevertheless if they can fix it up to the 100,000 population level, that will probably be sufficient for the majority of players.   Shows an A- for effort but a B- for testing. Promising but frustrating in its current incarnation.

Maybe wait three months and see where things are?

Cities Skylines on Steam

http://store.steampowered.com/app/255710/

Aesthetics, Computing and the Internet

draft /. a friend has pointed out that the development of lisp needs to be elaborated upon here and I agree with him.   So that will be written sometime soon, I promise....

They say that the internet is a bold new paradigm. They say that you can not judge the internet by what came before because it is totally new and those who attempt to judge it by past criteria are just not with the program and are whining uselessly. Well, indeed they might be whining uselessly, that much is true.

There are trends, patterns in aesthetics whether you know it or not, or care or not, and computing is about aesthetics from beginning to end. Like architecture, the aesthetics happen to hit the hard wall of engineering reality more often than other art forms, and indeed the engineering or construction aspects are fundamental, required, de riguere, both real and not real, but mostly real.

Nevertheless, we can perceive patterns in the aesthetics of this people's art of writing HTML just as we may see patterns in fine art, if we care to look.

In the following, we are going to discuss some of the history of ideas, which I know is very offensive to some of you more practical types. Either take a pill and calm down or go away.

Once upon a time, a generation of programmers grew up with the implied aesthetics of an experimental operating system from Bell Telephone Laboratories, an elite center of excellence in our country which no longer exists, the center that is, destroyed as it was by our government and the so-called “free market”. But at that center of excellence, an OS, later called UNIX, was developed with a minimal OS approach. A bit of the “less is more” theme going on here. True, some of the minimal nature was imposed on the work because of limited resources, but isnt that often true in art? Time passed and Unix got out into the world and then morphed into its bastard younger brother Linux, for better or for worse, that is what we are stuck with. I happen to like Linux and think it is better than we, collectively, deserve, but that is another topic.

One of the tricks about Unix was that it was designed by some of the best and brightest that our country had to offer.

Another aesthetic, which was a little busy for my tastes, was one we might call the MIT Lisp Machine style of software. This was written, it seemed to me, by hundreds of MIT graduate and undergraduate students cranked on speed, and it had many nuances, options, and so forth. Half the time it baffled me. But ultimately it was functional, well documented, and you could tell that while they might have been a little wordy and option-happy by the standards of a Unix fellow, there was no doubt that the people involved in writing, using and documenting this technology were very smart. Very smart indeed.

But now we enter the Internet age where we have vast software packages, their associated frameworks, and group sourced semi-documentation. This technology is to the Lisp machine what Lisp was to Unix, it is busy beyond belief. Every option has an option and every options' option has an exception. Whereas Linux and Lisp was designed by the best we had to offer, most of the Internet stuff, a bastard child of another project of excellence, but long ago, the Arpanet, is motivated not by excellence but by the most important philosophical principles of our great country: naked greed combined with arrogance, stupidity, ignorance and hypocrisy. There is no need to document, they say, it is all documented by the group mind. Not that there are not good parts to the infrastructure and conventions and languages and frameworks of the Internet, indeed there are. They are there along with everything else.

In other words, lest this sound too negative, the Unix and Lisp movements were movements by an intellectual elite, as was the Arpanet, whereas the Internet is a true people's movement. Rough, inconsistent, good, bad, horrible, insane, and all within a few characters of each other.

There is no order nor can there be, nor could there be, any order. It is the group fuck raised to the 1000^th power. Let us embrace the new aesthetic. It may be insane but it is our insanity.

Bees Get Hooked on Nicotine and Fall Over Dead say Scientists

With hive collapse syndrome threatening world civilization by dying before their residents, the bees, can serve their primary economic purpose for mankind, which is to pollinate agricultural crops in our great country, scientists have looked high and low to find the cause and help prevent economic disaster which would of course affect the earnings of the shareholders, a fate all good Americans, whether man or bee, can agree must be avoided. The bees can goddamn well die as far as we are concerned as long as they pollinate beforehand.

Now science has proven that the alleged cause of the threat to the shareholder's earnings is not, as the tree huggers have said without a shred of proof, caused by harmless and helpful pesticides which are only working to improve shareholder value, not damage it.  No the real cause of hive collapse syndrome is not the innocent and beneficial pesticides, but lies within the bees themselves.

This lazy bee can barely stand up she is so drunk on nicotine, nectar and pollen.

In an important new article published in Nature, science has proven that the real cause of hive collapse sysndrome is the bee's moral turpitude and lack of anglo-saxon work ethic. Instead of steadfastly pollinating like they should, they get hooked on nicotine-related substances and abandon their economic purpose and spend all day just lazing around and smoking, or in this case, sipping, nicotine. Its not the pesticides per se that are causing the bees to become slackers and suck nicotine until they fall over dead. It is their own lack of moral willpower.

One more time American industry has been vindicated. The bees need to go to church more often and teach their children the benefits of moderation and hard work and this problem is solved.

An article about this in The Guardian

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/apr/22/bees-may-become-addicted-to-nicotine-like-pesticides-study-finds