Reviews by Hubie Goode: Car Dealership Hell

Car Dealership Hell

Over the last ten years or so, it has been my privilege to work for not one, but two automobile dealerships in the same capacity. Once on a while you can find a dealership that is interested in someone doing their “in house” advertising, that is creation of their ads for print and radio, right there on the property itself. As a graphic designer I have done this twice in two different states and have been exposed to some of the most interesting inside information and bizarre behavior that one would never guess was even possible of mature, working adults.

First of all, you must put away all assumptions on which you have been raised about what happens in a car dealership day in and day out. This also includes some of you who already suspect much of what I am about to tell you. Selling is a tough enough job for anyone, as it involves going for another person’s wallet on a consistent basis to earn a living. I do indeed feel for the person who has to do this every day. Some people are good at it, I suppose, and they find no problem with the exercise, and it’s important that they feel this way, for it is integral to their success.

I myself, however, have never felt that this sort of thing was a good idea and I doubt I ever will. That probably goes a long way to answering the question as to why I have never been able to make any money at this sort of selling. I have, to be sure, done several jobs in the past such as retail, and for quite a few years in my younger days I was a framer. I enjoyed that sort of work, for I could actually help out customers who needed assistance and I didn’t feel there was anything improper going on behind the scenes. This doesn’t hold true for auto dealerships and I have long spouted off about the many things I have been witness to as I toiled away in the little side office with the glass wall window and the two little seats that had no salesman to occupy them.

About twelve years ago in a small town in the south I had my first assignment while I also worked for a major newspaper in the area. This was my first exposure to the incongruity of image to that of reality put forth by public advertising performed by major auto makers which is broadcast all over the country. While toiling away at the little in house computer, I had a front row seat for things rarely seen and rarely felt. There was of course, the usual standing around of salesman all day. They stand around the showroom floor of the dealership for about 10 hours a day, and they work usually six days a week. Always in dress shirt and tie, they endeavor to make the best impression on practically anyone who enters the car lot, or the showroom. But that is pretty much where it all ends.

One particularly slow day at the first dealership, and there are many, many slow days, four salesman where so board with the lack of business that they lined up on the road, a nice sized four lane highway about twenty yards from the show room floor, and if anyone even thought to slow down to turn into the car lot, they all reached for the car door handle at the same time. The car was still moving, engine was still running and the embarrassed driver was red faced and frightened. The idea, of course, was to greet the customer first and get his attention, for once a salesman has gotten your attention and talked to you, NO ONE ELSE CAN! They would slap and punch each other aside as they jockeyed for the door handle even before the driver came to a complete stop. I remember watching this one day from my little office in the corner and seeing grown men in their forties, some older, get into a literal fist fight out in the lot over the possession of a customer. I kid you not.

After watching this sort of behavior, I once got a chance to chat with the manager of the dealership and I asked him about some of the things that go on there, for they sure didn’t seem to match up with the commercials on TV. A prime example of laugh out loud fantasy would be those Honda ads where the salesman informs you that it’s his job to be helpful. I chuckle as I write that, for it is by no stretch of the imagination a car salesman’s job to be helpful.

I was informed by the manager, with practically no emotion or concern in his voice that many car dealerships prefer to hire ex-convicts as salesman, and much of the habits they form in prison follow them into the working world. I found that to be logical and also a bit alarming, having bought a few cars from dealerships myself. Yes, I found out, I probably somewhere and somehow did business with an ex-prisoner. But why, I asked, are they hired with open arms? I was told they are more productive. Really? I asked. Ex-convicts make more productive salesman? Oh yes, I was told with a wink and a nod, they don’t mind at all!

Got that folks? Ex-convicts don’t mind at all.

After my stint there, I didn’t think too much more about this as I had signed it all off to small town America placed almost invisibly along side the open stretches of highway between the major towns of our nation, where there is nothing to do and no place to go except church on Sunday. Surely, I thought, this can’t be the way things are, like say, inside a dealership in a major metropolitan city. Surely, I knew, that if I were only to see a dealership from the inside, in say, the second largest city in America, I would indeed find modern and sophisticated personages happy and busy at the work of promoting a major auto brand that everyone knew and loved all over our glorious land, the home of the brave, the land of the free.

Heh.

My second auto dealership was just such the venue from which I was now going to find out just how different things must be. As before, I joined a major car brand dealership to handle their in-house advertising and in the meantime, unbeknown to them, I was now going to get the inside scoop on things, hopefully from a mature and progressive point of view. There was a young man, about the age of twenty two, let’s call him Tony, who began a job selling cars in this particular dealership about the same time I had arrived. His office was next to the one they gave me for the computer generated ads and I was able to “pick his brains” on many things during the short time he stayed there.

He did, as many salesmen seem to do all over America, stand around a lot, for hours at a time. We were located on the major thoroughfare in the area, so therefore there was no big highway to go stand out on. Most of the day, for everyone, was spent in the confines of the dealership showroom floor. In fact, if one of the salesman did indeed get someone to sell to, they had to walk a block down the street to a small fenced in lot that had a discouragingly small amount of inventory. The idea being that one had to sell what they had on the small lot, not acquiesce to customers who wanted something the dealership could not put in storage.

Tony stood around for ten hours a day, just like the salesmen at the other dealership I had been at. He was required to be on duty on Saturdays even if he was ill, in fact they told him to get another job if he couldn’t make a Saturday, no matter what the reason.

One day he had a couple of customers come in whom he managed to land while others were either busy or looking the wrong way. They were a couple of young men who were from a local church, one was an assistant to a pastor, I believe he told me, and the other was a young man who was on a work furlough from prison who was trying to put his life back together. Well, they were nice enough, he told me, and he did his best to try and give them good service, which I do believe was his true intention.

The pastor’s assistant, however, knew his way around a car sale better than Tony did, who was called a “greenie” by the salesmen, and dickered a bit too much for the young man. Seeing this, the assistant manager decided to take charge of a sales situation that was taking way to long for Tony to complete and systematically got into a loud and nasty shouting match right on the sales room floor with the pastor’s assistant, finally telling him to get the f**k out of his dealership right in front of anyone who was within the next block to hear.

After all, it’s his job to be helpful.

The assistant manager was all smiles after this, patting Tony on the back and telling him not to worry about it, despite the fact that the man had just blown Tony’s first sale. You have to understand, he told Tony, customers are stupid and they have to be shown who’s boss. Yes, you read that right, customers are stupid. This was not the first time I had heard this in dealing with the inside workings of car dealerships, but I had no idea it could be so widespread.

Yes, they do indeed believe you and I are stupid. And that’s the word they use. Additionally, they believe that much of what they have to do to sell cars is the customer’s fault. If only you and I weren’t so afraid of commitment, they tell me, then they wouldn’t have to shove you off the cliff, so to speak, when buying a car. You should thank car salesman for their abuse, and there is really no other way to put this, their “trickery” when selling you a car. It’s your own fault!

Tony didn’t make very many friends working at the dealership - he wasn’t allowed to. Older and more larcenous salesman made him a target and even used to call him “fugly” to his face. For anyone who doesn’t know, the term “fugly” is a derisive term composed of two other words, one of them being the word “ugly”.

One day, Tony casually spoke with a customer who was milling around the showroom floor, he didn’t know another salesman had already approached the person, and he only spoke with them for a moment. Later that day, while he was standing around again, the larger and more aggressive salesman who was only moments before, laughing and chatting with another salesman, suddenly saw Tony standing outside on the sidewalk and charged out there after him. He pushed his chest into Tony’s much like football players who “bump” each other after a stellar play, and put his face right into Tony’s face and yelled, “What the f**k is wrong with you, fugly????? You never talk to another man’s customer!!!!” Was there a fist fight? No, but then, since this man was an ex-prisoner, it was perhaps best.

Tony was constantly dogged by this man the whole time he was there and had to take up the practice of standing around on the opposite side of the dealership from wherever the man was. I could see him moving around from outside of my office in direct tandem relationship to wherever the other man was, if the man moved left, Tony moved right, and visa versa. A wonderful way to spend ten hours a day.

Tony landed another customer one day and was in the middle of doing the four square and the “going back and forth to see the manager” in brokering the deal. The customer was there at the dealership all day, as is the plan, and they spent way too much time for my taste sitting in the office Tony had, all by themselves.

Getting up for a break, I went into the break room the dealership had only to see Tony and another salesman sitting there watching soap operas on the TV set in the break room. I asked him what he was doing and he told me he was going over the deal he was trying to make with the manager. Really? I said with a bit of surprise, eyeballing the TV set with General Hospital on the broadcast. Yes, he told me, if the customer is here until about 4pm, then they will be more ready to make a deal that the manager will give his okay on. “Weren’t they here early this morning like about 8 or 9am?” I asked him. Yes that’s true, he told me, but the manager won’t let him do this any other way, and besides, their keys are on the roof anyway.

“Their keys are on the roof?” I asked. “Yes, I had to take their car to be judged for the trade-in and I was told to throw their keys on the roof in case they tried to leave too soon.” This is done to stall you at all costs I am told, never never, give them your whole ring of keys. Never!

Tony’s customer eventually bought the car, but could not take delivery for the next week. In the meantime, Tony could not wait to leave. He told me that as soon as the customer picked up their car he would give them the keys and keep on walking, so disgusted was he with the crap he had to put up with.

In the meantime, another salesman wrote down the customer’s name on a piece of paper, sideways in a notebook and brought it to Tony. “Look,” he said, showing the name written on a page in a notebook. “I talked to your customer first, so I want you to go tell the manager this and get him to give me half of the commission.” Not wanting to make any more enemies, Tony went and told the manager what the salesman had done. The manager laughed openly at him, but still refused to comply and told Tony not to give in.

This made no difference, he was then accused for the rest of the week of trying to screw the salesman out of HIS money. So Tony had to avoid this man also when standing around the same showroom floor for ten hours a day, six days a week. Every time the salesman would confront him about it, the other salesman, the one who pushed Tony around on the sidewalk, would start visibly chuckling to himself. I told Tony to watch this when it happens, for it is a sign of inside knowledge old salesman are aware of and to stand firm to get his money, for he was indeed being scammed.

Tony’s customer got his car and Tony did indeed leave with them, in fact I believe he left without his commission on the sale, but I am not sure of that. Before that however, I was privy to the paperwork Tony did on the sale and he showed me how the customer was actually paying over $6,000 dollars more over the life of the financing they received than they were even aware of.

I am not a financial person, and my understanding of this was a bit foggy, but according to Tony, there were so many hidden fees within the small print of the paperwork that they added up to about $6,000 dollars that was hidden from the customer’s immediate knowledge. I found that incredible! He showed me a hidden finance fee of 40% on window tinting which the customer didn’t know about because it was included in the whole financial numbers. I didn’t understand this, but he told me there were many other hidden things like this that the finance manager had done.

Tony warned me never to get financing from the dealer. No matter the great deal they want to give you. I knew someone who had once been the finance manager at a car dealership and I asked him about this at a later time. He giggled like a school girl at the mention of it. “Yes,” he told me. “Stuff like that happens all the time.”

Here are some other things I learned about buying a car from an auto dealership. There is such a thing as an informal warranty. When too many of the same new model of cars have shown the same mechanical problem, the manufacturer will inform the car dealerships that it will cover the cost of repairs beyond the standard warranty. These warranties, however, are never publicized. Buyers need to write to the center for auto safety to find out about these things, and discover which components of the car are likely to fail and qualify for these repair warranties. If the part is covered and the service manager won’t fix it, you’ll need to either have a factory’s regional office representative mediate the matter, or take them to small claims court. Documentation is always needed.

Keep an eye on dealerships in your area that you may think you’ll do business with in the future. Go and look around one when you are not going to buy anything. You just want a feel for the personnel, and how they operate. When they approach you, and believe me, they will after standing around all day, just tell them you are window shopping and you’ll come and get them if you need anything. If they don’t insult you right there, then that’s a good sign. But good luck on that, this is not retail, they are not there to just be helpful. Don’t let them intimidate you or engage in any random banter.

Go to the service area also and just hang out a few minutes. Notice if things are being run smoothly, if the manager there and working, are customers treated with respect. Make sure you know for sure. Look at the service lot, notice the license plate frames. In a good dealership you’ll see plates from competing dealerships.

Don’t go out on the highway for a dealership, the salesmen know they have just one chance to make a sale, they could get violent. Multi-franchise dealerships can add to the overall trauma you experience in car buying, too many people are involved and this will cause a lot of confusion.

You choose the salesperson, don’t let them choose you. Ask them about themselves, how long they have worked, where they have worked, and if you may have references from former customers. If this works and you aren’t reviled and insulted, you may have a good thing going.

Just to note, in the high pressure of a salesroom, everyone is a target even if they are in the same ethnic group as you are. I once got a message on the phone for one of two African-Americans who worked for dealership #2 and I didn’t know who anyone was at first, so I asked the only African-American on the floor if he was this man Raymond, for whom I had a message, and I was snapped at and told “NO, I am the OTHER one!” So even the brothers didn’t get along and the customers were treated with no favoritism.

Remember, they believe that you and I are stupid, and therefore deserve what we get. So educate yourself first. Get as much information as possible on the car you want before you even sit down with a salesman. Collect brochures and read magazine articles on the auto you want. Don’t let them try to fool you with their impressive knowledge of the car, as this is just a device to take control of the sale and establish authority in the transaction.

You have to be knowledgeable and strong willed, and ready to leave at any moment. Know the competition too, if you mention that you are wavering between them and the competition they will, of course, knock them and be very convincing if you are uninformed. This isn’t a friendly exchange folks, don’t be fooled. Big money is on the table when it comes to you as a customer and they are armed to the teeth with ways of getting your money.

If you don’t know what you want, you will be sold what the salesman wants to unload. The most expensive model, with the most extravagant items, and all those hidden finance charges. You will have to eventually take a test drive of the car you want in order for the salesman to get you to take mental ownership of the car, he will glowingly praise the car in the meantime and try to get you to have fun while driving - NEVER GIVE HIM YOUR KEYS. Make absolute sure you give the salesman a single copy of your auto key if they truly need it, be prepared for this. Be prepared to walk (and be insulted as you walk away) if you need to. At this point in the sale, the salesman can take on an attitude not unlike a serpent with forbidden fruit for you to try. “Go ahead, it won’t really hurt.” he’ll imply.

Don’t buy when you are tired, if you are there for any length of time, just leave. Don’t let them sit in the break room and watch TV on you. They want you to wear out and believe that you will be primed to take whatever they promise you, even if they don’t have it, under the condition of being tired. There are no such things as idle questions either, any question is a probe to get to know what they can say back to you to make the sale. If they ask you what you do for a living, tell them you drive a cargo ship from here to the planet Jupiter, and without batting an eye they will tell you they have a cousin who does that too! Avoid probing questions if you can.

Remember those hidden finance charges? Options are where the dealer makes his money. So say for instance the dealer tells you that ALL cars come with power windows. But you don’t want power windows. At this point they will tell you it has to be a special order and it could take months. Walk out at this point if he doesn’t “work something out”. They magically will, they need the sale.

Standard options are listed in the manufacturer’s brochure. Cars for the lot may be ordered without a standard option like say, carpeting. You’ll be told that it is extra if you don’t know any better, and you’ll be charged for it too. Know what you are doing people!

Turning you over is a wearing down tactic. If they feel that you are not going their way or responding in the way they want you to, they will go on a break and let another salesperson talk to you. This can happen four or five times until you actually get frustrated and either buy a car or you are told to get the f**k out. If your salesman leaves for a break, then you leave too. There is a Starbucks every five hundred feet in America. I mean it! Be tough!

When you do finally buy the car, insist on itemization of what you have been charged and look closely for incongruousness in the finance price and the final price. Many people are just too confused and tired after a day at the dealership to really watch the fine print.

Check the car over and make sure everything is working and is just like you dealt for. Sometimes a car can be dented in transit and the dealer will park the car against a wall to hide the dent. Balloons in the back seat can be fun, but they also can hide interior damages. Remember, when you drive a car off the lot, it’s YOURS, there is no return policy and you just lost about $3,000 dollars just for making it a sudden used car the moment you hit the tarmac. Really! The value drops about $3,000 dollars the moment you drive away.

Laugh at those commercials you see on TV folks, they are NOTHING close to the reality of the auto dealership’s attitude toward you. Buy a good used car and have a mechanic look it over before you buy. The value is worth the work. And don’t even get me started on leasing. Avoid it if you can.

Oh and one last thing. There are NEVER any "sales". Those Veteran's day sales and Fourth of July sales are all smokescreens. Most of the time the "sale" is bargained and dickered away. Nothing really special every happens price wise on those days, they are just advertising.

Good luck to you, I hope this helps. And to those of you who have different experiences than what I have outlined, well... lucky you. ;-)

Reviews by Hubie Goode: Clever Hans, Apes and Bees, and Communication Part 3

Clever Hans, Apes and Bees,
and Communication
Part 3

If you missed part 2 you’ll need to scroll down or select from the links on the side bar.

Hey, Hey We’re the Monkees

You can talk to these Monkees----->

The idea that apes have no linguistic ability is only a recent discovery compared to the overall history of the study. We now know that they are merely cleverly mirroring the human intelligence of their trainers. The breakthrough came when a young chimp named Nim was trained with sign language. In the beginning it appeared that the chimp was indeed using signs in a language form, but later when video taped alone by himself, it became obvious that the chimp was merely using signs when prompted by the trainer and the signs never appeared at any other time. The chimp also never added any of its own signs to the mix or developed them beyond the original programming.

You can talk to these Animals----->

This underscored the information obtained from the experience of Clever Hans. Animals have a unique ability to observe and interpret human expression, and this ability borders on the supernatural. The next time you see a stray dog and think in terms of whether or not they will “smell fear”, consider more deeply the effect that simple turns of your head or body may convey to the animal, and also even small expressions of the face. Can you convince a pit bull that you love dogs? You might need to one day. But hopefully not.

One must consider the extent of the educational advantage gorillas like “Koko” have had in learning the way that they do. When we think about over crowded classrooms for our children where there is one teacher to maybe 40 students and these apes have had teams of 30 to 40 teachers trying to teach them to use language, one can see how highly developed even a gorilla with a 40 I.Q. can become due to the ability to mirror human intelligence. Mentally retarded patients at the Georgia State Retardation Center were also given these same techniques and amount of attention, and it was noted that they were much easier to teach than the chimps.

The study of child language and the human brain has even gotten stranger in recent times. According to the website www.reversespeech.com, babies who babble are actually talking backwards and from the right brain. Not only this, but we humans actually have a speech that comes from our right brains which is only picked up in the subconscious and is received in reverse. I am not sure just what to think of all the findings of Doctor John Oates, who is developing this science, but the website is an amazing trip to go through, and that is all I will say.

And There’s More....

In the beginning, back in 1661 when Samuel Prepys first encountered a baboon, the idea of apes being able to developed language grew and became an accepted avenue of investigation for many years right up until the 1960’s and 1970’s. There were, of course, many false positives that came from the studies, including exercises where chimps were taught to communicate with one another. Their success rate reached an impressive 95%. But those experiments used word symbols with a computer and when turned off, the communication rate dropped off the map. Apes have no ability to form thoughts into language but a huge ability to mirror the communications of humans, and without the humans, there is no “Dr. Zaius”.

Ahh but what about Dolphins???? Doesn’t Flipper have clout???

In the early 1960’s this idea of an animal having language was also applied to dolphins. The simple mistaken intel about dolphins having a larger brain than most was another true revelation of man’s hubris. It was believed that perhaps size mattered when it came to brains and dolphins might even be smarter than mankind. (There are many New Agers who promote that dolphins are actually evolved Atlanteans or Lemurians from long ago in the Earth’s history.) There is no dolphin mystique, plain and simple. Dolphins speak to each other in the same way all animals do.

Due to apes being believed to be intelligent and capable of language, one has to wonder why they were never taught to clean their own cages. No apes have ever cleaned up after themselves, or even have been taught to do so, they are after all... animals. Animals only work, prepare food and clean up after themselves when they are directed to do so by humans. This is undeniable. Humans are able to force animals to work due to their God given dominion over the planet, and man's ability to retain and transmit information over time. One would think that this ability would have made a greater difference over the history of mankind, with respect to man’s basic internal self. We have trains, planes and automobiles, internets and space shuttles and more medical advancements than at any time in history, but man is basically the same as he has always been. The fact that animals who act like humans, because they do what they see humans doing, can be mistakenly given powers of intelligent language production, is further proof of an age old hubris that has blinded mankind for his entire history.

Animals are incapable of creating day dreams and imaginations. Humans alone have the ability to learn and understand information relegated to him from the past. We can certainly understand the story of Christ and also make a decision based upon the information gained within that story, despite the fact that we have never been to that point in time. Animals have no idea what any of that means, and that makes us superior to the animal. Mankind alone has the capacity for the “Word”.

Word Up

Why should man alone, among all known life forms, be the only one that can disseminate information from the past and then transmit that information into the future? There is an absolute disunion between ourselves and everything else on the planet. Your house cat is happy their entire life just being a cat. Your trees in the backyard never gain the desire to travel to the south of France. If man were not around, had never been around, the earth would indeed look like a different place today. Nature would own everything, there would never been imbalance, even death would just be part of the circle of life. And yet the earth is vastly different because of mankind’s presence. If he were just an example of evolution, then that balance would be maintained, nature would have it no other way. But man is made in the image of his Superior Creator, and nothing else is.

Is there any evidence that relates the distinctive attribute of mankind with the word and the creation of human beings? Mankind alone has a unique strand of DNA with a particular string of nucleotide bases which allows a unique informational specification. The language cortex in the left hemisphere of the brain from whence speech comes is a direct difference of mankind in relation to the rest of creation.

Humans also assign meanings to verbal utterances. This depends not only on the words used but also on the state of mind and knowledge of those using language. It has been discovered that at birth the human child has an innate ability to understand the spoken word. This ability is genetically traceable to the informational specification along the DNA strand which echoes human life which, therefore, came into existence at the time human life was created.

If the divine attribute of man’s creator is “The Word”, then the human capacity to perpetuate a moral code through time itself, from the past long ago and then into present day and then beyond, is itself an overlaying shadow of the moral image overlaying all generations of human life. Man is life’s singular moral species with access to an eternity. The “passport” is a message that only mankind can receive. Our ability to choose whom we shall believe among all information received is our solitary ability and responsibility that neither ape, horse, bee or dolphin can make.

Terrace H. et. al. “On the Grammatical Capacity of Apes” in Nelson K. ed. Children’s Language (1980) v.2 Gardner Press (NY)
Chevalier-Skolnikoff S. “The Clever Hans Phenomenon, Cuing and Ape Signing: A Piagetian Analysis of Methods for Instructing Animals.” Annals of the New York Academy of Science
Gardner B. & Gardner R. “Comparing the Early Utterances of Child and Chimpanzee.” On Child Psychology (1974)
Gish S. Quantitative Analysis of Two Way Communication Between Captive Dolphins (1979)
Romans 9:16

Reviews by Hubie Goode: Clever Hans, Apes and Bees, and Communication Part 2

Clever Hans,
Apes and Bees,
and Communication

Part 2

If you missed part 1 you’ll need to scroll down or select from the links on the side bar.

Damn Dirty Apes

What really happens if animals DO learn some sort of language? In this case it means that human intelligence has succeeded in releasing animals from instincts they received at birth. This of course also leads to the possibility that animals could eventually learn to use this language to communicate with one another. If enough time is allowed, it is not hard to imagine that animals could indeed begin to resemble humans in the way that they communicate. Then, after this fact, the animals could begin to inform us of how their present state of affairs is the result of “adverse” evolutionary circumstances. If conversation then became common, laws against discrimination and in favor of equal opportunity could then be developed to protect animals from environmental factors that victimize them into a disadvantaged position relative to human beings.

They’d acquire rights.

Despite the fact that humans differ on many levels from animals, it would be easy for people to be blind to the fact that a division between man and animal was God given. Many seem to feel that except for human culture and education, it’s man’s mind that is indeed not so different from the apes, not the other way around. If indeed an ape was exposed to human culture, would the natural progression be an ape that has acquired human qualities? This kind of reminds me a little bit of “King Louie” from the Disney movie “The Jungle Book”. Interestingly enough Louie’s complaint was that he didn’t know the secret to fire; fire being a kind of power in this instance, and that does indeed sound like a human trait. But that’s NOT science, people.

The factual content on this matter is hugely diverse from what would be popular culture and wishful thinking. I seriously doubt that any orangutan in any zoo sits around all day imagining any other relationship between man and ape than the one he enjoys everyday. Imagination often leads to invention, and we’ve seen no inventions from the ape species - ever! If there is any difference between the two minds, that of man and that of ape, then it is by human choice and not by necessity. Science today will tell you that there is no common ground between ape and man that can be bridged naturally. Monkeys haven’t changed in all the time of their existence and yet mankind has landed on the moon in the same period of time. The belief that special circumstances produced a difference that can now be overcome with special engineering is to invent happenings of the past that are in fact unknown, and still unexplained and also beg to be accurately reproduced as only the superior mind of man can accommodate. This special circumstances belief is also a direct contradiction of the current evidence on the subject.

Primordial Snooze

Up until the 1980’s it was believed that apes could indeed be taught a language eventually. Many experiments had been done before this time with apes as varied as Austin, Sherman and Lana. They were taught to label different foods and tools. The fourteen year old chimp, Sarah, was said to be able to congnitize specific problems and even think her way into a solution. There were also six wild born chimpanzees that were said to prove an affinity for spatial memory organization. Paper marking tests were devised three years after “social conditions” were believed to determine the rates at which the chimps approached “hidden distant goals”. Language between chimps and children was at this time believed to be comparable.

How new indeed is the idea that animals can acquire language? It’s actually a very old concept. In 1661 Samuel Pepys wrote that it was his opinion that apes could indeed be taught a language. He devised this information from his first time encounter with a baboon. In 1885, Sir John Lubbock wrote that rather than trying to teach animals our ideas, it might be a better idea to produce a code of signals that allow the animal to impart his ideas to us. Twenty years later, and influenced by the academic antics of a horse named Clever Hans, a psychiatrist revealed that animals can think in human ways. They can also express ideas in human language.*

* Lubbock J. Note on the intelligence of the dog (1885) British association for the advancement of science.
Prepys S. in Marx J. (1980) op. cit.
Wolff G. Die denkenden Tiere von Elberfield und mannheim :456 (1914) Suddeutsche Monatshefete, Berlin

Just the Facts Mam’

Due to the fact that science is all about observable data, and any data that is not observable is something else entirely, and not science, the only facts we can truly devise from all this is that animals consistently prove that they are indeed organic machines energized by instincts. In the absence of human intelligence, animal behavior expresses itself under a dictatorial genetic system that imposes common controls from generation to generation. This is why the language experiments required training so structured as to be logically equivalent to teaching a child to swing through trees while supporting him with cables, harnesses and nets. The idea of training animals to complete tasks for rewards is not all that new at all. This has been successfully done with pigeons and even worms. This does not however lead to any kind of language use. All sign behavior can indeed be so mechanistic that it can be duplicated on a computer.

The language of the chimp, Lana, is attributable to only two basic processes called paired associate learning and conditional discrimination learning. Therefore as a practical matter, a computer can be programmed to simulate the alleged language of the chimp. This in turn reveals the mechanistic behavior of the animals themselves. Animals never act illogically against their programming unless mankind sticks his nose in the mix. (Of course, I speak of healthy animals.) Any animal rights person will inform you that elephants never sway back and forth while they stand in one spot, and yet you can witness this in any zoo in America. This “swaying” is actually a mental/emotional problem brought on by captivity.

A Horse is a Horse is a Horse of course

All of this brings up a very good question: Why are there so many highly intelligent people who believe that apes have the ability to use signs in a way that is characteristic of true language? How were these folks influenced into believing that animals can do things they really can’t do? This is mostly due to an ability that animals DO have. Believe it or not, apes have actually fooled human beings, really smart human beings, too. Although, the apes are not actually cognizant of their ability to do so. But there is a trotting horse called Clever Hans who can illustrate this idea for us.

Clever Hans couldn’t speak like the Mr. Ed of TV fame, but his owner was so captivated by his seeming intelligence that he went so far as to give the horse the benefit of a high school education. People came from all over the land to see the horse perform his amazing intelligence “tricks”. Clever Hans could solve very complex mathematical problems, and this astounded audiences. He could also solve non-math problems as well.

When given a math problem, Hans would paw the ground with his hoof. Yes and no answers were solved with a shake of the head left and right or else up and down. (yes and no). He could also name colors. If asked to find the color red, he would pick up a red rag, or a green rag for green and so on. Many people of the day investigated the horse; the owner, the people who had seen the horse perform. No one could discover the source of the intelligence that the horse displayed, this included Calvary men, psychologists and well known scholars.

One day however, after years of amazing feats by the horse, a person asked a question of the horse whose answer was unknown by the questioner or anyone physically close to the horse. Suddenly Hans was an idiot. Not only did he not know the answer, but it became alarmingly obvious that he had never known any answer to any question ever given to him.

Years of constant familiarity between the horse and his teacher enabled the horse to pick up the slightest signs and movements of the trainer’s head and body. At each demonstration, when asked a question, the horse was able to view, with his “jungle” eyesight and wider visual scope, the slightest unconscious movements of his trainer’s body. The trainer knew which rag was red and would naturally face the red rag in some small way either with his eyes or his head or his body, and therefore the horse would then grab a red rag. If asked a math question, the trainer would lean slightly forward while the horse pawed the ground and then when the correct number had been reached, the trainer would relax. All this happened imperceptibly to the humans in the surrounding viewpoint. But animals see these things. (In much the same way as a cat or dog knows a human who likes or dislikes a cat or dog.) Likewise with head movements, the horse might see the trainer blink, or move his head slightly, perhaps even a raising of the chin, and this would tip off the horse to answer in a pre-trained way to either a yes or no question.

Animals see things you and I do not, and it has been discovered that head movements can be perceived at well under a hundredth of an inch. Without the seeming superior intelligence of mankind, animals have been given an almost superpower advantage that man knows only a little about. The interpretation of this gift in human terms has lead many to believe that similarities between man and animal are only a bridge that needs to be gulfed, but in essence, they possess something quite different than what we assume they must have.

Cats and Dogs, cats and dogs. I was just thinking about dinner tonight.

About this time, as you can imagine, pet owners everywhere were revealing their special family members as being oracles of wisdom. In the next thirty years after Hans, there were as many as 70 pet owners who appeared on the popular circuit hoping for a chance at stardom with “Arnold” the pig and such. The problem behind each of those animals was the ubiquitous presence of its master. Without Jimmyjo Bob or Peggy Sue, Arnold knew nothing. This was something new, the connection between masters and their pets, and science moved forward to study this effect with the removal of the human element involved. An animal’s ability to recognize and interpret a human’s smallest movements due to its ultra sensitive and unseen perception fueled the so called discoveries of language possibilities that were then reported. Animals know their trainers and owners and also their expectations. They then combine this with their superior sensory organization and history is made.

But what happens when we pull the human element out of the equation?

More on this in Part 3.

Reviews by Hubie Goode: Abducted to Kill

Abducted to Kill

by Pola Muzyka

A young man struggles to guard and sustain his love for God, his fiancée, and his family when faced with the brutality of Sharia law.

Abducted into the newly formed Hezbollah army, a young American Christian fights for his life, his freedom, and the woman he loves when he defies a brutal regime during one of the most difficult times in Middle East history.

Friends begin to go missing and rumors surface. Some of Joseph’s friends are never heard from again. How and why they disappear remains a mystery. Joseph becomes entrapped in the mystery of the disappearances when, one day after work, he and his friend are forcibly thrown into the backseat of a black Nissan.

He and his friend are forced to join a ruthless militia. This military, formed by the IRG to protect Lebanon from invasion by the Israelis, contradicts its credence. Joseph witnesses the most horrific sins that man can inflict upon another human being and he wants out. He thinks his Maker has abandoned him and he questions God’s very existence, ultimately doubting his own faith.

After grueling years of enduring this military life, escape and concealment, a way opens up for him to safely flee the country and eventually return to the U.S.



Recently, I sat in a room with quite a few hispanic-americans who had come from various countries and towns down below the border of the U.S. and Mexico. This is not surprising seeing as the proximity of Los Angeles to South America brings about these sorts of situations everyday for those who live here. Some of those folks are legal and some are not, and this is only a fact of little importance, but it does carry some weight in this current situation.

In this room was a rather large television which was showing an Hispanic news channel. The news report being broadcast was about some drug traffickers who had been stopped from crossing the border with a large amount of illegal drugs that they had purposed specifically for selling to those who have been captured by the addiction of such items as cocaine, heroine, et al.

These men had been in a gun battle with U.S. Narcotics officers and they were all lying around the street, sitting in their cars, and hanging out of the doors due to being shot multiple times. It was a grisly scene in my estimation. The sight of seeing human beings, even drug traffickers who mean to make money from other people’s suffering, being photographed and carded with evidence numbers, was a bit much to witness. And the casualness with which it was presented was not lost on me.

Of course, here in America, on our news channels, these sorts of scenes are given only a few seconds of coverage if they are reported on and shown to the public at all. The sad truth is that most of what goes on in the world comes to the American public with a dose of sugar coating. Those who come to America from war torn states often bring their experience and attitudes from those countries to America’s shores, and for them this is a natural way of life. Godless, yes, but seemingly just the way things are for them. Such scenes for those sitting in the TV room watching the news were common knowledge to those present.

In her book, Abducted to Kill, Pola Muzyka successfully displays common tragedy of something that does indeed happen in the world; the death, the destruction, especially of human lives, and also the assumed right that evil takes in performing atrocities upon mankind all in the name of fanaticism. What she also does is balance said condition with the heart of mankind that forges ever forward. It is curious isn’t it, that no matter who those “other people over there” are, they all have a mother and father. They all have sisters and brothers. They all have a heart that needs to be loved and a life that needs to be vilified. It never fails to amaze me how mankind can be both the most dangerous thing on the planet and yet the most beneficial.

What Ms. Muzyka has done here is taken a main character, one Joseph Rabbani, and given the reader his story in alternating scenes back and forth from his current condition and then into his back story, as she renders the common life of a young man suddenly turned hazardous, and yet sadly, as the world will tell you, not all that uncommon. The story itself is character oriented and brings out a great deal of minute details in giving the reader a realistic rendering of both the persons involved and also their sometimes frightening surroundings. Surroundings based on Ms. Muzyka’s research and some actual events.

It would be difficult to relay to you many of the points made in this story about what is happening in the middle east, especially as per the Hezbollah army, but let me just say that some of the points revealed, if they are to be taken literally, will make you think more about some of the social issues and public changes that are, and have been happening, right here in America, for some time.

In the rear of her book, Ms. Muzyka has a few references that will perhaps give you a better perspective of the issues covered in the story, and although the story is fictional, these items are cause for great concern in a world which is supposed to be claiming progress from anachronistic ideology.

Culture of Death - Islam’s focus on the afterlife is meant to encourage Muslims to live pious lives. But that isn’t what Muslims are learning. Thomas L. Friedman, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and New York Times columnist, recently wrote about a terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia in which gunmen ruthlessly attacked a housing complex and specifically sought out “infidels” and Westerners to kill. He asked where such intolerance was learned, and he answered: “The Saudi Public School system and religious curriculum.”

Adultery - Penalty Code Article 104 is specific about the type of stones that should be used when a woman is to be punished for adultery. They “should not be large enough to kill the woman by one or two strikes, nor should they be so small that they could not be defined as stones. She is to die a slow death.

There are quite few disturbing other points which she has gleaned from her research, but these two should at least give you the understanding of the kinds of subjects that are covered in a fictional story that will have you wondering just what is going on with the Earth these days. Truly such events as 9/11 are the results of culture wars as well as terrorism.

Joseph is taken from his protective, loving family, from which he has grown up Christian in America, while he is currently in a new living local in Iran where his father’s business takes him and his family. The cold hard realities of such an abduction are well laid out in the story as Joseph struggles to keep the humanity within himself which he has always known, which he grew up with and considers his very true person. In much the same way as the main character of the recent movie “Brothers”, Joseph is cornered into violating himself and his own deep convictions of what he knows to be the good and human thing to do. In the interim, his family too, is effected and also the love of his life is deemed brutally lost by those who oppose her Christian beliefs.

It’s a tightly written story that will keep you reading a you follow Joseph’s story of a life lost, namely his own, to the militant powers that surround him, as easily as they could surround you or me. For many people all around the world, that kind of life is indeed what they see all too often. Ms. Muzyka isn’t taking the core of the story easy on the reader, for she could have easily placed the meat of the story in a science fiction setting and given us aliens and far away planets as a buffer from stark realities that happen all around the world every day. But she hasn’t done that. Joseph and his family and friends are people just like anyone else, be they American, Chinese, Indian, or in this case Middle Eastern. If today you feel somewhat distanced from terror and the horrors it brings to the innocent, who of course are always the first victims in war, then perhaps you would take from this story a lesson about the encroachment of militant fanaticism, even in your own town.

A well written, and voluminous book that has been given painstaking detail, especially in the way it brings distant fleeting images of news footage from the other side of the world, which one may not give too much thought to, and injects them with the all too missed perception of tragic humanity that is involved.



Pola Muzyka is an accomplished award-winning TV, commercial and corporate writer. She has always had a flair for dramatic writing. In the 1980’S, She wrote part of a script for film director Federico Fellini. She researched and translated work for four-time Academy Award-winner Danilo Donati, who deemed her work “the most extensive research ever done on a film.” Escape the Hezbollah is her debut as a novelist and combines her talent as researcher and dramatic writer in this powerful and gripping story.

Pola is a multi-disciplinarian who began her career as a dramatic actress, having done both starring and feature roles in Hollywood-based motion pictures. She has showcased her visual art in many galleries and currently hosts a television series for baby boomers.

Although she has traveled and lived all over the world, Pola was raised on a sheep farm and continues to enjoy country living. Her passion lies in her relationship with Jesus Christ and her ministry connecting Christians in media. She is the founder of the internet based, Christian Media Alliance. Subsequently, she has toured India as a media missionary and produced documentary films helping pastors in various countries.

The title of this book has been changed.

http://www.escapethehezbollah.com/

Reviews by Hubie Goode: Clever Hans, Apes, Bees and Communication

Clever Hans, Apes,
Bees and Communication

Whether we realize it or not, we are all cognizant of a rather unique talent that is inherent in mankind. Namely that mankind is capable of receiving, supplying and transmitting the written word. This has been going on for thousands of years. We’ve seen temple walls embossed with hieroglyphics, drawings along the sides of inner walls of caves, and lunar calendars engraved on bones. These are all evidence of humans synthesizing abstract elements and placing them into ordered composites, to be followed by written records that contain and communicate information that would otherwise be unavailable.

Mankind has this talent to lift himself up and outside of the time frame of his birth, and many would feel that this is indeed a unique circumstance germane to mankind and only mankind. If this is so, then how can we explain experiments that offer evidence of an ability in animals for the capacity for language, mathematical concepts, and even forming simple sentences? Haven’t we seen the fact that dolphins are capable of language? Haven’t we seen the videos of chimpanzees forming simple sentences with plastic symbols, or computer generated tokens? If the “word” is unique to mankind, then how can animals also posses it?

The ability to pass on information beyond one’s own locus of control and into the next generation is an ability that belongs solely to mankind. There has never been an animal that gathered information beyond it’s hard wiring and then passed it along to their descendants. Yet in recent years there are those who have made some impressive strides and amazing claims in the field of animal communication. Even orangutangs have been described as being “all too human”. This would seem to imply that if we were to give monkeys the benefit of human education and culture, that human qualities would be further developed.

There once was an ape named “Lana” who is said to have done this back in the 1970’s. A computer based language was developed that was targeted at seeing if indeed an ape could learn language. It was all very basic, symbols were created for a keyboard, and Lana had to type the symbols in an order to receive a banana, or some such thing. The results of this study seemingly proved that indeed an ape could use symbols in communicating its wants and needs.

That's NOT Lana --->

Sarah was a chimpanzee who preceded Lana and was given plastic symbols to organize into language. Evidence suggested that indeed Sarah could really form sentences out of the arrangement of plastic symbols. Scientists even went so far as to report that Sarah had a vocabulary of about 130 words and her work revealed actual sentence structure.

Supposedly, Sarah understood the use of verbs, adjectives, conditionals, and even compound sentences. Until the 1980’s, these concepts were considered canon. But in latter years the research has been shown to have been premature, and today we now accept that apes are indeed NOT capable of language. To understand this, let’s contrast their so called language with the waggle dance of the scout bee.

Say it ain’t so, Doctor Dolittle!

Honeybees are genetically able to perform rapid movements known as a “waggle dance”. A scout bee finds food outside of the hive and then returns and relays the information to the rest of the hive. It does this by moving in a circle if the food is less than 300 feet from the hive. It moves in a figure eight motion if the food is more than 300 feet from the hive. (Studies have been done!) The faster the bee moves, the farther away the food is. Also, the direction of the scout bee’s body with respect to gravity inside the hive reveals the direction that the bees must fly outside the hive with respect to sunlight. (Stop laughing, see for yourself.*) If the scout bee’s body is pointed upward, the bees fly toward the sun; if his body points downward, they are to fly away from the sun. So what happens on cloudy days you might ask? The bees have a back up mechanism. The bees remember the sun’s previous diurnal course in relation to landmarks that are local to the hive. The shape of the pattern traced out in the dance, together with the speed of the bee and the orientation of its body with respect to the gravity inside the hive, all serve to communicate information to the other bees as to the distance and direction of the flight they must take to reach the food. (Face it, for this to be explained by evolution is impossible since it would have taken so long for this system to develop that bees would have died out long before hand.)

* Dyer F. & Gould J. Science (1981) 214:1041 nov 27.

The important thing to take away from all this is that when a scout encounters a flower, the waggle dance is not something that it intellectually assimilates. A bee can see through 8,000 individual lenses in its eye with which it sees in all directions at once. Its reporting to the hive is totally an instinctual act where it automatically does the waggle dance. This act of communication is the direct result of DNA preprogramming which contains the information the bee needs to make the whole hive survival possible, and this includes knowledge of gravity and the presence of the sun. The bee doesn’t make instant cognition of this, of course, it just simply is the way things are for them.

Keep in mind also that every time a bee leaves its hive, it only takes as much honey with it as it needs to reach the flowers that the scout bee has reported. To return alive to the hive, they must use the sugar from the flower that they find. No 401K plan for these workers. If you see a bee limping along on the sidewalk, you are looking at a doomed creature who didn’t receive the message properly or was interfered with and will soon succumb to starvation.

The instructions for the waggle dance are imbedded inside of the bee’s genes. Even young bees raised outside of the hive understand the waggle dance. Despite its sophistication, the waggle dance actually exists of a small number of moves.

Consider for a moment the parallels here of the message of God. Only one bee comes from outside the hive with information on how to get to the flowers that will provide continued life for the hive. Any other bee with information will not be correct and will doom the whole hive. If an Eagle were to be flying over the flowers and then transmogrified into a bee in order to give the proper information for reaching the flowers, you would then have a “re-telling” of the Biblical story.

What did the Elephant say to the Ostrich? Apparently nothing.

In all places among the animal kingdom, communication is shared among members of the same species with no interference from mankind at all. In the case of apes, however, the new ingredient is added, namely: humans. Human intelligence is used to interpret if indeed apes are capable of using language. Necessarily, the studies are done in such a way that requires apes to interact over periods of time with human intelligence and expectations.

Where the scout bee tells other bees in the hive where the food is with genetically controlled body odors in conjunction with instinctive body movements, in the language experiments human intelligence attempts to teach apes the use of language with words created by the use of tokens on a computer screen or plastic symbols. But the ramifications are profound if you and I engage in such activity and actually teach these animals “language”.

More on this next time.