strangerAttractor

2005-11-22T22:16:00.000-08:00

What Is Human?

2005-05-27T21:35:00.000-07:00

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about the ultimate future of humanity as a species, as in: in a few decades, centuries, or millenia how many humans will there be? Hundreds of trillions, at the one extreme? Or none? For a look at what the former might look like, see Orion's Arm, an open source sci-fi world-building project that gives a comprehensive tour of the world of 12,000 AD (the species has built machines that have transcended human conscious six time in living memory ('living memory' being measured by millenia, for many), and populates an empire stretching across billions of stars.) For the latter, see Evolution, by Stephen Baxter, a sort of natural history of the species reaching back into the Triassic and then a further five hundred million years from now, with the assumption that humanity goes extinct (little hint: without humans, ultimately, life is basically fucked.)

A lot of people are talking about the immediate liklihood of humanity soiling and depleting the planet so horribly that we all end up dying of famine, plague, and war. Call this the bioapocalyptic side, in the question of whether or not humanity survives the coming century or so.

Many others have pointed out the possibility that the planet gets whacked by a big rock, or the Sun decides to do something unexpected, or a random burst of gamma rays from ten million light years away just happens to intersect our planet and boil off the oceans. Or, really, any of a hundred other natural catastrophes that could wipe out the species in a geological eyeblink. There's not much to be done about it: no matter how advanced the species (or what descends from it) becomes, there will always be natural disasters sufficiently bad to wipe it out. I will, however, point out the 65 million year extinction cycle, stretching back hundreds of millions of years and due, oh, any time now. Lets call this scenario the cosmocalypse, because in the end it includes the possibility that the universe itself simply ceases to be.

Then there are those who have been discussing the imminent possibility that mankind might begin drastically accelerating its evolution. So drastically that in a few hundred years, while intelligent activity is unquestionably far more abundant than it is even now, there won't be much that we today would recognize to be human, exactly. Most of those who talk about this (I'm guilty of being one of them myself, occasionally) call themselves transhumanists, but over on the extreme you can find, as always, the most entetainingly loony, at the technocalypse Yahoo! group. It's not even necessary to read the posts: just look at the collection of memes gathered under their keywords. At any rate, because we're talking about the possibility of humanity becoming extinct here, I'm going to go ahead and label this the technocalyptic side of the argument.

So, assuming we avoid a bioapocalypse and a cosmocalypse, we're left with a best-case scenario of a technocalypse. To a certain extent the latter of course comes down to a question of what is human. Is it Homo sapiens sapiens, and nothing else? Or, going backwards, would we include Neandertal man? What about Homo erectus, which innovated the use of both watercraft and fire, used tools throughout its history, and almost certainly possessed a rudimentary language of some sort? I myself would draw the line when the Australopithecines were the only hominids around. Any further back and you're in ape country.

What if we apply the same principle looking forward? What are the traits that define 'human'? Despite the fact that H. sapiens and H. erectus are morphologically almost identical, the human is unlikely to be purely taxonomic. Ask yourself if a person who just happened to have four arms, while being utterly normal otherwise, would be considered human. Most would say yes. Then start adding extra body-parts, sensory capabilities, and anything else you can think of. At what point does the creature stop being human? Or does it, so long as it also continues to talk and use tools? Morphology, in and of itself, could be completely beside the point when it comes to what matters about humanity.

My anthropology prof maintained that the single thing that separates humans from animals is fire. Or, more properly, the harnessing of energy outside the body in order to process matter, also outside the body (using this definition we can throw nuclear reactors into the same pile as camp-fires.) Everything else - language, tool use - is a matter of degree rather than kind. Her argument was that fire was unique, and extremely powerful as an adaptation. It is also, crucially, cultural rather than biological.

What if purely memetic criteria were to be used? Take the wholly cultural man, one who consists only of tools: an upload, utterly faithful to the mind of the original but in fact software running on manufactured circuitry. Is that entity human? Would a society composed solely of them be a human civilization? There are those who would answer it would be, so long as the entities inhabiting the computers (and probably robots) thought of themselves human, and expect to survive for millenia in just such a state. But what about when you start tinkering with the entity's thought processes? Increasing memory, speed, intelligence, and connectivity with others? Does a point come at which the structure of its mind is so different that, although the principle things defining our species (fire, and to a lesser degree language and tool use) are more abundant than ever before, there's nothing remotely human left? There's a compelling argument that there is, and to those who expect to achieve immortality through uploading I have this to say: how long do you think you'd remain you, living life inside an environment you control utterly, your mind running at such speeds that a year can last a subjective millenia ... or a subjective million years.

Of course it's also possible that not everyone will choose to transcend their humanity through technology. In the Orions arm scenario, humanity swarms by the trillions, like bacteria in an ecology of intelligence.

So in the end, there's no way of really knowing how long, or whether, the species will survive, and maybe it's best to act as we've always acted, as though ours (or our kids', or our grandkids') is the last generation that will ever be. But it sure is fun to think about, eh?

Cydcor

2005-05-07T12:11:00.000-07:00

Props to Decadent Leftist, who proves he isn't completely useless by doing some research for me and finding out this interesting information: the Bond Marketing Group is apparently a subsidiary of Cydcor aka DSMax. I'm almost ashamed that I got taken in by this, but after reading some of the other reports on Cydcor at the Bad Business Bureau I'm just glad I was only there a week, and not months or even years like some of these poor bastards.

A Week With the Bond Marketing Group: Day 2

2005-05-06T11:17:00.000-07:00

I show up at 11, as agreed, and get to stare at the wall and occasionally talk to the sort-of-cute receptionist (we'll call her Sorry, as when she wasn't juggling phone calls she was apologizing for juggling phone calls) for the next half hour; during this period, two more guys show up for their own days of observation, both of whom I avoid talking to thanks to the masterpiece of social insulation known as the iPod. Eventually Buzz comes out and says "Hi, Scott, how's it going? Good to see you!"

"It's Matt," I remind him, but he's already back in the office.

For some reason, I'm 'Scott' to him for the rest of the week. I give up correcting him after the second or third time. This is kind of weird, as my older brother's name is Scott and my dad occasionally makes the same mistake.

He comes out moments later with a middle aged brown guy in tow. "Hi Scott, this is Allen. He'll be taking you out into the field today." We shake, exchange pleasantries, and I trail along behind him towards the parking lot.

Allen is a middle-aged Trinidadian Mormon of East Indian extraction (I swear to God I'm not making that up) and he, almost alone amongst the money-goblins at the BMG, turns out to be actually a pretty decent guy. He'd been a Master's student in kinesiology or something at U of T before starting his career in door to door sales, and had designed his own line of basketball sportswear which, apparently, is still available on the website. On the drive out to the field (which turns out to be Burlington) he breaks down how the business works for me, and I do my best to ask questions and appear somewhat interested in their management opportunities. During the ride I manage to turn the conversation around to his own background, and we discuss the perils of academia, the sciences, and such other actuall engaging topics. Allen turns out to Know His Shit, so in addition to being a nice guy I have to give him props for being one smart fortune cookie.

There are three others in the car, all white kids about my age. The driver is a hulking, stoop-shouldered college student I'll just call Asshole. The second, Cryptopsy Choirboy, is a long-haired pretty-boy with supernaturally good bone structure, full of charm that's not yet completely artificial; he comes by his name by virtue of his second life, moonlighting as the lead singer of a local death metal band that shall remain anonymous. The third was so completely anonymous that I'm not even going to bother giving him a name; he's a scruffy looking high school student who, up until two days before, had worn his hair down past his shoulders (and, yes, he'd shaved it for the job, in a futile attempt to look presentable. Dumbass.)

By the time we're in Burlington I'm starting to really want a smoke, but so far as I know no one around me smokes and I don't want to look bad so I just ignore the cravings. We drop off Cryptopsy Choirboy and Dumbass at their territory (or 'T' as the BMG tribe refers to it) and then drive to our own. Asshole is still new at the job (it's his second day, and he'll only come back for one more) so Allen gets to drag both of us around until lunch.

So begins the arudous work of trudging from house to house, ringing doorbells and talking to suburbanite pricks in an attempt to sell them coupons.

Yes, coupons. That's why this counts as 'marketing', not 'sales'. In case the BMG or one of its many sibling companies has never darkened your doorway, here's how it works: they go to a local business and talk them into taking their advertising budget and spending the money on 'free' stuff for the customers. Then the Bondies take around these coupon sheets, and sell them at prices in the $30 range. The distributor (ie door to door salesman) gets 40% of that, the remainder being divvied up between the boss at the office and his boss at the parent company down in Salt Lake City or something.

We do this for two and a half hours, and I watch as Allen (Asshole is hopeless) manages to talk two or three reluctant homeowners into buying coupons for 'free' golf ('free' because it's actually buy-one-get-one, so you only recoup your investment if you spend more money at the golf course.) Then we break for lunch, heading back to Asshole's beat-up SUV, picking up Cryptopsy Choirboy and Dumbass, and going to a strip mall to eat at the first random sub shop we find. I'm broke, though, so I packed my own lunch; while they're ordering, I sit down, take out my sandwich and start to eat; the manager, an immigrant who obviously does not understand the cardinal rule of North American capitalism (that Thou Shalt Not Piss Off Your Customers) shouts at me, and while I'm prepared to just sit on the sidewalk my erstwhile colleagues are all "Fuck you, buddy!" and we end up going to Subway instead. When we get there Allen buys me a drink (see what I said about him being a decent guy?)

Over lunch, I take a cursory look at an info-sheet on the BMG's Ponzi scheme management training program, pretend to be interested and, as soon as I'm done wolfing down my sandwich and granola bars, run outside for a desperately needed infusion of nicotine. Dumbass comes out shortly after, closely followed by Cryptopsy Choirboy (who, I am somewhat horrified to see, is smoking a menthol bitch-stick. I see several others at the end of the day smoking the same cigarettes, and for a couple of days am half-convinced that this is yet another aspect of Bondie weirdness. Turns out CC just ran out of smokes on his way out the door, and had to grab some from his girlfriend.)

After lunch, it's back out to our 'T's. This time Asshole goes out on his own, and proves, in true asshole fashion, unable to follow the simple directions on a map, which results in Allen getting told off by a few homeowners who have already been bothered and, regardless of how polite they were the first time around, are in no mood for continued harassment. I trudge along after Allen, moving from door to door, smiling and saying hi to people when they answer the door, and watching Allen deliver his pitch, which is of course basically invariant from person to person. Every once in a while someone will try to throw him with a "What are you selling?" but, like a pro, he dodges that bullet and plows right on (somewhat pointlessly, as the odds of anyone who says that actually buying what you're selling are basically nil.)

We have fifteen minutes to go before the end of our time in the field, and Allen's still sitting on only three or four pieces (which comes out to like $50, which is pretty shit for a 12 hour work day.) I'm ready to just go home, but he pushes on and manages to sell four more pieces in the next twenty five minutes to two different people; for ten of those minutes, Asshole is sitting outside in his ugly white SUV, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel and waiting for us to get out so he can go the fuck home. Cryptopsy Choirboy and Dumbass have been kept waiting a full half hour, and are mildly pissed as, had they known, "We could have sold more pieces, man!"

Of course, there's no smoking in the car, and I haven't had one since lunch, so by the time we get back to the office (which is like 9:00) I'm basically chewing off my arm. I smoke a cigarette in about a minute on the walk from the car to the office, go in, and fill out a bullshit questionaire that Allen hands me. I'm supposed to ask questions, so I think for a bit and write down 'foreign management opportunities?' Allen (who's trying to build up his own team so he can climb the BMG's ad hoc corporate ladder) reviews it for me and makes some suggestions, and then takes it in. I wait for about five minutes, and then get called into Buzz's office.

Buzz is bouncing up and down in his chair like a schoolboy with his first erection, and if I didn't know he was a Mormon I'd swear to god he'd just done like six lines of coke. He rehashes the day with me, goes over the questionairre, then asks, "So, you're interested in starting a franchise overseas?" and I can see the glint in his eyes as he imagines a faithful, ambitious young vassal carrying the franchise over to some benighted backwater.

"Uh, yeah. Definately."

"Yeah? So where?" He's entirely too excited about this. Shit. I think for a second, casting about for something to say.

"Chile," I say, which is obviously complete bullshit. Nothing against Chile, I'd love to visit, but live there? Please.

"Chile? That's great! We had a guy go down to Mexico, totally virgin territory, just a few years back. He made a fortune!" Riiight. I have this picture in my head of barefoot teenagers running around in Mexico City's slums, trying to extract devalued peso's from unemployed piece workers so they can get discounts at Pablo's Taco Stand. Mexico. Yup. That's where the money is all right. Must explain why the Mexicans are leaving in droves.

Buzz offers me a job, we shake, and I go back out into the front office. Allen is talking to the only other girl in the office besides Sorry, a 19-year-old blonde I'll call Anoxia; she's cruising on the high of just having rung her first bell (ie, she made $100 in one day) and she's running around giving everyone high fives and going "Yes!!!" at the top of her lungs. I extract myself as soon as is polite, and go home to gorge, get high, and pass out.

A Week With The Bond Marketing Group: Day 1

2005-05-05T21:27:00.000-07:00

Monday, April 26 2005

1 a.m. I am sitting in my bathrobe searching through Monster. Amongst the many (well, not so many) jobs that I found and applied to was this: Entry Level With A Twist!!!! This sets off alarm bells deep in the most primal levels of my amygdala, but I'm uncomfortably low on cash so I suck it in and punch the number into my cell. I get ahold of a perky and, I later learn, actually sort-of-cute receptionist who promptly offers me an interview later that same day. The alarm bells are getting pretty loud at this point, but what the hell, I'm desperate so I accept.

3 a.m. Dressed professionally in my best suit (thanks, grandpa!) I show up at the jurry-rigged office of the Bond Marketing Group. I sit in the room for a bit, flirt a little with the receptionist (a very little: she's juggling phone calls three at a time for most of it.) Finally I get in to see the chieftain of this odd tribe, a large and suspiciously energetic Mormon whom I will refer to as Buzz. Buzz talks a bit about my resume, obviously-isn't-really-listening as I give my responses to his stock questions, very carefully does not call what his company does door-to-door sales (it's 'marketing'.) At the end, he offers me a 'Day of Observation' (abbreviated to 'Day of O') in the field with one of his leaders.

I've done this sort of thing before, so I'm thinking how bad can it be? "Sure," I say, "I'll show up tomorrow at 11."

"Good to hear, buddy!" Enthuses Buzz, sticking out his meaty hand. I shake.

Thus ends my first day's involvement with the Bond Marketing Group. Swing by tomorrow to find out how day 2 went.

Weapons of Mass Misinformation

2005-05-02T21:34:00.000-07:00

In his latest telegraph column, Steyn points to Hollywood's pathological avoidance of any referrence to the GWoT, and pronounces it a symptom of a loss of civilizational confidence. He had me right up until the end, when he asks (comparing present day soldiers to their forebears 60 years ago) "Where's their soundtrack?" Go read the column first. It's better written than anything here.

There. Done? Okay, lets continue.

It turns out the troops in Iraq are composing their own soundtrack, mostly in the key of hip-hop. Sixty years from now, when the veterans from Iraq get together, they'll be listening to their own music.

That got me to thinking, though: how important is it, really, that so much of the media (and the film industry, and music industry, etc) is completely against the war? A lot of conservatives make a big deal about it, and worry, as Steyn does, that the total unwillingness of media elites to get behind their country shows a sort of rot at the moral core of Western culture. Islamists, they say, are successfully exploiting that weakness, and if they can't win on the battlefield, they'll win by dragging things out so long that we just collapse.

And maybe they're right. Certainly, media elites are hostile to the war; and, also certainly, the Islamists are exploiting - or at least attempting to exploit - that hostility.

But Western culture is a complex beast, and all is not necessarily as it appears. What if the media's hostility serves as a kind of civilization-level fake out? I'm not talking conspiracy, here; just a sort of epihenomenon. Convince the enemy that we really don't want to fight, that we're softer than we really are, and thus more easily goad them into doing something rash which gives us all the excuse we need to eat their culture. Such a tactic could never have worked fifty or sixty years ago: people basically believed what the broadcasts and broadsheets said, and the enemy had access to that same information. Thanks to the internet, though, news can flow in far more complex ways, and the 'traditional' sources (ie, newspapers and network TV) can be given a hefty dose of misleading spin without seriously impeding the flow of information to those citizens who actually matter (one way or another, they'll find out what they want to know.) Odds are the enemy will look at the traditional sources first, and place the most trust in them as national barometers. Again, I emphasize that I'm not talking conspiracy here (though it's not impossible to believe that the Bush administration might, perhaps sensing this very principle, subtly encourage such behaviour); I am sure the newsmen who daily distort the picture out of Iraq believe sincerely in what they are doing and saying.

So, which is it? Is the media's odd behaviour a symptom of imminent collapse? Or just the re-purposing of an obsolete communications tool from intelligence dissemination to Weapon of Mass Misinformation?

Hillary and Victoria

2005-05-01T12:33:00.000-07:00

Okay, necessary caveat here: I've never even heard of NewsMax before, and I have no idea where exactly they get their news. However, they have a story posted a week ago which shows that the Clinton and Bush families are, er, getting long ... and that this may be, at least in part, a calculated effort to re-habilitate Hillary's image in order to soften up the 44th presidency for her.

In a way, this makes sense. With their super-majority, the GOP is likely to succumb to the same arrogance that any party too long in power is prone to. They are already showing signs, as Bush is likely only too aware (and need only look north of the Border to see an extreme example of this principle at work.) The odds of the next president being a Republican are slim. Unfortunately, the front runner for the Democrats is Hillary Clinton, a woman who inspires the same irrational hatred amongst the GOP core that Bush does. That irrational hatred has done wonders to marginalize the Democrats, so it makes sense that Bush would want to keep the same from happening the the Republicans.

This also means that Hillary is all but a shoe-in. One can only speculate what the effect of the first female president will be ... and since we're speculating here I'm going to go ahead and do just that.

Generally, politics is a man's game. This isn't some development of the patriarchy; it's just the way things are. Democracy, dictatorship, monarchy, or village counsel, it is almost invariably men who play at politics. This doesn't mean that women never play; however, it does mean that the women who do tend to be very, very good at it. Think of Queen Elizabeth (I, not II.) Or Queen Victoria. Or Boudicaea, or Cleopatra (okay, okay, so the last two weren't exactly successful in the long run. But you have to admit, they both gave the Romans a run for their money, not something many were able to do during their expansionary phase.) As a general rule, women who get to be head of state are a group of really mean, dangerous bitches.

My guess is that Hillary will prove to be the American Victoria. Think the U.S. empire has been expanding too far, too fast? You haven't seen anything yet.

A lot of people think the U.S. may be on the point of collapse, that the evil American Empire has reached the limits of its power, and that it's all downhill from here. Now, I fully expect this to happen at some point, and probably within my lifetime. But not right away. The U.S. still has too many advantages: demographically, it's far younger than most potential rivals (ie, Europe and China.) It has more experience at the bleeding edge of technological development than all but a handful of small countries, all of which are close U.S. allies. Both of these advantages are far more important than the fleeting powers of economic or military supremacy. The U.S. does have liabilities, namely its dependence on foreign oil (which, we are told is Peaking), and it's massive foreign debt. Neither of these are likely to seriously impede any U.S. expansion. The latter could do nothing, or it could create the sort of short-term economic crisis that is recovered from after a year or two. The former, on the other hand, is unlikely to create serious stress for at least another decade, enough time for technological fixes (hydrogen economy) and social adaptations (keeping to high-density urban living, in order to lower the use of oil) to be made.

So, that clears up the question of the U.S.'s fundamental fitness for continued hegemony.

The situation today reminds me most of two previous times in history. The first, during the second century B.C., when Rome sacked Carthage - it's only major rival - and proceeded to carve out an empire for itself that covered the entire known world and lasted for centuries. And the second, two centuries ago when the British took Paris, removed Napolean, and proceeded to enjoy the nineteenth century as the proud owners of the largest empire the world had ever seen. The parallels with the U.S. and the Soviet Union are almost too obvious to point out.

The British got about a third of the planet, and they didn't even want that much. But things were slower back then: they had sailing ships, not jetplanes and satellites. Historically, each empire has been successively longer, and successively shorter lived: the speed with which information, people, and material can be moved limits both size and lifespan. So now that the U.S. is free to expand, just how far will it expand? Could this be the Big One? The uber-Empire that swallows the entire world?

All that out of one little piece of political reporting. Isn't speculation fun?

The Scandals Just Keep Piling On!

2005-04-29T20:58:00.000-07:00

Just when I was starting to wonder whether we're really gonna have an election, I come across this: credible accusations that Maurice Strong and, far more to the point, Paul Martin are implicated in the oil for fraud scandle. Be interesting to see what Harpel et al. have to say about that when Parliament reconvenes....

Publication Ban? What Publication Ban?

2005-04-02T19:22:00.000-08:00

I wasn't really intending to blog about the sponsorship scandal, as it doesn't really affect me. The Liberal Party has struck me as corrupt ever since I started voting, so when I bother to vote at all I vote Conservative anyways (except for that one time I voted Marxist-Leninist, because all the mainstream parties disgusted me at the time and I figured I might as well just amuse myself. I was 25% of their electorate in my riding! Yay me!) Actually, this isn't about the scandal per se; it's about the publication ban.

Don't you love the internet? A judge establishes a publication ban, but there's no way to ban reading, so people in other countries (like, say, the U.S.) can ignore the ban with impunity, publish what they learn on the web, and the information gets out regardless. The mullahs in Iran can't keep their people from knowing what the score is. What makes Canada's judicial system think they can do any better, when our country is way more open?

So I says to the Liberal Party: go ahead, have your snap election. Try to skulk back into power before the Gomery inquiry blows open your whole sordid system. It won't work; we'll learn the truth anyways, and in plenty of time to do to send Canada's Natural Governing Party the way of the Whigs.

Sin City Criminals

2005-04-01T06:59:00.000-08:00

Last night I got to see Sin City, a day before the general population does, for free (my friends rock.) As a fan of the comic, and Frank Miller's work in general, I can only say it blew me away. Go see it. You won't be disappointed.

But I'm not here to sing the praises of Sin City. I'm hear to bitch about the way the audience was treated: as a crowd of potential criminals.

The line-up was long, and slow. It took literally 20 mins to get to the front. Why? Because a group of security guards were patting down everyone to ensure no one got to take their electronics into the theatre. No digitial video cameras. No digitial cameras. And, for some godforsaken reason, no phonecams. Good god, someone might take a low resolution screen-shot! It's obvious, after all, that no one will go see the movie if they've already seen a crappy still.

Oh wait. I'd already seen lots of crappy stills. And trailers. And, um, I went anyways. Go figure.

To cap off the inconvencience was this nice little piece of humiliation: everyone giving up their phonecams had to sign a waiver, stating that in the event of loss, theft, or breakage neither the security company nor the theatre would be held liable. As I walked in, I could just see one (or all) of the uniformed, nine-dollar-an-hour thugs saying to himself, "Gee, that's a nice phone. Can't afford one that nice myself. Think I'll take it."

I can understand being worried about piracy. I disagree with studios' position, but I can understand it. Seriously though, what are we going to do with our phonecams? Or, for that matter, with camcorders? It's been years since I've downloaded a movie that was bootlegged in a theatre somewhere. Especially with digital movies, it's easy for someone involved in the production process to let a copy leak onto a P2P network. Until the DVD comes out several months later, that's where most of the illegal downloads come from, not from customers in the theatre.

There's a lot of similarity, there, to the situation in airports, where even on intra-national flights every traveller is treated by the ill-mannered, poorly trained louts laughingly called 'security', as though they were potential terrorists. With, of course, all of the delay, inefficiency, and humiliation the process involves. Just as the anti-piracy measures at the theatre are highly unlikely to prevent any actual piracy, so is airport 'security' pretty much useless at providing actual security. In both cases, the aim is not the prevention of crime. It is control, through fear and intimidation, of the general population.

I'd ask, "Why do you sheeple put up with this nonsense!?" except that, of course, I put up with it myself. Which, sadly, makes me sheeple.

Sometimes, I despair for the future of our species.

Kyrgyzstan Kung Fu

2005-03-30T10:16:00.000-08:00

If wealthy playboy Bayaman Erkinbayev is to be believed, the recent revolution in Kyrgyzstan owes quite a bit to the prowess of his pupils, trained in the local martial art of Alysh. Looks like successful revolutions depend on more than protest babes (not that I have anything against protest babes.)

Book Review: Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson

2005-03-24T12:32:00.000-08:00

I read this book in two days. There are very few books that I can say that about. Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson, is one of those rare science fiction novels that is simultaneously a book about Big Ideas and a compelling character study.

The premise is relatively straightforward, and one that fans of Greg Egan's work (specifically Quarantine) will be familiar with. Humanity is suddenly enclosed in a membrane that isolates it from the universe at large. In Quarantine, the membrane encompasses the entire solar system, and is impermeable; it's properties resemble those of a black hole turned inside out. In Spin, the membrane surrounds only the earth, and does not actually prevent anything from leaving. Instead, time inside the volume enclosed by the membrane is drastically slowed down: for every year that passes on the Earth, a hundred million years pass in the universe at large.

The central characters of Spin are as compelling as the innovative plot device. The story is narrated by Tyler Dupree, an everyman physician who, due to his connection with a pair of extraordinary twins, ends up caught in the midst of cultural upheavel caused by the membrane's appearance. One of twins, Jason Lawton, is the scion of wealthy industrialist E.D. (his company manufactures high-altitude balloons; his fortune is truly made when, with the onset of the Spin, the earth's network of communications satellites falls from the sky.) Jason grows up to run Perihelion, the organization charged with understanding the Spin and, if possible, enabling humanities survival beyond it. Jason's twin sister, Diane, reacts to the Spin in a completely different way. Convinced that hers is the last generation of humanity - that she will live to see the Sun swallow the Earth whole - she throws herself into a life religious hedonism that, with time, degenerates into a life of religious fanaticism (the cover blurb says she marries a "sinister cult leader who's forged a new religion out of the fears of the masses", which isn't quite accurate: her husband Simon is basically a good-natured, though slightly dull man of faith who sincerely believes the End of Days has arrived. He is a cult-member, not a cult leader ... I mention this because one of the few disappointments of the book was waiting for that particular sub-plot to pony up with the implied drama, which never came.)

Tyler is child-hood friends with the Lawton twins (his mother was a sort of live-in maid for the Lawton family.) Inevitably, he falls for the beautiful and lively Diane; just as inevitably, he is forced to keep his feelings to himself. Their paths in life diverge, and while Tyler's feelings for Diane are submerged, they never die; they remain in contact throughout. Meanwhile, Jason brings Tyler to work at Perihelion as the staff physician, giving Tyler a privelaged view of humanity's efforts to beat the mysterious Hypotheticals before it's too late.

The first plan is to use the rapid passage of time to the species' advantage. As the sun warms, so does Mars; microbes are sent to the Red Planet, followed by simple plants, followed eventually by colonization effort. A hundred million years pass on Mars before the colonists' arrival, plenty of time for microbes to fix soil nitrogen, and for plants to oxygenate the atmosphere. Thousands of years pass for the Martians - enough time for them to develop a highly advanced bionanotechnology - before, inevitably, the Hypotheticals notice and cover Mars in a similar membrane. The second plan is to use von Neumann probes to explore the galaxy. Once again, a process that would take tens of millions of years is accomplished in what, for earth, amounts to a matter of months.

These two plans illustrate the great strength of Wilson's work: to take the modern, everyday world, give it a tweak in an unexpected direction, and then follow through the logical consequences and implications as far his imagination can take him. Which, I hardly have to add, is quite far. His previous books - namely Darwinia and Chronoliths - seem to use a similar device. It's an honoured science fiction tradition to structure stories this way, especially amongst British authors: virtually everything written by H. G. Wells and John Whyndham used this device.

If you're already a fan of Wilson's work, I probably don't have to tell you to buy this book. If you've never read him before - I hadn't - I suggest you start. The characters are as empathetic as anything in mainstream literature, and the ideas will blow your mind.

DIY Cyborg

2005-03-24T11:23:00.000-08:00

An enterprising individual has implanted himself (okay, he got a doctor to do it for him) with an RFID chip.

Dieback Insurance

2005-03-24T09:02:00.000-08:00

What if the human race were to experience a massive dieback due to ecological collapse? The scenarios are endless: nuclear war, the explosion of a supervolcano, the impact of a comet or an asteroid, plague.... the list goes on. The majority of modern humans would have their fitness dramatically reduced without the support structure of civilization, and it is, indeed, entirely possible that under these circumstances the human species could go extinct. Stephen Baxter explores this rather grim scenario in Evolution, a compelling novel that portrays humanity as a fleeting epiphenomenon, ultimately driven to extinction by its own actions.

The risk of a global civilizational collapse and massive dieback is, in my estimation, rather low. I think it far more likely that humanity (or our posthuman descendants) will end up colonizing the stars. However, the consequences of such a collapse are so great that the risk, however small, should not be ignored. Not all existential risks can be mitigated (for instance, the vacuum energy could spontaneously tunnel into a new ground state, wiping out the entire universe at the speed of light.) Many, however, are amenable to an insurance policy: namely, the preservation of neolithic technologies and social structures.

Stone age societies are remarkably resilient, absent competition by civilized humans. Small, voluntary 'tribes' of enthusiasts could be maintained in the larger national parks, where they would live as hunter gatherers, making their own tools from what they find and honing the skills needed to survive without technology. Contact with the outside world would be largely prohibited and, when it did occur, strictly controlled so as to guard against the threat of contagion if it's plague that finally does the species in. An enthusaist tiring of the neolithic lifestyle would, of course, be permitted to leave, to be replaced by new entrants selected from a pool of trained applicants.

Note that neolithic doesn't mean that they'd be limited to making and using tools existing thousands (or even hundreds) of years ago. Remarkably sophisticated tools can be made, using raw materials naturally available in the environment. Nor would the tribes be limited to neolithic knowledge; there's no reason not to give them access, through clearly marked but protected archives, to the full spectrum of modern science and engineering.

If the next-to-worst case scenario happens (ie, global dieback and total collapse of civilization, accompanied by mass extinctions in the biosphere) these tribes would be there to pick up the pieces. Even if only a single tribe survives to see the other side of the crisis, they'll be enough to rebuild civilization, this time with a clear guide on how to get from the neolithic to the information age in a fraction of the time it originally took and, hopefully, without making the mistakes that led to the dieback in the first place. If, on the other hand, civilization never collapses, then society has invested only the time of a few thousand individuals around the world. The total economic cost is negligible, as any good insurance policy should be.

Shari'a in School (And No, I'm Not Talking About Madrassas)

2005-03-22T13:32:00.000-08:00

It's always nice to know that Stalin's useful idiots are still around, even if they have found a new (though as yet unacknowledged) ideological ally. The left has always been willing to serve as a fifth column in the U.S. (and, really, just about everywhere else.) Exhibit A: marketing shari'a to American youth, using PBS, pre-made lesson plans, and textbooks extolling the virtues of Islam. Like Bruce Sterling said, if you own the youth, you own the future. And it looks like a lot of American high schools are selling their youth to CAIR at cut-rate prices.

You have to admit that it would be ironic if, fifty or sixty years after soundly trouncing Islamofascism on the battlefield and forcibly democratizing the Arab world, a large minority of Americans (probably blue staters, who tend not to raise their kids to be explicitly Christian) start converting to Islam. At which point, those evil redneck conservatives from the red states would start to look pretty darn liberal in comparison. I can see it now, a bunch of grey haired Vermonters scratching their heads at the burqas and the modques that have sprouted like mushrooms in their secular hippie paradise, wondering, how the hell did this happen? To which the answer is, you let your kids be indoctrinated in public school into thinking Islam is innocuous ... and then their children started converting, just to piss off their parents, started converting.....

It's the sort of grand historical joke the Great Pumpkin seems to enjoy playing on imperial powers (think of the Romans, who spent decades pummeling the Jews, only to end up worshipping one.)

IP Judo

2005-03-22T08:09:00.000-08:00

Normally, I agree with most of what's written in TechCentralStation, but this article, urging the Bush administration to get tough on IP, strikes me as getting it completely wrong. The author, Duane Freese, takes aim at both online music 'theft' and foreign piracy of pharmaceuticals and software. Early in the article, Mr. Freese notes that IP constitues $600 billion of the U.S. economy; later, he rages against losses due to piracy of $13.4 billion, worldwide. The latter figure omits the supposed losses of the pharmaceutical industry, so lets double the figure. That's still only $26.8 billion ... considerable, to be sure, but negligible compared to the size of the industry as a whole.

Lets start with filesharing. Mr. Freese argues, correctly, that it's pointless trying to take out individual file-sharers. Instead, he recommends focusing on commerical networks (one would assume he means Sharman Networks' Kaazaa.) Great idea ... sue the companies that actually make revenue through advertising, with the result that freeware such as Ares and Gnutella will step in to fill the niche. The recording industry could probably get money out of Sharman, but there's no money at all in the other software. Filesharing, frankly, is here to stay. No one's going to buy an iPod with 40 gigs of storage, and then shell out $10,000 to fill it ... and storage is only getting cheaper. Musicians would do well to look upon filesharing as free marketing, and make their money at live shows (which is where most of their money is made, anyways.) A similar argument applies to movies: sure, people might download them, but actually going to the theatre with friends is a social experience, difficult to replicate in front of the warm glow of your computer monitor.

So we can dispense with the argument that filesharing constitutes theft. What about the foreign piracy of pharmaceuticals and software?

This is trickier. Mr. Freese argues, essentially, for trade sanctions against countries that refuse to respect IP. "You don't want to pay full price for PhotoShop? Fine, we're not going to buy your bananas." This strikes me as, frankly, silly: American consumers will get to pay more for bananas, while Brazilian software companies will carry right on pirating PhotoShop (especially now that the banana growers aren't making as much money.) Even assuming the government caves to U.S. pressure, many of them (particularly Brazil) are likely to encourage the development of open source software, for the simple reason that they cannot afford to pay American prices for commercial software. As for pharmaceuticals, well, that's what black markets are for. If a fly-by-night company will sell you AIDS pills for $10 a bottle, and GlaxoSmithKline wants $500, a poverty-stricken third worlder is going to go with the fly-by-night, issues of quality control be damned.

Trade wars aren't the answer, here. The answer, I would argue, is more free trade. Get involved in a trade war, and those very foreign markets the IP companies want opened will just close down, exactly what the pirates want. Push for free trade, and the locals will, gradually, get richer. They'll be more willing to spend money to get brand-name drugs with guaranteed high quality, more willing to shell out for a legitimate, high-quality DVD in place of a pirated copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy with scratchy sound and a grainy picture.

CEOs love to moan about how their corporations are getting screwed over by those who refuse to respect intellectual property. In truth, many of them are weeping all the way to the bank: piracy isn't bankrupting corporations everywhere you look, it's just shaving a little off of their profit margins. The recording industry, for instance, is not in the red; it's profits just aren't quite as high as they were a few years ago. It's not possible to give a meaningul estimate of how much they're actually losing, as there's no 1:1 correspondance between, say, a song downloaded and a song bought. If I download a song, does that mean I would have bought it if the downloading option hadn't been available? Maybe. But nine times out of ten, I wouldn't have. Similarly, if an African villager whose wordly possessions consist of one scrawny goat and a patch of hardscrabble land hadn't been able to buy his three-month supply of AIDS meds for $10, it doesn't mean that he would have shrugged his shoulders and paid $500 instead. More likely, he just would have died.

If corporations are having a hard time selling their IP products, they might want to consider that, just maybe, they're charging too much. They also might want to reconsider just what it is, exactly, that they're selling: it's not, as so many of them think, the information. Rather, it's the quality of that information, whether in terms of clarity (high quality DVD vs. shitty pirated DVD), experience (going to a concert with friends vs. listening to the artist on your iPod), convenience (having a song download quickly, with a minimum of time spent trying to find it, and the confidence that it will actually be the whole song vs. the user-beware P2P environment) or quality (a bottle of AIDS meds guaranteed to do what the bottle says vs. a bottle that might do nothing or even make you sicker.) Users will pay a premium for all these services. Not all users, maybe, but some and, I think, enough that the corporations - and the artists, scientists, engineers, and computer programmers they represent - will be able to turn a profit and maybe even make a living from what it is they do.

Interview with Adrian Bowyer

2005-03-21T07:58:00.000-08:00

Adrian Bowyer (that would be the University of Bath researcher working on making a self-replicating fab out of a rapid-prototype device) has an interview over at Non-Tech City.

Army Tries to Raise Morale, Airforce Captain Outraged

2005-03-20T20:39:00.000-08:00

So the Purrfect Angelz are sent on a USO tour to boost the morale of the boys in Iraq, and a female Air Force captain feels compelled to speak out against the show. Speaking, not in her official capacity but as an 'outraged woman', Sharon Kibiloski is outraged that the army would allow such a debauched show to take place. This raises the question of what Capt. Kibiloski 's doing speaking in anything but an official capacity. I can't remember ever having heard a soldier say, "Speaking, not in my official capacity, but as an outraged man...." Guess the rules are different when you get to use the clean bathroom.

The problem? Apparently, she's offended that the military is trying to appeal to the 18-25 male demographic in its ranks - you know, as in the vast majority of enlisted soldiers - with a quartet of scantily clad on-stage temptresses. She's offended that the show doesn't appeal to everyone, especially women (solution: don't go see it.) She's worried that soldiers will leave the show so horny they can't control themselves, and might sexually harass their female comrades (solution: charge the idiots that do. Especially if they're dumb enough to make a pass at you: you're a freaking Captain.)

Sheesh, lady, lighten up. You join an organization composed primarily of males - an organization that, until recently, was composed exclusively of males, and has a corresponding set of traditions and habits - and you pretty much have to learn to be one of the guys. That includes taking off-color jokes in stride, and it includes letting the boys in uniform be reminded, every once in a while, of just what it is they're fighting for. I mean, they're in a war zone. Every day could be their last. And you're worried they might get turned on by a little USO T&A? Get your priorities straight. I'd think you'd have more pressing concerns, such as the possibility that - on the off chance USO takes you seriously, and bans future shows - you'll be fingered as the culprit by a country full of horny, homesick troops. And, you know, that could make for some really uncomfortable conversation in the Officer's Mess.

Latest From the Honourable Members

2005-03-18T12:41:00.000-08:00

The deficit this year was supposed to be $2.2 billion. Instead, it's $6 billion. Apparently $3.8 billion is an 'accounting difference'.

Another Reason Note to Worry About Peak Oil

2005-03-18T12:31:00.000-08:00

Even if my prior musings regarding the abiotic theory of the origins of oil are completely off base, this new development may well render the depletion of oil a moot point. If you're too lazy to read the whole thing, the essence is this: researchers at Sandia have developed a photocatalytic device (ie, powered by the sun) to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.

The planet's not likely to run out of water any time soon.

No Sushi For You!

2005-03-18T08:21:00.000-08:00

I realize this is old news, but I just encountered it recently so I'm blogging it anyways.

Apparently, the McGuinty Liberals just backed down from a proposed regulation that would outlaw fresh sushi. Now, don't get me wrong. I like seeing governments back down. It teaches them humility, which is good for their blackened souls. However, the story absolutely begs the question, Why the hell would they try to pass such a law in the first place? Hmm, lets see ... on the one hand, you have a lot of Torontonians who love sushi. On the other hand, you have a lot of Torontonians who vote Liberal. The Liberals had already managed to piss off the entire province with their Health Care 'Premium' (which isn't a tax!) Basically the only people in the whole damn province who might vote Liberal in the next provincial election live in the 416 and the 905. And then the government turns around and tries to regulate real sushi out of existence.

You know, for the first few months of this administration, I used to actually get mad about their ham-handed stunts. Now I just think it's funny. If they keep this up, it'll be a decade or more before the Liberals have a snowballs' chance in Texas of getting back in to office.

Book Review: Fab, by Neil Gershenfeld

2005-03-17T11:47:00.000-08:00

After reading the first chapter of this book, it was late and time to go to bed. Reluctantly, I put the book away, turned off the light, and spent the next three hours unable to sleep because of the storm of thoughts it had set off in my brain.

Fab is about how to build things. More than that, though: it's about how - sooner than most of us who think of such things expect - anyone will be able to manufacture almost anything in their garage. The centrepiece of Fab is what Gershenfeld calls the 'fab lab', or fabrication laboratory. It's a combination of computer, 3D printers, laser cutters, and assorted other machine tools for working with almost any material, ranging from wood to plastic to metal. Load in the right software, and a fab lab can build, well, pretty well anything you want it to build; even if it can't build it all in one piece, it can build the components, which can then be assembled.

The interesting thing is that a fab lab can - at least theoretically - build another fab lab. This has, to put it mildly, big implications.

The bulk of the book is divided between introductory pieces on the working elements of a fab lab - subtractive and additive manufacturing, sensors, interfaces, engineering software - and case studies of what actual people have done with the prototype fab labs that Gershenfeld's Centre for Bits and Atoms has set up around the world. One such concerned an art student who made herself a 'screaming bag'; another, a Norwegian herdsman who designed and deployed a wireless network for monitoring sheep and reindeer; yet another an Indian village that built measurement devices to test the quality of milk. Note that none of these people were professional engineers, nor did they have any sort of formal technical education. Not only can fab labs manufacture damn near anything, but ordinary people can use them to do so.

What really grabbed me about this book was how soon this technology is likely to be out there. People like K. Eric Drexler have been talking about self-reproducing, molecular manufacturing machines for twenty years now. The technology has become a science fiction staple, as ubiquotous in any serious treatment of the future as computers and space ships. The assumption, however, has always been that we'll need reasonably mature nanotech in order to make these things; Fab shows that, on the contrary, we can make them right now, using existing technology. They won't build spaceships out of pure diamond, but they'll build damn near anything else, including (as noted above) other fabs. And if a fab can reproduce itself, it can also repair itself, and - logically - incrementally upgrade itself.

Eventually, then, fabs will be nanotech-enabled (and able to make those super-cool diamond spaceships); in the meantime, however, we'll have a good twenty or thirty years to learn how to use these things. This is probably a good thing, because the proliferation of fabs - odds are they'll be everywhere within a decade or so - is going to cause one hell of a shock to the economy. The sheer range of what it's possible to make with a fab, and the fact that once you have one all you need are raw materials (dirt cheap) and blueprints (P2P, anyone?), and you can see how large sectors of the manufacturing industry are going to go tits up.

Fab wasn't perfect, the my problems with it were quite minor. Like most engineers, Gershenfeld spends a lot of time explaining the nitty-gritty, and not a lot speculating about the large-scale implications of the technology. Which is fine, really; the point of the book is to show us all what can be done right now, not to engage in hand-waving pronouncements. Still, in the chapter titled 'Future', he spends half of it discussing von Neumann and the machines named for him. The material is relevent, of course, but it really does belong in a different, earlier chapter. The other - minor - problem I had was with some of the case studies, some of which didn't directly concern use of a fab lab, but rather the use of CAD tools in general in contexts they weren't intended for. But then, fab labs are new, and there probably aren't that many examples to draw on as of yet.

In the end, this was an informative and occasionally even entertaining read, an eye-opening guide to a world-changing technology that most of the species hasn't even heard of yet.

As an interesting addendum, I found a post on EurekAlert! today, concerning researchers at the University of Bath who are looking into getting working, refrigerator-sized household fabricators onto the market within four years. It's spreading.

Madness, Genius, & Chemistry

2005-03-16T12:28:00.000-08:00

An interesting essay over at kiro5hin, concerning the effects on society - specifically the effects on its creative potential - of medicating psychological illness out of existence. The thesis is that when the threshold of mental illness is defined downwards, and the new crazy (those with depression, dysthemia, ADD/ADHD, etc) are put on drugs, we run the risk of squashing creative genius. There's something to this, I think: I have a schizophrenic friend who's always finding excuses to go off his meds, as he says it feels like his brain's made of porridge when he's on them.

On the other hand, however, the vast majority of people - and that includes the mentally ill - are not, and will never be, creative geniuses. They're just normal people, with jobs, friends, families. The benefits these people might get from being psychologically abnormal are somewhat dubious, measured next to the detrimental effects upon their careers and the pain their illnesses can cause not just them, but their loved ones. That said, I've always thought putting kids on speed so they won't get bored when the teacher's droning on about fractions is an idea that comes somewhere between misguided and criminal. Still, putting an adult on SSRIs when they're consistently, needlessly miserable is very much a good thing, if it improves their lives.

However, the point about creative squashing chemistry stands. There's something about the image of a happy, wholly sane and stable artist that just strikes me as deeply, horribly wrong.

But no one is ever forced to take their meds. Even people with disorders far more serious than dysthemia (like my aforementioned friend) can choose not to. I think, however, that it's a salient point that the choice exists at all. In the past, if you were crazy, then that was it. You were crazy, end of story. Either you died young, or became an artist of some sort, or (often) both. Happiness wasn't an option that was presented to you. These days, however, the young artist is offered a choice by society, one similar to the choice offered Achilles: a life of mundane, medicated contentment that will never amount to anything particularly memorable, or a life wracked by mental pain and occasional derangement that gives a shot at greatness.

No doubt many will choose the former. Others, however, will choose to suffer for their art, and their art may be the better for it, as they will have chosen that state instead of having it forced upon them by the great genetic crapshoot.

Hitler Was a Great Man!

2005-03-14T13:11:00.000-08:00

Udo Voigt, leader of the National Party of Germany:

“If you can call Churchill a great Briton, if you can make a hero out of Alexander the Great, then you have to give that status to Hitler, too,” Udo Voigt, the leader of the far-right National Party of Germany (NPD), said. “My lawyer has told me to say no more than that.”

Except that, you know, Hitler lost....

Microwave Foundries

2005-03-11T18:16:00.000-08:00

This seems like a valuable addition to any personal fabrication system.

A Dumbass New Law, Brought to You by Dumbass Politicians

2005-03-11T12:17:00.000-08:00

This is a horrible idea. Forcing educational institutions to buy expensive licenses in order to access freely available content. Outlawing 'parasitic' VoIP. Coercing ISPs into kicking off a subscriber if a content company so much as insinuates that said subscriber is getting access to copyrighted content (in effect, making it easier to prosecute file sharing than it is to stop child porn. Priorities, people.)

None of this shocks me. The recording industry is scared shitless of anything new that it doesn't own. At the same time the Canadian government - like governments everywhere, I suppose -tends toward the control-freak mentality, so it's no surprise that they'd grasp at any pretext to crack down on internet use, and damn the collateral damage.

The sad thing is, I'm really more amused than angered by this. Reason being, it doesn't particularly worry me. Not that I think the legislation won't pass - at the very least, I imagine a watered-down version will get through quite handily - it's that I can't see it being even minimally effective. One word, people: encryption. It's simple, really. Just lock everything down using a decent RSA algorithm, make it prohibitively expensive for the authorities to take a peek at what you're up to, and the law becomes impossible to enforce. Set up private darknets, accessible only to people vouched for by existing members who know them personally, and impenetrable to anyone else. Such inscrutable networks already exist. One of my friends already uses one, and swears by it (I haven't bothered yet. I'm cheap.)

Of course, none of this would be necessary if content were reasonably priced, given the low and dropping costs of storage and distribution. $0.05 per song would be entirely reasonable. But perhaps its a little much to expect content industries to adapt to changing technology ... it's not like we live in a capitalist economy or anything.

As a concluding note, if any of this strikes you as it does me - namely, as wrong-headed foolishness or (less charitably) cynical opportunism, communicate your displeasure to the following individuals:

Industry Minister David Emerson: Emerson.D@parl.gc.ca
Heritage Minister Liza Frulla: Frulla.L@parl.gc.ca
Toronto MP Sarmite Bulte: sarmite.d.bulte@rogers.com

(I didn't bother gathering contact info for the Canadian recording industry association, because there's only one way to communicate your displeasure with a corporate entity: don't buy their shit.)

The Extinction Cycle

2005-03-11T11:00:00.000-08:00

Two physicists at UC Berkeley claim to have uncovered a suspciously regular cycle of mass extinctions stretching back the Cambrian explosion. Apparently, an extinction event occurs every 62 million years or so (which, as Arthur Chrenkoff notes, makes us about 5 million years overdue.) The scientists involved make some guesses as to the possible cause of these periodic extinctions: comet showers brought on by the sun's orbit through the galaxy, or a cycle of mass volcanism. Apparently there's even some evidence for catastophic volcanism around the time the dinosaurs bit the dust.

My guess, though, is that neither of those explanations will turn out to be right. My geuss - based on nothing more than a hunch - is that the cycle is an epiphenomenon inherent to living systems, the same way market crashes are inherent to stock markets. Ecologies are massively complex, dynamically metastable systems: a small perturbation might do nothing, but it might also throw the entire system into a new metastable state. The transitional period is the mass extinction.

Now, the perturbation might well be an external factor - a comet impact, for instance - or it might be internal, like the evolution of a new species. What happened billions of years ago when the first bacteria learned how to turn sunlight into energy, and as a result started polluting the atmosphere with oxygen? Oxygen is highly reactive, and severely toxic to the anaerobic bacteria that - up to then - had dominated the planet. Similarly, what happened to other species when eyes were first developed? From our perspective, these developments were necessary and probably inevitable; at the time, they were catastrophic.

Note that the two broad classes of explanation - external versus internal factors - are not mutually exclusive. I have a feeling, however, that the internal factors will turn out to account for much of the observed periodicity, though, like I said, that's just a hunch.

Peak Oil, or 'Peak Oil'?

2005-03-07T18:54:00.000-08:00

While doing the dishes today, I randomly asked myself, "Self, what's the evidence that oil is a fossil fuel?" I remember reading somewhere - I think in New Scientist - that there was a theory that oil was produced by populations of deep crust-dwelling bacteria, extremophiles that ate rock and excreted oil as a byproduct. But I couldn't find the article. Instead, after spending some quality time with google, I found this article attacking the whole concept of peak oil and selling the abiotic theory in its place. The money quote:

The Wall Street Journal article previously cited noted that it "would take a pretty big pile of dead dinosaurs to account for the estimated 660 billion barrels of oil in the [Middle East]." I don't know what the precise dinosaur-carcass-to-barrel-of-oil conversion rate is, but it does seem like it would take a hell of a lot of dead dinosaurs. Even if we generously allow that a single dinosaur could yield 5 barrels of oil (an absurd notion, but let's play along for now), more than 130 billion dinosaurs would have had to be simultaneously entombed in just one small region of the world. But were there really hundreds of billions of dinosaurs roaming the earth? If so, then one wonders why there is all this talk now of overpopulation and scarce resources, when all we are currently dealing with is a few billion humans populating the same earth.

Hmmm. Now how I come I never thought of that?

If the abiotic theory is right - and it does match the observed date set better, given that wells have been known to fill back up again - it throws a lot of things into a completely different light. Suddenly our evil western way of life doesn't look quite so unsustainable. Oil is still finite in the abiotic theory, but in the same way that sand is finite.

Oh, and regarding the actual evidence that oil is produced by fossils: couldn't seem to find that. Seems the theory was presented by some Russian 250 odd years ago, and hasn't actually been tested since. No one saw the point, I geuss. Appropriately enough, the abiotic theory originates with Soviet scientist Nikolai Kudryavtsev, who proposed it way back in 1951.

Superman is a Dick ... Maybe It's Because He Can't Get Laid

2005-03-06T14:25:00.000-08:00

When I first found this page, I thought it had to be a parody. Before long I realized it wasn't ... no man alive could have the patience to make this many fake covers. The gentleman responsible seems to think Superman's awful behaviour is because he hates himself. My theory? I think Larry Niven's right. It's pent up sexual energy.

2005-03-04T12:55:00.000-08:00

One thing I've often wondered about is why so many people on welfare are, to put it politely, overweight. Well, not so much how as that's pretty obvious (eat a lot and don't move), as how they can afford to be fat. Leftists often remark on how difficult it is to survive on the paltry sums we dole out to them, but if this were true then one might expect them to be, well, not fat. I have some experience with poverty myself, not too long ago. I lost about 10 pounds in a month (since regained: I make no claims to a healthy lifestyle), simply because I couldn't afford to eat properly, and had to walk everywhere I went.

Am I stereotyping? Perhaps. But then, I grew up in rural Ontario, where there's a lot of welfare, and a lot of fat women collecting it. Why do I say women, one might ask, and not men? Simple observation. Most of the welfare collecting men are, in my experience, positively scrawny. I make no claims to statistical evidence, hear - I don't even know if studies have been done - but rely only on my own experience, which I freely admit may be flawed.

Weight isn't the real issue I want to discuss, though. It's children. Specifically, the children of welfare recipients.

At the moment, the government's policy is to increase a mother's welfare benefits whenever she has a baby. The warm and fuzzy rational for this is that, as babies are expensive, the family will require more money in order to properly care for it. This is fairly intuitive, and I have to say that at least one mother of my experience put that money to good use, raising a brood of children (in excess of eight: I lost count, after a while) who were amongst the nicest, brightest, and all-around most well-rounded people I have ever met. But (and you just knew that but was coming), this is sadly atypical.

What tends to happen instead is that these women realize that the only way they can make more money is by having more kids. So they spread their legs for anyone who comes by, specifically in order to get pregnant and increase the size of their monthly pogie. Some start while still in high school, dropping out to become full-time government supported baby factories; this is, indeed, their stated life goal. I am not exagerating here: I have known people like this, who saw no moral problems at all with it.

This shouldn't surprise anyone with a basic understanding of economics and human nature (which really come down to the same thing, in the end.) Incentives matter, after all, and if you give people enough of an incentive to do nothing but breed - especially when they have no marketable skills - that's exactly what they'll do.

There main problem here is that the kids tend to get shafted. There's nothing stopping the mother from using the money for whatever she sees fit, so that what should go to diapers and baby powder goes to booze and smokes. Now, if the mother is really horrible, her kids get taken away (and hopefully they're not permanently handicapped by fetal alcohol syndrome and malnutrition.) At which point she gets pregnant again, just to keep the cheques rolling in, and the whole cycle continues....

Some of the kids at my high school had mothers like this. Not so bad that they were taken away from them, but they still showed up reeking of cat piss, and their behaviour often spoke of some serious brain damage somewhere along the line. Needless to say they were ostracized, not just by the 'popular' kids, but by everyone (except others like them.) Many went on to support themselves with welfare, seeing government handouts as a right. Others went on to jail. Very, very few went on to rise above their humble origins.

And I've found myself wondering: why does our society encourage this? Why do we have what is, in effect, a breeding program optimized to bring out the very worst of humanity? It was bad enough in the early twentieth, when states around the world used eugenics programs to try and breed a master race. Is it really necessary to try and do the exact opposite? I mean, here we have a situation where one woman on welfare will single-handedly pop out ten kids - none of whom are likely to be particularly well-adjusted to society - while it will take, what, five middle-class families to produce the same number of kids with a better chance of maturing into productive citizens. Citizens who, it might be added, are going to be either supporting that first group through taxes (whether its welfare or the prison system.)

Now, I'm not about to suggest ending welfare completely. Clearly, their are cases where a little bit of tax-supported charity can make a lot of difference for the better. Let's face it: shit happens. Kids are young and stupid and careless, and sometimes that combination results in a pregnant 16 year old. A situation like that calls for a little bit of compassion. At the same time, it hardly makes sense to encourage people to have kids when, by definition, they are financially incapable of supporting them.

So here's my proposal: loans. Why not say, "Look, if you don't want to abort the kid, and you can't bare to put it up for adoption, we'll help you raise it. $1000/month for five years, interest free until the kid's in high school."If she gets a job at some point, once the kid's old enough that she doesn't have to watch it anymore, she still gets the loan. The catch, though, is that this is a one-time thing. If she's silly enough to get pregnant again society will not pay for her little darling, on the theory that once is a mistake, but twice is intentional.

I can see a lot of upsides to this (obviously, or I wouldn't have gone on at such length. Kudos if you got this far.) Most obviously, it removes the economic incentive to breed at society's expense. Logically, less welfare-children would result. At the same time, it removes the disincentive to work: conventional welfare cuts back benefits if the recipient gets a job, and given that most jobs that your typical welfare recipient can qualify for don't pay much better than welfare does, and are rather less pleasant than sitting on your ass watching Survivor reruns, there isn't much reason for them to work. With a loan, the mother has that money plus (if she's smart) whatever she earns from a job, and is able to provide her child with a much better economic start in life. Since society gets the money back much of the hostility towards welfare queens - a lot of which rubs off on their kids - is bound to be neutralized.

There's really no difference between this and a student loan. Both are investments by society in human capital. If a graduate has to spend six years after graduation paying for their education, then why shouldn't young mothers spend an equivalent amount of time paying society back for its investment in their kids?

Speaking of the Decadence of the West....

2005-03-04T10:22:00.000-08:00

What about this little number from France? 66 defendants - 27 of them women - stand accused of a child sex ring of epic proportions. Some of them were allegedly whoring out their own children for a pack of smokes.

People like this are why God invented ebola.

The Curse on the Stone

2005-03-04T10:06:00.000-08:00

What do floods, foot-and-mouth disease, and football have in common? A 1069 word curse from the 16th century, engraved on a 14-tonne granite boulder by Carlisle artist Gordon Young. The string of misfortunes have befallen the town since the Cursing Stone was installed at the centre of the city, and the city council is considering having it destroyed. Yet more proof that one does not lightly fuck with Old Gods.

2005 Wish List, Item 1

2005-03-02T08:44:00.000-08:00

A Transmetropolitan movie. With Patrick Stewart as Spider Jerusalem. Now how cool would that be? He even likes the idea. Not only would I watch this movie, I'd even pay to see it. And I don't say that about a lot of movies.

An Arizona School Board's Call to Prayer

2005-03-01T13:01:00.000-08:00

I couldn't resist blogging this. Seems that a parent in Arizona has noticed that his kid's curriculum is, shall we say, somewhat biased in favor of Islam. The faculty probably see it as an opportunity to be politically correct. The Muslims no doubt see it as an opportunity to proselytize. Same thing as with environmentalism and science curriculums, really. As usual, the kids get caught in the middle, and many won't realize whether they're being fed bullshit (or sanitized pap that dwells on nice poetry while conveniently omitting the slave status of women) until they're older; others won't realize it's bullshit at all.

Hopefully this stays in Arizona. Something tells me it won't get much further; if parents start complaining that their schools' religion classes are being used as Islamic recruiting centers, there's gonna be a lot of board members not getting re-elected the next term. Still, I think this does show the dangers inherent in letting teachers teach whatever they damn well please, regardless of parents' wishes. Great when you're trying to keep creationism out of the science curriculum, not so hot when the teachers decide to help people who want your daughter to willingly wrap a hijab around her head.

Deploying Logic Against A Stupid Argument

2005-02-25T12:25:00.000-08:00

One of the objections to the Iraq war I hear a lot is, "But Saddam was supported by the U.S. under Reagan." Similar arguments, of the form "Regime X was supported by Administration Y back in the day, so Administration Z is being hypocritical to try and take out X," seem to pop up all the time. This is, frankly, silly. It surprises me that theoretically rational people make this argument. Realizing the likely futility of the excercise, I will nevertheless attempt to use logic to refute this spurious argument:

At a time t1, Y is forced to hold its nose and do business with X (whom it finds abhorent,) usually because it has bigger fish to fry (another more dangerous regime, more pressing domestic problems, or any of a number of different situations.) At time t2, the bigger fish has been fried and Z is free to deal with X the way Y would have preferred to earlier on.

In other cases, at t1 Y does business with X because it thinks X is more benign than it in fact is. At t2, when it comes out that X has been up to some pretty nasty stuff, Z decides to correct the mistake of supporting X, either removing its support or removing X.

Now, we live in a democracy. I know it's hard for some people to understand this, but the whole point of a democracy is that the government can be changed, and in fact is changed on a regular basis. This means that there are different people in power. People who think differently. People who have different ideas ... different ideas about, oh, say, what regimes to support, what regimes to undermine, and what regimes to remove. If the actions of a new administration were to be bound entirely by the policies of previous administrations, there wouldn't be much point in holding elections.

I can understand this being confusing to foreign countries which are used to kings or presidentes-for-life. After all, they haven't substantially changed policy (at least, not since the last coups), so what's up with this constant western flux? What strikes me is that people who have grown up in a democracy don't seem to get this fundamental fact about democracies: that new governments are elected so that the bad policies of the old governments can be changed. Let me be very clear about this: this means that the policies change. I know, I know, it's hard to get your head around it. This whole democracy thing is pretty new, after all. I mean, it's only, oh, hundreds of years old, so I can see why some people have problems understanding the principle.

If someone takes a shit in your living room, and the cabinets need dusting, you clean up the shit first. But you don't then say, "Well, I chose not to dust the cabinets before. So I geuss I'll just never dust them, because that would be an inconsistent domestic policy and would make me look foolish in the eyes of my housemates." Or maybe you do decide not to dust the cabinets ... but if you do you're going to have one seriously dirty house after a while.

Nuclear Power is Un-natural!

2005-02-25T11:58:00.000-08:00

Or not.

Someones Feeding Scoobie Snacks to These Goddamn Animals!

2005-02-25T11:12:00.000-08:00

Hunter S. Thompson meets Scoobie Doo. I can't do justice to this. Just go read it.

Regarding International Law

2005-02-25T07:01:00.000-08:00

A thoughtful post over at Normblog. The essence of the article is that, while international law is something that we cannot afford to do without, at the same time it is hardly perfect, either. International 'law' that respects the rights of nation-state to torture its own citizens, commit genocide, and engage in other atrocities is no sort of law at all.

The article quotes extensively from an Atlantic Monthly piece, The Accuser, from March 2005. It describes in painful detail what Saddam and his Ba'athists did to the kurds, and others, in Iraq. Anyone who can read this and still defend an anti-war position needs to give their head a shake.

A Digital Orange

2005-02-24T07:52:00.000-08:00

The death penalty is immoral. So is imprisonment.

This wasn't always the case, but then, what is moral and what is not is often a function of what is technologically practical. Hundreds of years ago, when the resources did not yet exist to build and maintain prisoners for societies population of convicted criminals, the only viable options for dealing crime were the death penalty or public humiliation. We used to hang thieves, remember, and put people in the stocks for lesser crimes. We've lost the taste, as a society, for the latter, and the former has been abolished entirely in many societies, and in others is reserved for murderers.

Instead, we lock up our felons, taking away months, years, or decades of their lives. Is this right? In the past - even the near past - it was. Crime must be punished, after all. And yet, imprisonment is hardly an effective means of dealing with crime. It is expensive, for one thing. For another, it does not seem to achieve its stated aim of rehabilitation; some changes their ways, but many others only become hardened criminals. Granted, many of those locked up are sociopaths, and society must be protected from their predation. But what of those whose crimes are relatively minor? Who, had they not been brutalized by forced socialization with hardened criminals, might actually have been rehabilitated?

Things change fast, these days. The rapid advance of technology can render society almost unrecognizable to people who have known only the grey concrete walls of their prison cell for the last decade. How, one wonders, are these people meant to become productive members of society when their best years have been taken from them?

So here's my proposal, one which I imagine will shock, even disgust, some of you. It is unconventional, and it has never been tried because up until quite recently it was not even possible. But I believe the idea has merit, both in being a more effective method of crime prevention, and in being for more ethical.

The proposal is this: instead of putting the felon in jail, why not put the jail in the felon?

More specifically, why not implant interrupors in the nervous systems of convicted criminals? Four should suffice; one per limb. When activated, the interruptors - I call the system as a whole a nerve harness - would paralyze the individual. Guards would be assigned to watch the prisoner, 24/7, through surveillance systems that will likely be there anyways (at least, if David Brin's transparent society happens, as I think it will.) So long as the felon does nothing illegal, the guards would let him be. However, the instant he tries something - violence, theft, rape, what have you - he is paralyzed, and the police show up to cart him away.

A nerve harness would make it effectively impossible to commit a crime twice. A first conviction would result in the harness being implanted for a period depending on the severity of the crime. Two years for armed robbery, say, or twenty for murder. Every subsequent attempt to commit an illegal act would extend the term under the nerve harness. When the allotted time is up, the felon is set free (though would likely be kept under surveillance for a while, just in case.)

There are, of course, objections, some of which I have anticipated and will attempt to address.

1) Privacy: the system presupposes that the felon has no privacy at all while under the nerve harness, save perhaps when he is at home. All I can say to this is that felons in jail have very little privacy as it is, and in far less congenial conditions.

2) Security: What is to stop the felon from slipping out from under the surveillance net? This is an engineering issue. The system could be rigged so that, in the absence of an encrypted signal emitted from the surveillance network, the nerve harness automatically activates. At which point the police reappear to drag the felon back under the network.

3) Invasion of the Felon's Body: Forcing a felon to undergo surgery might seem, to many, to be a gross violation of their dignity. One might respond, "When did we start worrying about a felon's dignity?" But a better response would be that felons could be given a choice between old-fashioned imprisonment and going under the knife. Given that the second option implies far greater freedom, I imagine that many would choose the nerve harness over the jail cell.

4) Punishment: The nerve harness might strike some as being fundamentally soft, as completely ignoring the imperitive for retribution. There is some justice in this, but there is, I believe, a certain amount of retribution in the nerve harness: social stigma. There would almost certainly be some outwardly visible sign of the nerve harness' presence, one that would immediately mark the felon as a lawbreaker. This obviously much milder than being raped on a daily basis by the skinheads in your cellblock, but then, the primary point of the nerve harness is not to punish. It is to prevent the felon from re-offending, while simultaneously making it much easier to reintegrate with society.

If there are others, please bring them to my attention in the comments; I'll attempt to address them.

The major benefit of the system would be that it would greatly encourage rehabilitation. While under the nerve harness, the felon would still be able to carry on essentially as normal (so long as no laws were broken.) They could hold down a job, maintain a household, socialize. Or not. It would be up to them. The point is that the option would be there.

This was unexpected....

2005-02-23T13:38:00.000-08:00

A dark matter galaxy! Visible only in the radio spectrum, and apparently far more massive than can be accounted for by the hydrogen giving off the radio waves. How many more of these things are out there? And what are the implications of a whole galaxy of dark matter?

Cosmology just seems to get weirder every year.

Free Mojtaba and Arash

2005-02-22T13:20:00.000-08:00

I've never been to their blogs, nor had I even heard their names until today. But, I'll jump on this bandwagon. Why, you ask? Because I'm an opportunistic shit? Always eager to pin the latest good-guy-badge on my chest and smugly display my moral superiority? Well, yes. Bask in the humble glow of my righteousness, ye benighted masses!

More to the point, however, is that if the Iranian government can be pressured into releasing them, their power over their own population will be lessened that much more. The Iranian people will have less reason to fear their government, and a democratic revolution will be that extra bit closer....

Vegan Diet = Child Abuse

2005-02-21T13:44:00.000-08:00

Why doesn't this surprise me? Not only is it somewhat brain damaged not to eat anything from animals (what do these people imagine canine teeth are for? Dominance disputes?), it's now very likely that eating nothing but plants damages one's brain. Amongst other things.

What really makes my day about this is that the vegans can't go around sneering at the rest of us for our unhealthy diets. Quite the opposite in fact. And if they try and say, "Health be damned, it's still wrong to take food from animals!", we can respond with, "What's worse? Milking a cow? Or making sure your kids grow up with the strength of a raging mouse and the mental agility of a drug-addled tortoise?"

Attention Must Be Paid

2005-02-21T12:54:00.000-08:00

If any of you sanctimonious little shits still give a rat's dick that Arthur Miller is dead, then you've got worse taste than even I thought possible. Last night, the world lost a talent that burned far brighter.

RIP, Hunter. You deserve it more than anyone.

It's That Time of Month Again....

2005-02-21T12:52:00.000-08:00

Spiked injects some much-needed reality into the left's PMS-addled hissy fit about Gitmo.

For the record, I still think using sexual provocation to offend the inmates is pretty funny.

Finally! A Solution....

2005-02-17T13:57:00.000-08:00

... to the myriad problems caused by the petty assholes who so often surround us. This man has convinced me. I'm buying a squirt gun.

Evil Capitalists Kick Tar Out of Starving Hippies

2005-02-17T08:21:00.000-08:00

Brit Greenpeace activists, emboldened by their success in forcing Kyoto down EUrope's throat, decided to celebrate by crashing the International Petroleum Exchange. This was a mistake: floor traders are, I have heard, noted for being aggressive sorts, and said activists found this out the hard way when the traders rose up as one and literally kicked them back out onto the street.

My Head Is Spinning

2005-02-17T07:54:00.000-08:00

Thomas P. M. Barnett - the geopolitical genius who wrote The Pentagon's New Map - just had a piece posted on Esquire, Dear Mr. President, Here's How to......Make Sense of Your Second Term, Secure Your Legacy, and, oh yeah, Create a Future Worth Living. In it, he advocates letting Iran have their nukes and withdrawing the security guarantee from Taiwan, and then presents several options for dealing with North Korea. And you know what? It makes sense. Why is this man not the Secretary of State?

Now I've Seen It All

2005-02-16T07:09:00.000-08:00

Kabbalistic Nanotechnology, by Rav P.S. Berg. Really, what more can I say?

Decadence of the Left

2005-02-12T16:26:00.000-08:00

Decadent Leftist decided to attack me in the comments section of this blog. After responding, I decided to check out his profile ... and discovered that he was a proud participant in the Transplanted Texan Fan Club, a blog dedicated (so near as I can tell) to ripping a good friend of mine. Small world! I said to myself. So I mosied on over to said blog, and discovered - to my immense surprise - a litany of ad hominem attacks that don't seem to bother with even the most basic level of intellectual engagement, preferring instead to mock people's weight, sex lives, and other such utterly irrelevent aspects of their opponents. (Well, okay, it's not quite that bad. I exagerate. But not much.) Really, this post is just to marvel at the fact that my friend pissed these losers off so much that they (by their own admission) spent a month trying to debunk what he was saying.

Which really, when you think about it, says a lot about the state of the left these days. On the one hand, you have people trying to come up with creative solutions to the problems that plague our world (you know, nuclear terrorism, the demographic crash and the resulting social security fallout.) On the other you have people whose response is usually along the lines of "What you say is wrong, because you're a racist/sexist/cultural bigot, and anyway, you're fat and can't get laid, so obviously you're stupid and your ideas have no merit, which is why I won't bother trying to debunk your ideas or even propose ideas of my own." Because, you know, smart people have always been attractive, charismatic sex kittens. I remember from my days as a physics major, I mean, wow, I was absolutely surrounded by gorgeous, witty people. One had only to bask in their radiant presence, and know everything they said was Right and True, because they were all Beautiful People. Proving theorems through the rigorous application of mathematical and empirical discipline was completely beside the point; all one had to do was show the prof a dazzling smile full of perfectly capped pearly whites, and he knew that what you said was right. Even if you said bricks can fly and triangles have two corners. After all, it's all relative, right?

I suppose after writing this I'm going to get lots of hateful, petty remarks in my comments section. C'mon, guys, prove me wrong! Grit your teeth, mutter "What an asshole," under your breath, and go back to your comforting echo chamber. Or, you can fill my comments with LOTS OF CAPITAL LETTERS AND MANY (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) EXCLAMATION MARKS just like you have plastered all over your spiteful blog, and call me fat and stupid and racist and, really, just prove my point for me.

Eerie, no?

2005-02-11T11:56:00.000-08:00

Ward Churchill has, apparently, met with Col. Quadaffi in the past, in order to discuss diplomatic ties. The eerie thing was that Tom Clancy's early 90's nove, The Sum of All Fears, featured as part of the plot a connection between mid-east terrorists and a disgruntled ex-AIM member.

Fallujah, the movie

2005-02-11T10:23:00.000-08:00

Just thought I'd point out that Lt. Prakash has posted a compilation of clips gathered by GI's on his excellent blog Armor Geddon. I haven't watched it yet (I'm still at work) but don't let that stop you.

Torture at Camp XXX-Ray

2005-02-10T13:03:00.000-08:00

The media seems to like to harp a lot on Guantanamo Bay. Seems every few weeks, we get a fresh report of all the horrid, inhumane torture that goes on there ... usually something along the lines of "They brought strippers into my cell, and then they touched me in my special place."

Those poor bastards. I mean, how would you feel, if someone violated your human rights that way? I know how I'd feel. I'd be ... um ... very, uh, displeased, and, um, mortified, that I was being subjected to such cruel and, and inhumane.... Oh, hell, who am I kidding? I wish someone would violate my human rights.

Seriously, though. How did using strippers get classified as torture!? I mean, come on. Thumb screws, yes. The rack, sure. Electrodes wired up to your balls, or a glass rod shoved up your urethra and shattered, those are no-brainers. But strippers? That's not torture. Sexual harassment, I could see ... but unless there's physical pain involved, it's not torture. I mean, it's not like we're talking about twelve year old girls here. These are grown men, hardened killers.

And one other point. Since when does a grown man complain that he was forced to look at a stripper's naughty bits? In my experience, that means you're either, a) gay or b) still in the closet (unless the stripper's an ugbo ... have to file that away until pics come out. In fact, if the interrogators are preferrentially using total dogs, then maybe that would qualify as torture....)

The longer this war goes on, the less I hate the terrorists. They're to pathetic to be worth hating.

Celestica, Home of the Corporate Ninja

2005-02-09T11:28:00.000-08:00

While scanning the web for a decent job, I came across this somewhat odd offering: a Master Blackbelt Consultant. Now why, might one ask, should a multinational corporation whose stock-in-trade is high technology, need to employ a black belt? Do their executives feel a need to train themselves in the martial arts? In-house executive protection (ie, bodyguards?) Are they building a corporate espionage team? Cyberpunk-style megacorp street samurai?

Many answers present themselves; as always, I'm sure the reason is entirely prosaic. Which is why I elect not to do further research, my fantasies being so much more entertaining.

Some Disconnected Thoughts on the Budget

2005-02-09T11:02:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine sent me an excerpt to a NYT story on the budget, referrencing the expected (massive) cost over-runs of the medicare program, along with the following commentary:

Gee, like this wasn't TOTALLY FUCKING OBVIOUS when the bill waspassed. Shit, it's going to be more than 720 AND GUESS WHO GETS TOPAY THAT BILL - ME! I hate Bush so, so much.

As usual, I sent off a half-baked reply, which I reproduce below simply because I can:

But look on the bright side: the boomers won't have to pay for all those over-priced pharmaceuticals. It's OBVIOUSLY far more ethical for our generation to forgo such needless extravagances as cars, homes, and children, in order keep our parents alive for a few extra years. I mean, these ARE the boomers we're talking about here ... the world revolves around them.

More seriously, do you imagine the situation would be any better with Kerry in power? Or any other democrat for that matter? I didn't pay too much attention to the whole issue, but something tells me that the House democrats, if they complained about the budget, complained far more about military expenditures than about medicaid. Bush isn't the problem here; it's far more systemic than that. I see medicaid as a bribe to the american people: we give you 'free' drugs, you let us pump up the army and make the world safe for democracy. Which says a lot about the boomers: their parents, during WWII, said, "Hmm, we're at war ... maybe we should cut back on spending at home in order to support the war effort." But the boomers, sacrifice some federal entitlements for the war? Hell, most of their females wouldn't even sacrifice a few years of their career to raise their children.

I don't blame Bush; he's just playing to the Grampa Simpson constituency. "I'm old! Gimme!"As obvious as it was that this program would cost roughly twice what the White House said it would, it's equally apparent that it's not sustainable. This can't go on forever, and as wise man say, "If something can't go on forever, it won't."

Uh Oh ... The Lancet's At It Again!

2005-02-04T16:31:00.000-08:00

Showing once again why I resolutely ignore any and all food-and-drink related health warnings, a study has just come out showing that alcohol consumption was linked to more than 60 different medical conditions including breast cancer and heart disease. Wait ... I thought alcohol was supposed to be good for your heart ... or maybe that's just if you don't engage in two-pints-in-a-night 'binge drinking'. The joyless puritans who conducted the study go on to recommend higher prices and reduced availability as the most efficacious method of lowering the occurance of illness deriving from the Demon Drink.

As I said, I intend to ignore this study (conducted, incidentally, by the Lancet, those paragons of disinterested inquiry who charged, weeks before the election, that the U.S. military had offed 100,000 Iraqi civilians since entering the country.) I am certain, however, that nanny-statists the world over will be only to eager to put into place it's recommendations. I've yet to meet a politician who didn't get a hard-on at the thought of extracting yet more cash from the citizenry whilst simultaneously limiting their freedom in yet one more petty way. Of equal certainty is that, some years down the line, a study will come out showing alcohol to have a beneficial effect on 60 (or more) medical conditions. The little hitlers who inhabit the health ministries and lobby groups will, of course, ignore that study entirely (just as they have ignored studies showing nicotine to have a positive effect on parkinsons, alzheimers, and senility in general. It's okay to be old and stupid, but god forbid you be marginally less old and short of breath.)

Of course, this wouldn't be an issue if it weren't for 'free' public health care. But then, no one ever stopped to think that if it's the government's responsibility to pay the repair bills for our bodies, the government would get the idea that said bodies are its property. No government in its right mind would ever have entertained the thought of passing laws and raising taxes in order to promote 'healthy lifestyles' amongst (theoretically) responsible adults. Not, that it, before the welfare state. Now it's second nature, and the world gets a little less fun every day.

So before the government decides, in our best interests of course, that bars should close at 7 p.m. and beer should cost $50 the pint, I'm going out 'binge drinking.' And so should you.

Stealing Lenny

2005-02-04T13:14:00.000-08:00

My good friend Mike Flynn (not the science fiction writer) has been working on a blog-novel called 'Stealing Lenny' for a few months now. It's nearing completion, and he's apparently gotten an offer from a publishing house. After endless pestering (okay, two e-mails ... so I hyperbolize) I finally read it, and as your unfriendly globalhood aggregator, I advise you to read it. The weird fucker has managed to spin a twisted tale about a character who is, if possible, even more deranged than him. Substance abuse, animal abuse, and verbal abuse abound. Everything you could want and more.

Seriously, why are you still here? Go read it, you lazy bastards.

Government as Plague

2005-01-27T08:56:00.000-08:00

It's official: the effects of Big Government are comparable to those of the Black Death. This doesn't really come as a shock to me. It's not for nothing that the left has produced the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. For all their bleating about compassion, it seem's that Rand was right on the money when she condemned socialism as anti-life.

This demographic freefall squares nicely with my own experience. I'm 24, a university grad, and have absolutely no idea how I'll ever be able to afford a family, much as I want one. I have two older siblings, both in the 30s, neither of whom is likely to pass on their DNA any time soon. Amongst my friends, only one couple actually has kids. The rest are still in school, or living paycheque to paycheque, or both.

addenda: This meme could be the rallying cry for libertarians the world over. It's one thing to bitch about taxes and nannyism. It's quite another to be able to say, "The welfare state is as inimical to human life as the worst plague in history."

Happy Suicide Day!

2005-01-24T08:35:00.000-08:00

Ah, Mondays....

Seymour Hersh, License to Blab

2005-01-19T18:23:00.000-08:00

Or maybe the intelligence community has simply gotten used to a world where secrets don't stay secret for long. Between the media and the internet, things (especially big things like operations involving special forces gathering intelligence across a large nation-state) have a tendency to lose their secrecy quickly. Obviously, one adapts, and when information comes out, you don't confirm or deny; if it's false, it keeps the other side geussing, and if it's true, you adjust your forces accordingly.

No point whining about it.

Huygens

2005-01-14T13:06:00.000-08:00

I was hoping for a little more than some greyscale high-altitude images on the first Huygens webcast, but I'm not complaining. I'm no geologist, but those pictures really, really looked like a tributary system feeding into a lake.

Stripping as Valid Career Path

2005-01-14T13:00:00.000-08:00

Heh. No objections here.

Another one bites the dust

2005-01-13T08:25:00.000-08:00

First, it was a starbucks employee who got sacked for blogging. Now, some poor bastard at a bookstore in the United Kingdom got the same thing. Charlie Stross says it all.

Feral Cities

2005-01-12T10:29:00.000-08:00

So I'm at work, it's a slow day, and I come across an article of the same name as this post on my RSS feed, linked to below from Warren Ellis' excellently strange and twisted blog (I think of it as bOing bOing's evil cousin.) The article, by one Richard Norton, grabbed me enough that I'm actually getting off my lazy ass and blogging, for once, instead of passively scanning my RSS like some sort of info-cow.

Anyhow, the essay essentially asks what happens when public order dissolves completely inside a city, so that the state - assuming there still is one - no longer has any power to direct events within it. Said city is then feral. The only real example of this today is Mogadishu, but Mr. Norton provides several other examples of cities that are in danger of going feral: Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, and Johannesburg. All fun-filled places to take the family for your summer vacation.

Feral cities are characterized by urban hypertrophy (big and growing), a total absence of sanitation leading to a localized environmental disaster zone, extreme poverty, and infestation by criminal gangs, terrorists, warlords, armed militias, and other organized brutes who divvy up the turf between themselves. They are breeding grounds for disease, especially given that the absence of public health means that a microbial predator can mutate into something really nasty without anyone noticing. A feral city can also disrupt international trade, if it is a coastal port, home to a major airport, or both. And, as the U.S. military found when it tried to intervene in Somalia, they can be a perfect bitch to pacify, especially if you want to minimize civilian casualties or have something other than smoking rubble left when you're done.

This is all very chilling of course, and we can look around the world today and point to several cities not mentioned by Mr. Norton that are on the way to going feral, if not already there (most any city in sub-Saharran Africa qualifies, I think.) Great material for a sci-fi novel, though.

In the essay, Mr. Norton identifies four factors by which to measure the health of a city, each measured by a scale sliding from green (healthy) to red (feral.) The factors are Government, Economy, Services, and Security.

Now here's the rub. From a State's point of view, total loss of control ('red' under Government) would probably be enough to qualify a city as feral. However, does the first factor sliding into the red necessarily mean that the other three must, too? For instance, services (utilities, waste management, education, medicine, etc) could all be provided by private actors, as could security (by mercenaries, neighborhood associations, or even individuals ... the best guarantor of freedom is a well-armed and bed-tempered citizenry.) Now, a robust economy would be required for all of this to function ... but there are many today who believe that an economy needs little or no government in order to function, indeed, that government is essentially parisitic on economic activity.

One thing the essay continually overlooks is the effect of spontaneous, bottom-up order; the whole tone seems to indicate that, without some degree of top-down control, a city will slide down into feral status. I don't think this is necessarily the case. Let's try a thought experiment here: imagine, if you will, that the government is both corrupt and incompetent. Large parts of the city have fallen into the hands of gangs, with the government unable to protect citizens living in those territories. Those citizens who live in nominally government-controlled areas are preyed upon by dirty cops that are even worse than the criminals, having the 'law' on their side. Looks pretty grim, no?

So what do you, as a concerned citizen, do? Maybe you buy a gun. Maybe a lot of your friends and neighbors do the same. And then maybe you get together, at first to defend one another against street crime and then, as state power withers, simply to guard your own turf. Now, if enough neighborhoods in the city do this, the feral city will end up with no central government, but a patchwork of orderly neighborhoods administered directly by local citizens, along with certain other areas where you just don't go. A lot like modern LA, in other words.

Now take the issue the criminal gangs. A lot of gangs make most of their money dealing drugs, because drugs are illegal. With no state, 'illegal' becomes meaningless ... but that doesn't mean the gangs will stop dealing drugs, not if there's money in it. Instead, with territory and an economic activity to keep them busy, they just might (given time) metamorphose into more or less benign municipal governments in their own right, essentially on an equal footing with other neighborhood associations.

I could ramble on about this for a while, but I really just want to make one basic point here: 'no central government' does not necessarily equate to feral city. Withdrawal of state power might well push most cities into feral status, but that status need not be permanent: Mogadishu, for instance, has been clawing itself back by the skin of its teeth from the bloodshed of a decade and a half ago, without the formation of any central government. Admittedly I wouldn't want to live there just yet, but things might be different in 20 years. Who knows. A feral state might be merely a transitional stage in a metamorphosis into a functional anarcho-capitalist society, or it could be a metastasizing human tumor. Or both.

Interesting as all hell nonetheless. Check it out.

Why I Love Christmas, Part 1

2004-12-23T11:44:00.000-08:00

What a beautiful present. Thank you NASA.

Tobacco Control

2004-12-18T11:43:00.000-08:00

So it's official. Anti-smoking bylaws in Toronto have sweet fuck all to do with public health. The issue (as was obvious from the beginning) is all about control: there are now plans by the city to prosecute bars trying to attract nicotine-addicted customers with heated patios (I'd provide a link to this, but the story was in the Toronto Sun, and their webpage won't load.) The only people who frequent said patios are smokers, because heated or not, it's still warmer inside. Non-smokers, feeling no persistent nicotine craving, have no reason to leave the warmth, and they don't. There's no public health issue here: smokers don't worry a lot about second hand smoke (the science behind which is dubious, at best) given that they're already inhaling the first-hand kind, so trying to protect smokers from second-hand smoke strikes me as misguided at best. The socialist assholes in Council saw that entrepreneurs around the city were finding loopholes, had aneurysms at the thought that someone might be trying to slip their control, and are cracking down on the flimsy pretext of concern for the health of others.

Where's Guy Fawkes when you need him?

On Media Violence

2004-12-13T13:07:00.000-08:00

How many times have you heard this: media violence desensitizes impressionable youth to violence, normalizes its use, and results in more violence in society. This conclusion is often used as an excuse to condemn musicians, directors, comic book artists, game designers, and anyone else whom the busybodies in the media regulation business dislike. Every christmas, for instance, there's a list of the ten worst toys, worst video games, etc.

What utter shite.

The truth is, the amount of media violence seems to be inversely proportional to the actual level of violence in society. My generation, for instance, has been exposed to far more violence in the media than, I think, any generation before. When we were kids, it was He-Man, G.I. Joe, and Transformers. A little later - when I was in my early teens - saw the rise of hyperviolent, gore-soaked comic books. Then came video games, which have only gotten more violent with time. Oh, and metal, which experienced a spike in popularity just about the time I was turning 18, with bands such as Marilyn Manson and Slipknot leading the way, much of it glorifying violence, anger, and flat-out irrational hatred to a degree never before seen in music.

My generation also happens to have been raised with historically low levels of actual violence in our lives. Zero-tolerance policies at high schools, for instance, meant that even an innocent scuffle in the schoolyard could result in expulsion. Many of us had ex-hippie parents convinced that the testosterone-fueled escapades of growing males were the source of all evil, and did everything in their power to squash their childrens' natural desire for rough-and-tumble play.

Is it any wonder we salivated over Thundercats, bought Image comics by the truckload, and damn near shat ourselves with glee when upon discovering doom? That Fight Club is on every red-blooded male's list of 'best movie of the 90's'?

People don't seek out a reflection of their lives in media; rather, the look for those things which their lives lack entirely. Remove violence from everyday life, and it will express itself in art.

The fact that our media gets more violent with every increasing year should be taken not as a condemnation of depraved artists and debased content corporations, but as a ringing endorsement for the success at our society.

News on the Home Front

2004-12-03T21:04:00.000-08:00

Before going any further, I should note that this must be some sort of record. Four blogs in one day. All of them brought about primarily out of boredom.

At any rate, in a personal aside to the pearls of timeless wisdom I have been casting so profligately about lately (and no, I compare you not to swine, you sensitive, delicate creatures you) I offer for your edification the somewhat stupefying, holee-shit news item that I have a date with a girl, tomorrow night. An actual, honest-to-omega girl. A cute one, too, as I'd be more than happy to show you if I had a digital camera (hint hint, Christmas givers.)

Why, one might ask, is this newsworthy? Very simple, really: in addition to being mean and cantankerous, I am also a colossal geek who gets nervous as hell around women I like. Additionally, it has been a year and half since breaking things off with my awful monster of an ex-girlfriend, a creature who did more to put the fear of a wrathful old-testament god into me than years of compulsory church-going. The time since then has been spent in a state of almost monkish chastity, with only two encounters having even the remotest connotation of mutual sexual interest. The first was holding-conversations-with-herself Golem crazy, the second a cocktauntress of the worst sort, who spent the night at the bar carressing my quivering genitalia and promptly hopped into bed with my friend (who was just as baffled as I, even to the point of offering - with no prompting on my part - to kick her slut ass out of his bed and send her my way.) Neither of these proceded to coitus, for which happy fact I prostrate myself before Dionysus in thinks for his uncharacteristic forebearance.

I should mention that I've been climbing the contact ladder with this girl for over a month now. The first e-mail didn't get through (for which I am also grateful, having some days later re-read the invitation therein and almost suffered cardiac arrest at the sheer, overpowering, awkward geekiness of it.) Turned out she never checked that address, given to me by her friend and my housemate, the talented young artist Meg Hewick (I'd been too chickenshit to ask her for it in person.) Later I e-mailed her and asked to to the Alexander preview, and although she did not get it in time she responded with her phone numbers, for future convenience.

An encouraging sign, I thought. I did not, however, call her that weekend, as I already had plans: Friday, to see an old friend whom I have not seen in months, and Saturday, to attend a party being held by an old friend whom I have not seen in years. Friday fell through entirely. And as for Saturday, well ... the party was frankly underwhelming, if only because I knew naught but one of the attendees, and her a hostess. Sushi was good, though, by which I mean plentiful and free.

Volunteer publicity spot: if you're in Toronto, check out Boiled Weiners. This is the sketch comedy troupe that threw the party as a fundraiser for their upcoming Chicago trip. The principals walked about in costume, and they were funny as hell. One of the characters is a Serbian immigrant who moves to Church Street, and as a result sings a song about how 60 Percents Are Gays. Offensive and sometimes cruel. Great stuff.

The point, though, is that I could have called, but didn't. It's all good though. We MSNd this week, I called her yesterday, she returned it today and we have a date for tomorrow.

Oh, her name's Pam by the way. Did I mention that she's cute? And, for some unfathomable reason that almost makes me doubt her sanity, willing to be seen in public with me?

Great god above, I am motherfucking delerious. I'm going to bed.

Demarketcy, or, One Man, One Hundred Votes

2004-12-03T11:27:00.000-08:00

Okay, so this is my second long post in the same day. It's a slow day at work, and I'm bored.

The problems with the current system are myriad. It's a steam age government operating in an information age society, with results that grow more ridiculously dysfunctional every day. There's little accountability, either in legislatures or bureaucracies ... more than in a dictatorship, perhaps, but that's hardly saying much. There's no incentive to get results, just to appease the electorate by pretending to get them.

Tinkering with the system won't work. Somethign drastically useful is called for. So, here it is: the demarketcy.

The principle is simple. Everyone in the system - regardless of age - gets 100 votes to start with. These votes are used, not to elect people, but to elect ideas. The electorate votes directly on the laws themselves. Legislatures with elected reps can be retained, or not, but the power of creating new legislation is denied them; all they can do is propose. Citizens ratify.

So far there's no difference between this and a standard direct democracy. Here's the innovation: a citizen's voting power increases or decreases based on the effectiveness of the laws he votes for, or against.

For instance, lets say Charlie thinks gun control is a good idea, and that a total ban will result in a fewer gun deaths and less crime. Ayn, meanwhile, thinks a gun ban will result in a disarmed citizenry prostate before an emboldened population of criminals, and that crime will as a result increase. However, a majority of voters initially agree with Charlie, and the gun ban is imposed. Five years later, home invasion rates are up significantly, and the votes of those who voted for the gun ban decrease, while those who voted against gain. Charlie now has 90 votes, while Ayn is worth 110. Furthermore, the law - having been shown to be (worse than) useless - is automatically repealed.

The basic idea, then, is to turn the legislative process into something more akin to a stock market. Those who make the best decisions, voting for laws that actually work, will see their elecotral power increase. Those who make bad decisions will see their franchise decrease in power. The majority, who muddle through making as many bad decisions as good, will tend to stay about the same.

There are several advantages to this system. It gives citizens a direct stake in political life. It allows people to vote directly on issues, without having to understand the obfuscations of professional politicians. It distributes political power more evenly through society, such that it will resemble a bell curve more than a step function. It takes demagoguery completely out of the equation, which is important given that charisma is not always correlated with good sense. And finally, the system can be set up in parallel to the current system, without the necessity for a revolution.

It's this last that I find most attractive, incidentally. Revolutions virtually always lead to autocracies, no matter what the (often utopian) promises of the revolutionary leaders are. Unfortunately, the more out of step a government becomes with reality, the greater the probability that a population with no stake in said government will do what it can to remove it, by force if necessary.

I'll expound more on the individual points raised in this post later.

Officer, Arrest That Man! He Stole My Crack!

2004-12-03T10:49:00.000-08:00

Those who know me, know my stance on the drug war. For those who don't, and can't geuss: it's perhaps the biggest waste of time, resources, and human lives since, well ... actually I don't know if it's ever been topped. That it was entered into after the disastrous experiment with alcohol prohibiton has always deeply confused me: I like to think people are smarter than that (actually, I think they are. It's the government that's incapable of learning from past mistakes.)

The reasons for this are myriad. There's the contemptible position that people are unable to control their own recreational behaviour, and that the law must be employed to prohibit it instead. There's the fact that it hasn't worked: as drug war spending goes up, street prices go down, with bug bust effecting only a temporary rise in price. There's the inherent silliness of imagining that cops, propaganda, and foreign policy can have any significant impact on demand for chemicals that numerous groups have enjoyed since time immemorial. And there's the almost unspeakable brutality of the collataral damage - personal, political, and economic - in places like Colombia.

I'd like to make a different point, though. Over and above all of these things is the question of what, exactly, the criminal law is there to do. Implicit in the war on (some) drugs is the belief that criminal law should be used to keep people from harming themselves, or simply preventing behaviour that a subset of the population thinks is immoral. Laws against buggery - excuse me, homosexuality - fall into the same category, though the resulting oppression was relatively minor, and the distortion on the economy essentially negligible. This is not true for the drug war.

Elementary economics - hell, basic knowledge of human nature - will tell you that when there are people who want something, there will be people who are willing to provide it. Legality makes no difference here, save to add a risk premium to the merchant's profit margin. Now, for any economic activity to be viable, there has to be a certain degree of order. In mainstream society, that order is provided through the law: companies that fuck over their customers get fucked over by the government, at least in theory. Similarly, a customer who tries to fuck over a company will, more often than not, have sanctions brought against them. This helps to ensure that when disputes arise, as they inevitably do, they are settled with a minimum of fuss.

If there is no official sanction to an economic activity, the need for order does not disappear. However, being illegal, the entire apparatus of modern society by which disputes are arbitrated is denied the merchants; as a result, they need to enforce that order themselves. Lacking the resources for a parallel legal system, they resort to the most basic level of dispute resolution known to man. Namely, the direct application of violence.

Now consider something else. Merchants tend to have access to their product at wholesale prices. I, for instance, work for a book store; as a result, I get books very cheaply, often for free. Similarly, drug dealers have access to drugs at a very low price. Many of them take advantage of this (indeed, many enter the trade initially because they are drug enthusiasts.) The effects of overindulgence in chemicals on one's judgement and emotional stability are rarely for the better. Knowing this, ask yourself something: how smart is it to make illegal the trade in mind-altering chemicals, knowing that a) those who sell them have cheap access, often use them more often than the population at large, and as a result regularly suffer from impaired judgement, and b) that, being denied official dispute resolution mechanisms, they will have to fall back on violence in order to maintain a semblance of order within their profession.

Consider the alternative: legalize everything (yes, even crack.) At a stroke, drugs are cheaper, by a factor of 20 or so. A day's heroin binge can be had for five bucks, less than the current cost of a pack of smokes. Sure, more people might use them, though less than you might think. At the same time, those who do use them will have little reason to commit crimes in order to feed their habit. Also, at a stroke, those who sell drugs will be able to use the courts instead of carbines.

There's only one rational solution to the drug problem ... unfortunately, the problem is the government, not the drugs, and our glorious leaders will be the last to admit this.

In the meantime, I'm gonna go out tonight and get completely off my head. And no, not just with booze.

Misquoting Churchill

2004-11-29T18:14:00.000-08:00

Among Churchill's many timeless comments was that democracy was the worst kind of government, except for all the other kinds. A cursory look at the history of the world shows the truth of this. Everywhere democracy has flourished, war has lessened, trade has expanded, freedoms have grown, and everyone, in general, has been better off. At the dawn of the 21st century, we can all see the myriad states and countries of the world adopting broadly similar methods of government, as politics settles down into its final configuration and history draws to a close.

Er, well. Not quite.

Democracy is not a bed of roses. I can just as easily - and perhaps more accurately - say that everywhere democracy has broken out, personal responsibility has lessened, the state has expanded, and 'rights' have grown.

Now, before I go any further, some qualifications. Would I prefer a totalitarian dictatorship? Obviously not, and nor will I argue for that or anything like it. The tyranny of a single man or single Party is worse than the tyranny of a single majority. This does not mean, however, that we have the Best of All Possible Governments.

The problems with democracy are myriad, and have been explored in far more depth than is possible for me here. To summarize: the incentives are all out of place.

Power is given to those who actively seek it; to get it, they must receive the vote of a majority of the electorate (or at least that part which actually bothers); they thus have every reason to lie about their true motivations and intentions should they take office. Thus democracies often have at their heads messianic demagogues with a slippery grasp on concepts such as economics, science, reality, proportion, and honesty. True, we can always kick the rogues out ... unless, that is, the political class manages to narrow the competition down to the lesser of two evils, or the evil of two lessers (technical aside: the second and third images were the top hits on google's image search, and I used last names only. Kinda says it all, don't it?)

Then there's the cancerous growth of the state, a symptom that seems almost universal amongst democracies. Elected officials have no need to worry themselves over long-term effects; only rarely do they possess the ethical wherewithal do to so. As a result the civil service - a predatory subculture under any government - rapidly gains the real power. Under no real pressure from the government to produce results (unless it's wartime) the various bureacracies can gorge themselves on an ever-increasing portion of the economy, consuming so much they become a consumption.

When Churchill said this was the worst kind of government, he should have added: except for all the other kinds that we've tried.

I mean, seriously here, folks. It's the 21st century. We have to be able to do better than this.

China jerks the leash

2004-11-26T07:44:00.000-08:00

So the Bushies drop regime change hints about North Korea, and China - not liking the idea of another war in its back yard - jerks the leash.

Or am I reading to much into all this?

Iraqi W"M"D's

2004-11-25T12:20:00.000-08:00

Apparently, a mosque in Fallujah contained not just one of the largest weapons caches found in Iraq to date, but also a chemical weapons lab. No details yet on just what kind of chemical weapons the insurgents were making.

Note that quotation marks around the "M" in the acronym. Chemical weapons aren't really good for mass destruction, being notoriously unreliable; if they were actually useful for killing people, the professional militaries of the world's powers wouldn't eschew them. Still, given that those on the left as well as the right generally class chemical weapons as WMDs, and their absence as evidence that BUSH LIED!!!! PEOPLE DIED!!!! I can only say, Ha!, and again, Ha! No WMDs in Iraq? So a bunch of undisciplined barbarian fanatics in Fallujah could run a chemical weapons program that Saddam, with the resources of the nation at his disposal, could not? Please.

Why Bush's Economic Policies Don't Piss Me Off

2004-11-24T20:08:00.000-08:00

Here's why the Bush administration's demonstrated contempt for fiscal issues on the home front doesn't particulars bother me. In fact, I look forward to its likely devastating effects with a positive glee. It is even possible to see them as being favorable, from a libertarian perspective.

Consider Russia. The Soviet Union's brittle centrally planned economy failed spectacularly, decimated by the market forces arrayed against it. There came a time when it was blatantly obvious that the Party had lost any ability to pay its seventy-year outstanding debt to its citizens. Said citizens promptly withdrew moral support from the Communists, at which point a different group of thugs took over, sold off everything but the army at bargain-basement prices, dissolved the Evil Empire, and declared a market economy.

The U.S., with it's more dynamic private sector, weathered the economic storms it experienced during the same period and even thrived despite them. Its economy grew at a remarkable pace throughout the nineties. What growth there's been since then, however, has been primarily due to the bloating of housing-price and stock bubbles, wealth that can disappear very rapidly if the bubble bursts. At the same time, the government depreciates the currency on the international markets and runs up deficits orders of magnitude greater in scale than anything attempted by any other government in history. Although I must admit, in all fairness, the British have used similar tricks to great effect in three different wars, in the vast majority of cases such a policy leads to the economic apocalypse known as 'hyperinflation'. Indeed, some are already suggesting that the current housing bubble is itself a kind of hyperinflation, resulting not from demand for housing but from a large asset class soaking up the government's excess liquidity.

The most likely side-effect of a severe hyperinflation is that the government will no longer be able to pay its bills. Given the very large size of the economy under control by the State, this cannot fail to be painful. People will lose trust in the government. Hell, lets be honest here: who really trusts the government to handle anything competently, outside of defense (though up here in the True North Weak and Free, who really trusts the bureaucrats to do even that?)

Now, given that the United States government is a) controlled at every level by a party that at least ostensibly believes in the superiority of market forces over Big Government, and b) in the middle of an open-ended war against the only foe since the British to strike on the U.S. mainland, what will the most obvious solution for the Presidency to make when condition c) is applied, namely, the insolvency of the federal government?

Exactly.

For those who haven't been paying attention, I am suggesting that the Bush administration may be maneuvering towards the Soviet Solution: they will announce an emergency and sell off large chunks of the government infrastructure, essentially everything that isn't directly related to defence. They will replace the income tax with a flat national sales tax, privative social security, and nix medicare. No more postal service, no more department of education. Hell, they might even call off the drug war. When the dust settles, the U.S. government will consist of soldiers, spooks, and not much else; maintaining the military at its current size would be a bearable burden for the U.S. economy if the vast majority of the rest were gone.

Bush might well intend to preside over what will, in essence, be a bloodless revolution. He will achieve what Republicans used to say they wanted - a small federal government - by running the whole thing into the ground. It will be chaotic, divisive, and likely dangerous. The American economy will suffer mightily in the process, though I imagine the transition back to prosperity will be relatively quick. In the end, the American people will be better off, and history will look back on Bush and smile.

Of course, I might be crediting Bush with being smarter than the vast majority of the world believes to be the case. It could be he's just utterly incompetent on economic issues. Maybe he really believes Big Government is the way to do things, and this is all just wishful thinking on my part.

Maybe. Give it four years.

Alexander the Not-So-Great

2004-11-23T14:48:00.000-08:00

Ah, the perks at working for the worlds largest book retailer.

Last night, I went to see Alexander with a preview ticket I obtained from a coworker who had other plans. I went into this movie with, I admit, high expectations, the subject of the film being one of history's most fascinating characters, and the director (Oliver Stone) having made Natural Born Killers, one of my all time favorite movies.

Other reviewers have suggested that the subtitle most appropriate to this movie would be 'Alexander the Gay'. This is so accurate, it sums up the entire three-hour excercise in self-indulgent navel gazing better than any review possibly could. But I'll try anyway.

Alexander the Great conquered the entire known world, and a fairly good chunk of the 'Here Be Dragons' part, by his early thirties. He spent his entire adult life at war, though you would not know this from watching the movie, which includes a grand total of two battle scenes, neither of which is particularly gripping. Alexander spends more time gazing deeply into the eyes of his gay lover than he does killing people.

There are puzzling omissions in the movie. For instance, Alexander does not visit the Oracle at Delphi or cut the Gordian knot. His relationship with Aristotle is barely touched upon, despite the fact that Alexander remained in touch with his singularly brilliant tutor periodically throughout his life. For some reason, Collin Farrell omits certain mannerisms, for instance Alexander's characteristic head-tilt, which was remarked upon by many contemporary observers.

Indeed, Collin Farrell's portrayal of Alexander fails on almost every level. Here is a man, after all, who was a stategic genius and a machiavellian leader whose inspired his army to follow him to the ends of the earth. By any account, he was a singularly strong and complex man. He comes off, instead, as a sensitive metrosexual with severe Oedipal issues. In battle, he looks either confused or terrified; when speaking he is anything but inspiring, tending instead towards the insipid.

Mr. Farrell isn't the only one whose acting fails to convince. Anthony Hopkins, as the old man in Alexandria who remembers Alexander, manages to talk a lot without saying anything memorable. Though it's possible his character is meant to be a pompous old bastard, it's more likely he's meant to be the wise old man who acts as the guide to Alexander's life. He says nothing insightful or enlightening, though in all fairness the blame for this can be placed on the script writers.

Then there's Angelina Jolie, as Alexander's mother, Olympias. Conniving and ambitious, suspected by her countrymen of being a sorceress, Ms. Jolie does a good job, save for one disturbing (and possibly intentional) detail: when she gazes on her son, the love in her eyes is not best described as maternal. Unless, of course, you're from the Cahulawassie river.

About the only performance of any note is Val Kilmer as Alexander's father, Philip the Great, notable chiefly because it's perhaps the first role he's ever had in which he's not pretty.

In the end, don't waste your money seeing this is the theatre, or renting it at Blockbuster. Don't even waste bandwidth downloading it. If you must see it, wait for it to show on the History channel ... though perhaps Showcase would be more appropriate.

Robert Wilson, May He Be Sodomized by PCP-Crazed NeoNazis

2004-11-22T13:04:00.000-08:00

As some of you no doubt know, and the rest no doubt don't care to, I am now a University of Toronto graduate. It was my misfortune to attend the ceremony, at which the execrable Robert Wilson was given an honory degree and, for fifteen minutes, the podium. This forum he used to babble incoherently, first about an underprivelaged deaf-mute black kid from Arkansas whom he oh-so-heroically saved from a beating at the hands of a racist New York cop, and who taught him the meaning of thinking in images. He then proceeded to imitate the sounds of an institutionalized autistic child, capping off his speech by stating "Had I gone to Harvard or Yale, I would not be making the excellent theatre I am making today," ie, your high-priced degrees which you have sacrificed tens of thousands of dollars and years of your lives for aren't worth the cheap paper they're printed on.

Hence, this:

I graduated from U of T last week. I just wanted to thank you for cheapening the tens of thousands of dollars and years of time I, my parents, my bank, and my government invested in my education. Your speech was the most incoherent and meaningless collection of garbage it has ever been my misfortune to hear. I sincerely hope you contract ebola and shit out your own intestines. From the bottom of my heart, Fuck You.

Now, Mr. Wilson's email is not publicly available.

Oh, I mean, it wasn't publicly available:

robert.wilson@robertwilson.com

Now, getting it involved a little bit of geuss-work, and it might not be correct (though assuming it is, much might be said about a man whose email address contains his name twice.) I still haven't received a 'failed to deliver' notice, though, so I suspect it of being accurate. However, if it is wrong, there's this one too:

krista.fabian@robertwilson.com

Which, being publicly available, is almost certainly active. The poor woman has done nothing to me personally; however, she is tainted by association with this failed miscarriage.

It is thus with the greatest of pride and vicious pleasure that I announce the "I Hate Robert Wilson" e-mail campaign. Please, open the above links, and let all that vitriol and bile that's been festering within your souls poor forth in streams of verbiage exceeded in vileness only by the speeches of Hitler. Even if you have no idea who this man is, take it from me: he is a human slime-mold, a deserving repository for the worst you have to offer.

Oh, and be creative. It's more fun that way.

Why I Hate Christmas: Part 1

2004-11-22T00:28:00.000-08:00

Santa Claus parades. Everyone, it seems, loves a parade, except me.

All I wanted yesterday was some breakfast at Futures bakery. It was a nice day, I have a nice new iPod, and I elected to go for a stroll.

Then I hit the Santa Claus parade. The streets were so packed I could barely move. I was in a poor mood, one that began with when I woke with a hangover, and only grew as it was fed by gnawing hunger. I kept the edge of with Slayer and Sepultura; there's no better antidote to Christmas spirit than nihilistic death metal. I received the occasional dirty look from annoyed and frightened parents, as I muttered to myself about the suitability of AK47s for crowd control.

It was the kids that really pissed me off. They came in two varieties: sitting on Dad's shoulders, where their little booties were at just the right height to kick me in the head, and on the ground, perfectly placed for treading on their delicate little skulls. Parents who bring their children to these events should know better. It's not safe. There's people like me around.

Oh, and by-the-by, it's not that I dislike children. Quite the contrary. I also like steak sauce, fava beans, and a nice chianti.

21st century Renaissance

2004-11-16T17:21:00.000-08:00

People talk a lot about the decline of our culture, how only shit art gets made, how we're sinking into a tarpit centered on the mass-market attractors of ignorance and id. No one pays attention to true art, just to vacuous pop art.

Well okay. Maybe they don't put it quite that way. But, I'm willing to bet that this is a sentiment with which you'll be familiar. I'd also wager that what you just read just doesn't ring true.

The context is all wrong. There is no more ivory tower art world, just as there is no more pop art. Neither really exists anymore. The exclusionary nature of high art has fused its memes with its color-bedazzled cousin, and has spawned a thousand mutant offspring: the niche art of the modern age. The internet has midwifed into being a greater diversity of artistic endeavor than our species has ever seen, carried through with an unprecedented energy. People with the rarest of proclivities and the most eccentric of tastes form communities, providing markets for artists who before would have been co-opted into larger movements or simply vanished into obscurity.

True, we are watching our old culture die, though only in the sense that parents die while their children live on. The essential memes are robust, and they thrive even as our mass culture fragments like a broken mirror. A darwinian competition (or lamarckian perhaps? We deal with memeticities, after all, rather than genomes) is emerging between these endlessly variable sub-cultures, taking place at a timescale previously characteristic only of subatomic particles.

What does all this mean? I'm no more qualified to answer that than you are. In the meantime, I'm just gonna go and soak up the amazing cultural products of this glistening new renaissance.

In Defense of Cynicism

2004-11-16T09:00:00.000-08:00

Hmm. I just read the TransplantedTexan's 'Canada and Cynicism', and a lot of what he said hit uncomfortably close to the mark ... almost as though he were talking about me, personally. Now, I can't in good faith refute his claim that the majority of Canadians are cynics of the first degree.

I would, however, argue that it is no accident that we are cynics, and that it is indeed not neccessarily a bad thing.

First, the why: most Canadians are in this country because, ultimately, their ancestors were fleeing a political nightmare in the old country. This is such common knowledge that I doubt it needs any further elaboration (though if anyone wishes to challenge me on this point I'll be thrilled to do a further, fully-researched post in which the main immigration periods of Canada's various ethnic groups are compared to the situations in their homelands at those times.)

This has given us a characteristically uncharitable view towards politicians, one to which I wholly subscribe. Not all are bad, of course (the Gubernator, Jesse Ventura, and Ralph Klein come to mind) and not everything they say is a lie (for instance, I believe Dubya completely when he claims to be a Christian, and the Harris government in Ontario really did do essentially everything it said it would.) However, these are the exceptions to a rule of thumb that history shows to be true more often than not: politicians are lying scum. (Actually, my personal bias is a little more nuanced, to use an unjustly reviled word: I believe that politicians are incompetent lying scum.)

How many governments have introduced a supposedly 'temporary' tax? How many have brought their nations to war under false pretenses (a charge that can be levelled at Lincoln as much as at Bush II)? How many have frittered away astronomical sums on their cronies, in the name of the 'public good'? If these questions sound rhetorical, it's because they are. You already know the answer.

Am I cynical about politics? You bet your sweet ass I am. I do not trust any ass-covering beareaucrat or grandstanding demagogue to tell me the truth, about their beliefs, their intentions, or anything else. I do not trust them to ever to a job the easiest, most efficient, cheapest, or effective way. I do not trust them to do anything meaningful to improve my life or the lives of others, unless those others are a tiny special interest group using their lobbying clout to get the government's blessing to siphon off wealth from the rest of us.

There's one thing I do trust government to do, and that's to make a pig's breakfast of anything it touches. Witness: health care, education, defence, and infrastructure. Any Canadians want to defend the government's record on those?

Thought not.

And this brings us to the second part of TT's piece on cynicism: conspiracy theories. TT says (quite correctly, in my view) that excessive cynicism leads to paranoid conspiracy theories. I agree. I believe in many conspiracies. Any government worthy of the name is, I am entirely sure, absolutely swarming with malicious, vindictive, and possibly even malevolent cospiracies. However, I also have total faith in the astounding incompetence of government, such that I sincerely doubt any of these conspiracies will be able to accomplish their aims. Thus, I have no fear of them, and do not let their presence worry me ... though I do get the occasional chuckle when I contemplate the crippling effect this wealth of clandestine plotting must be having on governments everywhere, consuming them from the inside out like maggots.

So, sure we're cynical. Sometimes, though, cynicism is the only healthy response. After all, are you really cynical if you actually are surrounded by assholes?

e-Kinx

2004-11-14T19:58:00.000-08:00

One unforseen consequence of the internet is that we all kink in our own way. Virtually everyone has elements of their psyche that, while not unique, are rare, sometimes exceedingly so. Before the internet, when most people's social interactions were limited to a small number of people with whom they maintained face to face relationships, people kept quiet about their kinks, sexual or otherwise. This made sense: the vast majority would be likely to label anyone possessing them as either demented or simply mad.

The internet has changed that. Now, a vast number of subcultures are being knitted together out of the scattered masses who share those rare memes. Some are innocuous, others disturbing, most just weird. Regardless, they exist. Virtually every netizen eventually finds those odd little communities to which he belongs (I know I have. And for the prying voyeurs out there, the answer is no, I'm not telling.) The result is, perhaps inevitably, that people these days tend to kink in ever stranger, more eccentric patterns. The strange parts of the psyche, the ones you don't talk about with even your closest friends, the ones you keep secret from your wife, these propensities that previous people termed perversions (or PTPPTP's) become exaggerated.

I can't help but wonder if this development is not unlike that which occured when the first proteins started to fold themselves into strange and specialized functions. But enough speculation.

What I do know is that this, creatures and gentlebeings, is why there's so many assholes these days.

Ten Billion

2004-11-14T19:45:00.000-08:00

Ten billion atoms in a self-reproducing molecule. Ten billion molecules in a living cell. Ten billion cells in a multi-cellular organism. Ten billion individuals in a hyperindustrial posthuman planet-hopping supercivilization....?

Not sure where I encountered this meme, but it deserves propagation, because we're almost there.

Me and the Beanstalk

2004-11-11T23:30:00.000-08:00

I was reviewing my posts on this blog so far, and came to the disspiriting conclusion that many, upon reading them, my get the impression that I am of a singularly misanthropic disposition.

This is true.

However, I feel like rambling on about something positive, so here's my monologue of beanstalks.

Not the kind that you grow beans on; more like the kind that you grow hyperindustrial economies on. They're otherwise known as skyhooks, space ladders, space tethers or space elevators (okay, so skyhooks are slightly different.) For those not amongst the initiate in the weird world of speculative technologies, a beanstalk can be thought of as a railway that goes all the way into space. The current model, the one most likely to be constructed for a variety of reasons, is a ribbon, roughly a micron thick, ten centimeters wide, and, something like ninety thousand kilometres in length. Construction cost, roughly US $15 billion; time, two years.

Here's how its done. The first length of ribbon, constructed from carbon nanotube composites, is sent up in a rocket, which inserts itself into geosynchronous orbit. A second, smaller rocket then fires back down to the ground, attached to one end of the ribbon; the other end is anchored to the original rocket. The return rocket is recovered and the groundside ribbon attached to a platform in the ocean. The ribbon is winched tight. An unmanned crawler then proceeds to climb the ribbon, laying a second ribbon down on top of the first, and then adding its own mass to the counterweight in geosynchronous orbit. Bottom to top, the climb takes two weeks. After two years, the resulting ribbon is roughly 100 times as strong as it was when first deployed, and is now ready to start taking cargo.

Now, why go to all this trouble? Simple: cost-to-orbit goes down to about $500/kg. That means a ticket to orbit would cost me around $45 000. And I'm a big guy. Odds are, it would cost you even less. Now, in practice, a one-way orbital ticket would of course be more expensive. I'd be surprised to see them go for less than a million, myself, given the bulk of machinery that must be shipped up to keep one more person alive.

I'm geussing you're still saying, wow, that's expensive. Consider this: the current cost-to-orbit is, oh, something like $20 000/kg. Space elevators would thus perform a function in the 21st century very similar to that played by railroads in the 19th by providing a drastically reduced cost to access the solar system (once you're in orbit, after all, you're halfway to anywhere), just as railways opened up North America's West.

Initially, of course, the space elevator would serve fairly prosaic functions. Satellites first, to be followed by the machinery necessary to build orbital factories and the raw materials necessary to feed them. Much of this will be unmanned.

But.

People would climb the ladder, too, following the machines. Hotels for the rich are a near-certainty; habitats to house the workers needed to build such structures as solar power satellites (something so useful and frankly necessary that we'd be fools not to build it.) Communities would grow, up there, living int he harshest environment men have ever entered, straddling the edge of an endless frontier. Testing themselves and their memes against this void will put human ingenuity to the hardest test it has yet to endure.

With time, more will emigrate, smelling profit or fleeing politics. The communities will become permanent. And then the day will come when those Left Behind will look up and realise that giants really do live at the top of the beanstalk.

Remembrance Day

2004-11-11T16:59:00.000-08:00

It's not that I don't care. I just haven't been able to find any goddamned poppies! And from the looks of it, not too many other Torontonians have, either.

I'd observe a minute of silence, but I've been sitting at my desk on a computer all day. Silence would be redundant.

Sadly, it seems the only fashion in which Remembrance Day will impact my life is that the bank is closed. (Those lazy weasels at TD will use ANY excuse not work ... sometimes, I swear, Trudeapia's banks are worse than its public sector.)

In the end, it's only appropriate that 11/11 is fading from the cultural consciousness. After all, look at the symbol we chose: the poppy, the flower that kills the pain.

The Fat Fuck From Flint

2004-11-11T13:45:00.000-08:00

I'm no objectivist, but I am a big fan of Ayn Rand's literature. Now, for anyone else out there who happens to read this, and is also a foaming-at-the-mouth Randite, tell me: is Moseph Moebbels not a stereotypical Randian villain? I mean, look at the guy: a slovenly mound of quivering flesh, his face a patchy beard behind which hide beedy eyes and an ugly, self-satisfied smirk ... a self-professed 'man of the people' who seems to have nothing but contempt for those he claims to champion ... a man for whom Truth is at best somewhat flexible.... the bottom-feeding maggot could have stepped straight from the pages of Atlas Shrugged.

As Oscar Wilde said, art doesn't imitate life, life imitates art.

Hazy Predictions for 2005

2004-11-10T22:29:00.000-08:00

Other bloggers seem to feel entirely comfortable making predictions. So I figure I'll get in ahead of the game. If any of what follow proves wildly inaccurate, feel free to call me on it; in fact, in one year I will revisit these predictions. Before acting on any of these, keep in mind: you get what you pay for (contact me if you wish to have me held to a higher standard of accountability.) In the upcoming year, I expect to see the following events (in no particular chronological order):

1. Further Islamic unrest in Europe, possibly including video-taped atrocities involving kidnapped people. EU governments will resoluetely refuse to publicly admit that they have a problem with muslims, and will continue criticizing american actions. Mainstream EU opinion will continue to be anti-US; meanwhile, friction between Eurotrash and Eurabians will continue to break out into isolated pockets of violence.

2. At least one part of the US economy will collapse in spectacular fashion. My money's on the money. It won't surprise me if CAD $1.00 > US $1.00 by this time next year (assuming of course that our currency doesn't follow suit.) Capitalism, as always, will be blamed.

3. Terrorist attack(s) on U.S. soil. Not necessarily committed by arabs, though: it's more likely to be American citizens, born and bred, who have either converted to Islam or are acting out of a purely political loathing for the American government (radical Blue-staters.)

4. Mainstream media will become even more irrelevant with the rise in vlogging (ie, videoblogging.) Ordinary people will increasingly get their news from the net, and the polarization of our culture will continue.

5. Breakthroughs in bioinfonanotech will continue apace. Old media industries will continue to flounder ineffectually to preserve their business models. What we laughingly call our leaders will be increasingly out of touch with the way things work, now.

6. At least one important personage will be assassinated.

7. The march towards the illegalization of tobacco in the western world will continue.

8. There will be a revolution in Iran.

9. Efforts on the part of France and Germany to rein in the free-wheeling Eastern republics will flounder. Old Europe's fate is demographically sealed.

10. I will still be drinking beer and smoking weed and tobacco. I will also have gotten laid.

Bums in T.O.

2004-11-10T12:12:00.000-08:00

My British friends have commented to me on the surprisingly high numbers of homeless in the city, and on the - to them - surprisingly relaxed attitude taken by the average torontonian towards this 'problem.'

Sure, we've got lots of homeless. We also pay a lot of taxes, at least some of which go towards shelters and other programs, prompting an "I gave at the office" attitude towards panhandlers. It doesn't help that virtually every vagrant I've encountered fits into one or more of the following categories:

1. crazy
2. native
3. drug addict (in which I include winos.)

While I have sympathy for the first group, the next two get none. Natives, in my opinion, are lucky to be alive. Wiping them out entirely would have been effortless for our ancestors, and the fact that they instead set aside land for them, gave them tax-free status, and then lavished public funds on them to build houses, schools, etc., all this speaks to their highly developed sense of fair play. In return for this largesse, we get petulant guilt trips (the white man stole our land!) and imperiosu demands for more money. To which I say, fuck that. Let them keep tax free status, let them keep their reserves, but for the love of the Invisible Hand cut them off fromt the public feed. A little forced self-sufficiency and, hey, who knows: their economies might outperform the national economy on a per-capita basis.

Instead we pay them to do nothing, with the predictable result (well, predictable to anyone who has ever lived as a student, whom the government also pays to do nothing) that they all start abusing substances.

Which brings us to the junkies. Why do I have no sympathy for these benighted souls, enslaved to one chemical or another, wandering through life in a haze? Why do I ignore them as I walk by, refusing to part with even the most modest amount of pocket change? Simple, really. Money's tight for me too. I need whatever excess I have to buy my own drugs.

There's actually a fourth category, that of the Unlucky Street Kid. I've had some bad experiences with these; back in Kingston, high school kids who still lived with their parents took to panhandling when they discovered that their multiple piercings and ripped jeans were capable of eliciting from passersby on the order of $100/day, which paid way better than any other job they could get.

Still, some are legit, so every once in a while, I give a little. Particularly if they have a funny sign:

Karma, $0.25; Good Karma, $0.50
Need Help to Become Jedi Master
Enron Relief Fund
Will Kick Self in Head for Money
Why Lie? I Want Beer, Too

These people, I give money to, because they provide a service: they make me laugh. Sadly, few of the more, er, 'experienced' bums do this; mostly, they just make me cringe and breathe through my mouth. I do not offer them financial support; hell, I don't even offer them 'reality support' (ie, I ignore them.) Does this make me a bad person? Perhaps. But I'll lay odds that you do the same thing, too, because no one likes seeing another human being in a self-inflicted state of such utter dissipation. It arouses disgust, not pity ... and we all instinctively know that they use that to try and extract money from us, their very appearance is an implicit condemnation of those who shower and work and at least try to contribute something besides bodily fluids to society. There but for the grace of god, and all that.

Allow me, however, to relate a story. Two years ago, some friends and I were hanging out in Denison Square Park, - near Kensington market for those not accustomed to Toronto - stoned on mushrooms and playing on the swings. A trio of young men approached and randomly started engaged us in conversation. They seemed nice fellows, so we remained. At some point, another man approached us, an older guy; he mumbled something about needing money, and not having eaten for three days.

I would have just ignored him, that being my way. One of the guys there, though, turned on the middle-aged individual and gave him an earful. "You're either lying, or stupid," he said, "I've been on the streets. I was there for years. There are soup kitchens all over this city; if you haven't eaten it's your own damn fault. Now fuck off."

He fucked off.

So you see, even those who have been on the streets don't necessarily have sympathy. So the next time you pass a panhandler and you decide to keep your change in your pocket, ditch the guilt trip. Food and shelter are available, often for free. All they need your money for is drugs.

Fallujah

2004-11-10T11:34:00.000-08:00

It's always been my understanding that, when attacking a fortified location - especially one that's been given months to prepare - one attacks with roughly three times the number of defending troops, and expects to take casualties in a roughly similar proportion.

So far, the score is 70-odd 'Iraqi's' dead, to about 10 marines.

Hmm.

There really is an inverse relationship between fanaticism and competence, it would appear.

Tell me again how the states are 'losing' in Iraq?

The neighbors have spoken, the bastards.

2004-11-08T23:36:00.000-08:00

And no, I'm not talking about the Americans (or Jesusland, as the case may be.) I'm talking about neighbors. Like two weeks ago, some friends and I were having a bonfire (it was Devil's Night, after all.) We didn't have a license, which the firemen seemed to disapprove of. We tried telling them that it was a legal barbecue, but they insisted that, grate or no, four-foot flames didn't count as a barbecue, they count as an illegal firepit. They took it well, considering they were dealing with a horde of unstable drunks that just thought they were wearing really good costumes who thought it was funny to dump large quantities of water on the blazing illumination of the giant Honest Head.

Now, this was not our first bonfire. They'd been going, oh, three or four times a week, for about a month. No trouble from the firemen. It's possible, of course, that they were just a little more attentative than usual (being, as aforemention, Devil's Night.) I was disabused of this notion the following day, however, when it was revealed to me in a somewhat abrupt fashion that, in fact, it had been our neighbor who had ratted on us.

The bastard. What did we ever do to him?

Except for, you know, stealing his wood. (Hard to find, wood, when you're in the middle of a city. Seems city hall has issues with people who chop down the trees lining the sidewalks....)

Which brings me to the incident that just happened, with another neighbor.

Our door-bell was rudely rang at eleven p.m., at which point I discovered a strange brown matron whom I have never seen before, though I have lived here lo these many months. From the expression on her face I surmised that she was doing her best to work up enough energy to be mad. Seems the poor creature had wandered over in a befuddled haze, her sleep-deprived brain manufacturing delusions of some sort of decadent western party involving drug addled mayhem set to a soundtrack of degenerate underground music. Seemed she and her brood had to be up for some ungodly reason at five in the morning.

I gave her a strange look, and shut the door.

To be fair, I was playing Skinny Puppy and Chemical Brothers.

On laptop speakers, at half volume.

There was no other music.

I submit that there is no way save her ears possess the acuteness of a bat's that she could have heard the beats emanating from these anemic speakers. The intensity of the sound decreases as the square of the distance, and it ain't all that intense to begin with, folks.

Thus: my contention that she was wildly hallucinating, perhaps in shock after waking up in the middle of the night to realize that she had, in the midst of a somnabulic nightmare, throttled her children.

So, being a nice guy, I turned down the beats, muttering the occasional deranged thought while committing to this blog my irritation at her interruption of my night.

Lady at 476 Brock, 478 1/2, or 480 (wherever the hell you live), allow me to wish you one of those night terrors where you wake up with a demonic creature sitting on your chest and breathing the foul stench of death into your face.

Fucking neighbors.

strangerAttractor

2004-08-26T11:28:00.000-07:00

strangerAttractor

Man, what a mess politics is these days. In the states, the average yank has the choice between voting for a bigger welfare state or voting for a bigger warfare state. Of course, at least they get that choice. In Canada, we don't even get that.

I have to wonder, how much longer are we going to put up with steam-age institutions? It's the 21st century; why the hell are we still trying to govern ourselves according to what was judged cutting edge back in the 18th? What meant freedom back then, increasingly means tyranny now ... only now, the tyrants can at least cloak themselves in the mantle of the defenders of liberty.

2004-08-24T21:57:00.000-07:00

Fucking tired ... up since early, looking for a room (there must be someone in this city of 3 million who doesn't want me to sign a 12 month lease!) That is, after I managed to motivate myself enough to tear away from early morning web-surfing....

Incidentally, if anyone into scifi happens to read this lonely post in the vast plankton sea that is the blogosphere, check out this site:

www.orionsarm.com

Open source hard SF worldbuilding. 'nuff said.

Ah, the great scam that is university ... 5 years of my life (victory lap, oh yeah), $20 000 (and that's just tuition), all for a little piece of paper I could probably have forged given a decent printer and flexible morals. And i just spent the last few hours scouring Monster and Workopolis for entry level jobs that a 23 year old kid with a physics degree can get. A degree!? They'd prefer 2+ years of hands on experience.

Ah, well. In the meantime, between the end of my (formal) education, and the beginning of my (snigger) career, there's always booze, weed, friends, and various forms of electronic entertainment. (and my dad wonders why I insist I'm not a grown man?)