Slaves in All But Name?

Will Durant once said "Civilization exists at the consent of geology, subject to change without notice". Anyone who doesn't believe or understand that..., well, let's hope Yellowstone doesn't blow up to empirically validate that statement.

I offer a corollary: "Your job exists at the whim of the market, subject to change without notice".

Do you owe rich people your job? From my perspective, that is a poorly disguised rationalization of feudalism. That's something a serf or a slave would say. "Oh, thank you for my job, my lord" with a tug of the forelock and an averted gaze kind of argument. That is Corporatism, which is just another version of Statism. 


My response to that argument, quite logically and bluntly,  is Bull-Shit. 


Market demand created your job. That rich person was merely a conduit of money. If you really beleive that rich people and corporations created your jobs, go and lick boots, you lackey, you hunchbacked henchman, you dung-covered stooge. Go back to Year 880 where you belong. You got no self-respect. You can't even admit the worth of your own labor. 

Anyone who insists that they were successful solely based upon hard work is a complete ignoramus.  They got a lot of explaining to do, starting off with how they managed to pop out of thin air with all of their talents developed, their faculties in full bloom, their knowledge intact, and the aching void of the market and society miraculously vacant - that empty seat at the banquet to be waiting just for their soft watery buttocks to show up and fill that special place.

I'm sorry, no. Hard work alone did not get you to where you are. Luck. Luck is at least 70% of what you are. Lucky to be born in the developed world. Lucky to make it into adulthood. Lucky to be sound of wind and limb. Lucky to have the right kind of parents, teachers, mentors, coworkers, partially sane bosses, chance encounters, kind strangers, family, friends, neighbors that all lead to opportunity; in short, lucky to live in an egalitarian and lawful human society that nurtures and sustains you. If you refuse to recognize that, well, maybe we should ship you to Somalia or Mexico so you can truly understand your good fortune, what tyranny really means, what real hard work is like. No, I mean really real hard work. Really real hard work like really real starvation. Not "I haven't eaten all day" starvation. So, maybe, just maybe, you owe something back, and probably a lot more than you think you owe. 

 

Which suggests still another maxim: "The market exists at the consent of the governed". 

Don't believe that? Read up on the French or Russian Revolution sometime. Or the downfall of the Soviet Empire. Those were a revolt against economic conditions. Markets swim within an ocean of government. There is no such thing as a free market. Markets do not exist without rules and laws of behavior. And, unless you are one of those goo-goo-eyed wobble-headed Libertarians of that crypto-anarcho-capitalist stripe that live in candy cane houses on gumdrop lane in candyland village and believes that everyone can get along and practice self-restraint, you recognize that markets are neither efficient, nor rational, nor self-correcting, and a certain amount of government restraint is necessary. 

The question then is how much. Which, on the five to ten dimensions of political identity, boils down to the merit vs. equality axis. What is fair? As a liberal, I appreciate merit more than a conservative could possibly know or admit, but I side on equality more than merit. 

The statement (amended to the more modern statement): "All people are created equal" is a statement so easily disproved, you wonder what was going through Jefferson's head. What a starry-eyed dreamer! Why the very idea of "fairness" is childish, no?

Uh, well, no. It's the whole fucking foundation of what it means to be a civilized people. It's about time we got back to that.

Take America Back!

A common refrain from the New Right is that they want to "Take America Back".

The question is, to when?

1880? 880? 80? Prehistoric times? I've got to wonder. They sure seem like they want to wipe out modernity. They are not comfortable in the 21st century. Why even one their greatest humorists  doesn't seem to be at all comfortable in the present day. I've given him the benefit of the doubt, I read his stuff, ready to laugh, and, honestly, I can't see how he's funny. I mean, maybe he's funny if you like your humor corny and cornfed, and wearing a straw boater and spats, with an affinity for smallpox, patent medicines, child labor, diphtheria, and coal smog. I don't know, maybe life was funnier back then, or maybe humor was simpler. Like, setting fire to cats, and pitting bears against a pack of dogs was funny back then. Maybe that kind of funny.

And now it turns out that perhaps the reason they all wish to return to the past is because one of their ilk, a particularly backward-thinking individual named Dinesh D'souza, has discovered Obama's Dad's Time Machine .

Yes, Obama's dad had a time machine, and Dinesh is now convinced that Obama is trapped in it. That's what he says: "our President is trapped in his father's time machine".

I suppose Dinesh would prefer he get the President out (no doubt fulfilling a juvenile fantasy in the process), and use Obama's father's time machine for his own infernal ends.

Perhaps to send all of us back to a simpler time? A time before all this infernal complexity made life so difficult? Perhaps the Stone Age? Or maybe stop the mating of Kenyan goatherds, so that Obama is never born, and thus save the future, which is the present, from an economic collapse?

Well, we will never know, as Dinesh is obviously and unquestionably insane.

Electronic Drugs

I've written before about electronic remediation - how our technology threatens to add a layer to reality, especially the electronic gadgets that we filter our senses through.

You know, actually, this all started innocently enough out of a quasi-drunken discussion around a bonfire this past weekend. It started out with video games. One parent was amazed at how his kids could play video games with a controller that had about "three hundred buttons, switches, arrows and knobs" on it.

I mused "We had, like, a joystick and a button".

"Yeah, and now, I can't figure any of it out at all. I've just given up on trying to play video games with the kids". 

"Yeah, well, they been playing them since they was two. It's second nature to them."

"Well, look at remote controls on TVs. fifty, sixty, buttons. I'd much rather have an Iphone interface with symbols and pictograms, like I'm a chimp."

"Well, with electrodes and computers, the trend will head towards direct control through the brain. They are getting to the point where not only can you control machines with your brain, your thoughts can be read with computers ".

"I ain't wearing no bicycle helmet."

"Oh no. It'll be like a baseball cap or something".

"Oh, fucking great. Electronic telepathy. Like I can keep up with the kids now".

(Guy grabs baseball cap off his head, looks at it, throws it on the ground) "I can't get my hat to work! Goddamnit!"

"You know, if they can read your brain, can they write to it?"

"Oh man! The ultimate video game! THAT WOULD BE AWESOME!"

"Would it?"

Now I'm starting to wonder just how far in the future electronic drugs are? And I would define - since Google doesn't know about it - electronic drugs as the electromagnetic manipulation of the brain to provide alternate or modified experiences, emotions, and possibly... personalities.

Think LSD on Acid.

Techniques such as transcranial magnetic stimulation utilize magnetic impulses to stimulate or suppress nerve cells in the brain. This is often used as treatment for depression. Electromagnetic devices have also been used to possibly alter a person's moral compass . I'm assuming that as the technology advances, smaller and more specific brain regions can be modified. The ultimate progression would be technology that has complete and precise control over exact brain regions so that, say, the experience of playing with a puppy can be electronically simulated, or a bungee jump,  or the smell of a flower, or thrill of fear, or an impulse to steal, or, well, you see where this is going.

On the one hand, it means creating the ultimate video game, the Mother of all Addiction. Or mind control. Or who knows what? Scary, huh?

"It"

Long before, or perhaps at about the same time, James Lovelock came up with his Gaia Hypothesis, Gahan Wilson wrote an essay about "It".

Gahan Wilson, who I am surprised to find is still alive, is a cartoonist in the same genre of dark, grotesque humor as Charles Addams. In his essay entitled "It", Wilson speculated that the Earth as a whole was an organism, which he called "It". He did Lovelock one better in assuming that this organism was teleological, that it had a will and a consciousness. (Lovelock, I think is careful to not assign any conscious will to the Earth, to avoid seeming a bit too New Agey and kooky).

Wilson - since the essay, as I recall, was published in the National Lampoon - was under no compulsions to be all serious and scientific-like. His argument was that the Earth had decided to reproduce, and so "It" decided to evolve creatures that could move out into space, and take a baby "It" with them. "It" probably tried and failed a few times with evolving things. If the creatures didn't work out, the creatures would be folded back into the mix and a new attempt made. "It" doesn't really care so much about the creatures so long as they do what "It" wants, which is to develop space-faring technologies. If the creatures need to tear up parts of the planet, lay waste to some of the landscape to get at metals and resources and stuff, well, no problem. It's not like "It" hasn't been through worse throughout the course of Her 4 billion-year-plus lifetime.

Wilson speculated (this is the 70s mind you), that the reason humankind was building megamalls and developing disgusting processed food was to get used to the cramped and unnatural living conditions expected in the journeys through space. Funny thing. Wilson came across something that may actually be true to explain trivial fads. (Although the processed food shtick is still going strong).

I for one think Wilson may be on to something. I'm not all that serious about it, but it's an idea I can entertain. Not necessarily that "It" has any specific proposal in mind for us (or if it does I can only hope that it is sufficiently ironic and grotesque to satisfy my Wilsonian sense of humor). After all George Carlin speculated that maybe the Planet wanted Plastic, and the sole purpose of humankind was to give the Earth plastic. And now that we have done this, the planet is pretty much done with us, and we will all "be shaken off her back like a bad case of fleas".

But I do think that "It" being the vast, lava-gutted, rock-hided, giant monster organism that "It" is, makes no small plans.

Was Kennedy Snookered?

It is not even October yet. It is not even fifity (fifity? fifty) years yet. The 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis is still way off in 2012. But I like to try and stay ahead of the pack.

For a certain person of a certain age, the Cuban Missile Crisis is firmly implanted in their memories. It is a What If scenario that haunts them. A distant nightmare that has, like so much of life during the Cold War, warped and twisted their growth and development. Oh, not in any visible way, not in any traumatic emotional or experiential way, but in a cold, dry, academic way.

Had matters gone slightly askew, many of us would not be alive. Many of us would have had a vastly different life than the life of comparative ease and plenty we have enjoyed. Many of us would have grown up stunted, brutish, and feral, in a post-nuclear landscape. Those of us who had survived. Those of us who had not been incinerated, buried, suffocated, irradiated, or mangled in the exchange of nuclear fire. Those of us who made it through the years of starvation, famine, plague, and predation by our fellow citizens. Those of us who, due to the circumstances and necessities of mere survival, were not quite entirely human anymore. It is a world that can be discussed, possibly even envisioned, but in no real way imagined. It is a mythology we can all do without.

And speaking of mythology, quite a few myths sprouted from that crisis. Perhaps the biggest myth of all is the classic line from then Secretary of State Dean Rusk "We were eyeball to eyeball and the other guy just blinked". Well, movies have been made, books have been written, information declassified, and the tapes of the cabinet meetings released, and we now know that statement, like so much of American Cold War history, is pure and utter horseshit.

To cite just one example, and there are many, the crisis was resolved by a secret agreement between Kennedy and Krushchev to remove recently installed American missiles from Turkey in exchange for the removal of Cuban missiles. No macho posturing. No staring eyeball to eyeball. It was, in the final days of the crisis, Kennedy, against the wishes of his trigger happy cabinet, doing some horse trading with Krushchev.

Not all that surprising. Kennedy, after being bullied and lied to by the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Bay of Pigs fiasco, was understandably distrustful of them. Militarily, as Commander-in-Chief, he did exactly the minimum necessary amount, but no more. In the final analysis, the men in Kennedy's Cabinet, the "best and the brightest", were not so bright after all. And just as well!

But here's the thing. All attention is paid to Kennedy, but hardly any to the guy who precipitated the crisis, Nikita Krushchev. Most people think of him from his visit to America. The blustering, bad-tempered, Russian circus bear of a buffoon. I mean, who else but a buffoon would listen to Castro, manufacture a crisis by foolishly deploying Russian nukes right in America's backyard?

What kind of a buffoon? Why the kind of buffoon that managed to survive Stalin. That not only survived Stalin's inner circle, but managed to rise of power after his death. Someone that can do that is not a buffoon.

Which makes me wonder. All the evidence was from aerial photographs. All of the Russian nuke missiles are there, but there is no evidence that they are armed with nukes. Is it possible that a smart old chess player in Russia decided that he might just be able to get something for nothing out of a young and inexperienced President?

How do we know there were any nukes at all there? Did Krushchev snooker Kennedy?

Well, the evidence now is that a handful of tactical nukes were in Cuba, and that's it. Those tactical nukes had a battlefield range, and yield (a few kilotons). But there is no indication that there were any strategic nukes in Cuba. I think the wily old Russians pulled one over on us. You know, sometimes you get the Bear. Sometimes the Bear gets you.

And thinking about it, would Krushchev want to grant Fidel Castro access to strategic nuclear weapons?

Not even a circus bear would do that.

Making A Ring

This is going to be a picture post! While documenting some of my work this past Wednesday evening, I happened to notice that the instructor in the jewelry class was going to cast something. So I followed him around. Here he is gabbing an invested flask out of the burnout kiln. The flask is made from half a soup can, contains a mixture of plaster and silica flour, and used to have a wax ring in it, which has since had the wax melted out:

And here he is holding the invested flask with some tongs. The flask temperature is around 1100 degrees F. (I don't think he realized I was taking pictures of him, otherwise he'd have sucked in his gut:















The next series of pictures is loading the invested flask onto the centrifugal caster. This is an arm attached to a spring which is wound up and, when released, will spin around. The metal (silver) will flow from the crucible into the flask. Centrifugal force is needed because the hollow parts in the mold are too tiny for metal to flow and air to escape with just a gravity feed. The very last shot is the ring!

Love in the Electronic Age

It just gets weirder and weirder. One of my student aides broke up with her boyfriend completely through texting. I'm surprised the whole relationship wasn't over Facebook. Hey, no chance of diseases, unless you count a computer virus as such.

And now this weirdness.  "Resort attracts Japanese men with Virtual Girlfriends". Virtual? What the fuck? I mean, do I really even need to spend a paragraph or two making fun of them? I thought not.

And naturally they are Japanese. I've heard of the pathetic Japanese guy who has a Real Doll for a girlfriend. That's just super creepy. I mean, what is it with the Japanese anyway? It's not like they don't have a lot of fine-looking women. They do. So, what, what is going on? Why this supreme weirdness?

I need an explanation.