A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing

Happy Star Wars Day!

Sat, 04 May 2013 21:04:31 GMT

Over at Crazy Eddie's Motie News, I've been observing Star Wars Day.

Happy Star Wars Day!

Darth Vader on Dubstep

As I wrote last year "May the Fourth be with you!" Originally crossposted to neonvincent on Dreamwidth. Comment here or there, whichever you prefer. http://neonvincent.dreamwidth.org/83386.html

Nebs Sez #JamesBond #Oscars #movies

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 05:22:38 GMT

See my comment at the end.

Originally posted by nebris at Nebs Sez

~Dr. Lamb asked me, "Do you think it ["Skyfall"] deserves to be the most award-nominated Bond movie ever?

I replied: "I suppose I am still a creature of Hollywood as I read your statement "the most award-nominated Bond movie ever" purely as OSCARS^tm. The following was written entirely in that context."

"I do not tend to think of Bond films as Oscar bait. That's not really their place in the cinema landscape, not the 'classic' Bond [read Sean Connery] which are basically Adventure Stories, and certainly not the Roger Moore films, which are full on cartoons. [Richard Kyle smiles from Hell] All the ones that follow more or less remain in that genre, save for “The Spy Who Loved Me”, which has been a bit of an anomaly in the entire series, as it leaned back toward the source material, while kind of staying within the genre.

However...someone has gone back to the source material with this new series. The books are actually rather grim going, much closer to le Carré than the tone of the previous films would indicate. One must remember that Sir Ian was the real deal when it came to spycraft and the like. [yes, I know he was never Knighted, but I think of him as such anyway]

I have actually read all the novels. Did so one summer at camp while I was stuck in the infirmary for a week. In retrospect I'm surprised they allowed them, as they are quite cynical, sexual and brutal. Not really what the camp owners would have thought proper reading for an eleven year old boy.

In that context, I have to say that Daniel Craig is the closest to the literary Bond of any of them. Bond is an officer and gentleman and can put on a charming face, but he is moody viscous bastard and somewhat conflicted about his 'career choice'. Such is the nature of a borderline sociopath. He has just enough conscience to know he's a monster, but not enough to get in the way of his work.

Craig pulls that off magnificently. That he is, as The Eagles once said, 'brutally handsome' helps quite a bit. But he uses that instrument with great skill. His nasty smirk and grim glare tell us very clearly that this is not some 'movie hero'; this is a dangerous and unpleasant chap who enjoys hurting people.

Looking back upon the franchise, I'd say if it had started off closer to the source material, Robert Shaw would have been a better Bond than Connery. Go back and watch him in “From Russia With Love” and you'll see what I mean.

As for your original question, then yes, I'd say Craig was worthy of at least a Best Actor nomination for “Skyfall”. He certainly 'plumbs the depths' in the thing. And Dame Judy and Señor Bardem would definitely rate Supporting Noms as well."

Yeah, but none of the actors were nominated. Instead, "Skyfall" received nominations for cinematography, original score, original song, sound
effects, and sound mixing. In other words, screw the acting, but it sure looked and sounded great!
http://commanderbond.net/16869/5-oscar-nominations-for-skyfall.html

Ran Prieur On Disheartened Doomerism

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 13:19:35 GMT

Originally posted by nebris at Ran Prieur On Disheartened Doomerism

January 10. Ten years ago, when I imagined "collapse", it was interesting: industrial collapse means there are no factories and everything new is made by hand. Infrastructure collapse means there are no electric grids and we're riding horses on the ruined freeways. Economic collapse means the banks are just gone, cash is worthless, and economies are gift and barter. Political collapse means you don't have to pay taxes, kids don't have to go to school, and there are no police.

Now it's increasingly clear that none of these things are going to happen, even slowly over 100 years. As someone known for writing about collapse, I have two career options. One is to follow the bait-and-switch: keep writing about "collapse" but redefine it as something much less interesting. The other option is to write about what has now become interesting, given the new forecast. And that is: if the tech system keeps grinding ahead, what kind of crazy stuff is it going to do?

On this subject, there are two popular schools of thought, and I don't like either. One is late 20th century conservative disasterism, where the worst criticism we can make of any technology is that it will destroy a bunch of stuff that we want to preserve. The other is infantile techno-optimism. Look at this page that just got massive upvotes on reddit: "Papertab" paper tablet is your flexible friend. This is not revolutionary. This is a toy, and people who get excited about it are like little kids around the Christmas tree, believing that the shininess and novelty of their toys equals eternal happiness.

Now, there are possible technologies that are truly revolutionary. But my fear is that they will all be stopped, that the increasing power of the tech system will be used to keep the world stable and predictable, and to make us happy in the shallowest and least satisfying way. To avoid this dreadful fate, we need a cultural shift in which we gain a deeper understanding of quality of life, and we need to apply this understanding to technology, and start using it to increase danger and pain. I know, people in Africa would love to have the problem of not enough danger and pain. Don't worry -- in a hundred years, they will, and we'll have it worse than we do now.

Here's a new article from the Atlantic about this issue: There's More to Life Than Being Happy:

Having negative events happen to you, the study found, decreases your happiness but increases the amount of meaning you have in life. Another study from 2011 confirmed this, finding that people who have meaning in their lives, in the form of a clearly defined purpose, rate their satisfaction with life higher even when they were feeling bad than those who did not have a clearly defined purpose. "If there is meaning in life at all," Frankl wrote, "then there must be meaning in suffering."

Nablopomo for January: Energy Week 1

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 20:17:41 GMT

Michigan football players as biodiversity tourists

Good news for food and energy in the Fiscal Bluff deal

More energy-related news in the Fiscal Bluff deal

Fiscal Bluff, uh, Cliff Notes from Reuters

Greenfinger

Expect more energy tax breaks this year

Examiner.com article on belief in diet vs. exercise

More good news for energy in the Fiscal Bluff deal

Will Al Jazeera America hire Keith Olbermann?

Those are all links, even the ones that aren't in color.

Originally crossposted to neonvincent on Dreamwidth. Comment here or there, whichever you prefer. http://neonvincent.dreamwidth.org/83012.html

Nablopomo for January: Energy

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 20:04:38 GMT

Happy New Year! What's the theme for the first month of 2013?

ENERGY
It's the first month of a new year, and it's time to get energized. This month, we'd like you to think of ways that you're going to gather energy to use throughout the year as well as stave off any energy drains by realizing what is taking away from your productivity. Of course, we'll also be doing a lot of daydreaming about superhuman powers -- for instance, the ability to never sleep... would you take it if it also meant the chance removed to ever dream? -- and how well we'd do with an extended power outage.
...
So start thinking about how to best utilize your energy and ways you can change the world in 2013.

Based on the description above and the prompts, the theme refers more to motivation and inspiration than it does to energy as I use the term on this blog. Take today's prompt, for example. "From where do you draw your energy?" When it comes to motivation and inspiration, it's my love of knowledge and teaching that knowledge so that people can improve their lives, along with my intense desire to perform and be appreciated. But that's not how I'm going to treat this theme. Instead, I'll take the part about "how well we'd do with an extended power outage" and run with it.

When I blog about energy this month, I'll write about how many calories of food I metabolize, how many BTUs of natural gas is burned on my behalf to heat my house, heat the water I use, and cook my food, how many gallons of gasoline and diesel move me and all the things I need to where I need them, and how much dirty coal and Uranium-235 it takes to keep the lights on, refrigerate my food and drink, and run all the electronics. On top of that, where does all of this come from, how much does it cost, including all the hidden environmental and human costs, and what happens to all the waste that is produced. Finally, is there a better way and, if so, how can we get there?

Of course, I'm subverting the monthly theme to mean what I want it to mean, and what I do here anyway, except in a more intense form than usual. But that's OK. As the theme description always says:

The theme and writing prompts, as always, are there as a guide if you want some structure to your month, though you can always sign up for NaBloPoMo and chart your own path.
...
NaBloPoMo is what you make of it. At its core, all you need to do is post daily on your blog. The point of NaBloPoMo is not to be restricted by the theme, but instead to either take it or leave it. If you'll do better blogging every day based on what's happening in your world, throw aside the daily prompts.

Fair enough, although I had enough fun subverting today's prompt that I might just do it again.

Crossposted from Crazy Eddie's Motie News.

Originally crossposted to neonvincent on Dreamwidth. Comment here or there, whichever you prefer. http://neonvincent.dreamwidth.org/82925.html

The Slow Crash by Ran Prieur

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 19:59:00 GMT

Originally posted by nebris at The Slow Crash by Ran Prieur

[Edited and annotated December 7, 2012. This is a nice work of fiction, and an interesting view of cutting edge doomer thinking in 2005. I can see now that my timeline was still much too fast, my vision of the changes was too catastrophic, and I was too optimistic about popular adaptations.]

Imagine the end of the world in moderation. It's hard. We tend to imagine that either the "economy" will recover and we'll go on like 1999 forever, plus flying cars, or else one day "the apocalypse happens" and every component of the industrial system is utterly gone.

I'm not ruling out a global supercatastrophe, like an asteroid impact, an accidental nuclear war, or runaway climate change leading to an anoxic event. But what I'm focusing on here is the scenario that includes only events we're reasonably sure about: the end of cheap energy, the decline of industrial agriculture, economic collapse, wars, famines, infrastructure failures, and extreme weather.

If that's all we get, the crash will be slower and more complex than the kind of people who predict crashes like to predict. It won't be like falling off a cliff, more like rolling down a rocky hill. There won't be any clear before, during, or after. Most people living during the decline and fall of Rome didn't even know it. We're told to draw a line at the sack of Rome by the Visigoths, but to Romans at the time it was just one event -- the Visigoths came, they milled around, they left, and life went on. After the 1929 stock market crash, respectable voices said it was a temporary adjustment, that the economy was still strong. Only years later, when we knew they were wrong, could we draw a line at 1929.

I suggest we're already in the fall of civilization. In 2004 the price of oil doubled, bankruptcies and foreclosures accelerated, global food stockpiles fell to record lows despite high harvests, and we had record numbers of hurricanes and tornadoes -- and a big tsunami to top it off. If every year from here to 2020 is half as eventful, we'll be living in railroad cars, eating grass, and still waiting for the big crash we've been led to expect from watching movies designed to push our emotional buttons and be over in two hours.

You know the story: Electricity and water and heat are off and not coming back on. Food and fuel will never again be coming into the cities. People run wild in the streets killing and looting. If you live in the city, you will have to kill people to steal their food, or even eat them, and they'll be trying to do the same to you. If you live in the country, you'd better have a big gun to fend off the hordes of starving urbanites scouring the countryside. This condition will last until a strong leader rebuilds civilization.

This is a web of lies. The first lie is the assumption that breakdowns will be sudden and permanent. More likely it will go like this: As energy gets more expensive and the electrical infrastructure decays, blackouts will be more frequent and last longer, but power will come back on. By the time the big grids go down permanently, the little grids, patched together from local sources, will be ready to take their place. They will be weaker, less reliable, and more expensive, and they won't cover the slums, but by then we'll all be experts at living without refrigerators and running laptop computers from car batteries scavenged from junked SUV's and recharged with solar panels. Electricity is a luxury, not a necessity. When the lights go out, we won't go berzerk -- we'll go to bed earlier.

[Why did I think the grid would eventually go down everywhere? Because that's easier to imagine than the grid in the most energy-rich areas mostly staying up, and then re-extending after the tech system adjusts to renewable energy. Then it's just a question of how much of the grid stays mostly up. One percent? Ninety percent? ]

Likewise with gasoline. The oil's not running out -- it's just getting more scarce and expensive. People who want it will not form motorcycle gangs that chase tankers and fight to the last man. They'll do what my dad did in 1973 -- wait six hours for a fill-up. If you already know how to get by with a bicycle, you just won't have as many cars to deal with.

Water supplies are mostly gravity-fed. If something stops the flow, someone will be fixing it. Even the worst places, like Phoenix or Las Vegas, will not suddenly and permanently run out of water. As with electricity and fuel, water will get lower quality, more expensive, and unpredictably available. People will learn to store it and to stop wasting it by watering lawns and washing cars and shitting in drinking water. Adaptable people will learn to catch rainwater. With only 12 inches a year, a 10x10 foot square metal roof feeding a storage tank will gather 100 cubic feet, or about 800 gallons, enough for one person to have more than two gallons a day.

Food is more difficult. It doesn't fall from the sky, and industrial agriculture can't possibly continue to feed everyone. It would be easy to feed even our present bloated population if we converted every lawn and golf course to a food forest, but that's not going to happen. Populations have died in famines before and will do so again. The lie here is that the food supply will end suddenly and permanently, when really, like everything else, it will end in a series of small collapses and partial recoveries.

[I was underestimating industrial agriculture, which is becoming more efficient as it becomes more automated. It takes less energy to maintain and power machines, than to maintain human workers at a decent standard of living, so energy decline will not destroy automation. Solar panels feeding motors can already turn sunlight into work more efficiently than photosynthetic crops feeding animal muscles. There will be a few decades when the world has scarcer and more expensive energy than during the age of cheap oil, but this will not make energy-dependent systems disappear. They will just pull back and abandon the poorest populations.

Also, when there's a famine, most deaths are not from starvation. They're from disease or violence as people short of food become weaker and take more risks. I argue below that people rarely do premeditated murders to steal food, but lack of food makes them fight with each other for all kinds of other reasons.]

The other lie is that people will kill each other to steal food. I haven't heard of anyone doing it in areas hit by the tsunami. In the 1984 Ethiopian famine, in the siege of Sarajevo, even in the Irish potato famine, when Ireland was producing enough meat and grain to feed everyone and exporting it to wealthy Englishmen, when people would have been morally justified in killing for food, they did not kill for food. The Donner party ate their own dead but did not kill for food. Napoleon's soldiers retreating from Moscow would cut the organs from fallen men and horses, sometimes before they were quite dead, but did not kill each other to steal food. Nations have gone mad and killed millions for empty abstractions of race and religion and politics, but even in Rwanda or Nazi Germany or post-revolution France, it was uncommon that anyone would kill for food.

I can't explain it, why people will kill for ideas and then, when their life is at stake, will quietly starve. Maybe hunger comes on so slowly that by the time they're ready to kill, they're too weak. Maybe, in a real famine, the elite keep the food so well guarded that there's no point trying to take it, and the non-elite, not corrupted by power, would rather share what little they have than fight to the death.

Imagine yourself in that position. Whatever stopped the food coming into the city, it's probably regional and temporary, and you'll be expecting it go to back to normal soon, or at least expecting help. Exposure kills people much faster than starvation, so you'll want to stay in the place you know and try to get a piece of the aid shipments. If you leave the city you'll be headed for a particular place like a cabin or a friend's house, not roaming the countryside looking for a cornfield. I've gone by bicycle from central Seattle over Stevens Pass to near Wenatchee, and over Snoqualmie all the way to Spokane. I rode freeways, highways, dirt roads, and gravel trails, and I think I saw two fields of edible crops, neither in season.

What about stealing from other people in the city? Again, put yourself in that position. Do you know which houses have food? Which have guns? Would you really go to a random house and knock the door down? If you're even thinking about it, you'll be expecting other people to do the same, and you'll make a defensive alliance with your neighbors. If you're allied and you need each other for survival, you're going to share food. Those with the most food, if they're smart, will give some away to earn respect and loyalty. The situation will be all about social dynamics among neighbors, not physical conflicts against roving gangs.

The popular image of "anarchy" is another lie, an elitist caricature of lower class people as stupid and randomly dangerous, mindless and incomprehensible like a tornado. In reality, in the Rodney King riots, people were intelligent enough to not harm the Korean grocery stores where the owners had been nice to them. I was in the Seattle WTO protest, and the destructive actions were not mindless and crazy, but calm, deliberate, and focused.

Notice the propaganda use of the word "streets": "mean streets", "I grew up in the streets", "rioting in the streets". Where else are we going to riot? The lawn? We're led to believe that the most dangerous thing in the streets is people on foot with free will. The most dangerous thing in the streets is the automobile. How many people have been invisibly killed in car crashes in the same intersection where the big media spent days showing Reginald Denny being beaten by black people?

The function of propaganda is not to tell us what to think but to sink us deeper in what we already thoughtlessly believe: in this case, that in the absence of central control we get a dog-eat-dog universe full of shocking crimes. That's what we have now. The every-man-for-himself morality is a symptom of a culture that uses excess wealth and zero-sum competition to maintain hierarchy. In the absence of wealth and control, people get nicer. We learn to take responsibility, to work together, to help each other... until a new dominator appears and crushes us down.

[A recent book on this subject is A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit. She focuses on short-term disasters, and people might have more trouble holding together cooperative networks when there is no recovery in sight. I think it depends on their emotional intelligence and empathy, and in most of the world today, I would expect a long-term disaster to eventually turn into rule by warlords.]

All the worst mass-killings of history have been top-down. Genocide happens not when central control stops but when it stops holding back. If the killers are not direct agents of government or industry, they are ordinary people who know they have both the protection and the ideological guidance of the biggest bad-ass of the moment. Usually the ideology is utopian: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, French revolutionaries, and American "settlers," all justified their mass murders with a grandiose vision of a noble conflict to wipe the world clean and build heaven. The danger is not "terrorism" or "chaos" -- the danger is a new order that declares you the danger.

Still, the interesting question is not "How will people die?" but "How will people live?" In the town next to the mass grave, what will we do all day? Process data and feign enthusiasm? Get on the internet? Make crossbows? Tend fruit trees? The best I can figure it out is to look at a bunch of more and less likely modifiers to the world as we know it, and think through how they could change things.

Peak Oil. Global oil extraction will peak in the next year or two, if it hasn't already. By 2008 it will be clearly in decline, though some will argue that it's only a temporary adjustment. Oil sellers will exploit the hype by raising prices even more than they have to. We will not figure out some new cheap energy source, but we will figure out that hydrogen is just a storage method, and not a very good one.

[Did oil peak? We can't answer this without getting into the difficulty of defining "oil". Now there's a surge of cheap natural gas. The more important thing is that the cost of energy will continue to rise more often than it falls.]

But life will change less than the peak oilers are predicting, because we have so much room to cut out waste: to drive less often in more efficient cars, ride bicycles, turn off the heat and air conditioning, take the machines and industrial chemicals out of agriculture, stop flying food around the world. Gradually, more people will grow their own food, raise their own kids, tend their own health, do stuff with their own bodies instead of machines, and turn their attention from the stock market and TV characters to their more real lives. Those who can adjust mentally will recognize this as an improvement.

[In the paragraphs above and below, just because these adaptations are available and helpful, doesn't mean average people will change. Jared Diamond has written that the Vikings in Greenland starved to death rather than change their culture to eat fish. I think something like this will happen with American lawns and cars, except the government will prevent starvation by subsidizing industrial agriculture, and most people will just become more poor and sick and unhappy. So these utopian visions are bad predictions, but still good advice.]

When energy gets so expensive that people can't afford to drive their cars at all, or to buy the new super-efficient cars, they will abandon the suburbs to enterprising bicyclists or drug gangs or squatter communities or farmers. The abomination of the lawn will turn out to have preserved a lot of precious topsoil... which will now be depleted by moderately unsustainable agriculture. I don't see any likely way for us to resume the stone age lifestyle for which our bodies are made. It's not that we can't, but that most people will choose not to as long as they have other options.

Economic De-repression. There are many economies, and the one that's failing is the control economy. The dominant media will not even call it a depression, but some kind of temporary crisis, when really it's the permanent end of the centralized techno-industrial order. What they'll call temporary "unemployment" will be a permanent transition to self-employment in the meaningful activities of subsistence.

[Again, you and I can do this, but I fear most people will just become poorer and unhappier in their dependence on a techno-industrial order that continues to chug along. Technologies like 3D printers will threaten to make the tech system less centrally controlled, but I think it will respond by blocking autonomous manufacturing through expanded intellectual property.]

The dollar will continue to slide, until non-wealthy Americans will no longer be able to buy anything imported. Americans will have to learn how to make stuff again, and we could get a renaissance in light manufacturing. We'll start local currencies, like Ithaca Hours, or if the rulers jealously forbid it, we'll build underground barter and gift economies. All this will be good for us. Meanwhile, economies that depend on selling stuff to Americans will also decline.

Interest rates will rise and pop the housing bubble, and so many people will default on their mortgages that it will be impossible to evict them all, or to keep squatters out of all the vacant bank-owned houses. The elite will try to repress squatters enough to preserve their property/power, but not so much that it fuels a movement for land reform. Something similar will happen with credit card debt, but milder, because the elite are always more willing to forgive debt than to give up their claim on land.

[It is turning out to be surprisingly easy to keep homeless people out of abandoned houses, and to continue making claims on unpayable debt. The ruling system seems to be getting better than ever at keeping us under control without killing us. Bob Calvert said it best in 1978 in Hawkwind's song High Rise: "It's a human zoo, a suicide machine."]

Serial Fallujah. If we get overt mass-killings in America, this is my pick for how it will happen. The rulers will pick off cities one by one, feeding the bloodlust of the public in a ritual as old as civilization: demonize them, seal them in, and kill them all. If a volcanic eruption cuts off food to your city, hold tight -- you'll be fine. If the bodies of soldiers or police are dragged through the streets of your city, get out and never expect to return.

Disease. An epidemic that kills 10% will slow down or stop many systems, especially the medical system, but in a few months or years it will all go back to almost how it was before. One that kills 50% will reorder society in ways we can't predict -- when people think they're about to die, they do unpredictable things.

[Now I think that instant global communication greatly reduces the threat of disease epidemics, by making them easier to quarantine.]

Another factor is if the dead and the survivors have different cultural profiles. Almost any disease will go easier on people with healthier lifestyles -- in fact, this might already be happening, if sugary overprocessed foods are causing mental and emotional instability that makes people do stupid things that tend to get them killed.

Weather. Overall global temperatures will continue to rise, but in any particular spot, it will look more like crazy weather than warm weather. Everyone will get faster winds, bigger storms, wetter floods and drier droughts. And if the climate is being affected, directly or indirectly, by CO2 emissions, then there will be a lag, just like the lag between turning the hot water up in the shower and feeling it, but much longer because the atmosphere is so much bigger. If the lag is as long as 30 years, then what we're getting now is the effect of the relatively mild emissions in the 1970's. What will it be like when the giant car fad comes back to bite us?

[Stuart Staniford has argued that some regions, presently highly populated, will become so hot in the summer that anyone without air conditioning will die. Preventing deaths will require some combination of massive energy use and massive emigration.]

Astronomy. Eventually a mass-extinction-sized asteroid will strike the Earth. The chance that it will do so in the next 100 years is not worth bothering about. But some other cosmic events may be. A fringe theory of comets is that they are not "dirty snowballs" but hot and enormously charged with energy, and that a near pass of a comet can influence Earth in ways we don't understand. There could be all kinds of cosmic disasters that we don't know about because their physical traces are not as obvious as a giant crater or a layer of ash.

One event that is accepted by dominant science, somewhat likely, and could actually give us a sci-fi apocalypse that kills the system and leaves people unharmed, is a giant solar flare. The solar storm of 1859 fried the telegraph system by overwheming the wires with electric charge. What would that do to our computers? Solar flares are associated with sunspots, and sunspots will peak in 2012.

[Telegraph lines are more susceptible to solar storms than computers because the wires are so long. But a big enough solar storm would kill a lot of satellites. And there are possible weapons, not yet in use, that could make local electromagnetic pulse strikes strong enough to destroy computers.]

Human Consciousness Shift. We won't necessarily become better, but different. This one is fun to think about, and easy to argue for or against, because there are so many ways we are already smarter, stupider, or no different than we were before. Without some kind of shift in consciousness, it's hard to see how we can avoid falling out of balance and crashing until we go extinct. And with a shift, it's wide open.

The Miasma School of Economics

Sun, 25 Nov 2012 22:21:48 GMT

Originally posted by peristaltor at The Miasma School of Economics

Waaay back in 2008, I came up with a theory of conservatism I called the Deist Miasma, an attempt to understand for myself why the religious in general and conservatives in particular have such violent reactions against theories that challenge traditional interpretations of reality (specifically in that post, Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection vs. Creation). In Part II, I further delved into the why of the conservative reaction by tying their rejection to the more emotional parts of the brain that irrationally reject concepts that create a sense of disgust. I got that concept from Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map, a fascinating book that chronicled the 1848-49 cholera outbreak and how a new germ theory of disease challenged the prevailing miasma theory.

Never heard of the miasma theory? I'm not surprised. Here are the essentials: "There were practically as many theories about cholera as there were cases of the disease. But in 1848, the dispute was largely divided between two camps: the contagionists and the miasmists. Either cholera was some kind of agent that passed from person to person, like the flu, or it somehow lingered in the 'miasma' of unsanitary spaces." (Johnson, The Ghost Map, Riverhead, 2007, pp. 68.) "Miasmas" are detected by the nose; if it smells bad, it likely causes disease.

Miasma theory has been largely discredited since the perfection of ever more powerful microscopes and research into the efficacy of hand washing, especially when done by doctors before surgery and assisting births. Essentially, the theory lived long after the evidence mounted against it simply because of the disgust bad smells can raise in the brains of the smeller. This disgust overwhelms the smeller's desire to examine a problem intellectually and rationally. This strong disgust emotion trumps and overrides the rational brain, short-circuiting our ability to problem solve.

I hadn't considered it before, but econ blogger Asymptosis has: isn't neo-classical economics itself a form of the same flawed, disgust-based thinking that kept the miasma theory alive? He makes excellent points, points that follow almost to the letter my association between the creationist camp and the progress supporting natural selection. I would add that disgust against Marxist economics might have been the founding event for the neo-classical thinkers, and that all their complex theorizing stems not from the desire to craft rigorous and disciplined empirical modeling of reality, but to reject the fairly sound observations Marx made in Das Kapital. After all, creation "science" wasn't around before Darwin; there was no need, since the creation "science" was science.

Ah, but some of Asymptosis' conclusions resonated with some recent reading. James Howard Kunstler closes his most recent book with this observation about Barack Obama's first term:

He came along at a very difficult time in our national history. The economy is wobbling again for reasons this president has never adequately articulated (and which are the subject of this book), despite his renown for eloquence. And despite his genial disposition and adult demeanor he can be faulted for failing on many issues, including botched health care reform, a dumb energy policy, keeping two of the longest wars in our history going, and not reestablishing the rule of law in banking in the face of arrant misconduct.

(James Howard Kunstler, Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011, p. 240, I emboldened.)

In our President's defense, he studied law, not economics. For his economic expertise, he hired the brains behind Pres. Clinton's cabinet. Sadly, Larry Summers and Robert Rubin shared the same neo-classical tradition in their assumptions about our economic functioning, enough to pressure Mr. Clinton into signing the official repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, a repeal that got us into this mess. Back to Asymptosis:

[There] are many valid and semi-valid ideas, theories, and constructs floating around in the world of textbook economics. But they are so intertwined with, caught up in the miasma . . . theories that today constitute mainstream economics . . . that it’s hard for even the clearest-eyed economist — much less the everyday person or Washington staffer, legislator, or policy wonk — to tell the shit from the shinola.

(I again emboldened.)

The result? Yes, we can judge the President for his actions; but we should also realize that no one person has a sufficient grasp of the arcane minutia to not have advisers, and that given sufficient acceptance, even bad theories can prove widespread enough to taint said advisers. Translation: yes, Jim Kunstler may have a better understanding of our economy to avoid, as Asymptosis put it, "emptying the cesspools into the water supply" just like the Londoners in the grip of the miasma theory of disease; that doesn't mean a clear-eyed appraisal of our economy is wide-spread enough to reach the halls of power.

And judging by our current economic situation, I'd say it well and truly isn't.

Nablopomo for October: Mask final week

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 03:44:48 GMT

The end of the series.

Next up, Nablopomo for November: Blogging for blogging's sake!
Originally crossposted to neonvincent on Dreamwidth. Comment here or there, whichever you prefer. http://neonvincent.dreamwidth.org/82610.html

Nablopomo for October: Mask Week 4

Sun, 28 Oct 2012 12:16:08 GMT

Resuming the series.

As you can see, I've been busy, and I've already posted the first entry for the final week.

Originally crossposted to neonvincent on Dreamwidth. Comment here or there, whichever you prefer. http://neonvincent.dreamwidth.org/82376.html

Nablopomo for September: Eye

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 12:51:03 GMT

Better late than never.

Time for this month's theme.

EYE
Eyes are said to be the windows to the soul, and what else are you doing on your blog except baring your soul by writing about your hopes and interests day after day? This month, we're going to explore what we see... and what we don't... with our eyes. We're going to think about how we build memories, and which senses we use to access them later. And in delving into our Wordsworthian "inward eye," we're going to explore how you see the world around you.

This is NaBloPoMo and we love to play with words, so as much as we're going to be examining that body part, we're also going to think about how often you use the word "I" when you write and focus on your unique point-of-view.
...
So start thinking about what you're seeing around you and whether you have your eyes wide open.

I'm a visual person, and this blog is full of myself and my point of view, so I don't have to do much of anything different to accomodate this theme. All I have to do is be sure to include a image or video in each posts, something I almost always do anyway. In fact, since the Nablopomo badge for September is part of this entry, I've taken care of my self-imposed requirement already. Lucky me.

Originally posted at Crazy Eddie's Motie News.
Originally crossposted to neonvincent on Dreamwidth. Comment here or there, whichever you prefer. http://neonvincent.dreamwidth.org/82144.html

Nablopomo for August:: Sweet final week

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 13:12:41 GMT

The final entry is current the second most popular I've posted since the first anniversary of the blog and the eight most popular of all my posts there so far.

That's it for August. Now on to September, Originally crossposted to neonvincent on Dreamwidth. Comment here or there, whichever you prefer. http://neonvincent.dreamwidth.org/81843.html

Nablopomo for August: The Dream Cruise is Sweet 2

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 13:11:19 GMT

Picking up from where I left off in August.

One more week of August and all of September still to go. Originally crossposted to neonvincent on Dreamwidth. Comment here or there, whichever you prefer. http://neonvincent.dreamwidth.org/81413.html

Nablopomo for October: Mask Week 3

Sun, 21 Oct 2012 03:22:53 GMT

For some reason, this didn't get crossposted from Dreamwidth, so I'm reposting it manually.

Continuing the series. With this post, I'm all caught up for October so far. Of course, I still have September and half of August to post, too, along with an explanation of why I didnt post much then. Looks like I'll be busy.

Nablopomo for October: Mask Week 2

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 13:09:01 GMT

Continuing with the series I started yesterday, here are the links to the entries I posted the week of Wester.

Originally crossposted to neonvincent on Dreamwidth. Comment here or there, whichever you prefer. http://neonvincent.dreamwidth.org/81066.html

Nablopomo for October: Mask Week 1

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 11:27:59 GMT

As I mentioned yesterday, It's time to get back on track with my weekly summaries, although I'm planning on making up for lost time and posting them daily. Here is the first week of posts from Crazy Eddie's Motie News in between the monthly theme post, which I mirrored here yesterday, and the Happy Wester post, which I mirrored here a week ago Sunday.

Originally crossposted to neonvincent on Dreamwidth. Comment here or there, whichever you prefer. http://neonvincent.dreamwidth.org/80814.html

Nablopomo for October: Mask

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 13:13:42 GMT

So, what's the theme this month?

MASK

Whether it's as common as make-up or feigning happiness, every person spends time wearing a figurative mask, concealing features, thoughts, or feelings. This month we're taking off our masks and laying bare the truth beneath: how we feel about growing older (and whether you'd ever cover up the effects of aging with plastic surgery), how much of ourselves we reveal online, and why we chose the picture in our profile.

Of course, it's also Halloween, which means that we have to talk costumes and candy.
...
So start thinking about what you're hiding, and what you're ready to reveal by taking off your mask.

At first I looked at the theme and thought it would be another one I'd pay lip service to, but then I read the prompts and changed my mind. Here's today's: "When you saw the word mask, was your first interpretation protection, covering up, persona, or performance?"

Without the prompt, I might have responded with "persona," but with the prompt, my answer is "performance." I've been online since January 1990, and very early on I realized that I was performing for an audience.* I'm still performing here. My strategy with this blog, just as with all the rest of my public online communication, is to inform or persuade while entertaining, even if I'm only entertaining myself. As I've discovered when I'm teaching, if I'm bored, my students are bored. If they're bored, no one is learning. I try to keep that in mind while I'm writing here, too. May I succeed more than I fail.

*I shouldn't be surprised at this. I spent years around drum corps, where performance is king, and I can't even get away from the activity here.

Above orginally posted to Crazy Eddie's Motie News.

Because of a change in my online habits resulting from a double health crisis,* I haven't been posting my weekly summaries here for about two months. Time to get back on track.

*I'll get around to writing about it in a friends-only entry later. Those of you who are my friends on Facebook will have read about at least half of it already and some of you will have had to opportunity to read about all of it.
Originally crossposted to neonvincent on Dreamwidth. Comment here or there, whichever you prefer. http://neonvincent.dreamwidth.org/80572.html

Happy Wester 2012!

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 20:22:25 GMT

Adapted from my original 2007 post: Happy Wester Everyone!

Yes, you read that correctly--I wish you all a happy Wester! What is Wester? Well, it's the mirror image of Easter, which is celebrated on the first Sunday after the first Full Moon after the Vernal Equinox. Therefore, Wester is the first Sunday after the first Full Moon after the Autumnal Equinox, which is today.* In the northern states of the U.S. and the southern parts of the Canadian Provinces, it is usually one of the last days of pleasant weather before the full chill of Autumn descends. As such, it's a good excuse to enjoy summer activities outdoors one last time.

Although I'm probably the first person to wish any of you Wester (correct me if I'm wrong, as I'd like more documentation), I did not come up with the idea. It originated in Berkeley, California, during the 1980s, and the message was brought to Michigan by my colleague Tim Pearce. Tim invited me to a Wester party in 1991 and explained the holiday to me. The party was a blast, and I've been eternally grateful to him for introducing me to the concept. Therefore, I am sharing this meme with you.

One last time, Happy Wester!

Thanks to berkeleyfarm and etrangere for pointing out that Wester usually falls during Sukkot (The Feast of Tabernacles) and to popesnarky for claiming the holiday for Discordianism. Hail Eris!

*This timing assumes that the Eastern Hemisphere sets the date. If it were set locally, last Sunday would have been Wester, as the Harvest Moon was on Saturday of last week.

This year's greetings also posted to Crazy Eddie's Motie News.
Originally crossposted to neonvincent on Dreamwidth. Comment here or there, whichever you prefer. http://neonvincent.dreamwidth.org/80354.html

Felicia Day announces Season 6 of The Guild

Sun, 23 Sep 2012 20:15:06 GMT

Felicia at Dragon*Con
Felicia and the cast of The Guild announce that Season 6 will begin airing on her YouTube channel GeekAndSundry October 2nd, followed by a recap of what she did at Dragon Con.

Crossposted to knightsofgood and feliciadayfans.

Nablopomo for August: The Dream Cruise is Sweet 1

Sat, 25 Aug 2012 04:00:08 GMT

Here's the blurb I left at Kunstler's blog at the beginning of this week.

While Jim never did get around to discussing the Olympics, I finally did, as well as updates on gas prices, Americans driving less, Michigan's election on Tuesday, sustainability videos, and the Green Cruise, the Sierra Club's answer to the Dream Cruise, Detroit's celebration of "Happy Motoring." With that, I bid you "Happy Motoring--for now-from Detroit!"

I went into even greater detail about Dream Cruise during the week.

Americans not getting enough exercise while watching Olympics
The future of the Olympics
Green Cruise 2012
Dream Cruise Week of 2012 kicks off
Lessons in the psychology of sustainbility from MSU
Wednesday at the 2012 Dream Cruise
Thursday at the 2012 Dream Cruise
Time for a Paul Ryan label
On August 7th, I voted for myself

Last week's summary here (LJ Mirror).

Originally crossposted to neonvincent on Dreamwidth. Comment here or there, whichever you prefer. http://neonvincent.dreamwidth.org/80085.html

Nablopomo for August: Sweet Week 2

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 06:04:37 GMT

Last week's summary: Nablopomo for August: Sweet Week 1 (LJ mirror).

Originally crossposted to neonvincent on Dreamwidth. Comment here or there, whichever you prefer. http://neonvincent.dreamwidth.org/79653.html

#FBI declares #Juggalos a gang; #ICP sues #music #wtf #humor

Sat, 11 Aug 2012 05:15:02 GMT

I present to you some unfunny about a fandom that does unfunny things in a funny way--Juggalos. It seems that the fans of Insane Clown Posse have become decidedly unfunny to law enforcement and the FBI has made some Foolish Ballistic Insinuations as a consequence.

Last fall, the FBI included Juggalos in their National Gang Assessment for 2011 (PDF). On pages 22 and 23, the FBI lists them under "non-traditional gangs," calling them "a loosely-organized hybrid gang." Some of the criminal activities carried out by ICP fans appear in this section, along with a photo of a Juggalo with a gun that the FBI took from the ATF (trigger warning for descriptions of violence).

At first, the inclusion of Juggalos in the FBI's list was mocked by Spencer Ackerman at Wired, who observed "The FBI has recently had difficulty distinguishing ordinary American Muslims from terrorists; now it appears it has a similar problem distinguishing teenage fads from criminal conspiracies." As recently as Thursday, the Village Voice posted that people thought the FBI report was an example of "another example of a federal agency looking foolish for its cultural ineptitude." That was until the U.S. Marshal Service issued a press release listing the fugitives added to New Mexico's Most Wanted.

Mark Anthony Carslon A.K.A. Mark Carlton is wanted on two felony warrants for failing to comply with the terms of probation both on underlying armed robbery cases. Carlson is a member of the Insane Clown Posse “Juggalo” gang. The “Juggalos” were recently classified as a gang by the Albuquerque Police Department Gang unit and it is believed that Carlson is still actively committing armed robberies in the Albuquerque Metro area.

Bolding from The Village Voice, who also reproduced Carlson's wanted poster, which listed his criminal affiliation as "Insane Clown Posse 'Juggalo'." Poster over the jump.

This declaration has caused the band and its fans all kinds of grief, as outlined in Vice (NSFW--what do you expect from a magazine called "Vice"?). If nothing else, Juggalos can be sentenced as gang members instead of ordinary criminals and the band's merchandise is no longer being sold at Hot Topic and other stores, who won't touch "gang apparel."

On Friday, ICP announced that they had had enough. The Village Voice reported:

Insane Clown Posse announced at the annual Gathering of the Juggalos "seminar," a veritable State of the Juggalo Union address given to "the heartbeat of the entire Juggalo world," that they were planning to sue the FBI in response.

The article also contains the text of the band's press release.

ICP and their label Psychopathic Records also launched a website, Juggalos Fight Back soliciting their fans for information about any legal troubles they may have suffered as a result of their fandom. Qualifying applicants will receive legal assistance provided by Psychopathic Records' law firm.

Stay tuned for the fallout to this unfunny.

Originally posted to unfunny_fandom on JournalFen. Crossposted to Crazy Eddie's Motie News, ontd_political on LiveJournal and Michigan Liberal. Originally crossposted to neonvincent on Dreamwidth. Comment here or there, whichever you prefer. http://neonvincent.dreamwidth.org/79464.html

Nablopomo for August: Sweet Week 1

Sun, 05 Aug 2012 06:53:22 GMT

What's this month's theme?

SWEET

That perfect bite of watermelon, that time when a reader left the perfect comment, a picture that a child drew for you: NaBloPoMo is celebrating the sweet things in life this month. In fact, NaBloPoMo is kicking off during a very sweet time of year: the annual BlogHer conference where 4500 people are coming together to meet up with friends and talk blogging. This is the perfect time to jump into daily blogging when the creative juices are running high.

Of course, we're going to have to talk about what qualities make a person be described as "sweet" as well as our favourite candies, the best dessert you ever had, and who is really made of sugar, spice and everything nice.
...
So start thinking about all of your favourite sweet things.

More at Nablopomo for August: Sweet on Crazy Eddie's Motie News, including some fanart of manatees as superheroes.

The rest of the week's posts:

Originally crossposted to neonvincent on Dreamwidth. Comment here or there, whichever you prefer. http://neonvincent.dreamwidth.org/79179.html

Nablopomo for July: Kids Week 5

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 01:13:49 GMT

And that's it for July's blogging. I've already started Nablopomo for August: Sweet. Originally crossposted to neonvincent on Dreamwidth. Comment here or there, whichever you prefer. http://neonvincent.dreamwidth.org/78939.html

Evidence that Paul Krugman responds to requests

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 04:27:42 GMT

Since Paul Krugman was the one who alerted me to Ted Cruz, I decided to return the favor by leaving this comment on his blog.

Speaking of paranoia striking shallow, do you remember Ted Cruz, who you wrote about in "First, they came for the golf courses"? He managed to survive the Texas senate primary at the end of May. He's in a runoff election for Kay Bailey Hutchinson's U.S. Senate seat in Texas today. Back in May, he lost by 10 percent. As of the most recent poll, he was ahead of his opponent David Dewhurst by 10 percent. The guy who thinks Agenda 21 is a U.N. conspiracy to take away "golf courses, grazing pastures, and paved roads" is likely to be the GOP nominee and therefore the favorite to win in November. He is, as I'm fond of saying one of the GOP's maniacs who are promising people that they can keep their cars, McMansions, and commutes this year. Care to use him to make a point about how crazy the Republican Party has become--again?

That was last night.

This morning, Krugman published the following entry on his blog.

Tee Party
First, they came for the golfers.

So the Republican nominee for Senate in Texas is a man who believes that there is a global plot, led by George Soros, to eliminate golf courses. Also, that states can nullify Acts of Congress.
Politics in the world’s greatest nation

Never let it be said that Dr. Krugman does not respond to reader requests.

Excerpted and modified from Nablopomo for August: Sweet on Crazy Eddie's Motie News.

Crossposted to teamkrugman.