Clown Car, part deux

So, 10 guys go to a funeral to meet up with this one woman who knew it was actually a business meeting... That's pretty much the encapsulation of last night's clownshow which was only too ready for punchline after punchline. The continued pontificating and breathless grasping at the MLK moment ("I have a dream... that someone might say something of actual substance so that we may measure the content of their character instead of CNN's constant trolling...") all came in utter contrast to the one person who talked in blunt terms and short sentences. That's why many people think Carly Fiorina "won" the "debate", which is like saying someone outran a bunch of toddlers to the juice box table where everyone still got one. Hooray?

Fiorina answers questions like she's in a boardroom, which is precisely what you want if you want someone to talk about basic facts. She's still evasive as hell when someone asks a direct policy question (it's way too early to establish positions that could be picked apart for their inadequacy) but she keeps it short, spares everyone the flowery prose, and makes her case. People appreciate that, especially when it's down the dais from the bloviating Trump and his ego which only barely share space between themselves, much less Dexter Bush and the Right Reverend Huckabee. That makes Fiorina come across as halfway intelligent, even if she wasn't already standing out as the only female clown on stage. And on matters of sex and sexism, she did have the best genuinely funny moment (as opposed to all of the unintentionally funny moments) when she responded to Trump's idiocy from the last debate with her simple line: "I think every woman in America knew exactly what Mr. Trump said." That was worth a Kelso:

Of course, as soon as she wandered off the rez and decided to try to impress us with her prose, she withered. Note the pseudo-closing statement (dressed up nicely by CNN with their softball about what their respective presidencies would look like (You mean other than The Handmaid's Tale?)) where she blathered on about her personal manifest destiny, the return to the glory of the City on the Hill, and yadda yadda yadda (Gotta include the Yiddish phrase for all the Israel references when people were talking about what their American presidency would look like...)

[Tangent: It's hilarious to note the omnipresence of said references to Israel in most GOP discussions of foreign policy as perhaps the one hot button they can still press to get a visceral, red meat response from the masses. Said masses don't really know shit about foreign issues other than "Foreigners are weak [French], out to steal our jobs [Mexican], communists [Europeans, in general], and crave American leadership." but you can name drop "Israel" into almost anything and immediately get the kneejerk that equates to "Spend billions on the military to protect pseduo-Christians from evil Muslims and prepare for the Second Coming!" That latter part is most important to people like Huckabee, who always fail to see the disconnect between supporting the militarists in Tel Aviv so that they may bring about their own damnation when only Christians are allowed into Heaven. /tangent]

Speaking of CNN and their softballs... Ugh. These things are a complete farce in the first place, even if we weren't watching in glee over just how many clowns will do a pratfall as they climb out of the car, but CNN's questions were brutally bad. I know they're ratings-conscious and are aware that a large segment of the audience is watching for entertainment and not because they'll even consider voting for one of these idiots, but could they at least give a nod to propriety? The vast majority of the questions were the equivalent of conversation on a middle school playground: "Hey! I heard he said X about you! What are you gonna do about it?!" All they're doing is continuing to feed the perception that "the media" (whoever the hell they are) is out to get the GOP/right-wing/Trump/America's hayseed population. Even if that perception is inevitable, at least try to show a little class.

A couple highlights:

Christie: "Don't prosecute these people after the crime is committed, intervene before the crime happens!" I know what his intent probably was, but given all the other 1984 trappings that hang over much of GOP discussions these days (including the oft-quoted "Strength is peace!"; Ignorance, therefore...) that was totally a Minority Report moment.

Huckabee: "Vaccinations are a part of big government!" Why, yes. Yes, they are. Most people don't complain about the eradication of things like polio.

Trump: "We're three trillion in debt!" followed by "We're not spending enough on our military!"

This, of course, is a perfect example of the disconnect between the embedded disdain for George and Dick's Excellent Iraqi Adventure walking hand-in-hand with the earnest shouts to go balls out in Syria, because that worked so well the last time. Your Republican candidates, America. Exxon's biggest nightmare is someone hooking up a power cable to Goldwater's grave because he's not gonna stop spinning anytime soon.

Brief thoughts about language

I’ve run across several little points of interest regarding language in recent weeks, much of which was based around the World Cup as the confluence of many different cultures and peoples. As most of those who know me will be glad to irritably point out, I’m a bit of a grammar marm (“unique” is an ultimate; you can no more be “kind of unique” than you can be “kind of pregnant”) and mildly concerned about the degradation of the English language (the one I know best) and communication, in general. It’s one of the supreme ironies (genuine) of life that the world’s greatest communication tool, the InterWebs, is also the thing that is most reducing the ability of the species to communicate, whether by the reduction of text to something approximating alpha-numeric Streetspeak or the echo chamber created by only frequenting information sources that agree with your worldview. But the occasional pitfalls in communication only really become prominent when trying to bridge the actual gap of language, as we saw in this year’s tournament.

Hulk fall!

 The Croatian team had basically outplayed the hosting Brazilians in the first match of the event until the referee made an atrociously bad call in the box and awarded a penalty kick to Brazil. The Croats immediately surrounded the Japanese official, protesting the call, to which he responded with a couple mumbles and hand signals. Why? Well, because FIFA, in all its brilliance, had somehow assigned a mono-lingual official to the opening display of the biggest sporting event in the world. He knew only Japanese, which none of the Croatian players knew. However, that wasn’t what upset them. What really got to them was that he didn’t know English because almost all of them were at least roughly fluent in that (as are many other officials in FIFA’s ranks…) English, as many world travelers are aware these days, has become the lingua franca of the age. Here’s where we try to wrap our minds around the idea of English being the target of an Italian term for “Frankish language”, a pidgin communication used around the eastern Mediterranean by the dominant Italian and Ottoman merchants in the 16^th century. Strangely enough, actual French (the descendants of the Franks) became the lingua franca of the 18^th and 19^th centuries before English began to dominate in the last 100 years because of the spread of American culture and hegemony.

Smażyć się w piekle?

That moment reminded me of the Euro championships two years before in Poland and Ukraine, where anti-Russian demonstrators would often appear outside the venues for the soccer matches with various banners like the “Anti-Putin League” written, obviously, in English since it was the surest way of communicating among Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, and the thousands of international visitors. What makes this reality odd to many of us is the concept of the Ugly American; that famously abrasive traveler who appears oblivious to local custom or communication except to believe that by speaking Tourist (loudly and slowly via Twoflower of Discworld fame), they’ll be able to communicate anything to anyone: “CAN… YOU… TELL… ME… WHERE… THE… LOOV-REH… IS?!” These days, he’d probably be right.

Of course, the spread of English has largely been conveyed not only by American economic dominance but also by American entertainment, including sports… making it even stranger that it would be the dominant vehicular language of the largest tournament of a sport that continues to have little traction in the US, relative to other major sports, and which many Americans actively reject as “un-American” (no accounting for taste or intelligence there.) But forms of American slang are also spreading.

If only this was the most obvious example.

Textspeak, adopted organically as a matter of convenience, continues to leak over into other electronic communications, such that many businesses are expressly forbidding it in any kind of official communication attempt (like, say, a job application.) But it’s interesting to note that the lingo common to much of that new style was adopted much earlier by such things as the TL;DR exercise or simple typos.

An example of the former case is online forum communications, where anything past a hundred words is automatically dismissed by much of the Ritalin-prescribed populace as simply too much information to be absorbed. Thus, Too Long; Didn’t Read prefixing a one or two sentence condensation of the post that, of course, removes any and all nuance and context. The latter case centers on frequent typos. Perhaps the best known is that of “pwned.” The term first arose on the forum for Blizzard Entertainment’s Starcraft game and was an expression for completely dominating one’s opponent (originally “owned”.) There’s fairly widespread dispute as to whether the first use of the term was a typo or was the mistaken approximation to the intended term by the game’s vast Korean audience. I trend toward believing the former but the latter would add a certain texture to the story that speaks even more about the language difficulties and transformations alluded to above.

In ur base, killin ur d00dz...

Most outside the gaming world have only a cursory experience with terms like “pwned”. In other words, they know that kids and geeks use it, which is similar to many other expressions and shorthands that often separate generations and which become outdated with the accession of a new cultural overlay. With the increased prevalence of technology and the tendency of people of all ages to use things like textspeak, one wonders if we’re looking at a transformation of the vehicular language from English to a pidgin form of English even among English speakers.

Incidentally, the presence of the lingua franca wasn’t the only language issue that cropped up during the World Cup. The famously welcoming hosts, who speak Portuguese unlike every other nation on their continent, were reportedly pretty testy about hearing Spanish spoken around the venues; that being the language of two of the most significant challengers to their presumed victory. Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, for NPR, was castigated by listeners for not only speaking Portuguese with a Spanish accent but also supposedly speaking Spanish with an Argentinian accent (she claims otherwise), since Argentina was the most threatening of those potential challengers. The strange interplay among cultures wasn’t solely the province of the fans, either, as otherwise brilliant commentator, Ian Darke, attempted to make a point about fans in the stadium during the US-Portugal match perhaps favoring the latter because of a shared culture and language… neglecting to remember that Brazil was a Portuguese colony which fought a fairly ferocious war of independence to remove that status. That said, the US did the same and you’ll find a lot of casual fans favoring the English national team and the Premier League because them people look like us and talk like us…

Now I begin to wonder how we could increase the spread of Braille with accents. If you’re reading in Boston, do you replace all of the Rs with Ahs?

Coke and a smile, people

So, one of the resident conservative iconoclasts put this on the board today in response to Coke's ad during the Super Bowl:

You know what? I actually think the adverse reaction (which seems to have been pretty minimal) is more than anything else a case of people being annoyed at being told what to think.
Posted on February 3, 2014 
 
There are a lot of social signals that one has to conform to certain ideals. Diversity is good. Gay people deserve equal treatment. Bullying is bad. The rich don't pay their fair share. Poor people deserve a leg up. Prejudice is bad. Burning carbon is bad.

I think people at some point just resent being "herded" by broad, mass media social signals into viewpoints that are selected to be good by some collective agreement by some opinion makers. I think it is actually okay for some people to think, yes, America is the product of immigration, and is an example of diverse people from diverse cultures with diverse languages forming a new society--and continually adding diversity through immigration. But a cherished paean to America should preferably be sung in America's language--which necessarily is English even if plenty of Americans speak a different language as their first language.

In this case, I think I find the reaction to the reaction (calling people neanderthals etc.) more troubling than the reaction.

(Oh, and sometimes bullying is good. Some people deserve to have their ass kicked. And carbon energy has been a great boon to people in general, and has really improved the quality of the lives of billions of people. The doctrinaire attitude on some topics is sometimes worth questioning.)

There's so much ammunition there that it almost brought me to the point of immobility... but nah. I did sit there for a moment trying to decide whether it was more disingenuous or fatuous (definitely something with an "ous") but, in the end, it's like playing Tee ball.

The central theme is the usual pseudo-Libertarian horseshit that essentially states that people who aren't tolerant of intolerance are hypocrites. Coke, instead of presenting the song "America the Beautiful" in its proper language of English (how offended must the English be that their language has been abducted by idiots?), has done all independent thinkers (read: racists, super-patriots... oh, and idiots) a disservice by encouraging the social mores that state that diversity and respect for cultures and languages that are not explicitly whitebread 'Murrican are, in fact, a good thing.

First off, it certainly is trying to "tell you what to think." It's an advertisement. It's telling you to think about buying Coke. That's how they do. But you're saying the rest of society is telling you how to think about non-whites and gays and the environments and bullies? Who's telling you? The people that object to all of that anti-social behavior? Yeah. Life is rough that way. Most decent people will tell you that it shouldn't matter what color someone is or what language they speak (aka "Diversity is good.") And they'll tell you that gay people should be treated equally since they're, you know... people; that treating people poorly ("Bullying") is wrong; that poor people could use your help; that prejudice is bad... What intelligent person doesn't think those things? Certainly is a helluva lot easier to get along with your neighbors if you don't hold preconceptions about them before you even get to know them. Fer reals. It's, like, been proved and stuff.

Secondly, what could honestly be so offensive about singing a song in another language? Would you shout down a chorus in France if they dared to sing "America the Beautiful"? Are you saying that people who can't speak English aren't allowed to sing that song about their home (because that's quite a few residents of this nation)? I mean, that's what these people are saying:

No wonder I am a Pepsi man. #boycottcoke
— CUZ_55 (@Cuz_55) February 3, 2014

You know what's NOT American? America the Beautiful in a million languages #boycottcoke
— John (@JRaw1285) February 3, 2014

I love diversity and what not, but the Super Bowl is an AMERICAN tradition. #boycottcoke
— Macy (@Macy_Lewis) February 3, 2014

Last time I checked this is America and we sing patriotic songs the way they're written #boycottcoke
— josh (@joshmunti) February 3, 2014

You can't sing an American song in another language! #boycottcoke
— spencinator (@taylorspencer3) February 3, 2014

The most unamerican coke commercial ever. National anthem in non English #boycottcoke
— K C (@TheBoyCrispy) February 3, 2014

(H/T Midtown blogger for the list.) I bet you're really discouraged that you didn't hop on Twitter last night and number yourself among Mensa candidates like that. Such a lost opportunity. I especially like the last guy, since Coke has not only told him what to think but drinking too much of that crap has clearly corrupted his memory of his own national anthem.

What a number of people likely failed to remember is that Coke was bouncing off of their own 40-year legacy of having produced this commercial:

which explicitly and implicitly called for unity and goodwill among races and nations (albeit from the foremost front for the CIA in destabilizing and disrupting many of them...) Given that and the current rather divided status of these United States, what message would you have preferred to hear? "America is beautiful as long as it's sung by and filled with white, hetero, sometime bullies who don't want to be reminded that they're racist, homophobic assholes?" I mean, I'm sure there's a song out there like that but probably not from any composer this side of the Aryan Nation.

Now, of course, I'm being facetious (another "ous") because there's no way you'd (publicly) admit to thinking that because it would be stupid and make you look and sound every inch the Neanderthal that those fools did on Twitter last night. If one is so weak-willed as to object to being "told how to think" by a commercial or is objecting to the broad-based message of inclusion despite difference that said commercial is presenting then, yeah, I think you deserve every epithet being tossed your way, especially if you're willing to do so in a public forum like Twitter.

And, again, suggesting that people be tolerant of your obnoxious attitudes for fear of hypocrisy is perhaps the most asinine idea put forth in that post. Contradiction is not intelligent refutation (thank you, Michael Palin.) What you see as heavy-handed social engineering, the rest of us see as simple common sense. There's all kinds of people. Getting along with them should be the first order of the day, every day.

The art of letters

I'm a technological enthusiast. While not as quite as much a gadget-freak as my friend, Chris (who quickly obtains the latest phone/tablet/computer or other such enhancement to something he frequently already owns), I'm fond of moving forward, as it were. One of the ways we've all moved forward is in forms of communication, such as the one I'm using here. The US Postal Service, once the envy of the world, is now crumbling under this change. Who needs to write letters when one can email or text or blog or Skype or Vine or Tweet or whatever other method will emerge in the coming years? (Yes, olfactory communication (aka Smell-o-vision) is still on the minds of some people...)

I'm well into a novel at the moment by one of my favorite writers, Neal Stephenson. He actually published it a few years ago and I've had it sitting in my "to read" pile until last week. It's a very complex tale about communication, language, knowledge, and the roots of ideas and how they're transmitted. At one point, the lead character inquires if there will be some way to send a letter while they're traveling. His companion asks if he's writing "to a girl" and he admits that he is. When he stammers about what he should say, since their travel is taking him away from the woman in question, he's told that he shouldn't bother with the detail of what he's doing and where he's going. Instead, he should just tell her what he feels for her. Even in the fairly advanced setting of the novel, these people are in a situation where he's actually going to have to write a letter with a pen and a pad of paper. But that is, of course, the best way to pursue the advice that he's been given.

Modern communications can be dismissed easily. It takes seconds to text and, if one receives it, a response takes seconds, as well. Communication is constant and therefore ephemeral. While it's certainly more convenient and can carry its own level of intensity because it's everpresent and easily conducted, I think it tends to lose the gravitas that a handwritten letter once held because the latter could easily take hours to write and then days or weeks or even months to reach its destination. The effort in comparison to the modern 2-minute Gmail experience is different by multiple orders of magnitude. When one sat down to convey a message of importance, to let someone separated by miles or oceans know one's most heartfelt thoughts, it had to be conveyed with a certain level of ferocity and elaboration. Ideas had to be spelled out at length, both as a way to convey the feeling and to demonstrate its intensity. No emoticons or icons or hashtags could be used to elaborate upon (or cover up) the emotions involved. Only words.

Did she know that a certain scent reminded you of her and that moment put a twist into your gut until it passed? If not, you'd have to spell it out (quite literally) and she would only know weeks from now, when that moment was distant (until it happened again.) Did she know that you watched the sunset because it brought forth a memory of the sun shining through her hair as she looked back at you with an affection that you didn't know existed in the world to that point? You'd have to tell her and hope that perhaps she remembered the same moment. That world wasn't captured in rapid-fire moments of thumb-typed affirmations that soon get lost in the flurry of other signals, real and imagined. It had to be crafted over time and longed for with an energy that could either keep one moving through the days or make them agony until that separation was ended.

I'm not trying to say that the proliferation of communication and its ease have made relationships less passionate or that modern forms can't be used to convey those same ideas. But there's a difference. My friend, Leca, mentioned a text to me a few months ago that she'd gotten from her (now) husband, Kevin. It mentioned that she had looked especially beautiful that morning as she'd left for work. A mutual friend of ours had an immediate reaction: "Awwww. He's trying to get some." Maybe that's true or maybe he was being absolutely genuine with this thoughts. But if one had to set pen to paper and wait even just days for a response, would it be interpreted so casually or would it carry the weight of those supposedly more "genuine" impressions?

Of course, every time I try to think about writing something like that, my words veer into the archaic and Shakespearean, which makes it sound even less "genuine" than a simple text. The other advantage of this change in communication habits and styles is that my handwriting is god-awful, so I'm not sure anyone that I wrote to with a pen would be able to read it, outdated language or no. But I wonder if those ideas and gestures aren't being muted by the constant stream of contact we currently swim in and if it behooves us to take more time with matters that used to require strength simply to write down.

The nail ladies and their lack of understanding

This is brilliant.

New York’s rich and super-rich convened in the Hamptons on Sunday for a trio of fundraisers for Mitt Romney, expected to bring in as much as $4 million. And the well-heeled donors did little to avoid looking like, well, moneyed attendees paying for exclusive access to the Republican candidate.

While a group of Occupy Wall Street protesters assembled in the area, the Porsches, Range Rovers and BMWs streamed in. Here are some of the best quotes from the events.
A gem from the Los Angeles Times:

A New York City donor a few cars back, who also would not give her name, said Romney needed to do a better job connecting. “I don’t think the common person is getting it,” she said from the passenger seat of a Range Rover stamped with East Hampton beach permits. “Nobody understands why Obama is hurting them. “We’ve got the message,” she added. “But my college kid, the baby sitters, the nails ladies — everybody who’s got the right to vote — they don’t understand what’s going on. I just think if you’re lower income — one, you’re not as educated, two, they don’t understand how it works, they don’t understand how the systems work, they don’t understand the impact.”

Peter Cohen, the former Shearson Lehman Bros. chief, told the Associated Press — while chewing on a cigar — that Romney is a “plain-talking guy.”
Ted Conklin, who owns the American Hotel in Sag Harbor, told the New York Times that Obama is a “socialist.”
“His idea is find a problem that doesn’t exist and get government to intervene,” Conklin added, his wife, Carol Simmons, nodding beside him in their gold Mercedes.
But wait, there’s more. From the Times:

Ms. Simmons paused to highlight what she said was her husband’s generous spirit: “Tell them who’s on your yacht this weekend! Tell him!” Over Mr. Conklin’s objections, Ms. Simmons disclosed that a major executive from Miramax, the movie company, was on the 75-foot yacht, because, she said, there were no rooms left at the hotel.

 It's not like most Obama fundraisers would be any different in terms of attitudes and ignorance, but they're typically smart enough to keep their mouths shut.

Market-driven idiocy

So, I came across this interesting article from Al Jazeera, which goes into some detail about "peak oil" possibilities and the suspicion that most OPEC members have been drastically overstating their reserves in order to expand their sale quotas. Cue Capt. Louis Renault...

I posted it on the board because someone had earlier asked about the current jump in oil prices. The usual cavalcade of responses followed: some grim agreement, some questions, and the usual market-driven refutations about the limited knowledge of so-called "scientists" to understand how a "profit-making" venture really works.

To wit:

If it was more profitable to hold resources than sell them, oil companies would not hesitate to do that. So really, this article asserts that it understands the oil business better than the oil companies. I'll believe that when I see it.

 No. That's not what it's saying. It's saying that oil, the very cornerstone of modern civilization, the substance that is used (or the byproducts of which are used) for everything from energy (oil, gasoline, kerosene, jet fuel) to lubricants to asphalt to plastics to resins to artificial fibers (nylon) to solvents will soon become harder to obtain and, thus, more expensive... which makes everything produced from it more expensive and/or more difficult to obtain. Understanding the oil business has little relevance to anything if there's less (or no) oil to be had.

If it was clear that supply really will be restricted, people would be acting accordingly. If you really believe what you say, you should research the oil companies with the highest proven reserves and buy their stock, because you believe those reserves are undervalued at current prices.

 OK. See, first off, I'm not saying anything. I'm passing along what Al Jazeera and geologists, government agencies, and the US Department of Defense(!) have all been saying for some time now: there's a problem a'comin' and it has enormous implications for society as a whole, the preparation for which has exactly zero to do with sticking one's head in the sand and suggesting that short-term profit anticipation would have reacted by now to a long-term problem (which is ridiculous even from a market-based approach.) I loved the suggestion that I should invest for the long-term, though. Forethought! Or maybe...

The market's not perfect. But least it's informed. They have engineers working the fields. They have an exploration and planning process. They are thinking about replacing supplies as they are used. If the market had a reasonable basis for believing that supply will fall substantially, the market would react in anticipation, just as it has reacted to the threat of war in the Middle East.

This makes me wonder about the breezy conclusion in the article that we know supply is going to plummet. At a minimum, that conclusion is not self-evident to market participants, no matter the degree to which it is an article of faith in much of the environmentalist community.

 Hm. How to put this simply...? Ah. Got it. Market no matter if oil no there no more. I realize there were two polysyllabic words in there but one has to make allowances when dealing with a complex topic.

To the market devotee (especially the "free" market devotee), everything is defined by short-term profits. To expect traders and their true believers to think beyond, say, tomorrow is folly. Their self-assured position that the unfettered market will react perfectly and rationally to all available information and, furthermore, convey that information in a perfect and rational way to all of society is absolute. This is Adam Smith's oft-misinterpreted "invisible hand" phrase pushed to the Nth degree. This is economics as science putting all lesser sciences (like, say, geology) to shame.  Except that economics isn't a science. It's a loosely understood set of supposed rules that depends largely on external factors that often can't be controlled. Like humans, most of whom are idiots and subject to whim and lack of information or the wisdom to know how to use it if they had it. Or, even more important in this case, greed.

Even better is the assertion that the market would react appropriately to an anticipation of lack of supply when the article is based on the idea that the producers of said supply are lying about that very issue and making profits based on that lie. If the market can only function perfectly with perfect information (something the aforementioned Smith mentions repeatedly and which is studiously ignored by most of his presumed disciples), then it can't react to the problem.

But that's OK because "They are thinking about replacing supplies as they are used." See, despite the fact that oil is a finite resource, the smart engineers and geologists that work for the oil companies are already thinking about ways to make it sustainable. The market clearly hasn't reacted, so it must be so. Paraffin candles for everyone!

Outside agitators

I've been in a couple near-riots. The first was in 1989. Michigan had just won the national championship in basketball and the students (of which I was one) erupted on to the streets of Ann Arbor in a frenzy of celebration. As with most large gatherings that involve a) sports b) victory and c) alcohol, the cheers and hugs and dances soon turned to collapsed awnings, torn down street signs, and broken windows. In their rush to outdo each other as to whom can CELEBRATE HARDER, destruction became easier than doing a better dance. The university's response was to declare all such destruction to be the work of "outside agitators" and not their highly intelligent and presumably civil-to-a-fault student body. (Strangely, on a trip to a town of 60 people on the north end of Hawaii's big island 12 years later, I encountered someone whose only visit to Ann Arbor had been that very night, as he attended a concert at Hill Auditorium and later said: "And I walked out into the midst of a riot." I responded: "Yeah! I was in that riot!" Small world...)

The other was a few years later when I went to see the fireworks over the Detroit river with a couple friends. It had been one of those deathly humid July nights and something, somewhere, sparked a bunch of the locals to start intimidating, then threatening, and then assaulting and robbing the wealthier folks who had come down from Oakland County to see the show. By the time we were leaving, there were a dozen melees erupting all over Jefferson, Washington, Griswold, and Woodward and crowds of people naturally screaming and fleeing the ruckus. The city's assessment? "Outside agitators"... until someone pointed out that most of the young men arrested were, in fact, residents of the city. Then they became "hardened criminals."

I had first-hand exposure to the perpetrators in both incidents. The first group were students. Period. They were drunk and they decided to party to the limit, as it were. The second group were no more "hardened criminals" than my grandmother, unless average high school kids in Polo shirts had become the most fearsome element of society.

As I'm sure you've all seen, London and other communities are on fire:

Events were triggered by police shooting an unarmed man as they attempted to make an arrest last Thursday. The man, Mark Duggan, happens to be black. A candlelight vigil two days later soon erupted in the first wave of violence and it's been proceeding since then. PM David Cameron's and Home Secretary Theresa May's responses: "a certain element", "outside agitators", "hardened criminals." It's like training parrots: One says it, then the others follow.

In addition, they mentioned "more robust police action", "prosecuting to the limits of the law", and general harsh justice and recrimination all around. What they didn't stop to do was question why this much unrest amongst the typically staid British populace might be taking place with no Premier League win to be seen. Likewise on this side of the pond, only a few people have brought up the diverse array of motivations, any or all of which might be responsible for the outbreak: youth unemployment, racial tensions, police brutality, austerity measures. That's a pretty toxic combination of economic and social conditions that would strain most societies to a potential breaking point (unless they're distracted by the latest episode of Toddlers and Tiaras like, you know, Americans.) And yet London's response is typical British (and American) Empire: Control and punish.

Certainly, some swift action has to be taken to contain a situation that could easily boil out of control, if it hasn't already. And, of course, the stiff upper lip must always be displayed to reassure the rest of the obedient population that reacting to the government's draconian treatment of its non-wealthy citizens must not be tolerated. Can't go giving anyone any ideas or tolerating any new ones, for that matter. Like telling schoolchildren that they can't bring a nail clipper to class because of a "zero tolerance" policy, it's simply inconceivable to those in charge, especially annoyed as they are from having been dragged home from their Mediterranean vacations, that wielding the hammer even harder might be precisely the wrong thing to do. After all, if the trigger event for this was police brutality (only exacerbating the bad economic straits that many find themselves in), what happens when Cameron's order for a "more robust response" is taken seriously by the police on the ground?

As is the situation with most riots, the eruption of same in lower-class or middle-class neighborhoods has only engendered the disgust and enmity of the people suffering many of the same problems (leaving the racial issue aside, for the moment.) As Jello always said: "Tomorrow you're homeless. Tonight it's a blast!" That's not exactly the best way to effect social change, but some outbursts can't necessarily be controlled. All the same, just as in politics, making enemies of those who might otherwise be your allies and support you is, in a word, stupid. But I don't think anyone's ever seen an intelligent riot.

If I had my way, I wouldn't necessarily try to control it but, rather, direct it. No sense in tearing up your own community when the problem is the rather ritzier locales elsewhere, where the people who own your community actually live. It's like the old Q&A: Q- Why rob banks? A- That's where the money is. If you're going to cause general mayhem, you might as well do it where the money is. Nothing gets the state hopping faster than threatening the paymasters.

Am I talking about class war again? Tsk, tsk, old boy.

"Are you happy?"

Said question was put to me a while back by a friend. He's not a close friend, so it's not a topic that I would generally venture into with him. I don't mind communicating personal things to people, but this is a topic that could take some time and I'd be concerned about being soporific. The other half of that assessment is, yes, there are things that I will only talk about with a select few.

The topic came up because I had mentioned to him that a couple people I knew seemed genuinely happy in recent times. They had gotten over some significant hurdles and had reached that point of almost-nirvana; the "life is good/beautiful/perfect" moment. He said he'd known moments like that and then turned the question back to me.

"Are you happy?"

It struck me then that I'm not sure what that means anymore.

It's been so long since I've had one of those "life is good" moments; wherein I'd been content with the route my life was taking, my immediate surroundings, whom I was with, what I was doing, and could genuinely appreciate the positive side of almost everything, that I honestly don't know what it feels like any longer. I can't remember what it felt like in the past. I'm slowly beginning to question whether I've ever been there. Certainly, there are always the self-pitying reflections when times are difficult (as they are now, somewhat), when one becomes convinced that there's no way out of the turmoil and wonders if there ever truly was. There are sincere moments of regret for all of the woulda, coulda, shoulda moments that might have shifted the course just enough to bring at least some joy into the otherwise presumably bleak and Road-like outlook. One's perception is always colored by what's happening right now, so now would probably not be the most advisable time to sit back and wonder if happiness had ever truly been present. It certainly doesn't feel that way now, so how can memories have ever been better? But perhaps I'm thinking too much in the realm of absolutes.

Are there good times? Absolutely. I had a pretty good time last night, in fact. It's easy to be distracted from the overarching sensation by friends and experiences. Copious amounts of alcohol don't hurt, either. Life is not solely a path of misery and never has been. If ever that situation comes about, one can usually be sure that life is either going to take a dramatic change quite soon or be finished equally quickly. I can remember many good moments from the past 20 years. What I can't remember is that feeling of contentment and surety that says "life is good."

My answer to him was: "Probably not." (Evasive much?) So, he turned it back again: "What would make you happy?"

That stumped me for a bit. Again, I feel like I'm operating at a loss here because the sensation is seemingly beyond me. But I could think of several things that would make me happier and I listed off a few and quickly remembered that all of them are circumstances that are either largely beyond my control or situations in which my vote is not the only one that counts. Despite earnest lifetime effort, I cannot simply control all of the people around me and get them to shut up and do what I tell them to do. In a couple scenarios, doing so would at least mildly defeat the purpose, anyway.

He pointed out one scenario and said: "Why don't you pursue that if it would make you happier?"

Two reasons: 1) That was one of those that isn't solely up to me. If there were something out there that didn't resemble fly fishing from a B-52 (for all you non-Cold War kids: here), I surely would have attempted it by now. 2) Since it's not just up to me, it necessarily involves the happiness of people other than me. Diminishing someone else's in favor of mine is something that I may never be able to do.

My parents essentially instilled in me the idea that my personal happiness was secondary to all else. If someone else wanted to do something (usually them) that impinged on my life, then I was simply required to suck it up and accept it. It's a perspective that I still employ on a regular basis in my relationships with others. It's more important to me that my friends are happy than that I am so, as I've vaguely averred to before. It's also contrary to MA's approach, in which the nature of Stoicism is defined by not subsuming oneself in "destructive" emotions, but instead working through everything with reason. Reason, of course, can't account for everything and there's certainly room to question whether the human condition can survive a "pure" Stoic approach in the same way that aspirational Buddhism almost demands a transcendence beyond the consciousness of the human state. There's not really a classical philosophical approach to the idea of dispensing with "constructive" emotions except, perhaps, nihilism, but one wonders if that's a proper summation of the inability to feel genuine happiness any longer.

As noted, this isn't a topic of which I would go into great detail with most people, largely because I'd have to explain a lot of it and/or not be certain that the imposed upon would understand what the hell I was saying in the first place without jumping to any number of conclusions that would invariably be wrong and/or annoying. In my life, I think I've come across all of three people who could always seem to understand what I was saying as I was saying it. That's an incredibly comforting thing. The first is someone whom I haven't seen in almost 20 years and haven't talked to in about half that time. The second is someone that I barely talk to anymore, as she's enormously involved in her own life (as she probably should be.) The third is someone that has become close relatively recently and I still hesitate to impinge (that word again...) upon her because, once again, why douse someone else's day (and presumed happiness) with my own dire proclamations? "Let every action aim solely at the common good..."

So, I suppose I occasionally ramble on about these topics here so that people can choose when to stop while I attempt to gain some perspective on them alone. Effective? I don't know yet.

Two sides to everyone?

I was in Philadelphia a few years ago for a national Green meeting. It was 2002 and the party was rolling along at that point, preparing for the upcoming midterm elections and generally feeling pretty positive about where we were. It was an interesting collection of communication experiences for me, most of them positive.

There had been some turmoil within the California Greens concerning some supposedly misplaced funds and procedural irregularities. Many of them felt that it was going to tear our largest state party apart. But that's the kind of melodrama that many political activists like to wield in order to justify themselves or their actions. I don't think it was quite that serious, but it was sufficiently distracting to the national party that they put together a committee (my upcoming book: Life by Committee or Why Suicide is an Acceptable Alternative) to try to sort it out before the internecine warfare in California became the only topic ever raised on the national lists. I was on said committee with a couple other non-California Greens and one person that the GPCA insisted be present in order to have their voice in the middle of things.

When we sat down and went over what seemed to be the facts and reviewed communications both on the national and California lists, we came to the easy conclusion that most of the trouble was caused by personal animosity and had little to do with any genuine crimes with one exception wherein the state party violated its own bylaws, perhaps inadvertently. The role of the one California Green on the committee was simply to object to the casual dismissal of the "crisis" that the rest of us found to be plainly evident if everyone involved would just invest in a Valium or two. I gave the report to the national committee meeting in Philly and was immediately lauded for my efforts afterward by many people. I was baffled. We really hadn't done that much and the conclusion we came to didn't smooth over any of the hurt feelings. It simply exposed them. Perhaps that was sufficient, but it seemed like a pretty foregone conclusion to me. My profile as a "communicator" within the party skyrocketed after that for an effort that I found to be pretty trivial and over a matter that was equally trivial.

What that spotlighted for me, though, was the seeming inability of many people, even those within a small group of like-minded individuals, to simply talk to each other; to relate to one another on terms that they both understand. Both sides of that issue came into it with a predisposed attitude toward the other side and refused to abandon it, even when confronted with the facts. It took complete outsiders to get them to cease fire. This is a phenomenon extant in many situations throughout history, both large and small, national and personal, and I've always found it to be mildly irritating that people can't come to the obvious conclusion without someone, indeed, pointing out the obvious.

A different situation arose a couple days into the meeting when I, my wife, and a couple friends decided to grab dinner some distance from the hotel. We hopped into a cab out front, the three of them in the back, and me in the front. Our driver asked what we were doing in town and I told him and immediately struck up a conversation with him about politics, the Eagles, and life in the city, in general. We got to our destination and my wife mentioned to me that all three women in the back had sat there and kind of marveled at my ability to get into an easy discussion with someone I'd met 10 seconds ago. I did my Leonard Nimoy thing (arching my eyebrows: "Plainly not logical, Captain.") and wondered: Why? Because I'd just met him? Because he was black (whereas all of us were and are white)? Because he clearly had no idea what the Green party was but I could talk to him about the NFL? Some combination of those?

He was an average guy driving a car around town who felt like doing something other than driving, so he talked to me. And I talked to him because he was talking to me. That's what people do... or would do if they weren't taught to suspect and fear each other. It's really not that difficult but a lot of people shy away from it or assume that people won't want to communicate with them. What makes this phenomenon even more ludicrous is that we're currently enmeshed in the greatest communication tool ever created: these here Interwebs. People communicate, in the strictest sense, probably more now than they ever have before and on more widely varying topics. But people also use the shield of anonymity provided by the Internet to display opinions that they would never release in public. Does that make them less likely to communicate with their neighbors and casual acquaintances because they can't "be themselves"? Or is their Internet personality the Hyde to their Jekyll, rather than the converse?

When I talked to some of the California Greens about their troubles in Philadelphia, they were almost all reasonable and cooperative people. But on the national list (that tool we all used to coordinate between the states), many of them were fire-breathers. Was that sociable cabbie I talked to on the way to dinner a raving lunatic on ESPN's Eagles message board? Or was he always himself? Was I lauded as a problem-solver because I refused to dance around anything? I've been told many times that my tendency to be... direct is problematic. But that's what helped solve the CA issue.

I'll be coming back to this.

"What we've got here is failure to communicate."

I'm not a real fan of 60s-era films. Cool Hand Luke is one of the few exceptions (the title quote is verbatim, incidentally.) I was once very fond of a character I created for a comic series for our studio that I named Cool Hand Luke. I always wondered if we would have been sued for copyright infringement or if I could have skirted the edge of fair use on that one, since he wouldn't have been the title character of the book.

But I'm not really talking about films or comics today. I'd rather talk about guns ("Lots of guns."), particularly the ease of access to guns like the Glock that one Jared Lee Loughner used this morning in an attempt to assassinate Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. A cursory view of Loughner's Youtube channel reveals someone obsessed with currency, the monolithic power behind it, and his belief that the vast majority of Americans lacked grammar skills in some way. He's correct about the latter, but not exactly in the fashion over which he seems so obsessed. And, yet, someone this unstable had easy access to a powerful handgun with a 30-shot clip; the use of which enabled him to kill 6 people and wound 12 others in seconds.

Am I a believer in the right to own firearms? That's a very difficult question for me. When I was with the Greens, I believed in what they state are their Four Pillars: ecological wisdom, grassroots democracy, social justice, and non-violence. Those four ideals are supposed to be the underpinning of everything that the Green Party puts forth as policy. The US Green Party, being Americans, expanded those 4 into a superfluous 10 so that they could be sure that the public would be more confused come election time while feeling self-satisfied about their own philosophical acumen. But the original four are still the bedrock for Greens around the world and, indeed, American Greens, as well. Everyone had their little shades of gray (chartreuse?) for each of them and everyone had different personal emphases. The majority of the American political audience views the Greens as "tree-huggers"; environmentalists, by and large. But there were many of us who focused more often on the "social justice" pillar. We were among those that were occasionally termed "Watermelon Greens" inside the party, because we were supposedly green on the outside but red (aka Marxist) on the inside. And then there was an even smaller segment who occasionally struggled, at least internally, with the whole "non-violence" thing.

None of us were foolish enough to believe in the idea of beginning an armed insurrection against the government (at least, not yet...) While Jim Morrison famously said: "They got the guns, but we got the numbers.", modern American society is too tightly controlled to make that a viable option, even with the best of intentions. This fact goes all the way back to Shays' Rebellion (look it up.) But is it wise to have the option at least present, however difficult, in this malfunctioning charade that we accuse of being democracy? When we look back at history, there are very few instances where violence was not necessary for significant social change. However, we see the downside of having said option left open every day: easy access to extremely powerful weapons by people who should be nowhere near such things.

People are stupid. People are also violent. Giving people an easy way to express that baser nature in the name of a 200-year-old screed referring to organized militias is an expression of philosophical stupidity that has few parallels in human history. Loughner's video screeds show someone outraged over the inability of the general public to communicate in what he considers an acceptable form. As someone who shares that belief in a less homicidal manner, it's funny (not funny like a clown) to see someone else so concerned about failure of communication in modern society. While I tend to think that it leaves people largely passive, confused, and distracted as only those who own this nation would like to see, there are times when it becomes less passive and a lot more destructive. And these are the people who have access to an arsenal that puts the armed forces of many other nations in the world to shame.

There was a great moment in a series of 1980s-90s science fiction collections known as the Man-Kzin Wars. The series itself was about man's encounter with an alien species of cat-people (the Kzinti) even more violent than himself. Dean Ing wrote a couple stories for the first two collections called "Cathouse". It was about a man who had been captured by the Kzinti and dropped onto a kind of laboratory world that contained prehistoric Kzinti and prehistoric humans; both Neanderthals and early Homo Sapiens. There's never been a clear understanding as to why the branch known as Neanderthal disappeared and the branch that eventually evolved into current humans survived. Ing's conjecture was that Neanderthals were telepathic. They could read the thoughts and emotions of those around them, which made them extremely empathetic and, consequently, passive (also, very interested in free love; a kind of early Flower Children, as it were.) Early Man lacked these abilities and, thus, denied instinctive communication, responded to situations of confusion and change with the still-current instinctive response: fear and violence. Thus, early Man exterminated the Neanderthals because the latter kept trying to understand the former, who knew only to kill what it refused to understand.

Thus, we come to Loughner. Was it because the surrounding public wasn't empathetic enough to his concerns that he responded with a shooting spree? Or was it simply because he was so off-kilter in the first place and no one would have been able to understand him, telepath or no? Regardless, is it sensible of modern society (oxymoron warning...) to allow a situation that enables apparent psychopaths to mow down people at random (and, apparently, specific in Giffords' case) before anyone can even think of stopping them? By the same token, assuming that there does come a day when the bloody revolution is needed to effect change that both Jefferson and Trotsky spoke of in different ways, do we close off the only avenue that may enable said revolution to at least get started, if not necessarily succeed? Obviously, once the violence begins, communication is over. Thus, I'm aware of the hypocrisy of complaining about the lack of effective communication and then suggesting that, at some point, that massive civilian arsenal may actually be necessary. In that way, I sound like Loughner. What separates me from him is the lack of desire to actually mow people down in the streets and my further lack of interest in listening to insipid ex-governors of Alaska.

In the end, I suppose I come down on the side of needing to get the weapons off of the streets. Tragedies like today are simply too frequent and people are, as always, too stupid to be allowed to handle weapons that are that powerful (what does that say about our armed forces? Yeah. I'll get there.) But there's that niggling little sensation at the back of my mind that says: There will come a day... I'm certainly not looking forward to it.

Don't waste my time (or yours)

There's a certain level of stupidity extant in political/social/societal thought these days that manifests itself in a form of single-mindedness: if you are not with me, you're against me. One finds it in comparisons of Republicans and Democrats (as laughable and contemptible as that is...), "capitalists" and "socialists", Mac users and Windows users (and the everpresent Linux fringe), and the bowl system vs. the playoffs. The concept of finding common ground is a dead one and compromise is seen as the territory of that person not strong enough or smart enough to get what he wants (or should want, if he knew what was good for him.)

Now, when I say "compromise", I'm not suggesting the same route as exhibited by our current chief executive. You see, I, too, am a "sanctimonious purist" in the eyes of the Oval Office. Compromise does not imply capitulation. Standing up for oneself and one's sanity is a natural motivation. One can still live a principled life even if one favors the philosophy of a Life Without Principle (Thoreau; look it up.) But there are limits to all things and those limits are met long before one reaches the current of effluent that passes for public discourse these days. But this is a good example of how we've gotten to the point where the idea of something new and different is derided as unworkable before it's even considered:

A friend pointed me toward a discussion about the nascent social network, Diaspora. As with so many things on the Web these days, the network is being constructed as an open-source alternative to the Facebook monolith. The main topic of this discussion was how Diaspora was going to employ a blank text box for gender, so that people were not restricted to the commonly-accepted "male" and "female". Of course, what the wizards behind this idea didn't realize is that they'd just placed an enormous hurdle in front of the code writers for any kind of interactive tool that requires the use of pronouns. The English language employs three kinds: male, female, and neuter, with the latter not normally used to refer to people. So now they were forcing the code to properly interpret what could be a panoply of possible terms used to refer to someone of their own specification of being. Someone who brought up this sizable sticking point was immediately fire-bombed for being "oppressive".

So, here you have a nascent social network that's supposed to be the alternative to the invasive giant. But, instead of driving forward and producing a service that does things that Facebook doesn't do and which doesn't hassle you on the same invasive level, you place a hurdle in front of the programmers trying to produce the thing, make communication more difficult for programs, programmers, and even users (the very antithesis of the purpose of the creation), and generally distract everyone from the goal while making a few people sit around and smile to themselves about how 'cool' that is. And, of course, when people object on very pragmatic grounds ("Hey, you're making it more difficult for people to be social on a social network and for us to even get this thing off the ground in the first place."), they're excoriated for standing in the way of people's self-identification. Here you have a chance to create a new outlet for people, perhaps devoid of the targeted advertisers and Farmville, and instead everyone will spend every day figuring out whether to refer to each individual as "he", "she", or "zed".

This is the status quo of many of the progressive organizations that I've been a part of and a fine example of the single-mindedness I referred to above: people are tunnel-visioned to their own agenda, regard anyone not helping them with said agenda as "part of the problem", and do a fine job of draining the energy out of what should be a mass movement that could be trying to find a path back to some level of equality in our society for everyone; not this or that oppressed minority or persecuted class, but everyone.

We had the same problem in the Green party while I was there and something I spent a fair amount of time trying to change with a simple message: Get. Over. It. If all people want to do is sit around bemoaning the Plight of the Black Man or spending three weeks writing a time-sensitive press release about water issues on the Colorado by making sure every third paragraph speaks about the Navajo and Paiutes in reverential terms, you will never accomplish anything except making yourself feel better/righteous/self-satisfied for a very short time. That's not progress. That's idleness and that is more emblematic of American society than anything else I can think of.

More on this identity politics problem later, including the concept of how the current idiot in the White House wouldn't really know what a socialist was if one walked up and bit him on the ass.