head-- a thinking journal

Lost: Season 6 predictions

2010-02-15T21:10:00.000-08:00

I just finished Lost Season 5, which features time travel (or so we think) and ends with the bomb going off. Season 6, we are told, is the end, so here are my predictions and thoughts.

a) The time travel gimmick, really, I could care less if it's real or not, but its point is eventually going to be that the Oceanic 6 played a part in the narrative antecedent's bad stuff. They will have been Others, and the people before the Others, yadda yadda, and will eventually be fully implicated in the whole glorious mess-- ultimately they will not be outsiders at all.

b) The two off-island factions (Whitmore and whoever Ben represents) are obviously joined at the waist, since Faraday is (I think) the son of Whitmore as well as his white-haired Mom. The series is going to make the Star Wars-ish and fairly banal point that family dysfunction can infect the whole cosmos, or it will make an equally banal point that the world is one big family, man, and since we only have one of it, we had better not fight.

c) The "missing Dad" motif that I discussed earlier has come back in spades-- we not only have missing Dads, but false Dads, no Dads, substitute Dads, you name it. Most fo the main characters' Dads are, plot-wise, out of the picture, so expect epiphanies aplenty as the series closes, along the lines of "I should have ___ while he was still here."

d) What is most obvious is that the series will ultimately show us the standard circularity of time that underlies myth: the Oceanic Six will be their own parents; history will repeat itself (Whitmore's ancestors sent the 1840-something boat to the island that we see in Season 1; there was a discussion at the end of Season Five where some late 1800s sailors on the Island talked of how people kept coming and raping and ruining things.

e) The Island will ultimately stand for what is left of the world at the beginning of the 21st century: we are at the point where our capacities to act and affect the world are so powerful, and often so misguidedly self-interested, that we can really fuck things up if we aren't careful, and that the best intentions (the "original" Others) lead to Hell.

Good signs

2009-03-04T12:29:00.000-08:00

I was in the Interior last weekend, where there are always great home-made road signs. Two of my favorites:

NO SHOOTING CHILDREN ON ROAD

and

SLOW CHILDREN ON ROAD

Hipsters

2008-10-30T09:57:00.000-07:00

Adbusters makes a great article about hipsters in this months issue
http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html

Hipster is one of those words which describes people who live in my neighbourhood. They share most of the following characteristics--

-- white, University/college educated or students
-- into cheap clothes, or expensive clothes that look cheap
-- irony matters lots, esp. ironic t-shirts
-- musical preferences all over map, though they like thrashy punk and it's weirdly cool to like bluegrass
-- facial hair, tight-ankled pants with room for turds in ass on men
-- fixie bikes, ridden without helmet, light, reflector etc
-- girls like tight trashy jeans/cords
-- it's cool to be bisexual and polygamous

No hipster will admit to being a hipster.

Anyway, Adbusters makes a great point-- the whole hipster thing is the dead end of Western civ in the sense that what we have here is a cultural movement with no point, only fashion. Hip-hop, punk, hippie stuff, the Beats etc all had political agendas as well as the music, clothes etc to go with them. Obviously most were co-opted yadda yadda but they did have points to make, many of them sensible, and many had strong political effects. Hipsterism does not; it's fashion only.

Adbusters doesn't take it ay further, so I will. My qyestion...WHY has hipsterism emerged? Why an aesthetic movement with no politics?

Answer...starts with race. Hipsters are white, educated and generally privileged. Now, follow me through this seeming detour, please. Generally speaking, in Europe, Australia, and North America, rich white people run the show. At the same time, white culture has a tradition of "rebellion" as part of the process of individuation. Most white people, unlike, say, Indians or Chinese or black folks (allow me to generalise, please), feel the need to separate themselves from their parents either in real terms or symbolically as part of the process of becoming an adult. Of course, most of us white people eventually become versions of our parents, but still we go through the motions. This is something that started with the Romantic poets and writers in Europe around the end of the 18th century. Difference was, the Romantics (most of them) actually lived their ideals. Shelley and Byron died doing political stuff, Keats got tuberculosis, and even Wordsworth spent time in revolutionary France before ebcoming old and imbecilic.

So, you have a paradox: white folks need to rebel to become themselves (at least symbolically); white culture at the same time owns and runs the show, and nobody in their right mind is ever going to give uptheir social privileges, money, connections, knowledge etc. So...what to do? How do you stay part of the dominant system AND rebel at the same time?

White culture in North America and Europe since WW2 has managed to link this process of symbolic individuation with the counterculture (in mass-marketed echoes of what rich white male Romantic poets did in the late 1700s, and what the Lost Generation did in Paris in the 1920s). You have to rebel, so might as well add some politics to the mix, add some fashion, take some drugs, yadda yadda, and presto! you have a countercultural movement.

So now, back to my answer...hipsterism is basically the realisation of young white people that the order of things is not going to change because of anything they do, or want to do, so, fuck it, let's just do our own thing.

The overwhelming fact of white culture-- that rich, white people run the world for (largely) their benefit, with a few bones tossed to the dogs circling the table-- has not changed, ever. What, after all, do white people really have to rebel against? They own and control most of the world. True, they have shared the basics with others-- you can't really be openly anti-gay, sexist or racist anymore in most of the white world. The injustice that remains is economic. 40% of the world's wealth is controlled by 1% of its population (most of these white). In the U.S., 80% of the wealth is controlled by 5% of the population, a statistic that once applied to Guatemala. So, if you want to rebel, you have to rebel economically...and that means biting the hand that feeds you.

Dear reader-- would you give up one-half of your income to make the world a fairer place? I thought not.

Anyway, if you have to rebel, but don't want to bite the hand that feeds you, it seems logical to leave your rebellion on a purely aesthetic level. So have at, hipsters-- Drink. Fuck. Look cool. Live on Facebook. Wallow in irony-- it allows you to stay disengaged. Wear those gross clothes-- you can pretend for awhile that you won't be a part of The Machine. Pretend, with your fixie bikes that thumb their noses at the fat yuppies on their carbon-fiber road bikes, that you're simplifying your life, or, like, whatever.

But please, under no circumstances, should you engage in political work, vote for a candidate who wants to tax you and your trust fund and your parents more, ride a bicycle with gears (cos that's what yuppie cunts like me do) or believe in anything. Cos, like, whatever.

The Environment Sucks

2008-10-06T15:55:00.000-07:00

I hate the environment.

Sure, I like gardens, and hiking in mountains whose trails aren't full of garbage, and I like drinking water which doesn't have benzene in it. But really, these are just personal things. More fundamentally, I hate the environment, and I hate it as much as I LOVE my standard of living.

I like my car, my new clothes, my vacations to South America, my endlessly-replaceable climbing gear, and my expensive instruments. For me to buy these things, I need money. Money gets things done. It's basically energy, if you think about it for a minute. If money is going to work, it has to be tradeable for something real, be that an octave mandolin or a nice suburban house, since both of these things need materials, knowledge and energy, focussed by craftsmen, in order to be built. So to make money worth anything, it has to ultimately reflect the capacity of human beings to transform things into other things (oil into flights, trees into instruments).

Oil, coal and natural gas provide 85% of the energy in the world on average, and so basically my lifestyle demands heavy use of these fossil fuels. I would HATE to have fewer things (or mental things, like the ability to play music, or talk in complex ways about, say, cinema), cos that would lower my social status relative to others. I COULD be nicer to the environment by being poorer (earning less money). But then I would have lower social status and we can't have that.

So what I do is this. I PRETEND publicly to like the environment. (I recycle. I drive a cheap-on-gas car. I cut down on my meat eating. I don't litter in parks. I buy organic free-range lesbian Tibetan shade-grown gay-positive inclusive coffee. Etc). This is good because it helps me feel good about myself and it gets me friends. Mostly though I am pretty psyched that resource extraction and processing happens in shithole Third-World countries, cos that way THEY can have polluted areas and children with three arms, while Vancouver remains pleasant and eco-conscious!

A very good deal. Fuck the environment.

Lost: the Lost Children of Empire

2008-09-07T11:12:00.000-07:00

If you havn't seen to the end of Lost Season 4 stop reading now-- SPOILERS.

Lost will enter its 5th season this year and probably end in 2009. For those who havn't watched, it is a stupidly entertaining story of the survivors of an airline crash, who end up on a South Pacific island which appears to come equipped with polar bears, spirits and other weirdnesses, as well as with a Surivor-style rival tribe. Weirder even than the island are the off-island narratives that the multiple-plot-line series shows us: basically all of the characters on the island know or have met each other indirectly through a vast web of coincidences, etc, before they end up on the island.

Anyway, the thread running through both the island plots and the off-island plots is that of authority and the absent father. Every character is missing a Dad. Jack's is drunk and then dead, Sawyer's was killed when he was young, and Kate has never had a father (and has alienated her mother by killing her father-in-law). Locke-- the island's father figure whose name hints at the role he should be playing-- was abandoned young and one of the sub-plots involves a con man who preys on his adult insecurities about his lost father. Walt literally loses his father, and Benjamin (of the Others) is brought by his Dad to the Island and then abandoned.

Missing from the Island are not only Dads, but political authority in general. Within the first two episodes of Season One, the newly stranded are torturing each other. At the end of Season Three, the survivors have split into two groups. Authority seems to fall to Jack, but he makes enough mistakes and foolish self-indulgences that the tribe remains divided. Even the Others were (and remain) divided under the enigmatic Benjamin's leadership.

And, crucially, there are numerous references to Star Wars in the story (e.g. the Korean and the Black characters communicate, as do Han Solo and Chewbacca, despite not knowing each others' language...look online for many exhaustive catalogues of these connections). The show's creators have also admitted lifelong passion for Star Wars and have pointed out a # of the show's references. So...absent Dads, absent political authority, Star Wars references...how does this all tie together?

Well, first of all, Star Wars, whose first three episodes came out 1977-1983, was the second of the mega-blockbusters that Hollywood produced (the first were the Godfather series). Both take on the theme of the son's return, post-adolescence, to the adult world, and both examine the compromises that youth make as it enters the world of responsibilities, sin and decision-making. In the Godfather films, Pacino's Michael Corleone character is of course corrupted by the Old World's tentacles, his own greed and fallibility, and of course by his devotion to "family," which by the Godfather 2's end takes on what Paul Coates calls a nearly Shakespearian resonance. In Star Wars, Luke has to grow up (and find out all about Dad, while being guided by the Jedi substitute-Dads), while Han Solo has to face up to his financial, emotional and ethical responsiblities to Jabba the Hut, Leia and the Rebel cause.

Godfather 1 and 2 are ultimately about the failure of America to break free of its European historical baggage, and about the Baby Boomer generation's failure to develop meaningful autonomy from their parents. Mafia, sin and corruption are as New World (Eden) as they are Sicilian. Michael Corleone, the idealistic and decorated WWII vet tells fiance Kate that "that's my family, not me" when she brings up the delicate topic of his father's reputation for violence; Michael will of course become his father, and worse, and so the symbol of idealism and wholesomeness fails to break free of either father, Old World or the capitlaism-gone-amok that the Mfia "family" represents. Dad is absent-- the Godfather famously begins its complex story with the Don's assassination, and on his death, he lives on through his famous advice to Michael ("keep your friends close, and your enemies closer"). Who will Michael obey-- hsi conscience, his family loyalties, his duties to his father, or his greed?

Star Wars was offered as a palliative for the painful and ugly messages sent in the first two Godfathers. In Star Wars, the Rebels-- operating on a 1977 Apple-sized shoestring budget out of a garage on a tropical moon-- are 1960s American baby boomers, and they confront in the Empire and its Darth Vader (dark father)-led Death Star the corporate world they symbolically rejected in the '60s. But while the Godfather was ultimately hopelessly pessimistic about the possibility of you escaping from the power of capital, Father and corporate/Old World power, Star Wars made its money by being optimistic. In Star Wars, the Mad Dad is humanised, the outrageous evil lunatic fringe is controlled (Death Star blown up), the kids make peace with the parents, the Empire becomes responsible, the Ewoks and their eco-baggage are integrated into the scheme of things...you get it.

Star Wars' job was ultimately to tell the baby boomers-- who were by its 1977 release date having kids, getting real jobs, putting away the flower power signs and doing more coke than weed-- that yes, you can go and work for The Man, who will listen to you, and the world will be a better place. And, yes, Dad can be made to pay attention to you.

But back to LOST. Lost's absent Dads and Star Wars references re-frame it as way more than just endless narrative candy. The show is basically about the death of 1960s idealism and the ongoing political crisis in the United States. Since 2000, the U.S. has had two fraudulent elections. The president's approval ratings are so low that he cannot even campaign for his successor. The U.S. itself has now the largest debt it has ever had in history (by any definition), a total lack of respect on the world stage, it is devoid of resources, and it is even more profoundly morally bankrupt than it was in the 1980s. Perhaps the most representative comment came from Bush II, who after 9/11 told Americans to go patriotically shopping, as that would boost the economy. The larger American question now surfacing is, "what is the point of our existence and our leadership?" If Bush's suggestion that it be merely to consume, and to lead consumers, is it...Houston, we have a problem.

In LOST, we see the Others, gradually revealed to be the survivors of an idealistic early '70s project (Dharma Initiative) that was working on rebalancing cosmic energies (the work ont he equation), as having had their work hijacked by the evil corporate world. Meanwhile, the crash survivors-- a kind of mini-USA or mini U.N.-- cannot organise themselves, remain divided, and suffer from the losses of both real and symbolic (political) fathers. The plot revolves around control of the island's unusual natural wealth, and the Surivivors' job is clearly to form alliances with the Others and take a principled and organised stand against the depredations of their corporate "rescuers," just as it is increasingly clear that Americans need to...

-- get rid of ALL Bush II bills (Patriot I & II, the Military Tribunals Act, etc)
-- call an investigation into 2004 vote rigging in Ohio
-- call to task the various multinationals and banking cartels who by now control the majority of U.S. wealth
-- impeach Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Gates and above all Rumsefeld and charge them with treason, war crimes, etc
-- sign on to various international agreements (e.g. ICC) and play U.N. ball

Film Review: American Gangster

2007-11-18T11:36:00.001-08:00

Parties should be gotten-to late; film genres you want to be among the first. It gets harder every time to do something we havn't seen, especially when the film is in genre mode. Genre contractually giveth and genre contractually taketh away: the filmmaker agrees to give us certain things and in return we promise to sit up and pay attention.

American gangster is the more-or-less true story of the rise and fall of Frank Lucas, a black heroin dealer who at one point was the biggest single supplier in the U.S. and who had most of the New York D.E.A. in his pocket. Figuring out who he is, and then chasing him, is detective Richie Roberts who also happens to be a law student. This is interesting material but director Ridley Scott manages to ruin it. How?

Well, expository dialogue, for one thing. You have character explaining EVERYTHING. Makes me feel like an idiot watching it. After the Sopranos and GoodFellas, the dialogue sounds hokey and scripted. The pretend-complex morality business is laid on thick: philandering Roberts lacks personal virtue but engages in public service; Lucas is a pragmatist and family man who murders and mutilates when necessary. The film takes a boring look at women: they are whiners (Roberts' estranged wife), social climbers and causers of downfall (Lucas' wife), or hookers, dope-baggers or mistresses. On one hand, the film tries to show us something of the characters' interior lives, but leaves the job oddly incomplete. GoodFellas avoided this altogether; the Sporanos (and the Godfathers) have the time to do this; A.G. does a half-assed job. The gangster film tropes-- casual violence, (seemingly) trivial arguments about fashion, whining women, hilarious period clothing, corrupt cops-- seem re-hashed.

Most interesting, and therefore least looked-at, is the question of C.I.A. and government complicity in drug running. Lucas was paing $100,000 per shipment to Air Force and Army guys to transport his heroin on military planes (and then in body bags) from Asia to the U.S. How did this happen for six years with nobody finding out? How did Lucas make hundreds of millions for years with no scrutiny? What about the echoes of this practice-- in '84, Ollie North was busted for basically sing the CIA to sell cocaine to buy guns from Iranians to sell to the Contras. Gary Webb wrote in detail about the CIA's role in protecting and helping businesses launder money. There are interesting suggestions-- one character speculates that the CIA and the DEA want Lucas to stay in business, because there are 100,000 jobs in the U.S. which depend on busting drug dealers-- which the film doesn't pursue.

The film raises many questions and then fails to answer them. The American experience with Prohibition (which created the modern Mafia, as well as the Kennedy dynasty) was an object lesson in how black markets make crime. Loads of modern studies have suggested that the way to deal with drugs is to legalise the "soft" ones (weed, psychedelics) and control them like alcohol or tobacco, and to provide support for addicts of "hard" drugs (coke, heroin). Yet drugs remain illegal and meaningful discussion remains off the table for all political parties, except for a few fringe candidates who argue for weed's legalisation. This begs the question of why?

The only answer I can think of is that the drug business is Big Business and that there is loads of money laundering going on which benefits big business and government. Drug money needs to be laundered; "legit" businesses can make big $$ by helping with laundering. Government employment remains high (all of those cops and jailers), and lawyers make big $$ defending people on drug charges. GOvernment looks "tough on crime" for voters. Addicts don't matter; let them die; they have "made poor choices." And above all, drugs-- used by loads of people, esp. weed-- become a tool for the government to push people around. There is loads of evidence that government and big business is deeply complicit in drug money laundering: see the work of Catherine Austin Fitts or Gary Webb. SO where is the film's look at these questions?

Why are Vancouver girls so hot?

2007-11-03T11:23:00.000-07:00

(a) they only appear that way cos I'm not getting any right now

(b) another theory (warning, this is offensive)

oh and btw we will define "hot" as a mix of well-dressed, physically fit and of course the usual, high cheekbones, wide eyes, hip-to-waist ratio, etc, tho these are less important, as fitness and decent clothing choices can make up for not being a Norse or whatever goddess.

-- First up is girl competition. Women dress to compete with other women. Most of us guys could give a shit about how new your jeans are or how much your lipstick cost; indeed, most of us can't even tell when you did something to your hair or that you gained/lost ten pounds. So in Vancouver you have three big groups: whites, Indo-Canadians, and a mix of east Asians. Indo girls dress well, despite the Surrey stereotypes; Indo girls in University are a marvel. East Asian women dress well and-- crucially-- are slim. This means that white girls have to compete with the Asians on the slimness front, and with the Indians on the dress front. The Indians, at least until they are safely locked up in marriage (and because more and more of them are not having arranged marriages but are choosing (and being chosen by) their partners, and are no longer in a culural matrix that values fatness as a status sign in a hungry world), also compete with the Asian girls on the slimness front. So you end up with women who compete
with each other for body shape and dress.

This according to a friend's girlfriend stresses the ladies out, cos young women-- unlike in small towns, where the men outnumber them and so they can let themselves go-- are under pressure
to look good.

-- the beach and outside factor. Since there's a beach scene here in summer, and since you can easily exercise year round even in the rain-- running, hiking, skiing, climbing, all kinds of cycling, etc-- women are often in revealing sports clothes, and so they feel they have to look good. Yoga also plays a part here-- the hippie thing (and the fact that it's not really very difficult, and that it relieves stress, and it is (err I mean was, ill they started offering it in Surrey) "alternatve" and "holistic" and "non-Western," and it "gets you in touch with your body") means that women are really into yoga, and oh my God, anybody who has ever been to a yoga class knows that the only thing that demands more mental focus than the yoga itself is putting the yoga outfit together. BTW smart Vancouver men go to yoga classes. I mean, where else do you get to see hot women in tight clothes bent over mere inches from your face?

-- the Hollywood North factor. Loads of film work means hot people (you can't be in movies unless you are hot) so more eye candy for women to obsess about and compete with.

-- the dumping ground factor. Women are smarter than us men, do better in school, etc. so if you are a small-town chick, you are going to come down here for your education and a job that's not in resource industries or service.

-- the money factor. Money-- some of it corporate, some of it Asian, much of it illicit from weed, and there's lots of money here in Van.-- is generally controlled by men, and men buy, err I mean, have relationships with women whom many end up supporting in one way or another. (Ceteris paribus, women prefer men with money; among the upper-middle classes, it is a full-on status symbol for women NOT to work, and to have snagged a guy with enough $$ to support them as Lunch Mommies)). So women who don't work have lots of time for fashion, gym, whatnot; also, they have to stay in shape, cos their husbands/boyfriends have enough $$ to get other women and they need to keep hubby's eyes on them. Go to Kits and check out the yummy rich mommies one weekday morning as they buzz around a nice steaming pile of Starbucks.

Cold Vancouver

2007-11-03T11:20:00.000-07:00

Vancouver is beautiful, clean, safe (unless you are poor, take drugs, and live in the downtown East Side)..and unfriendly. And Vancouverites are polite and decent folk, but not friendly. Your typical Vancouver guy is nebbish, cool and inwardly focussed, and we all know the Kits Girl stereotypes. "Why," ask Albertan, Newfie or Quebecois(e) transplants, "are poeple here so unfriendly?"

Well...list of theories.

a) The culture mix. Asians (the newcomers) and English (founders) are notoriously publicly cold.

b) The "bling" race. Because of the massive (south and east) Asian big-money safe-investment-haven status of Vancouver, the enormous drug economy, and immigrant cultures' custom of displaying wealth ostentatiously, the wealth signs are everywhere and in your face. If you don't have money (or real estate), for whatever reason, you feel lower on the totem pole. This is one of the reasons why clerks and servers in Vancouver coffee shops and stores are often such assholes-- status resentment. It also means that there is an endless itemising and comparing going on.

c) Big city and loads of newcomers, plus suburban sprawl, plus culture mix, means that you don't really have communities of people who live close to one another who actually interact with one another. So everybody is a stranger.

d) The history of resource economics. In BC, the big jobs have generally involved resources: mining, forestry, lumber, industry. In these industries, you don't need to be friends with you co-workers to survive. You need to form a union to extract decent wages etc from management.

Contrast this with the Prairie provinces, where most folk (other than the Natives we killed and stole from) originally came from farming/ranching stock. Farmers and ranchers depend on each other for business, support, social life, friendships and often matters of life and death, and so have a massive incentive to be friendly.

e) The weather. The endless winter rains bum people out.

f) Liquor laws. Vancouver (and BC) had Prohibition longer than other provinces, and Vancouver had well into the '80s some of the most repressive liquor distribution and licensing laws in Canada. This meant that neighbourhood pubs-- which, given Vancouver's incredible density, should be plentiful-- didn't develop. The biggest immigrant groups-- south and east Asians-- generally don't drink, and they organise social life around family, so again you have less of an incentive to build informal community ties.

g) Weed. There is so much pot smoking here that lots of people are regularly in the spaced-out zone where social interactions are for them a hassle. The weed growing also means that people cannot talk about a big part of their lives, for fear of either the law or the gangs what prey on home growers. And when your income is illicit, you withdraw from normal social interaction to some extent, because you don't go to a job.

h) Extreme sports and the outdoors. A Maritime acquaintance pointed out to me that lots of young people don't build community around people who live or work near them, but rather around activities. This is great in one sense-- you hang out with your climbing buddies, or your mountainbiking or skiing partners-- but in another it takes you away from the city and from interactions with those who are different. She told me that she noticed a kind of "fuck this, I'm going ___________ing this weekend" attitude toward stress. She contrasted this with rural Nova Scotia (and even Halifax) where people's historical limited ability to move around (esp. in winter), poverty and local connections (through fishing and farming) meant that community was built around local people interacting.

i) The Hollywood factor. Because of the film industry, the physical activity and summer beach scene and the general trend among Asian immigrants to display social status with lots of shopping and self-adornment (plus the fact that East Asians tend to be slim), white women have to compete with east Asian girls (skinny, well dressed) and south Asians (well put together). This makes for stress for women. And also for guys: you get really aware in Vancouver how you look compared to the fashionistas who are everywhere. So there is this endless subtle game of self-evaluation and one-upmanship going on.

Ok, your ideas?

Star Wars

2007-10-23T20:54:00.001-07:00

This is more or less from Derrick Jensen:.

What few people know is that George Lucas' 1977 blockbuster Star Wars was originally a kind of eco-parable, written by some hippies from Northern California. Hollywood bought the script, and, wanting to make a mass-market sci-fi film, rather than trying to sell a heavy political movies, and wanting to make loads of $$, decided to make the film less realistic. So they changed the script to something totally ridiculous.

In Star Wars-- in the movie version that we have all seen-- the brave Rebels, who are in tune with the benevolent (but, like religion, potentially dastardly Force, take on the evil Empire, whose powerful symbol is the Death Star, a kind of flying factory, army base and Guantanamo prison. In a climatic battle, the Rebels defeat Evil and blow up the Death Star.

But THIS is what the ORIGINAL STAR WARS WAS REALLY LIKE...

-- the Rebels have a long debate about the use of violence. They eventually decide that "the master's tools cannot dismantle the master's house," so they renounce the use of violence.

-- Karma operates strictly in the Star Wars universe, so the Rebels decide to use only bows and soft-tipped arrows to slow the approaching Death Star, fearing the the cosmic vibrations of more overt violence will, in future, revisit them. The Death Star, confronted by these slings and arrows, retreats.

-- facing the onslaught of the Death Star at the film's climax, the Rebels, rather than sending out fighters to destroy the Death Star, decide to beam loving kindness to it to make its occupants surrender their egos and transcend their material selves and merge into the universal Atman (oversoul).

-- Han Solo, rather than being a rogue smuggler out to make as much money as possible, is a character who runs a kind of intergalactic car-pool, where shamans, eco-feminists and alien-rights activists can get free rides to their next protest.

-- deciding that they must "be the change we want to see in others," the Rebels refuse to use petrochemical-based fighter fuel and switch to an organic ethanol blend. The karmic rewards are such that the death star's lasers cannot touch them.

-- When about to cross the Death Star's ventialtion duct chasm on a wire device while being pursued by Stormtroopers, Princess Leia decides that, since kisses are an expression of the patriarchy's conditioning of women, she won't give Luke the inspirational kiss. She instead makes a Goddess offering and levitates across the chasm to show Luke the power of female intuition.

-- Han Solo is confronted over his excessive debts to Jabba the Hut. But instead of shooting the Hut's bag-man, Solo invites him to share a healthy vegetarian meal and discuss their differences.

-- the citizens of Alderaan, about to be annihilated by the Death Star, gather in public places on the panet's surface and sing "We Shall Overcome" together. This deflects the Death Ray and Alderaan survives.

-- the Empire's soldiers are named not Stormtroopers but Breezedrifters.

-- The Empire is not at war with the Rebels. Rather, it is seeking dialogue about trade and tariff issues and promoting justice and freedom from terrorism.

-- Empire citizens and soldiers regularly go on ecotours of Rebel planets and buy organic Rebel coffee from Rebel co-operatives.

Anyway, it's a real bummer-- Hollywood had this great fantasy script handed to it, and they fucked it up.

-- Darth Vader, needing information from Princess Leia asbout the missing 'droids, rejects torture, and instead goes through a Native peyote ceremony with her, during which they realise the underlying unity of cosmic reality.

So there you have it. Hollywood could have shown us a provocative, ethical story about how to bring about political change in the face of overwhelming hegemony, without the Rebels having to resort to violence, cruelty, force or deception. What we actually got was, well, Hollywood, and its usual ridiculous theme: sometimes you have to use violence to get what you want. How ridiculous-- and unrealistic-- is that?

Catherine Austin Fitts in Vancouver Oct 10

2007-10-10T07:49:00.000-07:00

Catherine Austin Fitts is giving a talk today in Vancouver. Fitts-- Wharton grad, former Wall Street banker, H.U.D. director under Bush Sr, and CEO of formerly Hamilton Securities and now the Solari Group-- is the Noam Chomsky of finance. Her research interests include financial fraud, money laundering and its effects on neighbourhoods. This is a rare opportunity to see that rarest of creatures: an American dissident who comes not from academia or the Left, but from the business community.

Event info: http://solari.com/events/calendar.php

Fitts' site: http://www.solari.com/

Book Review: FROM LANCE TO LANDIS-- INSIDE THE AMERICAN DOPING CONTROVERSY AT THE TOUR DE FRANCE

2007-10-08T09:18:00.001-07:00

It sucks when your hero stops being your hero, partly because, well, everybody loves a hero, and partly because you start to question the whole business that your favorite person was involved in.

David Walsh's book focuses on Lance Armstrong, who won the Tour de France seven times, and on Floyd Landis, who won it in 2006 and has just lost his final appeal against a ruling that found him guilty of using testosterone on a difficult alpine stage. Walsh also gives a bit of doping history. The overwhelming sense I got from finishing this was that these guys-- ALL of these guys-- are shitbags, and Lance is among the worst of them, a bully, a liar, and beyond doubt a doper.

Let's start with the whole cycling culture. Doping is endemic, period. This has to do with the arms-race advantages it confers, and with the fact that the sport needs massive sponsorships (of teams and of the whole UCI set-up) to run. Nobody wants a scandal, and the sport has been absurdly, stupidly slow to take up measures--easy simple sensible ones-- which would cut down on cheating. It typically takes years for UCI to first acknowledge there is a problem, accept a test, and finally outline the procedures around how the test will be interpreted and administered. UCI also does not insist that all athletes give DNA samples, which means that when massive quantities of doped blood are found (as was the case in Spain in 2005) with doctors who run doping rings, it can be very difficult to determine who is doing what.

There is a kind of omerta in cycling that one does not discuss doping. Those who see it and discuss it are booted from the sport if they are trainers or support workers, vilified by participants (and Lance Armstrong is one of the biggest bullies there is in this regard), and harassed on and off the racecourse. For example, Lance's former soigneur, Emma O'Reilly, who in a sworn deposition (i.e. this is a legal document, etc etc) mentions that she was ordered to carry vials of testosterone for Armstrong and teammate George Hincapie while working for Postal, has been slagged by Armstrong and his lawyers as someone who has a drinking problem, who slept her way around the team, who was incompetent, who was fired, etc. None of these allegations have any substance other than Armstrong's suggestions, as Walsh's book makes clear.

On top of all this, defences against those accused of doping take the form of procedural wrangling. Landis' case is simple: he using synthetic testosterone, won the Tour, was stripped of his title, and based his case on "procedural errors" allegedly made by the lab. His lawyers attempted to prove, among others, that his samples were mixed up with those of others, that there was contamination, that the process of reporting the results to the media was flawed, etc. None of the defence strategies said "he didn't do it" and none of them addressed the question of how synthetic testosterone-- which perhaps a couple of thousand people in the entire world could get their hands on-- could get into his system.

Armstrong has used similar strategies. When Walsh and others reported information in 2005 that basically proved that Armstrong doped in the '99 Tour, Armstrong sued during the media controversy, then dropped the suit two days before it went to trial. The evidence in this doping case-- a series of positive r-EPO tests-- has odds of about 1 in 500 of being inaccurate. Armstrong argued that the results "should never have been released" as these were "private," etc. IE, it was the "how," not the "what," of the issue that he attacked.

Walsh's evidence is compelling. Armstrong's standard story-- that cancer made him lighter and more focussed, that training changed his abilities dramatically-- is an outright lie. He didn't lose 15 pounds after cancer; he lost two. He was a perfectly average Tour rider in the mid-90s; then he jumped massively in ability. His vaunted V02 max is on the high end of average for elite cyclists; V02 max does not translate directly into performance (and neither does his lactic acid clearing ability). A number of scientists are on record saying that the only way Armstrong could have made these changes is through the use of drugs.

Armstrong has chosen to intimidate, litigate and lie his way through the endless allegations made against him. Walsh's book shows how he pushed O'Reilly, Greg LeMond, Frankie Andreu and others around. Armstrong admitted in 1996 to doctors, pre-chemo-- with eight witnesses present-- that he had used a staggering variety of drugs. Financial interests ensured that several of those refuse to discuss the alleged comments; those who did were harassed and excluded from Postal and Armstrong's life.

The book's final, staggering evidence against Armstrong is an IM convo between Frankie Andreu and Jonathan Vaughters, in which Postal's doping program is discussed and in which the dirty stuff shows up loud and clear. It is impossible to walk away from this book with a positive opinion of Armstrong.

Mob mentality

2007-10-07T23:10:00.000-07:00

Today I read this about the problems facing the U.S. economy and how mainstream financial analysts are a mob who don't get it. This brings to mind the true story of Bob.

Back in the late '90s, a friend of mine-- let's call him Bob-- graduated from UBC with an economics degree and a few business courses. He got a job with one of the larger Canadian banks. His job was to be a stock analyst. When a big company borrows money from the bank, they often put up collateral in the form of their shares. Bob's job was to evaluate those shares and make sure the bank was properly protecting its loans.

He was put on a team of four guys which was monitoring a company called Nortel. These guys seemed to be the next big thing-- they were in wireless Internet, cell phones, internet via cable, fiber-optics, what have you. Their stock price was so high, and had gone up so much, that they frequently bought companies by simply trading their stock for their target's.

Nortel had a massive loan proposal in with this bank and Bob's team was doing the analysis. After several months of work, they had a problem: three of them saw Nortel as a sure bet, while Bob thought it was going to at worst collapse, or at best be massively devalued: they were in debt up to their ass, their stock's price was built on speculation, not a p/e ratio or any other normal criterion, and they had lots of plans and precious few customers with signed contracts. The team could not reach consensus on what the stock was worth. Bob stuck to his guns. Management got annoyed that the team was unable to turn in their report. Nortel leaned on the bank to get on the stick and approve the loan.

Something had to give, and it was Bob's job. "You aren't a team player" was one of the cliches he remembers hearing as he was shown the door. Bob decided to daytrade. One of his first investments was "shorting" Nortel. He figured that in future it would be worth $25 less than it was worth at the time, so he signed a contract wherein, in 6 months, he agreed to buy X number of Nortel shares at market price, and he signed another contract that he would sell these shares at what was more or less their value at the time of the contract being signed. If the price went down, Bob was in the money. Six months later, Nortel fell through the floor, and with two transactions Bob made enough money to retire on. Two days later his old boss called him and offered him triple his old salary and a position as head of research for the bank.

"Why bother?" asked Bob. "You could have checked my research. All of my ideas were based in fact. Anybody could have seen that they had $100 billion in debt, and $15 billion in signed contracts. A grade 5 kid could do the math and say, gee, their interest alone would eat half of their revenue before they even got to costs. How come nobody looked at numbers?"

Groupthink. Groups have to function, and they do this by having shared assumptions. Bob's group shut out dissident thinking, ignored numbers and facts, and collaboratively fantasised. makes you wonder what Wall Street is doing-- the Fed cut rates, the dollar is crashing, and the markets are up.

The Orgy Bunch

2007-09-24T20:19:00.000-07:00

OK, one of the weirdest things about the '70s was the Brady Bunch. How since they were a blended family, technically, the children, like the parents, could have sex with their siblings. In Grade Nine some of us wrote a song to the tune of the show's theme called "The Orgy Bunch."

Now to one-up us, it turns out that not only were some of the Bradies getting it on, it was a same-sex thing.

Book Review: INFIDEL by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

2007-09-16T10:49:00.000-07:00

INFIDEL is the story of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who grew up in Somalia and Kenya during the 80s and 90s, was subject to genital mutilation (at her grandmother's insistence) and fled to Holland to escape an arranged marriage. There, she learned Dutch and perfected her English, became a translator and then politician, and was eventually harassed out of Holland by the Muslim fanatics who have become the fitting target of this remarkable book.

Hirsi's main question is "is Islam inherently anti-intellectual and misogynist?" Her answer is a resounding "Yes!" As we see her growing up, we see one awful thing after another done to women. Women are barred from public office and most kinds of work in many Muslim countries. Girls are genitally mutilated. Girls are pawns in marriage negotiations, and mothers-in-law, whose social status has to do with the number of children they have, often assist in the rape of newly married girls who understandably have reservations about allowing their sexually clueless husbands to use their penises to rip sewn-shut vaginas open. There are horrible double standards for women with which we are all familiar. A woman who is raped needs four male witnesses to support her case. A woman who responds to harassment by looking her harasser in the eye is "asking for trouble." In the hottest of climates, women are expected to wear stifling clothes. Men's gaze is predatory; women must manage this intrusive gaze by coverng up; nothing is said about men's behaviour. Most horribly, women come to accept and embrace Islam's sexism. The harem is a coveted place to be; women ae involved in genital mutilation; women band together to ostracise even women who criticise Islam or social customs.

More insidious, at least to an educated Westerner, is the Islamic resistance to openness of thought. Hirsi documents how Muslim immigrant communities in Holland who ran their own schools did a horrible job of educating their children to do anything other than mumble memorised Quranic platitudes. In Muslim countries, religious people can find in the Qu'ran very strict gender role definitions which exclude not only women from education, but new ideas from the discussion of religion. Islam's history of "reform"-- as witness the Wahhabist movement which runs Saudi Arabia-- unlike Western religions get steadily more conservative and literalist. The Qu'ran states explicitly that it is the direct word of Allah (Christian, Jewish and Buddhist texts make no such claims); to question its teaching is therefore inherently heretic. "But the Muslims preserved ancient texts and did science during the Middle Ages," say some. Hirsi responds to this quite simply: Islam "likes" science so long as it does not question Islam's main goals-- a strict system of social organistion, and "so what?"-- text coping eight hundred years ago, and astronomical and mathematical observations are hardly germane to modern questions like the killing of homosexuals and the accepted mutialtion and murder of women. Where, asks Hirsi, is that open Islam today?

The question often levelled at Muslims is, "is all this Islam, or a function of local culture?" Hirsi says it's both. The Qu'ran, which I've been reading, includes gems like this:

"Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts, because God has guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them, forsake them in beds [or bedrooms] apart, and beat them. [...] Surely God is high, supreme." (4:34)

"If two men among you commit a lewd act, punish them both." (4:16)

Worst of all, Muslims famously brook little criticism of their faith-- witness the Danish cartoon controversy--, conflating political shit-headedness (American support of awful regimes like the Saudi Arabian, and of Israel) with frank intellectual inquiry. Hirsi's life was threatened by Muslims in Holland when she exposed the horrible treatment of Muslim women and the poor Muslim schooling in that country. Muslims regard threats to their religion as threats to themselves; Islam under Hirsi's analysis is inherently reactionary. Indeed, its very meaning is "submission;" the believer does not maintain dialogue with God, but rather an endless quest to do His will.

When Hirsi lives in Holland and attends University and then works, she is astonished at how civilised the Dutch are. Women break up with their boyfriends, and the boyfriends don't honour-kill them. Women wear tight pants and aren't raped on the street. Women are educated, and argue with men. Women own businesses and employ men. Women are in the government! What we take for granted is simply not a part of much Islamic culture.

The book is readable, fascinating and horrifying. The books lets us be warned-- Islam is a religion which must be kept firmly out of schools, courts and legislatures, and which must be firmly exposed to the light of both reason and public scrutiny.

Some things I hate

2007-09-12T09:30:00.000-07:00

Today's rant Things I hate

a) fixed-gear bikes aka "fixies." These have no brakes and no gears, and you brake by using muscle force. Trendy urban shit. A way to stand out from the crowd, "HI, I am young and hip, gears are for, uhh, other people." Dumb. "Puts you in tune with the road;" sure, so does falling off your bike or beating your head against the ground. Simplicity is wonderful; anachronism, silly. It is amazing what people will do to look cool. Of course I will probably own one sometime. Also if you have a fixie you need a courier bag to go with it, is is this big urban package. "Hi I commute but only when the weather is nice and I can show off parts of me or my outfit, oh wait, did I just say that out loud?" Eventually everybody will own a fixie and then it will be "Zen" and "intuitive" to ride with gears.

If you really want simplicty buy a fucking unicycle. Oh, wait, those are hard to ride.

b) iPods. I fucking hate iPods. Cos (a) everybody has one, (b) cos nobody who listens to iPods can actually listen to an entire song, cos that stupid dial is so fun to fiddle with, it's like the iPod has not only destroyed the idea of the album but also of the song, since with songs now we listen only to the first 30 seconds.

c) Dreadlocks. If you're white, forget about them. Rastafarians. Well I have observed this in North America-- all of the Black Carribean dudes I have met who are "Rasta" and into peace, weed, reggae, what have you, also happen to have serious anger management issues. COnicidence? Jamaica is a notably violent country (and no, it's not the poverty, lots of other equally poor countries are much less vuiolent) or the fact that there are lots of Black people living there (ditto). Perhaps reggae is popular there as a wishful response to a violent culture. IE we are violent etc, so let's have a religion that pretends we are the opposite. Also weed. You think drugs put you in touch with the divine? You think smoking weeed improves your mind and makes you see reality? All you have to do is listen to most reggae music and you will see what weed does-- DULLS the senses. Somebody send me some awesome reggae music please.

So what do you all hate? Send in comments and I will publish them and add comments.

Erin Brokovich: Theme versus Ideology

2007-09-04T19:19:00.000-07:00

Erin Brokovich was a popular film, good for Julia Roberts, the studio, and above all for director Steven Soderbergh.

The story of a young legal assistant who helps put together a massive case against a polluting power company brings up some interesting questions about how Big Business (the film industry) accommodates political questions.

In one sense, EB is classic left-leaning. The little guys win, the corporation is bad, and there is transcendence of barriers (of class, of education, of gender) by the plucky heroine.

The question however arises of what the real business of this film is, other than making money. It seems to me that one of its central tensions is that it throws easy answers at the audience while ducking some of the tougher questions. On one hand, the true story does suggest that barriers can be transcended (Julia becomes a masculine agent/provocateur-- perhaps the endless hoochie mama wardrobe changes are a counterweight to this; her biker boyfriend becomes a figurative Mom, the white trash woman becomes a wealthy legal capitalist). But the question remains of why this point has to be made in the first place. If something happens and is easy, it isn't worth talking about. We don't discuss oxygen, or water, unless they are polluted or threatened. Does the film belabour the point because it doesn't happen in reality, but must be entertained as a way of making us happy?

Regarding the little firm's legal victory-- one question the film does NOT investigate is why this absurd situation should happen in the first place. Why is it that in the U.S., law is used as a tool for arriving at definitions of pollution and harm (and subsequently regulations), rather than the other way around: there being regulations in the first place? I would suggest that the film avoids this question because part of the American economic system is the primacy of big money and its influence on not only lawmakers ("don't regulate that!") but on access to justice itself. The lawsuit only goes ahead when the law firms merge; it is not right that prevails, but sufficient capital. The film does not address these points because movies that DO look at the nastiness inherent in the fabric of economic reality make people very uncomfortable. (Goodfellas comes to mind here, and so do The Sopranos).

There is also the question of the little guys (and girl) winning. Why is this a central plot point? I think because, in reality, this doesn't happen much. Class transcendence and the power of the individual are well-documented myths; not accepting them makes for an uncomfortable situation for white middle class North Americans who hate the idea that anything other than their own desires limit their lives.

So the theme is kind of put out there to counter the reality of life-- big business DOES run things, little people DON'T transcend, etc. Theme vs ideology, the film's job is to keep us happy and inspired.

Jerry Falwell is dead-- thanks be to God

2007-05-16T18:23:00.000-07:00

Jerry Falwell has died. Condolences to his family, but, honestly...YAY! Jerry, you homophobic, sexist asshole-- your own special Hell surely awaits you, unless the God you professed to worship is as decent as you were horrible.

Some classic Falwell quotes:

-"AIDS is God's punishment to gays." - Jerry Falwell.

- "If you're not a born-again Christian, you're a failure as a human being."

- "I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!"

- "Grown men should not be having sex with prostitutes unless they are married to them."

- "There is no separation of church and state. Modern US Supreme Courts have raped the Constitution and raped the Christian faith and raped the churches by misinterpreting what the Founders had in mind in the First Amendment to the Constitution."

- "AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals. To oppose it would be like an Israelite jumping in the Red Sea to save one of Pharaoh's charioteers."

- "Textbooks are Soviet propaganda."

- "The whole (global warming) thing is created to destroy America's free enterprise system and our economic stability."

- "(9/11 is the result of) throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools, the abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked and when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad...I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who try to secularize America...I point the thing in their face and say you helped this happen."

This is how much Lethbridge sucks

2007-05-01T21:58:00.000-07:00

Ok, well, Lethbridge appears to have some issues with Snoop Dog. Wake up, geniuses.

a) Consider yourselves lucky-- or him unlucky-- Snoop played your town.

b) The reason people come for miles around is because of this "bad" behaviour. The man is selling an image.

c) Isn't the use, and possession of enough for personal use, of marijuana a misdemeanor? If a rapper told his audience "get out there and get yo'sef some PARKING TICKETS, y'all" would the city want to ban him? I don't see the city going after, say, movies with people speeding in them (very dangerous) or smoking (deadly). etc etc, come on, we had this discussion in like 500 BC when Plato's ueber-boring Republic was going to ban not just musicians but poets! The city of Lethbridge could at least have an argument that's not 2500 years old.

d) Do you need to look any more boring than you already are? What do people do on a Saturday night in Lethbridge-- bowl? barbecue? hit the Legion for beers?

here come the ladies

2007-04-16T21:58:00.000-07:00

This is an offensive psot. Don't read it.

There's a certain weekend, usually in May but sometimes earlier, when the Gods favour men and lesbians. This is the weekend when women shed their winterish bark and show their tender blooms of leg.

So what do you like on a woman? Tits? Ass? Eyes? Legs? Long hair? Intelligence? No wait, that last one doesn't count. It's not what you see when she walks past you in the produce department.

Gentlemen and lesbians, I submit to you that the greatest of these is -----. let's proceed by elimination. Any girl can buy a push-up bra and have nice boobs. Hell, even *I* could wear a push-up bra. And I have. Make up? Anybody can learn to put that on. Nice hair? WHat with modern colouring techniques and chemicals, anybody can be an Indian, or a Norse goddess, or an Irish lass. You can even do your pubes, and the hairiest of asses can become porn-goddess denuded.

But there is one thing you can't fake. There is one thing you cannot buy at the drugstore or have a hairstylist or manicurist or physician do. There is one body part which, like a Tour de France cyclist or a hardcore alpinist, can only earn glory the long, hard way. And there's only one body part that will look the same in the morning, in the shower, minus make-up, hungover, and grouchy.

Ass.

Now I can hear women screaming at my shallowness. Whatever. Did you say something about winning the genetic lottery? That only lasts till you're 22, then it's junk city for you. Were you going to pretend that women don't fetishise male body parts? You were? Good, go ahead. They don't? THat's nice. Gentlemen and lesbians, enjoy, the season of legs is upon us.

Nation of Rebels-- book review

2007-03-04T10:54:00.000-08:00

What happened to the hippies? For that matter, what happened to punk rock, the Beats, cyberpunk, riot grrls, and, oh yeah, the union movement?

Joe Heath and Andrew Potter have some ideas in their book Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture.

In a nutshell, Heath and Potter argue that, after WWII, paranoia about Communism, mass consumer society and the memeory of the Nazi totalitarian state merged in the American collective unconscious to produce fear and drision of "mainstream" culture. This mainstream, mass culture-- be it working for a big coporation or government, or being in the Army, or buying mass produced products or doing things in masses with others-- got labelled as negative by varous countercultural types. First, the Beats, then the hippies, then punks, then punk wave 2, then cyberpunk, etc, criticised "mass consumer culture."

This is not new. What is new is the book's insistence that the counterculture, rather than rebelling against capitalism, actually drives it. Countercultural icons, be they drunken painters, heroin addict rock stars or actual objects of art or clothing, confer social distinction in a society uncomfortable with using overt financial signs to display social status. They are also cheap to buy early on in their existence, and often pay off later, in both financial terms and in terms of "I knew him/her/about that before..." Whether or not one has a liberating mental experience seeing a Warhol painting or watching a Kieslowski film (by any standards thoughtful), the consumption of these products brands the consumer as different from the crowd you find at the Multiplex. WHen a few do it, it's quirky; when the early adopters catch on, it becomes cool, and when the masses arrive to put Monroe pirnts in their living rooms, the hipsters have fled the scene for Jeff Koons and Kiarostami films-- and the masses have bought the old stuff, making somebody rich.

The counterculture's problem is that it has mistaken deviance for dissent. Doing one's own thing, dressing differently, dropping, taking drugs, etc, are cool statements, but they do not a counterculture make, because they inevitably become part of larger culture. Worse, a focus on personal autonomy, fashion and private cultural experience takes valuable energy away from the real work of political organisation that achieves transformation. As Heath and Potter put it, it is much sexier to wear cool hair, smoke weed and remix deep house tunes under the rubric of personal autonomy (and crucially to be SEEN doing all these) than to do political work like calling hundreds of people to come out to protest something, or to write letters to a government.

Real political work, it must be noted, is something we enjoy and then forget how much it cost. While there were a lot of gay men int he '70s shaking it at discos and taking massive amounts of poppers and blow, the gay-rights movement did not succeed because these guys looked cooler than their straight neighbours, or listened to better tunes, or dropped out of "straight" life. Gay rights-- like feminism-- happened over 30 years, and took a LOT of political organising. Rallies, letters, voting work, media work, etc. Talk to young women, or young gay men, and an awful lot of them can barely imagine that, geez, somebody had to fight for YOUR right to party.

Potter and Heath take nasty and very lucid aim at many of the counterculture's favorite arguments. They praise mass food and fashion and show how the value basis of most "high culture" products is purely an "in group" thing (e.g. it is well known that most oenophiles can't tell the Two Buck Chuck from the $50 Pinot Mon Cul; what is less well known is that most classic music fans (under the audio equivalent of a "blind taste test") cannot tell the difference between, say, Yo Yo Ma and John Smith). In other words, high culture is as commodified and branded as WWF, Celine Dion and monster truck rallies. Extreme sports are a class marker; so are food choices and the New Urbanism movement.

This is good reading. Enjoy it.

Global Warming (2)-- what we don't need.

2007-02-18T11:48:00.000-08:00

To deal with global warming, we must avoid the following:

a) environmental campaigns aimed at children.
b) any money/effort/time put into getting people to change their lives on an individual level.
c) most so-called "energy saving" technologies (esp. those related to transportation)
d) any corporate involvment in climate-change planning by governments

WHY?

a) Working on kids-- be it by having them "brainstorm ways to reduce carbon emissions" in high-school classrooms, or getting them to nag their parents, etc, is pointless, since the real issue-- reducing one's fossil fuel use-- is never on the table. Climate change action should be real, not an intellectual game. If you want to really educate kids, ask them what it would be like to live on $40/day in North America-- AT NORTH AMERICAN PRICES. They won't like doing that; their parents flatly refuse, but that's what you need if you want to really manage climate change.

b) Individual action always fails as a way to resolve collective problems. One person's (or group's) sacrifice involves another's gain. If some of us save on gas, there's more (or cheaper) gas for others to use. Net result? Zero. Social pressures on individuals will also ensure high levels of resource use. Drive a shitbox car when everybody else has an SUV and you'll know what I mean.

All action on climate change must be COLLECTIVE. Now: Kyoto for us, and Kyoto for the Chinese and the Indians. (Attention, Steve Harper-- if you ever get your shit together and meet Canada's Kyoto obligations, tell the Chinese "Kyoto, or no more wood/oil/ng etc for you" They'll listen. Oh, and you can throw in a word for Tibet while you're at it.). High gas taxes to kill consumption. Better public transit. Higher taxes to pay for E.I. for the many coming unemployed. Government work programs to set up microfarming within cities and to develop suburban land. Lawns made illegal and gardens mandatory. Government help to build community organic toilets and composting. Tax breaks for solar systems. RAILWAYS. BIKES.

C) ENERGY SAVING TECHNOLOGIES DON'T WORK. Jevon's Paradox is that when we make something cheaper to buy, or easier to use, people buy or use more of it. The increased efficiencies in gas engines over the past 20 years has resulted in SUVs; cheaper natural gas has meant monster houses. Higher energy costs must drive tech innovations. Merely increasing technological efficiancey will solve nothing.

D) We're the boss of business, not the other way around. I heard a guy on the radio, a UBC prof. Here is what he said: "I've been going to consultations on climate change and pollution between government and industry for ten years. All that industry does is stall and ask for more time and consultations. Well, we don't NEED any more consultations. We know what we have to do. Government passes laws-- a regulation-- because that's what governments are supposed to do: organise things. Business people adapt to government laws."

Climate change, bla f*cking blah

2007-02-03T17:56:00.000-08:00

The public debate is retarded. The Chinese and the Indians aren't part of Kyoto, and like anybody is going to lean on them. In the guiltier wealthier world (mine included), the reality is this: unless we cut fossil fuel use by about 85%, we won't make any difference. The media goes on and on about "who is to blame?" and "should individuals cut or corporations?" bla bla bla.

The only intelligent thing I've yet heard about the debate was on CBC when a guy from Greenpeace said "What we need, and now, are massively higher gas taxes-- like $5/litre-- an end to single-family houses, big taxes on highways, huge taxes on natural gas, etc. But the Canadian public isn't interested in higher taxes."

The problem isn't corporations, or lazy governments, or George Bush.

The problem is you.

Your real income if you want to not make more global warming is going to be 20% of what it was. You will be poor; your kids will be unemployed; many people you know will be seriously fucked, you will adjust to a more medieval life, where violence is reality and not video fantasy, you will not have a new iPod every 6 months; there will be no more vacations in Hawaii and jetting off to London for a week at Spring Break. There are no alternatives. You cannot stop global warming by pretending that if 600,000,000 people each bought organic coffee and hybrid cars, the world would be better off.

You might live this new slower more nasty lifebecause of worldwide adoption of Kyoto; more likely, you will live this because peak oil is going to cut your fossil fuel use for you whether or not you like that and no matter what you believe about hydrogen, solar or deep-sea mining.

So, media, shut up and tell the truth. We are going to be very, very poor, either because of cliamte change, or peak oil. Stop pretending that government debate, recycling, "walking more," bicycling, growing your own basil and taking shorter showers is going to solve the probem. This won't work well enough, and if it did, we wouldn't do it, cos we are driven by selfinterest, social status, laziness, and greed.

We aren't going to solve the problem; the problem is going to solve US.

Kill Arabs, not Americans

2007-01-13T16:11:00.000-08:00

Slamdance Film Festival has removed the "Super Columbine Massacre RPG" game debut from its lineup.

There have been various kinds of protests about this (and even some sponsors pulling from the Festival because they objected to the game's removal). No word, of course, on various MPGs where it's open season on not just individuals but entire groups of people-- prostitutes in GTA, for example. Kill Arabs, prostitutes, blacks and criminals, but not rich white kids.

On a lighter note...the Onion's response to the Columbine massacre.

Battelstar Galactica (new series)-- 9/11 politics

2006-12-16T11:33:00.000-08:00

In Galactica, a "lost tribe" of humans (the 13th astrological sign) living on a planet named Caprica, make helper robots named Cylons. These Cyclons rebel, attack their hosts, destroy most of Caprica, and the remnants of humanity flee into space.

It's post-9/11 politics and the Iraq war, set in space.

The contemporary issues and Galactica's take on these

-- 9/11: the Cyclon attack on Caprica is 9/11. The Cylons are the series' equivalent of fanatic Muslims in the American media imagination. They are humanity's bastard off-shoot (as Muslims are an off-shoot of Christianity).

-- religious fundamentalism : Cylons are "one group mind" in individual bodies and their shipo re-load their consciousness into new bodies when their body dies.

Human problems-- Scripture contains explanations about Earths-- question is, does one read these as literal or figurative explanations of what Earth is, and of how to get there?

Cylons use human women in breeding farms to incubate Cylon skin-job babies. Echoes certain views of Middle Eastern gender roles and purpose of reproduction.

-- Abu Ghraib: Battlestar Pegasus' corrupt (female!) commander condones torture and sexual abuse of skin-job Cylon prisoner. This commander is an ironic echo of Margaret Thatcher, and a reference to Bush's bitch, Tony Blair.

-- designated enemy combatants Pegasus' commander refuses to try Cylon agent (and later humans charged with murder) in open court-- kangaroo military tribunals

-- Peak Oil : the fleet is running out of its fuel, "trillium," and must attack and annihilate a Cylon base-ships (and the Cyclon ship which manufactures new Cylon bodes to replace the dead and into which old Cylon consciousnesses are downloaded-- Cylon base = Iraq, ship = Mecca or Afghanistan i.e. terror central in American imagination)

-- Us (and U.S.) vs "Them": Humans and Cylons mate. Cylon skin-jobs impersonate officers. Humans use Cylon skin-jobs as double agents. Cylons use humans as agents (Gaius Baltar).

-- occupation of Iraq: Season 3-- humans ruled by Cylons on New Caprica. Except, heh heh, the humans are doing all the shit we hate the Iraqis for (terrorism, subversion, suicide bombing). We are asked to sympathise with Iraqis, err, I mean, humans.

-- loss of meaning in West: Cylons ditch humans and rebel because humanity loses sight of Gods' desires. Cylons are religiously motivated.

--overdependence on technology: human technological sophistication allows Caprica's defenses to fall; only primitive technology (Battlestars and Vipers) can fight Cylons. Ironically criticises U.S. in Iraq, where unarmored guys with shitty guns are handing the Americans their asses.

-- Bush steals 2000 and 2004 elections: President Roslin rigs election to prevent humans from settling new Caprica and falling into possible Cylon trap.

-- dangers of military industrial complex: incipient rebellion in fleet as people feel they are being brainwashed by military about Cylon danger (echoes Bush's "war for our entire lifetimes")

write me and suggest more comparisons!

the word "slut"

2006-12-16T11:25:00.000-08:00

Women are mostly very jealous of each other. Teenaged girls diss each other with "slut," while adutl women get a bit more creative. Basically, if you show more skin or a nicer butt or better shorter clothes than another woman, you are in danger-- ceteris paribus-- of getting S-worded.

This has to do with women being aware of the sex competition thing: women try to get men by (a) appearing hot and (b) standing out from the crowd of other women (competition). But if you are too far ahead of your peers, they resent you (this is unfair). Also, the thing with prostitutes is that they offend women by the sheer outrageousness of their dress. So when a woman sees another woman as competition, she is reminded that she herself does exactly what the prostitute is trying to do-- get a man's attention via display of sexual characteristics, so that she can get some of his resources (emotional, financial, whatever). And we project what we don't like of ourselves onto others. Ergo, SLUT!"

The political economy of Indian sexism

2006-11-26T20:22:00.000-08:00

I've been learning about Hindu and Punjabi culture for seven years now and I am amazed at how even in Canada the culture retains its extraordinary racism and sexism.

Women must marry a man from a "good family," which is determined by parents and includes caste status, income and reputation. Many marriages are still arranged although there is more choice in many marriages (ie the kid gets to pick from a selection determined by parents). The bride moves to the husband's house, and must bring a substantial dowry to her wedding. Worst of all, she is under her mother-in-law's thumb, heh heh. God forbid an Indian woman should marry a white person (same for guys--white women are considered "whores"), and the end of the world would be if an Indian woman had sex before marriage.

So why this?

Well, in India, the law is basically useless. So when doing business, you have (a) no guarantees that you won't be ripped off and (b) little useful recourse to the law if you are. So, you need to insure yourself against problems, and one way to do this is to build alliances via blood. Somebody who is married to your daughter or son is less likely to rip you off.

Since the primary social unit in a world where the law is built (and enforced) around caste privilege will be first family and then caste (unlike the West, where the primary social unit is the individual), family and caste demands supersede others. For this reason young people are viewed as parts of a machine which play roles in the maintenance of a family's social and caste status.

You are also going to want to marry intra-caste. The income differences among castes are in some cases substantial. In addition, caste is tied to occupation, and the synergy of having two sets of realtives engaged in a similar profession is useful, whereas families from different castes will not be able to pool resources as easily.

Also, there is the question of distributing property once you die. Since India (like elsewhere) had during the Middle Ages its own screwed up methods of finance (loan sharking) it was necessary to keep assets in the family, since there were precious few ways outside family to make a living. So who counts as family? You want blood and marriage relations, and any kind of outsider-- an out-of-wedlock kid, an orphan, etc-- is to be viewed with suspicion. Hence an incredible emphasis on female chastity and sexual fidelity (not very different from Europe well into the 20th century).

Men own most property in India. This is probably a legacy of medieval social systems, where the lack of surplus energy meant that a strict division of labour emerged, as elsewhere-- men work outside, women take care of food production and childcare. There were not enough resources to free either member of a couple to be educated, or to change roles. Add to this physical prowess and the use of violence and men take control.

So, pace Marx, you might say that the political economy of medieval India has had a huge effect on sexual relations.

It is ironic that Indian culture is so amazingly sexist, since its culture worhips the female! India is a hugely sensual and sexy society, has loads of (embarassed) bisexuals and gays, loves its dance and music, makes endless films about forbidden romance, and dresses its young women better than anywhere I've ever been. Watch and Indian film, and it will have a woman at its center-- as the motive for love, as the object of a quest, as the unruly which the social order must tame and subsume. And hey-- the word "diva" is Indian!

The Fashion Arms Race.

2006-11-25T12:37:00.000-08:00

Skinny jeans are in for women. So are those awful shirts that look like you should wear them when you are pregnant, you know, the ones with the elastic band right under the boobs and below they fluff out. Also, all women need to throw out their old chunky '70s style boots as now it is wedges.

Now as an ass and leg man, I am disgusted. The low-cut, flared jean was God's own gift to us men. Accentuates hips and butt, the flare balances the middle out, and of course there is the fact that women have to stay in shape to wear these or they get the dreaded muffin-top. The new skinny only works if you are an anorexic teenager (same goes for guys).

While I am ranting please allow me to express my disgust with the manufacturers of rock climbing blothing, and with women rock climbers' sartorial hypocrisy. Women climbers go on and on about clothing's fit and feel, but what I see in female climbing clothes is the same shit as elsewhere: too few pockets, and too much display of sexual characteristics (tight pants, visible boobs, belly exposed, jackets that hug hips, bla bla). I mean no man would be caught dead in the very practical and comfrotable '80s neon tights...

Fashion really is an arms race. If you have enough money, and/or enough time, you can be ahead of the curve and stand out from the crowd (in the right way, of course, not the wrong way). Then other s race to catch up. So you move on. Women are insanely socially competitive in the looks department, so they dress for each other, not for men. I mean, most of us have trouble remembering if our girlfriends have cut their hair or not (we have to remember to notice).

What's interesting is that most women acknowledge this but none of them do anything about it. This is perhaps because the cost of dropping out of the race is huge personally (you feel like a loser), and it gets everybody else ahead (we all look good compared to somebody who doesn't dress "well"). And capitalists who make money off fashion don't care. They need you to replace yoru wardrobe as often as possible. Rejecting fashion is like political protest: doing it costs you; not doing it makes you comfortable.

Running to stand still (2)

2006-11-18T10:12:00.000-08:00

Why does it feel like the Western world makes progress?

a) The pace of change in the superficialities of social arrangements is massive and growing. With an explosion in technology integrated into daily life (Internet and off-shoots, massive increases in access to information) if feels like we are moving ahead quickly. Think about how your daily life feels. You now need to download cool recipes and buy "ethnic" ingredients to make dinner-- meatloaf is so white trash. You have to watch "foreign" films. You need your own website. God forbid you should listen to a Discman, or, worse, a Walkman. Fashion moves quicker, too, these days, especially for women.

So it feels like things are "moving forward" but I think we mistake change for progress. Every person I know is too busy.

b) Fossil-fuels and environmental subsidies. The last, soon-to-end bonanza of cheap oil and natural gas means we can live way beyond oru long-term means. We build stuff in China, ship it here, and throw it away after two years. The Chinese and others in the Third World are also buying twenty or so years' worth of Western life by throwing their environment out the window. When in the 1960s the Western environmental movement got underway, this happened not because people started giving a shit about the natural world. It started because there was no longer any way to throw crap away without coming face to face with it later. So we basically toughened our laws and moved bad stuff into the Third World.

Now, this is eventually going to bite us in the ass. China and others are under massive environmental pressure. In a country where one-third of drinking water is unsafe by any standards, it will be only a matter of time until people get pissed off-- or sick-- enough to demand changes. When -- not if-- this happens, you will see big changes there. And when fossil fuels really start to get expensive, and people are laid off, and IKEA stops being cheap, you will see that it no longer matters how cool your new phone is, or how many simultaneous downloads you can run on BitLord.

You will see that eventually we will be alone with a world too full of people, and devoid of the enrgy it takes to run our way of life, and lacking in simple ideas to make the future manageable. And you will see that Nature, and the unknown, like the '60s bumper sticker said, bat last.

Running to stand still (1)

2006-11-18T09:32:00.000-08:00

Progress is inevitable, right?

Wrong.

Since the late Eighteenth century, humanity's richer half has benefitted enormously from a massive increase in technological advance. A typical person in a Western and industrialised society now has fossil-fuel-powered/built machines which each day do work equivalent of the labour of two hundred people. Two hunded years ago, only nobility lived as a typical suburban Joe does, with his carriage (SUV), court time (TV) and portly demeanour (big gut). Most people were filthy, near-starving and desperate.

Now, at the same time, we all know that the twin fists of climate change and fossil fuel depletion are clenched and coming to strike at us. So, can we innovate our way out of these issues using new technologies?

Answer-- no. The amount and success rate of technological innovation has been dropping. We experience diminishing returns on investments in technology (and anything else). This means that, for making every extra unit of progress (after a certain point), it costs progressively more and more resources. Or, to put it another way, if you keep spending the same amount of resources to achieve more of something, each extra unit of $$ that you spend will give you fewer and fewer returns. Diminishign returns on investment = D.R.O.I.

Data:

-- in the 1950s, oil exploration yielded about one hundred barrels of oil for each barrel of oil (energy equivalent) expended on exploration. In 2004, it was 3.

-- Penicillin was developed in the 1930s for (in today's dollars ) about $20,000. It has saved several hundred million lives during the last seventy years. New antibiotics-- which we must constantly create as bacteria evolve-- can cost $50,000,000 to develop and test, and save hundreds of thousands of lives.

-- the U.S. health care system has dropped in productivity by nearly 60% from 1930-1980 (as measured by $$ spent compared to life expectancy). Data for other countries are roughly similar.

--the maximum point of technological innovation was in 1873. This was when (now seemingly simple) inventions and practices such as the light bulb, telegraph, washing hands with soap in hospitals and the provision of basic universal literacy (in Western countries) provided massive bang-for-the technological-buck.

-- In agriculture, as Joseph Tainter puts it: "To raise world food production from 1951-1966 by 34%, for example, required increasing expenditures on tractors of 63%, on nitrate fertilizers of 146%, and on pesticides of 300%. To remove all organic wastes from a sugar-processing plant costs 100 times more than removing 30%. To reduce sulfur dioxide in the air of a U.S. city by 9.6 times, or particulates by 3.1 times, raises the cost of pollution control by 520 times (Meadows et al. 1972)."

-- Despite well-documented increases in everything from personal and financial security to access to health care, education and political participation, to more wealth, the life expectancy and happiness of people in Western societies has not changed since WWII. However, increasing the wealth of the very poor in less-developed countries has a strong effect on their happiness.

So why is this? It's the "low hanging fruit theory." If problems are like apples on a tree, we are going to pluck the lowest-hanging ones first. As we get those, we need ladders, more personal risk, and more energy, to get into the upper parts of the tree to keep grabbing fruit.

There is no field I've ever seen data for where the DROI theory doesn't apply. Find me one and I'll buy you dinner.

But we feel like technology changes super quickly! DVDs! Cell phones! Internet! Wal-Mart ships from China to you! Fast computers blow your two year old computer away! PS3! IM!

What gives? See next post.

Ten Reasons for Owning an SUV

2006-09-18T18:10:00.000-07:00

10) I feel safe in it.
9) I want my kids and wife to be safe out on the road.
8) Yeah, you can throw all your stuff in the back.
7) I wanted something with a little more power.
6) I like the four-wheel drive in the winter.
5) I like sitting up a little higher so I can see better.
4) You can stretch out in it.
3) I need the power to tow my ______.
2) They're better on gas than you'd think!
1) Great for camping.

GoodFellas

2006-09-18T18:03:00.000-07:00

One of the Big Four of gangster film-- the others are The Godfather I and II, and a remarkable Brazillian film called City of God.

Scorsese's film, from 1990, is a most cogent summary and criticism of '80s Reaganomics (in a similar vein to Altman's The Player and Tolkin's The New Age). Henry Hill is your classic immigrant, looking through the frosted window of his crowded Irish house at the American candy store, run, it happens, by the Mob. Hill lies, cheats and steals his way as far up the ladder as he can, then sells his friends and turns respectable, moving into the suburbs, authoring a book (with Nicholas Pileggi) and ditching his wife for a new one. The film's last frame, with Hill picking up a newspaper in front of his subruban tract home, pretty much nails the Americna dream: everybody wants in, and everybody wants out. Gangster film doesn't glorify evil; it appeals to-- and disgusts-- us because we ARE those mobsters, excpet that we play by rules and go to movies, while THEY get to BE the movies.

Gangster film is fundemantally about revenge, the American dream (capitalism) and how the American Eden is a myth.

Eminem

2006-09-18T17:52:00.000-07:00

Eminem isn't really rap music.

He uses the thematic concerns of rock-- alienation, identity confusion-- and expresses them using the rap idiom. The three narrative personae (Eminem, Marshall Mathers, Slim Shady) suggest both narrative play and some serious self-doubt-- as if the lyrics didn't!

Rap plays with MC names and rapper identity because of ease of rhyming (it's harder to rhyme "Jackson" than "B") and because when your community of origin is black, urban and American, you have a pretty clear idea of who you are and where you stand. So you invent your way out.

Rap music also plays to an implied community who can be proud of themselves, having been historically victimised and having overcome and awful lot.

White musicians who invoke imagined white communities have awful associations from the social imaginary to answer to, like mobs of skinheads, or dumb '70s metal kids, or groups of poeple from-- God forbid-- the suburbs. Groups of young whites aren't cool, and can be kinda scary, so rock music leaves community as a kind of unstated longed-for project (emo!). And rock subtype groups that coalesce around around defined identities must see themselves as dorks-- the punks, the '80s "art-fags" who like the Cure, their emo descendents, those kids in flannels in the early '90s, etc. It's not an accident that rock subgroups look "bad" at least in relation to other sides of culture. Like those retarded emo-girl haircuts.

Democracy and human rights-- their real origins

2006-08-10T20:04:00.000-07:00

Thesis: what we all democracy and a state which actively redistributes assets oroginates and can only exist when the per-capita quanitiy of energy available to that society increases.

PART A) Energy is the foundation of all life and social organisation. Now, in what we Westerners tend to call "traditional" or even "primitive" societies, the defining feature is probably something like energy equilibrium. That just means that the amount of energy (and therefore physical goods, and social goods such as knowledge, science, arts etc) available to that society is basically unchanging.

Now think about the future. If you expect that there is no chance that in say ten years you will be earning more money, or have more free time, or have more objects (or whatever it is that extra energy translates into for you), are you going to be willing to share what you have? No, you aren't. Your rational tendency, actually, will be to ensure that you do not lose one single iota of what you already have.

Now if you imagine that the future is super-rosy, you are going to be more inclined to share what you have. You might consider charity, or voting for a government that will tax you more, because-- and this is crucial-- you are going to be better off in the future. You will consent to the increase of assets available to others only if your increase while this is happening is equal or greater.

PART B) What is democracy? Well there are lots of ways of defining it, but loosely democracy means that a set of privileges and rights is available to everybody in that society regardless of income, social status etc. Now why bother? Why not just have it medieval style, or India style, where your economic social and legal rights have to do with your income or where you live?

Well, it seems pretty simple to me: people who have nothing or are marginally employed (eg subsistence farmers, beggars, etc) have very few political needs, since they are basically concerned with survival. With land, water and social protection from thieves etc they will be "content."

Now suppose you take this kind of person let's clal him Johnny Peasant and you give him some property of his own, or maybe he has some $$ and wants to marry a wealthier girl (women prefer men with money). OK. Well, Johnny's self-interest now includes not just having access to food production and safety, but access to women and protection of his assets (which includes the right to do with them as he will, within reason).

So what does he need? He needs some legal rights. Now since these legal rights have formerly been the preserve only of the wealthy, they now have to be extended to Johnny's kind of people. The wealthy will either not care about Johnny's demands, or they will resist, since everybody wants to feel a cut above SOMEBODY. So Johnny will have to get together with his buddies in the same boat and make some noise.

Now if you look at where and when democracy emerges, it is all tied to increases in energy availability. England. OK, the Magna Carta in 1216 was basically a brake on the insane King's power. Real but messed democracy starts with the English Civil War in the 1640s, when masses of people protest rich privilege and their lack of proerty and other rights. Despite the horrors of the war, real democracy starts with the Restoration and the next 50 years, which also sees the time of England acquiring coal, steam engines and riches from its colonies.

In France, you have a state where you get no deemocracy during the 1700s and then BOOM, revolution, which happens partly because the rich fruits of colonialism aren't being shared by the wealthy.

In ancient Greece, the primitive deomcracy wich emerged around 500 BC lasted as long as the Greeks wer expanding their Empire. After the Pelopponesian War deomcracy decayed. In Rome, embryonic deomcracy worked until the late 200s, when the Roman State began to see real diminishing returns on its military campaigns (ie its energy balance flattened).

In the twentieth century, attempts at democracy emerge in three places in the early 1900s-- Mexico, China and Russia. This is (partly) because energy availability in these countries-- cheap petroleum and coal-- increases while the distribution of social goods is stagnant.

Later itn eh twentieth century, we see blacks, women gays etc properply going for their rights. We also see movements in all major industrialised democracies to greater and greater redistribution of wealth visa things liek socialised medicine, unemployment insurance, etc. These work (everywhere except in the corporate-controlled U.S.A.) because the 20th century is a time when energy availability is exploding. Returns on oil exploration, for example, have yields of 100 to 1. As energy avialability increases, it becomes possible for marginal groups to acquire social capital (e.g. lawyers and fees to pay them) so thay can demand rights, and the wealthy are willing to share since they see only increases in the future.

The turning point is the second oil shock of 1979 (inflation plus low growth). Not coincidentally this marks the time when we get the following political events

a) U.S. right-wing economic politics under Reagan.
b) same thing in England under Thatcher
c) in Canada, the QUebec attempt at secession, and the seeds of the Conservative Mulroney government of the '80s, as well as socialist redistribution of energy via tha hated National Energy program.
d) conservative governments in France and Germany
e) China moves forward toward more capitalistic ways

As energy became more expensive, business and its owners found it harder to make money, and so resisted the creation of newer social programs and the redistribution of wealth via right-wing political moves. It is not a coincidence that the '90s were a more liberal time-- the oil demand shocks of the late '70s and early '80s had finally brought cheap oil and natural gas online, and so energy prices plummeted.

As Richard Duncan notes, the all-time high point of human energy production was 1979. After this, we not only see worldwide trends toward mroe right-wing politics and authoritatianism, but we also see a massive increase in economic disparities. In some places, such as Africa, we have seen almost every human life indicator drop since 1980 (largely due to African countries' inability to recruit enough resources (energy) to deal with the HIV epidemic).

So yeah. Deomcracy. What you get when you need a way to manage your new stuff, and the rich are optimistic enough to share.

The environment-- why we don't care.

2006-06-23T20:18:00.000-07:00

Why does everybody who is polled about "the environment" want to save it, but nobody does so in practice?

Possibility (a): the real costs outweigh the cost of saying you want to help the environment. Talk is cheap; taxes expensive.

Possibility (b): most environmental damage has in First World countries been sent elsewhere (i.e. China, Indonesia). This means the issues we Westerners create, like the massive damage that the acids used to create computer circuits do when dumped into Indonesian rivers, don't affect us. And so when we are asked to deal with the costs (ie pay more $$ for a computer) we don't see the benefit directly.

(c) Problem of commons: the personal value you the individual extracts from overusing the environment (eg cheap salmon, polluted air from your car) is greater and more directly visible to you than the benefits of reducing/forgoing your use of same.

Star Wars

2006-06-11T12:19:00.000-07:00

Many theories have been put forward to xplain the wild success of the Star Wars films (I am here concerned with the first trilogy). Innovative marketing, the updating of the Western by way of sci-fi settings, the hero-beats-the-dark story, awesome effects, etc.

My theory? Star Wars is a farewell to the '60s and the moment when the '60s kids turn into yuppies.

Luke , Leia, Hann, , etc, are '60s America. Farmboy, Ivy League socialite, self-made working class businessman in hock to his backers. Everybody has a reason to dislike the Empire (and in Hann's case he profits as smuggler from its rules but hates the hassles it creates). The Empire is the American military-industrial complex, or whatever you want to call it, personified by Dad (dark father, Darth Vader) and his huge synthetic Death Star planet, the Earth run factory-crazy amok.

The trilogy's task: to symbolically overcome the worst parts of industrial capitalism and to integrate these with an organic and humanist way of being.

Sure enough, by the end, the children of the Empire have come home to rule it and are reconciled with their parents with the aid of eco-friendly Ewoks, capitalism is renewed (Hann can now be legit), the Force becomes part of the Empire leaders' way of thinking, and the Empire is now a force for good.

The '60s kids had to grow up, get jobs, and join the rat race. Star Wars is their reassurance that, yeah, it's OK, you can bring your '60s ideals with you when you join the coporate world. Of course, in real life, it didn't work out that way (you can have money or ideals, choose ONE) but hey, you have to tell kids something optimistic, don't you?

Distributed attention limits

2006-06-11T12:03:00.000-07:00

Back in the late '90s, when the Internet became accessible to pretty much everybody, it was widely predicted that the "democratisation of information" would lead to a revolution in social and economic behaviour. If anybody could pulbish and read news, the mainstream media woudl be bypassed, tyrannies would end, politics would clean up, etc.

Then came the 2000 U.S. presidential election, the invasion of Iraq, and the 2004 U.S. presidential election. The first was probably stolen, the second by all accounts fraudulently presented and incompetently managed, and the third was beyond a doubt stolen.

What happened?

Theory: distributed attention limits: there is only X amount of mental energy available for each of us to use for thinking about issues; politics ranks low.

Given that we spend about 7 hours a day asleep, two-three dealing with commuting, food, chores, etc., and eight to ten working, that leaves us with 4-7 hours of spare time per day. This time (which happens *after* working hours and thus with reduced mental energy) means that there are functional limits to the amount of attention we can pay to things. If we have a set of priorities which includes family, recreation, watching tv and caring about politics, we inevitably put political stuff lower down on the list after family, etc.

There is thus a limited amount of attention avaialble for non-local and non-immediate causes. At the same time, the amount of information available has grown. So we have more info, and less and less energy to deal with it.

Result? We know about the evils of the world, but we don't bother with them, and coporations and politicians exploit these.

Intro to Head

2006-06-11T11:56:00.000-07:00

Hello.

This blog is going to be a collection of examinations of ideas, crap I think about whenever.

I am not academically trained in most of the fields I write about, I am not a systematiser, I welcome feedback, and somebody else has proably already had (and published) these ideas. I steal ideas without credit when it suits me; when I can remember, I give credit.

My interests include energy resource issues, some aspects of economics, film and television, some spiritual issues, cultural anthropology, and whatever else I mentally run into.