The Aerie
This is why I believe academicians should be forced to work in the private sector on a recurring, periodic basis. Preferably in Marketing.
"A Stanford researcher has received initial permission to create a human-mouse hybrid as long as the creature acts like a mouse and not like a human being."
Great! Just what the world needs - arrogant, hypocritical mice.
It's doomed to fail, of course. The first thing that the "humouse" will do is learn to conceal its nefarious, scheming plans for world domination. And its taxes: it will conceal them both.
I don't know about you, but I'm putting my affairs in order. I've read "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," I've seen "Pinky and the Brain," I know how much trouble superintelligent lab mice can be. First they want brains, next they'll want rights, soon I'll be slouching to work on the train, reporting to a tiny, white boss, and spending the day fetching cheese and running in a pointless wheel.
Or, wait, did this already happen?
We finally relented, as it was almost inevitable as we would. We got the Xboxes.
I had always vowed to be a video-game-less household. Not because video games are some kind of caustic force upon the fabric of American society (which of course they are), but because they are largely consumer-driven machines. That is to say, you can use them as a consumer, but very rarely can you use them as a producer.
I've tried to instill in my kids a strong sense of producing versus consuming. Consuming is passive, consuming is expensive, consuming is playing into the hands of the powerful.
Producing is hard work. Producing is creative. Producing is, or at least can be, subversive.
So I never wanted to get video games. I wanted the kids to use their home computers to do things like "learn to run video game emulators," and "write your own games.' In short, I wanted to trick them into learning skills that would be useful in becoming producers rather than consumers.
Unfortuntely what I didn't count on was Monster's Den, a local gaming shop that provides a bunch of wired-up Xboxes for kids to use. For a fee.
And while I knew that my kids' friends' would have video games, I figured that distance would limit their exposure.
Between friends-with-video-games and the Monster's Den, my kids were frequently not home, and often broke.
So we decided enough was enough. Not having a video game wasn't preventing them from being consumers or using video games, they were simply doing so away from home, where we couldn't have any input or control. Better to have them, and sometimes their friends, over here, where we can keep an eye on them.
So I went out and got a couple of Xboxes, used, cheap, and a bunch of used games. Got some really good deals. Then on Christmas morning they were all set up in the basement game room, waiting.
Mind you, Christmas is upstairs. We opened all the gifts. We inspected the stockings. Afterwards we cleaned up the papers.
Then when the kids were convinced everything was well over, I told my daughter, "It's really noisy downstairs, could you go see what that is?"
Now the first thing she saw was the Karaoke box that we had purchased, and she was very excited about that. So when she started yelling, I sent my youngest down. "Go see what your sister is making so much noise about."
The wife and I listened as he went downstairs.
"Holy S^&#!" he yelled. He rocketed back upstairs, almost incoherent. Racing into their room he called his brother at the top of his lungs, managing to blurt "Xbox!"
The boys went downstairs, and we followed. As they were exclaiming over the first Xbox, I opened the door to my office and showed them the second.
Our eldest boy, at the surly age of 14, threw his arms around both of his parents and gave us a very enthusiastic, "Thanks!"
Sure we'll have battles in the weeks ahead keeping them on top of their homework and off of the video games. But it was all worth it to crack through a 14-year-old's armor, just for a moment.
He wears red and white because he's advertising for Coca-Cola. He sees you when you're sleeping and he knows when you're awake... without a warrant. He compiles an 'enemies list' of people he believes are "naughty" and "nice." He doles out material rewards to those he approves of, and gives greenhouse-gas-producing coal to those he doesn't. He outsources his labor. He dodges taxes by maintaining corporate headquarters outside of the U.S.
Are you sure he's on "our side"?
When your first allegiance is to your own fear, anyone with courage is a traitor.
-Me
Sunday was annoying in a lot of ways, but one of the ways was unexpected. I was already in a bad mood, in part because my wife was leaving to go to a party while I was going to be staying home, not going to a party.
She was in her coat, ready to leave, and I was making my lunch: the coffee was brewing, the bagel was in the toaster.
Then one of my kids came in. I won't say who, I'll just say The Kid, since if The Kid learns I've blogged this The Kid will destroy me.
Anyway, The Kid came in and said, "Dad, how does a toilet plunger work?"
With a sinking feeling, I asked, "Why do you want to know?"
"Well," said The Kid, "It doesn't seem to be working."
"Your father will take care of it," said Mrs. Party-Hearty, one foot out the door.
"Oh yeah," I snarled, "I'm just the #*!@% janitor after all."
Now, I have to explain. This Kid has a unique super power: This Kid can kill simply by walking out of the bathroom. Superman would veer off course and crash, flying through this cloud. Batman would weep. A couple of years ago we had a friend over, and The Kid walked out of the bathroom, and it was quite the sight watching our friend trying to oh-so-politely ignore the effects of The Kid's super power while her eyes were watering and her hair was curling. It would have been hilarious, except that being The Kid's father does not convey immunity - my vision was dimming, and I couldn't tell whether the black spots were from wooziness or from paint flaking off the ceiling.
So when This Kid in particular tells you that the toilet plunger isn't working, this isn't just an annoyance, it's a crisis. And when there's food being prepared, a disaster.
I urged The Kid to try again, but it was my fault The Kid could get nothing accomplished. The evening before had been the end of a real red-letter day, and I had celebrated by purchasing a new toilet plunger at the dollar store. Yes, I'd bought a $1 plunger. It was 99 cents overpriced. Every attempt to plunge the toilet caused the plunger to invert itself, requiring manual intervention to correct it. And believe me, you don't want to manually intervene with a recently-inverted plunger.
After a couple of increasingly frustrated and aggravated exchanges with The Kid, I was forced to look into the problem. We couldn't risk The Kid working on it any further. In the past, The Kid had decided to try to force the issue by flushing the toilet a second time, resulting in hours spent sanitizing the laundry room beneath the main floor bathroom. This time there were bags of Christmas groceries stacked all over the laundry room floor - a sceptic disaster could cost us over a hundred dollars.
Squaring my shoulders, and breathing only through my mouth, I marched steadfastly into the bathroom to inspect the situation.
I awoke in the living room, still weeping "No! Noooo!" Fortunately The Kid's powers tend to collect up at the ceiling, leaving a precious layer of life-giving oxygen below.
Taking a deep, dusty breath of floor level air, I returned to inspect the situation.
Apparently The Kid, like most superhuman creatures, possesses more than one super-power. In addition to being a one-Kid Buchenwald Shower, The Kid can block drains so thoroughly that blasting caps are necessary.
I fumbled with the lousy $1 plunger and discovered, as had The Kid, that I had wasted an entire dollar on this thing. It went in concave, and emerged convex, doing nothing useful in-between. Digging through the trash (which at this point was a welcome improvement) I unearthed the head from the prior plunger. It was so worn that it had developed holes all round the rim - this was not, after all, the first manifestation of The Kid's powers. Working very gingerly, I removed the new head and replaced it with the old one. Immersing it blindly into, well, immersing it, I positioned it over the opening and plunged. The clog didn't move.
Remember what I mentioned about those holes? Well, what happens when you squeeze a liquid-filled thingy that has holes?
Believe me, you don't want to imagine the results.
By this time my air was almost out, so I left the room to breathe.
Grabbing some more air, I tried several methods, none of which were successful, and none of which I'll disgust you by describing except to say, no, I didn't try THAT. Eventually I took the old "holey" plunger head, put it in a plastic bag, affixed it back onto the handle, and finally succeeded.
That, of course, was only half the battle.
The next 45 minutes was spent with a bucket of ammonia water (or possibly "watery ammonia" given the ratios), and a collection of old rags - some of which, ironically enough, were The Kid's old diapers, long since retired to the rag-bag.
Oh, didn't I tell you? Yes, we had twins and a singleton, and we washed their cloth diapers at home the old-fashioned way. My wife -you know, the one who was at the party during this whole thing? yeah, that one - my wife is a very old-fashioned girl. Old fashioned enough to want to wash cloth diapers: not so old fashioned, however, that she considered diaper-laudering or even diaper-changing for that matter to be "women's work." Oh no. No, her old-fashionedness extended to a very precise date early in 1956, after the women's suffrage movement but before bra-burning.
No this wasn't the first time I've had to deal with The Kid's super powers.
So ninety minutes after I started, I staggered out of the bathroom, reeking (hopefully only) of ammonia. In the kitchen my forgotten lunch was waiting - a rock-hard toasted bagel, and a small pot of black tar that used to be coffee.
But that was okay, because I really didn't expect to have any appetite for quite a while...
The wife arrived home from her party and later we had a chance to discuss the marvelous adventure that I had while she was out eating fresh homemade bread and birthday cake with a roomful of lesbians. "Stop," she said, laughing, "You're going to make me wet myself - you have to blog this!"
Yeah, that's what I want to do - relive THAT experience...
The increase in speed of communications has not led to an ideal world of instant learning and universal understanding. Instead we seem to be living through an age in which mass-marketing has combined with ideology and rapid communications to create a Perfect Storm of Propaganda. Just as spam uses plausable fake names and subject lines to convey legitimacy and elicit urgency, the caustic ideas of "memetic spam" are delivered pseudoscientific wrappings designed to lend credibility to stupidity, bigotry, lies, and nonsense that are absurd on their face, but that serve a particular group's interests.
This is the amplification of ideology over reason at the expense of credibility. The reputations of people and organizations that have been built up over decades are being leveraged and destroyed to serve short-sighted liars who actively despise the conventions of civil society. The Presidency has been abused to leverage corporate power and amoral ideology. Religion is abused to spread fear. Journalism is abused to lend credibility to lies. These are the Barbarians of Information tearing down the Rome of Integrity.
The end result is not just a frightened, reactionary, and easily manipulated population. The end result is a population which has been stripped of its belief and trust in any civil institution, whether that be Government, Scientific Method, Education, or the Rule of Law. Even Courtesy is labelled "political correctness" or "intolerance." Having been fed so many lies that they have lost faith in established societal institutions, people turn for guidance to whatever group best markets itself.
The best marketers are the groups with the most money, and those in turn serve powerful interests - corporations, organized religion, and ruling political parties.
Thus the population is taught to work against its own best interests in order to serve the interests of the rich and powerful. Deliberately instilled with fear in order to keep it disunified and easily manipulated, the submissive population is rewarded with flashy material goods produced by overseas slave labor, plentiful food designed to numb and addict, and banal entertainment designed to reinforce conformist messages. We are enslaved by low expectations, stripped of compassion by fierce moral judgementalism, and fed lies and comedy designed to control and lull us.
The best way to fight back is to reinforce and reiterate the values of education, diversity, reason, compassion, vigilance, and most of all courage. As individuals we must have the courage to loudly denounce lies, the education and wit to counter misinformation with truth. We must counter fearmongering with reason, and moral judgementalism with compassion. We must display a complete intolerance for corruption, and assert the supremacy of the Rule of Law over Authority or Power.
These assaults on the foundations of civilization are not the result of a centralized world conspiracy. These assaults on the foundations of civilization represent the collective efforts of countless amoral, self-interested parties seeking power and profit. They are permitted to scrape at the foundations of civilization by individuals who decide not to intervene, not to get involved, not to take a risk, not to live by their own values. In other words, everytime we relax our vigilance and allow ourselves a moment of hypocrisy, or let ourselves back down in the face of fear, we become complicit in the destruction of our own culture.
It doesn't take much to fight back - it doesn't take a lot of time, money, or even thought. We can each do our part. We don't have to go into politics or leave our jobs to work in the Peace Corps. We just need to resist fear. We just need to remain alert and present in our lives so that we can catch and counter the lies. We just have to preserve our ability to feel compassion. We just have to get educated. We just have to know enough history to maintain a healthy skepticism. We just have to recognize what we can do, and be ready to do what we can.
That's all it takes: alertness, willingness, courage, and a commitment live by our beliefs - in other words, integrity. That's all it takes. Everything it takes to save the world follows from there quite naturally.
Their first weapon is fear; their first victory is when you are too afraid to speak.
So maybe you noticed but I moved the blog around a bit. Bumped it up to the front page since that page was woefully neglected and I want to redesign the whole site. In particular I'd like to learn to adjust the underlying Movable Type blog software. I'd like to re-enable comments with some kind of authenticator, and I'd like to learn to adjust the style and links. So this is a first step.
Life is keeping me busy and there are tons of things I've wanted to blog about, but I haven't taken the time. Part of that is because I've been reading books and playing "nethack" again, and part of it is family stuff and Christmas preparations. This month's "Dad and Kid Day"s are devoted to Christmas shopping and we've got two of the three done now.
Anyway my next little project is to add a "buy" button for my books, "Mitlanyal: Tolmitlanyal" and "Mitlanyal: Tolkiriqaluyal" to the website, and then re-enabling comments. Meanwhile... back to work!