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By jdb, December 30, 2008

“Down the long lane of the history yet to be written America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect. Such a confederation must be one of equals. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength. That table, though scarred by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield. ”

-Dwight Eisenhower, the last Republican

We cast this message into the cosmos…. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some — perhaps many — may have inhabited planet and space faring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message: We are trying to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope some day, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe.

-Jimmy Carter, Inscribed on the space ship Voyager

“80 percent of air pollution comes not from chimneys and auto exhaust pipes, but from plants and trees.”

“My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”

“For the first time ever, everything is in place for the battle of Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ. It can’t be too long now. Ezekiel says that fire and brimstone will be rained upon the enemies of God’s people. That must mean that they will be destroyed by nuclear weapons.”

-Ronald Reagan, Alzheimer’s patient.

“The money powers prey upon the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than a monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, and more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces as public enemies, all who question it’s methods or throw light upon it’s crimes. I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me and the Bankers in the rear. Of the two, the one at my rear is my greatest foe..corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money powers of the country will endeavor to prolong it’s reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in the hands of a few, and the Republic is destroyed.”

-Abraham Lincoln

“They know if they can keep us looking at each other across a racial divide, if I can look at Bobby Rush and think, Bobby wants my job, my promotion, then neither of us can look at George Bush and say, ‘What happened to everybody’s job? What happened to everybody’s income? What … have … you … done … to … our … country?’”

-Bill Clinton

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By jdb, December 28, 2008

On the face of it, Richard Stallman’s  apocalyptic theory about information control and the death of liberty has a visceral appeal, but is it real? One thing to think about: when information was bound up in books, we arguably had more liberty than we do now.

Information about me can be collected and pushed around as well. restricting that information is a good thing, as Stallman well knows (note his cell phone stance, same as mine). So this is not so much about freeing information as it is a kind of warfare about who controls it. But does DRM prevent me from writing and sending political speech, or does it only prevent me from watching Goofy for free?

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By jdb, December 15, 2008

(This post is from 5/08)

In the face of war, villainy, anarchy, famine and plague, there are a lot of people that think the world’s biggest problem is that Mickey Mouse is not yet in the public domain, and that if people had the ability to make Mickey Mouse t-shirts at will then there would be no more poverty, ignorance, or political disenfranchisement, anywhere in the world.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/5/7/142421/5028/462/511107

As far as this particular bill I can’t tell what the esteemed Congress Critters were trying to accomplish except that people’s kids, like Phillip Dicks kids, would have to go through everything he ever wrote, catalog it, and pay a fee every ten years. That’s probably OK for his kids who make all their money licensing off his shit but if you’re talking about maybe someone more obscure, maybe Cordwainer Smith, right now a movie studio would have to find his kids and figure out if they owned something or not, whereas this puts the onus on the copyright holder to watch their own backs.

This bill is a resource grab by big companies, but the modern day trotskyites who put forward the philosophy used in it might see it as a way to enhance the people’s power against corporate power, but even though a lot of stuff accrues in the hands of big companies, which is the problem, copyright is a way for Joe Blow to use his mind to make something and make sure he gets compensated for it in this capitalistic world we live in, as something that levels the playing field. The problem is that authors/artists and especially musicians don’t have *enough* protection. Taking away pretty much the only tool they have doesn’t help, and honestly in the end, I think people have plenty of room to write their own books and make their own music without it being too much like Mickey Mouse. I think there are some other issues like being able to make fair use copies, libraries for instance, which will have to be worked out for protected digital media but other than that most of these issues are addressing problems that have yet to manifest…

Some related agitprop from Ars Technica:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/04/new-orphaned-works-act-would-limit-copyright-liability.ars

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By jdb, December 15, 2008

(Originally from 2007)

For the last twenty years, there’s been this supposition that ‘interactive’ forms of art will replace older, more static forms. It’s arguable that there are new forms of art, but it doesn’t seem like new forms supplant the old so much as coexist, at least to date. Photography alongside Painting, Drama alongside Film, now Books alongside Hypertext.

In the realm of fiction, there may or may not be something evolving and what it will end up being is still any one’s guess. will iFiction come from video games? There are some beautiful video games out there, but RPG’s and MMORPG’s aren’t much like fiction, bound by the simplicity of ‘traditional’ video games. It’s all still running though a maze and shooting stuff, or slicing it up as the case may be.

There are some people extending their table-top and live action role-playing games onto the Internet in shared spaces. This could be a type of interactive, collaborative fiction and people often talk about ‘shared narratives’. The thing that most resembled ‘interactive fiction’ however were the text games from Infocom back in the eighties – written by one person, and navigated by means of text. Unfortunately it was a dead end in evolutionary terms – over time the worlds could have gotten deeper, and the programs more intelligent at taking instructions and giving feedback.

The kind of gossip, rumor-mongering, scapegoating and self-reinforcement that happens on Internet forums and in blog comments could be a kind of interactive fiction but really I think it’s more a mythologization, where an intrinsic group creates it’s own reality regardless of ‘real-world’ fact. That kind of group think might be the Internets primary gift to social discourse and forms unique to the Internet, like public journals, might be the art form that flourishes in the Internet space.

In the end if could be that ‘iFiction’ if it even happens won’t be the kind of direct transfer of form that happened from Drama to Radio and Film, for instance, but something that just contains story elements and bits from other arts, something genuinely new, leaving ‘fiction’ without the ‘i’ to continue it’s meandering journey.

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By jdb, December 15, 2008

(Originally from 2007)

The way in which free-market crusaders view tariffs seems a little extreme to me, but at the same time they are more of a surgical tool than the blanket tariff demanded in populist circles. I think ‘American’ money is heavily invested in Chinese manufacturing right now, these are the same banls that float all of our IRAs and all the mortgages and all the small business loans. So we don’t want to hurt them, they are ultimately the bread and butter now even to a country with lots of industry.

There is also the issue of consumer goods – a tariff will cause price inflation on whatever product is penalized, especially if you don’t have a local source. So Joe Average ends up financing the tariff. I’d like to find a way to levy a tariff that only targets low-quality goods. I think we have a lot of transparent price inflation because you may be getting the same bushel of goods but in a lot of cases it’s of lower quality, for example if you buy a fleece blanket for five dollars it is roughly half the thickness of a fleece blanket you bought for five dollars at the start of the decade. At any rate, the idea is to nudge producers and consumers towards higher quality goods that last longer and have less environmental impact.

You can also directly tax people on trash by how many containers they own and put out, and this has a similar effect, but I would also like to see the trade imbalance with China addressed directly in some other way than letting our currency fall in value, which is what they fed is doing – the effect of which is to increase inflation and lower the quality of goods! That could also be offset by a surgical tariff of some sort…. a tariff on what I don’t know, textiles and small appliances seem likely candidates. Free-trade Republicans would likely call it a ‘poor tax’.

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By jdb, December 15, 2008

(Originally from 2007)

Is China completely turning away from all kinds of Socialism? People in the PRC are probably of two minds, there are those party leaders that think an economy has to pass through the stage of industrialization and capitalization in order to reach communism, as Marx outlined, and there are those party leaders who are corrupt greedy jerks. They have both civic minded people and profiteers just like everywhere and often the two categories overlap. Unfortunately it could be that the counter-revolutionaries who are in charge might be of the profiteering camp.

The reason the USSR failed, if that indicates a failure of communism, is mostly because the United States won the cold war. We spent them into retreat. First we erected and enforced global trade barriers. The economy of the USSR, while the Gross Domestic Product grew at the same rate as the US GDP from the time of the revolution until the breakup (without all the peaks and valleys I might add) was about one tenth the size of ours.

Meanwhile, we kept spending more and more on defense. They were spending about 90 percent of what we did post-wwII. That was one third of their GDP!!! When Reagan hiked defense spending in the eighties they couldn’t do it anymore and everything went to hell. Their oil production alone, which had been as much as the US and Iran combined in the eighties, plummeted and they had to focus on very simple things like making sure that people didn’t starve. That’s hard to do when the food is carried everywhere in trucks and you’ve got a country that big.

Capitalism can be ‘post industrial’ and chug along on buying power and usury even after empire collapses (note the size of the UK’s economy – still rolling on the spoils of empire) and that helps it roll over rough spots, but communism as we’ve seen it can’t do that.

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By jdb, December 15, 2008

(Originally from 2006?)

New Weird, Slipstream, ‘New Wave Fabulism’, call it what you will. IT is the relatively pretentious and highly self-referential side of the broad movement towards blended genre, riding on the coat tails of the more commercial Laurel Hamiltons and Storm Fronts of the world, it is the euro-elite playing catch up a few years after the fact.

It seems like a distinctly European act to take what is essentially a commercial strategy, arising from consolidation of both supplier and retailer and a desire for mximondo profit, intellectualize the fuck out of it, then take credit for it. Whatever. The fiction rocks, that’s all that matters.

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By jdb, December 15, 2008

(Originally from 2007)

The war on drugs has created the largest prison population in the history of the world, right here in the US. American Prohibition was so disastrous in the 20′s, it must have been obvious to Tricky Dick and the architects of his ‘war on drugs’ what the effects would be – a perpetuation of crime and poverty, a way to criminalize dissent, poverty, and being black, to allow control of the population and preserve the status quo. I think a lot of politicians since have seen the damage it has done to liberty but are unable or unwilling to try to effect change. In a lot of ways Marijuana for medical use is the ‘gateway drug’  to correcting the vast social injustices of the last forty years, and opiates should quickly follow. However it’s not as simple as just making the things ‘legal’.

I tend to think unrefined natural substances are preferable as medicine if possible. In general the advantage of natural vs. artificial is that our built in tendency towards moderation can take effect. There’s so much abundance around, we have to moderate our intake of all our substances – coffee, sugar, etc., but our bodies have a built in mechanism to deal with them. Artificial stuff goes right in and slams you.

Pot comes out of the ground, can be grown by the end user, and people are consistently demanding it. But what exactly are they demanding? As far as medicinal use goes, seems that for some people marijuana can kill certain types of pain but not others. I think one of the problems for medical use is that you don’t know how strong the stuff you’re getting is so it’s hard to moderate your intake. Also, different strains have varying effects psychological or otherwise which also makes medical use difficult. All solved by research and legalization of course. If prescribed for a condition, I think side effects would have to be considered relative to other options.

There’s still some hyperbole about pot floating around the kultursphere. Back in the 80′s when I was in high school they used to send guys around to try and scare kids away from drugs. They bussed us all to an amphitheatre and we had to listen to an ex-tv-actor talk about how this one married couple smoked pot and cooked their baby in the oven. We all pretty much saw through that. Even if something like that were true, I think now what I thought then – the pot smoking is coincidental and irrelevant to the act of homicidal cooking. There was something else that was very wrong in that situation.

In some absolute sense, I think people should be free to smoke pot and opium all day just as they are free to smoke tobacco. It’s their right to do whatever they want to themselves. But when we look at the situation in the US and all the moralizing surrounding hard drugs, I think it’s a more realistic goal to legalize opiates for medicinal use. It would certainly make drugs cheaper as natural opiates were substituted for their patented synthetic counterparts. There are some interesting issues that arise from the importation of cheap opiates…when, say, 20 percent of the people in the labor force are doing opiates instead of working you’ve got a real economic problem, all political philosophy aside. I tend to think that what happened in China had not so much to do with the existence of opium, it was it’s military-enforced cheapness.

Another question is, how powerful do you want the opium industry to be? The tobacco and alcohol industries? Do they do anything for us, as a group? Should they have the political influence that comes with wealth? I don’t think so. I think those companies are full of assholes. I can’t vote for CEO of RJ Nabisco but you bet I can try to use the government, as an extension of my reason, to limit the power of companies that do more harm than good. The only real power the govt. should have to do that is the power to levy taxes.

I think the ideal situation might be legalization of schedule 1 opiates, with a steep tax and a levy on import. It may be a fine point but a tax on opium is a tax on the trade of opium, not the product itself – no matter how it’s taxed, one is free to grow it, process it, and give it away. It’s a property right and a moral right as far as I’m concerned.

But that still makes opiates even bigger commerce. We’re talking an industry that owns whole countries. Tobacco was pretty powerful at one time before they got their ass handed to them. I can only imagine the real story, the alliances and private conversations – there’s no doubt in my mind that most of what we’re seeing in the debate pro/con cigarettes is just the public relations front in a battle for power, and somebody is getting money from tobacco. Or maybe I’m just cynical.

On a similair note, I just can’t figure out why opiate use went way up in the U.S. during the ‘covert’ ops in east asia, cocaine use in the U.S. went up during our involvement in S. and central America, and now we’re in Afghanistan opiate use is on the rise again – with cheaper street prices. Hmm.

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By jdb, December 15, 2008

(Originally from 2007)

I buy all kinds of trash bags. Trash bags are big business, a huge markup. I’m not throwing away food much, or useful stuff. I have to throw away all the useless packaging that stuff is wrapped up in. Then I have to pay for it to be recycled so the death machine runs more efficiently. If you make the trash bags out of recycled material, it somehow makes this process ‘ethical’.

Green consumerism insists that at the core environmental issues are an ethical problem, and the ethos of our government only reflects the ethos of the people. But ethical issues are personal issues, and our environmental problems are a public problem. The lady down the street may be a complete slob with a yard full of trash but the guy I’m worried about is the guy with the dye plant spewing carcinogens into the ground water. The woman shaping up her act doesn’t take care of the real problem, and she is completely dependant on the crap products the polluters produce. The argument for ‘individual responsibility’ is a sham the left has bought because of their powerlessness, a way for yuppies who can afford specialized products to feel good about themselves as they ‘change’ the world from a coffee shop window.

The left in the US has bought into the idea of ‘ethical consumerism’ lock stock and barrel, though. On the surface, it seems well intentioned, and the basic tenet of ‘we all make a little difference’ appeals to our Democratic heart. It is, however, a position of weakness, a position of retreat and helplessness. It says ‘we’ve lost the power to make companies accountable so we will pay higher prices for the same or lower quality, increase their profit margins, pay for recycling of corporate waste with our labor and our tax dollars, and buy the same crap over again.

The related ethos of ‘we vote with our dollars’ has become so ingrained now that the burghers in the US will look at you like you have two heads if you challenge it. Does it work? Well, so far all it’s done is secured the position of store chains that charge three times as much for the same thing because it’s wrapped in dye-free paper that we already payed to have made twice. It’s symptomatic of how the left no longer exists. There are now only different flavors of conservative.

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By jdb, December 15, 2008

Piers Anthony is one of those writers who was actually pretty good then he decided he’d like to make gobs of money instead and be adequate. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with writing or reading that but I don’t have the time for it, I wish I did. That being said, some of his early stuff is pretty neat.

The main problem with his post-70′s stuff is that instead of being entertaining and fun and writing at least one or two really fun stories every year, Mike Resnick and E.C. Tubb come to mind as doing just that, he takes what could have been a fun story and pads it until it puts you to sleep, and satisfies the publisher who feels that he must have a four hundred page book (or three, or five) to justify the nine dollar cover price.