the ant and the grasshopper

The ant only beats the grasshopper if you consider more misery worthwhile.

"America can be a superpower or a welfare state, but not both."

The Gates Farewell Warning

ok. i'm back from vacation, and i've now read this article. First, wow, ridiculous agenda pimping by the wsj. As for the specific arguments, i'll just ask how many $200+ million-dollar F22s does the author think it would take to withstand the army that 1.5 billion Chinese could send our way?

Seems to me, nothing short of our nuclear arsenal (which we've already paid for) would give us any margin for "victory," especially considering how long our economy could hold out after our biggest source for capital and most of our manufacturing base, strangely, decided to attack their meal ticket here on the other side of the world. So, if we are talking about military conflict with China, then, strategically, we'll just need to stick with our weapons of mass destruction and the mutually assured destruction that has kept modern nation-states from engaging in direct war with on another since Hiroshima.

And in any event, "superpower" is so passe. The cold war power relation paradigm is defunct. The superpower construct only works within a system of nation-states conflict. Within that system, a nation-state was the smallest denominator with the resource access to wage war against another nation-state--with superpowers dominating that system because they had the necessary resources to take on more than one.

But in a global system where 9 people can kill 3,000 in a day, superpower is just another word for target. Like the old gunslinger who spends his days taking challenges from young guns looking to make a name for themselves by taking out the legend, we are just waiting around to lose.

With regard to welfare? Whatever value we decide to place on the life of each american citizen, and how much effort we are willing to make to help each of them succeed through our collective agency, we can't afford to support the superpower illusion any longer. Not only is it financially crippling, but the costs to the american psyche to maintain this pissy dominance and petty, self-aggrandizing snobbery is making us the global asshole hypocrites that nobody wants to play with and which, ironically, is used to justify those who want to attack us...a truly vicious circle.

cats are the only domestic species that still says fuck you. so how does that trait evolve?

Thoughts on the new strategic calculus in foreign policy

especially when the standard unit for what constitutes a national-level, existential threat has decreased in size from nation v. nation in 1942 to nation v. (well-financed) rotary club in 2011. This is a result of our developments in science and technology that have exponentially expanded individual productivity in every arena of human endeaver, including its destructive capacity.

Currently, foreign policy making seeks to manage control of human populations only down to the level where they can be considered a threat to national security. In the 20th century, the enormous amount of resources it took to wage existential war meant that the only viable threats to nations came from other nations. Policy makers made their deals accordingly. Under this calculus, endorsing strongmen who can deliver a non-threat population ensures the security of the nation to because it limits the size of any potential opposition below the level of national threat--even while it guarantees some level of opposition by its nature. In other words, if it takes ten men to beat you, you can still win by pissing off only nine of them.

But in an era where 10 men can threaten 300 million, we need to re-evaluate that calculus. How long can we continue to operate even the smallest sized of these opposition factories when it takes so few to make so much destruction?

few disaffected souls to




The dominant paradigm of foreign policy was petrified around the notion that

Our developments in science and technology have exponentially expanded the human productivity in every arena of human endeaver, including its destructive capacity. Ironically, this shift in efficiency, which was pursued by nations to increase their power, may cause the end of nationalism altogether.



bought and paid for by a drive for national power, may cause the end of nationalism altogether.


nation-states by the n insatiable persuit of power by nations, will be the death of nationalism.

as information and technology have escilated the destructive capacity of the individual vis a vis its society. This shift in efficiency, while driven by the insatiable persuits of national power, will be the death of nationalism.


when the technical capacity of the individual exceeds the ability of forensic science to investigate, the few will destroy everything. imagine if you could program a mite-sized program to leave travel to your competitors store of its own volition and attack it; now imagine 10,000 mites.

Stuff like this is evidence that the dominant paradigm for global stability that has shaped foreign policy for everybody's lifetimes is beginning to crumble. We used to base our

there was a rate of exchange which says we will tolerate

Decisions were made about

the

Foreign policy making sought to manage control of populations down to the level where they can be considered a threat to national security. In the 20th century, the enormous amount of resources it took to wage existential war meant that the only viable threats to nations came from other nations. Under this calculus, endorsing strongmen who can deliver a non-threat population ensures the security of the nation to the extent it limits the size of the potential opposition. In other words, if it takes ten men to beat you, you can still win by pissing off only nine of them.

But the advance through modernity is beginning to change the math underpinning the entire security market. The developments of science and technology have exploded individual productivity, not only in business but in every arena of human endeavor, including its destructive capacity. If we now live in a world where 10 individuals can threaten 300 million, how many disaffected and disfunctional global citizens can we afford to create as the price for our autocratic buffer?

That means the world is probably going to get scarier in the short term. Imagine a room full of people where each individual had the capacity to end them all.


can we continue to support a system that



Correcting the calculations of national security will need to account


We can't keep making foreign policy through the paradigm which measure only national threats.

In that case, we can no longer rely on the efficacy of top-down control. We'll need to look to a much messier dynamic like individual buy-in.


technology has changed the math.


is a social good

with regards to ensuring the security of the nation.



The buffer autocracies are valuable to the central power to the extent they can prevent enough human and financial





get away with pissing off nine of them.

These buffer autocracies serve to lock down large swaths of the available financial and human resources that might have been used by national enemies; ultimately to become resources to be used against them.

However, the growth of human technology has begun to challenge the value of that exchange.



If we can no longer rely on top-down control, we need to put our faith in bottom-up participation.



Making foreign policy decisions based on controlling

today

I'm working at my computer and i'm thinking that I would like to listen to some symphony music, maybe Dvorak, which i don't have, handy. So pandora* fires up and I make a New World Symphony channel. After a second, the opening bars of Star Wars are blaring forth and i'm thinking, somedays it's nice to live in the future. :)

[pandora is a music server that streams content to me based on what it learns about my particular suggestions. It bears no resemblance whatsoever to the sony walkman player and Queen Greatest Hits cassette that I bought at Walgreens and wore out in the 80s when I first started listening to music. I wonder how much further I could have developed my tastes and knowledge of music if I'd started with this back then.

I also think it provides a good way to reference the potential effect technologies have on the people who grow up with them. Start with a baseline figure to represent Current Knowledge and model any learning curve for Knowledge Increase which presumes a positive relationship to Information Access. It is staggering to think about what, over time, the resulting data look like when you factor the different levels of Information Access. I think the potential effect from a conservative projection is still too mammoth not to exert evolutionary pressure on the human brain; re-ordering pathway construction and changing the way information is stored and processed in the brain. If it literally changes the way [0-100%] people think/perceive, what effect will it have on the stability of the social structures and institutions which were built up over centuries and are based on a quickly evaporating model describing human interaction?

Of course, Knowledge Increase is not directly correlated to Information Access, not only because some of that increase is eaten up trying to keep up with the steady increase in the amount of information as time passes and something new gets thrown on the pile of accumulated human content production; and there is also a significant amount of information inflation which is a byproduct of the wider access itself (more to see is more to talk about).

I am also not assuming that all people will engage these new technologies to expand their access to information. I expect that there are many people who choose not to engage in this new technical economy. What I assume is that these will be the people manning the defenses of the system as it teeters.]

maxim

property is a poor substitute for value

Glancing Off the Edges

Do they still call it re-entry if come into the atmosphere of a planet you've never been before?

jibberish

media studies is anthropology, not scientific psychology. When someone asks whether the modern webscape is a problem for society misunderstands the mission is not to pronounce good or bad but is and, then, what can be done. Maybe i am trying to say they are not what i am when actually if i'm not what i think i am but they are, then maybe i'm a cultural anthropologist, not a mass comm

Job pitch

I have a lot of experience working for the state and nonprofits which means
I'm real good at taking whatever you got and make it work for you.

the digital age

The digital age is the era of the infinite loop. Once man can set something in motion for ever, he removes himself from the mechanism of making. A man gets up and restarts the phonograph is engaging with the machine of happening in a different way. He is a participant and not just an consumer. Listening for your cue is different than just listening.

When you can't create your own moral sanction

"...she wondered what inner degradation those men had to reach in order to arrive at a level of self-deception where they would seek the extorted approval of an unwilling victim as the moral sanction they needed, they who thought that they were deceiving the world. Atlas Shrugged, p. 846, original edition.

ah ha

I think I just figured out that the bearded lady was a man with boobs.
http://www.boingboing.net/images/_images_I_51QPfzfT5wL.jpg

Overheard outside my office

A older man who talks like Matlock and looks like flintlock has had a coed cornered outside my office door for about 15 minutes while he jibberjabbered all the travails of his life; all the stuff he didn't get arrested for (because i guess because that was the shorter of the two lists), smokin' 3 packs a day before he was 16, the last time he fell off his dinosaur, etc..

As he was finishing up his verbal tome he said, "I just never could figure out what i wanted to do when I grew up."

"That should be the title of your book," the coed proffered patiently.

"What?" Matlock puffed, "I Don't Want to Be When I Grow Up?"

Twitter is an information utility

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/dear_twitter_youre_a_utility_-_get_off_the_fence_and_start_acting_like_one.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29

Leaves of grass

I just watched a movie where the uptight guy says he can't accept a world where everybody can make up whatever rule systems they like because if that's true, then what is the truth?

But maybe the truth is that everybody gets to make some up for themselves. That is the worthy universal constant. That everybody wants to make their own truth, even if they are only anointing someone else's. Once we accept that that is a driving passion of man, we can begin to build a society. But that doesn't mean that was is true is good.

The history of mankind is the struggle over the right to make truth. The skillful used words, the brutish used force, and the wealthy used God to create the dominant truth. The individual truth that strangles the peoples' truths.

The future of humanity is the acceptance that all people want to live by what is true to them. so we better figure out how to make that work because people will not be satisfied until they can feel their chance to define truth. Those masses denied that may be beaten and repressed, but they can not be satisfied, and they never have endured that state eternally.

Inevitably, when enough have nothing to lose, they put down their burdens (tribute?) and throw themselves onto the machine. A momentary pause as parts are replaced and the power is back on. Humming right along until it doesn't, again.

If we accept that the autocratic machine is unsustainable, then we can begin to think about how we build a society that acknowledges the human need for subjectivity. We need to stop thinking about which dictator will keep the peace. That is a seismic peace where every hour of quiet tension increases the force of the eruption.

Repression does not make good democrats. Dont be surprised if some people who emerge from the snake pit have poison in their hearts. The early result will be chaos. But out of chaos comes order.

If we're lucky it won't be the order of goose-stepping zombies. If we're not, what have we lost?

Anyway, it's either that or we're all fucked. I choose the unknown, always have.

apostasy

Some people claim that aesthetics is what makes us human. People who disagree often think it's reason. I say a human knows when something is beautiful, even when they can't think of why. Logic is a biased measure in black jar.

re-history

"We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bd and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion. The subterranean stream of Wester history has finally come to the surface and usurpped the dignity of our tradition. This is the reality in which we live. And this is why all efforts to escape from the grimmness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are vain."

- Hanna Arendt "The Origins of Totalitarianism"

Exhortation

Fuck! Did you come into work this morning and say, "Man, I bet nobody called up Rich today to tell him he's an asshole."

talking to the mentor

"How'd it go?"

"Oh. It was good, but it's hard to hear sometimes because he mumbles."

"Ah. Too cool for diction?"

sentence structure

That's the thing about the beginning of a sentence. Each letter exercises that much more tyranny upon the next. If i get good and stuck on an ending, it can be very helpful to just chop off the head.

Plane crash

Imagine you are on an airplane and you hit a wind shear. The plane drops 500, 1,000, 3,000, 10,000 feet and still diving. At that moment, in my opinion, you have two choices: you can either start screaming your head off, release your bodily functions and stab your neighbor, meeting your destiny with a blank mind and soiled pants; or you can sit back and try to connect with that carnival feeling in you belly and just let it build a smile on your face.

In the end, at least you can say you enjoyed the ride. And who knows, the pilot might just pull it out, in which case, you won't have to finish the flight overwhelmed by your own stink.

Anyway, that's what I think of when someone asks me how I can take it America these days.

braindrop fiction

I recently reread my first play. My only play. The act of the only play I ever wrote. Are you a writer? If you are then you understand what it's like to go back and read something that you wrote back when you didn't know a thing. Not that you know anything now, but at least you know that much.

Anyway. You read something that you wrote an eon ago and most of the time it's pure masturbation. The main guy? It's you. It's always you. but wealthy if you're a sucker. or poor if you got too much. or in a dress if you're trying to do the opposite of you, somehow. Maybe it's you getting you a better gig or a bigger stage--either way, it's you playing with yourself.

Well i recently read the first act of my only play and i had to laugh. It's at a wrap party way off broadway where a merry troupe of players just ended a run of A Midsummer's Night's Dream. See? Shakespearean masturbation. The whole thing centers around the Don Juan who plays Puck and spends the first act shirtless in outrageous woolly pants. The nuns told me i'd eventually go blind you know. By the unwritten end, Heartbreaker gets his own heart broken yet love sits on the horizon. aaand, denouement.

When I finished, I actually heard a voice in my head say, "Why yes, Mr. Lucas. Of course you can make a movie of my life, and I'd be honored if you think Han Solo would be a good fit."

Sitting here. I find myself torn between dying of wizened embarrassment and starting the next act.