Looking back at the fights I've gotten in, there was never a time when I entered into a place looking to cause violence. It was always a matter of me ending up in a place where I'd either have to leave, or fight. The fight happened because I chose not to leave.

This seems important when applied to larger forms of warfare: an army doesn't have to be convinced that some people far away need killing before these fathers and brothers go off to kill some other fathers and brothers.

It's more a matter of letting the military bring you to a place where you're not wanted, and letting nature do the rest. The fact that there are people in a spot who'll die rather than leave that spot, is a core element of the drama in war.

It occurs to me that we tend to take the same strategy to space exploration. Sure, robots punch the timeclock and do their bit, but it's the vulnerable humans, the spam in the can, that really spell out our ambitions out there past the well.

It's nearly unimaginable, a nation that would treat a battlefield like an enormous crime scene, and go in with a law enforcement ideal of zero casualties. The same kind of nation would send robots out in space to do the heavy lifting, and then put a human there for the fine detail work.

Maybe the same kind of nation could handle not just gays in their military, but a significant number of alternatively-gendered individuals in the officer class, reinventing the goals of armed conflict. There always seems to be more firepower than imagination when it comes to this stuff.

It's hard to imagine doing something useful with long exposures and sparklers, but with a remote trigger, i could probably figure something out.

I'm more likely to make use of a flachlight or an LED, though.

What's going on? People seem more interested than going out and doing great things, than in coming home and blogging about it.

I'm no better, I guess. Here's what we did last weekend.

Looks like a tourist trap

the nominal destination, I think

Engine 17


Father and child looking astonished



Tavalon looking adorable





Then we went to play in the snow



The mountain with the biggest tits

For some reason, this post about the brokenness of E-bay sent my mind a'spinning. I suppose it's a good time to ponder the future of capitalism, what with the crash of the real estate market and all.

The mathematics of it all works the same way for a battlefield as for an auction block. In both cases you've got buyers and sellers and bidding. The biggest differences have to do with the direction of bidding. In a battlefield, most of the bids are in the downward direction. It's a question of how much trouble the bidder will go to, to keep you from doing whatever it is you want to do.

So that should be it's own post: usually a military isn't called into the scene unless the conventional market has collapsed entirely, and no more positive bids are being made.

I'm thinking of shady behavior by players like Enron and those Nigerian scammers, and those questionable lending practices, and other problems that are so huge, they defy the law for remedy: it's easier to change the law to make it retroactively legal, than to punish the wrongdoers under the law.

And the collapse of Ebay's functionality reminds me that there are actually three parties to every transaction: the buyer wants to achieve the lowest buy-point, the seller wants to achieve the highest sell-point, and the market wants a transaction that's repeatable in the future.

The way I see capitalism these days, it's not so much that the buyers or sellers are being disadvantaged, it's everyone waking up to the fact that all those old-style transactions are no longer repeatable. The market itself is losing its ability to contain these transactions.

Market collapse? Call in the military. Except that has really only worked in the past when the bidding went below zero. Prices don't want to simply drop, they want to escape the numberline altogether.

I don't have a clever way to wrap up this post, it's too big for one sitting. But I am reminded of a battlefield collapse in the '80s, when that report on nuclear winter put a stop to all talks of "mutual assured destruction". In the parlance I'm trying to build, the market that is the ecosphere of the planet, found spokesmen to rule out certain maximum downward bids.

I think the modern equivalent, would be a report that spells out the dire consequences of Total Information Awareness.

Maybe something like this: when 'the market' (info-cops) knows the value of all bids before they can be tendered, it makes an unbiased transaction impossible. Human interaction that was formerly called "politics" is limited to what can take place inside the police station.

This probably ties into the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle somehow, but I don't know how to show my work in the same format that Heisenberg did. And if you insist that battlefield conditions are intrinsically separate from marketplace conditions, then I can't convince you short of declaring war. I don't want to be done with the upwards bid, and I don't think any sane person does, either.

So, this well known entertainer died, apparently from work-related injury. Nothing special there, we've come to expect it. I especially appreciated this note on it, it's pretty much what I felt about him from the beginning.

I like where this author goes, though, in comparing the income of the pop singer with the incomes of all the middlemen who remain to shape the economy long after the sound has stopped.

The scariest thing, though, is that the thing that's been done to Micheal Jackson over the course of his life, has also been done to all of us.

Like the king of pop, a whole bunch of us are information workers. Unless you bake bread for a living, or dig ditches, or build houses, something like that, you probably are an information worker too.

These days, capitalism does not value things very well.

And even that last video is overly optimistic, I fear. You don't have a conversation with an institution, no institution is equipped to listen to individuals. You organize to influence or compete with an institution.

When the institution in question is something as huge as capitalism, you don't compete with it without breaking a bunch of laws.

A black president notwithstanding, I think we are facing the kind of future where doing the right thing is going to piss someone off who would rather we all do things the old way. And in the early phases at least, the law is going to be on their side.


Micheal Jackson's passing serves to remind me of other Big Ones like Elvis and John Lennon, but also the lesser known genuises like Spaulding Grey. Dave Chapelle becomes even more of a hero in retrospect, for interrupting his own crucifixion.

Some information wants to not be free. I suppose if you look at it through one lens, I've spent 20 years making mud pies, of value only to myself. Looked at another way, I have to tell myself I'm still investing in a bond that can't mature yet, not until *All* the Bernie Madoffs of the world have been removed from power.

I had a somewhat politically incorrect epiphany after being a member of the wet spot for a few years: Putting oneself out there in the "marketplace of sexual ideas" also involves a value judgement. As in, "how much am I worth, sexually?"

Negotiating any sort of sexual favor with someone, from a back-room cuddle to a "let's go home and get jiggy" involves putting your cards on the table: this is how much I value my own sexual self worth, and here's how much I hear you asking for your side of the bidding.

It can take anywhere between one night, to three months, to a few years, or a lifetime, to properly interpret those bids and see how they match up.

One common way people have to frame this kind of bidding, and put it firmly in the realm of doable, is to get into all sorts of control fantasies along with the proposal. I tie you up, you tie me up, we exchange power with one of us firmly on top and the other firmly on the bottom.

I'm not immune to this impulse, but I also have the polar opposite kind of fetish: radical egalitarianism. It would turn me on to be in a relationship where no bondage of any sort is allowed, not even conceptually. Where the power level is exactly equal among both/all concerned. It's as distant a fantasy as, say, sex with a liquid metal robot, but I still can't help but think about it from time to time.

---

Anyway, it just now occurred to me *why* this fantasy would be so hard to make flesh. (so to speak) I am powerful in some pretty unusual dimensions. I am also very weak in some equally strange ways. To expect a partner to be able to match those strengths and weaknesses one-for-one, is unrealistic, and kind of dumb.

The more realistic idea, would be (a) Partner(s) who can accurately value their own weird strengths and weird weaknesses, like balancing off character traits on a GURPS sheet. This isn't really that much better though, because who really wants to weigh their own character defects against their own strengths?

Even if I lower the bar for myself, and instead of partners to raise children with, I'm only talking about fellow commune members- there's still the core equation to be balanced. "I bid all my strengths and weaknesses against yours, and gamble that we'll have a good life together"

Is there any way for that *not* to work out like some kind of poker hand, winner take all?


Going with the gambling metaphor, I guess my utopian vision is that the House still wins more often than it loses, but the House still represents the interests of all who play within it, even the chronic losers.

There are some more ideas around this, but it's hard to come up with concrete examples when you're selling vapourware.

There's a recurring fantasy that keeps popping into my head, despite decades of experience to the contrary.

If only I were more alone than I am now, then everything would just be swell!"

I think the glitch has to do with the way I characterize problems. If a problem is a noun, it's a thing that can be removed. And the person I most closely associate with that problem comes to represent the problem in my mind. Get rid of them, and the problem goes away.


Or so I think to myself. If the problem is a verb instead of a noun, it's a glitch in the way things need to happen, instead of a stand alone process that can be simply stopped. Changing the players involved will change the dynamic of the problem, but it won't make it go away, it'll just shuffle the hand.

At least I'm in good company- this is the same epic fail that characterizes crime and punishment in this society.

The early explorers of the Mississipi watershed would spend nearly all their time on the rivers, and they would eat little else but trout. As nourishing as trout is, a monoculture of it is no more healthy than eating nothing only greens. So they would eat and eat, but still be starving to death, and that's called trout starvation.

In the middle of the pacific gyre, there used to be a most productive ecosystem. Organic flotsom would accumulate there and provide food and habitat for many species. Now that it's become a garbage dump, the organic material is slowly being replaced with plastic. Critters can eat and eat until their stomachs are overflowing, but they gain no nourishment from this most filling substance. Plastic breaks down into poisons as well, it's true, but a great many beasts die of strangulation, suffocation, entanglement, or starvation before they can die from the poison.

This has got me to remembering my own behavior at certain parties, where I'll make as if to move purposefully from one room to another, even though there's no one there for me to meet. The small talk fills my time like styrofoam, but nourishes me not at all. The more ways there are for people to talk to each other, the less there is to say.

And like those creatures filling their bellies with plastic, I see people around me distracting themselves with shiny objects, shiny ideas, and brave speech that, when you parse it all down to the core semantic content, has nothing to do with anything very important. I don't claim immunity for myself, I get just as distracted as everyone else I see.

I often hear it said that if it weren't for pointless stupid buying behavior, the economy would grind to a halt. I have to wonder, though, if an economy that depends on such nonsense is really worth propping up in the first place?

Yesterday I was at the hardware store, trying to get some help at the cut desk. It was hectic, and it took three tries to get someone to help. When a clerk finally got there and was ready to cut my wire for me, his radio squawked, and he had to talk to someone else for a bit. When he came back to me, he couldn't find his cutters that he'd been holding when he first came over.

This embarrassed him greatly, and he was all set to go back and find another pair of cutters, when I finally saw them, perched on the shelf where he'd set them down. He seemed even more embarrassed then, but I totally empathized. I told him that sort of thing happened to me all the time, and how much I'd love it if I could put RFID stickers on everything I was ever likely to misplace.

He was happy to jump on that angle, and told me how much he hated to ask his wife where he'd put something down. I very carefully kept my mouth shut at that point, and we parted on friendly terms.

I'm not used to making any sort of emotional connections at a hardware store, no way, no how. And if the guy said, "it's a guy thing", with a wink and a nod, I might, under other circumstances, have tried to correct him, maybe telling him a little about ADHD and tavalon's lack of focus that I share.

Maybe if he'd been white, I might have taken the time to step off that script. As it was, I was happy to share a human moment with a black man, about something that transcends race or sex. I have got to pick my battles, I can educate people about ADHD, or I can educate people about male feminism, but I'm not going to try to do both at once. I suppose having white skin disqualifies me from having anything to say about race relations, at least to people I don't already know.

---

I ran out of hangers at that point, and one more layer would have broken the top hanger.