Cobb

Rich Barbarians

Just in case you forgot about Saudi Arabia
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On Foucault

My understanding and appreciation for Foucault comes from his idea of 'regimes of truth' in which he asserts that human understanding can a have reading of fact that is highly contingent upon social context. 

As a specialist in information technology, I find the implications of this concept very useful in my role in knowledge management and business intelligence. I thus think of a kind of 'thermodynamics of consensus' which is something that requires energy to maintain, rather than something that becomes established over time in positive incremental quanta. 

For example, the ideas that 'all men are created equal' or 'polio can be cured' or 'E=MC^2' are not plateaus of human knowledge per se. They are levels of understanding that must be pumped with energy to maintain. That's the energy of education and the energy to sustain an environment of education, and the energy to sustain the will to provide that environment. These become 'regimes of truth' and these regimes may rise to power or fall from grace. 

Foucault in this way rather undermines wishful thinking of 'progress' because he understands that knowledge can be created or destroyed because it must be sustained. The genie may be out of the bottle, but it has to be inside a house or the wind will blow it away. 

Foucault is misread, I think, by people who reside in very isolated bourgeois societies (houses) where the winds of discovery rarely blow. 'Regimes of truth' which maintain knowledge about the state of nature have no impact on nature itself. You cannot will yourself to levitate. Even if you spend billions of dollars to organize World Levitation Day. 

Similarly Foucault has motivated millions to think about 'deconstruction of narratives' towards a greater understanding. You might deconstruct the narrative of an automobile commercial and see that in fact that the roar of Ford Mustang does not make you sexy, but that doesn't change the fact of its engine does roar. People have taken Foucault (heh) a bit too literally in thinking every narrative should be suspect and the only relaible discovery of truth involves deconstructing someone else's version of the truth.

Blame Iraqis for Iraq

A certain question divides world opinion. There are people who believe in equal rights before the law, and people who believe there ought to be different kinds of laws for different kinds people. People in cosmopolitan, modern nations like America tend to be of the first opinion. People in unfree societies spend a lot of time, because their lives depend on it, trying to bolster up their side in a zero-sum game, and hiding from gunmen if their side falls out of power. It's cultural. 

The responsibility for the mess in Iraq is precisely a compromised regime of equal rights and the culture of the Iraqi people themselves who are unused to anything but monarchy. Once upon a time, America and other nations were committed to help fight the second opinion's violent power in that country. Today, not so much. I hear that we are sending about 300 advisors into a population of 32 millions. 

The rule of law in Iraq and other 'crappy governments'  (c.f. Cobb : Honor Killing & The Innocence of Muslims) is established in bloody spurts by sectarian groups, the militant ends are merely the tips of spears that would always be pointing at each other. Many wags say that this hostility is 1000 years old and America (and other civilized nations) ought to be ashamed to think that it can be solved. They are half right depending upon the racist content of the conclusion. There can be no denying that Sunni and Shi'ites, Arabs and Kurds are at each other's throats. But we dropped atomic bombs on Japan, and they are our friends only 50 years later. 

The United Nations is called United Nations, not United Humans because in the context of an equivalency of civil rights (misnomered 'human rights') the world needs to be organized into Nations. Iraq has a civil rights problem and fell and will continue to fall into civil war because all of its minorities believe other minorities are not worthy of life and liberty under one law. Saddam could only enforce 'national' unity in exactly the same way Hitler did, by militarizing society and drawing the people into war - 9 years against Iran, America's old foe, in brutal genocide against the Kurds and subsequently against Kuwait, America's friend.  

America, and every other nation on the planet needs peoples to be organized into nations. It is the unquestioned evolution of human organization. These nations require a singular constitutional law defending the civil rights of all its citizens and non-violent and frequent transfers of power. Any other arrangement will lead to sectarian disrespect and hostility.

This is key to the matter of terrorism because a state where the equivalent of political parties operate with violent impunity, aiming only to sustain the ambit of their authority, establishes a permanent state of corruption. Here we called it the Mafia. Whose civil rights are respected when the Mob is controlling things? Nobody's. We have become accustomed to the image of young fools brandishing weapons in their pickup truck patrols. ISIS in Iraq, Boko Haram in Nigeria, Haqqani Network in Afghanistan, C14 in Ukraine. None of these are nation-builders. They are native catalysts of chaos and destruction.

Whether you agree or disagree that America or any nation should assist in establishing the rule of law, civil rights and liberty for any people, you must understand people that don't have that will hate their neighbors and the only power they will respect is power. That's human behavior. Sectarian conflict is primitive, period. Those invested in such arrangements are always to be blamed for their failures to establish justice,  insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense,  promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty.

I personally believe with all my heart and soul that no person on this earth should not belong to a nation so dedicated and so consecrated. No one who believes in the brotherhood of mankind  should believe otherwise. I understand that the price of evolution from sectarian rule and dictatorship is alwaysblood and treasure.  So no matter how clumsy, any genuine effort to establish such rule of law and nationhood is a moral imperative of civilized countries with the wherewithal and courage required. Any backing away from such efforts is the co-signature of human misery.

You Don't Know Beans

"Technology is supposed to make life easier."

This is an interesting and unintended consequence of the impulse behind Marxism and the end of the British Empire. Bear with me, it gets really good.

 

Once upon a time in the early 20th century, before the days of baked beans in a can, the English were starving, literally starving to death and living in pitiful conditions. Around that same time a second industrial revolution was afoot. Think of the world just after rail lines crossed countries and steel mills were being built, but before Henry Ford's factories were all finished. Well smart people started seeing multimillionaire industrialists and starving coal miners and put two and two together. Something's got to change, they thought. We have the ability to use tractors and increase farm production. Nobody needs to starve in this world.

Now these same people, especially with their very clear understanding of the class system and how many Pounds Sterling any man needs to live a civilized life figured that these starving miners, if they only organized and got a 30 pound raise per year, could live very healthy, non-starving lives. That's because in those days, everybody all over the planet could live like a proper British gentleman for 200 pounds a year. Just read David Copperfield if you have a spare month- the whole thing is a rags to riches story. 

Then again the difference between rags and riches back in those days was not so much. All the starving miners needed to do was organize once, strike once, get their one time raise and let all the new industrialized technology like telephones and light bulbs and automobiles and industrialized farming and assembly lines and big hydroelectic dams... well, you get the picture. The future was at hand. If your were starving, all you had to do was join the revolution, all you had to lose was your hunger. The means of production would be shifted from the millionaires (who were an easily identifyable precious few) to the masses. This was called scientific socialism. It was all about progress. It was a very compelling argument. 

 

Fast forward a short 40 years and you're in the 50s. No longer are there just a few millionaires controlling Ford and Bethlehem Steel, but there are thousands of millionaires building commercial passenger jet planes, air conditioners, radios, cars, cars that look like jet planes and have radios and air-conditioners. It was all very Tomorrowland - all very kitchen of the future. Not only did the workers get their 30 pounds raise, they got supermarkets and Kodak cameras and station wagons and TV and movies and rock & roll on the radio, thanks to the clever millionaires who kept building neat-o products in the post-war era. But what did the workers have to do? Well, not much, except go to college, because all this new work was on new things that never existed before and it was complicated. You needed to understand electricity, and that's not intuitive like smelling a bean to tell if it's rotten. Once upon a time, you mined coal with a pick and a shovel. Now you have to operate the big diesel electric coal mining machines. Not so back breaking, a little bit more mentally demanding, but with union pay and benefits. 

Well if you were a coal miner's daughter, and you saw a jet plane, you got all kinds of crazy ideas that maybe you could make a million dollars and leave that old smelly town where your grandparents nearly starved to death. All you needed was a few more skills and a few more years of school. What you didn't need was to know how to wash dishes. There's dishwashers for that. You didn't need to know how to can beans for the winter. Beans come in a can at the supermarket. You didn't need to know how to sew or knit. Clothes in your size could be bought off the rack. Well, hell you were a modern woman, or a modern man. You didn't need any of those small town rural skills. Thats for bohunks and retards and low-skill immigrants fresh off the boat. Not you, brother. So you packed your bags and left for the big city.

 

Technology is supposed to make life easier. Well, if you were a college president in 1920, you had a secretary. Why? Because you were smart enough and important enough to deserve one. And you had a cook. Why? Because you didn't have time to cook yourself. And you had a driver? Why.. just because. You were occupied with higher ideas, like how to build the run the university that trained the engineers that designed the transmission on the tractor that harvested 10 million bushels of beans coming in cans to a store near you. Nobody cared about putting bean farmers out of work. This is Tomorrowland, bean farmers used to starve! They've been spared that fate by the technology of the modern world!

What works for a university president doesn't work for you Mr. Bean Farmer. However, you're a greedy human just like the coal miner's daughter and you want more than just to not starve. You want to fly a jet to Hawaii. You want to play electric guitar. You want a telephone that bounces signals off of satellites not only for you but for everyone in your family. You want everything the university president has, and you call that modern middle class life. You want a car that doesn't pollute. You want teeth whitener. You want shoes that make you look like Michael Jordan. You want fancy clothes made out of anything but fur, and you want to shop for them not just for the season, but whenever you feel like it. You want all that technology that makes your life easy because you're going to study Java programming in the big city and go to California and build a website that's going to get a zillion hits. And people call you a geek and you're alienated from society because you don't know how to cook, or sew, or knit or bake beans and can them for the winter. In fact, you don't know beans at all. But you don't have time for beans because you're competing in modern society and modern society doesn't have time or respect for bean farmers and coal miners. After all, doesn't coal pollute? Yeah. It's not green. And you're too sophisticated for all that manual labor and all that shit shoveling. You barely have enough time to finish all your education and get a proper professional job in this modern society. Heaven forbid you have to take care of a child before you turn 30. 

 

Now there are other unintended consequences of all this running uphill and competing. You actually do know how to be a millionaire. You're just about as well informed as Henry Ford ever was or could be. You're obviously not Henry Ford or Elon Musk, but you understand and live by the same rules. You and millions of other ex-bean farmers. Here's what you forgot.

 

Technology is supposed to make life easier, and save you time when you are living like the university professor, when you are running the marathon, when you are building the website, when you are actually working 60 and 70 hours a week. But it's not supposed to make your life easier when you are working a bullshit job. You only have to work 40 hours a week, that *is* easy. If you are the clerk at Joe's Rent a Car and you can't sew, or knit, or bake or fix your own light switches, or repair your own car, or deliver your own babies, what is it saving you from? You're spending all of your money just to fix the broken transmission on the car you drive to work. You're spending all your money just to pay for the electricity and internet and cable bills just to take an online course so you can make more money. And since you have weekends off, you spend more money to help you forget that you have a bullshit job. And you keep raising the bridge and never lowering the river, because you can't respect farming beans. 

 

How many years would it take you to learn how to build a house? How many years would it take you to then purchase the materials and start building that house? You don't know because you don't think about it. You just want to go to college and get a job that pays enough so you can afford a mortgage for a house in a good suburban neighborhood where you won't really know your neighbors. What technology makes you think about that and solves that problem? 

 

Technology for the common man was perfected 60 or 70 years ago. Everything since then has been for university presidents and rich people who fly in jets on the regular. There's no new technology that is more enabling. It's all just marginal improvements and fashion conceits. All you ever need were Levi's. You needed to learn algebra. You needed to read and understand Shakespeare and the basic laws in your small town. You needed to learn how to use a needle and thread, a hammer and sickle, a mortar and pestle, and pots and pans. You needed to learn how to take care of your own basic needs - food, clothing and shelter. 

 

But now look at you. You don't even know if cheese is good for you, or how to make it. You're just waiting for the next survey to tell you if you should eat gluten - not that you could identify gluten under a microscope. Don't worry somebody on NPR will explain it to you, with pop music between the paragraphs just to keep your attention. Technology is not going to make your life easier. Technology is going to make the engine in your car too complicated for you to fix. Technology is going to make the parts of your television beyond your capacity to understand. Technology is going to take you on a wild goose chase away from common sense just to the brink of where it appears to be magic. Magic like how to wash clothes, and how to wash dishes and how to rake leaves and how to write a letter. How do you plan a meal for 4? How do you tell time? How do you get eggs?

 

How? Lucky we have Howcast.com

 

We are not dumbing down. We were always dumb. We were so dumb that we were starving when left to our own dumb devices. Most of mankind is dumb. We are not university presidents. But some of us used to know how to grow beans. Those who didn't starved and died. Looking at starvation and death used to focus minds. But then some bright people said, all they need is a 30 pound raise... and they gave it to us. And for the most part, we didn't learn anything since then, 100 years ago. We didn't learn anything but how to watch TV, and listen to the radio. And we forgot how to live without them and our minds are completely unfocused. We didn't take over the means of production. That would have required focus. Most everybody who tried it failed. So we lucked out with the entrepreneurial millionaires. 

 

But the millionaires figured it out one day that we weren't getting any smarter, and we couldn't make rockets that went to the moon, and we didn't care about algebra and Shakespeare other than for the college requirement. Very few people replaced the very few entrepreneurial millionaires. Nobody's mind was focused by starvation, but focused on getting the new house and new car. And the millionaires said forget it. It's not fun any longer to build stuff that helps people like it used to be, lets focus on our mansions and our yachts. Nobody gets excited about designing tractor transmissions. Now it's more about marketing the beans than growing them - maybe getting some marketing genius to write a book about the Bean Diet. That'll get some traction. Who wants to be an actual entrepreneurial millionaire? No, people just want to be corporate execs, you know, fitting inside the corporation with a well-paying bullshit job. Heaven forbid you have to come up with the ideas, design and build the product, balance the books, work the factory floor and answer the phones for customer service. No that went out with the days when people's good names and reputations were all the marketing they needed. Millionaires are mostly assholes nowadays. Except for doctors. But were doctors ever supposed to be millionaires? Oh wait, they got MRI technology and we bought that. It's Medical Practitioners LLC. 

 

Technology is a a sleight of hand. People keep paying short attention and all they see is magic. They're sold on the whole idea that technology is an infinitely deep hat out of which we can keep pulling economic rabbits so that the dumb won't starve. 

Die Another Way

I've been thinking about the different ways to die in a Bungie shooter or any video game, and I think that the most satisfying kills are those that uniquely humiliate the target. So far they have been the assasinations in Gears and in Halo. But there has always been something special about Halo's deadly purple needler explosions that are utterly unique in gaming. So I'm wondering.. If I had the skills of a Bungie progammer, what kind of super unique kills might I animate that haven't been seen in any other videogame?

Now interestingly, I have a set of ideas based in physics about how you destroy something. Sooner or later in life, you'll find an unopenable can or something stuck that you cannot open - and you think, how can it be with all the forces of physics that I can't get this open? So, yeah. I have a list that makes me think of extremes of temperature, air pressure, water pressure, torque, vibration, sound, sharpness, etc.

So today I'm putting on my twisted thinking cap to imagine some ridiculous weapons.

Liquifaction Being reduced to a crap stain on the ground, or a puddle of goo has got to be in the list. But we all just think of acid, and it's always green and hissy. Now what might just work here is an acid blob gun with a great animation. But what about an acid blob shotgun that shoots out two dozen baggies the size of gumballs? Each acid gumball sticks to you and then they all simultaneously pop and dissolve you in all those places.

Implosion How about a vacuum magazine for a sniper rifle? Instead of a bullet, it's a dart with a total vacuum. It hits your head, your head implodes like a stomped on soda can.

Filament Shredder For close quarters, a shotgun like weapon that shoots out a bolo net. The net goes through you like a cheese cuber, and the you are a pile of ingredients for a chunky Denver Omlette.

Fireworker Here's a weapon that shoots like an RPG. But as the projectile gets close, it lassos your leg and then jerks you up ragdoll style as if you were a mortar. It reaches apogee and boom, you're a red flower.

Spastic Balloon Just like the Fireworker except it drags you all random all over the sky or ground like, you know, a spastic balloon.

Harpoon Yeah we've seen this before in Cel Damage, but there's nothing quite so satisfying as seeing an impaled body fly into the nearest wall. Sick, no? Yes.

Taster's Choice Oooh. Here's a weapon the instantly freeze-dries all the water in your body. Boom, you're Lot's Wife. A pillar of salt.

F5 Who wouldn't want to have a tornado in a can? I think it would make for a really cool grenade. Not quite so deadly, but it can throw you 30 feet. Then again, that depends on where you land doesn't it?

Mortification There's something classic about how the Ark of the Covenant made skeletons out of the Nazi's in that first Indiana Jones movie. Any animation that rots out a body down to the bones has got to be cool.

Accidents

All Unintentional Injury Deaths	120,859	100.00%
Unintentional MV Traffic	33,687	27.90%
Unintentional Poisoning	33,041	27.30%
Unintentional Fall	26,009	21.50%
Unintentional Suffocation	6,165	5.10%
Unintentional Unspecified	5,688	4.70%
Unintentional Drowning	3,782	3.10%
Unintentional Fire/burn	2,845	2.40%
Unintentional Natural/ Environment	1,576	1.30%
Unintentional Other Spec., classifiable	1,395	1.20%
Unintentional Other Land Transport	1,358	1.10%
Unintentional Pedestrian, Others	1,074	0.90%
Unintentional Other Spec., NECN	1,023	0.80%
Unintentional Other Transport	875	0.70%
Unintentional Struck by or Against	788	0.70%
Unintentional Firearm	606	0.50%
Unintentional Machinery	590	0.50%
Unintentional Pedal cyclist, Other	242	0.20%
Unintentional Cut/pierce	105	0.10%
Unintentional Overexertion	10	0.00%
All Others	0	0.00%

Fancy Date Democracy

I live in Los Angeles County. There are 10 million people here. The budget of the county is 26 billion dollars and it is controlled by five people. Everybody knows the names of those five people because they have been in politics since we were kids. Everybody keeps voting for those same people and nobody cares. We don't know exactly where the money comes from and we don't know exactly where it goes.

Think of it this way. Have you ever been to a fancy restaurant where a man is trying to impress his date? They spend all kinds of money on food, but the food is not so important. It's not about eating; it's not about solving a hunger problem. It's about impressing the lady. That's how our democracy works. It's all about impressing the voter, not about solving the problem, but showing that you can finesse the voter with a fancy plate of issues, policies and rhetoric. They will go all out to get you to the table. They will tell you how important democracy is and how important your vote is. But it's just to get our vote. The politicians don't care who they get the vote from, as long as they get it. 

We have a fancy plate of services as voters, but America is a fancy restaurant. The we only get to vote from the expensive menu because America is rich. So what happens? We order whatever, we don't like it we send it back making a big fuss, we try something fashionable, and we never finish and we throw food away.

Many people I have met from other countries are surprised about the existence of dog food in America. Yes, we have so much that even dogs and cats get an expensive menu, and we pat ourselves on the back to show that we can care about anything to any degree.

You asked if my vote counts. Not really.We voters are only asked on the date once every two or four years. We don't get to see the kitchen. We don't know how the food is prepared. We only get to see the expensive menu. Everyday politics in America is like reading restaurant critics, just waiting for the next date.

Once, when we lived in small towns with very small government budgets, the vote counted for a lot more. Maybe we'll get back to that. Maybe we'll even learn how to cook for ourselves.