Cobb

Feeling Good. Feeling Bad.

I had a bad dream last night. It was bad in many ways and as I was barely sleeping parts of it were based upon reality. I was waiting both in the dream and in life for something to happen and it didn't. In the dream I was made extremely angry by a dog. I was on the street of a residential neighborhood and a large dog kept rushing me barking loudly and then backing off. I had a switch and I swatted the dog on his nose each time. But he growled and took one less step back each time. A crowd gathered to watch this dramatic standoff between myself and the dog. I asked one family who knew the dog if they would please get the owner to pull his dog away. An old woman, obviously the matriarch of the family who owned the dog went through a list of children and grandchildren in her squeaky croaky voice. "Pooter, is this here your dog? Where's Jimbo? Dat Jimbo's dog? What about Cash? Ain't this Cash' dog?" I was two seconds from pulling out my pistol and blowing the dog into swiss cheese, but I kept asking politely. Will you please call your dog off? Nobody did. I kept swatting it on the nose. I couldn't take my eyes off of it for a moment.

I woke up, dead tired, angry. I told my wife that I had a horrible dream. I could hear the sleep in my voice mumble up my words. They conveyed nothing of the sheer awfulness of the dreamt experience. I was still boiling inside, still waiting for us to go watch the next episode of The Witcher together. Still staring at the back of her head as she patiently did her work from home. Still fiercely angry at everything that went on inside my head and of very little of consequence in the real world. I wanted to communicate how miserable I felt, how much I needed some tender and kind affection at this moment, wanting both to demand it in a scream and be quietly accepting that it wasn't going to happen. My mind went to the end. I'm going to die alone. We all are going to die alone. 

I haven't decided whether or not I'm going to pay my rent. I haven't decided whether or not I'm going to max out my credit cards. I haven't decided whether or not I even care. I'm not unhappy with my life with all of its shortcomings. And I thought about what would make me the most happy would be driving a convertible sports car up Pacific Coast Highway at 100 miles per hour. I can do that now because it's very Omega Man out there. I quit my gym. I can't remember the last time I went. But I do my morning walks alone. I did my 10,000 steps alone yesterday and I only took one picture and I don't really think it's worth sharing. I have worked from home for a decade and my solitude is second nature. I am socially distanced. When I post to communicate, I only get feedback on the stupid stuff I really don't care about. I am accustomed to dying alone. This blog has over 9000 posts. I have been writing it steadily since September of 2002. Even I don't read it any longer. In a way, I don't fear death. I am angry about not getting a chance to do what's next. Death is worse than derailment. It's the situation that you never get to address or correct. Death is the complete deterioration of the self; no matter how small your self may have been in life it is completely eradicated by the obliviousness of death.

I remember looking at my grey self in the mirror. I handed out my calling card at a meetup and somebody remarked, "That's not you." It's 4 years old when I was less grey. When I was in Bogota people kept mistaking me for Morgan Freeman. There's not much room even in my own imagination for whom that old black man in the mirror might actually be. I dress like a gardener, in Dickies tactical pants and nondescript black shoes. I'm putting on only the subtlest of shows, and I don't need to show off. My joie de vivre is what it is, but I've heard most of the jokes out there. 

So I sat on the edge of the bed waiting to watch The Witcher with my wife, because I want to do it together, but I might be dead next month.  She still has work to type into her laptop. I'm probably going to fall asleep while we watch. She probably will too. I have been playing the video game of The Witcher most of the afternoon. In the villages people starve and cough. They are surrounded by Imperial troops, wolves and monsters. I can kill them all, but sometimes I die. I have no savings. I spend all of my money on the best swords and armor because ultimately I am a monster slayer and that's what I'm needed for. It's a sword and sorcery classic and the narrative gets pushed along by me killing my way through the evil, solving the mysteries, negotiating with unsavory characters, resisting the temptation to treat the sorceresses as if they owe me affection as my deeds push the plot forward. I am a mortal enabler. A freak of nature. I am heartless and honorable and I don't have time to feel sorry for myself. Everyone dies alone except heroes and martyrs. I don't want to pick a hill to die on. I don't want to succumb to the forces of nature or destiny, but all I can do is live another day. It's obvious, but nobody seems to figure it out. We're caught up in the moment.

The dead live in the tales of the living. I only ever knew one song by Elvis Presley. "In the Ghetto". People got worked up about it, I recall. I sang it. It was a good song. I didn't care that it was Elvis. What a depressing song. But there it is. You don't even have to type 'Elvis' into Google, just 'in the ghetto'. People living in one room shacks. That's what they sang about. 

I once wrote that I figured out the reason for war. It was to remind mankind of their limits. War destroys memory and truth and it becomes the reason for everything. It has an irresistible gravitational pull on history and the Jungian collective consciousness. Now we are met on a new battlefield and I can't help thinking that these might be the last blogs I ever write. These videos may be the last time my face will be seen in its animated state. My voice, now clear, will be its last true self before the cytokine storm reduces me to rib-cracking coughs. Or I might just stay right where I am behind these two monitors and this keyboard and survive it all. Laying low. Risking nothing. Moving nowhere. 

I walked 10,000 steps yesterday. On my way back home I walked past a fire station. The men were playing paddle tennis in the side yard. You could hear the ball echoing across the empty streets and parking lots. I wanted to ask them questions about how I could use my old ICS training to help in an emergency. It was my instinct. But I didn't stop. I kept on walking past the sleeper on the sidewalk, past the old man digging in the trashcan. I held my breath each time. I didn't stop. The sleeper had a full canteen of water. The old man had a rough and ready coat on. Yeah. It's about that time. As I finished the steps, I finished the Sam Harris podcast with Nicholas Christakis. Now I'm informed. I should say that 'we' are the informed. Social isolation is all we've ever had, because we expect our knowledge to make a difference. We keep changing our behavior challenging common sense. We want uncommon insight.

We want uncommon insight because we're logical and disciplined. We want our minds to save us, and we get angry because everybody else doesn't work as hard to come to the same conclusions. They know whose dog it is, but they like the drama of not calling it off. Just because you want it.. you've already hitting it right on the nose, Mr Smarty Pants. But they don't see my gun. In my mind I'm justified. I could take the screaming action and everybody would get it. But maybe I'll just die a little bit today and hold my peace. it's not my war. It's not what I want to become known for. I'm just trying to be civilized, even if I have to do it on the DL. 

I have another meeting today. I need to confirm the time. I need to fill in the hours from last week. But my company could go broke and I could be dead next month. There's a book on the periphery of my list that I might move up in the queue. It's about 10% less democracy and why you should trust the elites more than you do. They're probably looking at us like, so why didn't you just do it? 50 Cent has a new show on TV, because he was ready to die trying to do that. I'm the writer. The writer writes. And here it all is.  This is what I wanted. This is what I got. I just need to keep it all going. I thought, in Episode 001 that I could just catch this and get it over with, because we'e all going to catch the bug, right? No. Delay death as long as possible. Keep everything going. Use your mind and take the extra edge. Minute by minute. Play the barbell curve. Be prepared for extreme negatives and extreme positives. My creditors could all be dead next month. My enemies, my doubters, all of the unknown unknowns could disappear. All of the decadent hubris could get the smackdown. Yes people are starting to scream. 

Maybe we should just be what we be. It's a bit weird to be a Stoic at this moment. There's so much to explain in that. It's a consequence of living a particular life of the particular mind. Being reconciled with triumph and disaster and treating those two imposters just the same is a kind of manhood for which few strive. It's not comfortable but it's necessary. That's why there is no panic here. There is also no resignation. You could call this a moment of dealing with emotions, of concretely wrestling with the logical implications of what I have already felt without making any hard decisions yet. I don't want to be singing depressing songs. I don't want to be angry in my dreams and then with my wife. I don't want to fear death or fear loneliness. I don't want to be overcome by the futility that often accompanies deep contemplation. This meditation thus is a public expression of my will. That's how Stoicism works for me. I don't mind being corrected. I don't care who is right, I care what is right. 

I didn't shoot the dog, but I did fall asleep during The Witcher. 

Some Thoughts about Space Colonization

Some perspective I have been missing in all of the fabulousity leading up to the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing tossed me for a loop last week. In all of the things I have been ingesting on rocketry it had only been buried in the back of my mind that the space race was not merely ideological and patriotic but in fact funded by the research behind ICBMs. In other words, putting a man on the moon wasn't really much more than another way to scale up the capabilities of the military industrial complex. Whoosh!.

What is easy to forget in the hype is that we didn't merely put a man on the moon, we took 24 men to the moon and back. My favorite, Michael Collins, drove around it while Armstrong and Aldrin left footsteps, planted a flag and took pictures. But there were many others who sat on top of the most powerful machine every built, the Saturn 5. And each of those rockets had five monstrous F1 engines. While those didn't power any of our ballistic missiles, Aerojet, Rocketdyne and Aerospace Corp learned a lot from the lessons.

So when I hear people quoting Elon Musk, whose SpaceX has done some very impressive rocketry say we should go to Mars, I'm a bit more hesitant. Like millions of Mikes born in the 60s when that was the most popular American boy's name, I wanted to be an astronaut. I read science fiction and Starman Jones was probably the most influential book of my pre-teen life. But it is clear now that nothing about the manned space program was intended to scale to the dimensions of colonization. Considering the ribbing astronauts got from military pilots there's more than a little truth that they were just handsome window dressing distracting from a MAD economy. The oratory from President Kennedy takes on a sheen of irony and slight of hand now in retrospect. I didn't become an astronaut nor an astrogator. I don't think Earthlings will get the opportunity to flee this planet.

For all of the interest on global warming or climate change or the de-humanization of forests, you would think that before we start talking about space habs, we might try much of that here. It seems to me that even given the pretense of mass colonization, Earthers are going to have to learn to live indoors in the dead cold or boiling heat for a long time. Longer than the Biodome. Longer meaning for life. So why not try and build a city somewhere in the Namib or the Arctic circle. What mix of people would not drive each other mad? How do you make water in the Sahara for 75 people in a habitat. What is the appropriate sexual balance? How many children, handicapped and seniors are necessary for human sanity and compassion to survive in desolate isolation?

These are not things most people think about as the millionaires put down their payments for space tourist reservations. Maybe we ought to. Everything cannot be saved by rockets. It certainly was not why they came about.

The Human Shark

In the news today, "Ancient shark with 300 teeth found by scientists". It turns out that this guy is about 80million years old, give or take 5 million. What evolution is it doing? It's not. Why has evolution left the sharks alone? Well, it's something we don't often think about, and quite frankly I'm not going to do a lot of thinking about here. But I will propose the question, and maybe some of my friends here will know better than I. 

What if we are only speculating about the different hominids? I mean what if, as I've heard more recently, Homo Sapiens actually did breed with the Neanderthals and with earlier hominids like Heidelbergensis, Erectus and Ergaster? I remember when I was a kid, I heard a lot more about Homo Erectus, and Homo Erectus is about 1.3 million years old. So let us speculate that we went back a million years in our little time machine. Obviously we'd clean up a few of those dudes and chicks and hang out with them. But would they be sexy to us? I'm thinking they would be. And I'm thinking we'd try them out. And what a surprise if babies happened!

That would prove that our ideas about speciation as far as humans are concerned is all speculation. How could we prove that the DNA is just that distant enough to say Erectus was real species barrier? I don't know. Maybe somebody spent the time on this question that just popped into my head. But what if human beings are about as perfected as we get in terms of speciation? We are already adapted to our environment as well as a shark is to the sea, and we don't need to evolve. Evolution is not this thing that relentlessly changes us. We relentlessly change ourselves. But we are not and have not faced an extinction event. If H. Erectus is our actually reproductive genetic blood, for a million years, maybe this is as far as evolution needs to take us, absent a nuclear holocaust. See what I'm saying? 

The other implication here is that just like all dogs are just dogs, all humans are just humans. We pretend that breeds are more differentiating than they actually are. I find it difficult to believe that vets learn in their schools that you must operate on poodles differently than bulldogs. There's no DNA barrier. It's just perception. We know that to be true of race. It's just human breeding for shallow effect. That means that 'social Darwinism' is really the only evolution that's going on, which is to say no actual biological evolution, just lethal discrimination. So if there is no actual scientifically empirical evidence for human evolution on the scale of half a million years at the DNA level, it's very clear that there's nothing we've got that the Romans didn't have, except for a better way of specializing ourselves into extremes. Usain Bolt and Angela Merkel can have a baby tomorrow. OK well, maybe Angela is past it, but you get my drift. The kid won't be as exceptional as either parent. 

So I think that leaves a lot more room for what we believe about 'genetics', but nothing anywhere close to speciation. That also means those Neanderthals were probably not as stupid on average as the average stupid person today. This argues for a very broad interpretation of the continuity of humanity as a lot more constant where it really counts, across the millennia. I take that to implicate our tendency to overhype our environmental circumstances. The guy with the iPhone X is really not better than the guy with no phone at all. And that means that stupid people aren't really that stupid. We laugh at Chihuahuas, but they still actually bite like wolves. 

Finally, this leaves me in an interesting place with regard to Extremistan. If more things are actually just social Darwinism, maybe we're just jawboning ourselves into superiority and inferiority. Maybe this is the secret the wealthy and powerful don't want us to know. Could it be? Nahh. Ok maybe. 

 

 

A Cursory Look at Monsanto and GMO Talking Points

Since I'm in a new food regime, learning how to cook better and more foods, and exercising like a maniac, my foodie interests are taking an interesting turn. In the back of my head there has always been some Biome stuff, but the questions around GMO/Monsanto are reaching a peak. Check back with me next year, I will have nailed most of it. Today marks article number two.

So over at Quora I've started following Justin Ma a young PhD in tobacco breeding and genetics at NC State. My first expert. Even though I'm more interested in water as a Biome subject, I think the GMO problem is more knotty. It might overtake. The contrast between the two with regard to market accelerations and regulatory restraints is interesting. Everybody loves overpriced, overhyped commercially modified drinking water in the face of drought. Everybody hates overpriced(?), overhyped(?) commercially modified food in the face of famine. Is water simpler than food? Is waste food so much worse than waste water? Does food matter more simply because it's more expensive to produce? 

Anyway. We'll start with Monsanto and Bayer and find some fellow travelers as well. This first pass may sound doofy in a year or so, but coming at it fresh gives me a chance to be bold and without qualification.

• GMOs kill bees
• BT Cotton made Indian Farmers commit suicide
• Taleb's Risk on Monoculture
• Big Ag kills diversity

 

One thing I'm simply not going to deal with is whether or not GMO foods are safe for humans. That's just stupid on its face. Of course they're safe or else you couldn't sell them because nobody would eat them. As much as I hate falling back to the Carlin position, 'Everything causes cancer'. But aside from that, there's penicillin and peanuts. The first will kill me, the second will cripple my daughter. Neither are genetically modified anything. 

Ma helps get through some false dichotomies with regard to identifying the market correctly. Consider the following:

First, the basic answer: GMO production will continue to grow, and more crops will continue to have GM traits incorporated into their breeding.  At the same time, organic production will likely continue to grow due to the market demand for them.  Both will continue to grow because they're defined categories, vs. the general practices we have now.  GMOs have been driven by producers.  "Organic" foods have been driven by consumers.

More details:
One, this is a false dichotomy, as many of mentioned.  It depends on your definition of organic.  Organic refers more to production practices, while GMOs refer to genetics.  While you can't have USDA organic with GM crops, you can certainly practice what might be classified as organic techniques on GM crops.  And what you definitely can have are non-GMO crops that are non-organic - this likely constitutes the majority of production in the world, with the exception of Africa.  (A little known fact: Europe, by the way, sprays more pesticides and apply more fertilizers than the Americas, due to their subsidies.)

So 'organic' vs 'GMO' doesn't mean anything real. And I am beginning to see cracks in the USDA and certainly a lot of confusion around how Americans perceive that their foods are produced. The fact is that we've been marketed so much food in so many different ways all of our lives that we are living in total isolation from food itself. We don't really know where it comes from, what processes it goes through (or why), and who does what to it.  The bottom line is that everybody trusts the label, and the stuff that's not labeled. Well, as I observed at a New York City farmers market, the more dirt on the vegetable the higher the price. Myself, I'm just beginning to know a good avocado from a bad one, and how to time the yellowing of bananas, so I'm not much better. But we're all learning together aren't we?

Speaking of dichotomies, it will be useful for me to get down into the product sets. Part of the GMO'ification of various seed-sets (better vocab soon come) is the embedding of pesticides, and others is some genetic hybridization presumably for flavor, texture, color and/or hardening to grow in previously adverse climes. The third way is for sterilization that makes previously 'seedable' crops now only 'graftable'. 

As for the monoculture stuff and Taleb's risk analysis, that's something I too will follow. He says, essentially, that the long-term risk of catastrophic crop failure is not worth any short term benefit. It's like planting roses on a volcano. 

I'm also going to defer to farmers who blog, like this guy, who says common sense stuff like "don't take your advice on the farming business from Willie Nelson", and more importantly will talk specifically about the terms and conditions of his purchase of seeds from Monsanto. 

Independently of this, I've been skeptical of both E85 and soy milk. 

So that get's us under way. More later. 

 

Borky's Beach

I'm writing again. But in a different form. I'm writing a novel. 

I've decided that I'm probably going to keep the blog at the volume I'm currently doing, which is about 3 posts per week, and then dedicate some television and gaming time to writing my autobiography and my sci-fi novel. The sci-fi novel is tentatively titled 'Borky's Beach'.

Borky's Beach is an investigative mystery through a post- pseudo apocalyptic near future Los Angeles. It's half mystery thriller, half speculative social science fiction. The environment makes the book and so far it's pretty exciting.

After a catastrophic plague decimates the coastal communities of Los Angeles County, a brilliant scientist discovers the cause and cure. His research leads to a revolution in Life Sciences that has captured the imagination of the world. He has figured out a way to regulate and control the microbes and flora of the human body. People can now have perfect skin, perfect teeth, and alter their personalities through the use of bioengineered microbes. In fact, he has integrated new digestive enzymes into human biology so that we can eat a wider variety of food. He has solved world hunger and made everybody beautiful. Naturally he is the richest and most powerful man on Earth. Consequently all of the information revolution abrubtly ends and recedes, rather like the end of the Gemini program did for manned space exploration, or the Oil Crisis did for the American Muscle Car. Into this situation steps our protagonist. All of the IT that's left has turned society into a panoptic nation of sexy, healthy stool pigeons. Wary of the new ways and adept at the old, he is assigned to find out if it's true that some people live off the grid in the original area of the plague. What he finds there is even more shocking and threatens to change the balance of power of humanity once more. 

 

185% Poverty

I came upon a bit of statistical propaganda today - all for a good cause of course. I was re-introduced to the term 'Food Security'. What the heck is 'food security'? Are the people hungry or not? Are they starving or just hungry?

I leave it to you as an exercise to get a handle around the concept. I will do it in terms of historical comparison. Which is to say, to flesh out my Peasant Theory int he context of what Americans take for granted and what the world standard for hunger and poverty actually is. Always in the back of my mind is the Gapminder. By world standards, poverty is defined as living on less than $2 per day. Yes that's two.  So ask yourself, while you are watching one of the Discovery Channel survival shows exactly how many calories you really need. Since we live in America nobody really says. Wolfram says anywhere between 1600 and 2800. Everywhere on the web there are Body Mass Index calculators which are just guides to help you become slim by convincing you that you are overweight. But that's not about the biological facts of what is necessary for you to survive. So such a wide range makes me want to hazard a guess, but I won't. I'll just say that hunger is relative. Consider the following survey question:

 “We relied on only a few kinds of low-cost food to feed our children because we were running out of money to buy food.” Was that often, sometimes, or never true for you in the last 12 months?

Hell, I ate mackerel when I was a kid because we couldn't afford Chicken of the Sea. We endured the shame of shopping at Lucky Supermarkets and ate plain wrap. Horror of horrors.

Fortunately, there is some nice transparency if you want to dig into the matter. A reasonably complete accounting of the terms and methods can be found at the USDA. Since I look at boundary conditions, I immediately went to check out Wilcox County, Alabama which had the highest rate of food insecurity in America - something on the order of 38 percent. It turns out that Wilcox County's population has been shrinking since after WW2 and is now about 11,000 folks with only 13 people per square mile. I'm not surprised that there are people who miss meals in Alabama, and it stands to reason that when you're that far out in the sticks, there ain't much work nor an easy way to get McNuggets. 

What strikes me when I read such matters (and in parallel, I'm reading Niall Ferguson's latest book which reveals that in 16th Century Western Europe the murder rate was 50/100,000 and the average height of a Frenchman was 5' 4") is how it is somewhat relativistic. In particular, coming across this particular paragraph was remarkable:

While children are usually shielded from the disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake that characterize very low food security, both children and adults experienced instances of very low food security in 1.0 percent of households with children (386,000 households) in 2010, essentially unchanged from 1.2 percent in 2009. However, among households with children in which incomes were below 185 percent of the poverty line, the percentage with very low food security among children declined from 2.9 percent in 2009 to 2.1 percent in 2010. 

Several observations:

1. I recall that there are 119M households in America. About 38M have children. 

2. Incomes below 185% of the poverty line.. OK the poverty line is not a line so much as a matrix. Here's the matrix:

 

 

Size of family unit	100  Percent of Poverty	110  Percent of Poverty	125  Percent of Poverty	150  Percent of Poverty	175  Percent of Poverty	185 Percent of Poverty	200 Percent of Poverty
1	$10,830	$11,913	$13,538	$16,245	$18,953	$20,036	$21,660
2	$14,570	$16,027	$18,213	$21,855	$25,498	$26,955	$29,140
3	$18,310	$20,141	$22,888	$27,465	$32,043	$33,874	$36,620
4	$22,050	$24,255	$27,563	$33,075	$38,588	$40,793	$44,100
5	$25,790	$28,369	$32,238	$38,685	$45,133	$47,712	$51,580
6	$29,530	$32,483	$36,913	$44,295	$51,678	$54,631	$59,060
7	$33,270	$36,597	$41,588	$49,905	$58,223	$61,550	$66,540
8	$37,010	$40,711	$46,263	$55,515	$64,768	$68,469	$74,020

 

 

 

So apparently it's a regular thing to not just talk about poverty, but people who are near to poverty. We are being statistically inclusive when we talk about 'the poor'. 

An old friend of mine used to joke about the 'LA Poverty Line' which for single hale fellows well met was 36K in 1985. By which we meant that our basic necessities included a sporty automobile and a nice apartment near the beach. Both of us celebrated when we rose above that 'poverty' line. And while today we can easily be considered to be part of the 5%, what I refer to as The Slice, it's clear that while we were joking about poverty inflation, others in the government were not and are not. 

Clearly it would be an abomination to inflate America's baseline poverty rate to something like the 150% or 185% levels. But we accomodate the public interest in fractions above 1% by including the inflated poverty benchmarks. It *is* interesting to know that food security in the 185% poverty category for children decreased 80 basis points from 2009 to 2010 from 2.9 to 2.1% - even though most of the general public doesn't use the term 'basis point'. 

I think I would actually like to see the return of plain wrap, but they'd compete with store brands and probably wouldn't do so well. The American poor. How poor are they?

Franklin Canyon

Yes this is Los Angeles.

Women Are Simply Weaker

Here's a piece of text I picked up. We've all heard the blather about women not having upper body strength and all that. Here are the details of the US Army study. Some simple facts that just sound so crazy because nobody ever speaks plainly about it.

The average female Army recruit is 4.8 inches shorter, 31.7 pounds lighter, has 37.4 fewer pounds of muscle, and 5.7 more pounds of fat than the average male recruit. She has only 55 percent of the upper-body strength and 72 percent of the lower-body strength... An Army study of 124 men and 186 women done in 1988 found that women are more than twice as likely to suffer leg injuries and nearly five times as likely to suffer fractures as men. 

The Commission heard an abundance of expert testimony about the physical differences between men and women that can be summarized as follows:

Women's aerobic capacity is significantly lower, meaning they cannot carry as much as far as fast as men, and they are more susceptible to fatigue.

In terms of physical capability, the upper five percent of women are at the level of the male median. The average 20-to-30 year-old woman has the same aerobic capacity as a 50 year-old man.

Well!

Post-Transportation Land Use

Over at First Things, I read the following:

Seven hundred billion minutes. That’s how much time Facebook’s 500 million active users spend on the site every month. 700,000,000,000 minutes. Let that one sink in for a moment. Every month we spend the equivalent of 1.3 million years on Facebook; the equivalent of nearly 18,000 lifetimes. More than half of us login every single day; we average 130 friends. And we spend vast amounts of time on there.

It’s funny that so much of the news on people spending time in cyberspace is considered unproductive. As somebody in the industry, we spend our careers competing for human attention. So for us this is all great news. Think about it from our perspective: time spent in cyberspace is essentially time spent reading and writing – well, even in it’s more primitive forms it is intellective work. It is time spent NOT driving cars. It is time spent NOT in dangerous streets where there might be crime. It is time spent not employing toxic chemicals, or risking physical injury. It is time spent using less and less energy as systems become more efficient.

So in my head there are several larger unfocused concepts gaining traction as I witness continued innovation in the IT industry and relative failure in automotive, heavy manufacturing and other 20th century styles of industrial production. This morning I was provoked by two tangential ideas. The first was that of Borkies. The second was the clumsy, secretive work being done by the Administration to take more American land off the market. 

No Humans Allowed
Over at Malkin,

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar today issued a Secretarial Order elevating the Office of the National Landscape Conservation System and Community Partnerships in the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to the level of a directorate within BLM.

“This action reflects the growing importance of the 27-million acre National Landscape Conservation System to local economies, to the health of communities, and to the conservation of some of America’s greatest landscapes,” Salazar said at the National Landscape Conservation System Summit in Las Vegas. “The BLM plays a special role in protecting America’s great outdoors for the benefit of all Americans – for it is the national conservation lands that contain the forests and canyons that families love to explore, the backcountry where children learn to hunt and fish, and the places that tell the story of our history and our cultures. Each of these places within the National Landscape Conservation System holds special meaning to the American people and is an engine for jobs and economic growth in local communities.”

Well I tell you how I interpret that in the economic context of a government in midterm jeopardy of sovereign default, the government will buy up as much land as legally possible, slap a 'no humans allowed' sticker on it, with very specific provisions, and then sell out at ridiculous prices.

I may be bound to think rather cynical things of this Administration, but there are several things in particular are brought to mind. The first is how the shift in land use and rules has occurred over my lifetime. Once upon a time, there was just wilderness. Now there are very deliberate rules and regulations about exactly what you can and cannot do in these government owned and protected properties. It's called public land, but it's hella regulated. All those canyons and forests where we might hunt and fish.. well who says what we can hunt and fish and why? Are those the rules generated by hunters and fishermen or by conservationists? It goes without saying that there are a good deal more commonsense laws than a few in these protected areas, but the politics sustain ridiculous compromises at the macro level. Nothing illustrates this quite like the refusal of water conservationists to allow for market pricing of scarce water resources due to legislative frameworks forged in the 19th century. NLCS is under suspicion. It's a big deal. 

It seems to me that Landscape Conservation means no development. It means hiking and fishing Disneylands in perpetuity, not homesteading and low rent housing, not energy production, and if any pol would dare allow for housing, it would only be after interminable subjective environmental impact studies. We know this - it's the environmentalist status quo. "Engine for jobs and economic growth in local communities" is just a lie.  

Sea Change
The Wild West is still fairly wild. There are places where land could be cheap if you were legally entitled to buy it. Much of the place where the government owns large plots are out here in the Western States. Nevada is most noticeable on Malkin's map. But who wants to live in the Nevada desert? So what if it's all government land? Well, in my larger Borkies story, I imagined some ecological disaster in which an ocean borne virus infected millions with a fairly severe flu. The point of that was to effect a tipping point in real estate value such that desert environments became more valuable than beachfront property. 

What's much more likely than some farcical aquatic paranoia or H1N1 'Fish' virus is the changing way that upscale populations view their amenities and lead lives worthy of emulations - at least economically speaking. One only has to look at affluent American teens today to know that they care more about being electronically connected than developing a sense of geography. Exploring cyberspace is more interesting than floating down rivers with Jim. Is a house a good house? That depends on bandwidth and connectivity. 

So why should we build the cities of the future near the coasts, or on riverbanks? The meaning of major transportation hub is changing as more and more human activity is engaged via computer communication networks. Why land is affordable has everything to do how it is expected to be used. If it sounds outrageous to you to see real-estate prices changes to make desert property more valuable than beachfront property, think about how our economy has been transformed by outsourcing and offshoring. The cheap property and cheaper economy in India and China has evaporated many domestic industries via improvements in logistic and telecommunications. Proximity is redefined. 

So where do you live, and why is your real-estate valuable? What economies does it sustain? 

--

I predict a day coming soon when people don't care so much about what car you drive, but what networks you belong to and what kind of device you sit on the table in front of you at the meetup. What do you see in a post-transportation economy?

 

Female Attraction

The other story I got from Lee was very interesting and anecdotally it's true for me as well. 

It turns out that there was an experiment in which men didn't shower for three days, so that all of their funk and manstink got into their sweatshirts. Women were then asked to dig into that pile of sweatshirts and find the one they felt most comfortable wearing. The result was that they were most compatible, all of them, and meaning sexually attracted to the man whose genetic profile was most different from her own. This is a natural kind of attraction that makes for human biodiversity.

However, when women are pregnant, that sort of thing reverses. Then they most want to be around family. It makes sense, family will protect her and the baby. 

So here's the kicker. If a woman is on the Pill, it works by simulating pregnancy. So a woman who stays on the pill will be more attracted to men who are genetically close to her. If she gets off the pill, suddenly she can't stand him. Similarly, as was the case for me, my girlfriend didn't particularly like me when she got on her birth control, but wanted me around more when sex was risky. After we got married, we had all kinds of headaches until I got my permanent fix and she could be off the chemicals.

So guys. If your girl is on the Pill and tells you that she loves you, she probably doesn't. 

Bacterial Affinity

You are god, and all things work together for your own good. The problem is that you cannot willfully communicate your gospel to your people because your people are bacteria.

We once mentioned the understanding that a person replaces his cells something like 10 times in his life. You are not the same person you were, physically. All of your cells have been replaced. I think it's the brain cells that never get replaced - so the fact that you have memory and believe your self to be yourself probably has something to do with that. But a lot of the cell in your non-genetic self, are bacterial. In your gut, and a lot of other places, you are host to a community of microbes that make up part of you. 

My friend Lee, the scientist tells me that researchers are coming to believe that human compatibility has a lot to do with our hosted microbial communities. That we might be genetically compatible on the order of 99% but what really makes us strangers are that we might only share 40% of the same sorts of microbes. 

Interesting.

The Diet

How did I lose 20 pounds this year? There were about ten things I did. Only a few of them had to do with changing the food that I ate. The rest were cultural.

The first thing was to ask a pharmacist what was the best weight reducing supplement. He told me that none of them were any good. So he helped convince me that there was there was no science. I knew that intuitively because of two things I remember. The first wat that people tend to believe the labels on food. I call this scientism - they believe the scientist because he's a scientist not because they understand the scientific method. You trust the label because you're not able to determine what cholesterol looks like under a microscope. I knew this a long time ago - back in the late 80s. I even wrote a rap about it called Food in a Box. Rule No. 1. No dietary drugs or supplements.

Rule No. 2 - Count Calories.
The next thing I did was to count my calories.  I did so to a degree I never did before. I had a general idea of what food was 'healthy' and what was not. We all do. But I never realized that there were a whole day's worth of calories in a large Quizno's sub. I got an app called 'Lose It!' for the iPhone and I learned a great deal. It turned out that Carl's Jr, was not so bad after all depending on which sandwich you eat. What was the surprise was that the chicken sandwich wasn't less than the cheeseburger. Just knowing which was which helped. 

Rule No. 3 - Drink Water.
OK so I lied. I changed the food I ate. But it was some of the food I ate instead of all of the food I ate. I always drank water and tea, but not all the time at every meal. Now I did. I really used to think that drinking lemonade saved me calories instead of drinking soda. For years. I counted the calories and I realized I was wrong. So I changed what was wrong. Now I have all different kinds of water and all different kinds of tea 90% of the time. The rest of the time I drink what I like. It was changing the main habit.

Rule No. 4 - Add Spice.
Whenever you have a snack, make it spicy. The hotter the better. I love chips and salsa. That's my snack. Otherwise, I'll do popcorn with seasoning salt. But even for meals, if you're going to experiment, try something spicy for a change. It forces you to eat a little bit slower, drink a little bit more water, and enjoy the experience of eating food just a little more. That adds up. 

Rule No. 5 - Ask Out Loud.
You're hungry and you want to eat. What do you eat? I dunno, whatever. If you don't ask anybody, then you make up your mind. It's better to socialize your eating question. Don't just make up your mind and do it, ask somebody. They'll look at you funny, like it's a quiz or something. After a few times, they'll get used to you asking. They'll almost never say Twinkies. And if they do, you know what to do anyway. It's a simply trick to get you to think twice about what you're eating. 

Rule No 6. - Don't Clean Your Plate.
If you think mathematically about how you eat, then you should employ the 80/20 rule. The time it takes for you to get past 80% of the food on your plate should go exponentially up towards..

Aside: I spent about 45 minutes designing a function that would show the curve. I think it's the first time I've ever done that - using calculus in the real world. I have a sense of where the numbers should be but building it into an algebraic function was interesting. Something clicked in my head.  Still, I didn't perfect it. 

The point is to always leave something on the plate, and that requires that you eat a little bit slower. Bring something to read if you're eating alone. Talk more if you're not. 

Rule No 7. - Schedule. 
Eat at the same time every day, in generally the same amounts. Get yourself on a rhythm and stick to it. You will get really hungry if you're one hour late to a meal, and then you'll snack on something in between. It's too easy to get 500 calories in a snack. One soda and a candy bar will do it. That ruins the whole day in 10 minutes. 

Rule No. 8 - Stagger
I decided that what I wanted to do was have a tiny breakfast, a small lunch and whatever I want for dinner. Since I'm not a breakfast person during the workweek, I might skip breakfast and then have an oversized lunch. That's a no no, but I did make sure that one of my meals was exactly normal or even large instead of scrimping all around and feeling cheated. So dinner is my reward meal and so that I can have that, I'm willing to sacrifice the other stuff.  On the weekend, I do have a big breakfast and no lunch and a generally light dinner, so I've got the variety.

Rule No. 9 - Token Exercise
Token exercise for me works when I'm on the road. It's easy enough to do 20 minutes of something every day when there's a gym or a pool at the hotel. At home, I just don't do it.  I have 2 hours of beach volleyball a week and that's it. A token. But with a good diet, that's enough. 

Rule No. 10 - Weigh every Day
I weigh myself every day, down to the tenth of a pound, and I write it in a diary. I know exactly how my weight fluctuates and how what, when and how much I eat makes a difference. When I'm disciplined and doing all of the rules, I can lose 2 pounds a week. When I take it easy, I can lose one pound a week. Right now I'm keeping my weight at 198. 

Here's Pollan. I'm surprised at how much we say in common. 

The End of Capitalism?

I think not. But it is the end of capital markets as we knew them a couple years ago. 

I just started to understand the rudiments of financial engineering back when I read Derman's 'My Life as a Quant'. The career I might have had, if I had stayed in NYC, would have been to be a programmer for the guys on Wall Street. I often think about the moola I might have made, but actually it's the technology that excites me. On the other hand I might have just been another tool at Bloomberg. But what's clear is that there have been a number of technological innovations over the past two dozen years that have given brokerage houses enormous power in altering the physics of trading securities. In addition, there has been, like with CAD, a revolution in the types of financial instruments that can be created. I can remember when stocks weren't traded in pennies. Don't you?

Sheila Bair rightly said that financial institutions are providing too much fake money into the GDP. Our nation should not expect upwards of 30% of GDP to come from the finance industry. It has become too self-serving and not serving enough of the nation's proper economy. We shouldn't make so much money just by playing with money, but by creating goods and services that people need. 

We need to get back to a world where our financial sector supports the functioning of our economy, and not the other way around. And we need to fix what caused the crisis by reforming our mortgage lending and securitization practices. Only by getting back to basics in these most fundamental areas of our financial system can we begin to restore balance to our broader economy and confidence in our economic future. 

As I think about the future of the US economy, there are several things that stick out in my mind. 

1. Biotech is the future. 

2.  Smart money will remain in America

3. Fewer banks is OK.

4. Chimerica will continue.

But here's the big thing. My goto guy, David Goldman says we're going into a zombie bank economy. It basically means that the banks will not take risks, they will not lend much. It will slow the entire economy. To me that means people sitting on capital are going to slowly bleed it rather than to aggressively risk it. The institutions that could more or less guarantee >7% returns on capital just won't be able to. 

I can't predict much from that. I can't tell if that's good or bad for the innovative businessman. On the one hand, I think money would get clubby as it is now and only go to super safe investments like US Treasuries. On the other hand, the opportunity to make a killing just making regular businesses smarter is very real. There will be *some* growth industries in America, even if that growth is only 8%. It won't be the whole economy, but when Wall Street was promising that, it was all bubble anyway.

Capitalism isn't going away. This is just the business cycle reminding us that it's permanent. Nobody is inventing a new kind of accounting, and accounting standards are going global and getting written into the substrate of IT. The human race doesn't even know another way to think about money other than through the tools capitalism has provided. 

Genomic Philosopher Kings

It was, I imagine, just a matter of time before one of those assembled in the room at last summer's Master Class in Synthetic Biology started in on their jabs at Intelligent Design. After all, they are only human, and humans are jealous.

As I got into the second reel of the seminar, the tape jammed and got stuck on hourglass, right in the middle of the other inevitable ethics discussion. Some had proposes a system of licensing. But there was the flaw. As someone mentioned, any 14 year old can steal the car keys and wreck their parent's car, despite the licensing system we have in place.

In a world where Murphy operates side by side with the minions of the Devil, there is a non-zero chance of those nasties to be engineered to get out and propagate. It seems to me impossible to have great desire to innovate, open sourcing, cheap tools, low cost processes, unintended consequences and ethical prohibition. Instead we will deal more often after the fact, just as we do with police and the law and justice. Pre-emption is impossible. And yet, before the tape jammed, I had the distinct impression that there were of the many some who thought some Leviathan possible.

I like the idea of synthetic biology. I think, as with every other invention, for the elite amongst us the benefits will far outweigh the risks. For the poor and weak among us, the ways and means to be destroyed will be multiplied. But at some fundamental level it will elevate us all to some new standard of living and leverage us one more degree into a complicated society made that much more complex by our new found abilities.

I'm not sure the flirtation it has with hacker culture, and the similarities it shares with computers in its ability to duplicate itself is preparing our ethical appropriately. I'm not sure the neo-Luddites will be considered so wrong. I don't see the shining new horizon yet. I just see newfangled solutions to today's problems and an undeveloped appreciation for tomorrow's problems.

--

'Biome' is my category for life in this new world of engineering. I am fascinated by the possibilities of understanding what it is we don't know, take for granted and consider perhaps unknowable. For example, what physically goes on when we laugh? Why is something funny? What kind of thinking is humor and what is its purpose? If we suggest that it's all part of some evolutionary biology and then find a way to re-engineer that evolution, what do we do with humor? Might we re-wire our limbic system to make those things that now generate fear become pleasurable? Super soldier there... or maybe, laughing in the face of death is an evolutionary dead end.

A Skeptical Triumph Over Global Warming Fraud

I don't know exactly how long I've been skeptical of the great hoax that Anthropocentric Global Warming (AGW) has proven to be, but a thoughtful researcher might check the archives of Cobb to make the point. They have always been open. Here's a classic quote from me:

My mind is made up on global warming. If it takes 100 years to move the planetary temperature up one degree, it will take 100 more years, or at least 50 to change it back. In the meantime, nothing that serious is happening. We need to focus on what people do. The Planet is fine.

I know that the ice cube analogy doesn't include land, but 17 feet of sea rising is not going to happen. Again, the fate of the Earth is not a political priority. Hurricanes don't kill six million Jews.

As it happens, I've been searching Slate's archives to find more editorial cartoons from Tony Auth who penned one with the subtitle "Obama's Believe It Or Not". The picture showed troops in Afganistan on an escalator directed by Obama. On the side of the escalator was the word 'Escalation', but at the top of the escalator was the sign 'Exit'. I think that oxymoron and the subtitle encapsulates the Obama presidency quite well - as well as the press infatuation with the idiot socialite party crashers to a state dinner at which strategic alliances with India should have been the subject of coverage.

In that search, I found a couple things to be true. After having watched about 50 cartoons, the first thing that can be said is that they are a perfect form of infotainment and are rarely reliable about anything except the simplest of public opinions. They never fail to make obvious and two dimensional, a multidimensional issue, and in that they can be a useful shorthand for the popular, conventional, unexpert and mass opinion. When applied to the matter of AGW that becomes overwhelmingly clear.

Before I show the killer example of this, I want to bring to your attention the importance of the ability for the President to articulate the policy and direction of his Administration in a similarly two dimensional way. It should be clear and continuous so that a person following that Administration gradually gets a 3d picture. In every snapshot of Obama's articulations, we get blur. We did not have that sort of evasion with GWBush. And so with that, consider the following editorial cartoon by Stuart Carlson:

It should be obvious by now that the theory of AGW is based on a fraud. The Telegraph has a very useful article by Christopher Booker that gives a clear sketch of the history and the culprits and the implications of the deception.

The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious methods – not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics' work. It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not least by ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports.

As I started this essay, I thought about entitling it 'The Natural Advantage of Conservatism' but I tire of politics, and I didn't want to imply with any relish that this revelation is a big win for my political side. Politically speaking, it's going to take just as long to unwind the 'thinking' and money invested in all this green hogwash as it did ginning the whole kaboodle up in the first place. (But I am selling my chromium futures).

I simply want to be correct. And that is why I am curious and skeptical and analytical. I don't have any need to play gotcha, even though it is entertaining to have one's skepticism rewarded. But I am looking at the language of this article in the Telegraph which names the names of the culprits behind the hugely anti-scientific deception and obstruction of Mann, Briffa et al, who had previously been given the honorific of being portrayed as a literal tidal wave of truth. You don't get that kind of reportage on a daily basis. We suffer from lazy reporters and their dimbulb language, which is why people like me filter news through intelligent bloggers. It has been over 15 years since I got my news from television, and at the time it was strictly Charlie Rose and before that only the Sunday morning interview shows, and before that only the Nightly Business Report. The last time I trusted the likes of Wolf Blitzer and George Will, who were among the best TV had to offer, was 1989. I sometimes forget how unusual that makes me.

Still the point remains that people who are engaged in professional pursuits of Progressive political interest tend towards debasing their profession in search of the revolutionary while calling it Progress. Just this week I hear of a revolution in Mammography. C'mon. These things actually take time. I'm thinking that perhaps I ought to coin another rule about being wary of people who claim to be on the bleeding edge of anything.

The late Michael Crichton had the right idea. He tantalized us with the possibilities of what's next and reminded us always of human fallibility in his novels, and he was a skeptic of AGW as well in his speeches. 

PS. To Laurie David: Drop dead.

McIntyre vs Briffa: TKO

This is better than Lefkowitz vs Bernal.

Briffa is now a name that will go down in history, with Al Gore as one of the greatest perpetrators of fraud in the modern world. Steve McIntyre will go down in history, rather like the man who finally stopped Senator Joe McCarthy by saying: "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" We'll probably forget McIntyre's name as we've forgotten the name of Joseph Nye Welch. We'll probably remember Al Gore. That's fair, the takedown has had many contributors, but baby it's over. The swastika has been blown off the Reichstag.  

This is one of those huge monstrous collapses. It's a scandal inside of a fraud leaked by a hack. It's like Eliot Spitzer wrapped up inside of The Chicago Black Sox with a Piltdown Man on the side. It's like Enron on top of OJ in the middle of Iran-Contra. 

Now that the actual source code that generated the hockey stick has been audited and outed by none other than Eric Raymond, all that's left is the fun of watching the suckers bail. Everybody who has been.. excuse me, every FOOL who has been measuring their carbon footprint is now going to have to explain that they've been practicing voodoo economics. Oh the unwinding! 

People are going to be able to Google "osborn-tree6/briffa_sep98_d.pro" for a long time and get the goods on what Briffa did. 

But I'm going to put up the most intricate detailed history of skepticism I've seen right here for the permanent record. Check this out:

Download Skeptical Real Climate Science

God, I'm glad I'm not a phony.

Twelve Trees

Global warming is a fraud.

Once upon a time, I might have been convinced that there was something to the IPCC conclusions about the infamous hockey stick of temperatures, but I've always been skeptical of the Green Movement. Well it turns out that this hockey stick has as its originating dataset, 12 trees.

Twelve trees whose growth rings were the basis of the conclusions that have shaken the world were selected by a dude named Briffa and another dude named McIntyre has called him on it. But it took years. Huh what? I mean to say quite plainly that the 'overwhelming majority of scientists' made their conclusion on the basis of a report whose original data was not made available for scientific review. The big bloody secret was that it was twelve measly trees. 

So it's official. That thing I've been distrusting for all of these years is just another scientific animism. A 'scientific' sounding idea that people who don't understand the science take as the whole truth and nothing but the truth, when in fact they are merely taking it on the authority of scientists. Of course that's what I'm doing right now, except I'm being very specific. McIntyre said Briffa was mistaken, and Briffa admitted that there were only 12 trees.

So McIntyre looked at all of the conditions under which the 12 trees were selected, and took a larger data set from the area. Guess what he found? No evidence for global warming. The twelve trees nullified geological testimony. They misrepresented the truth. The truth is that the planet is fine. 

Not long ago, I overheard some talk that all of the temperature variations that the Greenies have been talking about are explicable as epiphenomenon of El Nino. And I've published this claim that carbon dioxide is hardly poison, but that clouds and water vapor are the the big ballers of climate change - kind of back to what I learned as a kid. And of course the late Michael Crichton's State of Fear was all over these activists.

So now all you have to do is mention what should become common knowledge in a matter of days. The Yamal Dataset was faulty. The hockey stick was a myth. The 'scientific consensus' was false.

Carbon Burpprint

The average American drinks 54 gallons of sodapop every  year. So at a conservative estimate that's 100 million Americans therefore 5.4 billion gallons. So the question is, how much CO2 is in your average gallon of soda? There .. oh wait, I'm not the first person to have this brain fart.. Ecogeek beat me to it.

So his estimate, which is three times less conservative than I was going to speculate, is in the neighborhood of 400 kilotons of CO2 farts and belches, unless CO2 is somehow sequestered in the body of the person drinking, which I doubt. Good lord let us hope anyway, because the CO2 we get in soda is a by-product of other industrial processes. Coca-Cola will have us thinking about human sequestration.

Anyway, it turns out that even the generous number is a drop in the greenhouse gas bucket. We're talking US dumps 1.6 Billion Metric Tons of the stuff every year. So go ahead, drink, belch and fart with impunity. Your carbon burpprint is but a trifle.

Korean Beef

According to a quick glance, South Korea does about 78 billion dollars of business with the US annually. However they stopped the importing of American beef five years ago out of fears of mad cow disease. That strikes me as strange. We've never had a problem. Some may say that mad cow is inevitable in all beef supplies, but that doesn't seem a cogent argument against ours. It's about 20 billion worth of business that we've been doing without and in April the Bush Administration signed a deal to restart the flow. That's a lot of beef.

Well it turns out that South Koreans don't trust American beef, no matter what kind of deals our governments have put together. And so thousands filled the streets recently to throw down against riot cops in the streets of Seoul. The Democrats are opposed to the trade agreement between Korea's Lee Myung-bak and GWBush, but it's unclear why. Lee has something like a 25% approval rating in his home country, and there is probably no easier way to excuse any behavior in the US than saying it's the opposite of what GWBush would do. So the South Korean government is caving in by playing on what appears to be a popular idea that cows younger than 30 months old are less susceptible to BSE. Don't ask me about how prion-based infections work, half the websites I looked for on BSE are down (except for PETA's of course).

Bottom line politically is that it comes down to a matter of trust. The number of people who are going to be able to make any actual determination on the quality of American beef is not going to change significantly. The Koreans in the street are going to take it on faith, just as they are taking it on faith that American beef is unsafe. There's an interesting unravelling going on here.

My interest in this is based on my own kind of information theory with regard to the ability of people to establish and maintain policy that is both transparent and well-abstracted. I will follow up in that regard again in speaking about how politics makes people emotionally deranged and affects their willingness to distinguish Natural Truth from Political Truth.

You see there's a bioengineered solution to the problem just at hand. But what Venter understands is that engineered genomics is predictable whereas random DNA fiddling is not. That is precisely the difference between bioengineering and agriculture.

Downscaling

'Downscaling' is what I'm going to call the resistance to conspicuous consumption. I have been intimating in several different ways that implication to a Boyd rule is part of the path to sustainability. I've mentioned before that certain New Yorkers have this skill and that it may become something more and more people will have to assume. The Boyd rule is that there are two ways to have all you want, one is to be rich, the other is to reduce your needs to zero. Downscaling is about reducing your needs towards zero.

Urban property is at a premium, and it's a rule of social creatures that we will urbanize. But the concentration of people will not, of necessity create conflict despite what people say about 'income inequality', and I think NYC is the proof. You have very poor people meshed cheek by jowl with very rich people, and there is a kind of indigence possible in NYC that is impossible other places - ie sleeping on a subway train. It can only happen where there are subway trains - the homeless hustle is a skill. But at an appreciably higher socioeconomic level, there is another sort of 'indigence' and this is what I'm focusing on as key to some modifications of middle class behavior past the suburban model. 

Here is a kind of preview of what I'm talking about, although there was an excellent article in the Village Voice about the phenomenon of "bohemian cadging" published many years ago. From Kottke.

Ah, to be young and broke in New York. Some astounding stories of discipline and ingenuity about what it takes to make ends meet in the city. What's striking is that some of these people are literally starving and probably malnourished. And yet they still come to the city.

Drinking and eating carry their own complications. Especially if you are, say, Noah Driscoll, a 25-year-old project manager for a Chelsea marketing company whose salary is comparable to what a rookie teacher might make.

"For a little while I only ate grapefruits for my lunch," said Mr. Driscoll, who pays $400 a month on his college loans, "because they have a lot of nutrients and they got me through the day."

Mr. Driscoll has since started packing two peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for lunch. Dinner might be two baked potatoes. On a recent Monday, it was franks and beans. On a good night, he might spend up to $6.

"To live like a human being on the salary that I make is very difficult in this city," he said. "You've got to forget about brands, you've got to forget about, you know, what your mom made you growing up, and take what's out there."

Downscaling is not, unlike the bohemian cadging and homeless hustling, born of necessity. Rather is has a kind of intellectual and social appeal by people who have choices. For example, I think that my willingness to buy most of my clothing at Walmart and Target, although I could afford Gap and Eddie Bauer are examples. So I am cool with the Southern California fashion trend of baggy shorts and cargo pants; I can indulge this fashion trend and downscale at the same time. Buying rice by the 50 pound bag, and otherwise getting consumer goods wholesale is downscaling. Or is it? There has to be a difference between downscaling and smart shopping in both the amount of dedication to the social aspects of compulsive consumption & buying junk and environmental & macroeconomic impacts of such choices. There also has to be a difference between a shallow rejectionism of market winners and smart organic consumption. If McDonald's gourmet coffee is just as good as Starbucks', which do you buy?  So one has to be particularly aware of the social vs intellectual components of these voluntary choices.

Motorcycles are, in my mind, a very good downscaling choice. In many ways I think that the guy who buys a motorcycle as his primary commuting vehicle is doing a better downscaling job than the guy who buys a Prius.

How is downscaling different than conservation? I think there's overlap but that downscaling is more of a paradigm shift. I guess that has to be the difference. As I spend more time thinking about it, I'll comment.

Thermohaline Collapse

I reawaken the Biome category of futurist ecological scenarios with this mathematical framework for predicting dramatic global climate change, meaning something like 5 whole degrees on average.

Download thermohaline_collapse_challenor.pdf

I don't forsee this happening, the extent to which our atmosphere would have to be flooded with CO2 within the next hundred years would be very drastic. This seemed to be a big meme four years ago, but I think folks still talking about CO2 footprints don't have any clear idea how big a foot it'd have to be.

Cutting to the chase:

                                         

Years	P(THC<5 Sv)	P(THC<10 Sv)
50	0.0035	0.0280
100	0.0039	0.0274
150	0.0046	0.0248
200	0.0023	0.0176
250	0.0028	0.0174
500	0.0022	0.0176

Pretty slim.

Borkies: The Easiest Catch

The most fascinating thing about the latest gadget I have, Google Earth Plus, is finding out how sparsely populated the planet is.

If you spin the globe and point your finger, chances are that you're going to land in the ocean, a good place to find nothing. Having watched the marathon of 'The Deadliest Catch' in which 210 boats brave the treacherous Bering Sea for a few days to bring a couple million pounds of crab back, it makes me wonder what might be found in the middle of the Pacific. I have no idea of knowing how and where fishermen drop their nets and traps worldwide, but my newfound gut is telling me that there's a lot more fish out there. It seems more likely to me that we're cherry picking what we know how to cook, but that were we to develop a taste for octopus, we'd worry less about the sustainability of the world's fisheries.

In the sci-fi book I thought I might work on in the Biome category, I came up with the concept called 'borkies'. Borkies are just small bits of fish, generally squid, which are seasoned in such a way as to be individually delicious. As part of your highschool education, you are 'taste-tested' to see what your very favorite flavors are, and you cannot graduate until you learn how to prepare your own borkies. You then can exist in a semi-dependent, semi-independent way by purchasing or making your own borkies seasoning. Most people eat theirs with rice or noodles & broth in a bowl. People basically get addicted to what's good for them.

Squid borkies were chosen because I've heard that squid are some of the easiest marine protien to mass-produce. They eat anything and they're easy to catch or farm. In the Biome, eating your borkies is one of the basic tenets of civilization.

Here in Los Angeles, a great deal is artificial. We're in a desert, after all. So gazing at Google Earth, I am drawn to places with rivers and deltas and lakes. I watch towns which were established and grown in the eras of river travel, train travel, automobile travel. I look for the docks, the stations, the interchanges that shape the physical city. Los Angeles would adopt to borkies because we are accustomed to, and welcolming of the external, the import. We are integrative and dependent. We would know how to cook our borkies.

I think mine would be squid with wheat udon in broth. Warm and spicy with a bit of egg.

Borkies: The Easiest Catch

The most fascinating thing about the latest gadget I have, Google Earth Plus, is finding out how sparsely populated the planet is.

If you spin the globe and point your finger, chances are that you're going to land in the ocean, a good place to find nothing. Having watched the marathon of 'The Deadliest Catch' in which 210 boats brave the treacherous Bering Sea for a few days to bring a couple million pounds of crab back, it makes me wonder what might be found in the middle of the Pacific. I have no idea of knowing how and where fishermen drop their nets and traps worldwide, but my newfound gut is telling me that there's a lot more fish out there. It seems more likely to me that we're cherry picking what we know how to cook, but that were we to develop a taste for octopus, we'd worry less about the sustainability of the world's fisheries.

In the sci-fi book I thought I might work on in the Biome category, I came up with the concept called 'borkies'. Borkies are just small bits of fish, generally squid, which are seasoned in such a way as to be individually delicious. As part of your highschool education, you are 'taste-tested' to see what your very favorite flavors are, and you cannot graduate until you learn how to prepare your own borkies. You then can exist in a semi-dependent, semi-independent way by purchasing or making your own borkies seasoning. Most people eat theirs with rice or noodles & broth in a bowl. People basically get addicted to what's good for them.

Squid borkies were chosen because I've heard that squid are some of the easiest marine protien to mass-produce. They eat anything and they're easy to catch or farm. In the Biome, eating your borkies is one of the basic tenets of civilization.

Here in Los Angeles, a great deal is artificial. We're in a desert, after all. So gazing at Google Earth, I am drawn to places with rivers and deltas and lakes. I watch towns which were established and grown in the eras of river travel, train travel, automobile travel. I look for the docks, the stations, the interchanges that shape the physical city. Los Angeles would adopt to borkies because we are accustomed to, and welcolming of the external, the import. We are integrative and dependent. We would know how to cook our borkies.

I think mine would be squid with wheat udon in broth. Warm and spicy with a bit of egg.

White Laser

Clancy tells me that there's a new kind of high intensity laser light that is so powerful that it forces a kind of Newtonian Physics on various mediums. In the laser bath, Brownian Motion is polarized, therefore turbulence is practically neutralized. He shows me the famous video of the column of cigarette smoke.

My Travels To the Future

Every once in a while I travel to the future. I'm somewhere in America pretending to be a recent African immigrant. Everybody treats me like some kind of idiot when my understanding of the technology makes me derail the conversation. Then my friend Clancy tells me what's up. Clancy is about 24 years old, and the equivalent of a small town auto mechanic. He's cool with me because I'm off the grid. There are a few people off the grid but I really have to keep a low profile. Fortunately, I only stay in the future for short periods of time, so I don't get busted.

This morning, Clancy told me that he had to go get a new t-coat. I spent the morning getting my butt whooped in a first person shooter. When he came back, his teeth were sparkling even more than usual. Clancy explains:

Basically, when you graduate from highschool, your parents buy you molars and a t-coat. The molars have batteries in 'em and the t-coat covers your teeth. Whenever you chew, the batteries come on and charge your food the same charge as your t-coat. Plus every day you rinse with Listerine and it takes a micron off your t-coat. So basically your teeth stay clean. You can brush if you want but it's basically not necessary. I just got a 180 so I don't have to go back for a new t-coat for 6 months. It's kinda expensive but what are you going to do? You can't get a chick or a job without it. That's why you're a dead giveaway for a Third. Any cop that sees your grill is going to check you out.

I will continue my journeys to the future and start a new category at Cobb.