Cobb

Atomic Integrity

Q. Do you honestly feel that you have a genuine mission to help make the planet a better place to live, or one to just be a passive observer on it?

A. There is something called Gall’s Law which I paraphrase. All large complex things that work are comprised of smaller, simpler things that work. Imagine yourself as an atom. If your electrons fly away, if you tend to lose your neutrons, you’re radioactive. You need to be stable. You need to keep yourself together.

As one atom, you don’t have the ability to tell what the state everything else is around you. But when you bump into another atom are you stealing their electrons?

Similarly as one person, your job is to keep yourself together. The very presumption that you could be an accurate passive observer of the planet is ridiculous. How many languages do you comprehend? How many scientific fields have you mastered? Can you even scuba dive? How could you possibly be responsible for the planet? Your university, your employer and your family combined could disappear tomorrow and have no effect on the planet. You could be front page news for a week and have no effect on the planet.

Somebody external to you has convinced you that your every move can be directed as a combination of selfless actions in which you sacrifice for the planet. That sounds to me exactly like an evangelical minister whose god is named ‘Earth’. Is that why you exist? Is that the source of meaning in your life? What about you?

I have listened to people warble with joy that during the SARS2 pandemic, people’s misery, suffering, immobilization and unemployment have done wonders for lowering air pollution. There seems to be, very clearly, a preference for nature over humanity. Nature is full of creatures that kill, viruses and bacteria are among the most deadly. If you don’t believe me, get rid of your refrigerator. The math is very simple. Take away a chunk of humanity and chalk that up to a win for the planet.

I don’t worship Planet Earth.

I don’t pretend my weight is changing its orbit. I am on a mission to improve the lives of people around me directly. It starts with making sure the machine of me is working excellently. So that’s my electrical charge bumping into yours.

Global Warming Isn't Dangerous

This is essentially what I've been saying. Read Dave Burton's answer to Did 30,000 scientists declare that climate change is a hoax? on Quora One of my favorite excerpts.

Sea-level rise is supposedly the worst of the negative effects of anthropogenic global warming, but the measurements prove that’s nonsense. Here’s a particularly high-quality, 110-year measurement record at Honolulu, showing a very typical sea-level trend. Sea-level is rising about 1½ mm/year (6 inches per century), with no acceleration in nine decades or more:

Why Do I Run?

Why do I work out? I work out to preserve the joy of the freedom of movement, so I can run in my waking hours the way I run in my dreams, as long as I can. I work to keep my body strong and healthy. To fight.  To fight illness and suffering. To fight death. And to preserve the will to fight all of my days. To protect my mind and my spirit as long and as far as I can.

Towards A New Urban/Rural Balance

Nikka raises a sterling point in one word 'Doomstead'.

All these doomsteads, rural, urban, island, suffer from the same problem. No matter how many networks of reinforced concrete pillboxes with interlocking fields of fire you have, they can't save you from stepping on a rusty nail and dying of tetanus and gangrene, or getting bitten by a rattlesnake and dying of the venom. Most doomers have no idea just how vulnerable they'd be to disease and infection if their EOTWAWKI scenarios ever play out.

I'm one of those people who spent a lot of time flying over the country and feeling envious of those denizens below in Flyover Country. Growing up in Southern California, where the concrete goes for 50 miles in every direction except into the Pacific, and 2 bedroom houses go for half a million dollars has twisted my psyche. Driving from Ohio to Indiana one weekend made me thirst for buying some dump on 12 acres of land. So long as I have broadband and a Walmart, what am I missing? It can't possibly be worse than life at the Marriott, can it?

I have every intention of retiring somewhere exurban, but where I can still have satellite access and orange juice year round. I have often referred to Dyson's Utopia and Dunbar's Number. While hundreds of millions of people in the Global South are leaving agricultural living for the raised standards of urban living, I'm heading outdoors. What is the best human scale living we might afford?

Just the other night, I watched the excellent film 'Catfish'. In an important way, it reflects the kind of romance those of us who love New York living have with a horsey life in the country. The prospect of being hooked up virtually with people all over the world - ie the advantage of urbanization, yet living at an uncrowded, low rent distance is the kind of balance I seek. 

There is only a small element of 'doomstead' thinking in my fantasy retirement. In some ways it's exactly what we all want in living in our own literal castle somewhere between the extremes of Van Vechten's salon and Gosford Park. Sometimes I like the idea of some small scale industry - as my brother Doc wants to purchase a few acres in SD for the purposes of a specialty winery. Or perhaps it would be very cool to run a specialty cloud based service out of a repurposed loft building in a small town where the electricity is cheap. I'd like to outsource myself into bigger cheaper real-estate but not all the way to India. I'd like to maintain relationships with sophisticates, but not all the way to some insular group of wankers.

As you can tell, there are a lot of different values and priorities at work in this new balance, but let me add a few more that are out there more in the area of mystery.

Everybody knows that if you are sufficiently wealthy, you can get away from it all and take it all with you. Living in resort areas is always an option for the wealthy. Complete urban oases in 'exotic' locales are always available if you've got the scratch. But where the wealth really matters is how one can get access to superior urban services. Medical. Security. Legal. This is why I don't very often seriously consider any countries other than England, Canada and the US for my retirement. And this is where doomstead starts to be more of a consideration.

First of all, if England, Canada and the US become unliveable, it will truly be the EOTWAWKI scenario. But I don't expect that at all. What I do expect is that the medical, security, economic and legal quality of living will decline for the global middle class and that retirees like myself will need to think a bit more seriously about stepping out of the comfort of that which we have enjoyed by paying the 'insurance premiums' of our work lives in the urban setting. We have to go out towards a more Wild West, where civilization is a bit more feudal. There's a certain appeal of handling human business without third parties mediating the rules of civilization, but it's also a lot of work and all of us are not up to the task.

In the end, I am not seeking solitude. You can do that quite easily in an Omega Man fortress in any urban situation. I am seeking space, because it just occurs to me that man was not meant to live completely away from the land in anything under 10,000 square feet. But in the 21C, how does an American do this?

Another Good Group

 I got outdoors for the first time in a while. I forget, like I suppose most non-rich natives of Los Angeles do forget, that there are beautifully wild areas in close to the city. So I went, for the first time in my life, to Rustic Canyon, on an outing with the local Boy Scout troop.

Los Angeles is a city of canyons. There's Runyon Canyon just above Hollywood were trendy folks jog themselves and their dogs. I've never been there. There are Topanga, Rivas, Temescal and a dozen other canyons of better and lessor repute as far as beauty and fire danger. Rustic is just nice and remote. Well, remote for me because I live down near the water - and well most everybody lives downscale of this part of West Los Angeles. 

I've been cranking out 12 hour days in deepest darkest winter Cleveland where the temperature doesn't vary from day to night by more than 8 or 9 degrees. Out this way, the wind matters more than the sun. That's a very strange feeling. I'm accustomed to a high of 68 and a low of 46 around this time of year in LA which is about what we got this weekend. It makes us take an extra set of clothes or something and should explain much of the fashion consciousness of us Angelenos. We wear more variety of clothes because the weather demands it. So now you folks from the East can understand why San Francisco seems so cold to you. It's not cold, it's just night and it's supposed to get 20 degrees colder at night.  

At Rustic Canyon, I wore shorts and sat by a babbling brook, and watched the equestrians go by. I raked leaves, big sycamore leaves, and I watched the sky through the oaks.  I minded a passel of Scouts as they threw knives and tomahawks. I observed a parrot swerving to avoid the attention of a red tailed hawk. I munched on dried apricots and I shot a couple dozen rounds at 15 paces. 

The highlight of the afternoon was twofold. I always enjoy speaking with my friend Bob about movies and politics and this and that. I learned, from another of the dads, what it is that cats like to eat, from the perspective of catfood engineers. So there was fun, non-work oriented conversation. But the singular defining event of the day was the lost knife.

On his turn, one of the younger Scouts wound up and made his final toss of a nine inch steel knife towards the mounted stump four paces away. We all had a good chuckle as he missed the entire target and tumbled forward on the strenght of his right hand's momentum. But that moment of laughter turned out to be a misdirection worthy of Houdini, for nobody saw where the knife went.

 For the next 90 minutes, we pulled a mountain of leaves, rocks, sticks, grass and dirt from an area the size of a suburban bedroom. 17 boys and 4 men against a plot of land so small the most environmentally sensitive whackjob from Santa Monica wouldn't give it the time of day, except perhaps to park their Prius there. We raked, we shoveled, we poked and prodded. We found lizards, PVC pipe, golf balls, deer slugs, horse poop, caterpillars, sour flowers and everything but the knife. I honestly thought about how I might McGuyver my iPhone into a metal detector. It was useless; we were overcome.

I raked like a madman, working up the first sweat I can recall in months. I noticed something about everyone's work ethic including my own. I am the man who wants to be King, who turns to the man who should be and awaits the order. Hearing none, I bark out my own, heeding my own frustration and wishing everyone would work as hard as I. Sensing failure, I turn to a chuckling despair. I guess nobody wants to win so much, which is why I'm not in charge. And I retire silently to write my memoir, offering up a tasty morsel to those exacting critics like me - except I was there and you were not. It's not a flattering portrait, but there it is. Take the abstracted lesson for what it's worth - not a whole lot because what's written is only the narrative. Remind me to tell you about the dangerous falsity of narrative. I'm only recognizing it now myself, and so I have to undo 18 years. 

I sat on the edge of the firing range's platform as the target stumps were moved to new ground and enthusiasm ginned up again to continue the sport. The group split into thirds, one throwing, one hiking, one napping. I scientifically observed the pattern of missed knives as they tumbled in the area beyond the targets. I had no idea how something thrown so straight could bounce so crooked. Another metaphorical lesson learned in the wake of defeat. And yet the boys kept throwing, and improving, and thoughts of the lost knife faded.  

I left to take snapshots of the area. My target. The trees. The range. The leaves. The place itself. Rustic Canyon. As the sun stretched the shadows across the eastern hill, I observed the sunny top and the road back to Los Angeles. I had one day before I had to fly back to where I am now, 22 floors above Ontario Street. 

While we ate the sandwiches prepared for us all by the patrol leaders, we spoke briefly about Haiti and our own fate. How long would it take us to be in the clutches of nature and unable to cope? I remember my rule of threes. Three minutes without oxygen, or three days without water, or three weeks without food. That's how far off we are from the abyss. And of course we forget. I recalled for them the additional rule of risk homeostasis, thanks to Malcolm Gladwell. When we find safety in one thing, we make up for it by being more risky in something else. And this explains why people from dangerous neighborhoods don't go in for bungie jumping, and as well why pursuit of the Dosh makes one humble and attainment of the Dosh makes one rude. 

I know what kind of men I want around if and when it all goes to ruin. Today many are Boy Scouts. None of us have conquered the wild. None of us can. None of us ever will. We'll lose our tools, we'll always be humbled. But we know how to look out for each other, how to cook, how to shoot, how to keep God in our lives. We're a good group. 

Outside

One of the most important lessons that I learned from my father was taught to me by hiking. And when I think of the value of that lesson, the effect of the ignorance of that lesson immediately comes to mind. The lesson was that in the wilderness, you are responsible for your own survival and consequently when you are in civilization, others are responsible. 

We would go to the San Gabriel mountains, scarcely 30 miles from our house, and be totally alone. I felt that I was the master of my own destiny there. There was nothing man-made to corner me, nothing except that which I made. No social conventions except that which we constructed. No rule of law except for that which we created. I knew what it felt like to be the maker of civilization. 

The ignorance of that lesson became clear to me when, on one particular occasion, we took some [underprivileged] kids to Big Sur. I don't recall the circumstances, but it was certainly a great deal less wild and more picturesque as we descended from the road down to where we thought we might see some seals. Then suddenly some of the kids froze in fear. They had never been outside of the city. Somebody had made a strange chirping noise that triggered the fear. Keep moving I said, it's not far. I can't they replied, trembling. Why not? Jason's down there. Who? Jason. He's going to kill us.

It took some explaining to me that Jason was a character from a horror movie called Friday the 13th that I had never paid attention to, and that chirping noise was the sound effect that was employed whenever the teenagers were about to be slaughtered. The poignancy of the moment was not lost on me. I almost cried. Here were kids who were so far from being liberated by the outdoors that it was almost impossible. Their minds were captivated by nonsense. I became angry and gave a guarantee that no Hollywood slasher was going to attack. What began as a nature hike became a forced march. I would prove to them that they had too much foolishness in their heads. 

I don't know what happened in any other part of that trip. The memory has been reduced to the constant counterexample of what nature meant to me. In my mind it was a blank slate awaiting civilization or the sort characterized by Sierra Club bonhomie and Boy Scout honor. To them, it was an outdoor slaughterhouse.   

To this day, especially since I live in the World's Most Overpriced Suburb, I often think of the liberating possibilities of the outdoors. What I want, of course, is big fat broadband, ample heat and frozen meat somewhere I could live extraordinarily cheaply. Occasionally, I will find someplace on Google Earth which is stark, clean and beautiful. Occasionally I will fly over some interestingly remote place between my home and my job. I think about the few things I need, like Steve Martin in 'The Jerk'.

It's frightening to contemplate how much of the world is built up, quartered and owned in perpetuity. There are buildings in Manhattan whose upper floors I'm never going to see, even as I brush my fingers across the cornerstone at street level. That is the inside. But I get a feeling of longing when I think about those remote places I might never see. I get the feeling of wanderlust and I wonder how it might be to have a sinecure in some ancient, obscure yet relevant remote place. Have you ever wanted to live in a castle or a cathedral? Just last night I was watching 'The Man Who Would Be King' and I'm thinking about the adventure of making a civilized spot somewhere. 

The islands of Malta evoke such feelings, and that place where the Ruskies exploded the Tsar Bomba, and the Berents Sea where they lost the Kursk. And today I learned about the Scapa Flow. It's difficult to believe that nobody would know about the Orkney Islands and the fact that most of the German warships were scuttled there at the end of WW1. Warships. They all seem such an unimaginably distant and alien sort of power. In an archipelago of dozens of isles and skerries, north of forgotten, west of nowhere, in 40 meters of frigid water are the water graves of sailors. There's that lighthouse you saw in a movie once. Cliffs overlooking a nameless sea, houses, hovels and castles all made of rock, because only rock can handle the howling wind and frothy wet cold. 

I dream of outside because outside is where you could be. Eating food. Waking early or sleeping late. Where weather determines the time and a mind can connect across the distance to the greater economy. I think it might be my destiny if I can convince my wife, and somebody pays me to keyboard as I do. I will be on God's planet once again.