tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-76146221906607078392024-03-12T20:30:11.384-07:00DogKittenMarching to the beat of a fractal drummer.Xtianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02239593342541254887noreply@blogger.comBlogger14125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7614622190660707839.post-61224136612374687272013-10-28T05:11:00.000-07:002013-10-28T20:25:31.661-07:00Not that Heisenberg...Although it's half-life will doubtless be shorter than that of Werner Heisenberg's fame, today, a few weeks after the conclusion of the terribly popular broadcast melodrama called Breaking Bad, its flame burns brighter for sure. Hence the need to specify.<br />
<br />
I had an idea on waking this morning that made me downright happy. Buzzword-compliant, informative, and entertaining web portal idea that would, along the way, make the world a better place, if only a little at a time. An hour after I got up and started perambulating, I felt it necessary to write it down, but, literally, as I opened a notepad to write it down, it faded to white. I am sure if I rifle through my mental trash, I'll recover it, and now I'm thinking it must be good if it is so resistant to captivity.<br />
<br />
I don't think I'm the only one, and this is not the first time this has happened. I think it's part of the creative process. Corralling an idea without breaking it is no simple task. Ideas are born of other ideas shamelessly cavorting together, and the change in mindset that happens when instead of letting them cavort you ask them to come inside, wash their hands, and do their homework, changes their state completely. This is not a bad thing, but it does make the things elusive to capture.<br />
<br />
Werner Heisenberg is no less than the creator of the matrix, the father of quantum physics. His uncertainty principle, though, is what really has made him a household name. Everything that is a good formal mathematical model expressed in lay terms is a misrepresentation, because the very richness of language works directly against logical rigor. Nevertheless, the basic idea of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is that the more you try to pinpoint where something is, the less certain you can be about where it is going. Heisenberg only articulated the heuristic principle, and the resulting inequalities are often confused with the observer effect, which states that 'watching' a phenomenon may actually alter the outcome of an event. The literary symbolism of that observation is fairly irresistible, and Heisenberg is a pretty cool name, so there you have it - a short history of everything that is not topical about Heisenberg in popular culture.Xtianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02239593342541254887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7614622190660707839.post-3007480058143407092012-07-24T09:56:00.000-07:002012-09-22T15:03:59.818-07:00Advice on running the Bay to BreakersAbout 25* years ago I ran the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_to_Breakers" target="_blank">Bay to Breakers</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco" target="_blank">San Francisco</a>'s iconic foot-race. After a long spell not blogging, I thought the better of it and decided to start small, so here is an answer I posted to a recent question on Fluther about training for the race:<br />
<br />
In the participatory spirit of San Francisco life, I was taken with a desire to take part in this celebration of off-beat solidarity at least once. I trained specifically
for the Bay to Breakers in a month, after not running for years, by sprinting furiously up and down <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernal_Heights,_San_Francisco" target="_blank">Bernal Heights</a>, where I lived at the time, every day. My training was impeccably week-end warriorish, but no matter. I
managed to finish the race in under an hour, and, according to the results,
passed some 30,000 people in the process!!<br />
That last statement should raise an eyebrow or two. The point is that
the Bay to Breakers is less of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LinkedIn_Centipede_Participants_in_the_2010_ING_Bay_to_Breakers.jpg" target="_blank">a race</a> and more of <a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/Bay_to_Breakers_2011_Up.jpg" target="_blank">a melee</a> the further
back you get from the seeded runners. Although it is seven miles long,
you end up running about 10 miles, most of it in a zig-zag pattern, to
work your way around the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisters_of_Perpetual_Indulgence" target="_blank">Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence</a>, naked
extraterrestrials, rolling bondage platforms, <a href="http://www.google.com/imgres?hl=en&safe=off&biw=1143&bih=565&tbm=isch&tbnid=4pHfl6Zw18NNtM:&imgrefurl=http://blog.sfgate.com/stew/2012/05/18/best-of-bay-to-breakers/&docid=vA4ROwdWYhzJfM&imgurl=http://blog.sfgate.com/stew/wp-content/blogs.dir/2290/files/best-of-bay-to-breakers/b2b_archive_03.jpg&w=600&h=348&ei=WfYOUI64BIrprAeHyYFg&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=550&vpy=148&dur=254&hovh=171&hovw=295&tx=179&ty=100&sig=114843231490298717779&page=1&tbnh=111&tbnw=154&start=0&ndsp=18&ved=1t:429,r:3,s:0,i:81" target="_blank">prams carrying large hairy men</a>, and what-not. What’s worse, I was exhausted crossing <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/coolmikeol/4054544681/" target="_blank">the finish line</a>, but with 50,000 people behind me, I could not stop for another 100
yards or so!<br />
All the above advice is good. What I would hasten to add is this: If you
want to actually run it without running a challenging obstacle course,
you need to be there really, really early. Only then will you be able to
run about seven miles.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">*Note - in the interest of full disclosure - when I posted the original answer on Fluther, I guesstimated it was 15 years ago. After a quick nap and a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNsBc7PBw5E" target="_blank">Centrum</a>, I recalculated... it was closer to 25 years ago, around 1987.</span>Xtianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02239593342541254887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7614622190660707839.post-48260165845267324392011-04-14T22:02:00.001-07:002012-02-28T08:07:46.233-08:00Burocracia Emocionante...Un día lleno de aventuras en la frontera - tenía que salir de Nicaragua porque la visa de la camioneta vencía hoy. Muchos extranjeros que viven aquí se dan esa vuelta cada 90 días por la visa personal, o cada 30 por la visa del automóvil. A los aduaneros les carga la movida; la llaman <i>la vuelta del perro</i>. La lata es que técnicamente uno debe egresar por 72h, pero con $10 por acá y $10 por aya, generalmente se puede dar la vuelta en un día, lo que vale la pena, porque Costa Rica es carísimo, así que pasar tres días aya significa derrochar 15 días de gastos en Nicaragua.<br />
<br />
La salida de Nicaragua fue fácil. Una hora de papeleó, fumigación, etc. Pasar por 'la aguja', entregar el comprobante de importación de la camioneta, y ya. Entrando a Costa Rica hay que primero sacar visa, lo que es fácil, y luego navegar por un mar de camiones hacia la aduana automotriz, que forma parte del Ministerio de Hacienda. Ahí se sacan copias del seguro, y luego se hace cola para pasar por la ventanilla donde ingresan tu vehículo al sistema.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Wccm0d7f8Mc/TafOpdlZlpI/AAAAAAAAAgk/iY-LHn9elSY/s1600/P1050084.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Wccm0d7f8Mc/TafOpdlZlpI/AAAAAAAAAgk/iY-LHn9elSY/s400/P1050084.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><br />
<br />
Pasaporte, licencia, titulo, seguro, y comprobante del último egreso, con copias. Me presenté luego de una entretenida espera. Hay una tres filas de sillas, y está principalmente lleno de camioneros el recinto. Hoy, la fila de camiones esperando para cruzar la frontera estaba más corta que ayer - <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omMZYWg-FFI&feature=feedu">solo 20 kilómetros de camiones</a>! Antes de ayer, llegaba a Rivas la cola - 40km. Habiendo rebasado todo eso en el camino, manejando 20km en el carril izquierdo y lanzándome a la berma cada vez que venía algún camión, bus, colectivo, o carreta en el sentido contrario, esperar en 'fila' una hora par pasar a la ventanilla parecía como si nada. Lo cómico es que ahora tienen estas tres filas de asientos, y hay una orden social muy divertida. Para guardar turno, los camioneros se organizan, y se sientan en orden, de modo que cada vez que se despacha uno y hay una ventanilla libre, todo el mundo se para, y se mueve una silla a la derecha.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-_qr0Xs0xbPc/TafPsSVtcSI/AAAAAAAAAgw/JVvCUP4dK-A/s1600/P1050057.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-_qr0Xs0xbPc/TafPsSVtcSI/AAAAAAAAAgw/JVvCUP4dK-A/s640/P1050057.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br />
Hasta hace poco, esto era una especie de terraza cubierta. Nunca faltaba el calor insoportable, ni la polvareda, ni los bichos. Ahora es una moderna sala de espera con sus sillitas y aire muy acondicionado. El aire se siente rico cuando uno recién llega todo acalorado. Pero la espera suele ser larga, como hoy, y luego de 20m uno empieza a propiamente cagarse de frío. Solo queda aguantarse y congelarse.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-QkoJZM1fqpo/TafPL8fiw6I/AAAAAAAAAgs/0ctgstT8lpY/s1600/P1050086.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-QkoJZM1fqpo/TafPL8fiw6I/AAAAAAAAAgs/0ctgstT8lpY/s640/P1050086.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br />
Cuando llegó mi turno, me tocó la primera ventanilla, donde estaba atendiendo una señora que, me habían informado los camioneros a mi alrededor, es una real puta. Bueno, yo la conozco, y en general ha sido bien profesional, cortés, y eficiente conmigo. No le di mucha importancia a las advertencias. Pero hoy hubo un problemita. Miró ella mis documentos por un instante, ingresó al sistema, y luego fue como si tuviese ella un foco de alarma en la cabeza! Se alteró, y me informo que no pensaba dejarme pasar por ningún motivo con mis datos en ese estado. Parecía que el ultimo funcionario que me dio la salida no la ingresó al sistema.<br />
<br />
Casi perdí la camioneta debido a este problema con el sistema Tico, que al parecer borró mi ultima salida de Costa Rica a Nicaragua - según ellos, la camioneta había estado en CR por un més sin permiso, y me cobraban $1300 de multa por devolvérmela! Por suerte me puse las pilas, volví a pata, sin pasaporte y simplemente explicando el problema a los pacos aduaneros, a Nicaragua; hablé con el viejo de "La Aguja" - la caseta que representa el control aduanero final, y lo convencí que me dejara revisar sus archivos, encontrar el documento de mi ultimo ingreso a Nicaragua, y sacarle copia.<br />
<br />
Armado con aquél papel, volví al ministerio de hacienda Tico, y cara de palo me metí adentro de la oficina por la puerta de los empleados y fui a buscar al gerente. Le conté lo que pasaba, y creerás que fue muy amable, hizo un par de llamadas, me hizo esperar 3 horas, y por fin, gracias a mi comprobante Nica, me pasó un documento corregido? Llegué a la ventanilla con este documento, pedí mi ingreso de nuevo, el funcionario que me tocó esta vez se paró de su silla y literalmente fue a gritarle a su jefe, pero el señor, muy calmado, lo mandó a darme el documento corregido, y recuperé la camioneta!<br />
<br />
Fueron horas de tensión, pero todo salió mas o menos bien, solo que tuve que perder el día y dejar la camioneta en Costa Rica por otros dos días. Vuelvo pasado mañana a buscarla, y se acabó el cuento!<br />
<br />
Ahora me tocaba volver a San Juan, pero ya eran las 7, así que el paseo económico - colectivo a Rivas y luego otro a San Juan, ya no era posible, porque el último colectivo a San Juan de Rivas sale mas o menos a las 7:30. Sin falta, alguien se presentó. Gabriel es un joven taxista, muy amable y profesional, y se imaginó que cobrarme el impuesto de ojos azules no sería problema, solo que yo no tengo los medios que son la norma de los ojos azules. Negociamos un rato, y quedamos en que era un pésimo trato para los dos, pero que me llevaría hasta San Juan por $20 US. Siendo que eso es menos del doble del costo de combustible, me parecía sensato, pero me dolía de todos modos. Por suerte, apareció Xavi, un joven Francés que venía llegando de Costa Rica armado con largos palos de malabarismo con antorchas a cada lado.<br />
<br />
Compartimos el viaje y nos entretuvimos conversando acerca del robo que representan los proyectos de energía renovable para este país, con sus prestamos dedicados a devolver el dinero a contratistas extranjeros y ahogar al país en cuotas con interés.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dvOnoeYhlxk/TafNsEWVN3I/AAAAAAAAAgg/PAo7cNBj3tY/s1600/P1030508.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dvOnoeYhlxk/TafNsEWVN3I/AAAAAAAAAgg/PAo7cNBj3tY/s640/P1030508.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>Llegué a mi departamento a descubrir que había dejado las llaves en la camioneta, y que el dueño de la propiedad había salido, así que tuve una larga búsqueda hasta que salió su señora que me oyó hablando por teléfono con el hermano tratando de ubicar a Paco, y me pasó las llaves de ellos. Por fin, en casa.<br />
<br />
Tengo sueño...Xtianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02239593342541254887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7614622190660707839.post-55091469352477689262011-03-25T19:05:00.000-07:002011-03-27T14:00:26.514-07:00Just Another Day in Paradise<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.powerslacker.com/images/sjds/P1060607-800x600.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="375" src="http://www.powerslacker.com/images/sjds/P1060607-800x600.jpg" width="500" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">View over downtown.</td></tr>
</tbody></table> Sometimes, political thinking takes me by surprise. I don't know much about politics, so even the smallest remark can leave me wading in a quagmire of background information. Several weeks ago <a href="http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#%21/profile.php?id=834448747">Alex</a> found <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_the_Self">The Century of the Self</a>, a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bbc">BBC</a> documentary about the influence of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freud">Freud</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays">Bernays</a> on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertising">advertising</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government">government</a>, and became fascinated with it. With a little prodding, I watched it myself, and was fascinated from start to finish. It took me several days to get through the first episode, taking notes & looking things up. Then, out of the blue, she asked one day: "What do you know about Situationism?" We had watched The Society of The Spectacle in Lagunitas, and been left thinking a lot about the arbitrary nature of perception, and normal capitalist market-predation on these basic human faculties. As often happens, half-way through reading about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situationist_International">Situationists</a>, I got confused, and stopped to grock it for a few days.<br />
My Mac was overheating, so I tossed it in the refrigerator to cool down, got on my bicycle, and went shopping for food. I got to the store, and there was an acquaintance there parked in the middle of the vegetable section in front of a fallen sack of beans recounting some horror to a rapt audience. Since she didn't acknowledge me, I didn't interrupt. I just worked my way around the sullen employees and the gaggle of Americans listening to the tragedy, grabbed some tomatoes, and moved on. After getting some milk and a small bag of bleach, I checked out.<br />
The bags are a funny thing. Many liquids are sold in plastic bags here. Sturdy little bags full of mostly dairy or cleaning products. I don't even want to think right now about the endocrine-disruptors leeching out of these bags into foodstuffs and the products used to clean everything. I guess a low life-expectancy is a self-perpetuating thing. It is very comical, nonetheless, to see the Jinga game people play gently pulling a plastic baggie of milk from a cooler stacked high; one has to marvel at what must be a really high percentage of these baggies that make it home in the bottom of a grocery-bag jostling in a truck driving miles home on deeply rutted roads.<br />
At the checkout counter, my bill adds up to C$82.26. The leading and only supermarket here, where I am, is owned by Wal-Mart, so they are no strangers to sucking the very life out of local capital, and one way they do this is by having centesimal prices in a town where no one else accepts currency smaller than 1/2 a Cordoba (C$), and a country where as far as I know there is no C$0.01 coin. So when your bill adds up to fractional units no one has currency to deal with, a rounding rule is applied by the register, and you get fractionally less back than you are owed, but only sometimes. I don't understand the rounding rule, but my intuition, and my prejudice about Wal-Mart, tell me that it is a calculated way of gaining a few extra pennies by charging x.x4 and returning x.x5 instead of x.x6.<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.powerslacker.com/images/sjds/P1060685-800x600.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://www.powerslacker.com/images/sjds/P1060685-800x600.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The kitchen at the Blue Marlin restaurant.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>Reaching in my pockets, I find a C$100 bill, which will cover it nicely, but register-arithmetic kicks in. I locate 2 C$1 coins and a C$0.50 coin. Perfect. If I give the cashier C$102.50, I'll get back something in the vicinity of C$20.24, and since there is a C$20 bill in ample circulation, this makes sense, but the cashier refuses the C$0.50 coin. So he enters C$102 into the register, and is presented with a section of the text-based display that informs him to give me C$19.75 back in change. See how nice they are? They're giving away C$0.01, despite the fact that no such coin exists anymore!<br />
I blew a gasket when the cashier's drawer opened and after grabbing a C$10 bill, he started counting out C$9.75 worth of annoying coins. I said: This is ridiculous! Why did you refuse my C$0.50 coin, when you're giving me back a handful of coins now, some much smaller? There was a queue forming up behind me. It was not comfortable. Nevertheless, it seemed like a principle to disallow that bullshit at this precise moment. He was befuddled at my annoyance. I think I said some dirty words in the process of explaining the arithmetic once again. The panic button got pushed, and a manager promptly appeared. The cashier told his story, I told mine, and the manager instructed the cashier to take my C$0.50 coin & give me back C$20.25.<br />
I never exchanged another word with the manager, except to thank him, but I got back C$0.01 more than I was owed. Sadly, I'm guessing a situation report from the manager to management will be forthcoming and reprimands all-around for disrupting the amicable atmosphere of that dungeon. Even more sadly, I think the cashier had no nefarious intent to cause me a small bureaucratic annoyance. He just really could not do the math.<br />
After watching the BBC documentary on "The Century of the Self" describe in detail the application of Freudian theories on the subconscious to propaganda and the control of masses, both by states and private businesses, reading about Situationists this past week left my head spinning. "The Society of the Spectacle" by Guy Debord was the pinnacle of that line of thought, and held to be largely responsible for impelling the general wildcat strikes of May, 1968 in France. Since I had been watching & studying The Century of the Self, reading about Situationism was just icing on the cake. I had to stop when I got to the concept of recuperation. The very idea that evolution can render such an evil plan into play is both delicious and terrifying. So much of what I thought was good and honorable resistance to capitalism may be actions that are easily harvested by a machinery more able than any individual,and ultimately benefitting bad guys. So I stopped reading forward, and have been reading laterally and thinking about it ever since. If subversive icons, like Che Guevara, become commodity images to be silk-screened into profitable t-shirts made by forcibly sterilized slaves in Chinese sweat-shops, then what of subversion?<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.powerslacker.com/images/sjds/P1060697-800x600.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://www.powerslacker.com/images/sjds/P1060697-800x600.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Textures detail. <br />
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>The funny thing is that the cash-register is spectacular in that Situationist sense. I think the supermarket check-out counter is quite the marvel of psychosocial manipulation. Virtually any challenge to what the cashier does directly impacts those behind the consumer, putting him in the position of adversely affecting others as the cost of defending his rights.<br />
Semana Santa is coming up, and possibly that bears a little explanation. "Holy Week" is Easter. It is also "Spring Break". In a Communist Catholic surfing mecca, it is easy to see how that might create some opportunities and some tensions simultaneously. The bottom line is that unless your'e very diplomatic, or loaded like the Spring Break revelers, you're sleeping in the street. Most month-to-month renters get kicked out, since places will fetch for just the week the same amount of money they generate in about 50 days normally. I found a place in a small villa of charming yet rustic apartments with great views, and wi-fi. After many extended conversations with the manager, I finally nailed a room for next month & made an arrangement for Semana Santa; a place to sleep within a price-range I can afford doing death-defyingly underpriced syndicated blogging and off-shored technical contract work. Nevermind the scorpions, ants, wasps, and parasites. It is a God-send.<br />
I got back to my house. Since the water was running, which only happens part of the day, I grabbed a shower & did some dishes. Then I grabbed the computer out of the fridge, enjoyed the cool whisps issuing from it, and plugged it in. Along the way, I could not resist getting my infrared thermometer to take a few readings. What is a "cool whisp" in this land? The walls, the floor, and the furniture were all mostly around 89°F 30m after the sun had gone down. The computer, just out of the fridge and feeling huggably cool, was at 82°F. It's pretty warm here. When the temperature drops below 80°F, you wake up, and have to go hunting for a top-sheet.Xtianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02239593342541254887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7614622190660707839.post-20142868452582521032011-03-11T15:48:00.000-08:002011-03-11T15:48:58.223-08:00The Strange Science of FearThere was a terrible earthquake this morning in Japan, centered around Sendal, in the Miyagi prefecture. There is not much to say about the destruction the earthquake and subsequent Tsunami rought in the immediate region. Japanese television helicopter shots are awe-inspiring. Obviously, the disaster is of unspeakable proportions, and hard to understand in a human scale. Initial reports of a missing passenger-train should give you an idea of the apocalyptic disaster that took place there today. Further reports that it was big enough to shift the earth's axis 8cm paints a picture of cataclysmic proportions until we consider that this represents a shift in mass of approx. 10^-9, a number that is a little hard to visualize.<br />
Looking around, I saw that early this morning the national newspaper of Nicaragua <a href="http://www.laprensa.com.ni/2011/03/11/nacionales/54515">predicted an arrival time of 4:30pm today for the tsunami</a>, and the fear started. It was about 9am when trucks started driving around broadcasting emergency preparedness and an evacuation plan, and the 4:30pm expected arrival time for the tsunami, detailing how the beach area must be evacuated and people should congregate along escape routs in higher ground.<br />
When I heard about it, I looked up <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12709598">predicted arrival times</a> and did my own calculations. Assuming a fairly constant rate of travel, the tsunami, traveling about 510mph, would have hit San Juan del Sur between 2:30pm and 3:42pm - well 45m shy of the time when the government suggested hyper-vigilance.<br />
Well, it's 5pm now. I had a stroll through town 90m ago and the locals thought I was crazy, while Europeans were interested in my calculations and seemed to agree that it was pretty obvious that the nothing of much-ado notoriety had already passed by the time everyone was starting to run around like headless chickens. Still, despite advertised fatalism, real fatalism, or disregard permeated the city - a few very nervous people remained tense, trying to fgure out where to seek safety, with others not breaking step from their daily routine.<br />
I came back home, trained a camera on the beach at the bottom of the street just in case something interesting happened, and proceeded to make myself some linguine with a chile cabro / garlic while-sauce, and write this.<br />
In an era of up-to-the-minute reporting, and of desperation over Google page-ranks, is it possible that mejor media outlets and the blogosphere are equally committed to the "If it bleeds, it leads" philosophy of editorial integrity?<br />
Here we are - in the next 3 hours a giant wall of water could theoretically engulf us, but there is really no rational analysis that would lead to that conclusion. Would there be a possibility that this is all subliminal brain-washing: a government bent on showing they were willing to help when they knew that it was a lot of nothing?Xtianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02239593342541254887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7614622190660707839.post-44027945808170788082011-02-03T09:13:00.001-08:002011-02-03T17:15:48.613-08:00Stability in the Middle EastThe fertile crescent has been a seat of political unrest ever since the beginning of what we recognize as history. Archeological records and early prototypes of "social media", in stone, attest to that pretty clearly. Of course one of the great sticking points of modern society is an absolute commitment to a singular monolithic and monotheistic idea of what is real and of what is right. The broad divergence in the particulars of one person's reality versus another's creates a funny cognitive dissonance, particularly between people who live substantially different realities while maintaining open communication channels, like conservatives versus liberals in the US. It is interesting that the validity of these differing points of view is often contested on a wrestling-ring where reason and principle take a decided back-seat to the weight of media in favor of one point or another.<br />
The confusing thing about that conservative versus liberal divide today is that we have people like Hillary Clinton, rabidly defending the improprieties that enable an empire to extract capital from the conquered, such as <a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/Hillary-Clinton-other-subjects-of-leak-condemn-WikiLeaks-release/articleshow/7012256.cms">when she "condemned" WikiLeaks on charges of endangerment that she knew at the time to be false</a>, and the very same administration, which has supported a mockery of representative government in Egypt for decades, now calling for an orderly transition and preaching moderation, as if they had credibility or authority there. They have no such thing with the people there. What they have is money, and lots of it. Egypt has been an American base of operations second to few in the area for a long time. Today, Egypt is <a href="http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/politics/us-foreign-aid.htm">a huge recipient of US foreign aid</a>, at $1.99B a year. This money, of course, is largely earmarked to be spent on US goods (mostly killing machines), and has been used to maintain strategic security for fuel-supplies, protect American industrialist investments, and <a href="http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/middleeast/features/article_1436186.php/Imprisoned_Egypt_opposition_leader_vows_to_stay_in_politics_Feature">keep opposition leaders incarcerated</a>, among other things.<br />
There is revolution in the air in the Middle East, which seems about ready to cast off the imperial yoke of the US that nurtured and trained and funded the Taliban, Saddam Hussein's regime, and the many cross-border civilian massacres that Israel glibly carries out in the region, like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabra_and_Shatila_massacre">Sabra and Shatilla</a>, and <a href="http://sabbah.biz/mt/archives/2008/02/25/hebron-massacre-1994/">Hebron</a>, to name but a few. It started with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010%E2%80%932011_Tunisian_uprising">a popular uprising in Tunisia</a>, which is of little strategic value to our modern Roman Empire, but in a few short weeks the seeds of a people intent on recovering some sense of self-determination have spread like Roundup-ready seed in the mid-west. I can't possibly pretend to know enough about the middle-east to understand the political machinations in play, so take this for what it is - the opinion of someone who reads the news once in a while and remembers.<br />
The whole American discourse about moderation is especially infuriating because this is coming from the country that has <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States">the highest percentage of its population, and the most people, incarcerated in the world</a>. A country where exit-polls disagree violently with election results, yet the vote-tallying is done by machines that have legal protections from accountability, and where there are many laws making someone accused get treated as guilty unless they can prove their innocence by presenting evidence they are legally barred from accessing. In other words, the US is pretty far from democracy today, but they sort of have a trademark on the word, and on the awesome power of repetition through media. So what is 'preaching moderation' really getting at?<br />
Moderation, in this context, seems to be simply a code word for stability in a place where justice and democracy are hard to come by. Mind you, there already is a brand of democracy in the area that people living in the US do not enjoy. Can you imagine what your life-expectancy would be if you went with a bunch of your friends and barricaded Times Square? Brave people have taken to the streets, blood has been shed, and there is a lot of tension in the air about how much more blood will flow during these demonstrations, but I have the distinct impression that people in Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, or Chiapas for that matter, protesting thus in the streets, have a noticeably longer life-expectancy there than counterparts might have in the US. In September of 2010 Peter Cunliffe-Jones published <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-11399866">an interesting analysis of the difference between Nigeria and Indonesia.</a> Starting out equally troubled in the scope of his analysis, things have taken a substantially more democratic turn in Indonesia. His conclusion, loosely paraphrased, is that citizens of Indonesia took to the streets relentlessly until political change was necessary to appease them, while in Nigeria dissent mostly equalled death.<br />
Could it be that the presence of totalitarian American puppets is what has been keeping the Middle East so troubled and unstable for the past 30 years? Imagine a middle-east with no American army-bases or re-labeled missiles, bombs, satellites, F-16s, or monthly cheques doing the bidding of US investment through these proxies. For me, it is a troublesome concept because I have precious few heroes, and Jimmy Carter, one of them, would have been instrumental in architecting modern instability & repression in the region. But such is the history of the South. I might not be so opinionated about it, except that I have much direct experience. I went to private high-school in the deep south, and learned there that as a Chilean I was as much a foreigner as "immingrants" from the mid-west. More recently, I worked for Al Gore, and got to see first-hand the staggering difference between the democratic principles theoretically espoused by his political philosophy and the completely cavalier disrespect for ethics, legality, and workers' rights in a company he heads.<br />
The number of people engaged in full-time prognostication about what will happen in the coming months in the Middle-East is staggering, but one thing is for sure. People who need some semblance of democracy have not seen a friend in the US for decades, and rightly so. It is very possible that an ouster of US influence would help the region's governments become more representative of people than of corporations, as has been slowly but surely happening in Latin America despite the best efforts of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company">the United Fruit Company</a>, and its love-child, the CIA.Xtianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02239593342541254887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7614622190660707839.post-2787377442903248822011-01-16T13:28:00.000-08:002011-01-21T10:22:16.754-08:00The Acorn Doesn't Fall Far From the TreeUntil the 15th century, the concept of authors' rights was basically non-existent. If you came up with a great oral poem, and it was repeated, your stock could only go up. Books were <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book#Paper_books">a painstaking labor</a>, and each one owed much of its value to the very act of its construction.<br />
In the 1490's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Gutenberg#Printing_press">Guttenberg</a> was a businessman who had struggled with many ideas, mostly around the reproduction of some divine essence or other, such as light from mirrors. After many attempts at fame and fortune, and many impasses, he came up with movable type. Nevermind that in China, movable type was in use as early as 1045. It is worthwhile to note that a big profit-machine for Gutenberg was the mechanical duplication of Papal indulgences. At that time, there were few challenges to the 'authenticity' of the pardons from God that he was selling. Six centuries later, digital communications make the reproduction of any given original work already present in a distributable medium really trivial.<br />
The past few decades have seen many changes in the ability to reproduce printed or recorded material. From the very start of this revolution lawyers acting on behalf of capitalists have been at the forefront of a maelstrom of misinformation, intimidation, and repression in the interest of "protecting the profits" of their clients, while profiting themselves. At the same time, middlemen in the various publishing industries - books, sound, and video - have been gaining a larger and larger share of the revenue generated by product with a market for reproductions. An interesting corollary to this, but far outside the scope of this little diatribe, is the down-market luxury label.<br />
The recording industry has made a joke of itself in the past 30 years with middleman-sponsored organizations that are famously inept at trying to cow the masses into compliance to preserve a profit-machine. The first outstanding example of the tomfoolery that would define this industry is the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Phonographic_Industry">British Phonographic Industry</a>'s campaign against the rising popularity of cassette tapes: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Taping_Is_Killing_Music">"Home-Taping is Killing Music"</a>. 30 years later, it looks like a bunch of bullshit, yet the same message is replicated incessantly by producers and distributors who have as much capital as lack of interest in seeing how grass-roots diffusion has helped popularize their product. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word">Weasel-words</a> like "war" applied to the American invasion of Iraq, or "piracy" applied to the sharing of books, music, or video without re-purchasing of a license, have been terribly effective in misinforming the general public about cause-and-effect, and a mainstream media driven by a profit-motive have been exceptionally compliant in spreading corporate propaganda about how this must be bad because they can't clearly see the revenue arising from these interactions, despite <a href="http://www.p2pon.com/2010/09/16/musicians-revenue-higher-than-before-the-file-sharing-phenomenon-says-study/"> strong evidence that musician revenues have actually risen in the age of file-sharing</a>.<br />
Philosophically, the question of reproduction of ideas is a tough one, and a legal system, which operates fundamentally to preserve inequities in capital-distribution, is hardly equipped to be standard-bearing for civilization in untangling the complex question: Where do you draw the line between an idea infecting a mind from a distribution means, like a licensed book, as "intended" by the seller of the idea, and that idea being plagiarized, because a mechanical device was used in its transmission? If I quote Shakespeare in a declaration of love, I will, apparently, not get sued. So far, it is legal for me to make a copy of anything I want in my mind and reproduce it ad nausiem in other people's minds through any means I choose except literal reproduction. Curiously, this bit of law is quite ill-formed, because I can recite ideas from most any book I have read without getting in trouble, yet if I sing a song authored by someone else, from memory, I am liable for royalties. Worse yet, if I hand over a mix-tape of songs that speak my heart's desire to the object of my love, I am liable for imprisonment and a $250,000 fine. unless the mix tape is of nature sounds recorded by a chim, since the law has been interpreted to specifically not protect work created by "non-humans" What?<br />
Derivative works open up a whole new can of worms. Why does not Andy Warhol's "Campbell's Soup Cans" owe royalties to the Campbell Soup Company? Is it just that the privilege of being a media-darling made Warhol deserving of a different standard in human rights? Chalk that one up to the inequity preserved by the system that attempts to regulate and profit from communication between you and your neighbor - the legal system. I jumped onto the tail end of the internet boom in San Francisco in 2000, only to work very hard on some beautiful ideas about context that were absorbed in the crash by Dell in the interest of figuring out how to recommend alternative laptop configurations to shoppers. The frenzy of invention was a lovely thing to behold while we tackled fascinating problems about codifying some small aspects of cognition, and developed cool ways to range result sets in purely set-theoretic ways, using predictive methods and thus avoiding a lot of enumeration inefficiencies.<br />
Needless to say, there was a lot of coffee involved, and so, I thought it would be a nice update to that Warhol piece to do a piece called "dot-com", consisting of 40 Starbuck's cappuccino cups. It didn't take long to collect 40 photogenic used Starbucks cup. I photographed them individually, intending to silk-screen each worked image onto a small canvass so as to reproduce the Warhol piece without cheapening it. The unspeakable treachery of a bad marriage put a stop to many creative projects, and this one got swept away in the maelstrom. Nevertheless, had I done the piece, and had it, for some reason, gained some notoriety, would Starbucks have been as forgiving with an amateur like myself as Campbell's was with the juggernaut of Andy Warhol? And, more to the point, would I really have been taking advantage of their fair due in copyright by making a statement referencing their image? How does that differ substantially from an image of Christ on a cross infringing on the Catholic Church, or an image of the American flag infringing on the US Government?<br />
There's no question that a cultural cannon is based on precisely the use of one idea to inseminate another. If it were up to the lawyers, all of literary history would be based on a cost-per-epiphany model. This absurdity was highlighted for me recently, when I started looking into the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record">Golden Record</a>. Back in 1977, the US launched a satellite into deep space intended to carry a message from our civilization to whoever might run across it. The satellite naturally included this magical capsule of media, containing 115 images, followed by a series of sound recordings etched on at 16 2/3 rpm. You know - a plate with a groove in it. The Golden Record is a thing of beauty on many levels, as it contains a bundling of information painstakingly selected by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, who fell in love with each-other in the process of putting it together. In a way, this is quite the Narcissists' mix-tape. There are speeches, images, and pieces of music up through modern times. So this record was cast adrift into the far reaches of the universe for any random unannounced civilization to find out there in the next few dozen millenia. Beautiful thought.<br />
Naturally, reading about the glyphs on the record, and its contents, I got curious to have a listen. I looked around, and found it. Apparently Warner News Media "published" it in 1978 and re-issued it as a CD in 1992. So a private media concern is distributing it. That might be OK, except for one little thing. There is no public-domain image available on this earth of this recording. It's all Copyrighted.<br />
So I guess that means that any sentient beings out there who decipher it, etch it in their brains, and barf out briquettes that include the contents of their memory, are liable for copyright infringement. So the millennial universal message sent into the deep reaches of space is "meet us and get sued!", and it's entrapment at that because I'm pretty sure there are no copyright symbols or FBI piracy warnings on the entire craft, let alone on the disk. On reflection, it's quite a telling message to send into outer space.Xtianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02239593342541254887noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7614622190660707839.post-68679899098356829452010-12-27T21:20:00.000-08:002010-12-27T21:20:47.021-08:00Bradley Manning - a prisoner of conscience.There's no question that Bradley Manning violated military law when he, allegedly, leaked a treasure-trove of documents out into the great interwebs in April of 2010. Caveat emptor - his anonymity was guaranteed. It's not as if we've not seen supposed privacy on the internet stomped on by heavyweights before. The case of <a href="http://ululationnation.blogspot.com/2005/12/my-britannica-and-other-fallen-heroes.html">Seingenthaler</a> certainly proved that in 2005. The trouble, I think is that reading just Mr. Manning's Wikipedia entry lays out a clear picture of a true American - a constitutionalist seeing the constitution of the US wronged, greatly and systematically, by the very government he was serving. As long as that same government stands in judgment over him, his goose is pretty much cooked, but was he treasonous to the ideas laid out in the US Constitution - I doubt it. Contrary to histrionics by tools like <a href="http://www.examiner.com/news-in-national/hillary-clinton-condemns-wikileaks-attack-on-international-community">Hillary Clinton</a> & <a href="http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/12/meet-the-people-who-want-julian-assange-whacked.ars">Sarah Palin</a>, Manning's disclosure never put anyone at risk - and honestly, if one soldier died to safeguard the lives of two civilians, that soldier would have done his country good, yet the US does not count that way. Despite empty talk of human rights & equality, hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians could attest to that - their lives are rarely mentioned in the cloying eulogies for the 4000 (and counting) US service-people dead in that invasion. Yet the true nature of their deaths is rarely discussed. I remember reading death-rolls early on in the invasion, and seeing a staggering number of drug overdoses, drunkards falling into empty pools, and drunk-driving accidents - yet these are now all heroes, while someone who took a truly brave stance and disclosed filmic evidence of the true work of his brethern in Iraq stands ready to be guillotined by a marshal court. Reading <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Manning">Mr. Manning's brief biography on Wikipedia</a>, I suspect he is so brave that he would not take it back were he given the chance, and just that is what makes him Paul Revere ten times over.<br />
<br />
Today, in regards to the <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/wikileaks">Wikileaks scandal</a>, all eyes seem to be on Assange, and few on Bradley Manning, the man who made this debacle possible. The world will owe Bradley Manning a debt as great as that owed to another unsung hero in the battle for democracy over corporate corruption, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Wills_%28security_guard%29">Frank Willis</a>.<br />
<br />
Let's hope & work to insure that Manning is not forgotten in the same way.Xtianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02239593342541254887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7614622190660707839.post-55619486689754736462010-12-22T20:28:00.000-08:002010-12-23T12:06:31.896-08:00The Next Chapter in Corporate Bio-terrorism.The potato, originally from Pisac in Peru, is an amazing enabler of animal life. Not only do people benefit from potatoes, but so do many other animals that eat it. It has been suggested that the Industrial Revolution owes as much to the potato as it does to the steam engine, as this crop made it possible for shrinking farmlands to support swelling urban populations. If I remember correctly, a potato is a more efficient converter of agricultural nutrients into digestible calories than any other domesticated plant, including rice, by a large factor. What's more, a diet of potato and milk is a complete diet, containing adequate quantities of all the essential nutrients and vitamins that humans need to thrive, according to Michael Pollan. This means that an acre (why is such a British spelling preserved in American English - ought it not be 'an acer'?) of potatoes produces more food than an acre of rice, a gallon of water likewise. As urban centers spread around factories that put worker productivity into a sort of hyper-drive, supply chains struggled to keep up with demand. Food for workers, obviously, would have been one of these.<br />
<br />
Monsanto saw this opportunity, and manufactured a resistant potato, BT, in 1985, that produced a protein which killed these bugs. But in 2001, responding to pressure in the form of public protests, and fearing a public relations disaster, McDonald's stopped selling BT potatoes, effectively killing the lion's share of that market. Strangely, the survival of genetic diversity of potatoes owes a lot to McDonald's marketing acumen, because this one public relations decision fostered an environment where potato farmers interested in biodiversity and the 'organic' label were able to become profitable in the face of the profit turbocharging that chemical & bioengineered farming techniques offer at first blush.<br />
<br />
It is my feeling that this battle is far from over, and safeguarding the continuing health of the agricultural planet against the depredation of business engineering might be one job that needs doing and that it's not too late to do so well that it won't even be recognized as bringing anyone back from the brink. Will it be possible to safeguard the potato from, for example, the type of damage that Monsanto has done to the biodiversity of corn already?Xtianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02239593342541254887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7614622190660707839.post-63168813789757257252010-12-22T20:02:00.000-08:002010-12-23T11:53:18.256-08:00A Week Without the Interwebs...I cracked my sternum a couple of days ago, or possibly a rib right next to it. Goes without saying that it makes me cranky. It happened sparring with a mate, and yes, I was being a little over the top with my exercise routine at the moment. Every breath hurts, and reminds me that every breath I take in the next 3 weeks will hurt. I can no longer make the Chilean Empanadas that were maintaining me afloat and making a lot of people here quite chipper, but at least I have a syndicated blogging gig, which is a lot less romantic than you could possibly imagine, to generate income once I carefully place my shooting-pain-factory arm on the keyboard & get going online for the day. Four days ago, the landlady, once again, as is her custom every month, defaulted on her internet connection, so I am without. Annoying, even more so because of the 'technical problem' story I hear every month around this time when the internet goes out for 5 days, and it makes me ever more conscious of the radiating electric pain down to my elbow - and I would say 'down my ulnar', except not without verification; well, there's no internet.<br />
<br />
That might seem like a non-sequitir, but it's not. I have just figured out a way to get OS/X systems to effectively read ReiserFS devices. A topic that has almost been exhausted without result in the MGB(Mac Geek Blogosphere), this is of some interest to me because I've been living in the Wild West for 6 months, and the Wild West is not a great place to try to keep a server running. The story of why I would travel overland through Central America carrying a linux server, of all things, is another. Suffice it to say that I could not find a single good reason not to. So when I got here, I plugged mine in, and enjoyed the fruits of its richness for some weeks. Mine died, killing my 2TB movie archive, and another small disk (I think it was the swap partition), and leaving me in an ugly limbo where I have no change-control, no bug-tracking, no movie archive, killing my dream of showing wonderful movies in remote areas, and worst of all, no backup of pictures & documents. This is not comfortable. My MacBook runs hot all the time, FanControl notwithstanding, in this tropical, heat-laden, Nicaraguan night-air.<br />
<br />
I mentioned being in the Wild West, and Nicaragua may not seem like it to the uninitiated, so let me explain. I am in an especially integrated beach-town, where Nicas and Gringos and Ticos and everyone else get along with a nice, better-than-paper-thin veneer of acceptance and joyful co-existence. The streets, all of 5 years old, are buckling: all six of them. There are no addresses, lying & stealing are epidemic, and people fight dirty - sand in the face dirty. If you get an infection, break a bone, or worse, mangle a limb getting run over by a Bhrama bull, an ATV, or a rabid bus on its way to the big town, you're more likely here than many places to kiss that limb goodbye. When there is an accident, he who pays the police most comes out on top. Fault is an arbitrary decision. There are doctors here, and there are facilities. These facilities you would not use to warm a cup of noodles, but for local medical emergencies, they will have to do. Unless someone can actually see a recognizable piece of your anatomy falling off, or something completely unfamiliar issuing from your mortal coil, you are SOL, and will need to look elsewhere for some programmed analysis to attend to your ailment. There are deaths, seems like more than one a month; in a town of maybe 20000, it adds up quickly, but not as quickly as young people are having babies.<br />
<br />
There are many amputees, and many stories about using the machete without the stick, flipping the car with an arm hanging out the window, or getting an infection they did not want to stop them working until the tissue was too far gone to rescue. The moral of the story? If you're hurt, this is no place for you, physically. Emotional damage, on the other hand, is better tolerated and cared for here than in many places I've been. That single feature of the landscape makes me stay, without a clue as to what I would do to get by if I continued to be disabled with my cracked sternum, and consequently making me reconsider the extent of my pain.<br />
<br />
If I just buck up, surely I can continue to get along. No doubt, my right cross is useless, which sucks because I used to have an ungodly strong right cross, having learned & developed waist-whipping skills & strength thanks to master Tat Mau-Wong in San Francisco, and learned to fight entirely reliant on taking a few quick hits, but getting that right cross in, a roundhouse, or certain more elaborate strike sequences whose names I have no idea how to spell, and then getting stylized about my flamboyant 'conclusion to the negotiation'. No more. That little trick is unavailable to me, and the loss makes me feel as if it had always been 'Five Easy Pieces' with me - playing to my strength in a dissolute way, and reveling in the success of steering others in that direction, especially opponents, but never being without that direction to steer in that would be preferential to the outcome in my favor. So be it. I will learn.<br />
<br />
So I am still delighted that I figured out how to read ReiserFS filesystems on a Mac, but that is a process that is not the subject of this diatribe, mostly, that is because it is technically involved for anyone who has not been trying to find solutions to the same problem in the past weeks, and I will detail it in the near future in <a href="http://bugdujour.blogspot.com">bugdujour</a>. The trouble is that I need to look something up on the interwebs to really take advantage of this solution, and the safeguarding of my small photographic legacy to my children is still impossible if I cannot rsync what I need up to a proper hosted environment - the 'cloud' for the kids...<br />
<br />
I did not really finish the job of figuring out how to productively read a ReiserFS disk on a Mac, because now I can see this disk in all its glory in a virtual machine environment where I do not seem to have access to the local disk wherein the information resides, which is the object of my desire to back up. Dammit! I know this is easy, but without interwebs, it could take days of sifting through documentation to discover hidden mappings for fancy FUSE devices representing declaratively expressed shared folders. Obviously, the dirty trick is that without kernel primitives on-board, it does not work, because VBox additions require recompiling the kernel to work as they were intended to. Postponed until I can connect again.<br />
<br />
So I'm off to read documentation. It actually feels like a little time-travel: I have a simple question which will require an exceptionally accurate answer which can only be derived from a long time with manuals and a shell, or from a simple Google query. The former is suddenly not the preferable answer, since it means spending an entirely impractical amount of time solving a problem that has been solved 1000s of times before, and that's frustrating because the bottom line is that I will simply not spend the time researching the materials in my hard-disk when I know that 5 or 10 quick queries on Google would yield up the answer and let me move on.<br />
<br />
Now, late at night, after many pain-pills have taken effect, I strike out walking the streets, laptop in tow, to find a bar with interwebs, and here it is! The beauty of it is that they cater very nicely in the Café del Barrio - it's quiet tonight because it's freezing at 80°F - really - one gets used quickly to a certain average temperature, and this is not it. On top of the freezing temperature, there's a wind gusting to 20 or 30 mph - which makes it seem even more extreme. You have to wach out for falling coconuts. Yet on arrival here I sit down & find that there are at least two other people busily clacking away on their macs, and some writing in notebooks. A shot of rum, a double espresso, connect, and I'm in hog-heaven.Xtianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02239593342541254887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7614622190660707839.post-34074386301508800222010-12-13T10:33:00.000-08:002010-12-13T13:22:50.549-08:00A crisis of conscience.<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/weekinreview/12shane.html?_r=1&WT.mc_id=WIR-SM-E-FB-SM-LIN-KSW-121210-NYT-NA&WT.mc_ev=click">A piece from the NY Times.</a><br />
<br />
It's distressing to see the propagandist thrust of the flood of articles like this, making reference to "antisecrecy radicals", and drowning out discussions of the US blocking Human Rights initiatives and murdering journalists and teens from the sky.<br />
<br />
This is circling back to the very concept of civilization, which Freud described, albeit in his own terms, very well. There is a fiction predominant in Western culture of an absolute objective reality, and that is perhaps the west's most dangerous disease, buttressed by the artifice of enlightenment rationality and the nasty subsequent habit of discarding evidence that does not fit into a dominant paradigm or convenient mathematical model. In short, it's bad science. Rationality has made the west exceptionally unreasonable. The pearl in all this was constitutions, i.e. expressions of the moral nature of a state independent of the winds of mob politics. The crisis in the US is not unlike that in Nazi Germany - a culture of fear, sponsored by corporate interests engendered by the Industrial Revolution, with masses becoming wholly unreasonable, and subverting the very constitution that may have been the soul of a state.<br />
Today, the US is a war criminal second to few. Certainly Soviets, Chinese, Liberians, Ugandans, and many others can be blamed of equally atrocious behavior, but none on this scale of mayhem or hypocrisy, and none there today profiting from genocide in the interest of shareholder dividends and wearing the shield of a false 'democracy' quite as visibly as the US.<br />
It is clear that there are many sides to the Escheresque fence of political divides. We are human, and context changes our reality violently. As Whitman wrote: "I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes." Many among us have innocent ideals, and many others are irreversibly scarred by the reality of what can happen on the ground when the interest of 'good' from a given perspective is not backed by outright despotism to stem the 'savage horde'. It is impossible to deny sympathy to the soldier who has killed an unarmed person in the grip of panic. The same ideals that might have driven that person to become a soldier will never, ever, forgive that action, yet we turn our backs on them because they are unlikeable and remind us of our own human fallibility.<br />
I read somewhere an opinion piece (I believe it was German) about how the US cannot set itself right without a great national recognition and atonement for the crimes of the past three decades, like Germany did during its reconstruction. It makes sense. To rediscover common values instead of limping around damaged and fractured, it has to be recognized: the massacres, the murder, the xenophobia, the stealing, lying, and killing of democracy, the trading of human presence and rights for 'security' of profits, the extra-judicial assassinations.<br />
The real challenge is that when one has been radicalized by the crimes of a state, it is hard to visualize a positive way forward. Subversively, without ever mentioning it directly, Obama promised that to the US, and clearly he has become mired in this new "hot war", compromising ideals in an illusory democracy and horse-trading away what we all believe to be inalienable human rights to a feudal plutocracy that will not see its wealth dwindle at any cost, especially when that cost is to others.<br />
Assange is a criminal in the dominant interpretation, and Bradley Manning is a hero of conscience no different from Aung San Suu Kyi, the Dali Lama, or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Wills_%28security_guard%29">Frank Wills</a>.<br />
<br />
Do you know that name? He died in poverty and obscurity, despite having done a job well, and caused a house of cheating cards to crumble. No one cares that Hillary Clinton lied outright when claiming that US national security was put at risk by the revelations despite very probably being aware of the Pentagon's memo stating that this was not the case, or that Sara Palin called for Assange's death. These are real crimes of conscience, yet they go unacknowledged by a deeply compromised establishment.<br />
This is, indeed, doing my best to rain on an obscene parade. The time for parades is not now. This is the time to figure out how to make things right.Xtianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02239593342541254887noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7614622190660707839.post-88051921631589755262010-11-22T09:02:00.000-08:002010-11-22T15:12:58.020-08:00"Way Out of Line"Apparently, last week Jon Stewart complained on air that calling George Bush a War Criminal was technically correct but politically incorrect. He called it "way out of line", charging that it's "a conversation-stopper, not a conversation-starter".<br />
First, let me hasten to point out the traditional American weasel words "way out of line", which merit some notice. In a context with established rules of propriety, describing an inappropriate action in a social situation, this might be an OK idiom to use, but in political speech, even commentary, it seems simply intended to ignore an inconvenient point of view.<br />
I don't think I'm in a minority when I take "Way out of line" to mean "I disapprove and I'm not going to discuss why." I find that sort of ad hominem censorship counterproductive to political freedom.<br />
<br />
Nevertheless, this single blurb on mainstream television has raised a lot of awareness about Bush and the US Government's extensive record of Human Rights violations, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in the past decade, but these crimes are not without antecedent. One can directly attribute more killing, terrorism sponsorship, and squelching democracy outside its borders to the US than just about any other nation. The term "Banana Republic" describes repressive regimes sponsored by the US specifically to stamp out democracy and individual rights to create a climate more favorable to exploitive corporate operations like the United Fruit Company. In 1910, Sam Zemurray of the Cuyamel Fruit Company, which along with United & Standard controlled the market in Honduras and interfered, often violently, in politics there, simply <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic#Background">hired merecenaries and had a coup</a>.<br />
<br />
In 1933, during a hostile takeover of the United Fruit Company, Zemurray assumed control. It was not long after that, during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, that the United Fruit Company persuaded the US Government to form the CIA, and promptly in 1954 they sponsored a coup in Guatemala against Jacob Arbenz Guzman, effectively ending representative democracy there. This democracy had to be ended because Guzman's government did not take kindly to the United Fruit Company's antitrust hoarding of land, and expropriated lands the company was buying and not cultivating to retain their banana monopoly. Technically, then, at that moment Truman, Eisenhower, Zemurray, and the US Government became war criminals and criminals against humanity.<br />
<br />
If we step gingerly around WW2, the Korean War, Viet-Nam, Iran, Greece, Yugoslavia, Uruguay, China, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Egypt, Lebanon, Grenada, and the many other places where American troops were deployed in the name of Capitalism during the intervening years, and fast forward to 1991, once again, Bush Senior's administration, following in the footsteps of the Gipper, perpetrated some very serious war-crimes against Iraq & Afghanistan. Here is a <a href="http://deoxy.org/wc/warcrim2.htm">complaint filed with the ICC</a> against Bush Sr. & his cabinet in 1991. It is a good summary of what that administration gave the world.<br />
<br />
That his son's administration, arguably not even a legitimately elected one, has raised the stakes in the game of violating humans in the service of corporate profits, is an understatement. Bush was put in office to commit crimes against humanity, to make the rich richer, and to make the poor more exploitable. Essentially, it was time to make a banana republic out of the US - favorable to corporations and less fettered by pesky individual rights. He certainly did what he was told to do. For a roadmap showing the engineering of 9/11 and the events that have followed, check out <a href="http://www.newamericancentury.org/">the PNAC</a>, an extension of the Wolfowitz doctrine published in September 2000 that advocated raising the military budget by up to $100 billion, reneging on international treaties like the Geneva Convention and organizations like the ICC. But the PNAC was realistic and included these words: "The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor." In 1999, the budget was $298 billion. By 2006 it was up to $535 billion.<br />
<br />
Along the way, several ugly things happened to the US under the thumb of Bush's cabinet. John Yoo, an administration lawyer, issued <a href="http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=torture,_rendition,_and_other_abuses_against_captives_in_iraq,_afghanistan,_and_elsewhere_978#torture,_rendition,_and_other_abuses_against_captives_in_iraq,_afghanistan,_and_elsewhere_978">a memo</a> stating that the Geneva Convention did not apply to the US, and further that no international treaty on war or the treatment of prisoners was in any way legally binding for the president of the US. Then in May of 2002 the US <a href="http://www.alternet.org/story/13055">reneged on the ICC</a>. What a coincidence.<br />
<br />
The story of Americans torturing and murdering civilians all over the world since then is by now well-known outside US borders, though many Americans are completely misinformed about that and many other things. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_surveys_of_Iraq_War_casualties">Lancet's account</a>, perhaps the most scientifically sound, places responsibility on the US for the death of around 650,000 civilians in Iraq alone for the time period ending in June 2006. Remembering for a moment that Bush unilaterally and in direct violation of UN resolution 141 declared war on Iraq because some Saudis had flown planes into the WTC, which subsequently became the first, second, third, and only buildings in history to implode after being hit by planes, or in the vicinity of buildings being hit by planes, responsibility for each & every one of those deaths falls squarely on that administration's shoulders.<br />
<br />
So to Jon Stewart's pandering that calling Bush a war criminal is excessive, I say, look in the mirror. Dishonest political speech in America is a plague. You know that calling Bush a war criminal is not just not incendiary, it is not enough. Stewart saying that it's over the top is reminescent of that other high hypocrite, Hillary Clinton, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11611439">condemning Wikileaks</a> for showing us the real face of America abroad.<br />
<br />
In May of last year, <a href="http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0905/S00039.htm">the president of the ICC stated they would not prosecute Bush</a>. I'm guessing that it may have been a traded absolution in exchange for the US rejoining the ICC - a very Obama-ish sounding deal. In January, Lawyers Against the War filed <a href="http://www.ucimc.org/content/icc-complaint-filed-against-bush-cheney-et-al-uiuc-prof-francis-boyle-and-lawyers-against-wa">a complaint with the ICC against the Bush cabinet members directly involved in the torture and probable death of some 100 political prisoners.</a> Now, there is also <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-10-01/columns/considering-the-war-crimes-trial-of-the-bush-administration/">a brilliant move domestically to try these people for their crimes against humanity</a>, though I do not know how this Jackson Conference has progressed, but justice does exist, despite the US. Italy has arrest warrants for 25 American terrorists - CIA operatives involved in the kidnappings and assassinations of people inside Italy. As an extra added bonus, Spain, which has been the most effective defender of Human Rights worldwide in the past 30 years, at least, is <a href="http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/270075">pressing criminal charges against at least 6 Bush administration members</a>. Whether warrants will follow, I do not know, but I am happy to see that some people are still committed to a civilized humanity, still care about the principles of Human Rights, and do not horse-trade them away like the US has for the past decade. Put that in your pipe & smoke it, Mr. Stewart.Xtianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02239593342541254887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7614622190660707839.post-12712493572378204042010-11-08T13:46:00.000-08:002010-11-22T15:16:36.861-08:00The Difficult Proposition for Next Season in MotoGPThe past season in MotoGP has not been very interesting in terms of the rivalry for the top spot - barring a couple of dirty Rossi moves unpunished - fairly typical for the Florentine politics of the FIM - the contest for the top spot was just not that gripping, as it seemed that Lorenzo had it coldly in-hand, like a seasoned hit-man. There were wild and truly superhuman competitions for fifth, eighth, and double-digit ordinals on occasion, but the battle for #1 was like an old-style game of pong - obviously gripping to do, but not so much a spectator sport, if you will. Heroic at times, Lorenzo mostly did not get rattled; he did not waver. He lost out a few times, and he was a real gentleman about it, but mostly he was a convincing equal to most every challenge thrown his way, showing an almost monotone climb to the top spot, especially compared to the "I'm in; I'm out; I have superpowers; they lost my suit at the cleaners" kind of season that seems to have plagued Rossi, Pedroza, Stoner, and Hayden.<br />
In the spirit of full disclosure, I have to admit that as of this instant I have not watched the last race of the season, but I'm not so buried under a rock as to not know what happened - but the troubling thought came to me this morning as I watched the 125 race: Marquez is a very young guy, who is personable and engineered more for literature than business. He has a certain human flair and charm - there's more than raw speed behind his eyes: there's wit and joy. Watching his English fail post-race at Valencia today, and his easy way of not getting stuck on that failing, instead expressing himself non-verbally, reminded me of Rossi before he was trademarked, and made me think this: The arc of Marquez ascendancy is almost a given - we can quibble about whether he'll be on the top spot in MotoGP in 2012 or 2015, but he will doubtless be there - or I will have been dead wrong yet again (highly unlikely - my quota is used up...) - sooner or later. When he gets there, Lorenzo will have, with some difficulty, held pretenders at bay for several years, and will say of Marquez that "He's been racing against me for a lifetime while I've only just got the chance to race against him" or some such Biaggiesque remark - I sincerely hope, for Jorge's sake, that Marquez's easy professionalism does not make Lorenzo play Biaggi to Martquez's Rossi when the two finally meet on-track!Xtianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02239593342541254887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7614622190660707839.post-44256141093389758222010-10-29T11:59:00.000-07:002010-10-29T14:26:31.443-07:00It starts here.It's been a bumpy ride, but that's not important. I am here now, and that is the best thing about me. Finding myself far away from a home I will not return to, robbed of much of the vestigal cache of junk that remained after the immigration fraudster & the trustafarian got done clearing out my place, my savings, and my children's souls, I am in the awkward situation of needing to figure out how to make some money, and Nicaragua is no place to do that unless you have some capital or are really not bothered by becoming one of the bad guys.<br />
Enter syndicated on-line writing brokers! Demand Media seemed like a cute idea when I first saw it on Mashable a few weeks ago. "Of course, I am a greta writer! Just ask me! Why, I love my writing, on occasion, and my loving fiancee once in a while actually sits & reads something I've written, making a special effort to turn grimaces into smiles."<br />
I got down to reading guidelines, and the more I read, the clearer it became that I am not a writer, and that it's hard, brow-breaking work! Efficiency. Separate your research from your writing. Don't dawdle! Get in, do your work, follow all the rules (is that Oxford or AP style?), focus 100%, watch out for accidental plagiarism, black-listed references, meandering prose, commas in the wrong place, articles, conjunctions, dangling participles, split infinitives, straying topics, topics that are too similar, topics that are too different, being too technical, being too general, being too specific, not having quotable references, or having too many quotes, then get out! This is the gist of most advice from sage & experienced syndicated content writers out in the cloud, and it makes sense.<br />
I am afraid to try. Today, maybe tomorrow, or the next day, I need to get that first article in. I know I don't remember the 50 pages worth of rules, let alone the 432 pages worth of AP Stylebook that I, of course, already know (ahem..). I won't insult the reader's intelligence by even suggesting that either of us might not have Strunk & White memorized chapter & verse, of course. Thankfully, it's easy to find online as well as in the baggage we brought with us.<br />
I am feeling timid. I understand that Demand Media is, well, very demanding of its beginnign writers. Rejections are easy to get, and detailed explanations are hard to come by. Three strikes and you're out, like a Rastafarian at a Nancy Reagan tea-party...<br />
So the greatest gift of all is the gift of opportunity. After reading these guidelines for a week, I think I need to try. I see that I had no idea, and mostly still don't, but I believe that it's possible, and that all the good ideas in my head will not fall out just because I am writing how-to's for changing hard-disks and distributor-caps. On the contrary - if I cannot do that, then it is much less likely that I can tell a simple story, let alone from more than one virtual point of view. Anchors aweigh, then.<br />
<br />
<script type="text/javascript">
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-725177-4']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
(function() {
var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
})();
</script>Xtianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02239593342541254887noreply@blogger.com0