The Transhuman Comedy

Labels: Election '08, semiotics

Here's an old one from 2006, inspired by "Arizona Dream" by Philippe Bullot, #473 on this page.

We left the north dock of the New Ruidoso arcology about ten in the morning. The brown terrain, scuffed by low brush, flowed beneath our aircars. The jagged paired peaks of Mesa Doble loomed on the right and the autopilot took us close enough to see the strata of pale and dark rock striping across the mesa.

"Far enough?" Derome asked from the trailing aircar. Our aircar projected his voice to sound as if it came from behind us.

Our aircar also answered his question, 14.8 km, but I turned my head anyway to pour the data into deeper parts of my brain and the aircar obliged by blocking my eye's view of the cabin's back wall with a camera-collected view through the air behind us. Derome's aircar, like ours an aerofoil cabin with two lifters mounted on forward, chicane nacelles, had passed Mesa Doble. Behind the mesa, fading in the haze, New Ruidoso climbed, its jagged profile formed of sharp edges, a mimic of the mesa. They said New Ruidoso's architecture showed respect for the natural landscape, but at that moment it seemed to mock it with its size and its straight lines. Inside our relatives and acquaintances dreamed in Virtual, tended by machines, sheltered by buckytube walls.

"Far enough," I said.

Derome's aircar yawed a bit and then sped up. He'd already punched the hacked-up override. "Race you to the river and back!" he shouted as he passed us.

Labels: SCI FI Weekly gallery images, Sf

Sorry, between the Thanksgiving holiday and technical difficulties with my smartphone, my entry in the series for "Oblate" by Angelis Jara, #552 on this page, is late.

Eric climbed down the dropship's ladder and jumped off the last rung to the surface of the flowing lava. The cryocompressors in his boot soles hardened the molten surface and his newly-formed raft of igneous rock bobbed on the glowing lava lake. Vaporized helium flowed through tubing up his legs and lower back and radiated heat out of his suit's angel wings.

He had not thought of Anjara for a few weeks but he thought of her now. He remembered how she arched her back and sucked in breath through her teeth when he licked her labia and clitoris while his fingers stroked her G-spot. He remembered the moss-green couch and the retro brick accent wall in her apartment and how she and he sat over wide deep mugs of coffee and plotted his conquest of the world of xenogeology. Here he was, six and a half years later, leading the expedition to the magma wells of Beta Comae Berenices III-B, hated by older scientists like Geli Munday and her cohort, envied by his socially-inept peers. He was only here because of Anjara.

He froze in place but his mind swirled. He clung to the primary research questions to anchor his thoughts. Did tidal forces caused by the primary planet and the other moon explain B's still-molten core? Did the pillars of translucent komatiite date back to the moon's origin or a later impact event?

I'll never forget you, he'd said, in a last desperate attempt to make her stay out of pity.

She must have rented the worldweary expression and tone of voice from some marketer of personality traits, because he knew then and now Anjara had none of her own. The half-life of memory is seven years, she replied.

He had never cried after she ended their affair and he needed to. He needed to cry, to honor his memories of their time together and to redeem the years of byzantine academic intrigue and emotionless hookups since then. The realization rushed on him and his suit stiffened to assure his balance. His suit telltales, displayed inside his faceplate, showed his heart rate and blood pressure in their yellow zones.

Cry now, tears to be captured by the expedition's data stream? And let Geli Munday and his other enemies whisper mockingly about him in the corridors of the institute's xenogeology department?

Labels: SCI FI Weekly gallery images, Sf

The latest in this series was inspired by "Bugdropship Liftoff" by Manfred Thraller, #551 on this page.

Lt. Harrell finished his pre-flight walkaround of the dropship. The left hind tarsal claw showed some reentry blistering but otherwise she checked out. Harrell reached for the rope ladder to climb up but hesitated. SOP gave dropship pilots three hours turnaround time during an Orbit-to-Surface Round Trip and he might as well use it. The setting sun lit the puffy edges of low cumulus clouds
and a brisk breeze rustled across the lifeless rockstrewn plain. Within the square defined by the shield generators, the recon base showed as humps of buried shelters. Most of the six people based there would be asleep or on duty
wrangling their robots, but someone might be at liberty to swap stories over cups of moonshine.

Mr. Redmon spoke in his mind's ear. --Lieutenant, is your bug physically unable to perform?--

--No,-- Harrell replied, quite consciously leaving off sir. He could chauffeur the civilian without repecting him.

--I ordered you to shove off as soon as you did your post- and pre-flight checks.--

Harrell stared past the humped shelters toward low tan hills five miles away. --SOP calls for me to give a surface base CO one hour to bundle and load packages for return to the flagship.--

Through the link he felt Redmon seethe. --Lieutenant, while I am dirtside I am the commanding officer of all I survey. Now get your ass upstairs or I'll fill your life with more bullshit than a Texas barnyard. Do you roger me?--

--I roger you. Mr. Redmon.-- He turned his back on the base, scaled his bug's thorax, and pulled the rope ladder into the cockpit after him. He tapped the controls and the bug jumped on its springy legs, pushing Harrell into his
seat. At the top of the jump the minidrives kicked in, pushing him deeper and filling the bottom of the window views with spilling yellow-white light. He turned the bug toward the sunset and his orbital insertion and wondered what kind of bribe to the dropship group's XO would free him from returning to pick up the civilian.

Labels: SCI FI Weekly gallery images, Sf

I've been doing this series of sf-writing calisthenics for a while. Here's an early snippet, inspired by "Point of View" by Jérôme Bois, Cover no. 470 (April 24, 2006) on this page. (The seated woman and the servitor were visible when it was the SCI FI Weekly cover image, trust me).

"Birds don't fly in straight lines."

Across the room, legs crossed on a chair hung from the ceiling on slender carbon fiber, Priya looked up. Her gesture stopped the servitor carrying a tray with espresso
cups in mid-bow. Past the servitor, Arminius stood and stared out the window. He wore the gray trousers and green shirt combination she was certain represented a bug in his valet's software. Hands clasped behind him, his profile showed his gaze tracing straight lines through the air outside between their flat and the ziggurats downtown.

"You see a bird?" Every so often one strayed in from the
sea of wilderness outside the city, or snuck through the ductwork from the arcology's atrium.

He shook his head with a slight smile. "The aircars. Traffic control has them travelling in straight lines, but why? We've decoded the brains of birds and could code the same into the cpus of aircars."

"Birds fly into windows. You want an aircar to do the same?"

Labels: SCI FI Weekly gallery images, Sf

This week's entry is inspired by "The Search on Glacialis Luna," by Paul Gibson, cover no. 550 on this page.

Beta Comae Berenices had risen, but that only made conditions worse, Gib thought. Under the yellow sunlight, vapor steamed out of the open holes in the ice, cloaking the surface in a thick fog. Outcroppings of magnetite thrust jaggedly out of the pack ice and spoofed the scanner on Gib's airscout with false leads. Every kilometer, Unité observation towers stood on three spindly legs, but the sensors running around the circumeference of each tower's circular top deck had been designed for warmer planets and gave unreliable data.

Even if the impediments magically disappeared, the odds were high (p = 0.91, the airscout's Bayesian system guessed) the artifact had impacted too hard and smashed against a magnetite pillar or plunged through the pack ice into the sea below. This was a fool's errand. Gib slowed the airscout and left it hovering while his mouth contorted and he shook his head at the futility of the search. He turned the stick and upped the throttle to head for home.

"Monsieur Pauli asks that you continue the search," the airscout said in its cheery alto voice. "He will continue to pay you 125% of expenses, plus time spent."

Gib hovered again. M. Pauli knew the odds were against finding the artifact, but if he were willing to spend more money--

--The artifact must be worth a lot.

"I'll be glad to keep searching," Gib said. He pushed the airscout forward at low speed and tasked every spare cpu cycle on stripping magnetite ghosts from the scanner data.

Labels: SCI FI Weekly gallery images, Sf

Looks like SCI FI Weekly didn't get a picture up this week. Here's my entry in the series for Alex NIKO, "SinE City: Free Port" (Cover no. 548 here)

The sky above the city was empty this morning. All the spacers at liberty and slumming bobos slept late after their debaucheries the night before. L.X. throttled down the thrusters on the runabout and levelled off above the city. The rooftops, slabbed and angled like the offcuts at a giant's stoneworks, stood like an archipelago in a sea of morning haze. The haze and smooth surfaces veiled the inner workings of the city, where crimes against nature could be indulged in the flesh and, for an added price, the chirurgical vats and neuroanatomical programmers could strip those crimes' evidence from body and mind. OKIN tolerated the free port, aware of the needs satisfied therein and confident its gates and scanners could contain the city's excesses and preserve the narrow-minded serenity of the realm beyond.

L.X. patted the black leather messenger bag on the seat beside him, sipped hot green tea, and dove to meet those waiting for him.

Labels: SCI FI Weekly gallery images, Sf

Since I'm getting international acclaim for these snippets, time to get back in the saddle, though I confess I was difficult to inspire with this one. Nothing against Christoph Gerber's "Space Tour," #546 on this page, but views of ringed gas giants from one of their moons have been pretty common lately.

Tof pressed his nose against the ship's window. Outside lay a rock-strewn desert out of ancient Arizona or Alpha Centauri IV. "Isn't it neat?"

Gerber banked the shuttle. They flew low, below the tops of the natural spires of khaki basalt rising above the plain a few hundred meters apart. Flying between them left his augmented reflexes unchallenged. "It's a marginally habitable moon."

"But Grand-Orb is so close! You can see its clouds and count its rings!"

Gerber sighed. "It's a ringed gas giant. The galaxy is full of them. This trip is just a milk run. It's the antisense of wonder."

Labels: SCI FI Weekly gallery images, Sf

The last couple of months have been busy with work and play. Here are a pair of movie reviews for you:

It came as a fitting surprise, the kind that resolves a question you weren't consciously aware your subconscious had asked, to find after seeing the movie that Barbarella was based on a French comic book. At times, one can sense the title character reflects the beautiful-naif archetype of Gaullist-era pop culture I first encountered in the Clementine books my father had stashed away in a bottom shelf of the bookcase. Sadly, the film suffers from Roger Vadim's ham-handed direction. Few things are as tedious as the adolescent taboo-nudging of a previous generation, which was especially regrettable given the truly interesting potential of the conflict between the sexually-innocent Barbarella and the mad scientist Durand Durand. Alas, Vadim gives us his then-wife Jane Fonda's nude silhouette and some ludicrous dialogue (e.g., Barbarella tells the blind angel to "look out!"). The film had a few good moments, such as Barbarella shorting out the Orgasmotron, and Barbarella and Dildano using the intimacy pill to make love a la Terre, plus I could see themes, blurry through Zeitgeist transmission, from the atrocity exhibition that was '60s New Wave British sf, but those moments were few and far between.

300 is of course the highly-fictionalized epic story of a group of white men with ripped abs slaughtering thousands of veiled Asiatics and servile Negroes in the name of truth, justice, and the Spartan way. To be fair, effeminate Xerxes with his overdubbed breathy-bass voice has some Caucasians in his employ, but they are twisted and monstrous (and they aren't spearcarriers, either). Think of it as a sword-and-sandal version of The Iron Dream; it is the best piece of gay fascist post-September 11 propaganda I have yet seen. To be fair, the earliest fight scenes were well-done, before the viewer was numbed with their repetitiveness, and the symbolism of Ephialtes--whom Leonidas wants to stand and Xerxes wants to kneel--was more evocative than I expected.

This week's entry in the series of snippets inspired by SciFi Weekly's featured artist image is based on "Tunnels," by Luca Oleastri, cover #537 on this page.

"Papa, Papa," Luc said from within the tall flechettegrass. "Come see!"

Irritated, Henri turned away from the virtual press officer of the pro-Unité rebels. The sere yellow grass thinned out and he felt heavier as he returned to full verity. Across the living room, Luc stood at the picture window, his fingertips resting on the plasma pane, his posture showing him raptly watching something in the tunnel. Probably a maintenance robot, 1200 meters away on the far side.

"Papa, come see!"

The boy was too young for his brain to be nanolinked with the Communité Télépathique de l'Unité, so Henri could not send a ganger across the room to his son. He could let a concierge guide his body over while his attention remained in virtual, but the boy was old enough to see through that. Tell the boy no, he thought, but then he remembered As the Unité is to its people, so should parents be to their children. He heeded the CTU's wisdom and crossed the room.

"The worldship is giving birth to triplets!"

What did he mean? Then Henri saw the childish logic. The drydocks lay many kilometers to the left, past twists and turns, somewhere deep in the worldship's core; the tunnel was a birth canal and its blast doors a dilated cervix. If three ships came down the tunnel, they must be small ones, tenders or light patrol craft. Henri rested his hand on the boy's shoulder and looked up.

Gooseflesh stippled his neck and cheeks. The three ships were Oleastri-class cruisers, saucers half the width of the tunnel, bristling with weapons and sensor arrays. The conversion drives were throttled almost to zero, glowing dull red instead of white hot, with conduction and convection impossible through the tunnel's hard vacuum; even so, Henri squinted and the plasma shimmered when the ships passed. Luc yiped and pulled his fingertips away, but his gaze remained rapt. "They're so big!"

"Yes, son."

"What kind of people are in them?"

Henri sensed the crews through the CTU. Nodes of thought pulsed within and between the ships. "All the sorts of people of the Unité. Verities, uploads, cyborgs, robots, ais."

Luc's head turned to the right after the last cruiser. "Where are they going?"

"I don't know." In his mind's eye, Henri saw only stock images of space battles and support operations for ground forces. "But I know they will defend us from the Tiánquán Republic."

They stood in silence for a moment. Pride in the Unité welled in Henri's chest, perhaps an odd thing to feel looking onto the empty tunnel. The plasma pane deexcited, but what had set it off? A power surge? He'd have to call maintenance again.

Luc looked up. "Papa, what did you think of the triplets?"

Triplets? What was the boy imagining? Well, he wasn't even linked with the CTU. Let him enjoy his imagination while he could. "I liked them very much."

Labels: SCI FI Weekly gallery images, Sf

This week's entry in the series is based on "The Scout," by Colin Swift, cover #536 on this page.

Lini halted her steed and drank from her water tube. Four Archeaopteryx wheeled overhead, but obviously in a courtship flight. They hadn't found the missing pilgrim. A wasted hour in the midday rays of Beta Comae Berenices. Ride around Swift Hill and then back to the settlement--

Cols lifted its sleek blue head and peered beady-eyed to the right. Its nostrils snuffled the air and it made a caw-caw-caw-cawwwk sound deep in its throat.

Lini turned her head. "Boy, what do you see?" Her gaze roved the hard packed sand with colors swirled like a marble cake. Her gray plastic baroquehelmet swept a magnetic field through her occipital lobe and subtracted out the heat shimmer. A rippling black shape lay eight hundred meters away on the next slope and she realized the black ripple was the pilgrim's robe in the breeze. The pilgrim lay motionless, face up, on a stratum of sand red-brown like dried blood.

Labels: SCI FI Weekly gallery images, Sf

One thing I do most Mondays is check Sci Fi Weekly and, as a form of Sf-writing calisthenics, write a few paragraphs inspired by the week's Featured Artist image. 2007's images are archived here. The image for this week's edition (#535, 23 July 2007) is "Battlehorse Scylla" by Kevin M. Rooke:

Kevem brought the Scylla around for final descent. While his augmented muscle memory brought her down his gaze wandered to the monitors' view of Io. God knows why anyone would want to live on this motherless Irishman of a world. Sure the view of Jupiter was breathtaking, poised as it was over the hills north of the settlement, and the atmo machines spat out enough oxygen to form thin cirrus clouds and dye indigo the black zenith. The landscape's colors, a palette of yellows, oranges, and reds, looked like no other place in the solar system.

Then the Scylla touched and the engines ratcheted down. Silence descended, save for the ping of gammas picked up by the outside radiation detectors. Kevem squeezed into the rad suit and slid the compressor mask over his face. The straps tightened themselves over his ears.

Time to cycle the airlock. The outer hatch opened and Kevem winced. The mask never fully cut the stench. All the sulfur-reducing bacteria and metal sulfide ovens couldn't keep Io from stinking of marsh gas and putrid farts. Hurry up, get paid, get the local stevedores to offload the cargo, toss back some drinks and a doxy (and pay extra to make sure both were filtered of sulfur), then haul ass.

Labels: SCI FI Weekly gallery images, Sf

Reason's hit and run blog recently posted about National Review conservatives' phobia of Muslim birthrates. (Don't worry, I have far better things to do than read the New Republic or National Review). You've read the sound bites, e.g., Mark Steyn's "the future belongs to those who show up," deployed like infantry squares against the cavalry charges of political correctness, Muslim terrorism, and Mexican illegal immigration.

Relax--the "demography is destiny" people are out to lunch. Here's why.

1. Global birth rates are dropping. Let me repeat that for people who haven't realized Paul Ehrlich has been full of shit for decades. Global birth rates are dropping. The United Nations Population Division (that's right, the UN, America's third oldest enemy behind France and the Mahometans of the Barbary Coast) predicts global population to be from about 7-10 billion in 2050, with a median estimate of 9 billion for 2070 and beyond. The fertility rate (number of children born per woman) is below 2.5 and dropping in Mexico (2.39) and below 2.1, the steady-state level, in both China (1.75) and Iran (1.71)!

2. "Demography is destiny" is the desiccated husk of a metaphor from the dying industrial age. Once upon a time economic and military might emerged from the assembly line and conscription, but even then, the ability to manipulate information was a force multiplier--consider how its bureaucracy and school system gave Prussia under Frederick the Great (pop. 5-10 million) an army superior to that of vastly more populous, but poorer and less centralized, Russia.

But now, both wealth and the ability to convert it to military advantage are a matter of knowledge and communication, and not the bashing of bulk materials or the bludgeoning of conscripts. As I've told Curtis, one bullet in the right place at the right moment can do more to achieve victory than a million bullets fired blindly. (This photo served North Vietnam better than anything the NVA did in combat). The US victories against the Iraqi Army in 1991 and 2003 were won by superior knowledge, to which our fancy firepower was a servant. The US stalemate in Iraq from 2003-2007, conversely, emerged from inferior knowledge, specifically our failures to understand Iraqi language, culture, and social networks.

Not to encourage complacency--the US's position as the world's sole superpower isn't ordained by God--but let's be serious for a moment. Would the Caliphate Navy and Air Force be able to achieve enough air/sea superiority to land an invasion force on US soil? Would the Fuerza Occupada de Aztlan be able to suppress an anglo insurrection in Texas and California? China, India, and Europe look to be the only states capable of competing with the US in the information age. Hmm, someone should blog about that....

Labels: 5GW, Eight Futures, global population, information age

Other points from the Germany trip:

• If you take a Deutsche Bahn night train, go ahead and spend some money on a couchette or a private sleeping cabin. You'll sleep better. Also, if you board it at the earliest station, you can board 30 minutes before departure time, and sleep more.
• Muenchen struck me as being very touristified. Maybe because it was a weekend? We saw half a dozen bachelor/ette parties wandering around the Altstadt. At 8p on a Saturday, the only Germans in the Hofbraeuhaus were the oompah band, the waiters, and the security staff. If you hate the idea of seeing American fratboys posing for each other's photos while holding 1-liter beer mugs, pick another time.
• I thought I was the first tourist to get my photo taken at the European Patent Office, but my boss beat me to that brilliant idea back in '87.
• The Deutsches Museum was well worth the trip, especially for the aerospace levels. Sigmund Jaehn's Soyuz capsule sits near a cross section of a 747 fuselage and a WWI Fokker triplane. But a lot of the electricity and physics hands-on exhibits didn't work, and those that did seemed antiquated, pieces churned out on an assembly line by Prussian elementary school graduates-cum-Verdun survivors in the golden age of bulk-materials-bashing.
• Berliners heard me speak German and switched to English; Muenchners heard me speak German, "corrected" my German to Bayerische Plattdeutsch, and then switched to English.
• Schloss Charlottenburg in Berlin was more impressive than Schloss Nymphenburg in Muenchen, though the latter had a more pleasant walk leading to it (along a canal and around ponds full of ducks and geese) and Ludwig I's Gallery of Beauties.
• Lola Montez was the oil-paint-equivalent of photogenic (see the picture in the Wikipedia article), but not enough to justify Ludwig's infatuation with her. Presumably her exotic dancing or other, um, qualities sealed the deal.
• From Muenchen, we spent the last three days with relatives in my dad's hometown in the Spessart Mountains between Wuerzburg and Gelnhausen.
• Altes Weinkellnerchen, in Unter den Markt in Gelnhausen, had the best food of the trip. Filet with garlic, roasted potatoes, and peppercorns, paired with the house red. It was also one of the few German meals we had.
• Wir haben echtes deutsche Essen gegessen--doener! ("We've eaten authentic German food--gyros!") My uncle didn't catch the joke at first. Even small towns have Turkish restaurants.
• Q: Why do Europeans drive tiny cars? A: Because gasoline is $8 a gallon.

Labels: Germany, travel

Sorry for the long silence, but Liz and I were traveling in Germany last month and I had better things to do than blog. Let's roll through some highlights:

• We spent our first few days around Frankfurt. Hessenpark in Neu-Anspach is an old-style village, built from old buildings retrieved from around the state of Hessen, with craft exhibits and demonstrations. It reminded me of a renaissance festival, but without the fantasy imagery and the delusion that life was better 400 years ago. The bread tastes just as good today, and you don't have to store your wheat in a fortress to protect it from Landsknechts.
• We hit the touristy parts of Frankfurt: the Alte Oper, the Goethe Haus, the Roemer, the Dom.
• Deutsche Bahn to Berlin. We didn't stop in Sachsen-Anhalt or Brandenburg, but from the train windows, the former DDR didn't look any more rundown than Braunschweig. (No city looks attractive from the train, but Braunschweig especially looked rust-beltish). The distinctive sight in the rural stretches of the old DDR were windmill farms, blades big enough to kill rocs slowly spinning over green fields. A government subsidy, I presume--a map in the Deutsches Museum (for technology) in Muenchen showed average windspeeds across Germany: the highest in the mountains and on the coasts, the lowest in, you guessed it, Sachsen-Anhalt and Brandenburg.
• We had a great time in Berlin. We stayed at Hotel Lindenufer, in Spandau, a perfectly adequate hotel with the chief advantage of standing 20 meters from the top of the escalator from a U-bahn station. (In fact, Liz and I emerged from the subway with our luggage, looking along the street for the hotel and wondering if we'd made a mistake, until we looked up and saw the sign).
• La Bottega, on Breitestrasse in Spandau, is an excellent and inexpensive Italian restaurant.
• Maybe it's just me, or maybe things have changed in 15 years, but Zoo Station doesn't live up to the hype engendered by the U2 song.
• Speaking of changes, eastern Berlin, or at least the parts we saw, has recovered from the DDR era. High rise office buildings near the Friedrichstrasse S-bahn station; a thick crowd in Alexanderplatz; an Irish pub in Hackescher Markt.
• It was intensely gratifying to see that we--the free peoples of the West--won. The biggest building on Alexanderplatz, former showplace of DDR government buildings, was a six-story department store, and on the square outside, hucksters offered DDR uniform hats and Warsaw Pact gas masks for sale. The Roman marbles in the Pergamon stare at S-bahn trains joining Zoologischer Garten and Hackescher Markt. Best of all was Checkpoint Charlie; all that remains is the last guardhouse in the middle of Friedrichstrasse and the footprint of the Wall on the former Wessi sidewalk on Zimmerstrasse. Construction fencing, wire mesh with green plastic, blocks off a building site in the former DDR death ground. As for the guardhouse, tourist trappers have taken it over--for a few Euro, you can get your photo taken with a young man in US Army colors holding a six-foot US flag; for a few more, you can get DDR visa stamps in your passport from a girl in an Ossi Grenzepolizei uniform. The only thing that will make it better is when the construction is complete across Zimmerstrasse and a Starbucks occupies the bottom corner of the former death ground. "And all the shame/Was on the other side," if you'll let me wax heroic for a moment.
• Es tut uns leid, Sonja, wir sind nach einer Shisha-Lounge in Prenslauer Berg nicht gefahren. Naechstes mal!
• The dingiest place we saw in Berlin was, in fact, on the Wessi side, changing from S- to U-bahn at Yorckstrasse. Graffiti, run down shops, slackers who lack the gumption to move into hipsterville in Nikolaiviertel. It struck me as Muenchenerstrasse near the Frankfurt train station, but without the charm.
• Speaking of the S-bahn, we found out where the train to nicht einsteigen takes you.
• If you want to impress a 7-12 year old German child, show them pictures you took of Knut the polar bear while at the Berlin Zoo.

That's about the first half of our trip. More to come!

Labels: Germany, travel

From Arts & Letters Daily I found an article about a new edition of Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. One of my great frustrations is Hayek's relative obscurity. I've mentioned his name in a room full of intelligent, highly educated people, PhDs or grad students, and received blank stares in return. If you've never heard of Hayek, you owe it to yourself to read the article for an adequate summary of Hayek's life and his early works.

A pleasant surprise: The New Criterion is a conservative journal of culture--imagine a cross between the Sunday culture section of the New York Times and the Goldwater-era National Review--but the article accurately reports Hayek's self-identification as a "liberal" in the 19th century European sense. I won't complain too much that they left out the title of Hayek's essay explaining his political views, when I can tell you it's Why I Am Not a Conservative.

More on Hayek here. Ready to read him? The Road to Serfdom was my first book, but I'd suggest The Constitution of Liberty as a better introduction to his thought.

Labels: emergent phenomena, Hayek

When I checked the front page of today's Onion, I had a sinking feeling when I saw the news brief headline, "White-On-White Violence Claims Life Of Accounts Receivable Supervisor": yes, that's right, Herbert Kornfeld is dead.

The earliest Herbert Kornfeld column in the Onion I found in searching its archives is from November 1997. That sounds about right, slotting into a time in my life when I had 20-something aspirations to hipsterdom coupled with dot-com era superficiality. The premise: a white uber-nebbish accountant (the photo strongly reminds me of Derrick Tate, perhaps with a pinch of Darby Bunch) writes about life in the accounts receivable department of Midstate Office Supply in gangsta idiom. He drives the Nite Rida and wields the Letta Opena of Death against the Accountz Payabo posse, etc. As I said, the perfect thing for modern-day superficiality. I can read a Herbert Kornfeld column while wearing a $60 t-shirt with an ironic message and pretend I'm down with hip-hop culture. But like every Saturday Night Live sketch since Schmitz Gay Beer, Herbert Kornfeld was a one-joke pony that went on too long. The Onion did the right thing in killing him off gangsta style.

BTW, I'll be looking for Irving Weinbaum's arrest in a coming issue. (Scroll about two-thirds down).

Oh, and forget pouring out a forty in memory of Kornfeld. Next time I'm at a hockey game and my team scores a shorthanded goal, I'll say, "Cash Room Bitch Be Having My Shortie."

Labels: The Onion

For violating the one-week rule, Gus requested something not-Blacksburg and preferably positive:

I allow myself to be a child. I sit cross-legged on the floor and pound my fists on the rug, grunting and with my face twisting up. I shift forms and rock forward, dipping my forehead further and further, faster and faster, to the floor. The urge to move intensely fades. I sit on my shins, hands limp on my thighs, and stare into distance. I laugh when I realize that my forms are not ones I had expected from the issues that felt hot to me earlier this day or this week; I welcome the deep wisdom of my subconscious for knowing my priorities better than does my conscious mind.

Another active form; I sit on my side, with most of my weight on my right hip, and pivot. This urge fades and I return to sit quietly on my shins.

While sitting, I visualize myself twisting and rolling forward to lie on my back. I resist for a few moments, but commit to entering the new form. I lie on my back, stare at the ceiling, grin, and twist my hips. The rug reminds me of the carpet in the kitchen of my family's house from my elementary school years. I imagine my mother's presence, standing above, looking down at me with disapproval at my silliness or frustration that my imagination takes me places she can't or won't follow; but between me and her presence stands a pane of emotion-polarizing glass or a wad of emotional cotton. I lie on the floor and grin because these are right for me to do, whether approved or accompanied or not.

(In the now of writing the previous sentence, I feel a loosening in my stomach).

I feel calm and grounded in myself. My tribe tests me by asking about the issues I presented as hot at checkin. The issues remain but drained of heat and more susceptible to the problem-solving abilities of my mind. My tribe asks me to show completion of my forms. I sit cross-legged, drum my fists, and rock forward, but without heat; I enjoy the forms the way I enjoy a repetitive, non-strenuous exercise. We check my session out.

Labels: One Week Rule, TTP

Before Gus tags me for violating the one-week rule....

We went with our friends Paul and Amy to the Frozen Four in St. Louis last weekend. Liz and I also took the off-day to visit my brother and sister-in-law near Springfield, MO. Some quick thoughts:

• Springfield (pop. ca. 200k) looks almost like a real city now, a far cry from it during the '80s. Instead of Waldenbooks in Battlefield Mall and Hooked on Books on S. Campbell, now a Borders and a Barnes & Noble almost face each other across Glenstone.
• We had lunch with Curtis at the finest Mexican restaurant in M'field. And M'field is no longer dry! Have the Baptists been outvoted or the bootleggers switched their business to meth?
• St. Louis has long struck me as the westernmost eastern city. It reminded Amy of Baltimore. There's something to this: a wintry downtown? Dingy brick buildings throughout the city? Anyone have thoughts?
• Maybe I'm spoiled by Toyota Center in Houston, but Scottrade Center in St. Louis seemed very dingy (the concourses are clad in slate blue restroom tile) and dated (the colors under the roof are teal blue and yellow--who decided against Blues blue?). Of course, the arena is, what, 15 years old? Time to tear it down!
• We toured some wineries near Dutzow and Augusta, MO (about 40 miles west of St. Louis). Blumenhof has a red with the taste and mouthfeel of port that Liz and I enjoyed. Plus the hills and winding roads reminded me, in an enjoyable way, of growing up in the Ozarks. That doesn't happen very often!
• Along I-44 westbound around milepost 110, someone a few years ago put up a homemade billboard, "If Cardinals build highways, we'll build stadium." The homemade billboard is still up even though new Busch has been open for a year and, as I understand it, the State of Missouri declined to fund it. (Instead, our hotel and rental car taxes funded it, I reckon).
• Forcing Paul, a baseball hater, to walk past all three accessible sides of new Busch was kinda cruel. Though the statues outside the NW (left field) corner reminded me that baseball has a tradition and history in the US that is only matched in North America by hockey's in Canada.
• Minnesotans tended to recognize and comment favorably on our Houston Aeros sweaters, even though I wore a Fighting Sioux hat for both days of games.
• If a single male were looking for non-skinny German/Scandinavian-American girls, he could have found more than his share.
• North Dakota lost on Thursday to Boston College, 6-4, driving Amy into a funk.
• Worst fan award: the BC fan sitting in Sec. 303, row H, who left the championship game after Michigan State went up 2-1 with 18.7 seconds remaining. A goal in 18.7 seconds is very possible! Plus, it's the championship game! Even if you think the refs and the TV producers are biased against you, stick it out!

Labels: Frozen Four, Missouri

Though all tyrannies are ethically odious, there are gradations within the scale of ethical odiousness based on how far the tyrant and/or his apparatchiks reach into human relations. Any garden variety tyrant will interfere with the political sphere of human relations, in order to safeguard his position, his palace, his mistresses, and his Swiss bank account. But in some, the urge to be an alpha male, a silverback, gives way to the urge to treat his subjects, not as competitors in a status hierarchy, but as pawns to be maneuvered in instantiation of the tyrant's delusions. The suppression of truck and barter, of freedom of conscience, and of scientific inquiry represent a greater tyranny than ballot-box stuffing or indefinite detention of political opponents.

But most odious of all, at least until neuromic engineering will let the tyrant unlock the individual's mind, are those tyrants who interfere with the relationship between parent and child. From Pavlik Morozov to Luke 14:26, the greatest tyrants and aspiring tyrants have understood the most stubborn, mule-headed, anti-Year-Zero human institution is the family. The human tendency to privilege one's genetic relatives over all of the tyrant's other subjects is the stratum of granite underlying the sandstone of society; people will never sacrifice for non-kin at the rate and to the degree that they will sacrifice for the kin (at least until neuromic engineering, of course). Yet the worst kind of tyrant refuses to admit this; refuses to admit people are not blank slates on whom he can write his algorithm.

And for this reason, I condemn as the most vile and odious tyrant the official of the Swedish National Tax Board who issued an edict forbidding Michael and Karolina Tomaro from naming their daughter Metallica.

Labels: One Week Rule