SRF Heavy Industries

Change minds, change reality. That’s what people are saying, right? Human minds create the reality they live in, and a little faith is the most powerful thing in the universe….

It sounds beautiful and hopeful, doesn’t it? We experience the whole of reality — or rather the tiny slice of that whole that we can actually perceive — through our brains’ interpretations of our senses. Doesn’t it make sense that if we change how our minds work, it changes our experience of the world, which is effectively changing the world, at least for us personally, and for anyone else we can convince?

Sure. And cranking up the brightness on our televisions makes the world a brighter place.

Let me give you two scenarios. Two people, who are nearly identical, who have the same dream. They both decided at a young age that they really love dragons and they want them to be real.

Please note: for the duration of this exercise I am leaving out the question of the wisdom of pursuing this dream.

In the first scenario, our dreamer concentrates on the imagery of dragons: what they look like, what various landscapes would look like with dragons included, either flying in the sky or perched on the tops of sturdy buildings or distant mountain peaks. Eventually he learns to see them anywhere and everywhere. Nearby hawks in the sky, patrolling for squirrels and loose house-pets, look like stratospheric dragons. Certain peaks look like perched dragons. Or maybe that entire mountain range is a huge one in repose. Many clouds are also dragons, bringing beauty or fury at whim.

After many years of looking, he discovers he has been surrounded by dragons all along, and now he is happy.

In our second scenario, our dreamer focuses on old stories and legends, descriptions, and tales of their fantastical exploits. A lot of old fables have roots in actuality, even if weak, distant, and thready. She also explores the wealth of data on dinosaurs and the birds that have descended from them evolutionarily. She goes to college and gets degrees in genetics and evolutionary biology, and gets funding to replicate the experiments to reactivate genes on chickens to get them to express teeth and tails. Fifteen years into her plan, she sits stymied, waiting for funding and ethical approval to explore further and research how to create organisms to order, either for commercial purposes or to fill niches in endangered ecosystems where extinctions have left things unbalanced and threaten diversity — for which a dragon, possible within five more years of research and experimentation, might be the perfect answer.

She’s not happy at the moment, and she might never be, depending on funding and legislation, but she’s a lot closer to real dragons than our first dreamer, who has made himself happy by torquing his mind with a near-delusion.

Does it sound like I’m judging? Maybe I’m judging.

It’s easier to make yourself happy by disconnecting from reality and indulging in a little self-delusion, but in my view that’s a little selfish. For instance, maybe other people want dragons to exist too but lack the imagination to be satisfied by insubstantial metaphors. Maybe other people are fairly desperate for dragons to not exist — but will still be impressed and inspired by your success if you pull it off.

Wishcraft, prayer, positive thinking — that’s all just cranking the knobs on the television. And it’s all a little necessary, because 1) it’s good to have your own hand on your knobs, so to speak, and 2) sometimes the setting you thought was normal is just too dark, and 3) why the hell shouldn’t you make yourself happy now and then as long as you have the option?

But seriously, it’s revving the engine while you have the clutch down. You don’t go anywhere no matter how powerful the engine sounds. If you want to move — really move — you have to have your gears engaged with reality. You have to wave the mists and fogs of faith and hope away and see what’s really there, and then you have to do all the tedious work that takes you from where you are — once you can see where you really are — to where you want to go. And being work, you don’t get to be happy until it’s over — which is why it’s awesome to set a lot of little goals and take a lot of breaks so you don’t get tired and succumb to despair.

The universe is huge and functionally infinite in terms of potential and possibility. There isn’t much of a limit to the things that we can make with the components at hand, even if we start out in the direction of what we were firmly convinced was impossible at the outset. But we won’t ever bring our dreams to fruition if we waste all of our energy wishing really hard and begging for our desires to fall into our laps like a dog under God’s dinner table. All we can do that way is make ourselves happy with the idea of crumbs. We short-circuit actual success by finding a way to pretend we already have it.

Engagement of the gears with reality means preparing to be unhappy, preparing to sweat, to get dirty, to earn a few smashed fingers and blisters, and preparing for opposition from people who think your goals are stupid. If you don’t feel that load on the system, then you’re spinning your wheels and playing with the fairies in your head.

Nothing says you won’t get help from surprising directions, but don’t count on it.

[*]

From The prolongation of the lifespan of rats by repeated oral administration of [60] fullerene:

…

3.3. Chronic toxicity and effects of C₆₀ on lifespan of rats

Fig. 3 shows the animal survival and growth. After five months of treatment (M₁₅) one rat treated with water only exhibited some palpable tumours in the abdomen region. Due to the rapid development of tumours (about 4 cm of diameter) this rat died at M₁₇. As rats are known to be sensitive to gavages, we decided to stop the treatment for all rats and to observe their behaviour and overall survival.

All remaining animals survived with no apparent sign of behavioural trouble until M₂₅ (Fig. 3a). At the end of M₂₅ the animals of the control groups showed signs of ulcerative dermatitis with ageing while C₆₀-treated animals remained normal. As the growths of all surviving animals showed no significant difference until M₃₀ (Fig. 3b) indicating that the treatment did not alter their food intake, we continued observing their survival.

At M₃₈ all water-treated control rats were dead (Fig. 3a). This agrees with the expected lifespan of this animal species that is thirty to thirty six months. At this time 67% of olive-oil-treated rats and 100% of C₆₀-treated rats were still alive.

The survival distributions for C₆₀-olive oil-treated rats and controls were estimated by the non-parametric Kaplane–Meier estimator (Fig. 3) and compared by a log-rank estimated test. The estimated median lifespan (EML) for the C₆₀-treated rats was 42 months while the EMLs for control rats and olive oil-treated rats were 22 and 26 months, respectively. These are increases of 18 and 90% for the olive-oil and C₆₀-treated rats, respectively, as compared to controls.

The log-rank test leads to Χ² values (one degree of freedom) of 7.009, 11.302, and 10.454, when we compare water-treated and olive oil-treated rats, water-treated and C₆₀-treated rats, and olive oil-treated and C₆₀-treated rats, respectively. This means that olive oil extends the lifespan of rats with respect to water with a probability of 0.99 while C₆₀-olive oil extends the lifespan of C₆₀-treated rats with a probability of 0.999 and 0.995 with respect to water and olive oil treatments, respectively.

…

So I guess doubling the expected lifespan of a lab rat after seven months of daily dosing counts as no measurable levels of toxicity to C₆₀ buckyballs. Hunh.

[*]

____________
Baati T, et al., The prolongation of the lifespan of rats by repeated oral administration of [60]fullerene, Biomaterials (2012), doi:10.1016/j.biomaterials.2012.03.036

So I’ve been thinking.

Somewhere within a few hundred light years of here is where our sun formed around 4.6 billion years ago, and, with it, the rest of our solar system, condensing out of a bit of molecular-cloud-fluff thought to be about 3000 solar masses of largely hydrogen and helium. Probably a large number of stars are siblings to us in the nebula that was our nursery.

It’s been a while, so we’ve all drifted apart a bit since then. And quite a number of our more massive siblings have already snuffed it, as it were.

I carry a lump of iron in my pocket that’s as old as any of the iron we dig out of the ground. It’s a recent arrival, having landed on Earth back in 1947. I’d say it’s about as old as the iron that makes up the planet Mercury. Or the stuff that makes up Earth’s core. The Sun didn’t make it. It’s not old enough or big enough or dead enough. When Sol finally cools down trillions of years from now, it will be a huge oxygen-frosted diamond. That’s as far at it will ever get, fusion-wise. Any iron we have, and any of the elements heavier than iron, came from the super-huge progenitor stars that blew up to make our nursery nebula — or at least salt the huge molecular cloud with all of the heavy elements we grew up with.

So far so good, right?

When huge stars supernova, some of them, anyway — in particular, the ones that fling out chunks of iron and heavier elements like gold and uranium — they do so in a huge explosion that basically turns them inside-out. As part of the process, they eject a core of super-dense neutronium. Or a black hole.

Current theory says there were around ten supernovae salting the nursery with heavy elements, though I’m not really sure what math backs that up. But, given that, that means there are around ten or so neutron stars and/or black holes whizzing around in our local neighborhood (a hundred million to a billion in the Milky Way galaxy in general), slowly evaporating and/or making themselves a menace and/or generally lurking in the dark, biding their time. We can see them as X-ray sources when they’re feeding. But when they’re not?

In the last five to ten million years, the solar system has been traveling through a cavity in the interstellar medium called the Local Bubble — a space cleared out by yet another supernova or two ten to twenty million years ago. The bubble is about 300 light years across, meaning, basically, there’s even less interstellar medium in here with us to eat than usual. About a tenth of Milky Way average.

So what I’m wondering is what the odds are that there is a dark core of one of our parents/progenitors — or possibly a more massive sibling or neighboring cousin with a much shorter lifespan —  in here with us in the Local Bubble, stalking along behind us, shadowing us like a monster in the closet or under the bed.

[*]

Every word is the title of the story of its meaning. Any story can be unwound like DNA to expose its memetic elements, elements inherited from prior stories, elements gleaned from the experiences of the storytellers, elements mixed in from other stories in the minds of the listeners.

The DNA/genetics model covers this seemingly complex self-replicating, self-modifying and externally influenced chemistry of words nearly perfectly, down to the interplay of sounds and written letters being modeled by the interplay of RNA and DNA.

I’m not going to get bogged down in the details of the metaphor — which I personally suspect is somewhat stronger than a metaphor, but that’s the best word I can bring to bear at the moment without sounding needlessly prophetic — because I’d like what I’m about to say to be accessible to people who 1) haven’t stuffed as much science in their heads as I’ve tried to or 2) prefer to look things up for themselves anyway, and 3) the further I stretch things the more likely I am to include some kind of error that won’t actually impact my message here much but will lead into some kind of pointless argument.

Stories that are told and retold reproduce biologically. Not necessarily sexually, deliberately combining elements from different stories to see what sort of children are viable. Think of it more like a plant that sends out runners, or something quite a bit more primitive that reproduces by splitting off a bud that grows into a nearly identical copy to the original.

I say nearly because there are always environmental factors, viral factors that take genetic material from one source and insert it in another cell, epigenetic interference, and sometimes simple bad luck that can cause transcription errors that get passed down. Those errors are mutations — and if they make the story inconsistent, confusing, irrelevant, or incomprehensible, then they aren’t viable in their hosts. We stop passing them along in favor of different, more relevant, more useful stories. Stories we can understand.

Evolution is a touchy subject in the educational and cultural backwaters of the USA, but some of the pieces of evidence for it seem to be more easily accepted piecemeal. The fossil record (which, if one ignores the time scale of dating methods, provides little to disturb the literal interpretation of the events of Genesis — a particular sticking point) and adaptation due to environmental or ecological pressures (which we can see happen over the course of a single lifetime in species with an annual reproduction cycle) are entirely sufficient for the purposes of analogy, given that I’m thinking of only the last ten thousand years or so anyway.

Written literature is a fossil record. Without a living sample of the culture it was produced and living in, an enormous amount of the story is subject to conjecture — whether people took it seriously, how certain sections were interpreted, the meanings of individual words that have since fallen into disuse or changed meaning entirely, missing pieces we have no idea are missing because nothing refers to them — and since stories are open-ended, you can’t exactly look at a piece, declare it’s a jawbone, and reconstruct what the rest of the animal looked like.

Prior to writing, stories were soft-bodied pre-Cambrian things, transmitted only via oral traditions, preserved by rote memorization, subject to easy embellishment and on-the-fly editing. They weren’t completely without structure, being supported by mnemonic devices like repetition, rhyme, rhythm, and musical and dance accompaniment, but they were much, much softer. Even so, a story, sometimes even the introduction of a single new word, was the magic that would change a listener’s mind, and the most powerful and useful ones were preserved.

Anyway, I had a point when I started laying down this foundation, and the point was to address a lie I’ve been seeing circulating. I’ll get to that in a minute.

But stories drift, either oral or written. Written stories undergo massive changes any time they are translated, every time the language is updated to make it accessible to a new generation due to drift in grammar and the meanings of the words of which the stories are comprised. Stories change in impact and undertone when events happen that cast the depictions of events in the stories in a new light. Stories change when people name their children after people in the stories, and those children act in ways inconsistent with the recorded participants.

If you keep careful records, and also keep careful records of as many cultural and contextual details as possible, you can preserve very old versions of the stories. If you analyze a number of old stories and old fragments in the literary fossil records in terms of the elements those stories have in common, you can reach even further back and reconstruct even older versions of the stories, though you run the risk of including errors and the taint of modern thinking — or, more frequently, just not understanding what you’ve recovered because you have insufficient context even for the popular meaning of the words you’ve translated.

Even taking all of that into consideration, people with a mind to do so, and the proper resources, can track the elements of a story back thousands and thousands of years. And the particular story I have in mind is the story of El Elyon of the priest Melchizadek (Malki Tzadek) of Jewish and Christian faiths, Illiyyah of the Samaritans, and Allah of the Muslims, and so on into more modern denominations. All of these faiths pin their beliefs to their written materials, and all of these stories go back to characters of the same names, performing the same actions. Abram (renamed Abraham) and Sarah, Ishmael and Isaac, Moses (Musa) and Aaron (Harun), Noah and the flood.

Elements of the stories above appear in the fossil record predating the earliest work viewed as a core to a modern religion as well. Noah’s flood and ark belonged to Utnapishtim of Akkadian/Sumerian/Babylonian stories. And there are other memetic markers that show common ancestry elsewhere, almost certainly hinting at familial relations among the religions of the area: The Bull of Heaven of Gilgamesh seems remarkably similar to the rampage of Egypt’s Hathor. Al-Khidr of the Muslim faith bears elements of the Sumerian Apkallu/Apgal fish-men sages that gave the old kings the me, the tokens and concepts that are the foundations of law and civilization. Roman Jove/Jupiter has been linked by name and taste for animal sacrifice to the god of the Jews as well, and arguments have been made that Abraham mentioned above is preserved in Hindu tradition as Brahma. I could list these markers for hours and hours, some sketchier than others, and not get to the end of them.

Fun though that might be, I need to address the lie I mentioned previously, and that lie is that Allah of the Muslim faith is not the same as the god of Jewish- and Christian-derived faiths. The strife of Judeo-Christian faiths against Islam is a fight between brothers according to both traditions, between Ishmael and Isaac, extended through three thousand years, over land and birthright. It is not a fight over whose god is the true god, because they are the same god. That has never been in question.

The people who spread that lie only do so to keep the conflict hot and fervent so as to keep up the price of oil, preying on the gullibility of the ignorant and convincing them there’s not just a threat to supply of critical resources, but to their very way of life. That’s bullshit. The threat is not even to the stored wealth of these people, but to the stream that brings them even more money, to the repeat of the $40 billion they made in record profits last year, not counting the $4 billion they received in tax breaks. I don’t know what your personal definition of evil is, but I’d hope it includes people that would throw gasoline on someone else’s fire to keep up the price of gasoline.

These people know they are all children of Abraham. If they all worship God differently, to the extent that they squabble among themselves to the point of killing each other over which way is the right way and which prophets are the most revered, I reserve the right to lose respect for the whole bunch who thinks Cain’s murder of Abel needs endless replication. Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac, Esau and Jacob…. The stories they all share are rife with the struggle of brother against brother for God’s favor, and the results of that struggle, and yet some learn nothing from that. It’s sickening — but nowhere near as sickening as those godless outsiders who would exploit those scuffles for their own profit and drag the rest of the world into a living hell to get it, insulated, so they think, by a cocoon of flammable money.

This will not end well. But you can at least know who the real enemy is.

[*]

Behold:

[*]

Continuing previous lines of thought:

9 The name of the fourth is Penemue*: he discovered to the children of men bitterness and sweetness;
10 And pointed out to them every secret of their wisdom.
11 He taught men to understand writing, and the use of ink and paper.
12 Therefore numerous have been those who have gone astray from every period of the world, even to this day.
13 For men were not born for this, thus with pen and with ink to confirm their faith;
14 Since they were not created, except that, like the angels, they might remain righteous and pure.
15 Nor would death, which destroys everything, have effected them;
16 But by this their knowledge they perish, and by this also its power consumes them.

1 Enoch** 68: 9-16 (context: http://www.johnpratt.com/items/docs/enoch.html#68 )

There are plenty of references that conflate Enoch’s twenty-one deans of the University of the Fallen to the seven fish-men sages of Akkadian/Sumerian Apkallu/Abgal traditions, possibly with good reason. Stories mutate and evolve with the cultures that host them. As the settlements of humanity split and disperse, and the languages in which they are recorded drift apart, the stories that sustain those cultures also diverge, allowing for the application of an evolutionary model. Attempts to reverse-engineer the original stories is exactly as useful (and accurate, which is to say not very) as the attempt to reconstruct a proto-IndoEuropean language from modern spoken languages on Indo-European-derived cultures. But the constructs, modern though they must be, still have some utility despite the taint of modern thinking.

Antediluvian dates are plagued with the same problem that exists with any of the proto-Semitic cultures, namely the confusion between months and years as measures that makes Adam and Methusaleh’s lifespans have numbers in the 900s instead of 70s and list Noah as 400 when he started construction on his ark instead of, say, in his 30s.

Correcting for that, Sumer’s Adapa of the sages could be at least vaguely contemporaneous with the somewhat better documented Imhotep of the Egyptians, give or take a few hundred years.

[*]
__________
* “Penemue” is rumored to mean “the inside”, but I find nothing but assertions, no references to any languages in which this is the case. In the words of Wikipedia, [citation needed].

** translated from Ethiopic by Richard Laurence, London, 1883 (asserted by John P. Pratt, wealth of commentary on science, chronology and various flavors of divine apologetics, http://www.johnpratt.com/ )

First of all, let’s get one thing straight. Let’s make it perfectly clear. Copyright is a restriction on the fundamental right of free speech.

Unspool the word copyright into the sentence it represents at its fundamental level and just look at it: “You can’t say that because I am the person who gets to say that. I said it first.”

Let those words sink in for a moment and try to understand why it is that plagiarism, as it stands, is not exactly a crime. Imagine that the words in question might be an important fact impacting public safety. Imagine that the words could be an unpopular but strongly held opinion. How tight a grip do you want to have around people’s throats in those situations? And those are just a couple off the top of my head.

But I’m going to give you a new example to play with. Here is my newly created unpublished poem, “Toulouse-Lautrec”:

Toulouse-Lautrec

     Toulouse-Lautrec

          is a

               wheeliemabobbin.

… and that’s (C) me, Laszlo Xalieri, right this very instant. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED (C) 2012. Explicitly stated.

From this instant on, I can write some fairly unclever software to do a search on Google and Bing and, hell, it looks like Lycos is still a going concern, so there too, and a few other places just to be frighteningly thorough, and have automatically generated DMCA take-down notices posted in comments where allowed, forwarded to page owners, site webmasters, ISPs and carriers, and mailed to the addresses of administrators and technical contacts for domains, etc., for every URL that seems to yield the result.

Also I have a bit of a conundrum. Google, et al., can produce the entire text as a search result, so they get one too. Except if I do that, I can’t find my plagiarist perps to prosecute. That’s a tough one. I’ll have to come back to that.

As a further point of note, wheeliemabobbin is a terribly obscene word, defined as “a terribly obscene word that can never be weakened by overuse or twisted into a lighthearted term of endearment, only barely permissible in serious works of art with specific cultural relevance or academic application because if it is ever expressed directly it is automatically Hate Speech and/or Fightin’ Words.”

Now let’s say you actually feel that Toulouse-Lautrec is a wheeliemabobbin. And you feel it strongly. There is no more straightforward way to express the opinion than the sentence that I have, with much labor and aesthetic care, arranged into the components of my beautiful poem that, for it to have the impact that I desire, no one is permitted to see until it appears in 2012’s third quarterly edition of Hate Speech Quarterly Literary Journal, to which I have sold six-month exclusive English-language/North American copyright and two-year non-exclusive digital syndication so they can feature it on their website, scheduled for first publication in print in Late August. My copyright allows me to obsessively squash your opinion with the might of all of the lawyers I can bring to bear, and, upon publication, the revered HSQ can join in the fight with presumably even bigger guns. They can possibly even join in early to protect the value of their $35 annual subscriptions.

How screwed up is that?

If you can point to a constitutional right, to a Fair Use clause, or, well, whatever point of precedent that favors your case, you can try to fight. But I can punish you with the fight itself, with making you find and hire your own expensive lawyers or pro bono advocates from any of a number of fine organizations, and make you pit your right to hold your repugnant opinion against my right to earn $50 for selling a crappy poem (and also six free issues with my poem in it and a promise of pro-rated residuals with all of the other creators featured in that issue if print sales top 10,000 copies or site revenues top $50,000 any month in ad sales when my content is featured) in the sawdust-choked cock-fighting pits of civil law.

Welcome to America, where the most expensive and best-fed steroid-hopped cocks always win. That’s just one of the ways justice is for sale in our fine country. There are many others.

There are no real guidelines for protecting a valid expression of opinion. There is just an overworked judge somewhere, exhausted by hypertension and the recent diagnosis of a suspicious lump, going with his gut on whether to throw out a case he personally thinks is a wheeliemabobbin in a long string of wheeliemabobbins that just won’t go away. If you’re lucky.

Imagine how it must go if content publishers have nearly unlimited amounts of money on hand to tip the scales.

The DMCA is a travesty in a setup where we desperately try to hold to the ancient principles of due process and the assumption of innocence, suppressing your right to voice an opinion and earn money on your own hard work without a judge telling you you have to stop. Malicious prosecution is rife and goes unprosecuted. SOPA/PIPA are horrendous, for the same reason. So is the secretly developed and lobbyist-bribe-greased ACTA. On the surface those things merely allegedly protect the profit-streams of content publishers, but actually it only serves to make the law firms with the contracts for prosecuting alleged copyright violations extremely wealthy so they can pay lobbyists even more to grease the tracks. Where lobbying is legal, it’s just a huge positive feedback loop dumping money on the side of the scale where things are already hugely out of balance. You can’t tell me that’s right.

Copyright is important — and I say this as a content creator — but it clearly has to be secondary to the right of free speech and other matters of public concern. It is critical that prosecution of copyright adhere to the principles of due process. It is tremendously important that we work hard to shut down every instance where justice is for sale.

It’s clear that we need to address the issue of copyright from scratch, especially since our society trades so heavily on free information exchange, so that every last person retains their fundamental rights. And I say that as a person with rights, one of which is the right of free speech.

[*]

I’m going to cut through a lot of crap about intellectual property, copyright theory, and online piracy today.

The purpose of copyright and patent law is to guarantee the creator of a piece of creative work — artwork, a story, an invention, a method of production, etc. — a suitable period of time to make a profit on his or her genius, should he or she wish to do so, before the work would be released into the public domain so everyone could make the best use of it. Once upon a time, twenty years seemed like a good number. Later, this time was expanded to be the lifetime of the creator — just in case the creator really only had one good idea in his or her lifetime and couldn’t also hold down a day job. Incorporated entities began to be able to get locks on intellectual properties and used copyright and patent law to try to ensure they could recoup the investments of research and development. And individual copyrights began to expand past the death of the creators to ensure income for estates and families that wanted a free ride on dead ancestors’ ideas. And corporations lobbied for longer and longer extensions, basically buying themselves longer periods of profitability without having to actually #^@&ing work for it.

So now it’s kind of out of hand.

Understand I’m a writer — an author, a content creator. I’m also a smidge of an inventor, a programmer, a systems and processes designer, capable of churning out buckets of intellectual property — some tiny percentage of which might actually be worthwhile enough to spin into a modest income. I may actually be a literal genius, but I’m no Richard Feynman, Stephen King, or Dean Kamen. Maybe I’m too lazy, undermotivated, underfinanced, and/or undisciplined to compete on just the raw naked power of my brain. But I’m officially in the market and that’s where my opinions come from.

Think about the word “piracy” for just a moment. Just long enough to realize that it’s a dramatic and overblown term that in no way actually describes, literally or metaphorically, what happens when someone makes a copy of material in a way that violates copyright principles. Okay, that’s enough.

We used to have a term, “plagiarism”, that did the job just fine. Strange and hard to pronounce and spell, perhaps, but accurate. For discussions like this, I prefer accuracy to drama and emotional manipulation. That’s my preference, but I know it’s a losing battle to try to take a cool word like pirate from your mouth and replace it with something prosaic like plagiarist.

When someone plagiarizes the work of a creator, they take a piece of work, copy it, and present it as their own work. Possibly they put their name down as the creator and use it to unfairly add to their glory, at the expense of fame and recognition that ought to be due the actual creator. More often they just offer copies for sale and keep any money that would actually be due the creator. Or even more frequently they offer free download — and make their money from selling advertising on a site that will be undoubtedly more popular than any site that charges actual money for a copy of the work. No actual cutlasses or belaying pins or swinging from any rigging occurs — though I kind of wish it did.

The only reason piracy has become the official term of endearment for the process is that a cartel of wealthy corporations that are the middlemen between content creators and consumers want to keep the traditional punishment for piracy — hanging — in the minds of the public as suitable for the perpetrators. And it’s not like those corporations actually pay the creators a living wage for turning their works into the bulk of what hits the market. Teachers and firemen make more money than the average Hollywood scriptwriter. Less than five percent of novelists can even dream of quitting their day jobs. There are zillions of performing musicians and songwriters that can’t even cover the expenses of traveling and taking days off from paying work to set up somewhere and play for an hour or two. Corporate labels, Hollywood production companies, and publishing conglomerates do all the work of harvesting talent, contracting work, producing, promoting, distributing, marketing, etc., and they are the ones that reap the huge bulk of the profits. Because otherwise there is no way for a creator to market themselves. Until recently.

These huge corporations are the ones that claim they lose some of those profits when their highly-polished works are offered for sale or download by people who pay them nothing for the privilege. And while that may certainly be true to some extent, it’s not the situation as they paint it.

Most of the people who download copyrighted works do so because they don’t have the spare money to pay for it. So they wouldn’t be paying for it anyway. No money lost. Many of the people who download copyrighted works realize that their downloaded version is not as high-quality as a commercial version and will actually buy a copy later anyway — assuming it wasn’t crap. Nearly all of the people who download books or movies or music will talk about it with their friends if they actually enjoyed it — and that can actually generate a huge amount of sales.

“Pirate” networks provide a ton of expensive services for a creator for free. Distribution, marketing, market analysis, critical reviews and discussion. If you are unsigned — independent producer, not signed with any production house or label, small press or independently publishing — the pirate networks can offer you critical distribution and exposure and feedback you’d never be able to afford. You could actually even get people to start paying you money for your work directly, if you swing it right, and undercut the huge corporate middleman network that would otherwise only pay you a pittance per copy sold. Pirate networks put content creators in direct competition with huge corporate distributors.

And that is why those corporations are paying huge amounts of money to lobbyists to push through SOPA- and PIPA-like legislation. Also please pay attention to the fact that they are completely circumventing the assumption of innocence and due process. They want to shut down entire sites, one tiny portion of which might be accused of infringing, by mere accusation, and maybe you can get your site turned back on if you can prove you weren’t actually committing a crime. Despite the argument about what is actually illegal and what might arguably not need to be illegal, giving a conspiracy of corporations an immediate off-switch to silence unsigned content creators is an abomination.

The United States has a extensive and completely legal web of “pirate networks” that have been operating for hundreds of years, called “libraries”, that have been trying to provide the same utility as, say, PirateBay, but, for some reason, they don’t have the funding to be the community-embedded fountains of ideas and cultural enrichment that they were designed to be. I’m not exactly sure how they’ve fallen out of favor. Perhaps it’s too socialist an idea to fly in today’s unbridled capitalist and corporation-dominated society. But if we want to solve the “pirate” problem, fixing the “library” situation to be remotely effective as a 21st century institution is the only sensible path.

Just for an exercise, go back through the last several paragraphs and substitute “public library” for “pirate network” and see how well it works.

[*]

I have a policy. Well, a rule of thumb. A little rule — one of two — to help me decide whether I should do something that seems like it would be fun. The second rule (not that they really have an order — new fun should try to pass both) is “Avoid scenarios that would be difficult to explain to the paramedics, should they be required.” The first one is “Avoid scenarios that are likely to end in a hail of bullets.”

Beginning to rethink that one. Obviously some things are worth getting shot over.

Politically, people always mistake me for a Democrat. I just kind of shrug. I remember Clinton as well as I remember Reagan and the Bushes. Obama has made certain promises but hasn’t made it the right kind of priority to get follow through. See, what I’m really for is fairness, and justice, and human rights and civil rights.

Let me tell you, Republicans and Libertarians, et al., if that makes you think I’m a Democrat, that’s a wake-up call.

So.

If you were to ask me what the biggest remaining problem on Earth was, I’d say bigotry. Let’s talk about bigots for a minute.

A bigot is the sort of person who assumes that he or she personally has value — is a good person because of personal accomplishments, because of the values they embrace, because of family or family history or culture, or any of a number of things. Then this person assumes that people without those qualities, people dissimilar to himself or herself, are of lesser value. Those people are animalized, demonized, to make the bigot feel better about hating them. The bigot then acts like human rights and civil rights and compassion are something scarce, something affected by rules of economy, and that the objects of bigotry are in dangerous competition for the scarce resource of humaneness and humanity. Being animals, they don’t take up any precious humanity resources, like consideration and respect.

And don’t think the bigot just picks one other kind of person to demonize. They have a list. You hear about what’s on the top of their list mostly. But trust me on this: if you’re not an accepted member of a bigot’s family or close circle of friends, a person who worships the god of their choice in the way they do, you are probably on that list somewhere. And you’ll see it in their eyes the instant they are forced by protocol to shake hands with you.

You can see the fallacy there, right? And the perversity. There is no scarcity, no expense of supply and demand, for acting like a decent human being. The bigot acts like an animal to a human being who is different from himself or herself and feels justified because he or she thinks the other person is scarcely better than an animal.

You see how that’s at the root of the horribleness, don’t you? People only screw they other guy. Maybe that other guy is everybody, for a certain class of human monster. But usually it’s only black people. Illegal immigrants. Gay people. Jewish people. Arabs. Muslims. Catholics. Poles. Serbs. Gypsies. Irish. Italians. Southerners. White trash. Ignorant people. Godless savages. Athiests. New Agers and pagans. Transexuals. Gingers. Rich people. Educated people. Ad #^@&in’ infinitum. Seriously, there’s no end to the places where people feel justified in drawing a line between themselves and anybody else.

And it distorts vision. For instance, there’s been a lot of noise from current Republican presidential candidates about not wanting to take money from taxpayers (i.e., “white people”) to help black people on Welfare. Meanwhile, back in reality, there are more white people on Welfare than there are black people. And it’s a squabble over whose children deserve feeding. Whose grandparents deserve heating for the winter. I’ve never seen such bullshit — especially not from people who ought to be trying to compete for our respect.

And this thing about limiting voting. That’s some scary nastiness. Who is it again that doesn’t deserve to vote? Poor people? People who have been so marginalized by society that they haven’t needed ID for anything else? People who have trouble understanding complicated instructions handed out only in English? People in demographics that are far more likely to vote Democrat than Republican? That’s some bullshit right there. How the hell can you be for liberty and freedom and be on board with restricting who can vote?

Take a look at that picture at the top of this post. There’s a poor bastard troweling up the clotted blood of a man who was shot in the face for the nerve of speaking out for the civil rights — including the right to vote — of people that those in power were trying to exclude. Are we down to that again? Is it time for someone to get shot, nearly fifty years later, to show that we haven’t learned a damned thing?

Whatever. Thanks to the NDAA and associated legislative drivel, imprisoning people the government doesn’t like, indefinitely without trial, in the same kinds of concentration camps we used against American citizens of Japanese descent back during WWII is now legal. All it takes is for someone in power to name you — which does not take a trial — a sympathizer with some group that the same government has also arbitrarily decided is an enemy. It’s obvious we haven’t learned a damned thing. It’s all ridiculous US-versus-Them, More-for-Me-None-for-You bullshit based on the mistaken notion that there isn’t enough humanity to go around.

I’m officially too disgusted to continue this.

[*]

It’s been a right fucker of a decade.

I’m not particularly one to put too much stock in the raw numerology of damp rocks spinning around incandescent balls of hydrogen other than the fact that we’re still unavoidably biologically tied to certain cycles of cold and heat, light and dark — especially in the face of larger trends of general darkening of outlook and impending and ongoing upheavals. Some cycles are longer than others, and, well, less cyclical. Random-seeming.

Despite everything there were amazing high-points in the past ten years. Enough to point out that the incessant grinding of the lows weren’t enough to tank it all and make me wish I could pitch it out of history altogether. Not that that’s ever a wise move. If you forget all the bad stuff, you forget to stick it to the bastards that made it bad. And that’s especially bad if you were personally one of those bastards. And, in this case, I’m certain I was one. To a number of people. And also to myself.

Nothing unforgivable. Eventually. I hope.

Because of the numerology, people put a great store by resolutions for self-improvement, by coming out of the dark of the year with positive momentum, by having someone nearby to kiss for luck on the stroke of midnight. For luck. For a good omen for the next year. I can’t fully deny the raw psychology of omenry, even for myself, but I know firsthand, directly, how plastic and capricious time streams are. I can take a moment and stretch it out over hours. Weeks. Months, even. That’s not really a peculiar talent, but my awareness of it might be. Hard to say.

It’s my resolution to make the moment of the fracture of midnight between New Year’s Eve, 2011, and New Year’s Day, 2012, stretch and dissolve into the bulk of 2012, so that, at any point in linear consensus time, I can experience a facet of that temporal infinitesimal and expend it how I wish, on behalf of myself or anyone else present, up to the start of that very same moment next year, or maybe even beyond. I will carry those facets on me at all times, in a secret place, to be whipped out whenever a stored instant of indulgence or generosity or unbridled whim is required, spare time to be allowed to run alongside but outside of normal time, distilled and spiced and bottled and dispensed however I wish, free of judgment.

You’re free to do the same yourself, if you can figure out how.

[*]