3/24/03



In his monumentally misunderstood classic work "The Prince," Nicolo Machiavelli made an observation that has stood in good stead for me since I first read it as a cynical teenager (I was ahead of my time -- cynicism is rapidly coming in as the new irony, whilst irony is being downgraded to a mass market consumable via "The Simpsons" and reality tv). In the midst of his ever-so-practical treatise on How To Be The Man, good ol' Unca Nikkie contrasted ideas of predestination vrs. free will, the contradictory notions that a person's fate was "in the stars" or in their own command. His conclusion? An even-handed fifty-fifty split. Half of what you are, birth, rank, talent, luck and all that, is bequeathed at the behest of the gods, but the other half is up to you.

O'course, you can always ask if initiative and persistence are themselves aspects of innate temperament beyond your ability to generate, but that's Oroborean logic-chopping, really. Nicolo's Estimate makes as much sense as any other Bayesian-esque statistical fabulation in the absence of any hard data. If you really don't know and can't find out, what harm is there is giving yourself as much of an edge as your genes or the Powers That Be or some trifling diety?

But all this is of cold comfort to me in my shame. My garden died.

It's a truism of hippiedippie holistic medicine that working with living things is a source of healing energy. Tending to growing, changing, vivacious specimens, so the argument goes, gives you a direct channel not only to their chi but to your own nurturing and engendering powers. Last spring, as Sandahbeth underwent a veritable gauntlet of surgeries and infirmities, I decided to take up the gentle art of suburban horticulture as a means of revving up the old vital forces. My enthusiasm was sparked by the success I'd had the previous winter transplanting three trees from our brick-adobe-and-glacial-moraine front yard to the more arable back slope. With the coming of their riotous vernal foliage and blooming, I felt confident that I could make a go of vegetable raising.

My confidence also sprang from my heritage. While my father's side of the family ran to ministers, musicians, sailors, city planners and in one case a sheep commissioner, my mother's was pure salt o' the earth plow pusher. My grandpa worked his way through college farming a year, schooling a year, heel and toe right through to his teacher's certificate, at which point he apparently kissed the good earth goodbye and ended up as an uber-principal, married to one of his former students. But only apparently -- in later life they retired to a charming little orange ranch in Spring Valley, California, selling lugs to passing tourists and local groceries and practicing good old midwest farm virtues like canning and composting. That ranch was a source of many unique childhood memories for me, like watching decapitated chickens gallop madly around the yard before leaping back into the wheelbarrow into which they'd been flung.

My mother, too, true to her breeding, was an avid hobby gardener, raising up whole dynasties of zucchini and pumpkins in the backyard. She enlisted my sister's involvement, and family slides may still be found showing her proudly holding tomatoes sporting protuberant -- uh, noses. Yeah, that's it, noses. I, however, never cottoned to the process, believing, like our friend China, that the chief product of gardens was weeds, those being the plants I interacted with most.

Still, I reasoned, with background like that, how could I fail? Plants need dirt, sun, air and water. How hard can this stuff be?

Well, fill in the blanks. Harder than a) I thought b) it looked c) deleting spam d) snot. Okay, not so easy. Mostly, what it appears I lacked was patience and experience. The spring planting went well enough, including the construction of a lovely transom and planter box arrangement in the front yard to be seeded with climbing roses and grapevines, plus a flower and herb bed in the back, along with the construction of several hills of corn and squash. Seedlings and seeds sprouted satisfactorily in the spring rains. I sat back in contentment to await the harvest.

Then the drought came. It just stopped raining. In Seattle, yet. With no real notion of proper watering techniques, I alternately ignored and drowned my pathetic little crop. Then we went away for a week and the person we deputized as waterbearer couldn't get the hose working. By the time we got back it was midsummer and Saharan, and I had other duties to attend to. And the garden withered and croaked. Even one of the transplanted trees succumbed to the inattention and inclement weather. Salt of the earth? More like salted earth in my case.

Kinda low tragedy, really -- I'd fallen into a notion that watering every single day was something of a waste, without really knowing much about the needs of the green and growing. Weren't plants supposed to take care of themselves? Partly, that notion had been sustained by the plum trees in the yard, which prolixed with fruit each year like clockwork without undue attention. But even the plums were meager last harvest, spurring me to resolve to a more thorough watering schedule this coming season.

But not a garden. Even in the face of war and turbulence, I'm taking a year off from vegetable obsession. I'm beginning to understand that just because green thumbs run in the family, that doesn't mean they've caught up with me (brave image, that). I seem to be the beneficiary of the more lingual/abstract side of my heritage, those preachers and teachers and musical prodigies, and apparently somewhere a mechanic or two as well. My self-taught engineer hobby-writing music-dabbling father seems a more accurate precursor to my genome than my office-managing squash-growing mom.

So, fine -- maybe I can't grow tomatoes on a fencepost, but I can build the fence. It's a happy life when you can be thankful for being what you are.


3/17/03


Boy I thought I was pissed off at the Law before. I wasn't pissed off.

Now I'm pissed off.

The recent spectacle of a high court trying to determine the legitimacy of giving a prisoner convicted of murder, sentenced to death and driven mad by years on Death Row drugs to make him sane enough to legally execute could effortlessly make the Top Ten Ironic Atrocities of Justice Of All Eternity list, right up there with bombing villages into the stone age to save them from Communist aggression.

It's not just the outcome of the hearing, whatever it might be (appears to lean towards medication as a "required" action by the state to keep the prisoner healthy until they snuff him) that veers into the realm of the gaga. It's the Kafkaesque nature of the inquiry itself, the whole outrageously tendentious web of suppositions and justifications that it brings to view, vile and squirming under the marble edifice of jurisprudence.

We'll just put aside the criminal and the crime. The likelihood of the prisoner's guilt and the fairness of his trial is not of concern. Nor is the death penalty itself, gruesome though it may be. No, the problem with all this is the logic, the theory behind the whole legal drama.

Usually, this is my cue to run screaming from a topic -- the point at which it turns into a Professional Issue. I'm not a legal scholar, I don't play one on TV and I don't intend to. But, by the same token, I haven't swallowed any camels or strained any gnats lately and my own personal layman's perspective might actually have some use, given that lawyers have to twist their brains into Mobius strips just to pass the bar exam.

What I heard about the case on National Paranoid Radio suggested that the principle behind getting the convict straight before the Big Sleep was that he needed to be "aware of the nature of his punishment," that it was cruel and unusual (C/U, a brand new perversion even now sprouting a hundred dreadful websites) to execute a person too crazy to know why they're being strapped down.

Now wait just one monkeypunking minute here -- the accepted principle is that they're executing this guy to punish him? As they used to say in the 20th century, excuse me? Okay, okay, it's called capital punishment, duh. But words do have meanings, at least in my head, and doesn't punishment has the connotation of behavior correction?

Well, according to my trusty 1969 Random House dictionary (the only thing I ever got from my 4.0 in high school that meant shite), no. It describes punishment as "a penalty for some offense." And o'course "penalty" comes back as "a punishment...for violation of some law..." Gee, I haven't played Find the Circular Definition since, well, high school.

So basically we're killing this guy to mete out his moral comeuppance, to give him whatfor. Now there's a high concept. Devoid of any other justification -- deterrence? Naw. Rehabilitation? Are you kidding? Economics? Cheaper to keep 'er -- we're here as stand-ins for God, performing the religious action of demonstrating the consequences of sin. So much for separation of church and state.

The last time I went down this rocky road I concluded that we needed more slop in our definitions to counteract the Zoroastrian absolutism of criminal justice. Moral judgements may feel good if you're dishing them out, but they don't do much to keep society stable. But this particular barnsmell brings the whole notion of capital punishment into question.

If the purpose of capital punishment is to repay a crime, what difference does it make if the recipient is "sane"? Under the definitions of the system he's still guilty, and it's his guilt that's being punished, not his mind. It splits the prisoner into two distinct parts: the Criminal and the Human, with a different treatment prescribed for each. The Criminal is an animal to be put down, but the Human is a creature of reason and reflection to be treated with dignity and respect. Despite efforts and decisions to the contrary, there's no way to reconcile these two views within the scope of a death sentence. If it's cruel to execute a madman, how much crueler is it to off someone who's clinically sane? It smacks of the old joke about using an alcohol wipe to administer a lethal injection.

Perhaps what's afoot here is the crosshatch of two distinct streams of Western thought -- Christian dualism vrs. Humanistic compassion. Because the law, like so many other social institutions, is chockablock full of legacy code -- leftovers like some 1873 ordinance against wearing suspenders on Sunday in Mosshump Montana that shows up in the Ain't It Weird columns in supermarket tabloids -- legislations of widely differing origins reside butt to belly in the majestic edifice of Due Process. On the one hand we have the quasi-Bibical Thou Shalt Not Suffer A (insert crime of choice here) To Live absolutism of capital punishment, on the other the kinder, gentler tradition recently invoked in this particular numbskull decision.

To quote the illustrious me, here comes trouble in a three piece suit. Any hacker will be happy to expostulate at lengths resembling 19th century presidential speeches regarding the dangers of conflicting code in anything remotely resembling a practical application. Can you say "crash"? See, that wasn't so hard.

And that ain't all. The disputes within the foundations of law are only a symptom of the overall culture wars going on all over the West, forces of ancient partisanisms and binary morality rising from their coffins like so many zombies to assault the fruits of that hateful secular abomination, the Enlightenment. The medieval world of ism's and schisms, of antipopes and scholasticism and Clydesdale-mounted knights in sand-polished armor, here to save the souls of man from demon rationality. Oh, and by the way, your danegeld's way overdue. It's a clash of civilizations, all right, but not quite like they're spinning it in Washington.

It may be that the Dark Ages Redux bit is the result of the unwieldiness of democracy and rationality next to the utility and efficiency of dictatorial robotschaft. When putsch comes to shove, there's nothing like an army of mindless soldier-ants with an overlord calling the shots to kick some righteous ass. It remains to be seen whether democracy and rationality can come up with a counterpunch.

For all our sakes, I hope so.


3/10/03

Time once again for Wrequired Web Wreading, smart ideas from smart people presented smart n easily on the good ol' Smart And Easy Internet. Chow down on some way cool brainfood and Be Amazed!

Dancing with Systems -- Donella Meadows
http://www.wholeearthmag.com/ArticleBin/447.html

Conversational Terrorism --
http://www.proft.org/tips/conv-terror.html

The Problem with Music -- Steve Albini
http://www.negativland.com/albini.html

An incomplete Manifesto for Growth --
http://www.brucemaudesign.com/manifesto/manifesto.html

The Dazzling Dark -- Prof. John Wren-Lewis
http://www.nonduality.com/dazdark.htm

Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity In Words of Four Letters or Less --
http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/al.html

Heaviest Element Discovered --
http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/000953.html

World of Ends: What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else --
http://www.worldofends.com/


3/3/03 (co-o-ol!)

I've lived a life of spiritual -- okay, "adventure" is probably too strong a word, but "frolic" doesn't taste quite right either. I've had a high old spiritual time of it, more or less. Unlike many notable colleagues of my generation, I came by my particular form of esoteric practice (mostly) naturally, not pharmaceutically, but I've been none the less ardent, considering.

Of late, though, middle aged despondency coupled with a certain weary wisdom has begun to erode the surety I once felt in some sort of extradimensional apparatus lurking behind the half-veiled hints I saw around me. While I can still assume the mental posture of willing collusion with magick, at other times I see the disorder and randomness of the world and sink into existential numbness, grimly certain that perception is a dirty trick played on us by our own brains and that there is nothing in the physical realm but Democritus's "Atoms and the Void."

One of the spears of logic puncturing my dainty divine balloon has been recent research into altered states of consciousness involving the direct stimulation of the brain. After determining that yogis displayed increased alpha wave activity while meditating, technoseekers were quick to latch on to various "alpha pumping" devices intended to jack up the nervous system. But it took meddling neurologists spicing up a routine epilepsy procedure with a little direct stimulation of brain loci to really add the broken bottle to the barroom brawl. They found a node within the cortex that, when lightly shocked with the patient conscious, resulted in their immediate perception of Blake's Universe in a Grain of Sand -- the vision of the unity of all time and all space that is generally accepted as the Big Apple of meditational goals, the one only the really advanced guys receive. Just to add insult to injury, another set of meddlers found a spot that stimulates out of body experiences -- the higher the voltage, the more intense the episode.

It doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to extrapolate these findings into a complete No Sech Animal theory of supernatural experiences, a universal wet blanket on the fires of metaphysics general and specific. Mix with Nihilistic Self Interest for a dee-lishus Oblivion Cocktail. Nummy!

Well, what's a poor urban shaman to do? You could always get critical-thinking on their asses, haul out all the alternate scenarios and points of order that scientific lawyers use to fend off unpleasant likelihoods. Besides, it's not certain that what these experiments display is really a physiological cop-out for naysaying skeptics. Just demonstrating the existence of a receptor site could be in and of itself significant -- eyes and ears are there for a reason, and you can stimulation people to see lights and hear sounds, even recall entire memory sequences, too, but that doesn't mean that all light and sound and memory is illusion, now does it? Or not -- we also experience vertigo and synesthesia, both illusory results of nervous system malfunction with no "real" counterparts.

And with that, we bump smack into the unmentionable E Word, epistemology (oops, I said it again), ready to wander off into the dull intricacies of Like, How Do You Know You Know Anything, Man? (*takes deep hit off bong*). Doh, the philosophy of religion, my nemesis. Follow that particular trail of breadcrumbs any farther and you end up stumbling over the burnt-out campfire of the Neoplatonist camp, where Nothing Means Shit And All Is Confusion. My favorite waste of time.

The slippery slope of absolutism will always drag you down into the hell of the unnuanced conclusion, be it orthodox religious observance or scientific positivism. All such torments spring from the same sources: confusion of the map with the terrain and inability to accept mystery. No matter how many knights in shining armor you send out, there will always Be Dragons somewhere. Or, as the eminent mathematics professor and smartass Tom Lehrer reported posted on his office door, "You never know." But by the same token, you always know something. There are portions of the map (and terrain) that are certifiably dragon free. Such is the dilemma of human experience, and any attempt to avoid it is the short path to the mudslide and the snuff pit.

Take, for example, the Mach Principle. Here for all the world is an example of the opposite extreme from scholasticism, pure reason overrunning the ditches of experimental evidence and flooding the fields. Postulated by a 19th century physicist, philosopher and perceptual psychologist (scientists didn't specialize back then), it addresses the problem, later given a more thorough treatment by Einstein, of the detection of motion. Through a complicated and thoroughly unnecessary to recap theoretical argument, it arrives at the conclusion that, since without a background neither movement nor inertia are measurable, the phenomena of matter described by the Newtonian laws of motion must be generated and kept operative by (get ready for it) the background of fixed stars. In other words, we of our puny earthly pebble are kept in orbit around our meaningless, second rate star at the edge of a not particularly noteworthy galaxy by, oh, every other star in the universe. Not to mention the black energy.

This extreme conclusion is exactly what Einstein would call "spooky action at a distance," or, alternatively, "bad shit." The thrust of physics from the mid 1800's on down has been to eliminate such mysterious, invisible connections and replace them with palpable, calculable interactions of matter and energy. The study of electromagnetic forces lead to the concept of the "force field," later refined to the notion of particles of force carrying energy between material objects, always limited, according to Dear Old Uncle Al, to the speed of light.

Clearly, if the Andromeda galaxy (long may it wave) is keeping us on course, it ain't the actual Andromeda Galaxy Of Today doing it -- that particular critter is purely hypothetical, seeing as how we won't detect any light from it for another couple million years. No, what's doing the steering is the Andromeda Galaxy Old School, a figment of the past that happens to connect with us now. Equally obviously, the whatsit that provides this immutable ordering of the heavens isn't light. I don't become massless by going into a closet and shutting out the light of the stars above. Whatever is doing it is more pervasive.

LUKE: The Force?
BEN: Well, the Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.
(Artoo makes beeping sounds.)

--George Lucas, Star Wars: New Hope

Well, actually, no. While it would be nice to believe in some kind of purely informational binding for the Big Book Of Space/Time, there's no useful way (yet) to quantify or talk about the Cosmic Thought. But a unifying strand exists in the study of the very same inertia the Mach Principle addresses.

Physics has faith in the existence of four forces: electromagnetism, the weak force, the strong force, and good ol' gravity. Quantum mechanics has successfully unified the first three, all of which work over short distances, but as of yet there's no way to tie them in with the stellar-distance organizing big G. General relativity does mass attraction to a delta t but ignores quantum like a punk chick cutting a preppie (except in cheesy teen romances o' course -- the chick, not relativity). But if there's anything that can get into that dark, starlight-forsaken closet with you it would be gravitation.

So, the likeliest candidate for the Force would be whatever it is that manifests as gravity in masses and presumably as God/dess in the soul. Which means that I might... just... be... right when I introduce my song "Gravity":

This is a song which asks the cosmic question, "What is the most powerful force in the Universe, Love or Gravity?" And it answers that question, "Yes!"