Country living

Click on the image for the larger version. From our new place in San Juan Cosala on the North end of Lake Chapala to our old place in Chula Vista would be about 2.5 hours on foot at a good clip. And we're about halfway to Jocotepec, the next big town around the Lakeside. We've lasted a week so far without finding ourselves wishing we had a vehicle, so hopefully our luck will last. There's a bus going our way about every 15 minutes or so and they cost 6 pesos per trip or something - about 50 cents Canadian. I haven't ridden the bus in Vancouver in 10 years and I have no idea what fares are up to now, so I don't really have a standard for comparison. We're definitely going to be getting a couple of sturdy mountain bikes to explore the Lakeside area though. It's just beautiful, more so in the dry season, I think.

Change that's starting to seem disturbingly familiar.

I don't know if we're at "ominous" just yet, but we're definitely edging towards creepy -  and in a modern 21st century democracy of supposedly self-governed equals, downright unseemly. Makes Jesus Camp look like Plato's Academy.

One every 30 seconds

The current rate of violent attacks  in Britain. So, remind me again what all those CCTV's are supposed to be for. I get feeble as the years creep up on me, but it almost seems like the more paranoid and fearful we become, the more we create - or permit - a social, political and economic climate  that encourages our fear of each other to be made manifest. It's a chicken and egg argument, but if we were to try a daring experiment, specifically, dismantling the modern surveillance states and started teaching civility to young people as a matter of personal responsibility, would we...nah, never mind. That's just crazy talk.

Lucky streaks have a nasty habit of ending suddenly

If the asteroid that detonated in the skies over Indonesia on the 8th of October had detonated over Tel Aviv or Tehran instead, would we be fighting World War 3 right now? Probably. That one was just a pebble, a mere 10 meters across, but it released three times the energy of the Hiroshima A-bomb. It detonated at a high enough altitude that no damage was caused on the ground. There are an indeterminate number of Near Earth Asteroids out there larger - MUCH larger - than 10 meters and those WILL reach the ground. We simply don't know how many there are or when or where the next one will hit. Most countries are funding research programs to catalog Near Earth Objects, but that funding is woefully inadequate to the task and under constant threat of cutbacks.

Opponents of funding for space exploration, development and research always chirp that the money allocated to NASA and various international space agencies would be better spent "solving our problems here on Earth". But Near Earth Asteroids ARE one of our problems, probably the biggest threat our species faces. We can't stop them. Not yet. But thanks to lackluster funding, we've only managed to identify a fraction of the larger ones.

Sooner or later one of these is going to detonate over - or actually impact - a large populated area. In today's global political climate, doesn't it seem cost-effective to increase funding to space agencies so that when our luck does run out, we can at least tell the difference between an asteroid impact and a nuclear detonation? If we continue to underfund space research, then we'll really have some "problems here on Earth" to worry about.

Thought for the day

Never put off till tomorrow what you can pay someone to do for you today.

Escape from New York

When you start talking about "taxing the rich", the rich pack up and leave. Then you have to increase the tax burden on the middle class. Which erodes the middle class until there's no one left to tax.

What to do? Make sure the rich have nowhere to run, which has always been the intent underlying every version of global government ever proposed.

"We are trying on every front to increase the role of government"

Well at least they're Frank about it. Sorry worst pun ever. But that's always the answer isn't it? Increase the role of government on every front. What other solution could there possibly be? And what's the ultimate goal? Linkage. Joining up all those separate fronts to achieve total coverage. That's always been the dream. And the harder the dream fails as it inevitably does, the more convinced advocates of big government become that the cause of failure was not enough government. There's never enough.

It's the deployment of emotional reasoning that's especially predictable as a defense of big government in times like these. Don't you think that sick little children deserve health care? Does it make you happy when people are exploited by their employers? Do you get a kick out of seeing homeless people starving in the streets? Why do you hate the elderly so much that you want to see them live out their final years in destitution? Are you happy that 50% of adult Americans have a grade school level of literacy or lower?

Sooner or later the Heartless Monster card always gets played, usually whenever someone asks, "Where's the money going to come from to do all these wonderful compassionate things?" It's all well and good to talk about redistribution of wealth - when there's wealth to redistribute. When your nation is 11.9 trillion Dollars in debt and getting 3.81 Billion deeper in the hole every day, the only resources left to spread around are talk and good intentions. And we all know the market value of those.

Yesterday was a REALLY shitty day

Kenn and I lost our cat Shane, aged 17. He'd outlived the vet's best guesstimates by two years. Two very full and wonderful years. Yesterday morning, I found him down in the ravine by our house. He'd spent all night making his way down there, to die alone, as animals are instinctively compelled to do. He was still holding on though, so I carried him gently back up to the house, where Kenn and I made a nice soft bed for him by the fire and kept him company in his final hours. At the end, he looked up, gave a soft mournful cry and then just slipped quietly away. Yesterday afternoon, we took him up to the top of the mountain and found a secluded, shady space to make a cairn for him.

Shane was my constant friend, through some of the darkest and loneliest moments of my life. Everyone always says their cat or dog is special. And they're all right. There'll never be another Shane, not in our lives; not anywhere.

We also found out this afternoon that Mac Tonnies author of Posthuman Blues passed away yesterday at the age of 34. Mac was a passionate and often poetic thinker, fascinated by the world around him. He was a staunch rationalist who had the courage to explore the extreme frontiers of experience and ideas - and the kindness and patience to encourage my own early writings. We followed each other's blogs for years. Mac was the kind of person you could disagree with - sometimes profoundly - without ever needing to argue. A passionate enthusiast for Transhumanist ideas, he would often wade into some online flamewar to defend me when I criticized Transhumanism. He was just that kind of person.

He had apparently just finished the draft of his latest book The Cryptoterrestrial Hypothesis and was just beginning to achieve a well-deserved notoriety. Rest in Peace, Mac. You will be missed.

Shit doesn't just happen

It's true that government bureaucracies always mushroom in size and in the scope of their influence on private life. But it's not some inevitable, intrinsic feature of bureaucracy itself that causes this to "just happen". Government  bureaucracies are made to expand because the ultimate goal of Statism is, quite simply, absolute authority over every sphere of human activity.

Glory Years

If you're a Vancouver hater, you're going to flip on me for saying this - actually, chances are you already hate me just on principle - but I think that Vancouver in the years 1998 to 2001 was just about the coolest place to live on the entire planet.

Not that I think Vancouver's uncool now. Like every city, it has its problems and trust me, some of those problems are whoppers for a city of Vancouver's small size. But this really is Vancouver's golden age  - and it's often true that the dawn of a golden age is a more exhilirating time than the golden age itself. Let's clear up one thing right off the bat though: This isn't Vancouver's Age of Glory because of the Winter Olympics. Please. Here, breathe deeply into this paper bag and we'll continue:

What happened to Vancouver between the time money started fleeing Hong Kong in anticipation of the handover to the Chinese government and 2001 - well, it's almost impossible to convey. Vancouver went from being basically an over sized hick town with a reputation as a Slacker's Paradise to a world-class Pacific Rim Metropolis. That's a lot of ground to cover. By the time I moved there at the beginning of '96 that transformation was already well underway, but  even when I arrived, Vancouver still had that whole hippie outpost/redneck backwater thing going on. Don't deny it. I lived there. I saw it with my own eyes.

By 2001, that whole loser vibe was gone, or had been beaten back into cultural enclaves like The Drive, where it wouldn't get in anyone's way and no one had to listen to the endless fucking bellyaching and whining about there being too many Starbucks and not enough free government money for hack poets and shitty installation artists. I've lived in a lot of cities around the world, but I'll tell you, I have never seen a neighborhood as militantly unfriendly and nakedly hateful of the urban environment in which it was embedded as Commercial Drive. Ever. Nothing even close. Eww. Just thinking about that neighborhood and its Fauxhemian siege-mentality culture creeps me out.

Anyway, what made Vancouver so exciting specifically in the years 1998-2001 was that we were becoming this modern futuristic metropolis, a template for livable densification -  and the world wasn't paying any attention. The people who turn everything they touch into lead; the people who waste their lives chasing after the people who waste their lives in search of the NEXT BIG THING hadn't even heard about Vancouver yet. They were still scouring Seattle, San Fransisco and London, Tokyo, Paris, Shanghai, Beijing and Berlin turning over rocks looking for - whatever the fuck it is they think will make us believe that finding is the same as making.

So as a city, we were kind of left alone to explore our own unfolding future as though it were an uncharted continent. It was an absolutely amazing and electrifying time. By 2001, that continent had pretty much been mapped, or at least, the plans to develop it drawn up and finalized. But for those few years, the energy flowing through Vancouver was unlike anything I've ever seen or felt anywhere. It's the rarest of occurrences in this world that something new has a chance to grow to maturity before being trampled into dust by the seekers of the next Shangri-La.

Relax, you'll always be doing it wrong

Really enjoying being back at the gym after taking the summer off. That's wrong of course. You're supposed to train constantly throughout the year, with no breaks. I'm also enjoying just going in and doing whatever I feel like doing, in no particular order. That's wrong too. I use the wrong protein powder, eat the wrong foods, wear the wrong shoes, wear the wrong t-shirts and listen to the wrong music. I work out in a gym, which is wrong. I should be tossing tree stumps and scaling the cliffs of Yosemite decked out in 20,000 dollars worth of outdoor gear. And not just ANY outdoor gear. The right outdoor gear, not the wrong kind, which if I owned 20 grand of outdoor gear would, I feel certain, be of the incorrect variety. Sometimes I work out in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon. Wrong. Sometimes I eat before my workout, sometimes I eat afterwards. Wrong. Sometimes I stretch after my workout, sometimes during. Wrong, wrong, WRONG.

I've pretty much accepted that everything I do is wrong. I work on a PC. Wrong. It's a Dell: wrong. I should have custom built it myself and soldered each and every circuit with my bare hands. I use the wrong software, sit incorrectly when I'm working, use the wrong blogging tool and - well, you name it. Whatever it is, I'm doing it wrong. Once you accept there's always going to be someone out there who thinks that you're doing it wrong, and that their way is the One True Path, then you can relax and get on with actually being productive. Nowadays if someone wants to give me advice, I'd better see a diploma and proof of at least 10 years experience as a working professional before one uninvited syllable spills out of their mouths. Otherwise, they can take their advice and their right way of doing things and shove it up their ass.

"illegal signs or graffiti"

So, the cops can fine you 10 grand, toss you in jail for six months, and even enter your home without warrant to remove them (strictly for the duration of the 2010 winter Olympics of course) Because we wouldn't want anything embarrassing Vancouver during the games like say, an entire downtown neighborhood filled with aggressive beggars and junkies shooting up and smoking crack in broad daylight.

When the eyes of the world are on your city, you definitely want to put your best foot forward. To be fair though, the Downtown East Side is there for a reason: it's become a Vancouver institution, a Disneyland of Despair, an historic landmark that brings money into the city in the form of urban decay tourism. Visitors love it, and city council members get to parachute bails of money into the area for their "anti-poverty" activist cronies to intercept. It's a system that's worked just fine for almost 100 years.

There's one little detail the article doesn't mention: what, precisely, constitutes "illegal signs or graffiti". For example, if someone were to hang a banner off their apartment balcony that said, "Thanks for the awesome new Skytrain line, but can you please clean up that embarrassing shithole down on Main and Hastings and keep beggars from ambushing me every 10 feet when I go downtown?" I'm guessing that wouldn't go over very well.

Laughed

Farce

I'm part of an oppressed minority, I haven't driven a car for almost 25 years and I've never killed anyone. Where's my fucking Nobel Prize?