It Begins (Again) With a Salad

The salad I had yesterday:

chickweed, mint, arugula, olive oil, garlic salt, pepper, a smattering of feta cheese.

All of the greens came up this year on their own, and I can probably get a salad a day from them for at least a month, maybe two or three before I need to come up with other sources of greens. I don't want to over-romanticize this, but I also don't want to leave it so marginalized that it isn't even acknowledged -- my grounds provide me a salad a day if I am willing to go get it.

The arugula has self-seeded from a planting I made years ago.  (It was at least three, but maybe four or five).  I find it interesting to watch each year's self-seeding move a few feet away from the year before, walking across the lawn in time.  The mint originally came from my father-in-law.  He had some that escaped containment and sprawled out into a portion of his lawn.  That sounded like my kind of plant -- and still does.  I find the mint to be mild enough to be the base of a salad, but that is a fairly recent revelation.  Lastly, chickweed, as the name says, is a weed that comes in on its own.  For some reason, dandelions don't come in well on our grounds, but I count myself fortunate that chickweed does. (I might go for a walk today to see if I can find dandelions in a park or greenbelt, but for now I have a cat curled up on me -- one that rarely does, at that). 

And just like that, I can be re-connected after almost a year away.  I had my reasons, such as finally letting grief run its course. I needed to take away the responsibilities of a garden, and that got me out of the habit of checking the grounds.  In that time, I found great joy in creating, and I hope I can live a life that allows for creation, connection to nature, as well as any thing I need for happiness.  But it is nice to start in a place, ie the salad, where the real bounty comes independent of my efforts.   

As long as it isn't sprayed down with herbicide, the grounds can provide.  I once read in a book by a botanist that those of us with weedy lawns are a silent majority.  I hope that is the case.  But if it isn't, the larger of a group we are, the better.  One sign I keep looking out for that the ideologies and systems that work to rob us of our humanity have run their course is when I stop seeing poisons sprayed on lawns, attempting to create totalitarian mono-cultures.  The critique goes deeper than rednecks and suburban conservatives.  I agree with Mark Boyle when he questions the formulation that

destruction - carbon = sustainability.  

I see this idea implicit in imaginings, rhetoric, and most importantly, life-style choices of many people who think their hearts absolutely bleed while they beat on the left.

But even if we come of crises unscathed, perhaps using something like vertical farming and smart logistics, I will like feeling a sense of connection as well as a sense of place when I experience what the earth can produce.

==

You may also like this article from Tree Hugger on lawn weeds you can eat.

Back to Manic Intellect

How's my year going?  Good.  I tip my hat and thank you for asking. [1]

I got to the 23rd day of the year without finishing a single book.  This happened in part because I decided to slow down my reading to focus on writing.  Also, I started tightening up my Algebra II to prepare for my math certification test.  I think I was only past page 80 of the only book I was reading.  But around the 20th I realized  I was starving for information.  I can't describe the feeling much differently than that.  It was the kind of tingling you get when something is lacking.  So I ended up at the library.  First I wrote like a good boy, and located the quotes from the Peter Korn book I used in my essay Wise Words. Then I walked around the magical land of print access, eventually seeing The Lives of the Surrealists.

Oh hell yes.  I felt a back tingling of I-want-information-but-grounded-in-humanity-(particularly-those-who-want-to-explore-life-and-its-possibilities) signaled before any conscious narrative was formed.  My hand held the book still before the narrative's arrival.

Hypothesis: information lust, particularly information as adventure, is so deeply ingrained in this "me" you speak of that it is habit. It is muscle memory. It is very close to the metal indeed.  Time distorted around a new interest, more pages read in a day than the rest of the month combined.  Read a bit to go to sleep, and read a bit when waking up.

Perhaps I overdid the binge or (perhaps and) [2]  I was making up for sleep debt, but I was left with a really crappy zombie day.  A multi-hour nap in the middle of day which was in the middle of REM cycle was broken by Happy (we didn't name him) the sad cat expressing his loneliness and/or existential dread by repeatedly crying out in a room away from both me and the other cats.  Also, it was cold and rainy.  So I had a no-account day and I felt guilty about how little I had done.  `

The next day I went off to a coffee house to get back to working on math.  A former co-worker of mine, now retired, came in and we began a "small world" conversation built on the lattice-work of coincidence.  I had previously noticed that his wife and sister-in-law were the artists featured on the wall display, so I could give my regards there.  His daughter works at the school my "teaching baby" (student of mine who became a teacher) taught at.  And he had a photo of himself and Elizabeth Warren recently taken at a local restaurant on main street.  While she was a great celebrity of the hour with the Iowa caucuses coming right up, it probably wasn't that odd that she would be seen in Norman, Oklahoma.  For one, she went to high school in Oklahoma City.  It very easy to imagine her having friends in the region.  Also, Norman is a common enough fundraising stop for Democrats.

Two nights before, I guess partially buzzing from the surrealism book, but also thinking about On the Road, I had given thought to going to Iowa and spending a few days on the ground there.  It is anti-democratic and ridiculous that one state has so much leverage, but the fact remains that they do, and going there would have put me in the scene.  The planning never got much past the impulse phase.  However, I did look at the prices of flying in and renting a car.

After my acquaintance left, I switched locations to the new central library. Just as I was writing the first draft of the paragraph above a group of VIPs was being shown around the library.  The congressman for our district, Tom Cole, stood not ten feet away from this locus of perception (me).

Before that, but after my conversation with the old acquaintance, I had been buzzing on caffeine, math, and print access, and grabbed two more books: The Grapes of Math and The Joy of Mathematics with the intent of tearing through them.  I had positioned myself at the large wooden tables, simply wanting to write about the feeling of elation, I guess you could say I try to be a documentor (or philosopher) of feeling alive.  But this is what you get when I am in a manic state.  And in that state I noted: "thank god I have some stuff to read or I'd be insufferable to my wife when she gets home."

===
[1] I wanted to avoid simply saying "Thanks for asking," because that wording has become to easy to parse as sarcasm, along with any "Thanks for ___" or "Thanks ____."  We really do have a problem with gratitude in our culture.  Thanks, hipsters, and each of the assorted irony-mongers repackaged for each cohort of consumers who want to believe they are different than the ones before.  Assholes.

[2] "and/or" has become fossilized and/or leads with and, so it is too often parsed as simply "and."

Round Up #24

Aphorisms/Shorts

The real cruelty of America to its young is not that is denying them the American Dream.  It is denying them the Human Dream of starting a family that they can keep healthy and free from deprivation.  This is unsustainable.  If it is the first unsustainable thing to pop, then that will be for the good.  If it is toward the last, there will be no American society.

My advocacy of frugality is based on quality and personal freedom, not signaling.  And the help to the environment is a bonus.

"Live and love sincerely and vividly. Abstractions don't precede embodiment, they follow it."  Nathan Spears

I know modernity's shtick is efficiency.  But twitter does not efficiently give you information; rather, it efficiently kills time.

You are not asked  daily to participate in democracy.  You choose to freak out about things you can't control.  This is not the same thing, and you need to learn the difference.  However, you do make daily decisions about consumption and production.  We should think about those more.

It's not an exaggeration to say late stage capitalism keeps wrecking my sleep.

Contra neo-mania: rather than debating a banana and duct tape (yawn), we should be debating lobster-phone versus fur-lined cup.

When our country puts kids in cages, it invokes images of the holocaust, a horrible past.  When we use killer robots in the sky to kill kids, it is part of the future, a disruptive future.  No wonder progressives can accept the latter.

Reddit

Yes, the phone of the counter-revolution is a work of art.

I know I've been hard on Republicans lately.  Here's me really getting into it with a Democrat trying some of that sweet, sweet virtue signalling for Reddit karma.

I wrote some responses to the last episode of Bojack Horseman after binge watching the last episodes the day they came out.

Three little posts, one, two, thee without a home or a family tree.  Oh, and a bonus one on a fan theory.

Links

Article on the impact of Hilary's "deplorables" comment.  As a bonus, here is something to know about swing voters: "[they] didn’t care whether he [Trump] paid taxes or not — and thought he was smart to pay none."  (See, people love to scam the government).

I had never seen Soft Cell's "Tainted Love" 1981 music video.  It is most delightful camp.  If it had been made today, it would be the source of innumerable memes.

Side research for my piece on UBI lead to Changing my Mind about AI, Universal Basic Income, and the Value of Data.

Bucky's Idea

Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller was in many ways ahead of his time.  Of particular interest to me, in light of seemingly ubiquitous online discussions of universal basic income, is how much more effective his way of selling the concept would be.  Keep in mind that Bucky was born in 1895.  But you could say he had a fuller understanding of the idea than most (pun accepted. In fact, I revel in it).

Bucky spoke of UBI as offering research grants . . . to everyone.  And, yeah, maybe we should put "research grants" in quotes, but Bucky contended in all earnestness that even a minute fraction of productive grants would more than pay for the other grants.

This is a perfectly defensible claim, and perhaps one day I will organize research and quotations in order to make that case.  That doesn't sound particularly fun, however, so for now I leave you with topics and authors to look into: David Graeber (esp Bullshit Jobs), Bob Black's Abolition of Work, Bertrand Russell In Praise of Idleness, the story of how Linux came to be, Alfie Kohn (esp Punished by Rewards).  Also, I'm sure that out all of the contemporary authors writing about UBI, someone has probably done some great work on this claim, but only if they understand that  people can be freed up when they are out of our current systems, and conversely, these systems don't lead many individuals to their best work.

It seems, instead, that the dominate rhetorical thrust of current UBI advocates is that most jobs can be automated away, either now or in the near future, and that those displaced workers will be in need of handouts.  You can call it a "freedom dividend" but that doesn't make it more palatable to a Republican, unless an alpha enough Republican leader says it first -- look what Trump did for Russia's image amongst the Grand Old Party of liberty and other timeless principles  (CP Don't Break My Stuff, also this).

It is my bold thesis that if the mistake isn't made of having a Democrat say it first Republicans by and large could much more easily accept a system of "grants"/"loans"/or "investments" than "universal basic income".  Let's break that phrase down into it's parts. "Income" is a handout, "basic" isn't champagne wishes and caviar dreams, and "universal" acts like all lives have equal value, which just sounds communist.  But a grant could let you say you are going to do one thing, then burn the money on living expenses.  It could be a way to trick the government!  While Republicans aren't alone in their love of tricking the government, there is not much evidence of some principles against it.  And it makes some intuitive sense that they might find it extra sweet. [1]

The aftermath of the passage of medical marijuana here in Oklahoma made me glad I don't vote.  If I had voted, I probably could have been convinced to vote for medical marijuana based on the stories of people who have legitimate, you know, medical needs.  My wife knew of at least one child that fit that category, with some medicinal off-shot of cannibals being the only thing that didn't cause sever side effects.  All well and good, but I somehow didn't foresee that there would be more dispensaries than liquor stores, selling such valuable medicine as THC-infused gummy bears, lemon drops, and chocolates.  Next time I need an antibiotic, I'll see if I can buy it in gummy form from some shady store with a drug pun in its name.  It's just the right thing to do, and we do the right thing here in the heartland.

That's not to say in some world where I didn't refuse to validate our sham democracy [2] I wouldn't vote for straight-up legalized (or decriminalized) marijuana -- after all, weed and alcohol seem to be on similar levels as silly, overpriced vices.  It appears that I am in an extremely small minority of people bothered by medical fraud and a system that winks at it.  Though I cannot relocate the quote, I believe Charlie Munger once said something along the lines of "there is a special place in hell for those who make easily gameable systems."  But as social cohesion melts and anything goes (lol!), more and more people are looking for those gameable systems.

So just imagine an Agency of Government Grants which offered a form to say what business you were going to start or what you were going to research, and no matter how poorly you filled that form out, you'd get enough money to be above the poverty line.  The standards would be so low that you could write "$ biznes" in crayon, and you would get your checks.  Sharing live streams of progress in a video game would be a worthy enough enterprise for a grant, and there is ample evidence such streams promote utility.  The romantic set could write "research on mating rituals."  And to bring this all full circle, grants cloud be provided for "longitudinal studies of marijuana consumption."  No one will check on you, but you'll be "encouraged" to share results.  People would love it.

In order to make this work, I am pretty sure you can't advertise how low the grant standards in fact are.  Instead, my experience as a teacher tells me it is much better to maintain a level of plausible deniability that you expect more.  For people who are competent enough to get online and fill out forms, there should be options to go into extreme detail.  Someone like my wife who likes to do the "right thing" would be greatly helped by the appearance of high expectations, and frankly some way to receive praise.  Finally, I would have argued that there should be a place to share the data sets and research results, but that sounds like the internet, or at least what it was before the era of anti-social media.

If you thought the purpose of this essay was to a call action to adopt Bucky's rhetoric, you are mistaken.  I just wanted to write something interesting and bash the moral vacuity of a particular class of blow-hards.  Unlike nearly everyone else, I try to think how likely events are, not rather or not I'd enjoy them.  I think the odds of Bucky-style grants are about nil.  Though it sounds a bit like humor, I am serious that a Democrat cannot present any of this ("only Nixon could go to China" says Spock).  Also, I think we can count on the super-wealthy to pull the strings and exploit divisions in order to prevent redistribution.  We can also count on ivy league educated "thought leaders" to be horribly, off-puttingly elitist in their rhetoric, as lastly we can count  on Democratic politicians to be completely ineffective.

No, there will be no Bucky bucks.

===

[1]  I've many times heard things along the lines of "it's time to get mine" from those dead set against redistribution, with no apparent concern for the performative contradiction.

[2]  I know how disturbing it is for some people to read that, and I am sorry to cause offence.  Voting is part of a civic religion where we all have a duty to "make" our voices heard.  I would explain my reasons for refraining, but so many of them are obvious if someone were in a frame of mind to understand them.  Instead, I know "the importance of voting" is a belief held for psycho-social reasons, what Simler calls a crony belief.  Much like the vegetarian around meat eaters who isn't trying to convince anyone, I don't care if you vote. But I know that lack of emotional labor can sometimes raise the level of offence.

Also, I reserve the right to vote in local elections if I ever see the point.

New? Start Here.

Concentrated Value

   The Best of the Free Internet

The Art of Living

   Insight into Insight . . .

   Locate the Minimum Effective Dose

   Wise Words

   On Feeling Alive

   Searcher's Internet, Feeder's Internet

   Fun with Word Mentions

   Books to Leave an Echo Chamber . . . 

Other than that, I want to share that everyone should have a journal, even if it is one of those one-sentence a day systems. The problem I have with physical journals is that they really start to pile up.  Thus this blog was in part a my solution to that clutter. 

Update: current system is to journal in a text file for each month and then after a certain amount of time, print two hard copies, bind the spine of each with glue and duct tape, and put one copy somewhere other than my house to mitigate the possibility of a fire losing my work.  In this manner, I get the speed of typing with some protection from problems from the grid.

Notes on New Hampshire

This from an email I sent to a friend:

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You've been interested in the election, so I will add my take from last night: if the media had the same contempt for either Klob or Butti they have for Bernie they would sit on the fact that they cost each other the win.  As it is, contempt brain is stupid brain, so instead it is back to ignoring Bernie, trying to make 3rd the real winner, 2nd the next story, and 1st an after-thought.  This is part of the reason people hate them, but they really can't stop themselves. They are too clever by half, and then ready to gaslight when called out.

Actual political competence would include a call to winnow the field down, at least by Super Tuesday.  If we are looking at Klob, Butti, Money-berg, with the possibility of Uncle Joe resuscitated by South Carolina, then they are giving Bernie a free-roll -- he may have a lower chance of getting a majority of delegates, but he'll be the only one with any chance.  And do party elites really want to screw with a convention battle?  See what I mean about incompetence?

A three-steps ahead, bold take on the conditional: if they take it away from Bernie at the convention they damn well better give it to someone isn't running. [1]  John Kerry could be an option.  Al Gore would be interesting, though I'm not sure he would want to do it.  Fun fact: Butti won last night among voters who said climate change was the most important issue.  There is a huge appetite in the party to deal with climate but not deal income inequality.

===
[1] Do they realize this?  It's basic psychology involving resentment and loss aversion.  So no, they probably don't get this, preferring to protect their own sunk costs.  So much for #resistance.

My Personal History with Language.

In a sense, this is a companion to the piece Wise Words.

===


I was called a "motor mouth" in elementary school and I had many, many people fooled into thinking I was a scientific genius because I loved to use words like "molecular" and "atomic" -- and can we agree that "molecular" sounds much better?  I was merely imitating the techno-babble said by "smart" people on television, which I watched far too.  I didn't know I wasn't saying anything because I didn't know those "smart" people on TV weren't saying anything.  Also, I was cute, so I was praised.

I guess it makes sense that I fell in with science fiction, the perfect place for someone who agrees with the scientific paradigm yet can't do the math to access its precision. Asimov, Clark, and Bradbury were still easy enough to find both at the library and used books stores -- and, wonder of wonders, with complete series in the case of Asimov's Foundation and Clark's 2001.     

In middle school I dabbled in poetry, memorizing scraps of Longfellow and Whitman. Also in middle school through sophomore year I got into philosophy, first scraps of eastern, then western. It was always scraps at that age; only years later would I learn what depth is and why it is important.

This Junior and Senior year I did debate, not the best of places to learn depth, but somewhere to cash in a motor mouth for some medals and trophies.  Also, it was nice to not be lonely.

Meanwhile, I suppose you could call my academic path "the humanities," mostly history, with interest in literature, especially when literature was willing to play with language.  I took every English "exploratory" class offered at my high school.  (I had avoided history "exploratories" because they were mostly joke classes taught by athletic coaches, or and/were "current events." Is it possible that even at that young age I knew that current events were too chaotic to really study and that events are best understood digested by some time?  Perhaps, or perhaps I just got the word that those classes sucked.  Still, I read and read and read for my AP history classes and scored well on the tests.  Ironically, this meant that I ended up not taking a single college class for my favorite subject in high school.

When I realized that I would become a teacher, I choose English as because as I said "there is more history in English than English in history," and I find this especially true for interesting and mind blowing sociological content, though I do in fact love memorizing events and dates (more on that some other time, if I feel like it). Also, it really is true that in Oklahoma social studies is by and large a system of make work for sports coaches.

In college, I didn't read as much of the assigned literature as I now would have liked, instead reading a bunch of political philosophy as well as books on economics and science.  It was the loneliest time of my life, and I read for comfort.  But comfort for me is synthesizing ideas, not following simple plots.  The best book I read in that time was Douglas Hofstandler's Godel, Esher, Bach.  I was seeking realities and Truths. . . but that's is a different story than the one I'm telling.  (I have no idea when or even if I will want to write a piece on my personal history as a seeker).

In my career teaching English "Language Arts" and debate, I found a place to live and play in language a large portion of my days.  When you teach, you have such a great opportunity to learn.  No, not from the kids, at least not all that much beyond trivia that will be dated in a couple of years [1], but from sharing your subject to those with a novice minds.  Day after day I shared literature, some of it fitting for the age, some of it from the great masters, and in working to  make bridges between the narratives and where my students were at, my own education moved forward bit by bit.  Debate was a wasteland, for one because students, at least the ones most forcefully trying to use up my time, were always demanding the easiest way out.  There were not seekers, and were disrespectful of seeking. They had no integrity and were disrespectful of integrity.  Luckily, every year I taught debate I also had some English sections.

After I said good bye to all that, I caught up on literature, at least to my satisfaction.  I would describe this time as finally, more or less comfortably, using my own voice.  It is the type of play that most fits my location in life's journey.  It is also the extension of all of the playing came before it. 

===

[1] You also can develop strong instincts for human nature by teaching.  You can read people and their motivations, and figure out approximate baselines for what people know when they are unlearned in a subject.  All of this comes from proximity with a large cross-section of the population, not directly from their views on topics.

Thoughts on the Iowa Fiasco

First, what do I think the DNC should do?

• Admit that they have a problem hiring cronies and grifters.
• Commit to paper ballots
• Step down
• Vow to only work on local issues where they plan on relocating, since they are, in point of fact, incompetent at the level of governance they are operating.

The fact this is inconceivable only means that "career over country" is fully entrenched among the elites.

Second, we can probably expect the elites to double-down, and I think this brings up a very pessimistic understanding, the kind I would like to be wrong about.

DNC-style Dems don't want government to work any more than the GOP, and so they get to pull the same trick: make government suck so much that no one (really no swing voter) believes in it.  What happened in Iowa was a down-payment on what they can do to stop the visions of the Left. We really can't have nice things, and it once again shows.

Hanlon's razor "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." Fine, but I remember Venkatesh Rao once pointing out that you can be stupid and malicious at once.  DNC-Dems/ the GOP, together they make up our elites, and check out the game plan: 

Flail out, create chaos, in the chaos cheat, fail upward. Use those who failed upward to help create more chaos and pull more failures upward. All hail the Maze!

Incompetence is not a conspiracy, first-order.  But it can be bailed out with a second-order conspiracy, especially by people who think they are Philosopher-Kings.

===
Appendix

This is an email I wrote to a friend on the matter after he had responded to the piece above:

[Update 4/8/2020.  Wow.  I sure was wrong about some things.  I was wrong about me being done with the horse race.  I was also wrong about how the primary would play out.  I think I learned some things in the process.]
===

Greetings from Norman, Oklahoma, where we are having our first (and perhaps only) snow of the year.  I keep looking out the window because it looks like a postcard from another land, the kind television tells me is the heartland -- at least with my view of trees and the ground out of one window, and single family houses out the other.  We can't have one of those urban Christmases, or urban, cold loneliness, can we? . . .I just saw a neighbor take her dog out to see her first snow, and play in it.

Tying this together with your main topic, I am reminded of the Chesterton quote " . . . the real difficulty of democracy is not that voters are unworthy, but that their vote is generally the least worthy thing about them."  Not voting is a great way to not get sucked into what is unworthy about life, and then make room for what constitutes the real joy in being alive.  I just like having the peace of mind.  The waves of history are bigger than anything I can control.

With that said, I had [messed] up.  I had allowed myself to engage with politics a lot the last few weeks, watching videos,reading all I could and even getting into arguments on twitter and reddit.  I justified this all as a kind of festival.  And I was going to cap it with watching the election results as they came in, going from website to website for analysis, checking in from time to time see ABC's take.  I had even had a serious conversation with my wife about going to Iowa to do some political tourism, but decided to keep my finances on lock-down until I get a teaching gig again.

But what happened kept me up until something like 2 am, and the next day I stayed in a funk.  If this is how other people feel when they scroll through feeds all day, then I am frankly surprised our society hasn't fallen apart more than it already has. 

I'm done with the horse race this year.  Looks like either Bernie wins, Bloomberg white-knights, or Bernie will be cheated.  I now see how bizarro-world that cheating can get (and again, I'm not saying anyone set out for Iowa to go this way, but rather there will second-order exploitation of the disasters created by one's own incompetence), but this is something best watched from afar.  Same goes for the general election.

On to creative work, and other interesting things.