Money

This article cuts to the heart of the matter.

Money is a strange thing. So is economic organization in general. And the nation state.

The question gets asked in history a lot as to how the United States (and for that matter Germany, Japan, Britain, etc.) was able to mobilize so dramatically and build one of the largest most sophisticated war machines the world had seen, coming right out of the Great Depression. That sounds kind of strange now, seeing as how we are merely in a recession - though some are actually calling it a depression due to its profound effects and lifespan - and when it comes to simple things like paying federal workers, fixing infrastructure, funding college and social security, establishing health care for all, etc., we're just so broke! You have to sort of ignore easy money for banks in the form of QE and subsidies, energy and agriculture subsidies, and then the gigantic defense budget, among other things. There's always money to be found in the couch when someone needs to be bombed.

So why is it that we treat money as this scarce, material object, as if it grows on trees (to be a little ironic here), when reality tells us that it miraculously takes its existence from our very relations and what we are willing to do for each other? As a growing chorus of MMT theorists are telling us, sovereign governments can create money out of thin air (and just as easily destroy it if inflation rears its ugly head); all we need to do is decide as a people what needs to be done.  We could stop this absurd charade tomorrow and invest in clean and renewable energies (though more has to be done in dramatically altering lifestyles and energy consumption), but we won't.

That's because thanks to decades (or maybe centuries) of propaganda, we have been convinced that it is in fact some sort of scarce, material substance, which conveniently seems to come out of corporate and financial industry spigots. The government can't just start spending money into existence with better social programs and jobs, because that would break the financial monopoly on the distribution of money. We get paid by businesses that have to take out loans (that come attached with interest rates and all sorts of fees) from banks; we have to take out loans ourselves to buy houses and cars; our own government borrows from banks themselves, even though the government generated the currency by simply entering in numbers in a computer and having it magically appear in bank reserves, because that is how things are set up to work.

So here we sit, a society growing increasingly emaciated as it feeds useless parasites through deception, until it (and the rest of the societies around the world that are being subjected to the same thing) becomes so starved that its population becomes desperate enough for war.

That's the thing about war. It is always almost completely unnecessary. Even WWII if you trace the causes to before the rise of the Nazi regime and the Imperial army. We create the monsters in the first place with our economic inequities and the perverse cultural practices that accompany them, and then we have a new villain of the day to point our collective finger at and compel the people to rise from their collective stupor to mobilize and win the day! It seems to be bare survival that manages to cut through all of the symbolic complexities, that brings a people together towards a common goal. Too bad it often comes down to a war, which is then mythologized with childish archetypes and morality plays.

The abstraction and free-floating nature of money allows it to be instrumentalized  to both force people to put out a certain output and to direct those efforts in a certain direction. Money is only available from a limited selection of institutions that in turn utilize people power to satisfy their own ends. The mass of human effort is currently going towards administering a perpetual blowjob (to put it crudely) to a small and useless ruling class, until of course the collective perpetual pleasure engine breaks down, at which point it is probably time for war.

New villains can always be created and the people mobilized with the war drums (there is never a shortage of drooling reactionaries to carry out these ends, as hinted in the previous post), but it is my hope that this time, the people are quite exhausted with war. Hopefully this time, the next mass mobilization that occurs is (as the author of the linked article suggested) a mobilization to address problems that actually do threaten our collective survival, such as the disintegration of the environment which houses us.

For that to be possible, we would have to completely change our view of what we are and what we are capable of. And then organize a society with social equities, power sharing, and communication in mind. Otherwise we simply aren't going to make it. As a lifeform we've become too powerful, too able to affect an entire planet for us to be playing around like this. One can hope anyways.

And finally, here's a good usage of Tumblr to check out.

Into Town

Every other day I walk down into town to check the mail and do other things. Lots of old white people in this town. Lots of scowling old white people. Some of them warm and smiling though.

Picked up some bird seed (those suckers eat a lot; a 20 lb bag is already almost half gone) and peanuts. Chatted with the lady in the animal store about birds and squirrels. We talked about how shy flying squirrels are as well. I resolved to be extra quiet and try to see one. Haven't seen one yet. She saw an injured one at the animal hospital and mentioned it was a pretty remarkable creature. I like animal lovers. They usually have tender dispositions.

The animal shop was broken into last week. The front door was smashed out and glass was all over the sidewalk. They said it was the 10th break in this month. The 10th break in.

There is a trailer park nestled in the trees. You can barely see in though. Thick trees surround its perimeter. Almost as if it is deliberately hidden away from the otherwise picturesque little town.

Passed by a truck with three stickers on its back window: a Christian fish textured with the American flag, a sticker with "Capitalist" in strange lettering which I didn't quite grasp the significance of ( I could swear the C was a hammer and sickle but that just doesn't make sense) and an NRA sticker. It still baffles me that such an array of glaring contradictions manages to hold up in the conservative American spirit. But there you have it. That's how the reactionary mind works.

I doubt that guy is an animal lover, or maybe he is but not in the sense I originally meant. He probably loves to eat them, and have a squeeze at their necks here and there. Oh but I josh. Maybe he loves his dog or something, though dogs give you unconditional love and loyalty generally, so...

Well, anyways.

Arrowhead Pt. 3

The domineering hummingbird retires around 7 or so. When the sun goes down. Around that time other hummingbirds come around the feeder to see whether he is gone, and then take a drink.

There were two of them here tonight. They were both afraid. Both sitting across from one another, they'd take drinks and then take glances up into the trees before resuming.

It is a sad and beautiful thing to watch.

Private

I walked around a portion of the neighborhood this morning searching for a good lookout point. I was disappointed to find that all of the great vistas were crowded out by cabins bunched together. Everywhere you could walk out and get a better look was someone else's land. It is not a surprise that all of the good spots would be claimed, but it is somewhat disappointing that there are no public clearings anywhere with a bench or two, which would have been nice. I figure I'll explore another section of the neighborhood, but the the entire north end, which will have ridges with a view of the lake, was a no go.

There was this one house hidden down in the back behind some trees. It was this huge, monolithic, fortress of a cabin. Just huge blank faces of wood with narrow slots of stained glass going down the sides. This fortress-like or castle-like building was almost brutalist in nature. There was this huge outspread carved eagle above the garage, and a barbed-wire fence in the back. It looked like a military installation but it was a cabin. So strange.

Wild Speculation

Now this is just a shot in the dark, but it is possible that the evolution of our belief systems has partially to do with our media and the way in which information is shared.

For example when Jesus was around you had writing technology, but it wasn't mass produced and then a lot of the information was spread orally. So with a lack of information, people probably had no recourse but to mythologize his figure, cutting away from his life story the details of him as a human being, and extrapolating with those vast intuition-based concepts found in old religions. A different part of the brain was being used.

Then as information became more sustained and mass produced, we had more insight into human figures and could understand them in a rational context. Information was still missing however, and socially we tend to display a certain idealized self which translates in the actual information too.

Of course, this happens in cycles. Civilizations begin around founding myths (myths which are usually pretty rich and explanatory and spring from kernels of truth), and then progress into rationalism of increasing complexity, and then regress to superstitious myth which is temporally confused and incoherent, but emotionally appealing, like you have with neoliberal economists today or religious fundamentalists. This is probably due in part to the fluctuating energy use in certain parts of the brain: we use certain high executive functions until with overcomplexity things break down and we return to those lower regions we were ignoring.

But I would also hope that with as much information as we are swimming in now with cyberspace, a theoretical increase in transparency (which is not guaranteed, as there is some gnarly stuff happening with tech right now), and hopefully a softened, more human ideology, we can function better as collective thinkers, using both our rationality, emotion/intuition.

Mythology is nice, but when it becomes too stylized it forms restrictive social templates for future generations to squeeze into, regardless of their own material circumstances. Hopefully with more information, we become more understanding of each other and flexible as a society...though the information field itself is becoming increasingly distorted into a battlefield.

Yech

I'm not too concerned about smaller spiders and other insects. Their small size is almost an abstraction.

Its the big ones that freak me out. Their larger size lays bare their alien features and triggers the disgust reflex. Unless you're an entomologist or something, or you're at a safe distance where you can just look. Then their features become pretty fascinating.

Don't Fall

It is strange watching the behavior of certain industries like the fracking industry or the pesticide industry. With the fracking industry, you have this incredibly destructive and energy intensive process that really doesn't produce much other than a few additional huffs of gas for us oil junkies. They're blasting chemical laced water deep into the earth. That can't be good. Plus they're using WATER to do this, which is kind of alarming, considering the oncoming droughts and growing water crises in certain parts. There have been reports of insurance companies in Pennsylvania refusing to insure people's houses in frack territory, and then you have the actual industry shouting and waving that its totally safe and its an energy revolution and such and such. Pure nuts!

Then you have pesticide companies that continue to promote pesticides that have been found to be implicated in mass bee die offs. And yeah we kind of need bees to pollinate things. And they get lawyers to threaten to sue activists and beekeepers from protesting. On a related note, there was a recent report of Facebook removing an activist rally page to protest Monsanto. They all support each other. They come together with the same values and world-views and they just sort of vibrate together.

And then you have the banking industry...well, hah! It would take a library full of books to rifle off the extent of the social destruction and economic chaos they cause.

The self-interested yet collectively self-destructive activities of industries like these can be incredibly puzzling, but make more sense when you take the culture into context.

In this culture (and I'm not saying everyone adheres to it) you are on your own and you have to fend for yourself, and if you fall, you only have yourself to blame. There is less social support for such a fallen individual, and so if you fail, you are to go down in flames completely. This is more true in a social sense: a family will take care of its own materially, so long as it possesses the means (the number of families of which are dwindling), but due to our individualist and action-oriented culture, one is what one does, and this is where the social power comes from, or even social sustenance, and if one fails at the one defining thing that one does, well one is shit. It is comparable to death.

I sympathize with that fear, no doubt. When I was very depressed, I temporarily lost function of my thinking, writing, and musical faculties, and with that a huge loss of pleasure. I felt I was good as dead. With someone in the middle class like me, and then so on up the food chain, survival becomes less about material subsistence (that is already taken care of, more or less) and more about social meaning. One feels one is surviving when one has ability that is worthy of being socially esteemed. Even this is changing of course, as material subsistence itself slowly comes into question. Everyone will have to deal with that fact eventually, including myself.

But that's the experience of living in this culture. Don't fall. And so these CEOs and entrepreneurs and politicians spend their entire lives struggling to climb atop this silly heap of ours, and whatever structures of power they use to become something, they are stuck with it, the poor dears. You climb to the top of the jungle gym and you better not let go. The jungle gym is all there is.

It is tempting to try to imagine a society in which people are nurtured and encouraged as individuals, and that whatever they set out to do is supported (granting it is not destructive). That if you fall, everyone is there to catch you, and set you right back on your way. I have to wonder if these people would continue to insist on their destructive activities. I'm thinking here of a shift from a masculine mode of organization to a feminine one, though the principles are always mixed in practice, nor should one adhere to any pure extreme. However we are at a masculine extreme now. Thus the growing awareness of and enthusiasm for the feminine.

Jahbs

Yes!

There are those times with your friends when as a group the whole of your activities revolves around the wishes of one friend who has become obsessed with doing a certain thing, so that everyone else is pulled along due to the tight bonds, half-heartedly engaging in whatever it is that the insistent friend wants to do.

These things happen. We all get fixed on something from time to time and wish to drag our companions along. But what if this is what's happening on a larger scale, in perpetuation, and the insistent friend in this case is the ruling elite: powerful leaders of empire, titans of finance, tech, and industry (well, what's left of industry)?

Cloudset

It is not just the act of the sun setting, and the associated colors from the light refracting in the atmosphere (though those things can be nice too), but the formation of a distinct and pleasing pattern of clouds that provide a deeper dimension for the color to grade and become fleshed out along their contours, that makes for a magnificent sunset.





It is the clouds, blooming high into the sky, and being smeared every which way, or rippled out and sculpted, that add such a striking depth of character to a falling sun. Here is an active sculpture, forming before one's eyes, cut into and spread out as the myriad invisible wind forces shape it, a great aerial sculpture then lit up and changing color as the sun's rays pass through their phases, with new contours and textures revealed as the light first blazes orange, and then explodes into pinks, reds, and purples, before bleeding out red and leaving the clouds that darken to a bluish and purplish grey, with a white afterglow fading away in the horizon beneath them.



Such natural beauty is sustenance; its gradual and wholistic movements invoke gentle waves of grandiose and cosmic feeling that permeates ones awareness and leaves one glowing and buzzing, as sharply opposed to our radically constructed artificial beauty, which assaults the senses and at least delights temporarily, but then blows out one's sensibility and afterwords one feels dead, with repeated permutations necessary to rekindle those extinguished feelings.



I get writing again with experiences like this because the sensations themselves produce sustained reactions that feed my head. I think perhaps in an urban environment one is constantly battered about by artificial displays of beauty and simulated beauty. There is a place for these certainly, but our mainstream society knows no moderation. We destroy natural beauty and then build the artifice on top of its ashes, and so over time one becomes habituated and numb to a constantly changing but static composition of forced sensation.

Natural beauty just is. All of the information is there, none of it amputated or stylized. It is all connected to its origin, for the observer to take from it what they will, without it shaped by a finite intelligence. I do still take great pleasure in photographing such a panorama, which necessarily limits its nature. Though pictures are limiting, they function as tangible artifacts that can be shared and used to construct, which I think will always be an essential component to the human condition. But one must take care not to get lost in the images, to collapse into the postmodern temptation of believing that image is all there is. It was extracted from something. And it is necessary to go back to that something to be replenished.

Going back, now that is something. Not to deviate too far, but that makes for a large portion of the zeitgeist. I'm writing for a company right now that manufactures fixie bikes. They're fixed gear bicycles that have become wildly popular among the bike enthusiasts and hipsters and others. It is an old, simple bicycle design that goes back to the fundamentals. Bikers want to feel the road. They want to build their own out of scratch or at least have a simple, barebones bike to play with. It speaks to a collective desire to return to roots, to the earth, or at least to simpler platforms before we started branching off into blinding, labyrinthine complexity.  There's this sense that we've come so far out in our technological and intellectual progress that we can no longer see where we came from, leading to a danger that we might be going the wrong way.

And it is true in some ways. Processed food, chemicals, bank derivatives, the latest iteration of Windows (hah!), all abominations of overcomplexity. Some manipulation is fine. Too much though, and you begin to lose the collective intelligence required to understand what it is you are affecting, or what it is that is keeping harmony. That darned reductionism. I can name all of the parts but where the hell do they all go? And then there is the tendency of the business types to take those increasingly fragmented segments, claim ownership over them, and then erect toll gates for those who don't posses the technical know how to get around. I'm thinking of a proprietary car engine, which has become so complex (and deliberately so) that no one but the company's highly trained specialists know their way around them.

It seems easier to claim ownership over something that becomes radically separated and instantiated as a separate object. When one understands all of the connections, one is less inclined to take possession.

Anyways, off the rails again. Better stick to watching clouds.

Arrowhead Pt. 2

So, the hummingbirds. Or the lack of. It has been interesting, this thing with the hummingbirds.

Here's how it goes: there's this big wonderful red feeder with flowers painted on it, and it dispenses nice sugary water, sugary water of an infinite supply that I can make anytime. But there's this one asshole hummingbird who has gotten it into his head that the water is scarce, and he has monopolized the feeder and the entire space surrounding the feeder. Here's the little prick now:

Yes he looks very cute, and he is. But he's a bastard. 

Why the animosity? Well, he sits up there on his branch and when any hummingbird of any size or any cuteness so much as approaches the space around the feeder, he viciously chases the intruder away. As a result, there are virtually no birds ever at the feeder but him, when he comes to reap his ill-gotten rewards:

A year ago there were scores of hummingbirds that would come and feed. They'd be by everyday swarming the feeder. Now nothing. Here's him again gloating over his little fiefdom he's established. Fat, bullheaded and self-satisfied, he'd make a great capitalist: 

He knows not that he is judged. 

I tried several things. I tried blasting him out of his tree with the hose (it was a weak spray but it would still shoo him off) but the stream didn't reach. I then tried moving the feeder to the other side of the deck. Surely there are plenty of other feeders in the area. He can go find another one to lord over like the others he's chased away. 

But then he continued to sit in his branch, checking the empty mount every once a while to see if the feeder had returned. I started to feel sorry for him, so I put the feeder back. Who knows why he's picked up the behavior he has? Has his habitat been destroyed? Have the feeders stopped flowing like they used to? Perhaps he'll grow tired of his repetitive life of domination, or maybe not. Maybe the feeder will flourish again when he dies. Or maybe he's radicalized and taught his behavior to all the birds he's chased away and they're all taking up positions around feeders of their own, jealously guarding their contents. Maybe the same was done to him. Maybe he'll father little prick children and we can have a little oligarchy rise up around the feeder. Who am I to say? Oh well. 

I've watched the other smaller birds and their activity around the seed feeder. Incredible creatures. So agile: they hop around vertically on the feeder wires, darting in and out of the holes, hopping straight into the air and doing half turn barrel rolls and dashing away. They traverse the faces of trees without a care for gravity or vertical orientation. Certain species will sit in the feeder and actually pick through the assorted nuts and seeds like bargain shoppers rummaging through a bargain bin, searching for their favorites and casting aside the ones they don't care about. Heh, birds. 

Ideas Like Trees

Ideas are incredible things, their workings so complex it is hard to even think about them.

Metaphors always help to encapsulate and organize vast stores of information: the sciences tell us of dependable natural laws and one can infer that a common elemental logic underlies the expansion and contraction of all life in space, including ideas, which is why metaphors always seem to appeal intuitively anyways. Perhaps they are hinting on genuine parallels.

But what's this metaphor then? So, like an idea, the blueprint of a tree is contained in its seed, but it is not the whole of the tree that exists as a potential in its seed. The seed can be the beginning and the end, which is only mere logical categorization anyways. From the seed, the tree flows with a logic of its own out into its environment, taking shape both in accordance with its blueprint and the contextual demands of the environment itself, changing the tree in the process, which then spreads new seeds of its transformed self, so that the process can begin anew.

And so ideas as seeds bear their own fruit, as George Clinton noted, and their fruit grow far beyond their original form, producing new seeds in turn, while the old fruit rot and die.

Why then, this expansion and contraction? Why must such a duality arise from one? What is the point? As Wayne Coyne asked, "What is love and what is hate, and why does it matter?"

Amidst a Storm

Two nights ago there was a strange reversal of mood in which I went from a complete state of tranquility to an electric state of dread and terror.

It started with the cat. She began hissing and running about the house for no apparent reason. I suspect she was bitten or stung.

There was a sharp escalation when I was doing some reading (yeah I should be avoiding this and enjoying the mountains; call it an addiction) and an emotional revelation hit regarding the state of things. It is a strange state of affairs: slowly the mythology is being peeled back, as empire is revealed for what it is. And as the populace grows more conscious, and a general unease spreads across the land, a material buildup continues quietly in response.

The mass surveillance itself has become a feeding frenzy. They've already built a massive Costco-sized warehouse full of servers to store all of the information. They're collecting everything, so that they have a vast searchable matrix that can be mined for whatever they want whenever they need it. What can you do with that kind of information? You can sell it for insider and blackmail purposes. You can use it for blackmail yourself to gain power (they are stabbing each other in the back left and right; you can bet that is what is behind those sex scandals that make the news). You can use it to assist your corporate sponsors. You can use it to crush dissent (they're classifying environmental, consumer rights, civil liberties, and other progressive activists as terrorists). They're even distributing it to local agencies for law enforcement purposes and covering up the nature of the illegal evidence.

What is puzzling is their fierce tenacity in attempting to maintain a veneer of legitimacy. This is a government that has gone far beyond the rule of law, where might makes right doctrines have been re-established with full force and Enlightenment-based conceptions of human rights and law have been pitched out the window. Why not simply declare the game over and tell everyone they are locking things down? Still going after whistleblowers, still insisting on tortured legal logic and highly intricate propaganda and theater. But then there is perhaps still a mass of people that haven't come to consciousness, though they may be vaguely aware something is wrong. It seems that as much energy as it takes to generate mythology and an air of legitimacy, it is still less energy than ruling by mere brute force.

The whole thing is incredible: the bloodless transformation (well there's plenty of blood but its hidden) of a free democratic society (well it never was but there was at least a better time) into a totalitarian dictatorship. It is the prophecy of all of the paranoid fantasies of  Orwell's 1984 coming to fruition. It is all worse than I previously imagined. Hard to comprehend.

Creeping paranoia, and all of this culminating in a violent thunderstorm as the sun went down. Turned out those towering clouds were the crest of a thunderhead; underneath it a cascade of lightning flashes pulsed in the distance. What strange timing! A storybook setting if there ever was one. There's a reason countless dramas feature an increasingly deteriorating set of external circumstances, such as the culmination of a raging storm or the disintegration of the structural integrity of the surrounding environment as the peaking tension plays out in interpersonal dramas. This transformation of a society into something monstrous and the simultaneous increase of environmental chaos is no coincidence. All must take account of one another. Power becomes concentrated and proportionally smaller and powerful, which insulated and in danger (power antagonizes its surroundings by its nature) attempts to assert greater and greater control over a chaotic environment that its very operations are creating. We can expect greater, more spectacular and violent displays of nature due to climate change, and a totalitarian power made abominable by its fear and necessity for control. There is something very symmetrical and self-contained to the whole thing. Remarkable!

On a lighter note, I was woken up by the thunderstorm around 4:30 in the morning as it passed over. Instead of fear and a greater existential dread, it pacified me. It was beautiful. It lit up the darkness with bright blue and white flashes and the trees were outlined black outside the windows as the thunder crashed in waves - it was the sonic equivalent of an ocean wave breaking in tiers due to the tapered surface of the sand beneath it, it made one wonder if similar motions happened in the clouds above due to density variations, the thunder of which becomes a sonic imprint of the physical motions:

The storm passed in time and hovered beyond the trees, arcs of lightning flashing far away in the clouds as they moved on, leaving a serene sunrise in its wake:

That's the thing about these natural cycles: they remind that yes things grow violent and terrifying for the life caught up in them, but there is always another beginning following in its wake.

Arrowhead Pt. 1

I suppose this blog is going to function as a nature journal the next couple of weeks. Inputs and outputs and whatnot, and staying up here in the mountains alone, plunged in silence and solitude, I am surrounded by nature constantly, which is going to form the bulk of the inputs, which I am quite fine with.

The weather is warm during the day and feels quite mild at night. The summer clouds bloom out and pile up high in the sky over the trees:

Far beyond the surrounding row of the trees you can make out the faint shimmering blue of the lake. You can hear the roar of motor boats all day on the weekends, and occasionally during the day on the weekdays. I don't imagine I'll be going down to the lake too often. The activity around the lake occupies some uncomfortable extremes from the exclusionary private shores to the highly commercialized Village bay on the south shore of the lake.  

Surrounding the lake are huge luxury homes, many of them vacation homes that are empty most of the year. I heard there was an actual ordinance that specified a minimum size that your home has to be in order to be built in the vicinity of the lake. Necessary to keep the real estate high and the riff raff out of course. The homes are surrounded by gates and fences. Coded locks and electronic swinging gates bar the way to most of the lakeside homes. There is an insane network of chain link fences that cover the docks and immediate shores, at least on the south side where we walked. Everywhere, hideous fences obstructed views and obnoxious signs promoted the manufacturers of the fences, or signs warned with large block font that this here is private property and you better stay out! 

Spanning one small section of the bay, which made up the yards of several huge homes, was an expanse of emerald green lawn absurdly transplanted over the mountain soil. I wonder how much water it took to water that thing? And considering there's been a drought and the lake is exceptionally low, the grass seemed quite green and healthy. It made me ponder whose priorities were being fulfilled first, no doubt. 

The Village is full of shops with expensive luxury goods. The land rents must be quite high and the landlords quite avaricious, because it seems the store turnout is pretty rapid. There's always someone going out of business whenever I've gone by. There's much wealth surrounding this lake. And most of the activities that occur on and around it are of an economic or at least exclusive nature. How do such communities form? Certainly population concentration coupled with economic principles of supply and demand set conditions for the composition of the residing community. But why here? Because of its beauty and remoteness, yet proximity to the Los Angeles area, another locus of wealth concentration perhaps?

But I'm getting carried away. Further away from the lake, there are plenty of modest homes that are scattered among the trees on the mountain. Plenty of humanity, and despite the high development and flows of traffic that pass through the Arrowhead and Big Bear areas, the natural ecosystems seem to be decently preserved. Back to nature!

Throughout the day there is constant bird chatter, all of it highly varying, which amounts to a steady drone that forms a sonic backdrop during the day. Small birds like hummingbirds respond with high frequency tones, while there are plenty of middle tones and even bass tones such as those coming from crows and other larger birds. There's tons of species here, which means tons of distinct voices. 

The Blue Jays and squirrels love to grab the peanuts I set out: 

Occasionally the Blue Jays squawk at the squirrels, or the cat which sits out on the deck and lays about fat and happy, watching the birds but never attacking:

Woodpeckers have come by for seeds and water: 

As well as some type of dove and a fascinating spotted bird with orange accents on its face and on the underside of its wings:

Many species of birds (and even squirrels) happily coexist around the feeders. Most of the time. They come to drink water, grab seeds, or bathe. They have quite an appetite, and the seeds must be refilled frequently. 

 It is satisfying to maintain a forum in which all sorts of animals can subsist and socialize and enjoy sustenance that you provide, which is markedly different than the experience of participating in a modern market-based society. In such a setting, you get to experience and enjoy the system of life you participate in, whereas in an office you are cloistered away, toiling towards invisible ends and satisfying phantom individuals that are equally unaware of your own existence.

Throughout the day and night cycle there occurs some fascinating movements of mass activity. In the morning and early day, there is a flurry of hummingbirds (which I'll get to later) and Blue Jays (if there are enough peanuts strewn about on the deck). Throughout the day, a fascinating array of species comes by the feeders. Small birds hop along the trees and decks, picking at the wood for insects. As the sun begins to drop, the bats come out, darting back and forth in the dusk air catching insects. Supposedly much later, a flying squirrel comes by the feeder. But these creatures are quite shy and afraid of the light. We've heard one scratching around in the tree above but have yet to see it. I guess an owl comes by here and there too. 

Beyond the trees, the sun sets out over a glittering San Bernardino which almost seems to glare beneath the twilight, as during the day its unfortunate population simmers under a noxious cloud of smog, which appears from the mountain road along the ridge as a thick soup that blankets the lowlands. Hills rise as black curves above the city lights in the distance, while behind them the horizon cycles through yellows, oranges, and then reds and pinks as the sky above goes from navy to black, with the moon rising amidst the stars beginning to twinkle into view. 

The crickets start in and the wind passes gently through the trees. 

More to come throughout the week. 

Egypt

This morning the NYT reported that Obama condemned the latest outbreak of violence in Egypt and cancelled joint military exercises (oh my!) from his vacation spot in Martha's Vineyard. Of course, no word of dropping support entirely of the Egyptian military and withdrawing that $1.5 billion in aid to the military and its associated old-guard Mubarak-era oligarchs and bureaucrats. 

That's curious. I wonder...

Oh yeah. 

Color Change

Yeah so after 8 years or so I finally brought myself to change the look of my blog. It is really not much of a change I know, and really it is kind of boring, I know.

I was trying to do something with one of the new templates. There was a color scheme I had in mind but no good backgrounds really. I've been wrestling back and forth with crap all night. I wanted to convey a mood and say something significant at the same time. 

Ended up with this intense-looking moon over an angry outline of night clouds, and the picture itself was nice, but with the text over it, I couldn't help but crack up. It ended up creating this over-the-top impression, as if I was delivering this Romantic-era sermon on the top of a jagged cliff with a cape and a top hat. Hard to explain. 

I couldn't find any good abstract backgrounds that were getting the desired effect either. They were all too busy or if they were simple enough, the color scheme wasn't quite right. 

Might try something later. But boring works for now. Better than crap. Or ridiculous. 

WoW!

I never really stopped to think about it, but of course massively multiplayer online games are going to be introducing reproduced social systems to facilitate the open-ended gameplay they introduce; you have to have a mechanism in place that keeps players coming back to play.

You have to wonder though - and this is really an eternal question that rears its head occasionally - why do millions of people participate in artificial systems that have no bearing on their own physical well-being when they are merely unimaginative reproductions (well maybe there's a little imagination) of the same shitty social systems they are attempting to temporarily escape from?

People want to be admired. If their only avenue for growing in power lies in a virtual simulation, I suppose it is understandable that they would pursue it, as unfortunate as that is. But why is it that the most popular simulation in the history of video games is the one that treats the players with nothing but contempt? Just as the real world elites have done, which in turn produces this unappealing real-world environment that they feel the need to escape?

Scientific Quality

The scientific process and scientific knowledge itself have been systematically corrupted by money power and its corollary: political power.

The good news is, the corruption has become so blatant and absurd that more and more scientists and non-scientists are becoming aware of it, and incorporating it into their understanding.

Rational reductionism has been curtailed. Microscopic focus on one's own immediate discipline is slowly being pulled back, and lines of communication between disciplines are opening up again.

Quality

One answer to the mystery of declining quality might be buried in my own experiences this week. I'm writing multiple pieces for a man who is quickly becoming big in the tech world. He started out as a decent personality that people trusted and he probably did pretty good work. But he got bigger and more popular and now he is making a lot of money, and he wants to make more. He is monetizing his fan base, literally selling the people that trust him. He does this by charging companies to promote their products to his large network of fans. He can do this because he promoted products before, the difference being that they were products that he actually liked and believed in.

I'm writing pieces that are basically low quality fabrications, due to the nature of the company I work for. It is easier and cheaper to pay a contracted worker like me to write rubbish from crap I research on the Internet, crap that is the work of other people. I write pieces to promote products of companies that have paid, and the pieces have to look like they were organically created by him and his affiliated bloggers, while really it is just the hawking of the product of a paying company.

The bulk of his site's articles are going to start looking like this. You are going from people writing about stuff they care about, to having a company that can mass produce these writings for cheap based on some economic process which really amounts to exploitation. So the quality of the articles are going to decline and this guy is going to get very rich. This partially has to do with the amoral nature of money too, and its tendency to become decoupled from the communities it gains legitimacy from, but that's another issue altogether.

This might seem a little confusing because I'm being very careful to be vague about the operations of my job, because it is the only thing bringing in money. But there is a general principle to be taken from all of this.

You see things like this happening all of the time. Some institution or business is started by an individual or group of people that is doing something very good that they care about, and wish to expand this good and become a little more powerful in the process. But eventually the expansion runs away from them and their operation takes on a life of its own. Awareness shifts from the good and the community to their own persons and their power as derived from this operation. The original mission declines in quality in proportion to the growing power of whomever is benefited by the operations of the mission.

In many cultures, the emphasis on the individual and the power of the individual over the good of the community is what evil actually looks like. This is the essence of Satanism. The funny thing is that we as a culture have adopted wholesale this ethos.

It is necessary to get to a point where we can jettison these values and stop this kind of thing from happening, because it is happening everywhere with everything. For many of us, it is all we know about how to live.And it is ruining everything.

1st Street

It is lit with rows of lamps that glow in orange lines that converge far ahead down the street. At night the orange lanterns look very beautiful against the violet sky, with rows of dark trees outlined beneath the humming night sky. The houses are gorgeous: heterogeneous and built with care and an aesthetic enthusiasm. Riding down the street, one feels as if one is transported to the past when neighborhoods were built with an eye for beauty, before monoculture and the awful sterile beauty-death of mass-produced homes.

But then it is too easy to dream up some mythic past when all was gold and everyone had a beautiful, ornate home. In reality, the poor seem always to be left with barely passable shelters thrown up in haste, the middle class with "luxury" shelters built with economical and repetitious means, utilized by the rich to accumulate wealth, while the rich themselves are able to afford the time and energy for an aesthetic dwelling.

The same happens with food, with entertainment, with transportation. The good becomes increasingly expensive as wealth becomes concentrated...the wealthy and powerful accumulate more resources and control and most goods are stripped down to their bare utility functions, and then to less than that, so as to transfer as much energy and wealth to the producers. Soon goods have no aesthetic value, they are stripped of their meaning. You have to search carefully or pay a lot for quality. Why does it happen? How does it happen?

Why not share?

Tonight there was a towering wisp of what looked like steam, or just a thin cloud in the sky, which rose above the row of lanterns. Purples, violets, blackened trees, oranges...those make for a nice color scheme. The night air was pleasant and there was an ocean smell in the air, along with some jasmine. It was enough.

Write Drunk, Edit Sober

The old saying is partially metaphorical, but then partially literal sometimes too. You write, or engage in whatever other creative act in a fit of inspiration, rapidly belting off various ideas, sometimes only dimly connected. The task after that is to take the raw output and shape and edit it, taking care to add connections to those ideas you've thrown so sloppily about, or trim and edit here and there. Keep in mind the reader, or the listener, or the observer, and think about what they are thinking when they look upon what you are trying to communicate.

You could say the creative act is almost entirely subjective and instinctual. You are merely trying to externalize what is inside of you, regardless of what it means, or whether it is correct or useful. The editing is a social act. It is the attempt to shape an act of communication and establish the connection to another intelligence. The objective takes shape after others witness the externalized subjective, and then incorporate it into their own subjective experience. The objective is the subjective amplified and averaged in various ways.

The creative act is usually pretty fun. The editing is usually drudgery. But it doesn't have to be. It is all necessary.

Ignite

The power comes back on early this morning temporarily. I write a few things down but the thoughts and sensations are coming too fast and uncontrollably. And then a work order comes in!

Hours pass and I return to consciousness, deciding to take the bike out to burn off the top layer that's peaking. Out in the path with music I feel like an animal, responding to mere sounds and sights with proportionate animations. I feel the superficial surge of cola energy peeling away, revealing it for its baseless and nutritionless nature as cheap fuel. Charging against the wind, I feel a hollowing out and an energy deadness inside, though I feel intensely alive: a cavity forming amidst a ball of fire. I have to keep riding though, as I'm far out. The energy continues to burn up fast. Cola. As if I walked out over a sliver of rock that is barely hanging over an abyss.

The thoughts stabilize and I feel alive again. I know its only temporarily but I have to grasp it and experience it now and then. It occurs to me there's two separate plates, two planes gnashing against one another, one comprised of an old animal logic, and the other comprised of a new human symbolic logic. There might be more. The two share energy: with power going to the symbolic, the animal is suppressed or at least stabillized, with the inverse occuring with an inferno-like animal logic surging and retreating, pulling the symbolic logic violently with it.

Social power is derived with assent, and assent is derived from the directional nature of animal logic. Assent leads to consolidation and enrichment of its object, while dissent leads to separation and destruction of its object. Our logic and narratives form around the imprint of an emotional act, but then systematized  and powered themselves, the logic and narratives guide any subsequent emotional movements within a circumscribed pattern until these circuits are worn out and the animal logic breaks loose once again. We call this chaos, but really it has a defined logic of its own that we have just chosen to ignore, and so it lies beneath a cognitive veil.

The chaotic movements, after exhausting their peaks and drops of energy stabilize, allowing the logic and narrative to coalesce once again and form a new prescriptive system.

Is this narrative nonsense? Or does it describe an underlying reality? The answer lies ultimately in what we choose to do with a narrative, and how we frame it: whether we choose to call it true or nonsense, and order our actions accordingly.

I reach the top of a hill pedaling my way up, accompanied by driving hip hop, reflecting on a civilization that has stolen the music vitality of an entire race for itself to sell records for predominantly philistine business-class whites, stuffing the human producers of culture themselves into inner city ghettos and prisons. Images of war and capital, slavery and conquest burst forth in clusters and are gone. A moment of strife and I'm riding again. Don't get too lost. Something can be done yet. Give what has been given to you and do your best to create. That goes for anybody really.

Life Affirmation

There's a tendency in an individualistic society to regard expressions of earnestness or even truth-claims as a sort of obstacle to surmount. As if someone expressing their opinion is reaching for a prize that is only available to one person, in this case universal reverence for being "right," and so the person and their opinion needs to be neutralized. Its as if you have this eternal game of leapfrog in which scores of people mount each other in oscillating cycles, striving ever higher for a sort of perceived throne seat atop universal reverence from the masses.

This happens within every discipline, but I could probably explain its mechanics best by detailing its activity in philosophy. What happened in an institutional setting is that you would have this fashionable discourse - at the time it was logic and language - and within the discourse would be minds competing for top honors by positing the most powerful, explanatory theory available. Everyone has a different way of explaining things, a unique expressive language so to speak. And due to people's personalities and fixations, they see different angles of things, so of course you're always going to have someone stepping up and saying, "well no this is actually how it is," or something like that. Camps form around the most powerful arguments and they become schools of thought, with more refined theories advanced by figures within the schools, and competing schools arising taking up arguments defined by either variants or direct inversions of the arguments held by their opponents.

So let's take an older argument. You had this perennial philosophical debate concerning materialism and idealism. You have a camp saying that everything is material...just matter and that mental properties arise out of that matter. And you have a camp saying it is precisely the opposite: everything arises from the mind and everything we encounter in the world is an idea. Then you have a new camp come in and synthesize these ideas, saying, well no both of you are getting at something but it is a little bit of both. So you have this hybrid argument wherein there is this material world that becomes transformed when perceived by our own minds and so on. This new, more powerful argument unseats the old and now you have a new system of thought to surmount. Of course there's not only one synthesis, there arises multiple schools trying to solve the old dichotomy in different ways.This is the sort of thing that Hegel was trying to explain in his account of history and progress.

Meanwhile, the underlying conditions of living are changing. Societies undergo change. Environments undergo change. World systems undergo change. And there are other disciplines that are presenting their own new bodies of knowledge, freshly energized from vital energies emanating from new systems of philosophical and scientific thought. And there are artistic movements introducing emotional and aesthetic perceptions that modify general consciousness as well (or at least express the current state of consciousness, the validation of which generates vitality). So you have schools of thought arising to unseat the old ideas with their own new ideas in an attempt to bring consciousness in line with the new perceived reality.

A greater reality to be aware of is the fact that all of these ideas are generated at a historical time and place. There is an underlying condition of living, as well as a dominant emotional constellation from which these ideas arise.

There comes a point when the old competitive expansion is exhausted, and the dominant ideology takes on a post-modern outlook. What I mean by this is that everyone collectively becomes aware of the falsity of the old idea, by virtue of the fact that real conditions have drifted past the ghost of the ideological snapshot, and then there arises an ideology that all ideologies are false, or conversely all of them are equally true.

At this point one wonders, what's the point? Why bother having an opinion at all? You're just taking up an insignificant point in time and space, and so are all the others who have opinions of their own, and soon someone comes along to contradict you or history grinds on and your point fades, or etc.

I think one of the more subtle readings of Nietzsche shows that he understood this. It was his wide cosmic understanding that allowed him to be read differently by virtually anyone who picked him up, so that you have progressives and reactionaries finding value in his works, and you could go from the opinion that he was responsible for the formation of Nazi ideology, to the opinion that his work is spiritually therapeutic to read.

But what makes him a therapeutic read? This is one of the most interesting things about him I think. His ideology was life affirming. There was a zest and an energy to it. He wrote enthusiastically about affirming life himself and rejoicing in what one was. He was disgusted with what he called slave morality and its Christian adherents, but ultimately he probably saw them as a just ideological formation that was necessary for their historical position.

One is alive in the world and breathing and thinking. What one believes should be advanced with a celebration that one is what one is. One should rejoice in what one is. There is no backing down, there is no folding over, or shrinking back. One should stand tall, unashamed and embrace the conditions for one's own life. One should be free to create one's values in accordance with what one is, free from the shackles of false morality and religious superstition.

Now his affirmation was warlike, which led to the proliferation of modern individualist consciousness, though that wasn't the only source. He rejoiced in what he was, but intended to do battle with anyone else that had different opinions or was of a differing constitution and that came up against him. He rejoiced in that battle. This of course had to reflect the social undercurrents of the time, but today I'm not so sure this attitude is so appropriate.

Now it is a mark of philosophical strength to be able to believe in truth and be flexible enough to not collapse into dogma at the same time. Such an ideological system allows one to do this. The idea that each ideologies develop in historical time and space is quite powerful, and allows one a powerful framework with which to understand the human world, but then going and emphasizing conflict when unique ideologies clash is not the best thing to do in my opinion.

Perhaps a better formulation is that yes, each of us consists of different characters, and yes we occupy a unique historical period with its social and ecological reality, and its own store of knowledge to draw from. But instead of emphasizing conflict when coming up against these differences, the idea should be to understand them and synthesize them.

Ah but this formulation will only age and die like the rest of them, to be replaced by something new and shinier in the future, until the greater cycle places us back in this position when a similar but new formulation is to be iterated. What is the point? Well I suppose I'll just have to affirm life then.