Danny's Weblog

2008 Sep 29 [ Mon ]

Amateur video shows Death Star over San Francisco

This is an amazing short, consisting of handheld shots taken around the San Francisco area, with routine tourist views in the foreground and the Star Wars Death Star, or an Imperial battle cruiser, or At-Ats, in the background.

Here are a couple of links to it:

gizmodo.com [http://gizmodo.com/5037927/galactic-empire-begins-invasion-of-san-francisco]

starwarsblog.starwars.com [http://starwarsblog.starwars.com/index.php/2008/08/15/i-left-my-star-destroyer-in-san-francisco/]

There was only one clip which lacked authenticity for me – a small pasenger craft swoops to a landing, folding its wings. Somehow, it seems separate from its environment; a little too glittery and shadowless. Everything else works well.

I don't know what kind of software he used to make the Star Wars shots maintain alignment so well with the foreground. I suppose his basic idea was that if the distant items are *very* distant – perhaps miles away – local camera motion does not require any alteration in the appearance of the distant item, so *only* alignment was necessary to maintain credibility. I think also he chose the blend modes well so that slight matte errors on edges did not cause visible flickering.

It's occurred to me before – eg about the most recent Star Wars movies – that if the camera pauses, and stops the story, and gazes at length on some special effect, the viewer is jettisoned from the story, and thinks to himself "ho-hum, big special effects scene, blah". Whereas if most of the shot is *not* a special effect, we think about the *story*. This short seems to exploit that idea to the full: the clumsy camera work, often clearly aimed at capturing San Francisco rather than the Imperial hardware, puts you squarely in the alternate-history narrative of an ordinary person.

Overall, it reminds me of how easily video can now be faked. Actually, it looks more credible than the shots we have seen from 9/11.

2008 Sep 28 [ Sun ]

The Great Debate about the 700 billion USD bailout

There is a debate in Congress about Paulson's proposed 700-billion USD bailout of the financial industry. But it's just theater – for instance the moment when Paulson got down on one knee to plead for acceptance.

Meanwhile, what the TV news doesn't say is that last week the banks borrowed 940 billion USD *already*. The TV pundits also don't dwell on the fact that the proposed bill would actually allow Paulson to create an *unlimited* amount of taxpayer-funded debt – the much-quoted 700-billion figure is only the amount to be "outstanding at any one time": www.prisonplanet.com [http://www.prisonplanet.com/bank-borrowing-from-fed-already-exceeded-bailout-total-in-last-week.html]

But don't worry. The Great Debate – ie, "Do you want families to lose their house and savings?" – continues

2008 Sep 19 [ Fri ]

Amongst their weaponry... are such elements as... I'll come in again

In a previous posting, I said that the three weapons of governments are to increase taxes, borrow and start wars: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Opinions/Politics/Miscellaneous/credit01.html]

I realized later that I had forgotten a major one that most books quote: to debase the currency.

In Roman times this had a literal meaning: the government withdrew gold and silver coins and reduced the value of their precious-metal content either by reforging them with a higher fraction of base metal or by simply shaving the edges. Over the centuries this process continued until today we are used to paper currency which has no precious-metal content at all.

Not to be defeated however, governments realized that they could inflate the currency to serve the same purpose. The benefits, as far as the government and its cronies are concerned, that the true value of debts (eg to pension savers) are reduced, and the effective tax rates rise without requiring changes in legislation. So in my defence I can say that debasing the currency is now equivalent to raising taxes and borrowing money.

This reminds me of a speculation I had about the motives of the Feds in creating this crisis: they intend to destroy the value of the dollar so that dollar-denominated foreign debts (such as T-bills) vanish. Presumably they don't care about the horrendous consequences to the economy, because if they and their buddies are correctly positioned when the crash happens they can buy US companies and real estate for (effectively) pennies on the dollar. And once the US population has been subjected to mass bankruptcy, unemployment and starvation they will be glad to accept third-world wages and working conditions, so new US businesses will be competitive with the Red Chinese.

But that explanation is probably too simple.

Another example of how financial stability was destroyed

In the last couple of postings in this thread I've made the point that over the last few years financial institutions "began to operate well *below* long-term stability".

Here's another example: the "Financial Services Modernization Act" passed by the US Congress in 1999. A Slashdot poster quotes Senator Durgan's eloquent speech opposing the bill:

I believe fervently that 2 years, 5 years, 10 years from now, we will look back at this moment and say: We modernized the financial services industry because the industry did it itself and we needed to move ahead and draw a ring around it and provide some guidance, some rules and regulations. I also think we will, in 10 years time, look back and say: We should not have done that because we forgot the lessons of the past; those lessons represent timeless truths that were as true in the year 2000 or 2010 as they were in the year 1930 or 1935.

ask.slashdot.org [http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=968941&cid=25065385]

Incidentally, my position is basically anti-regulation. However, the current system is full of regulations which were assiduously sought by the industry. For instance, the Securities and Exchange Commission, which most people think of as a watchdog over the industry, primarily acts to shield it from individual lawsuits.

More generally, the legal concept of the limited-liability company led very rapidly to the situation of the 19th century where huge organizations were able to form impregnable monopolies by bribing legislatures, which is still the case today.

A more recent example is the CAN-SPAM act, which legalized spam by making it impossible for individuals to file suit against spammers.

But most people would probably think eliminating the limited-liability concept would be a little harsh, and would be more open to increasing regulation, so here we are.

2008 Sep 18 [ Thu ]

Another followup on the credit crunch

In my posting yesterday I made the point that financial institutions "began to operate well *below* long-term stability". I didn't post any links to confirm that, believing that anyone who takes the time to read any of my postings (all three of you) probably does not find that statement hard to swallow. www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Opinions/Politics/Miscellaneous/credit02.html]

Still, I was happy to find today a good link to an illustration of what I said: bigpicture.typepad.com [http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2008/09/regulatory-exem.html]

Apparently, the big 5 US brokers somehow persuaded the SEC in 2004 to write a special exemption, just for them, to allow them to make riskier trades than other smaller brokers were allowed to. To take a charitable view, even the biggest brokers were under so much pressure to take risks that they decided to operate well below the limits which had been designed in 1975 to ensure stability (and which had protected all brokers from competitors who might take a higher-risk strategy).

Now imagine what the *smaller* brokers felt about all this.

2008 Sep 17 [ Wed ]

Some more thoughts on the credit crunch

My posting on this topic yesterday: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Opinions/Politics/Miscellaneous/credit01.html]

I happened to see a webpage which suggests I am not the only nutter who expects the government to loot private pensions. Apparently Alicia Munnel, a Clinton administration appointee as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy argued that private pensions should face a capital levy to make up for the fact that their accumulation was tax free: www.prisonplanet.com [http://www.prisonplanet.com/us-economy-rudderless-and-reeling-from-direct-hits.html]

Her argument is almost rational; it's almost the same as something I argued in that posting. But it ignores the issue of who argued what when these pension schemes were first proposed, and who really benefited, and who paid the price.

Another point, about the Long-Term Capital Management fiasco: when I thought about the things I said in the previous posting about the *message* people took from that disaster, I realized I wasn't as clear as I would like. What I should have said is as follows.

The message people *should* have taken is that, for one reason or another, even institutions which are arguably stable in the long term are prone to calamitous collapse, so regulators need to force them to operate with a much greater safety margin than merely breaking even.

Of course, the message which financial institutions took from LTCM was that nothing was really dangerous and if anything did happen the Feds would bail them out. Worse: they concluded that if any institution decided to operate safely, its competitors would run it out of the market. So they began to operate well *below* long-term stability.

So here we are.

2008 Sep 16 [ Tue ]

The credit crunch has been coming for sixty years

I'm pretty old, so I'm old enough to remember not only things that happened, but also what we were told about them at the time.

For instance, pensions. When the universal pension scheme was introduced in England at the end of WW2, most people welcomed it, but it was fairly obvious that it was being financed in a strange way. That is, current wage-earners were paying for current retirees, and no more than that (actually even less, but that's another issue). In the long run, this only works if the numbers of each group remain stable, or if the wage-earners exceed the retirees. But in this period we had the baby boom. Clearly, unless the population was going to explode, the baby-boom generation would be followed by some sort of reversion to normal fertility rates. And that would break the system. However, the government did not worry because for many years there would be more wage-earners than retirees.

By the time I was old enough to read analyses in the early sixties, the effect was obvious. Simple arithmetic showed that the burden on wage-earners would become stupendous by around 2015. At that time, I was less cynical than I am now, but plenty of people said many cynical things about what the results would be. I formed the opinion that one of the ways that the government would react would be by heavily taxing pension income, and means-testing the recipients of state pensions. I have followed that judgement all my life, and have no pension arrangements whatever.

Why did everyone else not see what I did? Actually, many did: I have often seen it referred to that most baby-boomers believe the pension system will collapse before they can get back what they paid in. But almost everyone took the opposite route: they tried to build up personal savings so that they could survive without a state pension. I think the government will not dare to let pensioners starve, and will continue to provide some sort of pension scheme, but it will have no compunction about seizing assets to pay for this. So I can profit now, while others will be robbed of their life savings to pay for me later. I don't think my behavior in this is any worse than the government's, and much less hypocritical.

But a much bigger reason is what we were being told at the time. We were being told to expect a future in which electric power would be too cheap to measure. We were being told to expect robots capable of carrying out any task, combined (somehow) with full employment. Where is my flying car?

At the same time, we were warned of the risk of nuclear annihilation. Why bother worrying about changing society, or planning, when all of our problems would be swept away, one way or another?

In the fifties and sixties many people relied on company pension schemes. But the swinging sixties left young people no longer expecting to spend their lives with a single employer, and pension schemes ruthlessly punished job-switchers. Also, a string of cases where companies looted their pension schemes were publicized. The best-known case (from the eighties and nineties) is of Robert Maxwell and the Daily Mirror: en.wikipedia.org [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Maxwell]

Such cases continue to happen, such as (my observation) the way older employees were encouraged to give up long-term jobs at Sears in exchange for apparently more promising jobs at sister companies, only to find that the sister companies were left to wither and the small print of their contracts meant their pension rights disappeared.

So how could people form a nest-egg for their retirement? One way was to buy a house, but there are obvious problems with that. After retirement most people are not eager to go through the turmoil of moving to a smaller, more easily-maintained house, but how else are they to get cash out of the house? Also, as people live longer and require many more years of assisted living, the house would have to be truly palatial, resulting in enormous local tax payments.

And people became aware that there was a speculative boom/bust cycle now in housing. The government kept the house prices high, way above the natural level, by providing tax relief on the mortgage interest, but this resulted in occasional deep falls in prices. (One of the major conclusions from the era of the Wall Street Crash was that it should be specifically forbidden to lend money for the purposes of investment, but that's exactly what the government encourages in the housing market.)

So HMG and the Feds started to offer various schemes to allow people to build portable pensions. Now they never really explained how they were supposed to work. Why exactly should other taxpayers, who maybe have no spare cash for their own pensions, pay higher taxes to subsidize someone to make investments for his own pension? The only undeniable result of these schemes was hugely increased business for the pension companies, plus a new source of investment for various companies on the Stock Exchange.

Still, people were happy. Their money poured into various accounts with a lot of small print, and the investments seemed to prosper (partly because money was pouring into the investments, but oh well).

But what is the *long-term* picture for such investments? Recent history is full of cases where fund managers have made serious blunders in administering a fund, eg Long Term Capital Management (a name which became highly ironic, but which actually did not even reflect their stated modus operandi): en.wikipedia.org [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management]

A particularly interesting element in LTCM's case was that after its collapse, its holdings were liquidated making a small *profit*. In other words, even operations which were sound in some sense were vulnerable to speculation. Unfortunately, society took the wrong message from this. It seems to have decided that financial institutions deserved to be bailed out when things go wrong. Society would have been much safer if it had decided to execute LTCM's directors and major investors.

But now we had a situation where millions of individuals with no experience were expected to administer their own pension plan. Not only is it quite possible to pick stocks which go bad – for instance, by misunderstanding the correlation between various holdings so that what appears to be a balanced portfolio is actually highly vulnerable – not only are stock markets subject to long troughs, so that an entire generation of retirees are forced to sell off most of their holdings in the first few years – not only are government-controlled inflation indexes well known to ignore medical and nursing expenses vital to retirees – but simply having too many transactions kills the small investor. Transaction costs are minimal for investment funds themselves, because they know the system and have a strong negotiating position. But individuals see a fee of 2% of the buy and an 0.5% per-annum fee and think that's not much. Well, 0.5% per annum profit is about what the *best* strategies get, long-term, beyond inflation, for the small investor. And a single 2% fee can blow several years of compound interest. And a lot of investors get suckered into even *higher* fees, as well as exposing themselves to intensive marketing to churn their accounts. "Intelligent" pensions are about as good a deal as "long-term capital management".

So people start thinking about housing as an investment again: not just buying your own house, but investing in various more complicated ways. Governments like this because they really have only three strategies: increase taxes, borrow and start wars. (Kind of like the joke about the guy who starts a new job and his predecessor hands him three envelopes.) The beauty of inflating house prices, from the government's point of view, is that it can hand out money to people and the people who will have to *borrow* that money are people in the *future*.

What do I mean by that? In order to hand out more money, the government gives money to banks. But the banks then have to *lend* it to people. This works best if people are *forced* to borrow it. But if the government forces up house prices, by offering tax breaks and reducing the supply by zoning etc, people who *already* have houses are insulated. Those people can easily get loans based on this artificially inflated value, and spend the money on real-granite countertops and Harley-Davidsons and investments in government securities, and the people who will really pay the price for all of this are those people's children, who will be forced to buy houses because rental prices are pushed up by the house prices, so it will still make financial sense to choose to buy instead of rent.

All of this was clear to me 30 years ago, when I sold a house I'd owned for a year, and observed that I made more money than I'd earned that entire year in my job (even after transaction costs).

Well, maybe a lot of people had the same thoughts. But they didn't react by putting any pressure on the governing class. They just figured the situation wouldn't change anytime soon.

Cut to 2003. The US government, for reasons best known to itself, wanted to have a war in Iraq. It didn't want to finance it by raising taxes, because then the people might finally start putting two and two together, and it was lying about the real cost of the war. But it really needed a *lot* of money, so it borrowed the money. It flooded the international market with US securities.

But the supply of credit is not infinite (despite the Chinese government's apparent attempt to demonstrate it). All over the world, sources of credit started to dry up. Housing finance rates, which had been very low for a long time, started to creep up. Young people began to despair of ever entering the housing market and began to resign themselves to sharing housing and living with their parents and siblings. The supply of willing buyers dried up and houses became unsaleable. And people who had been encouraged to buy a house on the assumption that its price would rise enough to pay off a balloon mortgage found that someone else had made a big bet that *they* were going to lose.

Well, you know I'm talking about the credit crunch, which has left most financial institutions which invested – in whatever overcomplicated way – in the housing market completely exposed to fully-leveraged losses. But it's not some big surprise, and the banks who made bets that it would never happen are not the real architects of this disaster. The people who are most guilty, and are least likely to be punished, are generations of politicians of all parties who conspired to convince everyone that "Social Security is the third rail" and anyone who dared to propose the reforms that would be necessary would be destroyed.

And the Bush regime, but you probably guessed I'd say that.

And all of this is happening even *before* the baby boomers start to retire. Now *that* is going to be the real third rail. And we're all going to have to pee on it.

"Intellectual Property" -- paint "A Starry Night" again, man

Joni Mitchell, the famous singer-songwriter, made a live album "Miles of Aisles". On one track we hear the audience calling out to her in the gap between songs, hoping to hear their old favorites. Joni addresses them directly:

That's one thing that's always, like, been a difference between, like, the performing arts, and being a painter, you know. A painter does a painting, and he paints it, and that's it, you know. He has the joy of creating it, it hangs on a wall, and somebody buys it, and maybe somebody buys it again, or maybe nobody buys it and it sits up in a loft somewhere until he dies. But he never, you know, nobody ever, nobody ever said to Van Gogh, 'Paint a Starry Night again, man!' You know? He painted it and that was it.

I have attended live performances by any musicians quite seldom, because when I do so it turns out that I have grown used to the recorded version of the songs, and the live performance seems like an inferior copy. Her "The Last Time I Saw Richard" is better on "Blue" than on "Miles of Aisles": www.lyricsfreak.com [http://www.lyricsfreak.com/j/joni+mitchell/the+last+time+i+saw+richard_20075265.html]

Joni Mitchell has had a long career, and has frequently talked about how irritating it is that her fans prefer her older work to her current work. I have to say I feel the same way; "Hissing of Summer Lawns" is not as good as "Blue" and "Court and Spark", etc. Apparently, she would prefer to produce new music which does not have to compete against her own older music. Of course, she is one of the most admired and respected figures in popular music, so her new music continues to be marketed. (I wonder if Joni is the singer Philip K. Dick refers to without naming her in several of his stories.)

The position of an unknown musician who's trying to find an audience is rather more difficult. An ex-girlfriend of mine many years ago – let's call her Renate – was a passionate and accomplished singer-songwriter. She was living in NYC and doing occasional gigs on Bleeker St. One weekend I was staying with her at her ex-boyfriend's house in Connecticut and helped her record several songs as a demo. One of them, "For the Sake of Believing", in my opinion is as good as anything Joni Mitchell ever sang. It was just her, and her guitar, and her beautiful voice, in a small back room, and me with her ex's Dolby Stereo cassette deck and her semi-pro mikes. They were basically single takes.

Renate wisely dumped me shortly after. She continued to get gigs, but never got anywhere in the music business. I saw her at an sf convention 13 years later when she was promoting her novel, and heard she had given up on her music.

Renate had had to compete with Joni just as Joni did. But Joni's recordings had been made with top session musicians, the best equipment, and skilled technicians at the peak of their careers, assembled by producers with years of experience. And then they had been heavily promoted, with millions of dollars going into making sure that everyone who might enjoy her music would be exposed to it. And then all of this had been amplified by her subsequent career. Anyone who might have considered promoting Renate to compete with Joni would have had to match that sort of investment.

A few years after Renate dumped me I was dating a music company owner – let's call her Sally-Anne – and I asked her to listen to the original tape I'd made of Renate. When Sally-Anne (also wisely) dumped me and I was leaving her house, I happened to see the tape in a pile with other tapes. I took it because I was sure Sally-Anne would never listen to it, and I didn't want to lose the original recording. But I still wonder if I should have left it.

That's the real cost of music copyrights. They make it possible to build a vast business out of pouring investment into a tiny few performers, while destroying the lives of everyone else. Without copyrights, there would be no incentive to invest in someone's career. Instead of going to watch Joni glumly reproducing her old favorites, we would listen to ten thousand performers who were close to her level, or even better, performing songs we had never heard before.

It's also the cost of movie copyrights. The requirements of the movie *business*, which depends on mass promotion, result in movies aimed at the crudest human drives. I've only attended a pro baseball game once (at Fenway Park), and my clearest memory of it is that the bulk of the spectators were very visibly mentally subnormal, in the 60 to 80 range, I suppose. But the drives of *that* group are what the "summer blockbuster" has to aim at. The "Die Hard" movies are obviously crude revenge fantasies with resentments and explosions, made by skilled and thoughtful people who might have made something like Dr Zhivago – or Dr Strangelove – with that part of their lives, but instead they polish and polish until even I find these movies watchable. Of course, they would not have had so much money to throw around in the absence of copyright, but why exactly is Bruce Willis, for instance, worth tens of millions of dollars per picture? Mainly because of his presence in similar movies which were also heavily promoted. There are thousands, perhaps millions, of actors who could do as well or better.

In the absence of copyrights, nobody would invest in movies, *unless* they just wanted the movie to exist. The internet makes it possible for small groups to produce very tightly focused work. A good example is the anime subtitling community: en.wikipedia.org [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fansub]

The issue of software copyrights and patents is even clearer. In many cases, patents have been granted on algorithms which are basically obvious and which require no great or distinctive effort to create, unlike music, or movies. Amazon's "one-click" patent springs to mind. A Slashdot discussion of such a case: yro.slashdot.org [http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/08/09/15/2223259.shtml]

But the real problem is even worse, ie network effects: en.wikipedia.org [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect]

Once you establish a monopoly, you can use the network effect to build a wider and wider monopoly position. That's certainly what happened with Microsoft; by controlling Windows, MS was able to destroy Lotus and Word Perfect, and with the cash from Windows and Office, MS was able to flood the market with "free" Internet Explorer, destroying Netscape. There's no equivalent to network effects in the entertainment media, although vertical integration is also bad, especially combined with technical standards like widescreen or video cassettes.

In the absence of copyright, we would lose some work. For instance, one of my favorite musicians is J. J. Cale: en.wikipedia.org [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_J_Cale]

As I said, I don't usually like to attend live performances. But I thought J. J. Cale's music was particularly likely to work well in performance: it sounds underproduced, with audible master tape noise and rumble on some tracks. I went to see him play at a lesbian bar near MIT about ten years ago. But he sounded terrible: the songs that had sounded relaxed and warm and genuine in his recordings sounded sloppy and meandering in his live performance.

Maybe he just had an off day. But it's possible that he's simply not very good (or routinely wasted), and he can only build himself up to a good performance once or twice a year. Without income from recordings, he probably wouldn't survive against his less famous competition. Without music copyrights, we might lose his music. But we would gain the music of a thousand others.

And on TV, maybe we would lose shows aimed at attracting the maximum number of gently-anaesthetized viewers to commercials and designed to deliver hidden messages about how weak and helpless individuals are, and gain shows that people created because they wanted them to exist.

2008 Sep 11 [ Thu ]

Another good one-liner for atheists

Atheism is like masturbation. Faith is like masturbating with a smiley face drawn on your hand.

Source: news.slashdot.org [http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=960201&cid=24955885]

2008 Mar 16 [ Sun ]

Mysterious deaths of British police officers

I had started to notice one report after another of dead or missing police officers. I was surprised to see no speculation about possible reasons for this string of deaths. I noticed in the London Times (2008-03-14 p9) the following summary:

Mr Munro's death follows the apparent suicides of Police Sergeant Richard Fuller, 55, in Calne, Wiltshire, and Michael Todd, 50, the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester.

plus this interesting statement:

Dewi Pritchard-Jones, the North Wales Coroner, took the unusual step of calling medical evidence at the opening of the inquest [on Chief Constable Michael Todd] in Llangefni, Anglesey, in order to dispel "suspicions and fears" about the "ridiculous" stories circulating in recent days.

If I was circulating any "ridiculous" stories, I think I would start with the interesting way Todd's cellphone signal led searchers to a location miles away from where he was found. Did his killers not realize that cellphone companies can monitor user's locations? Or did they deliberately lead rescuers away from where he was eventually found, rendered unconscious and left in freezing 80 mph winds without a jacket? Perhaps it was just essential to provide a pretext of suicide as fast as possible, so they used his cellphone to send text messages ostensibly from Todd, although the cellphone conveniently doesn't leave any evidence of who actually punched the messages in... while the person who sent the messages was miles away from Todd's dying body.

But what could lead HMG to kill *several* police officers at once? Perhaps it's like Waco, where most of the LEOs found dead had served as Clinton's personal bodyguards. What element of their past links them together?

Hmmm... also, that kind of thing would have been planned and set up in advance. Why were the killers in such a desperate, slipshod hurry?

From a Times Online article:

A Whitehall source said that Mr Todd's death had nothing to do with his work but was related to his personal life.

Well, he would, wouldn't he? The government also seems to be pushing the line that the real reason for Todd's murder is that he had led an investigation into the CIA rendition flights via British territory, but this seems implausible to me: HMG has been caught red-handed on much worse and the running-dog media just keeps shovelling the government's spin. And it doesn't explain the other two deaths.

The meaning of Orwell's 1984

I vaguely remember reading an analysis of 1984 which suggested that Orwell thought that his world in 1948 actually *was* the world of 1984; he only set the novel in the future, with a few irrelevant sf touches like the telescreens and the names of countries, in order to get it published.

Unfortunately I couldn't find that idea in a casual web search. Indeed, one of the first webpages I found was so collossally badly written that I wondered how it could possibly have acquired pagerank: studentweb.tulane.edu [http://studentweb.tulane.edu/~jgray1/]

This is much better, though tendentious: findarticles.com [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1571/is_49_17/ai_81790763]

As usual the Wikipedia entry is valuable: en.wikipedia.org [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four] although it does not address my point.

My previous article re Orwell and Big Brother: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Opinions/Politics/Miscellaneous/bigbrother01.html]

I have been thinking about this issue because for several years I have been reconsidering my entire worldview and tearing away successive layers of belief about historical events. Having come to believe that the British and US governments created the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for their own purposes, I found it easy to see what HMG gained from the war in Ulster, and so forth.

In particular, 1984 shows scenes of grinding poverty which are more similar to the grim conditions of Britain in 1948 than the Ipods and holidays in Ibiza which we see around us. But what was Orwell actually saying? The Wikipedia article shows that in the world of the novel, the government ("inner party") deliberately kept the people in poverty:

The point of continuous warfare is to be rid of the surplus of industrial production to prevent the rise of the standard of living and make possible the economic repression of people.

I have been feeling more and more keenly that living standards for most people have hardly risen over my lifetime. It's true we have mobile phones and widescreen tvs, but many more important things – job security, public transport, access to medical care – have become much less satisfactory. And yet technological advances have taken place. Productivity has been steadily rising for fifty years; why are we still working 40-hour weeks? More people own their own homes now, but their homes' rise in value is at the expense of their own children. Do people realize that? That they are taking those holidays in Ibiza by refinancing a debt which is being imposed on their children?

So I believe Orwell's analysis was valid for 1948, and 1984, and 2008.

2007 Dec 26 [ Wed ]

Glamour Magazine: they would, wouldn't they

Every now and then I like to read Glamour magazine. In England, it's a small-format women's magazine. Honestly, I "read it for the articles", not because I was in Asia as a pre-op.

Anyhow, the articles always seemed more real than other magazines, particularly Cosmopolitan, which is superficially very similar. Here are a few ways I've noticed magazine articles falling below the threshold of readability:

1. Laziness: my picture of women's magazines has them staffed with the laziest and dullest employed writers, who will seize on a publicist's press release as the basis of a "story".

2. Pandering: yet another story aimed squarely at the reader's prejudices (at least most guys are aware that Penthouse letters and the like are fiction, but the equivalent "true life" stories in women's magazines are at least as sappily unrealistic).

3. Infomercials: pages and pages that are ads lightly disguised as editorial.

As I say, I've actually found Glamour to be one of the best on such criteria: certainly better than T3, for instance. But lately I've become aware of two problems.

One is a huge rise in infomercials. For instance, in the current issue, p 155, "6 beauty resolutions to break (and 6 to make)". Glamour suggests breaking "I will go to the gym for an hour every day to get my dream body" and advises "Forget the gym, go shoe shopping!..."

But what was truly egregious was their subscription blowin. In the small print under "your details" was "tick the boxes to receive information/ great offers from Conde Nast by email _ telephone _ or sms _ and great offers from companies and partners selected by the Conde Nast Publications Ltd..." Typical. "Selected", indeed, I thought. As in, we sell your name for 0.20 UKP to a mailing list house.

But the real kicker was in the even *smaller* print, carefully sandwiched between "INSTRUCTION TO YOUR BANK OR BUILDING SOCIETY" and (in red) "Subscriptions will begin with the first available issue" (which btw means they send you the one you just bought): "Please tick this box if you DO NOT wish to receive direct mail from The Conde Nast Publications Ltd _ or other reputable companies _."

This is clearly absolutely and intentionally fraudulent. They make the first opt-in relatively easy to see and hide the second opt-out.

How can companies get away with things like this? (Probably, I can hear you saying, because most people don't have enough time on their hands to read the small print on a magazine subscription.) It's left me feeling stupid about buying it and I don't intend to do it again for years. On the other hand, I am just complaining about it here and not writing a letter to Glamour.

It reminds me of a perception I had recently: simply by being lying murdering power-crazed gangsters, politicians make most of the electorate decide that *every* politician is worthless, and that any involvement in the political process is contaminating. Perhaps there are still some people in Glamour's editorial department who would care about this sort of thing, but who could have faith in that?

2007 Oct 14 [ Sun ]

Another data point on the killing curve

Some years ago I wrote an article about the fact that goverments have become more and more skilled at convincing us to kill each other: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Opinions/Politics/Miscellaneous/killing01.html]

It recently occurred to me that there is a data point which is outside the curve I had in mind in that article. And that is: can governments make a man kill himself?

In WW2 governments which demanded such a sacrifice were viewed as totalitarian and despicable. When Allied governments "needed" a "suicide mission", they requested volunteers, and even then the men would not be expected to actually kill themselves.

But now governments have developed and tested the technology to create suicide bombers. Remember, suicide bombers are just as new in Moslem/Arab society as they are to their audience in the West. Everybody has grievances, and now the techniques have been perfected on the Moslems they can be tried out on anyone.

Feminized jobs and their effects on men

I like the word "feminized" but since I started thinking about this article I have realized that most people use "feminized jobs" in a rather different sense than I had understood it.

Most people think that classically high-female-ratio jobs like nursing or teaching are "feminized". But that "ize" ending suggests to me a more active form of planning than the historical evolution of those roles.

For more than thirty years business has been under tremendous pressure to "improve" its gender ratios and the gender gap in pay. But how could they actually do that? The feminists who pushed for this program seem to have assumed, or at least given the impression, that business managements only needed to remove unfairness and the gender issues would magically disappear. But actually there are many qualifications for jobs: not just in education and experience, but also in social and psychological parameters.

As a result managements actually had to *change the jobs*. Feminists whiffled about tangential aspects of this, like maternity leave, but they chose not to talk about the effects on the *men* of job changes.

You see, managements have stopped rewarding men for the things they used to be good at. Men used to grow up knowing that they would need to support a family, so they would study hard, and undergo a lengthy appreniceship, all of which, combined with experience, would make them valuable and even irreplaceable to management.

But for decades now management has need to create the kind of jobs that women like: interchangeable, with heavy social interaction, requiring only superficial study, like web page design.

And these jobs have slowly eliminated real jobs, so that slowly men have been discouraged from investing their time and energy in training and skills. And now their earning potential has fallen to that of women – rather than women's rising to meet men's. Women must have some dim feeling that the good men, the good "catches" have been disappearing: the ones who could support them and their children. Instead, the women find themselves too busy and tired with meetings and planning conferences to be able to take advantage of the (still inadequate) maternity leave. And anyway, their genes tell them it's dumb to bear the child of a man who can hardly earn as much as they do, and whose job is a woman's job.

The cockamamie Chinese one-child policy

As soon as I heard of it I could see it would lead to a situation in which males would seriously outnumber females. According to Wikipedia, the ratio has been steadily rising, and was already at 1.17 by 2000 (although Chinese official statistics are notoriously unreliable).

At the time it simply struck me, as a male, that this was a bad thing. I thought the rulers of China, being male, should be more clever than that.

Recently it occurred to me that this effect was surely as instantly obvious to China's rulers as it was to me. But what could their intentions have been? I somehow could not accept that their plan was to break down Chinese society's predilection for sons by having a catastrophic period of shortage of females.

I believe it fits in with the ruling class's perception of itself as a class, whose interests are not the same as the citizens'. The ruling class are rich and powerful enough to seize as many women as they feel like anyway: *so long as they retain power*. So their aim is to use population policy to retain control. But how?

Religion certainly has many aspects, but I believe the reason a religion becomes popular is because it serves the interests of the ruling class. "Unto Caesar that which is Caesar's" is a motto which Caesar was probably pretty happy with. Religions that try to oppose governments tend to get the label "cults", like David Koresh's group.

A recurring aspect of religion is the monastery, certainly common in Semitic religions and Buddhism. It seems strange, doesn't it, that rulers would allow a religion to take away a large fraction of the manpower. But what are the results of that subtraction? It only requires a small difference in the sex ratio to leave either gender desperate to find a partner. If access to a suitable partner is controlled by the state, the state has almost total power over one or both genders. Just as the fundamental mode of operation of governments is to turn the people against each other, its fundamental means of controlling people is artificial scarcity.

Recently English newspapers have had many accounts of the generation of women whose potential mates were wiped out in the Great War. But actually my thoughts turned to the young men who died virgins at the age of 18, as opposed to the women who died as old maids. What was in their minds? What makes a young man die for his nation?

I think the Chinese ruling class is planning to *use* that looming surplus of young men, desperate to find a mate and vulnerable to propaganda which makes them think that "all the nice girls love a sailor".

The Chinese don't even really need to *win* that war. *All* the ruling classes like a nice war now and then.

2007 Mar 30 [ Fri ]

Iraq war reason -- I never thought it was oil till now

I said in an earlier post that I thought the Iraq war was so costly that it outweighed any benefit from grabbing Iraq's oil: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Opinions/Politics/Iraq/bush01.html]

I felt confirmed in that belief when no effort was made to get Iraq's oilfields back on line – production is still much lower than before the war.

This link certainly confirms my idea that the war is stupendously expensive – it estimates over *two trillion USD*: www.informationclearinghouse.info [http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15499.htm]

But one of the costs mentioned in that page is actually profit for someone – clear profit at zero risk (unlike say the role of Halliburton). That profit is the *increased price of oil* due to tension in the Middle East as well as diminished flow from Iraq. If the Iraq war had not happened, the big oil companies, and the islamic dictatorships in the Middle East, would still have sold the same oil but made much lower profits.

The story in the link eastimates that the US *alone* will pay 300 billion USD extra, assuming that the Iraq war caused just a 10 USD/barrel price rise – although the price of oil has risen since the Iraq war by around 40 USD per barrel. So the oil companies and the oil sheiks might be congratulating themselves on a 1,200 billion USD profit on US sales alone.

Now we're talking the kind of money where people might reasonably decide that the utter destruction of the USA is worth the trouble. Hmmm.

Who knows if Bush's buddies really control the oil sheiks? Or is it the other way round? Suppose the oil sheiks were going to change to dealing in euros because the USD is collapsing, but Bush bought them off with a price rise? Less hysterical version of oil/euro theory here: www.feasta.org [http://www.feasta.org/documents/papers/oil1.htm]

Anothe pet conspiray theory of mine finds some justification here: www.newstatesman.com [http://www.newstatesman.com/200703120024]

I've often wondered whether the US dead figures in Iraq were really true – after all, Bush lied about everything else. The above link mentions, without connecting the dots, that the US Govt's official figures show that the ratio between wounded and dead is an astounding 16:1; in the first Gulf war it was 1.2:1. Hmmmm!

2006 Dec 30 [ Sat ]

Hermann Hesse's "Demian", and thoughts on "coded" art

Here are some notes I wrote about Hesse's Demian when I had to study it for a German course I did years ago. I can't be bothered to translate the German but I think it's fairly obvious that Demian is about a young man who has no way to come to terms with the fact that his sexual orientation is as a homosexual submissive.

I happened to come across this text when I was doing a backup of old files. When I now look at it, I think about the reaction of the other members of the class when I told them about it. None of them really took it seriously.

Many references suggest that the book was influenced by Hesse undergoing Jungian analysis. I think that probably explains the references to the hero seeing his own image as that of Demian; I imagine homosexuality was seen as narcissism.

Presumably Hesse was conscious of all this himself! It makes me wonder about the (rather abrupt) end to the book in which the hero and Demian rush off to fight in WW1. Is he saying that the impulse to serve in battle is based on homosexual and submissive urges?

Several years ago I looked at quite a lot of references on the web to Demian, and found none which addressed my theory specifically. However it just occurred to me to search for "hesse demian homosexual", and I found the following page which acknowledges the homosexuality angle although not the submissive side: www.anneke.net [http://www.anneke.net/education/coursework/320/paper_320.html]

Incidentally it appears to have been written by someone studying German whose German is stunningly bad. In parts it reads as if it was translated by computer.

Here's another: www.gss.ucsb.edu [http://www.gss.ucsb.edu/projects/hesse/forum_archive_new/forum_archive/759~showflat.html]

The following three references do not address either: www.anneke.net [http://www.anneke.net/education/coursework/320/paper_320.html]

en.wikipedia.org [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demian]

www.kirjasto.sci.fi [http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/hhesse.htm]

I found nothing under "hesse demian homosexual submissive".

So what does it *mean* that a perfectly straightforward explanation for just about the entire book – not to mention the fact that Hesse initially had it published under a pseudonym in 1917 – is either completely missed, or almost completely unmentioned?

I think it certainly means that there must be *many, many* more coded works in literature and the movies. Not just about homosexuality, either – in fact homosexuality is probably the element which is most notoriously coded, and which is most assiduously sought out. The fact that "Demian" is not a *famous* example surely suggests that any other coded topic is liable to remain completely unnoticed.

It may also mean that Hesse was an extraordinary writer. He apparently managed to write a classic book which many have cited as an influence on a whole generation, yet one which was not even about what its readers imagined.

Notes on Demian, by Hesse 10 May 1991 / 2006-12-30

Title Demian

Written 1917 Published 1919

Author Hermann Hesse DOB 1877 Calw (sic), Wuerttemburg, Germany Died 1962

Characters

Emil Sinclair Viewpoint character.

Father

Mother

Franz Kromer Child who terrorizes (peinigt) Emil at school

Max Demian Slightly older friend of Emil. (Name came to Hesse in dream: Dämon, demon, spirit, evil genius)

Fr. Demian Max's mother

Alfons Beck The oldest student at the Knabenpension in "St. ". About 18 when Emil meets him.

Pistorius Ex-theologian, now organist.

Knauer Fellow student of Emil's.

Chapters

Foreword

The viewpoint character says this is a true story (what a fib) and says it might be a bit confusing but that's the way real life is (what shit) and says if men were not immortal there'd be no point writing stories (what a twerp) and everybody's story, because he's an individual, is worth something (not to me!).

"Einen Wissenden darf ich mich nicht nennen. Ich war ein Suchender und bin es noch."

"Das Leben jedes Menschen ist ein Weg zu sich selber hin... Mancher wird niemals Mensch."

Chap. 1 Zwei Welten

"Ich lebte sogar zuzeiten am allerliebsten in der verbotenen Welt." At ten, in a "süddeutscher Kleinstadt", he encounters Kromer. He brags about stealing apples. Kromer makes him swear it's true. Then Kromer says the owner said he'd pay 2 marks to find out who did it. Kromer says he'll go to him or the police. "Sag mir doch, Franz, was ich tun soll! Ich will ja alles tun!" Kromer demands he steal from his parents. "Meine Sünde war nicht dies oder das, meine Sünde war, daß ich dem Teufel die Hand gegeben hatte." "Ich wußte, da ich jetzt ein Geheimnis hatte, eine Schuld, die ich allein und selber ausfressen mute." "Ich fühlte mich meinem Vater überlegen!" "Dieser Augenblick war das Wichtige und Bleibende."

Emil takes the money out of his piggy-bank (Sparkasse), but it's only 65 Pf, and Kromer isn't very happy. Kromer still wants his money, which Emil pays off in dribs and drabs, and Kromer starts to use him like a slave, running errands (Augsänge zu besorgen), or ordering him to stand on one leg. "Mein Zustand zu der Zeit war eine Art von Irrsinn."

Chap. 2 Kain

Demian retells the Kain story: Kain was blessed in spirit, people were afraid of him and his children and made up a story. "Nett war bloß die Art, wie Demian solche Sachen sagen konnte, so leicht und hübsch... und mit diesen Augen dazu!"

"Ich hatte mir eingebildet dies Zeichen sei eine Schande, es sei eine Auszeichnung, und ich stehe durch meine Bösheit und mein Unglück höher als mein Vater, höher als die Guten und Frommen."

Emil dreams of Kromer: "in denen ich ganz und gar sein Sklave wurde... Der furchtbarste... enthielt einen Mordanfall auf meinen Vater."

And then of Demian: "Ich träumte wieder von Mihandlungen und Vergewaltigung... aber statt Kromer war es diesmal Demian, der auf mich kniete... das erlitt ich von Demian gerne."

Rumors about Demian; mother very rich; not churchgoers; Demian very strong; Demian had had sex (Umgang mit Mädchen und alles wisse).

Kromer demands Emil bring him his sister: "Mein Entschluß, das nie zu tun, stand sofort fest." (Jealousy!) Demian sees Emil, says he can read minds, and says somebody did something wrong, and someone else knows about it and so has power over him. Demian also guesses that Emil has dreamt of him. Demian tells Emil to get rid of him, and says he would help Emil to kill Kromer if necessary.

Emil doesn't see Kromer for a while, and then Kromer avoids him. Demian says he had had a word with Kromer.

Emil remarks that he did not feel grateful to Demian for freeing him. "Ich mußte die Abhängigkeit von Kromer durch eine neue ersetzen, denn allein zu gehen vermochte ich nicht... so wählte ich die Abhängigkeit von Vater und Mutter..." Emil asks his father about Demian's view of Cain, and his father says that it was an old heresy which he should put out of his mind.

Chap. 3 Der Schächer (the robber, as in the one crucified with Christ)

"Es kamen die Jahre, in welchen ich aufs neue entdecken mute, daß in mir selbst ein Urtrieb lebte, der in der erlaubten und lichten Welt sich verkriechen und verstecken mußte." Emil talks about puberty and sex, but not girls. "Was einst Franz Kromer gewesen war, das stak nun in mir selber."

Emil hears a rumor that Demian "lebe mit seiner Mutter wie mit einer Geliebten".

His mother decides to have Demian be confirmed, later than usual, so that the older Demian is in the same confirmation class as Emil. They exchange glances during a discourse on Cain and Abel, and then Demian starts sitting closer and closer. Emil remarks how eagerly he sniffed for the fresh soap smell from Demian's neck (!). "Die Morgenstunden waren nicht mehr schläfrig und langweilig. Ich freute mich auf sie."

Demian says he can control the other pupils and the teacher with his mind, and says nobody has free will, but "Wenn ein Tier oder Mensch seine ganze Aufmerksamkeit und seinen ganzen Willen auf eine bestimmte Sache richtet, dann erreicht er sie auch." (Use the force, Luke!)

Emil mentions that Demian never took him home so he had no idea what Demian's mother looked like.

They discuss the Crucifixion. Demian says he prefers the sinner who did not repent, and would prefer him as a friend. Demian says God should bless the whole world: "Man müßte sich einen Gott schaffen, der auch den Teufel in sich einschliet, und vor dem man nicht die Augen zudrücken mu, wenn die natürlichsten Dinge der Welt geschehen."

Emil tells Demian about his "two worlds". Demian says "Nur das Denken, das wir leben, hat einen Wert." Emil says "es gibt... verbotene und häßliche Dinge... soll ich denn... ein Verbrecher werden?" Demian says "Die Griechen und viele andere Völker haben im Gegenteil diesen Trieb zu einer Gottheit gemacht..."

In class, Emil sees Demian meditating, aparently outside his body; Emil tries to imitate him, but cannot.

Emil is sent to another school.

Chap. 4 Beatrice

The school is in "St.".

Emil feels lonely and unattractive: "die Liebenswürdigkeit des Knaben war ganz von mir verschwunden... nach Max Demian hatte ich oft große Sehnsucht".

Alfons Beck invites him to a Kneipe and they talk at length. Emil gets drunk and feels guilty the next day. But he soon becomes a regular drinker and man about town (verflucht schneidiger Bursche). But "ich war niemals dabei, wenn meine Kumpane zu Mädchen gingen, ich war... voll hoffnungsloser Sehnsucht... Niemand war... schamhafter als ich".

The teacher in charge of the boarding house sends Emil's father a letter to warn him of the deterioration in Emil's schoolwork. Emil feels sorry for him but does not react to his threats.

Emil sees a woman in the park that he feels attracted to; he calls her Beatrice, from an English artwork. She has "diese Schlankheit und Knabenhaftigkeit der Formen... die ich liebte..." Emil cleans up his act and stays away from the Kneipen: "Ich war wieder bei mir selbst zu Hause, obwohl nur als Sklave und Dienender eines verehrten Bildes". Emil resolves once again to renounce the "Dunkle und Böse" in himself. "Nicht Lust war mein Ziel, sondern Reinheit." "Ich begann den Morgen mit kalten Waschungen..."

Emil takes up painting. He tries to paint Beatrice, but without success: then he tries to paint his ideal woman. "Es war nicht das Gesicht eines Mädchens... Es sah mehr wie ein Jünglingskopf aus als wie ein Mädchengesicht..." Emil falls in love with this fantasy woman, who reminds him of someone. "Wie hatte ich das erst so spät finden können! Es war Demians Gesicht." Then he sees the painting as himself.

Emil longs for Demian. He dreams of Demian holding in his hands the crest that hung over his parents' house, but the crest is distorted; Emil paints the crest as it appeared in the dream, and sends it to Demian without a note. Emil is now doing better at school, but living in a fantasy world.

Chap. 5 Der Vogel kämpft sich aus dem Ei

Emil receives a mysterious note at school: "Der Vogel kämpft sich aus dem Ei. Das Ei ist die Welt. Wer geboren werden will, muß eine Welt zerstören. Der Vogel fliegt zu Gott. Der Gott heißt Abraxas." Emil is sure the note came from Demian. The teacher happens to describe Abraxas: "(der) die symbolische Aufgabe hatte, das Göttliche und das Teuflische zu vereinigen".

Emil again feels an urgent "Trieb des Geschlechts". "Unmöglicher als je war es mir, die Sehnsucht zu täuschen und etwas von den Mädchen zu erwarten, bei denen meine Kameraden ihr Glück suchten."

Emil dreams of embracing a woman who combines Emil's mother and Demian. Emil also senses Abraxas: "Wonne und Grauen, Mann und Weib gemischt, Heiligstes und Gräßliches ineinander verflochten, tiefe Schuld durch zarteste Unschuld zuckend – so war mein Liebestraumbild, und so war auch Abraxas". "Ich wollte ja nichts als das zu leben versuchen, was selber aus mir heraus wollte. Warum war das so sehr schwer?"

Emil hears organ music from a church and starts coming back to listen. Emil sees the organist: he has strong eyes and brow, but soft, childish mouth and chin. Emil approaches him and mentions Abraxas. The musician is taken aback.

The musician invites him home. He lives with his parents, has many books and a piano. He had studied theology. They gaze into the fire for an hour (!). On leaving, Emil sees the name Pistorius.

Emil remarks on seeing invented images in random forms.

Emil says he was never very impressed with what Pistorius was saying, but it helped him to "Eierschalen zerbrechen". Pistorius interprets Emil's dream of flying as meaning that Emil will fly when most people fear to.

Chap. 6 Jakobs Kampf

Emil is now 18. "Oft hatte ich mich für ein Genie angesehen, oft für halb verrückt." Pistorius is still helping him reach Abraxas.

Emil repeatedly dreams of returning to his mother to find that she has become the androgynous figure.

Pistorius tells him to do what his dreams tell him, and says "Wenn wir einen Menschen hassen, so hassen wir in seinem Bild etwas, was in uns selber sitzt". Emil later sees Pistorius drunk, and wonders if that is his way to the world inside himself.

Knauer introduces himself. Knauer has chosen celibacy, but it is very difficult for him. Knauer asks Emil for advice, but Emil tells him he has to look inside himself. Knauer is disappointed and shouts at him.

Emil has a dream in which he sees the androgyne very clearly, so he can now for the first time paint Abraxas. Emil faints before it and the next morning it is missing. Emil wanders the city and finds himself at a building site where Knauer is hiding. Emil tells him he was drawn there, and guesses that Knauer had been about to commit suicide. He tells Knauer ("Es sprach aus mir") "Du bist den falschen Weg gegangen".

Emil is making progress in mysticism. He feels he can summon Pistorius mentally, both Pistorius in the flesh and an image of him that Emil can talk to. Meanwhile Knauer has become a pet of Emil; Emil feels that Knauer's questions help him (Emil) make progress. "Dieser Knauer verlor sich später ungefühlt von meinem Weg."

Emil has been feeling less benefit from Pistorius, and one evening tells him, "Das, was Sie da reden, ist so – so verflucht antiquarisch!" Pistorius is wounded. "Er war ein Sucher nach rückwärts." Emil feels guilty and leaves, and feels for the first time the mark of Cain. Emil decides he must give up dreams of becoming a poet, artist etc: "Wahrer Beruf für jeden war nur das eine: zu sich selbst zu kommen". He meets Pistorius again; P. tells him he has decided he wants to become a priest, as he is not suitable for the "new religion".

Emil feels lost without a guide. He longs to contact Demian. His school is finished; he is to take a vacation and then go to university, starting with a semester of philosophy.

Chap. 7 Frau Eva

Emil visits Demian's old house: they had moved away. The new inhabitant shows him a picture of Demian's mother, whom Emil recognizes as his "Traumbild". During his vacation, Emil wanders hoping to find her. He brushes off a woman who pesters (nachstellen) him.

Failing to find her, he enters university in "H." and is unimpressed. He enjoys the freedom however. One day he recognizes Demian on the street with a Japanese; Emil greets Demian, who is pleased to see him. Demian says his mother is living with him here too. Demian says the groups forming in Europe are not real communities, but the outcome of irrational fears. "Diese Welt will sterben, sie will zugrunde gehen, und sie wird es." They arrive at Demian's house; Demian does not invite him in, but tells him to come anytime (?).

The next day Emil makes a visit. Let in by the maid, he sees his painting of the bird and the world-egg. He sees Frau Eva, her face "gleich dem ihres Sohnes ohne Zeit und Alter". She is pleased to see him, and says Demian had told her many years ago that Emil would be his friend. Emil refers gnomically to his dream, and perceives her reply as a rebuff. She tells him to call her Frau Eva, and then sends him to Demian, who is doing boxing practice; Emil finds him very attractive (prachtvoll). Demian says she has never asked anyone else to call her Eva in the first hour.

Emil spends much time there. He learns more about the secret of the "Zeichen". Most people see humanity as something to be protected, but the initiates see humanity as the far future. The house is visited by many mystics of various kinds; Emil and the Demians are unimpressed, seeing their duty as becoming themselves. They also worship fate.

Emil finds it difficult to be so close to Fr. Eva without embracing her, so stays away for a few days. Fr. Eva tells him to do something about his desires or forget them.

He recounts a dream to her in which he joyfully joins a sea or a star; she says "Der Traum ist schön. Machen Sie ihn wahr!"

Emil sees Demian meditating. Emil asks Fr. Eva if he's sick, and she tells him not to be a little boy and sends him away.

In a storm , Emil sees a vision of the bird. he tells Demian, who says that he and Fr. Eva have also seen visions. He is not sure what they mean, but that "Etwas Großes und Furchtbares im Anzug ist, das mich mit betrifft". Emil feels anxious.

Chap. 8. Anfang vom Ende

Emil resolves to summon Fr. Eva, but Demian shows up with the news of war with Russia. Demian mentions that he is a lieutenant in the Reserve, and will be in the field in a week. Emil sees that the news overshadows his relationship to Fr. Eva. Demian mentions that they had felt him calling, so Fr. Eva had sent him.

Emil feels ready to accept his fate with millions of others. Demian and then he are sent to the front. Others speak of "Vaterland und Ehre", but he sees "Schicksal". He sees that while few will live for an ideal, many are ready to die for one, yet it can not be a personal ideal.

Emil sees a vision, a city with Frau Eva as its goddess. She cries out in pain, a star flies down to him. Emil wakes up wounded, feeling that "ich dort sei, wohin ich gerufen war". He sees Demian next to him. Emil cannot speak, but Demian tells him that he is going away, but Emil will be able to summon him from inside himself. He tells Emil that his mother wanted him to give Emil a kiss for her. Emil goes to sleep. When he wakes up, Demian is gone.

When Emil can avoid thinking of his pain, "...dann brauche ich mir nur über den schwarzen Spiegel zu neigen und sehe mein eigenes Bild, das nun ganz Ihm gleicht, Ihm, meinem Freund und Führer".

2006 Dec 10 [ Sun ]

Opinion of an Iraqi in "Why We Fight"

"Why We Fight" is the title of a recent documentary about the USA's continuing need to maintain a state of war.

At around 1 hr 33 mins 43 secs on my copy, an Iraqi is shown complaining about the USA, speaking Arabic. I copied down the subtitles because I find them powerful. Here they are:

Due to their behavior the Americans will fail.

They will fail completely among the countries.

And another country will rise and take the Americans' place.

I am not a political man, but that is my analysis as an ordinary person.

America will lose because her behavior is not the behavior of a great nation.

I am particularly interested because I have come to believe that it was the intention of the Bush administration to destroy the USA all along, although "Why We Fight" pushes the argument that the military-industrial complex just wanted the administration to create another enemy now that the USSR has fallen. I think the military-industrial complex probably still believes that the US administration is working for them, although they have got to be starting to wonder.

2006 Apr 08 [ Sat ]

Large corporations are a branch of the government?

This Slashdot poster makes the excellent point that because many large corporations like ATT are heavily regulated and given monopoly powers by the government, they are effectively a branch oif the government which is not subject to normal constitutional restrictions and monitoring: yro.slashdot.org [http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=182479&cid=15087190]

It makes me wonder whether governments are *aware* of this point. Certainly governments routinely set up organizations to carry out operations for them with plausible deniability. The most famous is probably the US Federal Reserve, although opinions vary as to whether the US Government set up the Federal Reserve or vice versa.

Likewise I have posted many articles about the chances that rebel and terrorist organizations are actually run by the governments they are supposedly attacking (eg the Brits are now known to have operated terrorist groups during the Malayan insurgency). But it had not occurred to me that this technique might be useful at all points along the spectrum.

2006 Mar 12 [ Sun ]

New theory on Robert Maxwell "suicide"

Many years ago, Robert Maxwell, widely-known ruthless media baron, went missing from his boat and his body was never recovered.

A recent news story says that a police memo has been uncovered which states that at the time of his disappearance he was under investigation for having murdered a German mayor: at the time of the Allied invasion of Germany Maxwell had been an officer in the British Army, and had allegedly been negotiating a peaceful surrender of the mayor's town when a German tank fired on his men, and had shot the mayor in retaliation.

The memo suggests that Maxwell must have been aware of this investigation and theorizes that it could have been a motive for suicide.

This suggests many things to me:

1. How much things have changed since Maxwell's disappearance. These days a British officer could order his dog to gnaw off an Iraqi mayor's testicles and the Sun would fawn over him.

2. Maxwell was a pretty tough character. To me it sounds utterly, insultingly ridiculous that he would have taken his own life over fear of such an investigation. If the police could present this as a motivation for suicide in his case, they could use any motive for anybody.

3. If you think the government might want to get rid of you, get very cautious when they put you under pressure: it may be the prelude to an assassination.

2006 Feb 21 [ Tue ]

Was it even really possible for the towelheads to pilot the jets on 9/11?

Well, 9/11 is a long time ago now, and I guess we're never going to know the truth. I've considered posting links to new speculation probably fifty times, but what's the point? Most people have apparently decided it makes them too uncomfortable to think about the story the Feds put out – kinda like I gave up subscribing to "Reason" magazine because most of the stories made the veins stand out in my forehead.

Anyway. I had often wondered about what was *really* involved in getting three out of four planes to their targets (does anyone believe that the other one was *not* taken down by an inconvenient Air National Guard guy who *believed* the cover story?) – the *coordination* struck me as difficult (have you ever tried to fly someplace to meet someone flying there too?) – but this link has a lot of apparently knowledgeable arguments for why the reported level of flight training of the towelheads was *ludicrously* inadequate for their mission: www.propagandamatrix.com [http://www.propagandamatrix.com/articles/february2006/210206impossibility.htm]

This story about general 9/11 issues – why people ignore *basic* problems in the Feds' story – is also great: www.propagandamatrix.com [http://www.propagandamatrix.com/articles/february2006/200206questions.htm]

2006 Feb 18 [ Sat ]

More about the meaning of games, the sequel (my theory of history)

I recently posted about the human weakness for games representing a dangerous vulnerability in the human mind which may already be being abused in unexamined ways: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Opinions/Society/games02.html]

At the time I had no idea *why* humans have this weak point. Since then however I remembered something else I've posted about: if predators always try to breed and consume at the maximum rate, they are vulnerable to catastrophic crashes in population when they eliminate their prey species. And one can say games=play.

So it is very striking that every predator animal spends a great deal of its time in play, dominance rituals and just lying around sleeping, while prey animals all eat and breed as fast as they can. I think it would be a reasonable guess that humans, as a predator species (although my own sabre-tooth-tiger-trapping skills happen to be rather limited) are hard-wired to limit their normal "cruising" efficiency in various ways just like lions, wolves and otters do.

On the other hand bird and insect predators do *not* have any form of play that I ever heard of. Perhaps the triggers which induce the "limiter" to cut in are rather subtle and difficult for an insect/bird brain to discriminate.

However, I would have thought that the triggers would *not* have to be very subtle. It could be just something like "am I well fed? Are there a lot of people around me?" (I'm guessing that the people would also need to be close to one's own genotype, too.) That kind of thing could work off nothing more high-level than pheromones.

So when people started to gather in cities, they presumably started to have fewer children and sit around drinking all day. That probably isn't what ruthless leader types wanted, so they had to invent crap like religion to make the workers keep working.

I've always thought that the world had all the technology at the *beginning* of the twentieth century to make the world a paradise. Sure, most of us would probably not say no to penicillin among other things, but basically we could have been a lot happier by 1930 than we are now. Looking at it from this predator-game loop aspect, our ruthless leaders seem to have decided that unless *all* human societies had balanced levels of lotus-eaters, the cruellest and most "efficient" would eventually eliminate *them*. So they invented the conflict between capitalism, socialism and fascism to entertain us and make it look like we all had to work extra hard, when in fact it was only necessary if you think maintaining the ruthless leader class is necessary. Bread and circuses.

2006 Feb 15 [ Wed ]

More about the meaning of games

I was musing about games yesterday: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Opinions/Society/games01.html] and of course referred to computer games.

Today there's a thread on Slashdot about some Pentagon gnome who figures that the games are now sufficiently accurate simulations to help soldiers react in real combat: games.slashdot.org [http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/14/2158232]

I had already been thinking about warfare. It seems to me that despite the obvious danger of death and whatnot, plenty of people experience wartime as exhilarating and involving. Actual wartime, it seems to me, is mesmerizing because of its game-like elements.

Paranoid as usual, it makes me wonder about whether the PTB actually exploit this consciously. We know that the Pentagon withholds cooperation from war movies with "undesirable" themes or elements; perhaps one might work backwards from the detail changes it insists upon to estimate which buttons the Pentagon wants the movies to push in our brains.

Since I realized what blatant lies 9/11 and the war in Iraq were based on, I had to reevaluate the Vietnam War. Slowly I am starting to reevaluate the entire 20th century. Was that entire horrible century set up merely to *divert* us? As some sort of macabre entertainment to make us believe... what? That governments matter?

Those plastic models of Spitfires and Phantom jets and Stukas... why are they sold?

From the thread:

"It felt like I was in a big video game. It didn't even faze me, shooting back. It was just natural instinct. Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! "

A lot of people are scared by stuff like this, but in my eyes, it's how it has to be. We're not talking about cold-blooded killing, we're talking about one of mankind's greatest quirk - war.

It's all a matter of making a more effective soldier out on the battlefield. One might liken my perspective to that of "brainwashing" or "propaganda" used by Nazis and Japanese in WWII, but I think it is more mild and acceptable like our propaganda.

2006 Feb 14 [ Tue ]

Why do we enjoy games? What are they for?

For the past few months I've been doing the Sudoku puzzle several times a week. I considered posting my system for completing them after I checked the sudoku site and discovered their hints were so useless, but I gave up when I thought about *why* people play games. Ie, it is essentially pointless to provide ways to play Sudoku "better". (Incidentally, if you want hints, try the Wikipedia entry.)

Basically, games take considerable time and effort and there is no objective reward at all. I can remember no analysis of why we do them that went any deeper than "because they're fun". But *why*? For instance, how do you *improve* a game? Major sports occasionally change their rules and there is considerable argument over the details each time, but while everybody has an opinion I get no impression of a body of knowledge which could be used to systematize the various arguments somehow in order to reach a conclusion.

Likewise, when computer games are reviewed the reviews tend to concentrate on things like framerate and polygons rather than the playability of the game. How many polygons does Tetris have?

In my own case I played a *lot* of bridge when I was in college. I was never very good: I simply enjoyed seeing the random allocation of cards presenting so many interesting puzzles. It was all a terrible waste of time. There were people who developed heroin habits that got better grades than me.

Musing about this, it occurred to me that a game is like a meme, or a virus. It is crafted to appeal to something at a *subconscious* level, and then it takes over the host, who then walks around trying to find three more people to play bridge (you never played before? No problem!).

It also occurred to me that this is similar to addictions. Now of course it's trivial to call computer games an addiction. But when you consider that there is no objective benefit from them, you start to see them as a little more worrying. They represent proof that there is some sort of vulnerability in human minds which allows a cycle of destructive behavior to be established.

Which makes me wonder whether this vulnerability is not exploited by other social forces and behaviors. For instance, it's a commonplace observation that people who were raised in abusive families tend to become abusers in the same way. My analysis of this is that *they become addicted to the game*. It's like football fans: if they just yell at their spouse it's like Monday Night Football, but if they put them in hospital it's like the Superbowl. They are going through a *pattern* which is as hypnotic as the falling shapes in Tetris. Their mind is responding to a system of rewards which we do not understand, even though we play *explicit* games every day.

Incidentally, my personal observation is that people who "inherit" abuse do not seem particularly likely to take either role – a man with an abusive mother may become an abuser himself, or with about the same probability may seek out or "train" an abusive wife.

One of my favorite sf authors wrote a book (actually a collection of short stories) called "The War Against the Rull". At one point, the hero, Professor Jameson, manages to trap one of the Rull by exposing him to a pattern of lights. As soon as the Rull sees them, his mind is captured: his body continues to move, endlessly mimicking the sequence of lights.

Like me playing Millipede.

2006 Jan 30 [ Mon ]

A believable argument for why the gold standard is bad

There's an interesting posting on Slashdot: politics.slashdot.org [http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=175545&cid=14594809]

Metal standards tie international currency exchange and therefore to the most desirable country's interest rates. So let's say everyone wants to trade with the USA. A dollar equals an X of gold. So if the British pound is nominally worth two dollars then a BP is also equal to X/2 [Danny: he means 2X shurely?] of gold. Now if the US economy is doing well and interest rates are 6%, then interest rates must be 6% in England as well. If the economy is doing poorly in England then to make capital more affordable interest rates CANNOT be lowered by the Bank of England. If they did lower the rates, arbitrage trading would take place on the BP, effectively borrowing up all the pounds, converting them to dollars for short term, higher interest loans, and then converting back and paying off the pound denominated loan. This would steal away all the capital from England. So world interest rates get locked. Fiddling with interest rates is one of the strongest tools available to central banks for ameliorating business cycle swings. Take this away and you can get terrible bouts of depressions and/or stagflation that can take decades to get out of.

On the other hand, the poster seems to think that dinking with interest rates is a fine upstanding way for governments to behave. (For decades, HMG imposed currency controls in an attempt to decouple interest rates within the country from outside the country. Eventually HMG decided that this effort was futile.)

He also seems to be assuming that the British govt in his example would simultaneously be trying to maintain the price of the UKP in gold, and maintain the interest rate. For instance, if the US economy is doing well as in the example, wouldn't it be natural to allow the dollar to rise against gold, and/or to allow the UKP to fall against gold?

It's true that all this stuff is interrelated. I think that many people who are sympathetic with proponents of a return to the gold standard simply want the operations of governments to be more transparent, and if there were some mechanism which automatically produced obvious signs of manipulation, so that the electorate couldn't be hoodwinked as easily, it would be better. The value of one's national currency is certainly something that makes the electorate sit up and take notice.

In his example, the British government would be able to maintain the value of the currency against the dollar, and would choose to maintain the interest rate, at the price of a disastrous flow of capital out of the country. This is almost exactly what did happen in England when Lawson was chancellor, due to his insane insistence on joining the ERM (despite his avowed opposition to a single European currency).

However it did not cause the uproar it should have, so I suppose the value of a return to a gold standard for regulating the behavior of governments is probably slim.

2006 Jan 12 [ Thu ]

Another reason torture doesn't work for interrogations

I've always said that the USA is using torture not because it's full of homosexual sadists (although that could well be true), not because it's full of incompetents (obviously true too) but because the US government *knows* the actual results – hatred, the failure of its ostensible mission, the corruption of the US armed forces, the isolation of the USA from the free world – and wants them.

But today it struck me that torture is *clearly, logically* unable to produce reliable intelligence information.

When you torture someone, the victim clearly has no other reason to give you information, right – he has no incentive to give you correct information.

His *only* incentive is to give you information that will stop the torture. The problem is you – the torturer – *don't know if what he's saying is true*. You have no means of distinguishing between fact and fiction. The accounts of the pedophile witchhunts in America – where the child witnesses were only mildly tortured by police – show that interrogators cannot distinguish between fact and fantasy when the victim is trying to give the interrogator what he demands. (The children produced utterly preposterous accounts which were solemnly recorded, and then the interrogators threw away the parts which were so ridiculous they would make it impossible to get a conviction even in the hysteria of the times.)

You could say "well the interrogator can compare stories from multiple people". But how does he know the *first* story is correct? If he knows that he doesn't need to torture anyone else. And if he doesn't, he's probably just amplifying the original fantasy story, like a polymerase chain reaction.

So the inerrogator has no way of "rewarding" the truth, so the victim has no incentive to provide it. Indeed, even if, through faulty analysis, the victim *tries* to provide it, the torturer will probably reject it. And the torturer has "experience" of all the "successful" interrogations he's already conducted (on hapless strays kidnapped by brigands and sold to US forces for thousands of dollars) so he's not likely to be "fooled" by the truth.

Torturer: You took your orders from Masawi, right?

Victim: Yes, yes! Masawi, right!

Torturer: So when did you meet him??

Victim: Aaah! Erm, erm, August 2nd 2002!

Torturer: You lie, pig! Masawi was in Indonesia on that date!

Victim: Yes, you are too clever for me! I too was in Indonesia!

Torturer: Hah! [Writes "Masawi Indonesia confirmed 8/2 in notebook]

2005 Dec 04 [ Sun ]

Excellent summary for reasons why US Administration would fake 9/11

The article includes a great deal of well-attributed evidence for the argument that the USA was already planning to invade Afghanistan and Iraq long before 9/11, and that Rumsfeld and his buddies – you know, the whole "Project for a New American Century" thing – had specifically talked about a "New Pearl Harbor" as the opportunity to implement those plans.