Welcome back,

Here's how I spent my last few days. 1900 words or so. Just autobio.

Thursday I worked a bit, corresponded, read the blogs, tinkered. In the late afternon I played some Civilization III -- an integral refresher for western history -- and then went out to the grocery store to pick up supplies to make Grandma Madeline's Iowa Beef Stew. It's simple stuff, but really righteous, and a good pot of it can feed quite a few folks, or one person for quite a few days, quite sumptuously and economically.

Luke came on over to have dinner, and along with Dan we had a little meal of it, toasting with a quart of Miller High Life each. Dan and I showed Lucas Halo 2 and Xbox Live, which represent another frontier in gaming and kind of freaked ol' "Straight Arrow" Dauter out a little bit. After eating and visiting with Dan, Luke and I headed back to the East Bay to hang out and talk and meet up with Luke's friend Sid.

We got pretty high for the BART ride -- oh yeah, get a little paranoid on the BART -- which helped to drive a lively chat on the walk through North Berkeley about the nature of existence and whether or not Domination was a fact of life. Luke maintains it isn't necessary, but I disagree. However, I qualify this with my belief that properly contextualized and balanced, there's nothing necessarily malignant about Domination. I just think you have to pass the conch shell around enough to keep everyone honest, and it'll all work out from there, at least as far as the rules of the State are concerned.

But then that gets into this whole other business of when power is being exercised, and all the forms domination and power-poverty can take; from outright physical deprivation to the kind of mental slavery that exists today. So yeah, that's true, but I'm with Bob Marley when it comes to emancipating ones self from mental slavery: "none but our selves can free our minds." It's not up to the State to Prohibit any and all forms of Domination. It just wouldn't work.

Anyway, it was a good vigorous philosophical debate -- heated at times, but essentially friendly. I'm into philosophy, you know. Like most things academic, I think it's gotten to be a bit out of touch, but I believe in the discipline, whether or not it's being very aptly applied at the moment. I believe I can make it my own. See, we're getting to a new stage in human development. The development of scale-free community is going to shake up the whole nature of society, sure as the cottin gin did.

A brief flashback; I remember the room I had at Rubin hall my Freshman Year at NYU. How innocent. How full of life. How shabby and gorgeous. Back when my life was light, entirely my own and at the same time entirely supported by a vast institution. "Everything's gonna be allright; Everything's gonna be allright..." It was a much more brilliant if significantly less focused time. I think my fond recollection has something to do with the current bout I'm having with the ever-present crisis of meaning.

Anyway, we drank beer and whiskey and got high from the Sobe Bong -- a neat little hack of engineering made by Kim's little brother -- and shot the shit for a while. Sid showed up, and he and Luke tore a brilliant sociological streak that I was happy to mostly observe and pick up bits and pieces from. Sid's a little older, doing grad school as well. He studies interracial violence between Latin and Black gangs in Los Angeles, a serious sociologist.

I started fading after a massive attack of munchies hit as I spectated on Luke and Sid's discussion of these wild academic times. They're onto some rebel shit, all obsessed with Foucault and fired up about alternate theories. For my part, I hadn't gotten much sleep the night before because I was having a wild tumble with this really fantastic woman who I met dancing last weekend. More about that in a while. The point is, Luke put on The Big Lebowski and I fell asleep at some point.

The next day we lazed. Luke had to go proctor an exam for about an hour, but other than that there was nothing on the schedule. Luke showed me where he was at in San Andreas and I played a mission or two on the saved game I made when I was hiding out at his place right before the election. It's a fun game; verging on role-playing in its depth. Having only played a fraction of the game, I don't really know how strong the plot is -- starts out pretty good -- but if those people at RockStar keep working on it eventually they'll hit some kind of jackpot.

There was a little shenanigans with the test because the professor who was nominally "in charge" had gotten drunk at the Sociology Department Party the night before and forgotten to photocopy the questions. So while Luke was out dealing with that and making sure kids didn't cheat, I picked up a sequel to Hitman, which I'd enjoyed playing once. It was interesting. Very adult in terms of the lack of twitchy action (though that's always a possibility) and also in terms of the disturbing darkness of the plot. It was a twinge of what my friend Chris calls Survival Horror.

I play for a bit, and eventually Luke gets back from his exam. We talk about the game and some other things a bit, and soon Kim comes over. Luke and Kim have been together for a couple of years now, but last week they broke up, at least as lovers. They're still really close friends in terms of being mutually supportive and hanging out pretty often, and they'd had tentative plans to go see a movie, so I tagged along. We decided on Blade 3, because why not. It was a matenee, and we figured we could get high over at Kim's North Berkeley House of Bachelor-Degree Holding Graduate Women and make a go of it.

It was allright. The walk over was quite nice. It's good to be high in Berkeley on a relatively warm late afternoon in December. School is getting out and it's a Friday and the energy was bright. The movie had its ups and downs. I think it might just be the first consciously ironic but still serious action movie, another sign of how comic books are coming to inform the media of film. The casting of Parker Posey is the icing on the cake. I recommend it on video if you enjoyed the other installments; wonder how this kind of film pans out as an investment.

After the movie we talked about food and Luke and Kim exchanged some DVDs at Blockbuster. They watch a lot of stuff, have that pass where you can just keep a certain number of movies out. It turned out Luke had had a bit more than me to drink last night and was suffering from a hangover, so we decided just to chill. Kim and I went back to her house where I took a shower listening to Sammy Hagar on 107.7 The Bone via her antique bathroom radio, which has great sound. It was fun, especially since I'd been wearing the same clothes for quite a few days.

When my shower was done and Kim had had a small sandwitch, we went back over to Luke's (they live like three blocks from one another; it's cute) to get Brazillian pizza and watch Shaolin Soccer, an entertaining and worthy -- if somehow distastefully Disney-esque -- attempt at creating a Chineese film with some western crossover value. After that I hoofed it back to the BART home.

Finding myself still with energy to burn and it being Friday night, I took a bike ride to the top of Twin Peaks. I've been doing light yoga, pushups, leg bends and situps this past week, slowly waking up my body. Adding in some good cardiovascular bike riding is the next logical step.

I did it up right with the longjohns under the torn up black cut-offs and the Neal Young-flavored mp3 mix; sweated my ass off, getting in some good uphill attacks and some solid projing on the shallow rises. Downhill I took the twisty backroads route rather than bombing down Portrola; there's this great smooth two-block downhill that leads into a shallow one-block uphill. You can really pump and lean into the downhill, because you know the return curve at the bottom will catch you and let you bleed off the speed. On other downhills it's generally 15-degree slopes broken by flatland crossrodes and you have to take it easy, pump those breaks, don't want to go flying off the edge or slamming uncontrollably into oncoming traffic 200 yards down the line. But this one little lazy half-parabola, you can soar, and I know how to hit it really good. Cheap thrills.

After getting home and stretching/pushups, I took a bath and relaxed. Slept late.

Saturday I had a date. The night before I'd traded voice messages and quick conversations with Carrie, the girl I met dancing last weekend, setting up the plan. She was going to come to my neighborhood and we'd get a drink and see what happened next. I was excited. I spent the day cleaning up the house and my room, then late in the afternoon I fixed myself a little leftover stew, and then headed to Ryan's house, a friend of Nicks, where we were watching Vitali Klitchko defend his heavyweight belt on pay per view.

Nick's a pugilist -- a longtime fan of boxing and now taking lessons himself -- and he does a great job of representing and trying to spread interest in the sport. It reminds me of the people who consciously tried to promote soccer when I was growing up, except somewhat less wholesome. It's sometimes a little weird, but I generally enjoy having a few beers, watching some fighting, eating some chineese food or whatever. It's a good masculine ritual to have.

And then the date, which I thought I would be late for because there were three undercards, and most of the fights went into the late rounds. I cut loose back from the Marina-area to the Mission along Fillmore, slicing through the taxi and SUV-heavy traffic in grand Manhattain fashion. There's something about making a mockery of automobiles with my superior agility that's especially satisfying when you do it to yuppies. I arrived at The Attic, where we'd set to meet, pretty sweaty but generally charged up. Turned out Carrie was stuck up on Twin Peaks because of a public transportation mix up and was waiting for a cab, so I waited, had a beer and listened to some great old reggae music.

She came in good time, and we sat for a bit and caught up. My plan had been to go look at art for free at some of the nearby galleries, but they were all closed because it had gotten late; so we just walked around the mission and eventually came back to my place, which was all right and then some.

That pretty much brings us up to speed. I had breakfast with Carrie at Big Al's. I definitely dig her. She's really funny and really good looking and she really seems to enjoy being with me, and that makes me feel fucking great to be honest. After that I just whiled away the afternoon and evening.

I'm thinking more and more about this big road trip and just how exciting it all is. Maybe it's all the biking and sex and reefer, but I'm starting to feel loose, like I might actually hit a good groove again sometime soon. I think I'm over the election, and I think I'm going to be fine with my separation from Music for America. There's going to be a lot of stuff still to sort out, but I'm starting to feel confident about myself in terms of my ability to set and follow some direction. We'll see how this plays out in this week, if we can actually get some Praxis going.

I'm coming back pretty strong now I think. A week of unemployment has passed, and I'm just about ready to get back to the thrill again, the thrill again. Need to start drawing up plans, redesigning this website, reviving this other website, and cracking on making some artful writing.

So batten down the hatches and point your nose to the wind. Banking on a slow return to physical fitness and mental clarity, we're headed back into the storm for a while to see what we can fish out. It's a jungle out there, Wild America.

I don't relish the position of being a naysayer, and anyone who knows me knows I'm an eternal optimist. However, my fundimental optimism rests on my faith in human beings to make the right choices through reason and insight, and as such from time to time it becomes necessary to say things that seem very negative. The point of this isn't to say that all is lost. On the contrary, the point is to say, "Hey! We need to take stock of what's really going on if we want things to get better!"

In that spirit, here's something that's bound to be unpopular: if there is such a thing as a global war on terror -- and for the record I don't think there is; we need better language here -- we are losing. In fact, we are playing directly into the hands of those who are convinced the US must be destroyed. Daily Kos -- Pentagon: Bush's 'hypocrisy' lost us hearts and minds

• Muslims do not "hate our freedom," but rather, they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf states.
• Thus when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy. Moreover, saying that "freedom is the future of the Middle East" is seen as patronizing, suggesting that Arabs are like the enslaved peoples of the old Communist World -- but Muslims do not feel this way: they feel oppressed, but not enslaved.
• Furthermore, in the eyes of Muslims, American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq has not led to democracy there, but only more chaos and suffering. U.S. actions appear in contrast to be motivated by ulterior motives, and deliberately controlled in order to best serve American national interests at the expense of truly Muslim selfdetermination.
• Therefore, the dramatic narrative since 9/11 has essentially borne out the entire radical Islamist bill of particulars. American actions and the flow of events have elevated the authority of the Jihadi insurgents and tended to ratify their legitimacy among Muslims. Fighting groups portray themselves as the true defenders of an Ummah (the entire Muslim community) invaded and under attack -- to broad public support.
• What was a marginal network is now an Ummah-wide movement of fighting groups. Not only has there been a proliferation of "terrorist" groups: the unifying context of a shared cause creates a sense of affiliation across the many cultural and sectarian boundaries that divide Islam.

That's from the Pentagon's Defense Science Board, people, not Dennis Kucinich. It's for real, and the longer the president and his administration insist that we're living in some comic book reality, the further we travel down the path towards failure and defeat. Full report PDF.

In Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere around the globe, we are engaged in 4th generation warfare (4GW). The important thing about 4GW is the it essentially about moral conflict. In other words, if you do not "win the hearts and minds" you loose, unless you are willing to commit genocide.

I'll say it again, and not because it makes me happy. We. Are. Losing.

(NOTE: I learned to read and write phonetically, though not w/hooked on phonics. Sometimes that puts me in a loose/lose situation. Please pardon my lack of rigor.)

The Prank Monkey turned me on to The Daou Report, which is a bit like Technorati except somehow captures the essence better.

It's always interesting -- though sometimes depressing -- to read right-wing politics online. For instance, I remember Moxie when she was a Doc Searls fan, and before the headline of her blog called liberalism a mental illness.

Being down in the trenches of politics for the past year seems to have kept me insulated from the day to day polarization we've got going on in America. I mean, I generally tend to ignore Television and I don't see much point anymore in getting excited over what Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, or Rush Limbaugh opine or publish. So I suppose it's surprising to look out and see people -- real people who I know are complex and sophisticated beings -- turning into hackneyed political carictatures. It's kind of sad.

And then there are really interesting things, like this entree on the shameless nature of our society. I really think a vibrant entry into the philosophic realm is what's needed to get some good mojo going in American politics. I'm probably too young and wild to have much of a dent in the mainstream for a wile, but politics is a long game, and I'm happy to keep pushing my message on the frontier for now. I think things are headed in this direction anyway. Consider it homesteading.

In the midst of discussing the Democrats troubled relationship to foreign policy -- really fascinating stuff from/for the insiders -- Ezra at Pandagon drops knowledge how to have a viable opposition to war, you have to have a viable message and a viable vehicle:

...it's really crucial that the anti-war portion of the left begins representing itself better. Moore is absurd and Kucinich, sorry, seems like he's from Mars... the figures leading the charge seem uniformly unfit for PR purposes. As Matt and I have both noted in the past, part of what sent us towards the hawk camp was that, without much historical context for what war means, we simply evaluated the arguments (and sadly, that means the spokespeople) for the two sides. In that calculus, becoming a hawk seemed not just warranted, but unavoidable. That's not fair to the doves and not fair to the Democratic party, and while we (hopefully) won't make the same mistakes again, it's really incumbent that the anti-war wing funds a media savvy opposition (instead of protests organized by subsidiaries of Maoist groups [read: ANSWER]) so future generations aren't turned off by the absurdity of their spokespeople.

Let's amplify this thought. This has always seemed fucking obvious to me, and I said and blogged so even as I was with the protesters. Something that needs to happen in the Anti-War and more uppity Left in America is for people to realize that the '60s aren't coming back. A "protest movement" is an impotent movement.

Conventional (mass) protests do not drive the media cycle, talking heads do, and they are often able to spin the protest event any way they choose. Mass protest are also very poor places to organize people for effective grassroots activism, maybe you make some friends with the people you happen to be stuck there with, but it's not network-friendly. So, without driving the media or growing successful organizations (or achieving anything through direct action, for you real radicals out there) what good do a million people in the streets accomplish? Not a lot. It might be fun for the participants -- and the ritualistic aspect of becoming radicalized via attending a march and getting tear gassed shouldn't be overlooked -- but on the whole the return on investment seems rather low.

Hopefully some of the sage old heads will expand their thinking and realize that focusing with aclarity on grassroots member growth, earned media coverage, and targeted direct action (hopefully non-violent) rather than the general rubric of "protest" will get us a lot further. Of course, my real advice is not to wait on anyone. We can do this ourselves, and if we do it right we will find some places where we can win, and if we win we'll build momentum. Nothing succeeds like success.

Supposing things don't go well in the world, I wonder when the Bush administration will do its Sportpalast Speech?

Ok, now I've seriously got to get back to work.

Oh man. The order of occupation in Fallujah has some really unnerving aspects. Prank Monkey: Fallujah Gets Flair --

So not only are we occupiers in Iraq, we're now genetically tagging citizens, making them wear identity badges on their clothes, and forcing them into manual labor to clean-up the city we destroyed (in order to save it).

In truth, it reminds me of nothing so much as The Wave, the high school experiment cum After School Special where a teacher allows his students to show themselves just how easy it is to turn into fascists:

A thought-provoking dramatization of an actual classroom experiment on individualism vs. conformity in which a high school teacher formed his own "Reich" (called "The Wave") to show why the German people could so willingly embrace Nazism. This unflinching yet sensitive 1984 Emmy Award-winner raises critical questions: When does dedication to a group cross the line from loyalty to fanaticism? Does power corrupt? What is the nature of propaganda and mass persuasion? Can something like the Nazi Holocaust happen again? Grades 7-12. Color. 46 minutes."

Anyone else ever get the feeling that Iraq -- maybe the whole Bush administration -- is just a big social studies experiment gone wrong? If only it were over at the end of the semester... Say cool! Have a neat summer! Sorry for bombing your house and killing your family! Friends 4ever!

In his most recent NY Times column, Fly Me to the Moon, Tom Friedman (the Moustached One) calls for a national science project to give us energy independence:

nice idea, Friedman, but what does it have to do with your subject - foreign policy?

Everything! You give me an America that is energy-independent and I will give you sharply reduced oil revenues for the worst governments in the world. I will give you political reform from Moscow to Riyadh to Tehran.

Nice to see he's catching on. Energy independence, thermodynamic strategy, the Apollo Alliance... whatever you want to call it, a national initiative to make up for the Market's complete lack of a solution to the global energy situation would be a great use of government. A quick look at Bush's biography will tell you why it will never happen, but that doesn't mean it's still not a great idea.

I've considered before what we might have gotten done in response to 9/11 if there'd been different leadership. Bush used the political capital he got there to start the country down the path of hard empire and to give away hundreds of billions of dollars to the upper class. A different mind could have gotten us off foreign oil and given us single-payer health care.

How's that? Well, Tommy boy's spouting the rationale for energy independence, which also pays a peace dividend that would be a comparable economic stimulus to Bush's trickle-down booster shot. As for health care I've got one word for you: bioterrorism. Somebody maken a simple powerpoint on what smallpox would do to our highly urbanized population which contains 50 million people without insurance who don't go to the doctor until they're very ill (if at all). That would get that shit taken care of ASAP.

Jessie Tayor (1/2 of Pandagon) writes: Pandagon: Thank You For Coming To Loews, Sit Back And Relax...Destroy The Show!

It's also a bizarre idea of truth that you can arrive at what's true by reading people supposedly equidistant from the political center and somehow triangulating the truth from that, as if it's merely a factual cartogram. It assumes that centrism is the height of accuracy (which feeds into several false narratives in and of itself, more of a "bias" than anything Matthews talks about) and that partisanship necessarily removes one from truth.

It's been a singular pleasure to read Pandagon over the past year or so, to watch their evolution. These guys are in my generation, I feel, but they're still emerging, coming into their own.

Now we see this line of thought developing -- something that's coming across multiple cultural vectors, I might add -- that averaging out partisanship, the whole notion behind "balance," whether attempted in good faith or not, creates a bias in and of itself. This is a revolutionary idea. The realization that the national debate is a false one, that the choices offered (while real) are also quite limited, leads ones thinking down alternate paths in the pursuit of real change. Couple that with the parallel realization that partisanship (or agenda) doesn't equate to innacuracy, and the next logical step is to look around for Reality, decide what to do, and then start mobilizing yourself and anyone you can convince to get it done. That's the revolution, folks.

Let me state up front that I my theory of revolution is social, cultural, political; not militant. Rather than destroy our institutions of power, I think humanity is better served by reforming them to once again reflect first principles. This isn't quite socialism, capitalism, liberalism, communism, or anarchism. I like to think I'm informed to some degree by all these ideas, but I don't have an -ism yet, ok? Anyway, check the rap...

Historically there are always things the political establishment is reluctant to address, stuff that no one wants to talk about changing. Sometimes these are cushy breaks for the powerful. Sometimes these are traditions which it takes great political will to break from. Often these are the interests of the political class (Left and Right) itself -- a case that becomes especially common when the true number of players shrinks to as small a relative size as it's done in the past 40 years.

There are 115 million people out there who vote, but really about %0.01 of them actually run the show (thx to Britt for the graph). That kind of power distribution inexorably produces corruption. It's as close to an axiomatic law as any social science can get: concentration of power increases corruption, which can be evidenced by ignorance and inaction just as it can by outright abuse.

I've been reading The Great Transformation by Karl Polani, and one of the points he makes is that the Industrial Revolution owes more to advances in the social sciences, rather than the natural. It was mostly amateurs, tinkers and artisans who invented the labor-saving machines of the era. Physicists and chemists were peripheral. The critical scientific advancements of the time were in the human sphere: the development of economics, social policy and the destruction of old community orders which were incompatible with self-regulating markets.

I believe we're headed into an information revolution. After a great period of consolidation in the development of Industrial Infrastructure -- a period in which great applications of natural sciences allowed the wholesale re-invention of life on earth to spread worldwide -- we are poised for the next wave. To put it another way: we can't stay where we are. In times past I've imagined a kind of new dark age settling over the globe, a period of relative stasis, life as usual, whatever it may be. But that's clearly untenable. Given our current trajectory in another century there will be wars over water and oil and clean food if nothing else.

So either things change for the better or they change for the worse. I'm hoping for the better, and my hopes are pinned on the notion of an information revolution, which I believe is already underway. I think it will follow the same pattern Polani lays out: a series of social innovations will allow a new way of life to emerge based on a series of essentially technical innovations.

Today our information artisans are called hackers and designers. Rebel engineers and people who cut their teeth writing utopian business plans. The social sphere is going to go through some serious changes. All these efforts are building up to something. It might not be good, could be Orwellian to the extreme. Will the history books record an explosion in Social Entrepreneurialism or the development of Total Information Awareness? Open question.

However, as it stands, going along this line seems to be the only way going forward that doesn't involve Mass Death/Depopulation at some point, so it's the path I choose to follow. Call me a sucker for sci-fi, but I believe in the promise of progress.

Bringing it all back home, a critical component of progress seems historically to be a strong respect for empirical truth, for the reality that binds us together. That's Truth with a capital T, and it exists in the physical and the meta-physical sphere. Cultures which have respected and revered this do well. Those which run afoul inevitably stumble. We seem to be stumbling.

The joke on humanity is that you can't ever know it for sure. Uncertainty is pervasive. You can't fight Heisenberg in the physical sphere, and post-modern consciousness is essentially the extension of the impossibility of truly neutral observation into the social and cultural sphere. Brautigan: you can have security or you can have sanity. Pick one.

On the whole, the reaction over the past 40 years to these revelations has been a gradual decline in the value of Truth on all sides, which is really too bad. We've got to bring it back. An end to bullshit and mind-games, that's the way. We need to stand up for the principles of the enlightenment, for the promise of the Individual and for the virtue of the Public, because the alternative seems to be the continued ascendency of the State as an instrument of the ruling political class.

Make no mistake, there's certain kind of Truth in fascism, in the cynical observations of Menkin, in the mechanics of propaganda. But these truths rest on the centralization of "reality," in the dispossessing of the people of their own ability to observe and choose, to freely participate. There is truth in mental slavery in that it can work, and possibly even accomplish Great Things, but it's a backward idea. It leads back to that ratio of the power elite to the rest of humanity, and that ends in corruption and ruin, things we can ill afford more of these days.

So the challenge is to develop a pervasive global culture that can allow people to unite to their mutual advancement, but which does so by distributing power to them and allowing them to negotiate for themselves what constitutes advancement. That's a big project, and without some ideas for how to get there and where it goes, I don't think it's going to get off the ground. But we've got time. Fill in the blanks.

Hey, I still got it! Nothing like going out dancing at random and meeting girls you can kiss. It kindof gets you in the right frame of mind. After my dance partner left with her friends, I also met a girl who was out for her bachelorette party. She came up and played that she had an accent (she was Indian), and I totally fell for it. Her and all her friends had a good laugh at my expense, but they said I looked dreamy. I was just happy to play a positive role.

This is what happens when you shave before going out. Just imagine when I get my hands on some nail clippers.