Who Watches Watchmen?

https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1083759782098583553

Upstart socialist representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez taunts Democrats:

None of you understand.

I'm not locked up in here with YOU.

You're locked up in here with ME.

This is a literary reference to occultist Alan Moore's limited comic book series Watchmen, or the collected issues in graphic novel format, or the movie adaptation of the same name. Watchmen was the first comic book taken seriously as a literary work, and it is clearly intended to be serious literature.

For those unfamiliar with the work, the plot is this:

In an alternate history, vigilante cops started wearing masks to fight masked criminals, becoming the first costumed crimefighters. Then a tragic accident transforms a scientist into the first and only superhuman being. The government dubs him Dr. Manhattan and teams him up with the costumed crime fighters to win the war in Vietnam. As a result, Richard Nixon remains president into the 1980's when the main story takes place.

Superheroes have been outlawed, and former superheroes are being killed by assassins. Because some of those killed never revealed their identities, one particularly paranoid vigilante - who never stopped his violent crusade against society's filth - named Rorschach - suspects the government or some other sort of inside job.  AOC's quote comes from a scene where Rorschach has been caught, arrested and thrown into prison, taking advantage of the opportunity to massacre some of the scum he couldn't reach from the outside.

Ultimately they discover that the assassins are working for Ozymandias, the smartest man alive and one time leader of the Watchmen, a group of superheroes. (The question "Who watches the Watchmen" is literally asked - darkly but without irony.) He has engineered a deadly hoax that will kill millions of people, tricking the Americans and Soviets into abandoning their nuclear arms race, saving humanity and ushering in a golden age of peace, prosperity and clean energy. Dr. Manhattan realizes that he has to go along with Ozymandias plan, even though it is evil and wrong, to save humanity, but Rorschach refuses to compromise his principles, forcing Dr. Manhattan to murder his former ally for an evil man's scheme. In the coda we see that Oxymandias's plan has indeed created a utopia, but a fringe news outlet discovers Rorschach's journal, so there is a possibility that the truth will come out, whatever the consequences.

Reading Therapy for an Historic Election Year

Five candidates are competing to be nominated for President of the United States by the Democratic and Republican parties:

• Hillary Clinton - the Butcher of Benghazi
• Ted Cruz - rumored to be the Zodiac Killer
• Bernie Sanders - Stalin
• Donald Trump - Hitler
• John Kasich - former Fox News commentator

In these polarized times, our most noble ideals can blind us to the reality of the world around us, including real problems and common ground we share with our political rivals. So I strongly recommend reading at least one of the following three books that cut through the partisanship and black and white thinking that can overwhelm us as we fight for our different teams:

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (528 pages)

Jonathan Haidt explores the psychological foundations of morality, and discovers that western moral philosophy - including America's progressive and libertarian politics - has huge blind spots with respect to the essential role of social conventions like family, community, religion and patriotism in the maintenance of welfare and freedom. Also interesting if you've ever wondered why people in general have such a hard time actually living up to our moral values.

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State (320 pages)

Micklethwait and Wooldridge from The Economist look at how the excesses of the welfare state in modern democracies have contributed to dysfunctional government. They show how emerging economies are turning away from our example and toward authoritarian inspirations like Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew. The book particularly focuses on American politics and how both Democrats and republicans hypocritically support programs which are both wasteful and increase inequality - not because of the influence of shadowy elites - but because the programs are popular.

Twilight of the Elites: America after Meritocracy (304 pages)

Chris Hayes provides an alternative explanation for growing inequality in America. Like Micklethwait and Wooldridge, he examines and rejects the partisan and conspiracy theories. However, where they found the problem rooted in democracy run amok, Hayes shows that meritocracy - the American ideal since 1965 which strives for equal opportunities instead of equal outcomes - has actually made it harder to climb the ladder of success and allowed a new class of elites to emerge who are able to trade wealth, power and fame in spite of rules that are supposed to separate government, wall street and the media. 

Lies, Damned Lies and Carbon Dioxide

The US government says 2014 was the hottest year on record, and the fourth such record since 1997. Skeptics say global warming stopped 18 years ago. Who is full of it? The graph shows temperatures since 1950 with El Niños in red. (It does not include 2014, which was the warmest year yet, and not an El Niño.)

Both the government and skeptics are trying to mislead us.

Rubio gets it. Stewart struggles to keep up.

On Tuesday, Jon Stewart interviewed conservative senator Marco Rubio. This sketch from before the interview provides context for some of the banter that follows:

http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/dic6af/florida-haters

Here's the interview:

http://thedailyshow.cc.com/extended-interviews/d7iye4/marco-rubio-extended-interview

Rubio is working on bills that aren't just bipartisan alternatives to liberal proposals that Jon Stewart tries to inject into the conversation (like free community college and raising the minimum wage.) Rubio has actually done some homework and found smarter ideas. Two examples:

Before Obamacare: the only constant is change

How was American health insurance changing before Obamacare?

According to the US Census Bureau, between 2005 and 2010, 18 million Americans stopped getting health insurance from a job. About a third of this was people switching to government insurance (mostly retirees.) Some of it was part of a longer trend of fewer insured dependents, but mostly it was because of people being unemployed for more than 6 months or not getting insurance from their new job.

Bro Tech

Back when people still thought the future was flying cars and moon bases, the word "high tech" was coined to describe cutting edge, advanced technology, with the implication that technology was progressing upward with significant steps.

Then "high tech" became a source of anxiety. As automation replaced factory workers, industry and government told people to learn new skills that would be needed by future jobs that would be created by new technology.

See for example this extraordinarily disingenuous and manipulative advertisement by a private college founded by a manufacturing company. In February of this year, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sued ITT Tech for predatory lending.

Teleportation: Version Control not Bandwidth Problem

NBC News has posted a very good article about a recent study which concluded that teleporting a human would take a quadrillion years. The original paper assumes we want to "recreate the human brain on a quantum level" and then transmit it with 30 GHz microwaves - in other words pretty much the way the transporters teleport people in Star Trek.

This is a good way to show that the fictional transporter is poorly engineered, but it is not how you would actually make a machine to teleport people.

Star Venom

Why are the heavens silent? Are we alone in the universe? Where is ET? Here's one possibility:

At some point around 5-10 billion years ago our galaxy was full of civilizations that traveled between the stars.

Each civilization would eventually disappear, perhaps driven to extinction by competition or perhaps evolved into something different. But they were always replaced by another civilization.

This pattern ended gradually. Over a period of 1-10 billion years, the number of new interstellar civilizations fell to zero. Intelligent life would evolve over and over again, and then disappear before spreading beyond the planet where the intelligence evolved.

Complexity is Simple

According to the New England Complex Systems Institute, high food prices triggered rioting around the world in 2008 and 2011 and we are due for another wave of global social unrest this summer.

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says global food prices are becoming more volatile because...

“Increased vulnerability is being triggered by an apparent increase in extreme weather events and a dependence on new exporting zones, where harvest outcomes are prone to weather vagaries; a greater reliance on international trade to meet food needs at the expense of stock holding; a growing demand for food commodities from other sectors, especially energy; and a faster transmission of macroeconomic factors onto commodity markets, including exchange rate volatility and monetary policy shifts, such as changing interest rate regimes. 

What is more, financial firms are progressively investing in commodity derivatives as a portfolio hedge since returns in the commodity sector seem uncorrelated with returns to other assets. While this ‘financialisation of commodities’ is generally not viewed as the source of price turbulence, evidence suggests that trading in futures markets may have amplified volatility in the short term.”

Plain English translation:

• global warming: climate change from using fossil fuels
• deregulation: special export zones
• globalization: loss of national self-reliance
• peak oil: growing cash crops and biofuel instead of food
• capitalism: using food production as a bank

In other words the hippies are right. Allowing wealthy people and corporations to accumulate and trade control of land, industry and infrastructure gave us a cycle of reinvestment in technology and resource extraction, leading ultimately to a world with many more, healthier, wealthier, better-educated people. But this is also an volatile and expensive world, and at the peak of our prosperity we have decided to stop controlling the volatility and ignore the hidden costs.

Spider Golems

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, golems are artificial life forms created as robot-like servants by intelligent dinosaurs.
Just as humans build anthropomorphic robots that look like people, so intelligent dinosaurs might make dinosaur-like golems. These golems are based on spider biology, but they have reptilian skin, legs that jut downward from the body like a dinosaur, and pedipalps modified into arms with grasping claws.
Of course a spider golem doesn't have to be shaped like a spider. The shaggy spider golem on the left has four legs. One of the missing legs has been replaced by a circular attachment point for modular biomechanical components.

The golem in the middle has a more conservative spider shape, and a hard mechanical-looking cuticle. The pin joints of each limb have been modified into stronger hinge joints which can support more weight. Standing next to it is a furry insect-based golem with a dinosaur-like body plan.

Dinosaur Sketches

I have been scanning in some drawings, and found a few dinosaurs that I like:

The shading shows some loose skin on this sauropod.

This is some sort of lightly built therizinosaurid, perhaps Erlikosaurus. While most dinosaurs held their spines horizontally, parallel to the ground, the therizinosaurs held their backs up at an angle from the ground.

This is a speculative creature that evolved in the Squawk Role-Playing Game universe. In the millions of years since hadrosaurs and other giant dinosaurs disappeared from our world, mammals have evolved from squatty short-limbed critters into a variety of descendants, including graceful forms like deer and wolves. In the Squawk universe dinosaurs have also evolved long-limbed, graceful forms like this hadrosaur.

RPGs Separate us from the Animals

Ethan Gilsdorf's Salon article starts out looking at D&D as simply generation X nostalgia, but then explores the important impact roleplaying has had on the character of that generation.

Then he wonders about generation Y:

But like so many people my age, I miss that Friday night realm of paper and pencil. That camaraderie, that connection to open-ended storytelling. D&D was an experience we made for ourselves, for each other. Was D&D then a "better" imaginative experience than "World of Warcraft" today? I like looking back on my primitive game and scoff at these younger generations of video gamers. All I needed to "immerse" myself in fantasy worlds were pencils and paper, not PlayStation consoles and pixels, I snort.

The RPG store in my hometown is filled with teenagers playing RPGs. I am the only generation X-er in my D&D group. Obviously young people have a flexible schedule and spend a lot of time hanging out with their friends, but I suspect that D&D is even more popular with generation Y than it was with generation X.

WoW - at best - is a gateway drug - like the Lord of the Rings movies (which I heard have been made into a series of books :-) WoW is essentially just a cheezily polygonned version of Mafia Wars - and it's not even integreated with Facebook. WoW borrows some tactics and thematic elements from D&D, but even the most sophisticated WoW clans don't approach the shared creative experience of a typical D&D group.

Roleplaying games teach you how to look at the world as a common experience, created by peers who embody various complementary virtues. This worldview is nearly absent from the baby boomer generation which sees the world in terms of utilitarian bottom-lines and kantian moral paradoxes.

People who lived through the austerity of the Great Depression or the generations before them know a little more about creativity and character than the baby boomers, but I think the worldview of the rising generation has more in common with the Renaissance or the ancient Greek philosophers, sharing with those thinkers an interest in how human virtues transform the world, but with a thousand times as many people participating.

The tabletop is the new studio and the new gymnasium, but without the nudity :-)

Squawk Campaign: Chapter 1

I am running a campaign of the Squawk RPG with my D&D group. Each player started out with one of the example characters:

• Gao Choy - a titan swordsman from Peleg
• Orgraff - a behemoth butcher from Peleg
• Foi Shin - an aeolyte alchemist from Peleg
• 992 - a skand clone mercenary from the Lower Worlds
• Hammerdrum - a myrmidon mutualist from Trydeen

After a nasty gunfight with space pirates that left their mobile space habitat badly damaged, Gao Choy and Orgraff rescued Foi Shin, 992, Hammerdrum and the myrmidon's students, then commandeered a captured pirate stealth fighter.

Gao Choy maneuvered the stealth fighter into a transfer orbit that brought the stealth fighter to Midgard's L5 lagrange point, where the binary dwarf planets Radix and Monopolis orbit each other. There they met the helpful but cagey stygian Captain Gabriel, who pilots a huge vessel crewed by insectoid golem servants. After dropping dark hints about the Monopolis Trading Company, Gabriel left our heroes with the suggestion that they visit his homeworld (asteroid CMX-5 near L4.)

At Ariel University

After descending to the surface of Radix via beanstalk (space elevator) the crew found themselves stranded at a train platform in the middle of a stampede of Triceratops and Edmontosaurus. One particularly nasty male Triceratops managed to knock the platform off it's foundation, crushing 992 who was using the platform for cover. Fortunately everyone managed to recover from their injuries with the help of Foi Shin's alchemy and Orgraff's unusual tribal healing techniques.

The passengers who were rescued by the team's brave defense of the train platform included the mysterious strix scholar Skreel and his myrmidon protege Chainstorm. Chainstorm recruited the party to help them provide security during Skreel's debate with the silver tongued gremian Commander Spriley at the university amphitheater. Commander Spriley presented a popular theory that each living species was created by intelligent machines, while Skreel defended the "tree of life" tradition which claims that all living things descended from a common ancestor.

At the end of the debate things got nasty as Commander Spriley's gun thugs converged on Skreel, but our heroes helped chainstorm fight off the commander and his minions. Skreel suggested that it would be expeditious to leave Radix and Monopolis before the commander's fellow Trouble Shooters decided to investigate the incident. Using his Symbiotic Order and Tomb Keeper connections, Skreel arranged for the entire crew to travel with him to Peleg and drop to the surface of that world in a disposable vehicle.

On the way to Peleg

In transit, 992 discussed the disturbing implications of Commander Spriley's theory with Skreel. As a clone, 992 is a product of technology, but if Spriley's theory is right, then all living things are just machines created by other machines. Complicating things, in spite of archeological evidence for technology that dates back thousands of years, there is no evidence for the common descent of species in the Abaddon system.

Skreel then explained that his study of the ancient scriptures and archeology of the Middle Worlds suggest that life in the Abaddon system came from distant stars, and millions of years of fossil evidence may be scattered around the universe. Skreel also quoted an ancient cosmological text which claims that all carbon and other heavy elements that make up both machines and living things was produced by the stars themselves going through cycles of life, death and birth that last for millions of years.

Save the Frances Haddon Morgan Center

http://www.kitsapsun.com/news/2011/feb/08/power-moves-at-play-in-frances-haddon-morgan/

The Frances Haddon Morgan Center (FHMC) takes care of 54 severely autistic people. The parents of those autistic people are upset because governor of Washington and DSHS are threatening the lives of their children.

Governor Christine Gregoire wants the FHMC shut down, and instead of trying to make her case to the legislature when they vote on her proposed budget, she had friends at DSHS try to scare the parents into transferring their children to other facilities. They misled the parents by presenting the threat as if the legislature had already decided to shut down the center.

The FHMC is a pioneering facility specializing in severe autism. Washington state used to have 6 residential rehabilitation centers for 4000 people with various mental health problems. Now it has 5 facilities serving only 900 people, and none of the other facilities specialize in autism. In other words the system is already lean and efficient, housing only the people who need it most, where they can be helped the best.

More information about the five facilities that are still open:

• Fircrest School Shoreline, Washington
• Frances Haddon Morgan Center, Bremerton, Washington
• Lakeland Village, Medical Lake, Washington
• Rainier School, Buckley, Washington
• Yakima Valley School, Selah, Washington

The pages for Fircrest School, Lakeland Village and Rainier School show us pictures of trees. They are located on low-value properties out in the woods where growth management policies limit new development (two of these facilities were built before WWII.)

The FHMC is the newest facility. It's page tells you more information about the services it provides AND the relationship between the center and the community. It is an important source of employment for people in the city of Bremerton - especially those who are not afraid of dirty, hard work (and sometimes risk of injury.)

The FHMC is located within city limits and uses land efficiently. Unfortunately there are people who would like to use that land to build a park that will raise property values. The Frances Haddon Morgan Center is already adjacent a large park. Some people see all government property as their personal piggy bank - not to mention all the private property that is affected by these projects.

Bremerton already has empty luxury condos downtown and a massive low-income housing project that has been evacuated and scheduled for demolition even though nobody wants to develop that land. The last thing we need is to kill 54 autistic people so we can plant some trees where people used to be employed doing something useful.

The families and employees of the FHMC are holding a rally to protest this abuse will be held on Saturday from 9 AM to 3 PM at Arnold's Home Furnishings Center, 3520 Kitsap Way, Bremerton.

Squawk Role-Playing Game

The Squawk Role-Playing Game that we have been working since the mid-90's is finally available as a book from CreateSpace and Amazon.com or as a PDF from RPGNow and DriveThruRPG.

See the Game Arts Guild Press Release for details.

Conversation with Spiced Ham

Once in a while I just can't resist the urge to reply to one of these e-mails that grandmas like to circulate around teh internets. There is no point in replying directly to the arguments of a chain letter, but always a surfeit of subliminal content to play with. This time the subject is the US health care reform bill. While I think the critics of the bill might have some good points, they are generating more heat than light - and mostly lulz. The chain letter in question uses the abbreviation HC for health care (because your time is precious!)

Page 22 of the HC Bill: Mandates that the Govt will audit books of all employers that self-insure!!

What do these employers have to hide, that they don't want their books audited?

Page 30 Sec 123 of HC bill: THERE WILL BE A GOVT COMMITTEE that decides what treatments/benefits you get.

I am so enraged about this interference with my right to have my treatments selected by some bean counters at the HMO.

Page 29 lines 4-16 in the HC bill: YOUR HEALTH CARE IS RATIONED!!!

There goes the all-you-can-eat health care I have grown accustomed to.

Page 42 of HC Bill: The Health Choices Commissioner will choose your HC benefits for you. You have no choice!

Wait, so instead of the current system where I "choose" whether to wait in line at the clinic with my day laborer buddies in the alley behind the market in Seattle where I live on weekdays or with the meth heads across the street from Walmart in Bremerton where I live on weekends, the HC Bill will have both a Commissioner and a Committee competing for this privilege?

Page 50 Section 152 in HC bill: HC will be provided to ALL non-US citizens, illegal or otherwise.

It's just not right to treat our guest workers to that kind of abuse.

Read the Rest on Google Docs!

Views of Lagos

This is a presentation I produced for an Urban Studies class at the University of Washington Tacoma. I present Lagos as a megacity of the global periphery and outline the geography of the city, showing conventional development statistics and current issues facing the city. I have embedded a preview for the documentary Nollywood Babylon which shows a different perspective on the development of Lagos, generated by the people who live in the city for their own consumption. This presentation was also influenced by Jonathan Haynes' paper Nollywood in Lagos, Lagos in Nollywood Films Africa Today 54:2 [Winter 2007] p.130-150.

Green Shoots

The furniture store next to this McDonald's across the street from my parents' house burnt down last night/early this morning. I tried to convince my dad to don a suit, put a hot dog on a stick and wander around asking: "Can you spare a dime for a brother just lost a furniture store?" The economic recovery is nigh!

Tianyulong

This is a picture of lagosuchus, a close relative of dinosaurs, not the newly discovered Tianyulong, an ornithschian dinosaur covered in protofeathers. (Click here for a picture of Tianyulong by Lida Xing.) I drew this picture years ago to illustrate the idea that dinosaurs are descended from fuzzy warm-blooded creatures with elevated metabolisms. 20 years ago it was a reasonable idea, but there was no evidence for (or against) fuzz on small dinosaurs. (Scaly skin was known for some large dinosaurs, but large mammals are also often naked.) Greg Paul's comments on the Dinosaur Mailing List add some important information missed by the news stories covering this new discovery.

Intelligent Designs

I have uploaded some pictures of the intelligent species along with theories about their origins - specifically their own theories in their own words. One theory based on religious tradition claims that all living things share a common ancestry while the other theory - based on information available to scientists in the Squawk setting - is skeptical about this claim and suggests that complex machines like animals were probably created by simpler machines.

More pictures and controversy...