If only J.K. Rowling could write another Harry Potter book

Then Richard Dawkins would make a perfect villain for it. Now the nutty Professor is after parents who stunt their children’s intellectual development by letting them read about wizards and magic. It’s really a tragedy: when I think of Dawkins, I don’t think of Dawkins the brilliant scientist, I think of Dawkins the humorless scold, Dawkins the would-be censor, Dawkins the vile cloisterer of children’s imaginations. That’s really quite a sad transformation, but I can’t say I’m surprised. It was only a matter of time before the mask slipped and he revealed himself as a joyless, rigid fanatic. He and his “new atheists” remind me of the prohibition brigades of the last century. What a pathetic lot they are.

Round two with the Mexican health care system

So far so good. Looks like what I thought was a poisonous spider bite is actually a resurgence of chicken pox that I had when I was 4 years old. It only affects about 0.3% of adults later in life, and that’s good because you REALLY don’t want it.

Anyway, the affected area includes my left eye, so as a precaution I got sent to this othamologist. Made an appointment this afternoon for seven this evening. Showed up to a full waiting room at the clinic, but was sitting in the doctor’s office at precisely 7 sharp. 300 pesos, or about 26 US for a 30 minute consultation and exam, without Mexican national coverage. Another antiviral prescription, about 40 US at the pharmacy. Again, less than the cost of a similar fully covered medication in Canada.

I have an early stage cataract in my left eye, but because I don’t have binocular vision and don’t really use my left eye much, I don’t consider it an urgent problem. But out of curiosity I asked the doctor what the typical waiting time for eye surgery is. I had cataract surgery on my good eye a few years back in Vancouver and I was on a waiting list for something like 7 or 8 months. Maybe it was a year – I can’t remember exactly, but it was a LONG wait. He said that if I came in and we decided it was time, I could probably have the surgery done the next day – it’s not even really surgery – it’s a little five minute procedure, easy as pie.

So, definitely an eye-opening experience with Mexican health care, at least so far. I admit I did have some preconceptions and old-fashioned expectations.

Who’s left?

As a general principle, I’ve always found that core Republicans tend to love the iconography and the mythology of America, yet they detest the American people. They don’t like gays, lesbians, poor people, hollywood and coastal “elites”, journalists, urban professionals, young hip people, Muslims, Blacks, Latinos, “activist judges”, intellectuals, artists, academics, students, vegetarians, atheists, agnostics, Jews – the list goes on. And on. And on.

So who’s left? Sarah Palin, the diva with the $150,000 wardrobe and a shameless media whore who isn’t even a real plumber. Imaginary media fantasies concocted to appeal to people who despise the America of the 21st century and seek refuge in the comfort of meticulously crafted icons.

Ouch

Two antibiotic injections later. I’m sitting. At the clinic waiting for my final forms to be processed. I’ll be on a antibiotic regimen for at least the next ten days.

This is my first experience of the Mexican public healthcare system and I have to say it’s pretty impressive. Despite a full waiting room my wait was less than half a hour, and the cost of medications without coverage was nominal – less than I would expect to pay for covered medications in Canada. And the waiting room is a luxury lounge compared to some that I’ve sat in.

Off for a few days

So it looks like I got some kind of poisonous insect bite just over my left eye, which has now swolled shut. Luckily my left eye is my bad eye that I never use much anyway, but I’m off to the clinic to get it looked at.

“…there’s one word no one will ever write into a business plan again: Web 2.0″

Well since Web 2.0 was never anything more than an overflowing crock of shit cooked up by hyperventilating hustlers and self-professed tech gurus, that’s probably not a bad thing. If a global recession is what it takes to purge this sort of crap from our cultural vocabulary once and for all then bring it on. Look at it this way: sure, we’re going to have to surrender a lot of national sovereignty and individual liberties in order to erect a new system of global financial governance, but at least we’ll be spared dotcom bubble 2.0

The coming credit amnesty, or why this time really is different

This recession isn’t anything like the one in the 90’s or the one in the 80s, or the really big one in the 70s. (isn’t it funny how many of these apocalypses we’ve survived?) This one is unique – though that doesn’t mean it’s going to be more or even as severe and prolonged as previous ones. The percentage of debt load to productive capacity makes this recession unique.

Basically, we’re all a LOT more in debt as households and nations even adjusting for inflation than we were in previous crises. When debt is modest compared to the capacity of your country to produce tangible material goods and services, then it’s not that hard to ride out a recession. But now, the production of tangible goods and services has become so globalized (i.e. outsourced to slave-labor nations) that locally retooling to real economic activity is going to be much more difficult and will take much longer.

Most people and nations have much more debt than they could ever work off in their lifetimes in a Realeconomy. In short, you have a better chance of paying off personal debt selling homemade muffins than you do as a mergers and acquisitions consultant in the new economy. It’s just that you’d need to make about 40 trillion muffins to keep up with the coming inflation and surge in interest rates. 30 years ago, you could have managed. Not today. Not unless your debts were to just magically disappear.

So I think what we’re going to see in the next few years is the beginnings of broad credit amnesty at the individual, corporate and national level. It’s going to be pretty revolutionary, but it’ll also simply be an acknowledgment of the reality that certain national and household debts will never be repaid and that pursuing lost credit in court will be futile and costly. It’s not going to be popular, especially with people like me, who’ve made a point of keeping my debts modest and paid up. But it’s going to be necessary. To get out of this rut, we’re going to have to invert the balance of debt load vs productive capacity. As advocates of gutting public treasuries to rescue corrupt CEO’s might say, the alternative is too terrible to contemplate.

Wrong Tense

It’s not a “looming” recession. It’s loomed. The biggest clue is plummeting oil prices. Consumer auto demand is only a fraction of global consumption – it’s declining industrial activity that’s causing the drop. That’s fairly worrisome, especially in combination with dropping values on other commodities like copper and steel. That means a LOT of cancelled orders bankruptcies and layoffs out there in the last 3 months.

New Games

Silent Hill Homecoming and Bioshock, both for the PS3. It’s great to see some games that are really beginning to take advantage of the Playstation 3’s capabilities. Apart from playing the first five minutes of each, they’ll have to wait for a rainy day – and we don’t get any of those in Guadalajara until June.

Thank You

I’m also troubled by, not what Sen. McCain says, but what members of the party say, and it is permitted to be said such things as:  “Well,  you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.”  Well, the correct answer is:   he is not a Muslim.  He’s a Christian.   He’s always been a Christian.

But the really right answer is:  What if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country?  The answer is:  No, that’s not America.  Is there something wrong with some 7-year-old Muslim-American kid believing he or she can be President?

Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion:  he’s a Muslim, and he might be associated with terrorists.  This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

Colin Powell, via Salon’s Glenn Greenwald

They’ve all but accused Obama of peddling crack cocaine at daycare centers. But they still have time.

Worst Convention Party EVER

Worldcon, 2006, the Anaheim Hilton. Great convention, great hotel. (Yes, really!) And really good parties. Except for  this one. It was supposed to be this gathering of GLBT Genre fans in someone’s room. The first red flag should have been the fact that the  party  started at 8:00. So we show up an hour later and it’s about 50 people crowded into this single room with no balcony. Nine Inch Nails was playing and I swear to God, not one person had a beverage in their hand. About five people were talking. Everyone else was looking at the Thomas Kincaid painting over the bed. Seriously.

Best Convention EVER

That would be the 2000 E3 games expo in LA. The games industry was at the top of the world. Small companies could still make fortunes overnight. The period from 1998 to September 2001 was a time of incredible optimism, buoyancy, excitement. Probably the darkest years of Ron Moore’s life. E3 2000 was basically just a giant party from start to finish. The thing is, more business was probably done that year than at any E3 before or since. But it was done under the table in hotel rooms or at bars and clubs outside the venue itself.

So the next year they started cracking down. No more booth babes ( male or female) Tightened attendance requirements and so on. The final blow was the year Nintendo demo’d the Wii. Their booth was swamped for the  entire convention, while everyone else watched the tumbleweeds blow by. Sony was not amused and threatened to pull out of E3 altogether unless the format was revised. And now E3 is a series of corporate presentations. Too bad.

The Other Worldcon

Yes, as a friend reminded me, there is the other Worldcon, the one where people only want to talk about mind uploads, immortality and nanotechnology, who bitterly and venomously despise the people like me who are interested in anything else and who whine endlessly about how the convention scene has been ruined by our presence, etc. etc. But they’re kind of off in their own corners at these sorts of events, and they don’t actually bother anyone.

In fact, Worldcons are diverse enough to accomodate a whole spectrum of subcultures who either get along with each other, or as with the purists mentioned  above, ignore everyone and are ignored in turn. But I would say that the stick-up-the-ass purists of all stripes are only a small minority – at conventions, as in life. And  trust me, Star Trek or  superhero comic fans can be just as humorless and stuck up as any Transhumanist or hard science purist. No clique corners the market on asshattery.

It’s a shame that some  people go to events like Worldcon with the intention of associating only with their own clique and snubbing everyone else. That’s what we have the internet for. The whole idea of Worldcon is to meet people and encounter ideas you otherwise wouldn’t.

Funniest thing I’ve heard all month

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/88218

Thanks Mac!

With a capital G

Going to my first Worldcon convention was as liberating to me in some ways as the first time I set foot in a gay bar and saw grown men and women having a good time. I’ve been a science fiction fan since as far back as I knew I was “different” but my true dark secret, which grew more shameful as I got older was that I like everything: horror, fantasy, Gothic romance, epic poetry, psychological drama, adventure, spy thrillers, superhero comics – anything and everything larger and stranger than life.

To me, it was all just one genre. Much too broad to define of course, but like the Judge once said of pornography, “I know it when I see it” I always had a bit of a guilty feeling about that, as though my inclusive tastes were somehow lowbrow, best not brought up in the company of purist friends who thought that Star Trek couldn’t be called true Science Fiction because there was sound in space.

So imagine my joy when I went to Worldcon expecting dry seminars about artificial intelligence and stuffy expositions on the impossibility of human space travel. Instead I met serious academic and literary giants who wanted to talk about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural and Iron Man comics. And they didn’t feel any need to apologize for it.

That’s when I really began looking for a term that was broad enough to encompass everything I’m into. Scifi/Fantasy is much too limiting, not to mention cumbersome. Some people think that everything should just fall under the umbrella of Fantasy, though I suspect they’re just trying to bait scifi purists into flame wars. For me now, saying that I’m into Science Fiction is like a sports fan saying they like hockey skate laces.

A lot of fans just use the term Genre to describe the big tent that has room for people like me who are into everything from Greg Egan to comic books. And it’s the term I’ve settled on. It’s as broad as my tastes, but it also feels specific. Say the word Genre and no one is ever going to mistake you for a Margaret Atwood or Nip/Tuck fan. Not that I have any problem with those – but they’re clearly not Genre. You just know it when you see it.

Alaskan Glaciers Grow for First Time in 250 Years

High snowfall and cold weather to blame

Well, that would do the trick I guess. There’s been talk floating around for the last few years that one of the consequences of a rapid global increase in temperature can be the triggering of an ice age. It’s not a popular idea in some academic circles, partly because it’s felt that there’s a need to stay on-message with the whole global warming thing. But also it is a bit fringey. There’s a lot that’s still not known about how ice ages get started or why they seem to end so suddenly and catastrophically. Warming the planet by a few degress might not be nearly enough to trigger a state change to an ice age. We do know that they can get roaring in a really short period of time though – less than a decade. There’s no reason why the human race couldn’t survive another ice age – we’ve lived through them before. But not anything like 7 billion of us. Not even close.

Transition

Ken and I have one foot in the future and one in the past. I have seasons one to three of Stargate: Atlantis on DVD. Seasons four and five have been downloaded from the Canada iTunes store where, due to some bureaucratic oversight they are miraculously available until some eager beaver cultural engineer discovers that the show is not, in fact, set in rural Quebec and doesn’t actually qualify as Canadian Content.

Downloaded movies and TV shows look fine on our screen, at least as good as a regular DVD, and infinitely better than direct broadcast. I’m still a little mystified as to why a little iPod touch or iPhone can power an HD TV, when trying to run a DVD through a graphics workstation laptop can only play in a reduced window.

Anyway, we have some things on DVD. Others as downloads as they become available at a funereal pace. Other things such as the incredible Planet Earth documentary series we have as Blu-Ray. How long until we’re download only? I try to remember how long I had a mixed collection of VHS and DVD. It was about three or four years, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it takes about as long for this conversion.

Saved from the Red Menace

So it looks as though China is funding the purchase of U.S. treasury bills after all, out of their own considerable ( est. 1.9 trillion) cash reserves. So really, the US government buying the banking and finance system isn’t really socialism after all, since China’s the buyer, one step removed. Still good old capitalism!

Looking Good

The publicity stills being released for the upcoming Star Trek movie look pretty awesome so far. It’s obvious that Producer J.J. Abrams and his crew get that Star Trek is mod. I’m glad they’ve retained that aspect of the production design without slavishly adhering to the look of the original series – which looks today as though it’s barely a decade removed from the age of vaudeville. I’m sure there’ll be plenty of bellyaching from Trek haters and purists alike, but…actually I didn’t have a point there. Other than that I’m sure that there’ll be plenty of bellyaching that no one will listen to.

The Elephant in the Parlour

I’m absolutely amazed at the exuberance that’s gripped people over the bounce in the stock markets. “It’s over! The bailouts worked! Hurray for government intervention and bottomless treasuries!”

But hang on a second. Those trillions in bailouts came from treasuries that are already tens of trillions in debt. So America’s national debt has increased by almost 3 trillion dollars in the last month alone. Which means the money used to bail out Wall Street and the banks doesn’t really exist. Now tell me how that isn’t going to come back and bite us all in the ass.