A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have
Gerald Ford
Archive for December, 2008
So it turns out that “The Christmas Season” in Mexico isn’t quite the way we think of it in Canada. For Canadians, the holiday season basically lasts from about the 23rd of December to January 2nd to 6th-ish, depending on when the nearest convenient start-of-workweek falls in the new year. More and more companies tend to give people 10 days or more off work.
That’s always been my experience when I was working for others: Christmas meant a week and a half to two weeks off. It’s only since Ken and I went into business for ourselves that we ever experienced having to work on Christmas day, or New Year’s eve – for the first time since we were in our 20s, doing service industry work. Even so, there’s enough of a slowdown in the publishing industry over the holidays that it still feels like we have a two week break every year.
Here, Christmas seems to just be a really special statutory holiday. I’m sure some people have the “season” off, but mostly everyone seemed to be back up and running the next day. I think that’s something we definitely get right in Canada. Even if Christmas can’t be a two week holiday for everyone, it should feel like one for as many people as possible.
We’ve been catsitting for our neighbors over the holidays. When he gets excited he likes to bite. Hard.
Don’t Take Health Tips from Celebs if You Know What’s Good for You
Published December 28, 2008 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
For starters, they’re egomaniacal monsters who are often just plain stupid, crazy or both. Madonna’s obsessed with neutralizing radiation, Tom Cruise thinks psychiatry is bunk, and Demi Moore uses trained leeches to – actually, I don’t even want to know. Michael Jackson had his hyperbaric Oxygen chambers…the list goes ever on.
Also, celebrities have access to resources that you and I don’t and never will. They have personal trainers, feng-shui consultants, cosmetic surgeons, personal assistants and stylists – even private numerologists and astronomers. They have access to the finest foods of the highest quality from all over the world. You and I have to haul our asses to the gym by ourselves and make do with the grocery section in Wal Mart.
So nothing these people have to say is going to be a) sane and informed or b) have the slightest bit of relevance to the practical realities of everyday life. I’m hoping that radical life extension breakthroughs will be just far enough around the corner to leave Madonna a wizened dessicated old hag sucking the juice from the pituitary glands of virgins flown in each morning from the south of France.
From January 1st:
2008 is going to be the year a lot of shit comes crashing to the ground. I’m not even sure we’re going to have what we think of as “globalization” by the end of it – if by globalization we mean getting wage slaves in third world industrial shitholes to make cheap consumer goods that Target sells to North Americans with maxxed-out credit cards. If that snake’s still got any tail left to eat by the end of this year, I’ll be surprised.
Of course people like Paul Krugman and James Kunstler had been telling us that we were headed for trouble for years, so it’s not like I’m really looking for any seer credit. But considering there were “experts” still trying to reassure us as late as October that things were hunky-dory, I don’t think I did too badly.
And yes, I think that globalization, at least as we’ve known it so far, is pretty much finished. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong, but with all due respect to China, I don’t think we can say at this point whose century this is going to be – if anyone’s.
Definitely not a home-and-hearth day. Everyone goes downtown, buys ice cream and wanders around the vast plazas that nations born of revolution tend to have. The usual things are open: Starbucks, fast food, Oxxo (our local version of Seven-Eleven) some retail stores and street vendors. But before Church gets out, the streets are silent and deserted.
Do we even believe it really happened?
Ken and I are sitting at Starbucks, having just braved the local Wal Mart for some last minute supplies. Those photos of snowbound Vancouver finally managed to get me in the mood for the holidays, although it really is nice to have a low key holiday this year. Hope yours is awesome!
My friend Alec sent me these shots of Vancouver getting dumped on by a massive blizzard of the type we only get once every 10 years or so. I look at these shots and I’m right back there, walking our dog Lucky who passed away two years ago. She used to love being out in fresh snow. I can actually hear the expectant stillness that’s so rare for Vancouver. I can feel my jeans soaked up to the knees. I can see the one inevitable head-to-toe-bundled chump struggling to wade through hip-deep snow to reach a bus stop – for a bus that will never come.
There are any number of factors that could force Ken and I to return to Canada, but regardless of how expensive it is, no matter how many pretentious Asian Fusion restaurants they open, Vancouver really is the only place in Canada I would ever consider living.
All classics destined to haunt their authors for years to come. My favorite is Charles Krauthammer who, to the best of my knowledge, has been flat out wrong about absolutely everything since as far back as I’ve been reading him.
The pattern that emerges looking over these choices is that any prediction which sounds like a pissy, petulant defense of the status quo is almost certainly doomed to be wrong – and laughably so.
And it’s not just that hindsight’s 20/20 either. We knew these boneheads were wrong at the time. For example, no 4’s Donald Luskin, ridiculing talk of a recession – in September of 2008 – a full year after the housing bubble burst!
There’s this emerging consensus in the field of neuroscience that bothers me – it’s the flatly stated assertion that free will is an illusion, one that we sentimentally cling to because we lack the courage to face the awful truth. This is based on mountains of experimental data showing that measurable activity occurs in the brain before the point at which we become conscious of initiating action. In other words, almost all of what we do, say and think is decided by the unconscious mind and we only think we’re initiating action when in reality, we’re just being informed after the fact – when we’re informed at all.
And yet the certainty that we have free will refuses to go away. Personally, I’m no more troubled that action occurs in my mind that I’m unaware of than I am by the fact that my heart beats without my conscious direction. There’s a principle in logic which states that no complex system can ever contain a complete model of itself. That certainly applies to us as individuals and it’s at the core of what makes consciousness so difficult to define – and so far, impossible to reproduce artificially.
If we ever do create an artificial intelligence, it too will be a complex system – probably vastly more complicated than we are and much more efficiently organized. Yet it will be just as logically impossible for that system to ever contain a complete map of itself as it is for a copy of a cube to fit perfectly inside the original. That artificial entity will have to discover itself, just as we have to spend our lives discovering and mapping ourselves. It will by definition have an unconscious component. But it’s the need to engage in a process of self-discovery that will make it an entity like us, not just the fact that it thinks. Or thinks that it thinks, if you prefer.
I don’t think that any amount of evidence of unconscious (or more accurately, pre-conscious) brain activity will ever resolve the conundrum of free will. I can accept that many, maybe even most of the trivial actions and thoughts I engage in throughout a normal day are generated from a part of myself that I’m not aware of. But what about a decision like moving from Canada to Mexico? There were literally tens, even hundreds of thousands of very specific actions that had to be undertaken both by myself and Ken, to make that happen. No amount of data will ever compel me to believe that at no point in that chain were either of us exercising anything less than completely free will.
Maybe I’m just clinging to a sentimental fallacy and moving across a continent is something that ‘just happened’ and I convinced myself that it’s something I decided. Or maybe instead of defining the concept of free will out of existence as an incorrigible inconvenience, we might have to accept that our consciousness is simply much greater that we can or will ever be fully capable of knowing. That doesn’t trouble me in the slightest. There are many things we might never understand. Science doesn’t collapse in a heap because our minds aren’t wired to describe certain things. And if free will and consciousness are illusions after all, then, like the apparent solidity of matter, they’re illusions so convincing and impossible to ignore that in every sense that could concievably matter, they are real.
When it comes to charity, I follow a simple rule: let each person practice charity to the extent and in the direction dictated by their own conscience and no one else’s. Not mine; not Bono’s. People who run around loudly proclaiming their own efforts while helpfully reminding us that we should do more remind me a bit of the Pharisees of the New Testament – whom even Jesus despised.
I think the thing that appalls me the most is the assumption that we need to be reminded to be charitable because we aren’t. To which I respond: how dare you. How dare you assume that just because I don’t run around boasting of it, that I don’t give any thought or help to others. And even if I didn’t – what possible business would it be of anyone’s?
For most people, charity is a very personal matter that properly resides in the heart. Wearing it on your sleeve – or worse, demanding that others wear it on theirs, kind of violates the whole spirit of the thing.
If there’s anything I can say I actually hate about Christmas, it’s sanctimonious appeals to ‘think of those who have less than we do at this time of year’. Because we soulless, depraved WalMart shoppers never ever think about that and need to be reminded to do so. Hmmm, I can’t remember – did I mention: fuck you?
Here’s my advice for this holiday season: enjoy yourself. Have a great time. Try not to think about the problems of the world for one lousy week and don’t let anyone try to guilt-trip you.
God, how I’d have loved for there to have been a place like this in our old neighborhood in Vancouver. I can’t believe it took us almost ten months to discover it. There’s about 30 different salads on the menu and the ones we’ve tried are amazing so far. I can’t bring myself to post photos of the actual dishes because I find that a little…weird.
I’ve mentioned before that if you want to stay lean down here eating traditionally more than a couple of times a week is just not an option. This place has two levels and it’s always fairly busy, so I guess I’m not the only one who feels that way. And like pretty much every restaurant in Guadalajara, the free Wifi is excellent.
The sunny 30 degree weather and total absence of snow helps, but this year I’m just not in the mood for Christmas. In years past, we’ve never failed to have lights and decorations and cards out on display. This year though, I’m quite happy to just ignore the whole thing. I’ve spent 46 years associating the Christmas season with snow and winter clothing. Even temperate Vancouver rarely failed to provide appropriate weather for the Holidays. And even though they go apeshit over Christmas down here, it’s going to take me a little while to find the sight of garish Nativity scenes bleaching under the Guadalajaran sun anything but cognitively disconcerting.
Not her, silly. The Asus eee. My laptop isn’t portable enough, and it’s my primary work machine, so I can’t risk anything happening to it. The iPod touch is OK as a portable device, but it’s too limited: no proper keyboard, no cut and paste, etc. Just look at how much she’s enjoying the product!
And yes, I do sometimes feel like blogging or checking my mail down on the beach. I’m sure I’ve heard somewhere that the Asus series have this new technology that makes them impenetrable to fine dust and sand particles. I saw it on online. So I really really need one. Someone has to take responsibility for keeping the retail economy afloat.
Very sad news for Star Trek fans as Majel Barrett-Roddenberry has passed away after a brief battle with Leukemia. I always loved her appearances and I don’t think it’s possible to overestimate her contributions to the spirit of the Trek universe. Both she and Gene Roddenberry shared a positive, inclusive, Humanist vision that is at the heart of what makes ST so unique and enduring. We’ll get to hear her one more time as the computer voice of the Enterprise in J.J. Abrams’ upcoming Star Trek film.
Although the State of Jalisco in Mexico has committed itself to instituting a recycling program, things are pretty much stalled due to lack of funding. A few communities like Chapalla are taking it on themselves to get things rolling, but it’s pretty clear it’s still going to be years, maybe even a decade before there’s a state-wide recycling program similar to what we’re used to as former Vancouverites.
We’ve been down here for nine months and I still can’t get used to the idea of throwing everything into the garbage. Even though I knew most of Vancouver’s “recycled” matter was just getting shipped over to China to be sorted and reclaimed, at least something was being done with it other than dumping it in landfills.
But Mexico faces a lot of formidable economic and social challenges – especially now, obviously. Recycling, or at least the illusion of being green, just isn’t at the top of the list. It’s also a matter of education too, with a lot of door-to-door campaigning required in extremely impoverished areas to explain to people why they should sort their garbage.
It’s not like the habit of recycling took hold in Canada overnight, either. It was something people had to gradually learn to do. I remember being ridiculed more than a few times for making the effort to sort garbage properly by friends and co-workers who would gleefully toss their paper pizza slice plates into the garbage – as though they were sticking it to THE MAN, somehow. Yeah, you really showed those treehuggers, douchebags.
Why this particular interglacial period has lasted so unusually long has been a matter of debate for decades. If the Earth’s climate was following it’s normal cycles, we ought to be well into the onset of an ice age right now. The answer now emerging from computer simulations and analysis of ice core samples is that Humans have been altering the climate for far longer than was previously assumed. Specifically, the deforestation of Europe and the large scale cultivation of rice in Asia ( releasing enormous quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas for more powerful than CO2) over the last several thousand years have altered the atmosphere enough to forestall glaciation.
Of course, the effects of organized agriculture are minor compared to the last 200 years of industrialization. But they were just enough to keep the climate mild enough for long enough to enable us to develop an industrial/technological civilization. So it’s ironic that without the climate altering effects of agriculture and the artificial prolongation of our currently pleasant interglacial climate, we’d probably never have developed the industrial civilization that we now worry is causing global warming to accelerate – we’d have been bumped back down to scraping out a subsistence living in another ice age. And it’s a double irony that the technological development we’ve been lucky enough to get away with in the first place is the very thing that will one day enable us to permanently manage the earth’s climate – moderating warming and keeping the glaciers at bay.
You are what you eat, but also, you are when you eat. If you want to stay lean or get lean, always start with a full breakfast and never eat anything two hours before bed. It’s really very easy once you stop trying to exercise yourself to death. Anyone can lose weight and keep it off by just making some simple changes to their eating habits.
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