The VW corporation is officially retiring the Beetle after 70 years.
Actually, they retired the model once before but then resurrected it in the form of the New Beetle. And in fact the old Beetles lived on in countries like Mexico and Brazil. In Mexico, for example, I believe they only stopped manufacturing old Beetles in 2003, while in Brazil, they continued to be made until 2006.
I have owned 5 cars in my life. 3 of them were Beetles (old types). It’s the only car where I was able to take apart and put the engine together successfully. I lived in my Beetle for a summer in 1985.
The first bug I owned had been my mom’s before it was mine. We traveled in it across Canada in 1977. The car was known as “Betsy.”
Here is Betsy in Ontario in the summer of 77.
Later I drove Betsy through 25 states and she died in the town of Normal, Illinois, in late 1985. I sold her to a kid named Derrick for $50.
My second bug had been my grandmother’s, and when she died in the late 80’s I inherited it. That car was known as “Rog.”
I had it with me until I was living in Philadelphia in 1997, when Michelle and I sold it because we were broke. It was a sad.
My third bug I bought when living in L.A. and Burbank in 2000. It was named “Vato,” because it was a very Mexican-seeming bug – it had been “lowered” and had one of those vato-ized, mini steering wheels. But it was a good car.
It caught on fire and died on the 134 Freeway near Glendale, I think, one day when my dad was driving it.
Category: Politics, Economics & Current Affairs
Caveat: Incademic
The Quechua language, the historical Native American language of the Inca Empire in the prehispanic period and still alive today, has gone academic: a woman wrote and defended her doctoral thesis entirely in Quechua for the first time in history, in Lima, Peru.
Perhaps this is the first time any Western Hemisphere language has claimed the academy? The only other possible example might maybe have arisen with Nahuatl in Mexico, but I can’t find evidence.
Caveat: the base alloy of hypocrisy
In this historical moment when a motley riot of neo-know-nothingists are mucking about with the levers of government, I find hope for humanist values in the apropos observations of a certain famous politician:
Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equals, except negroes and foreigners and Catholics.” When it comes to that I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.
– Abraham Lincoln
Caveat: Tree #296
Arthur and I went to a kind of “community meeting” this evening. Apparently the City of Craig has imperial ambitions with respect to the denizens of Port Saint Nicholas Road (“PSN”). The denizens, however, are quite ambivalent about this. I would myself be inclined to agree that the city offers little of value in terms of improved services, given their fire department’s poor showing during the house fire next door in August (which currently they are legally obligated to provide despite being outside their tax base, but which they receive state monies to do, too, so it’s not like they are losing money on it).
Right now, the battle is about who really controls, owns, and is obligated to maintain the road. This is taking the form of the city’s “Ordinance 719,” which appears to be an unconstitutional “taxation without representation” proposition, wherein the city is allocating to itself the “extraterritorial” right to tax property owners along the road despite their not being voting residents of the city, in exchange for road maintenance – which the city is already legally obligated to do because of where they chose to site their water treatment plant. There are a number of dramatis personae: there’s the city (and specifically its hapless yet hubristic water department), there’s the tribal association (nominally non-profit), there’s the tribal corporation (for-profit, that owns all the non-parcelled land around Craig and PSN, and that originally built the road – it’s not, in fact, “public” in origin), and there are the helpless denizens themselves. At stake: the gobs of state and federal grant money lurking out there for whoever can control the road.
But the City of Craig’s long game is pretty obvious – they hope to undertake an expansive regional annexation into their taxable territory a la Ketchikan (which took over its entire island) or Juneau (which took over several large islands as well as the mainland and became the single largest city in the US in land area). Arthur finds the prospect sufficiently alarming that he was motivated to dislodge himself from his hidey-hole and go find out what was going on. There is a grassroots, community-initiated “legal defense fund” that has hired some lawyers to battle the city and their plans in the courts. So we attended the meeting and became better informed. Arthur donated money (“…pay voluntarily now to avoid paying [taxes] involuntarily later”).
My own opinion is slightly more ambivalent. I don’t share the majority of my neighbors’ instinctual distrust of government and visceral resentment of taxation. I can see that the city has, in this instance, been poorly managed and ham-handed with respect to their treatment of the PSN community, but I refuse to generalize this behavior to the potential of governments in general. My own instinct would be to counter Craig’s ambitions with a move toward a greater degree of counterbalancing self-government: at the least, one or more legally-empowered and -chartered homeowners’ association(s); at the most extreme, pre-emptive incorporation of Port Saint Nicholas as its own “city” (village, but “city” in the legal sense) to effectively “block” Craig’s expansion.
And on that note, I provide this photo of a member Port Saint Nicholas’ silent majority: the trees.
[daily log: walking, 3.5km]
Caveat: On Democracy’s Spiral
Sometimes I have essentially decontextualized insights and I decide to write them down. I was reading some blog about current political events, and thought the following. It’s not a reasoned argument, just an idea that occurred to me.
In a true democracy, it seems to me that the things people believe about government will eventually become true about government. If people believe their government is dangerous, the government will become more and more dangerous over time. If people believe their government is corrupt, the government will become more and more corrupt over time. This can go the other direction too, though: if people believe their government is capable of solving social ills, then more and more social ills will be solved by government over time. If people believe their government is a virtuous protector of individual rights, then the government will become more and more virtuous in this way over time. There is a most disturbing aspect of this “spiral effect” of democracy, however: if people specifically come to believe their government is undemocratic, then the government will become less and less democratic over time. And the problem, there, unlike any of the other spirals, is that there is no way to spiral out from this problem once you’ve descended, because once the government is no longer democratic, this feedback process is no longer in effect. Thus the absolute most important belief for the nurturing and sustenance of a democracy is the belief in democracy itself.
Caveat: a lottery for participation
Periodically, in the United States, people go around with guns killing random people in public. This is just part of our culture, apparently – check the news.
Here is someone thinking about this cultural phenomenon.
The United States has institutionalized the mass shooting in a way that Durkheim would immediately recognize. As I discovered to my shock when my own children started school in North Carolina some years ago, preparation for a shooting is a part of our children’s lives as soon as they enter kindergarten. The ritual of a Killing Day is known to all adults. It is taught to children first in outline only, and then gradually in more detail as they get older. The lockdown drill is its Mass. The language of “Active shooters”, “Safe corners”, and “Shelter in place” is its liturgy. “Run, Hide, Fight” is its creed. Security consultants and credential-dispensing experts are its clergy. My son and daughter have been institutionally readied to be shot dead as surely as I, at their age, was readied by my school to receive my first communion. They practice their movements. They are taught how to hold themselves; who to defer to; what to say to their parents; how to hold their hands. The only real difference is that there is a lottery for participation. Most will only prepare. But each week, a chosen few will fully consummate the process, and be killed. – Kieran Healy
Caveat: Lady Burns
In January, 1985, I was studying in Paris.
I had a camera my uncle Arthur had given to me – a fairly high quality Pentax (film-using, of course, in those days), with some nice lenses.
One day in Paris I walked around and over to the Île de la Cité and to the Notre Dame Cathedral. Because it was cold and overcast, there weren’t many crowds, and I climbed one of the towers and took pictures of Paris.
In the picture below, which I took at that time looking out on the Paris cityscape toward Montmartre, the gargoyle in the right foreground is part of the cathedral.
Today, Notre Dame burned.
Caveat: Not Just America
In fact, the incarceration of children whose parents are in violation of rules about migration is a global problem. I was recently impressed by some discussion of the growing problem in my erstwhile home, South Korea, where it is normally an untouchable subject.
You can read about it here. The below video is included on that site.
irreversible effects of immigration detention on children (full version) from APIL Korea on Vimeo.
My important point is that the recent outrage among some parts of the US population about this issue is in fact quite narrow and parochial. This is a global problem and the US is at best a minor violator. That doesn’t excuse it. Rather, I think this core problem of child punishment for parental behavior is key to understanding why migration restriction regimes are on par with chattel slavery in ethical terms.
Caveat: not all creativity needs to be bonded by wage
AOC was talking at the SXSW conference. An excerpt:
We should not be haunted by the specter of being automated out of work. We should not feel nervous about the toll booth collector not having to collect tolls anymore. We should be excited by that. But the reason we’re not excited by it is because we live in a society where if you don’t have a job, you are left to die. And that is, at its core, our problem.
[…]
We should be excited about automation, because what it could potentially mean is more time educating ourselves, more time creating art, more time investing in and investigating the sciences, more time focused on invention, more time going to space, more time enjoying the world that we live in. Because not all creativity needs to be bonded by wage.
[…]
Capitalism is based on scarcity. What happens when there is enough for everyone to eat? What happens when there is enough for everyone to be clothed? Then you have to make scarcity artificial. And that is what has happened.- AOC
Then the moderator said: that’s “Full Star Trek Socialism.” AOC just smiled.
The concept of the “post-scarcity society” has been around for a long time. And now we find that AOC is fluent in this thinking – that was not a prepared speech, but rather a response to an audience question. I’m interested.
Caveat: on agency costs and the capital gains tax
I haven’t been posting much of this type of thing, in recent months – since my change in lifestyle with the move to Alaska. But I still read several economics blogs, and I think this is very interesting and insightful.
Very high top tax rates are a means of encouraging “predistribution” rather than the tax part of tax-and-transfer redistribution. Their purpose, their very point, is to create those “agency costs” that economists from the 1970s until now have derided and demanded be ruthlessly excised from corporate practice. But every “agency cost” to shareholders is income to someone else, whether that takes the form of luxury offices and stupid jet travel for firm managers or better work conditions at higher pay for more employees. The ideologically tendentious presumption of the economics profession post-1970s has been that agency costs yield no real benefits, that they look much more like luxury offices for the C-suite than predictable schedules for service workers. But that was always just presumption, and historical experience does not support it. It is, I will admit, not a slam dunk case, it is only suggestive, that the ruthless efficiencies of contemporary labor markets and the shattering of union power happened just after we, in relative-to-prior-period terms, dramatically subsidized payouts to shareholders over other uses of funds. But it is suggestive. And it is plausible that “Treaties of Detroit” and Bell Labses, that corporate practices generally which favor workers, customers, and other stakeholders, are easier for companies to “afford” when shareholders have to give up less to purchase them. Which is precisely the effect, in the most basic economic terms, of taxing payouts to shareholders heavily. – from the blog interfluidity
The point above is that by lowering the capital gains and top tax brackets in the 80s, this encouraged companies (via giving incentives to owners and management) to reduce “agency costs” – which weren’t just perks for managers but also perks for regular employees – things like healthcare, living wages, etc. So the tax cuts of the 80s drove the creation of the new, low-perk, low-security workplaces that we see today.
Just sayin’.
Caveat: intoxicated by slogans
A mass movement readily exploits the discontent and frustration of large segments of the population which for some reason or other cannot face the responsibility of being persons and standing on their own feet. But give these persons a movement to join, a cause to defend, and they will go to any extreme, stop at no crime, intoxicated as they are by the slogans that give them a pseudo-religious sense of transcending their own limitations. The member of a mass movement, afraid of his own isolation, and his own weakness as an individual, cannot face the task of discovering within himself the spiritual power and integrity which can be called forth only by love. Instead of this, he seeks a movement that will protect his weakness with a wall of anonymity and justify his acts by the sanction of collective glory and power. All the better if this is done out of hatred, for hatred is always easier and less subtle than love. It does not have to respect reality as love does. It does not have to take account of individual cases. Its solutions are simple and easy. It makes its decisions by a simple glance at a face, a colored skin, a uniform. It identifies an enemy by an accent, an unfamiliar turn of speech, an appeal to concepts that are difficult to understand. He is something unfamiliar. This is not “ours.” This must be brought into line – or destroyed.
Here is the great temptation of the modern age, this universal infection of fanaticism, this plague of intolerance, prejudice and hate which flows from the crippled nature of man who is afraid of love and does not dare to be a person. It is against this temptation most of all that the Christian must labor with inexhaustible patience and love, in silence, perhaps in repeated failure, seeking tirelessly to restore, wherever he can, and first of all in himself, the capacity of love and which makes man the living image of God. – Thomas Merton (American monk, 1915-1958)
[daily log: walking, 4km; tromping, 250m]
Caveat: Caravanophobia
Maybe I should stay out of politics, but I found sympathy with this cartoon on the matter of the hypocrisy inherent in fears about immigration.
[daily log: walking, 4km]
Caveat: on the emergent paradigm
Here is a random philosophical thought, not fully developed, which occurred to me the other day.
Most people don’t care about the surveillance state and/or the lack-of-privacy which is being induced by modern technology. There is actually a simple reason for this lack of concern. It is because, in fact, that lack of privacy is the human cultural baseline. Through most of history, humans lived in small, extended family or tribal-sized groups where everyone knew what everyone else was doing. What is happening now is a return to that baseline, but within the context of a much larger social structure: city, nation, planet. Everyone knows what everyone else is doing: a global village of 8 billion. What’s to worry about? It’s like it always was. The anomaly was the period between the invention of cities and states (approx. 2000 BC) and the development of instantaneous universally distributed communication. In the grand scale of things, it’s a pretty short period of anomaly.
[daily log: walking, 4km]
Caveat: Brilliant Defense Policy
This strikes me as quite hilarious.
Everything you need to know about Australia's defence policy… #UtopiaABC pic.twitter.com/nadv8IVVBV
— Working Dog (@workingdogprod) August 30, 2017
Mutatis mutandi, a similar analysis could apply to the US in some respects, too.
[daily log: walking, 4km]
Caveat: a big solving, indeed
It is reported that Seoul has been saved from anihilation. The below is apparently an utterly true transcript.
Dramatis personae: the new space emperor, Kanye West, Jim Brown.
"MR. BROWN: And I like North Korea.
THE PRESIDENT: I like North Korea too.
MR. BROWN: (Inaudible.)
THE PRESIDENT: Yeah. Yeah. Well, he’s — turned out to be good. Dialogue. We had a little dialogue. And Secretary of State just came back — Mike. He just came back from North Korea. We had very good meetings, and we’ll meet again. But we’re doing good. No more nuclear testing. No more missiles going up. No more nothing. And it’s — that was headed to war. That was headed to war.
MR. BROWN: Yeah. I mean, it was — to me, it seemed like that.
THE PRESIDENT: Yeah. It was so close. We spoke — I spoke to President Obama. I will tell you, that was headed to war. And now it’s going to be — I believe it’s going to work out very well.
MR. WEST: You stopped the war —
THE PRESIDENT: We really stopped the war. Saved millions of lives. You know, Seoul has 30 million people. You don’t realize how big. Thirty million people who are right near the border; 30 miles off the border. Millions of people would have been killed. And I will say, Chairman Kim has been really good. Really good. And we’ve made a lot of progress.
That’s nice that you say that, because that’s a big — that’s a big thing. These folks were covering — they were covering North Korea not — I think not very promisingly. And there were a lot of problems. President Obama said that was his biggest problem. And I don’t say anything is solved —
MR. WEST: You, day one, solved one of the biggest problems.
THE PRESIDENT: Yeah.
MR. WEST: We solved one of the biggest problems.
THE PRESIDENT: It was a big solving. And not solved yet, but I think we’re along — I think we’re on the way."
(h/t The Rude Pundit)
[daily log: walking, 4km; tromping, 350m]
Caveat: peninsular psephological observations
I decided to take a break from documenting my visit to Oregon and my uncle’s health crisis to address the elections held this week in South Korea.
As my sister said, off-handedly, just now, “there are no coincidences in politics.” Thus, the fact that the Kim-DJT summit in Singapore was held this week, right before the elections, can hardly be imagined but to have been some bit of orchestration on the part of the South Koreans. And the incumbent president Moon Jae-in and his left-leaning 더불어민주당 [deobuleominjudang ~ “together democratic party”] clearly had decided that the blustery leaders’ drafty summiteering would benefit them electorally. It did.
Arguably, Korea experienced a “blue wave” such as some are forecasting for the US elections this Fall. Which is odd not just because Korea isn’t in the US, but because this is a kind of Korean mid-term, and as such, just like a US mid-term, you’d expect things to swing the other way. Since Moon had won in 2016, it seemed that things should swing rightward for this election. That didn’t happen. The main right-leaning party remains in disarray following the impeachment scandals that led to Moon’s election, and Moon is benefiting from domestic fears that Mr T is going to mess things up for South Korea.
So it goes. It’s interesting to compare the 2016 electoral map and the 2018 electoral map. You see the “blue wave”, barely noticeable and somewhat ambivalent in 2016, engulfing the country this time around. I have the 2016 map in my blog post from that election. And here is this year’s, below.
I like electoral maps. They’re interesting. Call me an amateur psephological cartographer.
[daily log: walking, 5km]
Caveat: there’s probably an app for that
My experience at Seatac passport control yesterday was surreally 21st century in character.
I was standing in line. And standing. A very long time standing. And then… one line manager official mentioned that those with "mobile passport" got to use an expedited line. I began wondering what this "mobile passport" might be.
So seeing as I was standing there with nothing to do, and I had a good airport wifi connection, I researched it on my phone's internet browser. Lo and behold, there was a "TSA-approved" app in the google play store.
I downloaded the app to my phone. I knelt on the floor and scanned my passport into the app. I stood against the wall and took a really bad selfie, and I loaded the pic to my phone and added it to the app. I checked a bunch of boxes on the forms in the app, possibly turning my soul over to the TSA. And voila, I got a QR code on my phone, which then I showed to the line official. "Oh, step right over there," he said, opening the little vinyl strap separating the lines. I only had to stand in line 5 minutes after that.
Perhaps the difference between Korea and the US is that at the Korean border, such automation (with accompanying surrender of privacy) is obligatory, and thus relatively painless, whereas in the US, such post-modern efficiencies always tend to be "opt in" which means that many others are left in the "slow lane."
[daily log: walking, 5km]
Caveat: Gitsoft
Microsoft is buying GitHub. If you've never worked in the field of software development or systems administration, this is meaningless to you. GitHub, however, is a remarkable and important website if you do things with computers at the level development. In my recent adventures with setting up my own fully functional Ubuntu server running the "OSM stack", GitHub was nigh indispensable.
My take on this acquisition can be simplified as follows:
- Good for Microsoft: looks like I won't be selling my Microsoft stock anytime soon. Like the company's other gestures toward the Linux ecosystem (e.g. SQL Server for Linux, the bash shell for Windows), it shows that the bigwigs at MS "get" where the best devs are at. Devs appear to be in the driver's seat in Redmond, and it shows in many of their decisions.
- Bad for me: in my role as a free software consumer, I'm preemptively depressed. At some point, gates are likely to appear on this once-upon-a-time opensource Mecca. Should I close my GitHub account now, or wait for Microsoft to send me a notification about my "free upgrade to a paid account" in the uncertain future?
[daily log: walking, 7km]
Caveat: Brown-Eyed Mayor
It almost makes me wish I was living in Saint Paul again.
I have high hopes for Melvin Carter in the realm of Minnesota Politics.
[daily log: walking, 7.5km]
Caveat: Party just for you
Childish Gambino (AKA Donald Glover) has a new song / video out. It's quite remarkable, and has received high critical praise from important media™. There is a detailed parsing of the video and song at Huffington Post, for example.
It's a rap song. It's also a dance composition. It's cinematography and poetry. It's also hefty, deep and dark social criticism. Make of it what you will. I'm impressed.
What I'm listening to right now.
Childish Gambino, "This is America." Is this America?
[Intro: Choir]
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah, go, go away
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah, go, go away
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah, go, go away
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah, go, go away
[Bridge: Childish Gambino & Young Thug]
We just wanna party
Party just for you
We just want the money
Money just for you
I know you wanna party
Party just for me
Girl, you got me dancin' (yeah, girl, you got me dancin')
Dance and shake the frame
We just wanna party (yeah)
Party just for you (yeah)
We just want the money (yeah)
Money just for you (you)
I know you wanna party (yeah)
Party just for me (yeah)
Girl, you got me dancin' (yeah, girl, you got me dancin')
Dance and shake the frame (you)
[Chorus: Childish Gambino]
This is America
Don't catch you slippin' up
Don't catch you slippin' up
Look what I'm whippin' up
This is America (woo)
Don't catch you slippin' up
Don't catch you slippin' up
Look what I'm whippin' up
[Verse 1: Childish Gambino, Blocboy JB, Slim Jxmmi, Young Thug, & 21 Savage]
This is America (skrrt, skrrt, woo)
Don't catch you slippin' up (ayy)
Look at how I'm livin' now
Police be trippin' now (woo)
Yeah, this is America (woo, ayy)
Guns in my area (word, my area)
I got the strap (ayy, ayy)
I gotta carry 'em
Yeah, yeah, I'ma go into this (ugh)
Yeah, yeah, this is guerilla (woo)
Yeah, yeah, I'ma go get the bag
Yeah, yeah, or I'ma get the pad
Yeah, yeah, I'm so cold like yeah (yeah)
I'm so dope like yeah (woo)
We gon' blow like yeah (straight up, uh)
[Refrain: Choir & Childish Gambino]
Ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh, tell somebody
You go tell somebody
Grandma told me
Get your money, Black man (get your money)
Get your money, Black man (get your money)
Get your money, Black man (get your, Black man)
Get your money, Black man (get your, Black man)
Black man
[Chorus: Childish Gambino, Slim Jxmmi, & Young Thug]
This is America (woo, ayy)
Don't catch you slippin' up (woo, woo, don't catch you slippin', now)
Don't catch you slippin' up (ayy, woah)
Look what I'm whippin' up (Slime!)
This is America (yeah, yeah)
Don't catch you slippin' up (woah, ayy)
Don't catch you slippin' up (ayy, woo)
Look what I'm whippin' up (ayy)
[Verse 2: Childish Gambino, Quavo, Young Thug, & 21 Savage]
Look how I'm geekin' out (hey)
I'm so fitted (I'm so fitted, woo)
I'm on Gucci (I'm on Gucci)
I'm so pretty (yeah, yeah)
I'm gon' get it (ayy, I'm gon' get it)
Watch me move (blaow)
This a celly (ha)
That's a tool (yeah)
On my Kodak (woo, Black)
Ooh, know that (yeah, know that, hold on)
Get it (get it, get it)
Ooh, work it (21)
Hunnid bands, hunnid bands, hunnid bands (hunnid bands)
Contraband, contraband, contraband (contraband)
I got the plug in Oaxaca (woah)
They gonna find you like blocka (blaow)
[Refrain: Choir, Childish Gambino, & Young Thug]
Ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh, tell somebody
America, I just checked my following list and
You go tell somebody
You mothafuckas owe me
Grandma told me
Get your money, Black man (black man)
Get your money, Black man (black man)
Get your money, Black man (get your, Black man)
Get your money, Black man (get your, Black man)
Black man
(One, two, three, get down)
Ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh, tell somebody
You go tell somebody
Grandma told me, "Get your money"
Get your money, Black man (Black man)
Get your money, Black man (Black man)
Get your money, Black man (Black man)
Get your money, Black man (Black man)
Black man
[Outro: Young Thug]
You just a Black man in this world
You just a barcode, ayy
You just a Black man in this world
Drivin' expensive foreigns, ayy
You just a big dawg, yeah
I kenneled him in the backyard
No probably ain't life to a dog
For a big dog
[daily log: walking, 7km]
Caveat: the sound of money
Ōoka Tadasuke (1677–1752) was a Japanese samurai and bureaucrat during the shogunate of Tokugawa Yoshimune. He served as a magistrate of Edo (Tokyo), and his roles included chief of police, judge and jury. He has evolved into a kind of folk hero, as an archetypically fair and honest judge. There is a famous story called "The Case of the Stolen Smell." Ōoka heard the case of a paranoid innkeeper who accused a poor student of literally stealing the fumes of his cooking by eating when the innkeeper was cooking to flavor his dull food. Although his colleagues advised Ōoka to throw the case out as ridiculous, he decided to hear the case. The judge resolved the matter by ordering the student to pass the money he had in one hand to his other and ruling that the price of the smell of food is the sound of money. (Above adapted from the wikipedia).
[daily log: walking, 7km]
Caveat: 映画に出てくるような 本物のヒーロー
I suppose you could say I’m a bit of a fan of the Japanese polymathic popstar Genki Sudo. I’ve posted at least 3 of his videos on this here blog before.
He and his group WORLD ORDER (all caps, please) made a new music video, darkly satirizing America’s twitterer-in-chief.
What I’m listening to right now.
WORLD ORDER, “Let’s Start World War 3.”
歌詞 (I’m not sure this all the lyrics, but it might be – the song’s actual words seem pretty short).
“We assembled here today
are issuing a new decree
to be heard in every city
in every foreign capital
and in every hall of power.
From this day forward
a new vision will govern our land.
From this day forward
it’s going to be only
America First.
America First!”
つまらない日々に 終わりを告げる男が
世界を救うため この世に遂に現れた
お金持ちで背も高い プロレスもできて頭も良い
映画に出てくるような 本物のヒーロー
Let’s start World War 3
We’re gonna have a party
あなたの金髪に 青い瞳に憧れ
僕らはどこまでも ついていきます
Let’s start World War 3
We’re gonna have a party
“Let’s grab them by the pussy”
Let’s start World War 3
Can’t break out from this feeling
Let’s start World War 3
“We will make America wealthy again
We will make America proud again
We will make America safe again
And yes, together
We will make America great again”
Translation of the Japanese part above (from the subtitles).
On a boring day
A man who speaks of the end
and wants to save the world
finally appeared
He’s rich and tall
And has a mind that can even understand WWE
Like from a real hero
Right out of a film
I yearn for your blonde hair
and blue eyes
Wherever you go
We will follow you
[daily log: walking, 7km]
Caveat: The View From Over Here 🔫
Currently I am a long-term expat. I observe my home country, the US, from a distance both psychological and physical. The whole "gun thing" seems both tragic and absurd, from my perspective. I currently live in a country with one of the lowest incidences of gun violence in the world – a cursory examination of a list of countries by incidence of gun deaths shows South Korea as being the 3rd lowest, only after Hong Kong and Japan.
Anyway, it's pretty safe here, from gun violence. I have sometimes wondered if there exists any kind of "gun culture" in South Korea. Actually, I speculate that there does, in fact, exist such a culture – but it would be inextricably linked up with the military. Since military service for males is obligatory, that means that, in theory, at least, every Korean adult male in the entire country has fired a gun at some point in his life, and the vast majority have probably qualified with a rifle. That's interesting, vis-a-vis the non-military culture, right? It makes it a far different situation than either Hong Kong or Japan, where military service is, in the former instance non-existent, and in the latter instance, extremely rare and utterly voluntary (given Japan's relatively small military, in per capita terms, compared to South Korea). What it means is that any Korean man who wants to "play" with guns in a safe and responsible manner has an easy way to do so: he can continue to serve as a "reservist" – which many Korean men do. Then he can go out on the range and shoot as much as he wants, several times a year, I can imagine.
My own experience with guns is broader than you might expect, given my liberal white privilege. I qualified with a rifle during my Army service – as an expert, even – though I sometimes felt I had simply had some very lucky days on my qualifying days. I had even gone on to take the first steps on qualifying with a pistol, as well, before I mustered out.
Further, despite having avoided seeing any actual action in the first Iraq war (1991) – which took place during my military service, and which I watched on the barracks televisions while stationed here in South Korea at that time – I have nevertheless had the experience of having been shot at, directly. I was lucky, in that the man shooting at me was too drunk to aim well. I was not hurt. There is no doubt I might have died – I consider it one of the several times in my life when I have had to look death right in the eye.
Additionally, I once witnessed a man being shot dead. This was during my time traveling in El Salvador, in 1986 – which was during the civil war. It was not clear to me if I witnessing a crime or an act of "enforcement" – there were plenty of uniforms present but it wasn't clear to me if the uniforms were military or rebel forces, and how it all worked. I suspect that during the Salvadorean civil war of that era, the line between crime and military enforcement was pretty blurry. My main reaction was to get away from the situation as quickly and as unobstrusively as I could manage. I boarded a bus and let it take me away.
In the end, my view of guns and gun violence is complicated. I think I have no issue with the type of allegedly draconian gun laws as exist in Japan or South Korea. I think it hardly makes these societies "less free" – there may in fact be ways that these societies are "less free" than in the US, but I don't think the relaxing of gun controls would impact that in any positive way. My libertarian tendencies are undeniable, however. In principle, I have strong sympathies with the "2nd ammendment types" who will brook no infringement of individual rights. My biggest concern with those people is that they are, almost without exception, utter hypocrites – they are libertarians on gun control, but if you ask them to opine on issues like women's rights or immigration, they are all about control and restrictions. This is "libertarianism for me but not for thee." It makes me much less sympathetic to their position – when I find mostly hypocrites holding a given political position, my gut-level response is to assume this is strong evidence of some kind of flaw in that political position.
I will conclude with a humorous video I ran across – a tongue-in-cheek "European perspective" on the American gun problem, which could probably just as easily represent the typical (informed) Korean position.
"A small country on the coast of North America."
[daily log: walking, 7km]
Caveat: Sending a Sportscar into Space
Occasionally, I have the thought that I have arrived in the future. Most of the time, I don't feel this. Inevitably, the future arrives more slowly than I expected when I was younger, but it does sometimes nevertheless put in an appearance.
SpaceX corporation's test of their new Falcon Heavy rocket today is one such example. The real innovation is their recovery of the the booster stages for re-use. The recycling of these rocket parts, instead of just dropping them in the Atlantic, in old-school NASA style, will make space flight much, much cheaper over the long run. And the video of the simultaneous landing of two side booster rockets back at Kennedy is a pure science fiction moment, circa 1950s.
That said, Elon Musk, the visionary leader of SpaceX, is also a megalomaniacal plutocrat and basically a living incarnation of a classic James Bond movie villain. Perhaps this is the kind of person who advances humanity – I don't know. Is that just what it takes?
Musk's new rocket test needed a "dummy payload," so, in finest egotistical form, he launched his own sports car (a Tesla Roadster, manufactured by one of his other companies), with a mannequin in a space suit at the wheel. So now, humanity has launched a space-suited dummy at the wheel of a sports car, out into space, and eventually, past the orbit of Mars. Furthermore, he placed a towel and a copy of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide in the glove box. Can you imagine the aliens finding that?
Maybe Elon Musk will move to Mars. Somebody should move to Mars, right? Why not him?
[daily log: walking, 8km]
Caveat: A message for the spies
Some months ago, the whiteboard in room 212 had been coming loose. There was worry that it would fall down at an inopportune time, so Curt told Mr Park (the 과장님 – literally "supervisor" or "chief" but really he's a kind of glorified handyman and janitor at Karma) to add some reinforcements to its support. He duly attached some extra screws with fat washers to hold the whiteboard in its place on the wall.
I guess for whatever reason, one of the girls in my HS2-M cohort noticed these rather larger features in strangely placed, apparently random locations on edges of the whiteboard.
"It looks like a CC camera," she observed. It did rather, if you didn't look too closely.
"Someone is spying on you," I observed, perhaps teasing a bit.
Another girl turned and pointed at the "official" CC camera, mounted on the ceiling in the corner of the room. "Of course," she observed.
Such CC cameras are ubiquitious in Korean life, and as far as I can figure out, are actually legally mandated for settings like schools and hagwon. Presumeably, they serve to provide reassurance to parents that nothing bad can happen to their children because there is a record of classroom activity. And I know Curt has spent money to make sure they are all working and well-maintained, which supports the idea that there's a regulation requiring them – but I don't know this for certain.
"That one is unofficial," I clarified, pointing at the screw-with-washer on the whiteboard. This obligated me to spend several minutes explaining the word "unofficial." Which, of course, is exactly the sort of conversation I most like to have with my students: relevant, student-driven, but, hopefully, full of new information and/or vocabulary.
After that, one of the other girls, Gayeong, asked, "Who would want to spy unofficial?"
"Kim Jeong-eun," I joked. One of the other kids laughed.
"Oh no!" Gayeong declared, and mimed an insincere, mocking look of shock and terror. The North Korean leader is mostly an object of derision and gallows-humor for typical South Korean middle-schoolers. He's not taken very seriously.
But then a soft-spoken and shy girl, who happened to be sitting closest to the whiteboard, really shocked me. She leaned forward, toward the "camera," and in an earnest whisper said, simply, "Fuck you."
"Jiwon," I declared, both impressed by this very idiomatic experession and dismayed by its vulgarity. "What's that about?"
Of course, even without teaching them, all the kids know this type of English – it's too ubiquitous in American pop culture (movies and music) for them not to know what it means and how it's best deployed effectively.
Jiwon just shrugged and smiled. "He's a bad person."
[daily log: walking, 7km]
Caveat: What would Justinian have done?
I had a flu some weeks back, and I feel I have not ever really recovered.
This whole week I have slept at least two hours longer than my normal sleep time each night, which for me a reliable sign that something is amiss with my general health. Despite my occasional bouts of hypochondria, I don't think worry about cancer is well-placed, since just a few weeks ago I passed my semiannual inspection successfully. I'm just feeling unhealthy and consequently rather glum about life.
I should add to the above the fact my normally predominant escapist hobby – my geofiction – has been on indefinite hold due to a strong sensation of burnout with respect to what you might call the internal politics of the website where I was engaged in that.
So I have been feeling adrift and painfully uncreative – allowing a possible exception for my daily effort at poetry, but with the caveat that even there, I am "depleting my reserves" rather than doing much that is new.
So what am I doing with my time, outside of work and sleep?
I have been reading history. Almost exclusively, and for many hours each day. I began, a few weeks back, with a curiosity about the Byzantine Empire, I have been wandering off wherever my interest leads: Sassanids (Persian pre-Islamic); Avars and Lombards and Franks and Visigoths; Khazars and Göktürks. It's notable that with the internet as it is today, one hardly needs to go out and buy books to pursue these eccentricities.
From this reading, I have only this generalization to draw:
The world is always just about to end. There is nothing new under the sun.
[daily log: walking, 7km]
Caveat: Weak! Sad.
"A shutdown falls on the President's lack of leadership. He can't even control his party and get people together in a room. A shutdown means the President is weak." – DJT, 2013.
[daily log: walking, 7.6km]
Caveat: Making cabbage in other ways
I just learned that South Korea has a horrible "kimchi deficit," in an article here.
The same article points out, however, that overall, Korea runs a major trade surplus. And they make plenty of money on that surplus, which, apparently, they spend importing cheap Chinese-made kimchi.
The irony is that "cabbage" (배추) is a slang word for money, in Korean, as well as being a main ingredient in most varieties of kimchi. So they make their "cabbage" selling the world smartphones and memory chips, and then spend that "cabbage" for real cabbage from China.
Personally, I'm going to have to look more closely at the labels on my pre-made, store-bought kimchi, because I prefer to avoid food imported from China – the quality issues in the past have seemed quite notable. I do marvel, however, at the fact that China has become such a dominant food exporter in so many product domains: a country with so many people, where people were dying in famine half a century ago, still manages to export vast quantities of food.
[daily log: walking, 7km]
Caveat: the supremacy of the individual conscience
On Monday, the US commemorated Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday. Dr King's memorial has become the somewhat anodyne fillip to an annual dialogue about race and civil rights, couched in terms guaranteed to offend no one. But he was pretty offensive to those aligned against him, in his era – and those people were offensive right back at him. Not least, consider this bit, written shortly after his assassination:
Those who mourn Dr. King because they were his closest followers should meditate the implications of the deed of the wildman who killed him. That deed should bring to mind not (for God's sake) the irrelevance of non-violence, but the sternest necessity of reaffirming non-violence. An aspect of non-violence is submission to the law.
The last public speech of Martin Luther King described his intention of violating the law in Memphis, where an injunction had been handed down against the resumption of a march which only a week ago had resulted in the death of one human being and the wounding of fifty others.
Dr. King's flouting of the law does not justify the the flouting by others of the law, but it is a terrifying thought that, most likely, the cretin who leveled his rifle at the head of Martin Luther King, may have absorbed the talk, so freely available, about the supremacy of the individual conscience, such talk as Martin Luther King, God rest his troubled soul, had so widely, and so indiscriminately, indulged in. – William F. Buckley, April 9, 1968.
Buckley, in essence, blames the actions of Dr King's murderer on the message he advocated and preached. It is deeply disturbing that in Buckley's view, "submission to the law" is a component of non-violence. This confuses the admonition to "render unto Caesar" for a quite different notion: "submit to Caesar." This is definitely not what any notable advocate of nonviolence has ever had in mind, including Jesus himself.
In light of this, please don't believe that dogwghistle racism and "blaming the victim" are in any way new to the right's discourses contra civil rights. I once thought rather highly of Buckley, but over the years I have seen more and more evidence to support the idea that he was, behind his high rhetoric, yet another defender of the Jim Crow status quo ante.
The only thing actually new in our current Emperor is a certain incisive vulgarity – the content of the message is little changed. Yet it is the content of the message we need to be concerned about, not the manner of presentation.
[daily log: walking, 7.5km]
Caveat: The sad degradation of presidential rhetoric
Our current president: "Why do we want all these people from Africa here? They're shithole countries …"
Ronald Reagan (or his speechwriter, I suppose): "I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still."
Say what you wish about Ronald Reagan. In terms of actual policy, Reagan was not that far removed from the current administration, to the extent either has any coherent policy besides a kind of reactionary anti-liberalism. But at least his rhetorical instincts were good – even in his twilight years (the above is from his Farewell Address).
[daily log: walking, 6.5km]
Caveat: Inventing Secret Conspiracies
My friend Peter, who once lived here in Korea but is now a graduate student of Korean Studies in the US, dropped by on Friday morning. He travels back to Korea fairly regularly – which is a natural consequence of his major, I suppose. It's nice that he takes the time to visit.
We seem to always find a lot to talk about. He's one of the few people who can talk intelligently about Korean politics and religion, two topics that interest me but for which it's nearly impossible for me to find others who care – there's a certain need for caution when expressing opinions or ideas on these topics with my Korean colleagues, and most "foreigners" (people like me) seem genuinely uninterested in such things.
We spent some time concocting "just so" conspiracy theories (which I think neither of us would actually believe) about the "Korean deep state" vis-a-vis the weird preponderance of bizarre cults in South Korea and the North Korean situation. Or perhaps more accurately, I concocted and he encouraged me? Anyway, it's entertaining.
Here's Peter and I standing in front of the Karma sign in the little lobby, when he dropped by with me there.
Here he is looking meditative over our lunch at the 본죽 [bonjuk = a chain of "juk" (congee Korean savory porridge) joints].
[daily log: walking, 1km]
Caveat: America Jumps the Shark
The phrase “jump the shark” is a contemporary idiom that means that moment when something that was for a long time a serious artistic undertaking is transformed into a kind of parody of itself, as the work’s creators pursue novelty. Originally it was applied to TV shows and other works of a serial or episodic nature – e.g. book series, etc. Nowadays, the idiom seems applicable to anything where an initially earnest project becomes self-parody. I believe the expression arose in a critical discussion of a certain episode of the TV series “Happy Days.”
So this happened to that project called “United States of America.” The USA has jumped the shark. I have evidence.
Exhibit A:
It doesn’t even matter if this is intentional satire or if it “real.” It is out there.
Some points to consider:
- History repeats itself, “the first as tragedy, then as farce.” – Karl Marx.
- At what point does satire, parody, or fiction also become reality (e.g. we have a president who emerged from the realm of “reality TV” – which has always been a type of fiction)?
- Finally – we must never, ever misinterpret stupidity or ignorance as evil.
Slightly related:
Perhaps Obama’s biggest mistake: the blogger “Atrios” at Eschaton blog speculates that Obama should bear some of the blame for the current mess in the White House: “Do not sanction powers you do not want your successor to have.”
[daily log: walking, 8km]
Caveat: Stealth Xenophilia
Hey, foreigners! Want some money?
I had this brainstorm as I was walking to work through the snow, listening to NPR about the newly passed tax bill in the US Congress. So here's a rare 2nd blog post for this day.
I have seen plenty of discussion of the way the new tax "reform" bill is essentially a wealth transfer from the poor and middle class to the wealthy. What seems less commonly commented upon is that it also will be a wealth transfer from US citizens to non-US citizens. This is remarkably dissonant with the Republican platform. I wonder what's going on.
Let's think about it. Who holds US equities? Who are the owners of stock in US companies? Some brief googling found numbers from 2015, that stated that foreign ownership of US equities was 21%. While this may be not exact, it hardly seems that far off, either.
The point would only be – that means 21% of the huge corporate tax break is benefitting wealthy non-Americans. Since the tax cuts are being financed by losses to government spending or by government debt, under best-case scenarios, or, by eventual higher taxes on US workers under darker scenarios, it becomes irrefutable that what the tax bill represents is not just a wealth transfer from the middle class (and poor) to the wealthy, but from Americans to foreigners.
Is that what they want? I can't imagine they're really so ignorant as to not realize that. Who are the international wealthy who own all these equities? Russian oligarchs, Saudi princes, China's party-member nouveau-riche.
Interesting, right?
Further, to the extent the tax bill is being financed by increased government debt, we need to also ask, who holds US government debt? One quick google search showed me that as much as half of US debt is held by foreigners. Now, to the extent that that debt is… debt, it's not really an asset transfer. But debt-holders are acquiring access to streams of future US revenue, in the form of interest payments on the debt (which come from taxes, right?), so again, this boils down to a wealth-transfer from US coffers offshore. Who are these US debt holders? #1: China. #2: Japan. The Cayman Islands is high on the list – which is just a proxy for people who are rich but don't want you to know about it. You get the picture.
They say this is going to help the US economy, right? How? Even if there's trickle-down (which is of course empirically questionable), it seems that a large chunk will be trickling into other countries' economies.
Indeed, to the extent that super-wealthy South Koreans (e.g. the Chaebol families, such as the owners of Samsung or Hyundai) hold US equities or debt (which I'm sure they do), I may benefit more from this tax plan as a resident of South Korea than I do as an American citizen.
And here's the snow I walked through.
