Rhinocrisy

Occupying streets is for losers. Occupying Wal-Mart? Now you’re talking. Or hablando, as the case may be.

If you can’t deal with the lengthy and tough-to-comprehend Spanish chanting, just jump 10 minutes into the video. It gets better and better.

And in case you haven’t been closely tracking Mexican politics, they had an election this summer in which the lefty was narrowly beaten by the rightist in an election marked with many irregularities. Voto x Voto, or Voto por voto, or vote by vote, has become the slogan of the lefty’s demonstrators, who occupied the financial core of the nation’s capital for more than a month in August and September.

According to Chris of Attitude Adjustor, such demonstrations took place at 22 Wal-Marts around Mexico City in one afternoon. I don’t know — I was in Mexico at the time and unsurprisingly heard nothing about it on the national news. Maybe this explains why the security at the Wal-Mart near the Refineria metro station got so nervous when I started shooting photos two days ago. (Yes, there’s a subway station for the refinery. I went there just cause I loved its name. The area was dismal, with WalMart sharing space with a mall called “Suburbia” that reminded me mostly of the movie Suburbia.)

Strange, I have so much to write about Mexico and here I am starting by writing about something I see on the Internet rather than all that I saw and recorded with my eyes, pen, recorder and camera.

I would like to think that the San Francisco Police Department has a new and salutary practice for dealing with terrorists: arrest them and treat them as common criminals. Yesterday, an Afghani man, Omeed Aziz Popal, ran down at least 14 people on the streets of San Francisco, most of them in largely African-American and Jewish neighborhoods. Two of the victims were outside the Jewish Community Center. Neither the cops nor the media brought up his ethnicity or that of the victims’ neighborhoods, though today’s SF Chronicle update does describe the ethnicity of the victims. The only mention of terrorism was apparently on local TV Channel 2, which said the driver claimed to be a terrorist. The police denied his assertion.

This is brilliant. Deny the guy the attention he might have been seeking. And refuse to be terrorized. Hooray SFPD.

The sad part is that this probably isn’t a new modus operandi. If Popal had used a gun or a poison instead of a car, the news worldwide would have covered this carnage and there’s no doubt that the word “terrorism” would have been thrown around. The reason it wasn’t, in this case, was most likely because people are so inured to car violence.

It’s always nice to hear from a security professional who cares about security more than he cares about getting on CNN. Bruce Schneier is such a person. His new column at Wired News is worth a read.

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics.

The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

And we’re doing exactly what the terrorists want….

The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. And our job is to fight those politicians who use fear as an excuse to take away our liberties and promote security theater that wastes money and doesn’t make us any safer.

I’ve been saying for years, the best response to terrorists is to treat them as particularly meddlesome criminals, not as threats to the basic essence of society. That gives them too much credit and our society too little. The only reason bin Laden and friends were able to destroy much of American democracy is because of their allies in high places.

An old girlfriend of mine is interning at a company that is looking for found materials to make their products out of - in this case, durable cloth-like materials.

This morning I removed some old keys from my keychain - some of them I can’t even remember what they’re for. I didn’t know what to do with the old keys afterwards. They can’t really be recut and they’re more or less useless in other contexts. Hallowe’en costume, maybe - the Keymaker from The Matrix Reloaded.

A few weeks back I was reading an article in the Boston Globe about pollution in Morocco resulting from their prolific olive oil industry. Apparently they have tremendous problems from the remainder, the pulp produced in the olive oil production process, being dumped into waterways, where it produces an oily olive-oil slick and all sorts of other nasty problems.

One of my utopian schemes has been as follows: after the Revolution, garbage collectors ought to actually play the role of “sanitation engineer”. That is, after they’ve picked up the trash, they go back and figure out what to do with it - categorize the kinds of trash received, which ones are problematic, which ones can be easily recycled and have amazingly useful second lives. This seems like it would actually be a fantastically entertaining and profitable line of work. I’m not entirely sure why it doesn’t happen already…

Apparently, someone decided to list us as a “Blog of Note” on the blogger.com front page. Undoubtedly this brief window of fame^* will result in a meteoric rise, culminating in my being deluged by attractive women and buried alive in a mountain of money and precious jewels. Please send shovels.

In accordance with this elevation in status, we will immediately begin to implement the points of our ten-point program, which are as follows:

• A federal Civilian Caprice Corps will be created to encourage the growth of spontaneity, eccentricity and public exhibitionism; corps members will patrol the streets undercover and reward exemplary spontaneous behavior with a shower of chocolate coins.
• To Adam Peacock: I forgive you and your gang of cronies for teasing me in the third grade. You can keep your thumbs.
• Our first major economics reform will be the imposition of the tyranny of the International Organisation for Standardization (ISO). This will apply at all levels: hot dog buns and hot dogs must both be packaged in compatible multiples; all laptops, cell phones, electric razors and other portable electronic devices will employ common plug interfaces; cameras, etc., will agree on a single freaking memory card format. To avoid confusion due to the newfound prominence of the ISO, the International Socialist Organisation will be disbanded. Sorry, college Marxists.
• Federal dollars currently spent on nuclear stockpile maintenance will be diverted to a National Boondoggle Fund, which will require the construction of a city-wide jungley-gym, kite the size of a ten-story office building, giant mechanical rhinoceros or other frivolous item in every major metropolis in America. This will be a waste of money, but at least it won’t be wasted on the means to destroy the planet.
• To discourage currency speculation, the dollar will be de-floated and fixed against a standard again. This action will be tied to our conservation program by backing the dollar with infant pandas, ensuring that even in the event of a panda-rush and rapid devaluation, no one will be too upset.
• “Local news” programs that report on the travails of neighborhood pets and how the corner drug store is “fleecing America” will be replaced with international news, so Americans know what countries they are bombing and can identify them on a map.
• All politicians will be shot, or at the very least severely reprimanded.
• Foreign aid will be directed towards actual progressive development goals, as opposed to bolstering our favorite gangsters or promoting trade partnerships with American businesses.
• People will actually be made to learn something about how to build democratic institutions in this so-called democracy, starting with civics classes in elementary schools.
• “Mild” and “Medium” salsas will no longer be sold. If you can’t take the heat, eat some rice cakes instead.

Some of these goals may seem controversial^† However, we are confident that with enough good faith and the judicious application of suitable hallucinogenic compounds, you will come to agree with all of our positions. We’ve already printed up the t-shirts.

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^* I’m told I can expect this to last somewhere around fifteen minutes.

^† We have considered the possible catastrophic effects of panda extinction in a number of detailed scenarios. However, a small intrepid team could be sent back in time to Qin Dynasty-era China to save the species from total annihilation. We’ve already started our calculations for time warp.

Lately I’ve been playing a lot of video games. Actually, I’ve been playing a lot of video game: Halo 2, the $600 million-selling sequel to Halo: Combat Evolved. Halo is a sprawling space epic (or at least it tries to be - the format of first-person shooter is obviously somewhat restrictive). This is my first encounter with Bungie Software, which it seems has a long history of intricate games with detailed backstories and overstuffed plots. I can’t say it’s particularly inventive, since Halo is an agglomeration of hundreds of ideas pilfered from some of science fiction’s best writers.^* But there’s neat work in that assemblage itself, which I think earns it a place in the annals of worthy science fiction.

This leads me to ruminate on the central appeal of all good (non-dystopian) science fiction, which I think boils down to “narrative”. Not the internal narrative of, e.g., the Halo trilogy, which is compelling in its own right, but the implied, grand narrative for human history. The idea that we have some kind of future at all that doesn’t suck. Or rather, that’s still tense and full of conflict and purpose, that offers new vistas and directions.

Hungering for this sort of narrative is arguably a pretty juvenile impulse, one which might prompt more sober individuals to tell you to “grow up”, and possibly to “get a job”. But I’ve never been afraid of juvenile impulses; I’m probably dangerously attracted to them.^† In this instance, I think the impulse has extraordinary merit.

True, we’re hardly in a position to be thinking about such things. It’s absurd to even conceive of historical trajectories for humanity when we’re parching the ground beneath our feet, and the majority of humanity refuses to acknowledge the humanity of the rest of humanity. But you’re never going to cure myopia by staring at the end of your nose. Grand ideas are what’s needed, to draw the gazes of us ants away from the dirt and towards the sky. Where, after all, we want to end up, right? We don’t want to stay in the dirt.

The grander, the better; preferably, they should be so massive they have their own gravity. So that, even while we’re distracted by the idiocy of our lives - our nationalities, our property, our families, our jobs - the individual vectors of our trajectories will tend towards a single direction, and, eventually, hopefully, form a tide.

I realize this is somewhat of a discredited notion, and we’re supposed to be living in the end of history where nothing at all happens except possibly the purchase of a new pair of Manolo Blahniks, but I’m tired of postmodernism shitting on the mere idea of imagination. We NEED to imagine something, even if it’s false, unattainable, or hopelessly stupid. If we don’t imagine something, we’re listless and boring. (You may have observed this in your own life. When you cannot imagine your own future, you become unspeakably dull.)

All of which is to bring me around to my fucking point, which is: where do you think we’re going? Where do you want us to end up?

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^* It piqued my interest at first because it’s set on a ringworld (the eponymous “Halo”), first conceived by Larry Niven in the book of the same name.

^† As Lao Tse said, “I don’t grow up, I throw up. And when I look at you, I shut up.” Insofar as “growing up” means calcification and death, it should be avoided.

By all accounts this is a low point for this country.

Many people in Europe were upset to find out that some European countries may have been hosting secret CIA detention centers, implicitly condoning the legal and probable human rights abuses going on there. Some EU officials even went so far as to threaten sanctions against any countries that had been found to have aided the CIA in such a fashion. (Strangely, no one seems to have suggested sanctions against the United States itself, which, presumably, was the most responsible party.)

As if that weren’t enough, the American president seems to be the worst one ever. He has now admitted to what is surely a flagrant violation of the law, for no other apparent reason than the fact that he could.

Never fear. I have devised a way for all of us to profit from these developments.

In fact, you might say my revolutionary scheme will solve a great number of problems for the entire world, like that whole ‘peak oil’ business we’re always worried about here at Rhinocrisy. Things are going to start looking up for humanity. Way, way up!

Like most good ideas, this one came to me on the pot. I won’t go into too much detail, but suffice it to say that this is a place where a lot of good thinking can be done. (Garbage out, garbage in, as they say.)^*

Although I have not provided any working prototypes of my idea, I think the concept is fairly straightforward and doesn’t require extensive proving. The basic premise is this:

Over the years empirical observation has taught us that outrages committed that offend the memory of the deceased causes them to revolve in their graves. (I’m a bit rusty on my Maxwell’s equations, but the direction of rotation should be given by the right-hand rule, or something.) Since we know there is conservation of angular momentum, this means over the years some of our ancestors will have acquired quite a high rate of revolution. Someone like Mark Twain or Thomas Jefferson is probably running at a good two or three million RPMs.

This is a huge amount of stored rotational energy that needs to be tapped right away. A simple belt and turbine device, as illustrated, will suffice to capture the energy.

Even if it is not very efficient, I think it will be hugely beneficial, since this will basically result in another energy boom comparable to the discovery of petroleum. (Even better, this one produces zero emissions, and it’s renewable, to boot. We’re putting more dead people in the ground every day.) The great thing is, everything you do will outrage SOMEONE. Gays being persecuted? Harvey Milk is incensed! Fags getting hitched? Richard Nixon just sped up by a few hundred clicks.

There’s only a few problems I can see with my scenario. One is that my own country will be at a distinct disadvantage, since we’re in the habit of burning our dead and have no buried ancestors to exhume and strap into a generator device.^†

The other is that people will probably end up trying to increase ancestral outrage in order to increase power production. Funerals will be disrupted by people pissing on the casket during the eulogy. Babies will be given absurd names like “Mushelda” and “Smelly Poopy Pants”. Carrot-Top will be elected Pope and will do prop comedy on the balcony of Saint Peter’s basilica.

In the extreme, we might see the development of “outrage factories”, where electrical workers would have orgies featuring farm animals, copious quantities of Johnson’s baby oil, and the current crop of Mouseketeers, all while reciting the Lord’s prayer backwards. Parents would strive to raise the most ill-mannered, loutish children they possibly could.^‡ In other words, the immoral will become moral, and there will be an almost total breakdown of the social fabric. However, this all becomes worthwhile when you consider that otherwise you wouldn’t be able to fill up your tank of gas in fifteen years.

Finally, it should be made clear that this boom time won’t last forever. We can expect the law of diminishing returns to apply, as existing generations suffer from “outrage fatigue”, and later generations will be forced to do more and more outlandish things to outrage the deceased. It’s possible there will be breakthrough advancements in outrage technology (e.g. mime cloning), but we shouldn’t count on these.

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^* Fortunately I had the good taste and presence of mind not to run out of the bathroom, half-naked, shrieking “Eureka!” when I had my idea, unlike SOME people I could mention.

^† Note that while cremation seems like a bad idea in general, some laid-back people who are not easily outraged (e.g. stoners) are just a waste of valuable graveyard plots and definitely should be incinerated at death. This probably comprises a good portion of my readership, but there’s nothing for it.

^‡ I know it seems like parents are already doing this, but this is apparently an unrelated phenomenon.