Darfur

The time for action in this concern is ...
long since past.

Estimates vary on the number of dead ... perhaps between 400,000 and a million, perhaps even greater than that. All of the rest have been uprooted, relocated, their homes and their lands and their lives destroyed.

So perhaps its time to say what I think really happened, since no one else has said so. A few of the western media stories mentioned the possibility that there may be oil underneath the ground, that the native Nubians living on it did not care to prospect for it, that the Arabs lusting after the land perhaps did, and that the western world thirsty for the commodity might have a bit of responsibility for it. I do not know. For the most part, the western media reports on the slaughter,
the burning of homes and villages and crops, the departure from the area to other places, tend to implicate the Sudan government either by design or by neglect. They tend to portray the situation as perhaps a racial issue, with the native blacks the hapless victims and the Semitic aggressors as the guilty perpetrators. They endlessly debate whether or not the situation may be labeled "genocide" as if that term will make one whit of difference to any of the people affected.

I do know that there is a tree which thrives in the area and grows nowhere else. This tree has been cultivated by the Arabs for many years and they annually tap the sap in order to harvest a product called "Gum Arabic". This substance, a sticky yellowish crystal, is known to be an excellent emulsifier. What an emulsifier does is to allow substances such as oils, such as aromatic hydrocarbons, to be dissolved in water and to remain in suspension throughout the fluid rather than floating to the top or settling to the bottom. Aromatic hydrocarbons include such things as oil of cinnamon, oil of wintergreen, and in fact a thousand other
fragrant oils, many of them considered pleasing to the taste or smell. Chemical laboratories have attempted to create man-made emulsifiers but no product that could be mass-produced has ever resulted. "Gum Arabic" is the best there is.

If this discussion doesn't have your heart racing with excitement yet, then consider one consumer product, that of the carbonated soft drink.
Consider by how many and how often this product is consumed.
Consider the jobs, the factories, warehouses, retail outlets,
vending machines, sales clerks, and everyone involved in
producing and disseminating this product.

The flavors of soft drinks are provided not by natural juices
but rather by the oils that natural fruits contain and which give
them their distinctive flavors. the oils can be successfully and
cheaply manufactured artificially. However, they will not mix
with water or soda-water. an emulsifier is required to
get them to mix and stay mixed. And that means: gum arabic.

The people who were living peacefully in Darfur, minding their own business, were growing subsistence crops and raising animals on the land. The people who have been taking the land from them have been cultivating gum arabic for generations and selling it for cash.

If anyone had really wanted for the violence to end, they needed for citizens of the "civilized" world to stop drinking any soft drinks. That would have done it. Nothing else would have.

But its always so much easier to point the finger of blame
on someone else than it is to change one's own behavior, isn't it?

In-security

I have just completed my annual computer scan for viruses, trojans, worms, botnets, and other malware.

I deleted McAFffee from my system over a year ago. The yearly subscription fee was not that bad, though it did me no good. But I had come to recognize that the software, running constantly, was using over 60% of my machine's resources. It occurred to me that the "cure" had most probably reached and exceeded the damage of the threat. I was also aware that my operating system was programmed to harass everyone who does not have virus protection software running. Just as everyone is almost forced to lock their car doors nowadays when they leave their car, in the same way everyone is almost forced to buy and run virus protection software, which means that the real threats are finding their way in through some different corridor.

But my machine had been running a tad slowly lately. Sure enough, the up-to-date free scan turned up 5 instances of commercially-installed advertising spyware and over a hundred tracking cookies. Note that every single one of these uninvited intruders came into my machine from popular commercial sites, most owned and operated by large international corporations. After a whole year of constant surfing and use, my computer had not picked up one instance of robot use, of hackers' viruses or trojans, but it had picked up enough unwanted garbage from "legitimate" sites to cripple the machine. I was not surprised.

Is it just possible that our culture is overdoing this "security" bit, just a little? Do we have enough ambulances and fire engines and police and spy cameras and spy satellites and wiretapping and cell-phone geo-tracking and recorded financial transactions? Maybe enough to cripple the few people left who are actually trying to do creative, productive, useful work for other people?
Enough SWAT teams breaking down the doors of innocent families, shooting their dogs and forever altering their lives?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/01/AR2009020101031.html

Do we have enough Medivac helicopters in the sky, running our health insurance premiums to the sky, crashing into each other and killing people?

http://wjz.com/local/medevac.helicopter.chopper.2.827484.html

Do we have enough people getting sick from flu shots? (I know the medical community vehemently denies that this is even possible. Is there any unbiased research done to determine incidence of influenza with and without the shots? I'd like to see it.)

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20081007144810AAqkk6u

I am not rabid about this. After all, I am the man who wrote the very first computer virus and then sent the concept to Rumania (maybe I will tell you all that story another time). I usually lock my house doors and I check my accounts frequently for transactions I did not initiate. I don't advocate abolishing police. The things I do to protect myself against the very rich, the large orporations, lawyers, doctors, politicians, religious zealots, and so forth, I won't detail for you but they take up a miserable amount of time and energy. But is it just possible that we have overdone it a little bit? Is it also possible that we habitually look in the wrong direction?

Negative Numbers

Who out there can provide evidence to the contrary? I'd really like to see it.

My darling wife had reason to drop out of school after the third grade.
But since immigrating to the USA she's been demonstrating outstanding
determination and motivation to learn spoken English, writing, and arithmetic.
She is enrolled in our county adult education program receiving GED instruction. She is mastering fractions, decimals, word problems, our crazy system of weights
and measures, and simple geometry.

In helping her with her homework, I have reluctantly and gradually come to
the appalling conclusion that the public schools in this country no longer
teach numbers below zero, what they are and how to manipulate them. None
of the textbooks she has worked from have any mention of them.

I have perhaps jumped to the conclusion that the omission is not
accidental or isolated, but rather part of a systematic trend in my culture.
Mention has been made that the past president strongly preferred to be
surrounded with "yes" men while anyone in his administration who offered
alternative viewpoints came to depart prematurely. Mention has been made
of the strong bias of investment advisors towards the "buy" grade for
stocks while too-sparsely using "sell". When the music single "Don't
Worry. Be Happy" topped the charts I took that as satire but I have since
heard numbers of individuals enthusiastically recommend such a philosophy
and approach to life.

So now, here I am, an investor in the stock market, preparing my annual
tax forms and grumbling about the capital gains taxes that I am going to
have to pay, but realizing that not one investor out of a thousand is in
this boat with me. Apparently, investors were not taught negative numbers
in school. Apparently they were not aware that stock prices sometimes go down.
And they were not aware of the implications for the macro economy that the
housing bubble was setting up.

Three years ago I had the honor to speak with Michael Jones, founder and
CEO of KeyHole, then Google VP in charge of Google Earth when the search engine
giant bought it. One of my hobbies is automated nautical cartography. I
spoke to him admiring the wonderful tool his company has created. I respect
the man immensely, I have never heard any contemporary executive with
equivalent power and authority to speak so passionately and compassionately,
most especially for the highly-persecuted original settlers of the land of
Canaan, which usurpers continue to slaughter in the name of God.

I digress. I hope you all have had the opportunities to enjoy, and or
put to use, the Google Earth tools. Especially, I hope you have been able to
virtually "fly around" in their 3-D space. If you have, then perhaps you
have noticed how between 2/3 and 3/4 of the surface they represent has
an elevation of "0". Since I work with bathymetry data this is a concern.
The sea floor cannot be shown with their tools. A year later I raised the
issue again with Bent Hagemark, GE CTO. But yesterday, with great fanfare,
Google released a new version of the tool which includes "Google Oceans".
they have added nice relief shading showing major ocean bottom features.
But the elevation still reads "0" everywhere. The 3-D software still
doesn't work, as it does so well on most land features (excluding places
like Death Valley, which is also portrayed as "0").

But maybe their programmers were never taught negative numbers.
Maybe they really don't know how to instruct a computer how to deal
with them.

Please tell me that I am wrong.

Or, raise your voice in protest. Is it so difficult for people
to understand that denying negative information does not make it go away,
but it sure does make it more difficult to talk about and work with others
on solutions?

#2 tries harder

Marketocracy is a website set up for the purpose of
identifying the top amateur stock pickers and traders in the country
and making their picks and insights available for professionals.
Anyone can join, at the outset you will be alloted $1 M in virtual money,
which you can use to buy and sell stocks.
Results are tabulated with maybe an hour's delay over real-time prices.
In about ten years they have attracted some 80,000 members.
Every quarter the site publishes rankings of its members.

The results for the past quarter, ending Dec. 31, 2008, were posted today.
I made #2.

Here's a cut-and-paste from their site of my full results since I joined:
Oct 17, 2008; Nov 14, 2008;


ALL RANKINGS FOR YOUR FUND
Date 1 Month 3 Months 6 Months 1 Year 2 Year 3 Year 4 Year
Sep 30, 2005 64.7% 88.7% Q:
Dec 31, 2005 88.9% 67.6% 89.6% Q:
Mar 31, 2006 52.4% 75.1% Q: 79.9% Q:
Jun 30, 2006 52.6% 94.0% Q: 92.6% Q: 94.8% Q:
Sep 29, 2006 2.3% 60.5% 92.2% Q: 94.9% Q:
Dec 29, 2006 56.5% 96.6% Q: 96.2% Q: 98.4% Q:
Mar 30, 2007 65.6% 40.0% 89.8% Q: 97.2% Q:
Jun 29, 2007 62.1% 88.1% Q: 77.4% Q: 95.7% Q: 98.0% Q:
Sep 28, 2007 8.7% 48.0% 75.9% Q: 87.4% Q: 95.6% Q:
Dec 31, 2007 93.6% 96.5% Q: 88.4% Q: 88.9% Q: 97.8% Q:
Mar 31, 2008 97.5% 99.3% Q: #71 T: 99.1% Q: #56 T:
Jun 30, 2008 97.2% 94.5% Q: 99.2% Q: 99.0% Q: #87 T: #93 T:
Sep 30, 2008 97.4% 40.6% 94.5% Q: #31 T: #16 T: #10 T:
Dec 31, 2008 40.7% #54 T: 98.2% Q: #15 T: #7 T: #2 T:


Lemme see if I can copy in my chart:



I suppose this is a skill that I could market.
I just seem to be too shy about it, not to mention
that the kinds of people most likely to want to avail themselves of my skills
are not the kinds of people that I most commonly gravitate towards.

Mainly its just something for me to enjoy about myself, quietly.

New Year Predictions

I wrote this comment to a Washington Post opinion piece:

It would be typical of americans to think that pop culture and cheap art hold any insights into the future.
Because I have been right, time and time and time again, when nearly everyone else has been wrong, I offer my opinions.

First of all, whether because of mankind's waste or just because of natural cycles, the next ice age is wgathering strength. Within the next generation, large areas of the United States and Northern Europe will become uninhabitable, while the Sahara and the Middle East will become green and fertile again. This event alone would cause major shifts in power balances in world politics. But there's more:

The past year's financial crisis and credit crunch were only the opening salvo of economic distress for the Caucasians in control. The debt of the United States has grown beyond imagining. It deserves junk status, it deserves default, and in time people will figure that out. The United States has lost super-power status and will no longer be a major factor in world events.

Also, peak oil is not a theory, it is a reality -- the peak production occurred in 2005. The decline is inevitable and will happen faster than anyone expects. Also, politicians and science fiction writers notwithstanding, there is no other energy source on the planet to replace it. None. For that reason, all technology and civilization have begun an inevitable, permanent decline.

The good news is that there is hope. High technology led to arrogance and greed, to genocide and willful abuse of simple human beings, unprecedented in history, and will never happen again. Simple lives, subsistence living, and taking care of each other whenever possible, will gradually come into preeminence as all this bovine feces falls away. Those of us who survive will be happy.

Inside Out

The other evening I was sitting with an Ethiopian friend enjoying
a meal of injera and tibs and some quiet conversation. The tv was
tuned to some evangelistic channel.

At other times, I had told her that the world is inside out from
the way that most people see it most of the time. That most people
are wrong about most things, most of the time, although there are
some people who are wrong about everything all of the time.

An infomercial came on. They showed african children, their limbs
horribly thin, their bellies distended, flies busy around their faces,
and eyes full of sadness, fear and hunger. They showed one or two
white people, handsome, strong, healthy; giving food and administering
to the children. They asked for the viewers to send money.

I asked her what she thought. She shrugged and said "The poor
will always be with us."

I said to her, "But you know, these are the only images that
most of my people ever see of Africa. This is what we think of
when anyone mentions the continent. We are taught this way to
believe that we are strong, healthy, and happy while all of the
Africans are desperate, unhappy, dying, and in need of our help
and support. This is such an insidious message. We are exhorted
to send money but we also learn that we never, never want to go
there. We send money to make us feel good and powerful. Almost
all of the money received stays in the hands of white people, the
rich evangelists and charity organizations with their fine offices,
the rich agribusinesses, the transport organizations, and all that
infrastructure. Only a tiny amount actually becomes food and help
for these children. And even when they receive help, they still
grow up to face an environment with no jobs, no land to work,
but only more needs."

"In this way, my people receive a message of their superiority.
They receive reassurance that the way they live is the best. They
learn control and arrogance. But you and I, we have been there,
we know differently. The people of Africa, by and large, know an
astounding beauty, happiness and joy, companionship, sharing,
friendships which is utterly beyond the knowledge and experience
of my people. In reality, my people have an appalling emptiness
in their lives, they dare not reach out to talk or to share anything
with strangers or even acquaintances, but instead live in isolated
cocoons, unable to taste any but the slightest little bit of
spiritual food."

I saw a light go on in her eyes. Suddenly she saw, she
understood, how most of us see things and why we act the ways we
do, towards her and towards her country and her people. A light
went on which will never be extinguished.


It was Jesus' message as well, over and over, such as his
statements at the beginning of the sermon on the mount, about the
poor inheriting the earth while the rich are so poor in spirit.
Those statements are so familiar to so many people, but they read
and write and say and sing them without any understanding.

You have to go there.

Pain Medication

Few people can have even a casual conversation with me without
catching a glimpse of gold. In fact, there are twelve gold crowns
in the back of my mouth. They may not, however, realize that all,
all, of the teeth in front are also crowns, but of the porcelain
variety. Throw in a handful of root canals and several separate
extractions, and you may admit that I could be an authority on
this subject.

Reclined in the chair, my mouth fully occupied by foreign
tenants, I could be forgiven for trying to picture the doctors
during the US Civil War using wood saws to remove injured
soldiers' limbs before (or after!) gangrene. Imagining such
scenes I could easily suspect that the most difficult aspect
of such tasks was to restrain, and listen to, the patients.

In such a situation, one observes. I observed that if I
had not received sufficient Novocaine, that my body makes a
very timely reaction to steel drills amongst certain nerve
cells. I further reserved that such reactions would tend to
upset the individual working away in there almost as much or
maybe even more than myself, to bring out another hypodermic
with alacrity. And I further observed, that after sufficient
Novocaine had been duly administered and received, that those
reactions came to an end, but, my body still concentrated on
sending messages to my brain that somehow, somewhere, I was
under severe attack, that there was something very, very wrong
going on. Having this experience over and over, I came to
understand that the novocaine really did not lessen my
discomfort at all, or very little, that its main effect was to
reduce my ability and urge to react to it and thus, the anxiety
and distractions for the person peroforming the procedures.

From there, it was a simple exercise to extrapolate. One
observes how very often and for such a variety of circumstances
that doctors and other health practitioners push pain
medications, from aspirin to serious narcotic. They insist,
almost demand, that people take them.

The worst problem with that scenario is that the medical
community has thoroughly conned the consumers into PAYING for
all these drugs when it is the doctors who benefit the most.
I'm sure that most of our community actually believes that
they need these drugs and that they help them. Of course,
of almost as much concern is the destruction and havoc that
addictions can have on peoples' lives and the phantom pains
and distractions of withdrawal.

I know, this is just one more example of the deceptions,
lies, and con games that the large corporations and the very
rich have gradually, insidiously, foisted upon the american
people, and that they have allowed them to so do.

Its almost enough to make me want to SCREAM!!!!!