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Wanted: Another Renaissance.

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It’s hard not to feel at least a little dismayed every day these days. It seems that the news is full of headlines that twist knives of fear in our fragile human hearts. We’re largely kept pretty busy simply maintaining our own lives.

Food and shelter are as needed now as they were needed when our ancestors first slithered from the primordial ooze. Our bodies did not evolve to stand our environment, instead we wore the skins of those that had. We did not evolve to consume abundant vegetation, so we ate those that do, yet our bodies did not evolve to become predators.

In fact, compared to most animals on the planet, our bodies aren’t that evolved to suit the planet at all – we’ve been ‘cheating’ with technology, appropriating as much as we can from others on our planet. Our technology has evolved faster than we have, our impact on the planet has evolved more than we have, and our technology is not really being used to reduce that impact.

We communicated, we coordinated, and we took on greater tasks. Oral cultures formed and passed down information from generation to generation, but there were flaws with this sometimes as we played the telephone game (or Chinese Whispers) across time. Contexts changed. We figured out how to write things down – to literally set things in stone. From there we found more and more portable ways to write.

Imagine the announcements of tech companies back then: “New stone allows more words on it for the weight and the size! Less oxen needed to pull! They will pay for themselves!” and later, “Use Papyrus! Have a stone-free library!”

So at first only those who were literate were allowed to participate in writing, but more and more people became literate despite those who once controlled written language. In a few thousand years, we managed to spread literacy pretty well across humanity, and the cacophony of it began to build on the Internet.

And yet we ourselves still haven’t really evolved that much. We’re basically still living in caves, though our cave technology has increased to a level where we have portable caves and caves we stack on top of each other to great heights.

We’re still basically pretty much the same with more of us, and our technology almost provides enough for everyone, maybe, but our great civilization on the planet is hardly homogeneous in that regard. Most people can point to a place where people have less or more than themselves, and the theory of hard work allowing people to progress seems flawed.

Now that so many people can write, they get on social media and jibber-jabber about the things that they like, most of it just being sending packets of information around through links – some not reading what they pass along because it has a catchy headline that meets their confirmation bias. Others have learned how to keep people talking about things, or to start people talking about things, and despite having the capacity to think for themselves, they only talk about what they’re manipulated into talking about.

Our feeds fill with things that we fear. Election years have become increasingly about fear rather than hope – any hope is based on fear, and people just twist in place, paralyzed by a lack of options. The idea that we could, for example, have women control their bodies and not fund a foreign government’s version of Manifest Destiny. We could have a better economy and better healthcare that isn’t wrapped in a sinkhole of people making bets on our health and forcing us to do the same – insurance companies. We could do a lot of things, if people simply trod their own minds more thoughtfully.

We’re insanely busy getting the latest technology because… well, technology is what we have to evolve since we haven’t. Tech companies are the new politicians, making campaign promises with each new release. It can’t be ‘new and improved‘ – pick one; you can only improve on the old.

They promise us more productivity, implying that we’ll have more time to ourselves in our caves drawing on the walls when we spend more and more time being productive for someone else. We’re told this is good, and some of us believe it, and some of us tire of the bullshit we believed for so long.

We could use another renaissance, if only so that people begin thinking for themselves in a time when AI promises to do their writing – and their thinking.

The “That’s Not It” Sea Story.

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This is one of my favorite sea stories.

There was this sailor who walked around on the deck of a ship, picking up any piece of paper he found and looking at it seriously for a moment. He would then toss it, saying barely audibly, “That’s not it.”

He was counseled about it by his Chief, and when the Chief handed him the paperwork to sign for the counseling, he looked at the paper a moment and said, “that’s not it.” and threw it to the deck.

Flustered, the Chief sent the sailor to the sick bay to see the Doc, and the Doc checks him out. He pulls out the Rorscharch test cards to see what the young sailor had to say he saw, and every card just caused the young sailor to shake his head and say, “That’s not it.”

The Doc talked to the Captain, and the Captain decided to have him go to see Psych when they got back to shore, confining the sailor to quarters for the interim. Months later, the same thing played out on shore at Psych. “That’s not it.”, over and over again.

Finally the Navy decided to discharge him, so he went to the Personnel Department where they had his discharge papers. The Yeoman pushed them across the desk, telling the sailor to read and sign.

The sailor diligently read the pages, nodded, and said, “That’s it!”.

He whipped out a pen and signed the paperwork.

He was stoic, and held out for what he wanted – and got it.

The Sperm Whale Throat Sea Story.

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As a young non-commissioned officer, this was one of my favorites not because it pulled rank, but because it pointed out accepting reality is necessary. A Master Chief told me this and it stuck – I was trying to buck the system somehow, as if the system would suddenly change because of my wishes. I was, of course, wrong, but that’s part of being a young NCO.

He looked at me, deadpan, after a moment of silence, and asked me, “Do you know what the size of a sperm whale’s throat is?”.

I, of course, didn’t know.

He held up his hands palm outward, his thumbs and forefingers from each hand touching, and pushed them out toward me. “This big. Do you know why?”

“No Masterchief”

He pushed his hands out at me with every word, and said slowly and firmly, “Because that’s the way it is.”

And verily, that was the way it was. Petty Officer Rampersad wasn’t going to change it by himself. Better to accept it and move on.

There’s some wiggle room here. We should question things at times, buts sometimes we don’t have the luxury of time for navel-gazing, particularly in the military, so sometimes you just accept that things are the way they are and move on. If it’s not a hill you want to die on, don’t.

Navy Wisdom: The Sea Story.

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I find myself from time to time thinking about how certain Sea Stories I heard in the Navy apply to other things, and so as I think of them I’m writing them down. The other branches of the U.S. Military likely have their own versions, if not the same in some cases.

Most sea stories you here are along the lines of the old sea monster stories that sailors told each other to whittle away time on long voyages. Some were complete bullshit, and were meant to entertain. Some had an almost parable quality to them, and those are the ones I’ll write to link back to.

In the parlance of my time in the Navy, a sea story was supposed to start with, “This one’s a no shitter!”, as in it really happened, but that wasn’t necessarily true. From things that happened on shore, and for me, things that you saw and dealt with as a Hospital Corpsman – good stories got embellished and improved with the telling, and there is no shortage of people who want to tell yarns – but few who can do it right.

You can tell the ones who do it right because everyone stops and listens.

A Battle of Perspectives.

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I had just returned to Florida from a 30 day ‘vacation’ in Trinidad and Tobago, and I was invited to have dinner with some friends who both worked where I had in different departments. It was before the turn of the millennium, my friend was in the midst of domestication, and I had some pepper sauce I had made while down there from bird peppers picked in the yard.

As usual, it was a good dinner, and as I recall I had also brought some rum from Trinidad – I never really enjoyed rum, but it was something to bring from my recent trip and there were no two better people to have it at the time. After dinner, we sat at the pool overlooking the pond, and somehow the whole Middle East came up. Everyone liked talking to me about the Middle East for some reason; I had no roots there, I only had access to the information everyone else had access to. Maybe it was because I was a veteran. Maybe it was because of a project I had completed for Israel when I worked where they did. Maybe it was because I was brown. Maybe it was because I grew up partly outside of the United States.

I dreaded these conversations because I grew up around Muslims in Trinidad and Tobago, and I had grown up around Jews in Ohio. In neither place did either group speak ill of the other at the time. They were busy being who they were, living their lives.

She brings up Israel, and I had only recently found out she was Jewish. She talked about how terrible it was that her people were being attacked all the time in Israel, and I agreed – civilians being attacked is never a good thing, and at the time random rockets had been tossed at Israel from some group or the other that were Palestinian, and she went on about how terrible these Palestinians were. My knowledge of the area being less than it is now, I did know that the Palestinians she was talking about were living in occupied territories, not unlike the ‘Reservations’ in the United States for Native Americans.

Being me – I have an unfortunate tendency to be me – I mentioned that it was terrible, that it wasn’t good of them to be launching rockets at civilian targets. It was a problem, there was no doubt about it, but then I asked, “Well, what do they want?”

She looked at me, having been caught mid-rant, as if I had grown another head. I expanded. “Well, if they’re attacking people, they want something. People don’t go around just launching missiles without a reason”. She stared at me a moment, and she said they wanted to kill Jews. That was pretty obvious, so I asked, “Well, why do they want to kill Jews?” and suddenly I was painfully lectured through World War II history, and the Holocaust – which did happen, by the way, and it’s shameful that I have to write that.

After she wound down, having heard her out, I said, “It seems weird that people who have so much in common would be so violent with each other.” She asked what I meant, and I said, “Well, kosher and halal are pretty much the same idea, the same concept, as an example.” She told me they were not the same thing, but a rabbi1 and I had eaten in a Middle Eastern place in New York City years before, and he simply asked if the meat was halal and was fine with that.

She had become very upset. She’d brought it up, I honestly didn’t want to talk about it anyway, so I tried to change the topic but she wouldn’t let it go. They hated her people. It was deeply personal for her, and I felt bad because she was a friend and I didn’t want her to be upset. The whole time, her husband, my other friend was quiet, but that was his way.

These people, she told me, were animals.

I’ve never liked when people do that, so I said that they weren’t animals, and that there had to be some reasoning – however flawed it might be – that had them upset enough to launch missiles randomly into a human populace.

She told me that I didn’t know what I was talking about, that I didn’t know the history, and got up to go inside – but before she did, I said, “You’re right. I don’t know what I’m talking about. I don’t know the history of Israel.” In a moment, she was smiling again.

She was absolutely correct. I had no idea of the history. So she sat down and told me the history, late into the night, and I listened and asked questions carefully.

I got a big hug before I left and all was well.

The More Palestinian Perspective.

Over the years since then, I’ve encountered more Muslims than Jews that talked about this issue, and they gave me their perspectives, which were sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians. So I head that side as well, though I never heard them refer to Jews as animals2. Of course, none of them were Palestinians, and the only anchoring point they had with the Palestinians was a common religion.

Yet no one really helped the Palestinians in meaningful ways. The surrounding dictatorships only seem to use it to political ends, not to end the politics of it.

What I Learned.

The tensions have been built up over the decades – 7 of them – and nothing has been sorted out. An occupied people would of course have some extremists that want to fight back. Until recently, Palestinians weren’t really given voice in the public forum. How could that happen? Everything that came out of the area, everything that went into the area, passed through Israel’s hands. Yet not all Palestinians have resorted to violence. Hamas came into power, but it’s not really a democracy in the occupied territories, and how could there be a democracy there within what is cast as the Middle East’s only democracy?

And when you live in Israel, you don’t want exploding things hitting civilians either. So you get angry Israelis when that happens.

So there’s a lot of angry people doing angry things, but some angry people are better armed, and have mandatory military service that seems mainly to be about keeping the Palestinians in the occupied territories while settlers move in.

The situation is out of control, clearly. The Balfour declaration was born of war, quickly following the declaration of war by the British Empire on the Ottoman Empire, garnering support of Jewish people for the war against the Ottoman Empire. The whole existence of Israel seems to have been built on war, and it battles for existence are extraordinary.

Yet what we’re seeing today is not a part of history, it’s a culmination of history, and while history was being studied, the world has changed. We’re connected now to see things we could not see before, we’re more aware of human rights, and empires are waning. We should not be killing civilians anymore, unlike what Putin’s Russia has been doing in Ukraine. We say we hold ourselves to a higher standard.

It’s time for the situation of Palestinians and Israelis to be resolved, once and for all, not as a final solution, but as a lasting solution.

But it’s not being resolved as the world watches the same mistakes being made again. I cringe at what Israel has been doing, just as I cringed at the actions of Hamas on October 7th, but disproportionately.

I hope in 10 years this is all a bad bit of history, but from what I’m seeing, it could either be remembered as a terrible part of this century or just more of the same. The world wants it to end.

  1. I’d fixed his laptop that he was returning to a store while he was in line ahead of me, and only later found out he was a rabbi. We became friends, though I lost track of him in his travels and mine. I hope he’s well. ↩︎
  2. I had an Uncle who was Hindu that called the Palestinians animals, and was a big Netanyahu supporter in the 90s. ↩︎

Danger Polls.

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The world is a strange place. Something captured my imagination. Being a pollster in Gaza and the West Bank. This, apparently, is a real thing.

I found out this morning that people did polls in Gaza and the West Bank after October 7th, when Israel started Israeling after Hamas Hamassed1.

There were pollsters running around after October 7th2 in Gaza and the West Bank (the West Bank has it’s own troubles). That seems a very brave thing to do, wandering around while things are exploding and asking people their opinions.

Being a pollster there sounds like a pretty exciting job in that area – a job for young people, hopefully with health benefits. Dental would be good too, though it seems that hospitals are at a premium at this time. Do you get to march in front of the line and say, “I’m a pollster, I have a headache” in front of the line of people with missing limbs? I doubt it. Health insurance rates must be high, too.

What do you do when you’re not polling? What do you do if you’re wounded? Do you find a pigeon, scribble a note with the appropriate findings and say defiantly with your last breath, “The poll must be completed!”

Gaza and the West Bank have been very scary places for some time. This does not mean that random exploding things falling on parts of Israel makes for Israel to be ‘safe’, but it’s more reasonably safe than the occupied territories because there, you get both the IDF and Hamas 24/7. No election since 2007. Only the people who shouldn’t have guns have them.

How would it be to be born in an occupied territory? To have no rights that can’t be taken away? To see in the distance, above a wall, a modern nation funded by another modern nation? I *might* think that it wasn’t fair. Maybe a friend gets killed by that modern nation’s people. Maybe a family. Maybe I feel injustice with no outlet, no real representation. Or maybe I just don’t care, wandering around and eeking out a living, but it seems that I would care. Would you? I’d probably feel a little angry, honestly.

I might kick a can really hard, then get detained for littering. Things probably would not go well for me, for I have been spoiled by a better illusion of freedom.

I joke a bit in this post, but that belies what I’m trying to do: Add context to a world that screams should the wi-fi get sketchy. We are all just staring out of our caves through our flat screens, not understanding the starvation being twistedly enforced in unforgettable ways, ways that the world has now seen in imagery that cannot be forgotten.

It seems that during all of this, the somewhat simple task of simply doing a poll – something that we take for granted in much of the world – is so very different there, in a war zone, but there are people there doing it because they clearly think it’s very important, more important than the two lizard argument being presented to US voters.

Anyway, if someone applies for a position at your company who has been a pollster in a war zone, I’d say that you’d want to hire them. Actually, anyone who has found a way to survive there should be advanced to the top of the stack of those applications just based on resilience.

  1. We have two new terms to use. I remember when going postal was new, and we humans have made it so we have new ways to express groups of individuals going postal in the same direction. We need a word that combines the two, the dance of complex history. Until then, we’re stuck with the cumbersome phrase, “Gaza War”. ↩︎
  2. The poll can be found here, on the Palestinian Center for Policy and Research website. ↩︎

How To Keep Bored People Entertained In The Future.

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Sometime in the future, assuming humanity survives despite itself, there will be archaeological digs that will try to understand we, the predecessors to whatever comes next.

They’re going to want to know how we lived, what we did – really boring stuff for us. It’s not exciting at all or you wouldn’t be reading this.

So, you know that drawer where you have all that stuff you cannot get yourself to throw away? Take that drawer and empty it out on a work table. Don’t use the good table. It is necessary to use the bad table, the one that has an awkward tilt and is scratched up so that your significant other won’t be upset.

Stare at the stuff for a while. Soak in all the junk, the USB cables, the charging cables, etc. Maybe break some of the stuff open just to see what’s inside. Connect what you can connect with glue, screws, nuts and bolts – whatever. Make a doohickey, or a whizbang, or something like them. It should have absolutely no purpose, but it should look purposeful. It’s a good idea to make sure it won’t hurt the environment.

This can take some time, so make sure you stop for meals, sleep, etc.

Once you’re happy with your object, type up some instructions on how to use your device. Be imaginative. For example:

SuperWhamoDyne Internet Oscillator (SIO) Instructions:

Make sure it is a sunny day, and place outside until the lights come on. The SIO will create an Internet connection to the Muskovite Satellites in orbit and begin the oscillation that will cause transmogrification of information so it is more consumable.

It is advised that you and your computing device are at least 100 meters away when operating it, as this device sometimes attracts lightning.

SuperWhamoDyne! The Future Was Misplaced!

It’s suggested that you use automatic translation to some language that has fallen out of popular use, then laminate it.

Now that you have your object and the instructions, and cleaned out that drawer, the next step is to take it somewhere remote – away from people, and simply leave the object there with the instructions. Abandoned houses or shacks make ideal places.

The future was misplaced – like this object that has been confounding people.

N.R.A. Thinks Middle East Needs Second Amendment Rights.

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The Nationally Ruffled Association’s1 (NRA) spokesperson, Mr. Rooster McGraw the 3rd (he was emphatic about that), has broken their silence on the war in Gaza and put out a press release, tapped out on paper.

He also wants to be certain that the Nationally Ruffled Association is not associated with the National Rifle Association, though he is surprised that they haven’t put out anything like their release.

The release cites the United States Second Amendment (the right to bear arms).

The overly verbose release states that had the Palestinians had the Right to Bear Arms, they could have overthrown the tyranny of Hamas, but the tyranny of the checkpoints has not permitted arms to do so, so we got some clarification from Mr. Rooster McGraw.

“It’s all a cluckup, you know? Had those Palestinians been able to rise up against the tyranny of Hamas, the whole October 7th thing wouldn’t have happened. Instead, we have what we have here. A failure to bear arms.”

When questioned more about this, he says, “We learned a lot from the National Rifle Association, which is how we got rid of those foxes”, he says as he points at his fox skin hat, “people should have the right to defend themselves. You critters have arms. We only have these wings and our feet, so we’re out at the range pretty often practicing at night. ‘Cause that’s when foxes come, ya know?”

When we pointed out that a lot of civilians have been killed or injured, his response was, “Well, that’s just a cluckup. I don’t know who the cluck decided that only the terrorists should have weapons. We need less gun control in the Middle East! We don’t need no gun laws!”

We tried to ask more questions related to Israel and settlers, but Mr. Rooster McGraw simply looked down, scratched the dirt, and said, “Getting dark soon, gotta go to the range. Freedom and Liberty need to be defended! Sell them all guns, that’s what I say! And tell the National Rifle Association to rename themselves if they ain’t gonna export the Second Amendment!”

In a cloud of dust, he flapped off.2

  1. It’s imaginary, for those of you who need that spelled out. ↩︎
  2. In case you missed the first footnote, or are particularly dense, this is satire based on the fact that the Palestinian civilians cannot defend themself against Hamas or the IDF, and haven’t been able to for decades. You can’t overthrow tyranny with rocks. ↩︎

Quotes Are Not What You Want Them To Be…

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I like looking into the background of quotes that I come across – I source just about everything I write, with the exception of what is imagination or opinion. In doing so this morning, I was thinking of using a quote by Musashi, and I thought to use:

“Truth is not what you want it to be, it is what it is, and must bend to it’s power or live a lie”.

I went to my copy of the Book of Five Rings, which is pretty much where all legitimate Musashi quotes come from. That quote wasn’t there. I check Project Gutenberg for the book, since they would likely have an older copy, but strangely they do not have that book – which should be in the public domain by now! – at all1.

No one who uses the quote cites a source. No one.

It seems that this was something added by D.E. Tarver in his rendition of Musashi’s “Book of Five Rings”- but apparently it’s not in the original Japanese. No texts by Musashi seem to have this quotation.

This does not mean it doesn’t express some of his teachings, such as in the Dokkodo – accepting things the way they are, though extrapolating to living a lie does not seem to be something he actually did.

The fact that this quote circulates so much is pretty much the exact opposite of what his teaching would be.

これは翻訳者によって追加されたようです。(Kore wa hon’yaku-sha ni yotte tsuika sa reta yōdesu.)

  1. Someone should get on that. I have a translation that isn’t in the public domain, sadly. ↩︎

A Moment Between Worlds.

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I have been living in two very different worlds lately.

The world I share with you has been full of violence, protest, nonsensical conflations and corporations taking advantage of individuals. It’s dystopian, and the only real commodity worth trading in a species that likes trading everything else is hope. Yet hope is often weaponized as a way to get the mob to do as others wish. I’ve lived long enough to see the fruition of false promises, and I’ve lived short enough to still be seduced by hope sometimes.

The world that I will share with you when I get done with it views our humble little blue dot from a distance, through many different lenses. It’s been hard to get there over the past week, but when I get there I stay longer. Everything is better there, because everything is different there. In writing this fiction, this world that I enjoy creating and manipulating, maybe it will allow the readers respite from the world we share. It’s certainly big enough for everyone, I made sure of that.

Our universe is really, really big and we forget that too often, that we actually do have larger issues to contend with as a species than who called who what name, what boundaries dead people set on flat maps of a round world, and why someone farting in court should be newsworthy. From that other world, we’re all raving lunatics, watching people who get dressed up to go to events escaping reality in their own way and then imposing it upon them and then complaining that they did go and didn’t say things we agree with.

I simply don’t understand why people gave them the platform in the first place, but I expect it’s about the same escapism, living vicariously through people we put on pedestals. Fortunately, just about all the people I have on pedestals are dead and every year the pedestals have gotten shorter. Manipulating them to do what we want seems more democratic than the insults to democracy that we call democracy in all these countries. By all means, take your attention away from them – but don’t blame them for the attention you gave them in the first place. Maybe you grew a little and their pedestals have simply become shorter. That’s not their fault. You’ve simply outgrown them – maybe – because if the intent is to hurt them, you still have them on your mind.

From a distance, we all seem silly. Even me.

Between A Rock…

Yesterday I found a nice rock. I’m not kidding. I liked the rock. In front of people who respect me, I picked up the rock because I had plans for the rock. A rock. It’s silly. I saw some potential in it, the handful of quartz with sedimentary sandstone in parts of it.

I soaked it in water overnight after teasing some of the sediment out with a bit of wire. People are generating crappy content all this time with generative AIs, and here I was working on a rock. I went to the hardware store and bought small diamond files and tools for scraping out the sandstone from the rock, giving me holes that I will someday run roots from a bonsai through. I saw that in the rock yesterday before I picked it up, and this morning I banged that rock against another rock to break it along the sandstone fault lines, so that the rock will fit in one of the bonsai pots.

It certainly beat looking at the news. The news is definitely a hard place right now, and there’s not much I can do where I can see a tangible difference. Thus, it seems, I went back to humanity’s roots and was banging rocks together.

That’s a little insane. I do hope the nebari of the tree I pick will work with this stone. It will be the hard place from which the tree seems to grow. Like me. Like you. Like everything else on this wonderful blue dot I enjoy more and more from a distance than I do through the windows of technology.

We Need To…

the world around us, even when it’s painful, even when we have an escape, because to grok the world around us is to grok the need for escape – and what better than escape than to make the world into a place we want to escape to? Why can’t we do that instead?

I wish I knew the answer, though it seems so many don’t understand that there is a question in the first place.