Balcony Bluster

The news-o-sphere is all a-flutter with the bully congressman, Michael Grimm, and his idiotic return to camera frame.

Bill Maher had a view-worthy rant about republicans and perceived manliness in his show over the weekend (#304?) - and he hadn't even had the benefit of seeing Congressman Grimm's outpour of dumb.

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June 2019

Nothing much to add, except that we should well have known 5 years ago that today is exactly what we were headed to.  

A Defense of Radicalism

I want to submit a not-so radical idea... that we re-


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April 2019

I taught a course one time called "Theories of Revolution".  I started this post several years later, but made this case to them.

John Hickenlooper is running for president.  He eschews the term radical moderate (i think more because he doesn't want to be called a moderate, more than he doesn't want to be called a moderate), but i kind of wish he wouldn't.  I'm not likely going to vote for him in the primaries, but i would be more inclined to support a radical moderate than an establishment progressive. 

In addition to liberal and conservative wings, there was a time when parties also had radical wings and incremental or establishment wings.  A radical approaches solutions and isn't interested in which process gets them there.  The establishment loves the process, the wheel, the way that it is.  They work to turn it this way or that - to the left or to the right, but ultimately it wants things to stay as they are.

Source: comicsverse.com

I've started watching the first season of Cloak & Dagger - the timeline has been updated i'm suddenly behind without it.  It's an origin story - Ty's are in Vodou; Tandy's are in the Mad Scientist.  The structure is of a teen drama, full of life lessons.  While they often feel like cliched nuggets, there is some deeper philosophies at work in them.  A complicated theory of self - that you are not your self, not anymore, anyway. 

It's a radical notion.  We all hold our sense of self seriously - our hopes and fears (what's the difference, right?) are our own - or so we believe.  In reality (ha!), we are a reaction to our surroundings.

"There is nothing in all the worlds that will destroy us like we will."

Another, Better Four-Year

It's been four years since the massive earthquake destroyed much of the capital city of Haiti.  News outlets love anniversaries and there have been plenty of retrospective 'where are they four years after' and 'where did the money go' articles popping up over the last few days, so I don't want to spend a lot of space here railing against the injustices the West has done to Haitians since goudou-goudou (and the injustices Haitians themselves continue carrying out against other, poorer, Haitians).

My Sunday started off strangely, with my wife's clock radio going off at the usual early weekday time, and hearing the voice of my friend and mentor, Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, speaking to me from the darkness.  He had been interviewed on the show On Being some years ago and was rebroadcast this morning.  The interview is fascinating and a useful primer on Haitian Vodou, but hearing the words spoken pre-earthquake

Resilience is not always a virtue...

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9/20/2017
Returning to this post some years later, I don't quite know what it was meant to be about, but I had tagged it "travel", and had been to Haiti in late 2013.  I think i thought to provide some commentary on the progress (or lack thereof) from the time of the disaster, and a bit of the socio-economic and political superstructure that contributed to the depth and complexity of a "natural" disaster like this one...

Here's a video of me driving around Haiti!

I was on a jury... and it was really awful... but hugely important

Last month I was called for jury duty and was ultimately selected to serve on a criminal trial involving two young black men who were accused of perpetrating an armed robbery in the Western Suburbs of Milwaukee. The experience was singularly unpleasant, not only in the ‘this is jury duty and it sucks” way, but also in the resulting loss of faith in humanity (which was already fairly unsteady).

The trial itself took the better part of a week, starting on Monday afternoon (after a couple hours of jury selection) and ending Thursday afternoon. Almost all of that time was spent on the prosecution, which made a fairly circumstantial case that the two young black men in the room were in fact the two, similarly shaped, young black men appearing on a poor-quality surveillance video. The defense* re-called one witness, a Milwaukee cop, and asked a few questions to demonstrate how little police work really went into all of this (not following up on additional leads or suspects, etc.)

At that point, after some final arguments, the case was given over to us, the jury. This is the point at which everything went to hell.

It was approximately 4:15pm by the time we adjourned to the jury room (a dreary room with a long table and mis-matched chairs, the windows covered in privacy tape and an alarm on the door). As we took our seats, the bailiff came in and said we would need to elect a foreperson. He asked for any volunteers and the old woman seated next to me (who will hereafter be referred to as Crotchety O’Lady) said, “I’ll do it.” She was eager, but worked hard to seem resigned to it.

The long and short of it was that most of the folks on the jury were convinced by 'authorities'.  The prosecutor and police officers who testified laid a flimsy groundwork based on burner cell phones and the aliases assigned to burner phones in the contact list of one guy who was not very believable, and whose vehicle was at both locations according to the grainy video footage.

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3 May 2018
I am sorry that i didn't post this in real time... It was a lazy period for me (regular life, in other words).  [Is it just me #iijm or do we find ourselves creating irl type abbreviations in the real world (#itrw) - i wanted to abbreviate #irt and #iow when i was typing earlier this paragraph, but then realized i was making those up.)

I was called to be a juror in late 2013, and it was in the early days of my being a person with a real job.  When i was actually called into a court room, i answered honestly (mostly**) when the attorneys were selecting jurors.  I did make myself sound banal (a "staffing specialist" rather than a "graduate student"), and not overly opinionated.

Mostly what i found being on a jury is that people crave leadership and most people have strong prejudices that they are astoundingly unaware of.  There were a few (or perhaps a couple) people on this particular jury who were actively and obstinately racist in their preference for convicting.  But at the beginning of deliberations, almost all (actually all, except for a middle aged African American lady, who described the defendants as "guys who could my kids", and me) jurors were initially in favor of conviction despite the lack of any compelling evidence.

In the end the two of us had convinced enough of the jurors that there was enough doubt to acquit one defendant entirely and get a hung jury for the other. 

Since serving on the jury, i have been shocked by the number of times i've heard friends, colleagues and other folks discuss openly how they have or planned to avoid jury service by answering introductory questions to the effect that they are prejudiced or would not be able to be impartial.  Jury service is a pain in the ass, but the fact that so many middle and upper class and educated people shirk their responsibility means that juries are largely and disproportionately peopled by under-educated and  underprivileged people... people who are more likely to be unintentionally prejudiced.

And these people need a leader in their midst in order to do the right thing.

*Note: In point of fact there were two separate “defenses” as each defendant was being tried independently of the other, with separate counsel. This becomes important later in the post and only one of the two “defenses” called anybody to the stand.

** Defense attorneys asked whether any of the potential jurors had any "pre-conceptions" of whether the defendants in this case were guilty or not.  My immediate instinct was to answer that, "yes, i would go into the case starting with an assumption about their guilt - namely that they are not guilty, unless the prosecution can prove otherwise."  I withheld this smart-alec remark, which i think would've gotten me tossed by prosecution despite it's accuracy.  

Happy New Year - 1844

Sitting, enjoying some quiet holiday pause, I am reading my way through Kierkegaard's Stages on Life's Way, and he unexpectedly had something to say about the New Year, which I thought worth sharing today.

"In case a man in all seriousness surrenders himself to love, he can say that he has lots of assurance, if only he can get any assurance company to take the risk, for a material so inflammable as woman must always make the insurer suspicious.  What has he done?  He has identified himself with her: if on New Year's Eve she goes off like a rocket, he goes with her, or if that does not occur, he has nevertheless come into pretty close affinity with danger..."

-Constantin Constantius 

Source: thedanishpioneer.com

... And now, a bit of context!  Soren Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher with really excellent hair.  His book, Stages, is a collection of 'found writing' purportedly by a variety of different authors, put together into one volume by an intrepid (and equally fictional) book dealer.  The three works, "In Vino Veritas: The Banquet", "Observations about Marriage" and "Guilty/Not Guilty", presents perspectives from the several speakers on love and life.

I find "In Vino Veritas: The Banquet" something of a tough nut to crack.  The premise is fairly simple: several men go off into the woods and get rip-roaring drunk while opining about women.  The present speaker (good ole Constantin) seems to be of the mindset that any sort of congress with ladies is an inherent risk, offering up the novel concept of 'love insurance'.

The book seems an odd collection of conversation and opinions, some or all (or none) of which may be Kirkegaard's (though the notes imply that he was hung up on some woman named Regine, and his thoughts on love and life were heavily influenced by that failed relationship).  In what would become a tradition of existential writers, the text contains what seems to be a simple narrative, with piles of introspection (and in this case elocution), the content of which seems over simple - the meaning of which is to consider simple existence.

Regardless, on this New Year's Eve day a century and a half later, I wish you a Merry New Year (it seems to me that merriment goes much better with celebrating a new year, whereas happiness should be more to do with Christmas (or whatever gift-giving, family oriented holiday you may celebrate).  Make it a good one, and a safe one, though, of course, there can be no assurances...

Star Trek - Ranked

I watched Trek Nation this evening... It was okay, but not hugely enlightening...

Essentially it confirmed my idea of the Trek mythology as a mode of world making.  The philosophy of WWZCD?  Make decisions based on which one is most likely to lead to the outcome of our world being most like the Star Trek world.  Because, what else would we want the world to look like in 200 years?  Anyone have any better ideas?

Source: http://lordOfTheWings.BlogSpot.com

Trek is a religion.  It's a collection of canonical (and some non-canonical) texts that create a world modeled after our own.  In a world of dystopic futures, Star Trek is uniquely positive - a vision of what we might be able to achieve.  It's blindly hopeful, and particularly in a leadership environment that we live in today, we have trouble imagining a way forward that produces positive outcomes, let alone working toward some sort of utopic end goal.  Of course, in the Star Trek canon, it takes an aftermath of a third world war to make the space for creating the imagined future.

But that's not really what this post is about.  Someday, I'll put those thoughts together, but this is a best of list, an attempt (incomplete until it's not) to rank the films and seasons of Star Trek.  There are other lists by Trekkers, I'm sure (including this one, which ranks series versus films).  To my mind, though, ranking an entire season at one quality (5th or 25th, say) doesn't make a lot of sense.  For example, Season 3 of Star Trek: Voyager has too much Kes for my taste, but season 4...


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January 2020
I don't think I'm going to do this anymore... I'm already in the midst of the chronology, and while i think this idea has some merit, it's just a lot to take on.  Maybe someday, but for now, i just wanted to post the pre-amble, which i like quite a lot...

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December 2020

I had a thought to finally post this, after having found just such a list (or almost) as I was intending to create only to find that I had already done so at the outset of this (clusterfuck of a) year...

and so it begins...

December 2013 marks the start of the as-of-yet-unnamed endeavor, which has been referred to as The Commune -

yaaayyyy...

The first few bylaws follow, but I wanted to reminisce a bit on the history of The Commune and imagine, a bit, the thinking and the dreams:

I was a guest on Ron Felten's podcast, Strangers in My Life, over the weekend, and we talked a little (only a very little, the rest is interesting, I promise) about The Commune (which I unfortunately initially was re-branding the Clan at the start of the show). 

If you've known me for any length of time (and in particular if you've ever shared a few drinks with me), you have probably heard some version of my theory of commune. It was interesting (though only arguably useful) to try to explain it to the ethereal audience of a podcast. The hope in doing so, I suppose, is to fully articulate a concept, which I haven't fully worked out in my head (even after 15 years of jabbering).

I think the renaissance of my communal thinking may have come while Stephen Colbert was formulating his Super-Duper PAC plans – "I don't know" – the over-arching plan for donating to his mass of untraceable money-speech, but the twinkle has been a constant since at least around 2001.

The concept is essentially this: that we (we being anyone who ascribes to this idea and who those of us already inside {so far that is just me} decide they want to bring in) form an elective community, dedicated to the proposition that we all should dedicate ourselves to enjoying all of our lives, including, but not limited to: work, leisure, travel, consumption (the act, not the disease), ownership, business, and politics.

To achieve this seemingly simple goal, I propose that the collaboration of thought, effort and resources is fundamental. Together we can think better and do better, both work-wise and play-wise.

To that end, I propose the following three bylaws as a place to start:

I. Whereas, in the modern era, an organization needs money in order to function and act in the world;

 

Whereas members of a specific community should be invested and have a stake in that community;

 

Therefore each member of the to be named organization (which has previously been known as The Commune) shall contribute a minimum of $10.00 per month to a common account.

 

I.a On 5 February 2016, a vote was taken at the monthly meeting to increase the monthly minimum contribution to $25.00 per month. Furthermore, individual members may choose to save their contributions in an alternate location from the common account (bank account, cracker box, under mattress), but the location of those funds should be shared knowledge among all members. The sentence immediately preceding this one shall no longer be valid, and will be stricken from these bylaws, once the membership number of the commune reaches 7. 

 

II. Whereas the organization is in its nature a democratic and communal group;

 

Therefore all decisions, whether they be monetary, organizational, procedural or enacting change in the world will be voted on by all vested members, requiring a simple majority to make any decision (ties will result in a measure being voted down).

 

III. Whereas it is good for a community to have members who are fully invested in the organization;

 

Therefore a member only becomes fully vested with voting privileges after they have contributed a minimum of $100.00 to the community.  Before a member is fully vested, but they are members (a maximum of 10 months), any contributions they have made to the community may not be used in any way, regardless of any voting decisions, except in increasing the amount of money (e.g. interest being paid to accounts, etc.)

So there it is.  It's on.  Let me know if you want in and we'll take a vote to approve your membership (thus far I am the only vested member, but we can only grow from here... unless I quit - note: I'm not going to quit).