the duchy of hetkettle trophish

— close encounters of the third kind, 1977

well, why not. they were talking about visitors from other worlds. we’re talking about our world becoming alien. ’s’just a bigger rabbit hole.

so that’s it, then. no more excuses about avoiding the 11th hour.

if the roles were reversed. Imagine the following news story in the morning paper:

“Plan United States, completely funded by the Mexican government, will place Mexican drug enforcement agents in border customs offices and key points in the interior, including Laredo, Kansas City, Miami, and New York. A new wiretapping system, produced by SPY-MEX and supervised by Mexican intelligence officers, will monitor private communications of U.S. citizens suspected of involvement with organized crime, while Mexican-made planes overfly communities thought to be located along drug trafficking routes. The U.S. army, recently deployed to cities across the nation to fight the drug war, will receive arms and training from Mexico.”

one of laura carlsen’s 70 reasons against deep militarization.

Plan Mexico is seen as an historic opportunity for the United States to gain military influence in Mexico and use it as a platform in the ideological battle with Venezuela and Cuba et al. This is a dangerous and wrong-headed strategy for international relations in the hemisphere, where mutual respect and self-determination should be the guiding principles for lasting peace. It also compromises Mexico’s relations with its southern neighbors.…

The argument of groups opposing Plan Mexico is not that, given the deplorable state of its judicial and law enforcement systems, Mexico does not deserve the U.S. aid package, as if this were a type of reward for good behavior. The problem is the type of aid envisioned in Plan Mexico. Empowering (and enriching) corrupt and abusive institutions before reforming them empowers abusers, and potentially deepens and consolidates corruption.…

Both the United States and Mexico should reject appropriations that place the emphasis on a military solution to their shared drug dependency. Ironically, the one part of Nixon’s drug policy that actually worked — expansion of treatment services — is the one part that has been the least emulated. The military-police arm of the “war on drugs” has proved to be not only a failure but a threat to the same social values it claims to defend.

they have good sites for solar generation, too. we could help each other out of the jam.

“Let us be clear:

we strongly believe in regional cooperation and reciprocity on matters of mutual concern like environmental protection. However, we reject the idea that acceptable hemispheric policy on such important matters can emerge from cloistered summit meetings that exclude the public, civil society, trade unions, the media, and — in violation of the constitutional traditions of all three of our countries — transparent legislative oversight.…

Rather than attempting to handcuff the new administration and the people of our three countries to NAFTA-plus, it is time to chart a fair trade future for North America that fosters democratic governance, growing economies, rising standards of living for all, and puts the interests of working people and the environment over those of global corporations.

She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.” [via]

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project — every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in — that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, watching just the ads.

but

If anything, the thesis could be that TV is a short lived aberration of completely passive consumption of culture, set against a background of long standing human participation and sharing.

or

we could say the human animal will pay good money to play democracy, never thinking positive feedback would be the entire return-on-investment.

ps. i don’t like you at all.

pps. i told somebody this. i told them, when they asked, how will we do this? because i said, this will be a lot of work. and i said, then, there will be work and there will be puzzles. it’ll be like sudoku, except it will be green sudoku.

is it ok to say “we”?

always, i think.

is a greater nihilist than the believer in power?

to endure. that question’s everywhere serious, and fuck it.

no fear can fix this.

bring out the crazies, let’s hear something new.

bring out the visions however induced.

i’m in the mood, suddenly.