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Category Archives: General
The End of Politics
The end of politics for me, at least.
I anticipate backing away from public life on the Web. I will still post here, particularly music, wine commentary, humor, and maybe a story from time to time. Perhaps I'll venture into deeper waters on occasion. But I don't really want to talk about the State that is developing.
For one thing, it will become increasingly dangerous to voice any opinions about the United States other than jingoistic patriotism.
If I thought it would do any good, I'd probably continue to write and torpedoes be damned, but I don't think it will do any good, and it will only keep me in a state of perpetual anger, outrage, and agitation, as well as expose me to government and mob retribution. So far as I can see, the board is set, the pieces are in motion, and Black — the thoughtful minority — has already lost the game, though it may take another hundred moves or so sweep all the pieces off the board. Besides, White cheats.
Anyone who feels otherwise, by all means, keep writing blog articles. Keep protesting and marching and signing petitions. Keep writing letters to your congresscritters. Keep voting. I've been wrong before, and I'll be wrong again, and this could well be one of those times.
I find that I'm already moving on.
Here's the thing I think I need to point out. The Soviet Union collapsed, starting in the late 1980's. It actually collapsed: as in fell completely apart, ceased to be an international entity of any sort. The USSR went from a world superpower to a failed nation and a historical footnote in a matter of years, not decades.
And yet, Russia lives on. In many ways, it's stronger than ever. As is Georgia, Chechnya, the Ukraine, Crimea. Czeckoslovakia became the Czech Republic and joined Europe, as did Hungary.
People still live in all these places. They eat, go to shows, fall in love, have children. The thing that fell — the USSR — was an abstraction; a thing of the imagination.
The United States is collapsing right now. The election of Trump is merely the most visible of the symptoms. I don't think it will take long for it to fall.
But representative democracy in North America will live on. As will various other kinds of states, kingdoms, satrapies, and smaller nations, all of which will be filled with people who eat, go to shows, fall in love, and have children.
We just have a nasty period of fascism, kleptocracy, and economic collapse to get through. Just like the former states of the USSR did in the 1990's and the first decade of the twenty-first century.
I'm not going to waste energy, or risk jackbooted thugs, just to speak out against the decaying government of a failed nation. Though I grieve its death — I still have good days and bad days — the failed nation is no longer of interest.
But it isn't yet the right time to start looking toward what will replace the failed nation-state we've called America.
For one thing, I have no idea how severe the intermediate chaos will be. It could range from a quiet dissolution of the Union of States, through trade embargoes and a full-scale nuclear war between the US and everyone else. We could emerge from the economic chaos into a largely-intact world willing to accept North American states as peers. We could emerge into a completely lawless dark age.
It's even possible that a fading shadow of an American Empire, like Rome in the centuries after the death of Marcus Aurelius, could flicker on and off for decades or centuries.
Another reason it isn't time to look forward is that there will be a lot of variety in the restructured North America that follows the collapse. There are already unbridgeable cultural differences between, say, Vermont, Alabama, and California. How those cultures will emerge as independent states without a federation to hold them under a common constitution and legal authority is pure speculation. I'd rather explore that in a fictional setting, because it will be purest fiction.
As for how to deal with this collapse at a personal level, I do have a few pieces of broad advice, which I will be trying to follow myself.
Be kinder to others than you've been in the past. There will be plenty of pain to go around: don't add to it.
Be more generous than you've been in the past, with your money, your time, your attention, your help. There will be a lot of people who need help more than you do. They are not lazy — they have instead lost opportunity, and probably hope. If you can help them become self-supporting, fantastic. If you can't, then help them find a roof and a meal. If the wind blows wrong, I can guarantee that you will be astonished by how quickly you can find yourself on the receiving end of charity.
Be useful. Your training, your credentials, your degree, your seniority, your expertise, your pension, and even your rights will all become meaningless. What other people will always value, however, under any circumstances, is your usefulness. They'll pay you for that, whether in dollars, or eggs, or a place to keep warm. They'll protect you and watch your back when you're sleeping.
Get to know your neighbors and your community. Knock on doors, introduce yourself, bring cookies. Hold a block party and invite everyone over. Go to others' parties. As things fall apart, these are the people who will save your life — in many cases, literally. Think in terms of walking distance. Of screaming-for-help distance. Those are your neighbors.
If you find that you truly cannot stand anyone around you where you live, now is the time to pull up stakes and move.
Limit your Internet and television exposure, especially social media. It is becoming clear that both television and the Internet have become potent and highly tunable propaganda tools, the reach of which has exceeded even that of historical religions. Meet with your neighbors instead, face-to-face.
Read books. Good, old-fashioned books.
Appreciate the little things. The sound of a gentle rain. Starlight. The smell of coffee, or roses, or warm wood in the sunlight.
Remember the Lakota expression, "Today is a good day to die." This means, be at peace with your life, all its successes, all its failures. Do not harbor regrets over the past; do not live a life justified only by a future that may not come to pass. Remember that you will die — it is the only guarantee in life — so do not let your fear of death drag you into degradation.
Endure.
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The Lies We Tell On Ourselves
There are a few stock phrases floating around out there that I've lost patience with.
"I'm not a racist, but …." Let me finish that sentence for you. "I'm not a racist, but I'm going to say something that sounds racist, and would make you think I'm a racist if I hadn't assured you beforehand that I'm not. Trust me."
Right. I think it's a lot more likely you don't know what "racist" means. But you certainly do know what other people think it means, or you wouldn't be trying to reassure me in advance that you aren't one. So no, I don't trust you, and I don't especially want to hear your racist statements.
"As a Christian, I have no choice other than …." Let me finish that sentence for you. "As a Christian, I have no choice other than to support some idea that any sane, compassionate person would think is horrible. But I'm not responsible; please don't blame me."
You will never hear me say, "As a Druid, I have no choice other than …." I own my choices. Right or wrong. I don't blame them on the Devil, or on my religion. And you know what? Since they're my choices, I can actually discuss them, and even change my mind. You can't — as you say, you believe you have no choice. Well, I do blame you, and I really don't want to hear your tortured theological excuses.
"We need your contributions to help fight …." Let me unpack that sentence for you. You are saying that the real decisions are bought.
I have no problem with giving the win to the highest bidder, if it's a matter of auctioning off Marilyn Monroe's underwear, or the Mona Lisa. When it's a matter of justice, or basic human decency, this is a kind of extortion. "Pay us, or bad things will happen."
Although, perhaps it's just a scam, if a well-meaning one. Consider a legal defense fund for innocent prisoners on death row. Sounds like a good idea? Not really. It's a bad legal system that routinely imprisons and executes innocents — bad in the war-crimes sense. And you're saying it's a good thing to plaster over this war-crime level of injustice with a few very expensive, case-by-case "corrections" to a few percent of the victims of a corrupt and war-crimes-evil legal process. Sounds to me more like a burned crust of bread thrown to a starving conscience, purchased at a premium price. ConscienceCrusts™, only $99,999,999.95 each. Prices are rising daily, so get yours NOW!
What would be good? Correcting the corrupt system, which is (ultimately) merely a matter of changing the laws to protect rather than prosecute the innocent, a process that is also called "legislation." But that also takes lots of money, because the real decisions are bought. And my desire for protecting the innocent is up against a prisons-for-profit industry that doesn't care who fills its beds.
Contributing money to organizations that claim to influence legislation is participating in a scam, or an extortion scheme. It won't help correct a legislative process gone rancid; it will only speed the spoilage. So don't come to me for money for political causes. I'm not interested.
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Death of a Nation
Last Wednesday, in shock, I wrote on Facebook: "What do you do, the day your country dies?"
My personal answer turned out to be, "Go to work, like any other day." I simply didn't know what else to do with myself. I've learned through the experience of similar shocks — like losing a daughter in the middle of the night — that sometimes it's best to just run on autopilot for a little while.
It may still be too soon for me to write, but I'm feeling that familiar pressure to put thoughts and feelings into words.
So let me start by linking to a post I wrote a little over a year ago. It's hardly "prescient" — my observations were entirely too obvious and derivative for that. The question hanging in my mind a year ago was not whether Trump could become President, but whether the US electorate was ready to embrace Fascism. The answer has turned out to be, "Yes."
We are now living in the early stages of a typical Fascist State.
I think it's extremely important to point out that this isn't about Trump. Trump is a venal opportunist who serves as the focal point to what the Germans call a "Zeitgeist," literally "Time Ghost," more correctly, "Spirit of the Age." This isn't about Trump, or his deplorable lack of character, or what he will or will not do. It is about the American People, and they have called for a "strong leader" to remove the constraints of law and punish the scapegoats they have chosen to blame their troubles on. Remove Trump from office (by fair means, or foul) and another "strong leader" will be called up in his place. Exterminate one set of scapegoats, and we will choose another.
There must be a bloodbath. The People demand it.
A year ago, I thought — I hoped — that Bernie Sanders represented a possible alternative to this. Fascism doesn't arise in a vacuum. It happens whenever the majority of the reasonably prosperous citizens start "taking hits for the team," yet the team keeps losing, the hits keep escalating until they threaten homes and families, and no one in power listens to them. This all started in the US in the collapse of small farms and the loss of US manufacturing jobs, back in the 1970's. That decline, in turn, was built into the weakened but still-deadly capitalist economic system we chose to retain in the 1930's. We came very, very close to Fascism in the US the 1930's — it was all the fashionable rage in Europe at that time — but we instead adopted an attenuated form of Democratic Socialism that soothed the angry beast that the American public had become. That peace lasted for two generations, before capitalism began, again, to erode prosperity in favor of wealth.
I fully expected Bernie to be written off as a Socialist crank a year ago, and was both surprised and deeply encouraged when he wasn't — instead, he became a populist figurehead for a countervailing Zeitgeist: a vision that did not involve a bloodbath.
I believe he would have won this election. I do not think the majority of people in the US were hurting badly enough, or were angry enough, to reject a peaceful real hope for the future — or even a Hail-Mary hope.
The broken two-party system didn't support him; instead, it locked him out and confirmed all the worst fears and contempt of the electorate. The Democrats, caught up in far-less-important liberal social issues rather than hard-rock economic issues that meant food on people's tables, decided that they must now put a woman in the White House, by fair means or foul: and the only possible candidate was a woman who was a quintessential avatar of the existing dysfunction. Republicans dismissed the existing dysfunction early in the game, and turned with open arms to Fascism.
So where this election could have been a referendum between two Zeitgeists for change, a peaceful one versus a bloody one, it instead became a referendum between slow starvation and a bloodbath.
The People chose the bloodbath.
Yes, Hillary won the majority vote, by the teensiest of margins. She lost the election because a huge percentage of the population abstained entirely. Most of the uninvolved doubtless abstained because they've abstained for decades — they had long ago given up on politics as meaningful in any positive way, the clear consequence of our multi-generational political failure as a nation — but many of the newest recruits to political indifference simply could not endorse either starvation or bloodbath, and stayed home.
We must now endure the bloodbath. The People have demanded it.
I want to think it could be over relatively quickly. The Axis powers in Europe lasted less than a generation. But it took a World War to stop them. I think this will soon end up in yet another World War, and I strongly suspect it will involve a major nuclear exchange. The US may throw the first nuke, it may not — but it will certainly be one of the targets, and will just as certainly strike back.
That seems to me now to be the most probable way this nation, and modern civilization, will end.
I really, really hope I'm wrong.
I'm not even close to thinking through other scenarios. I'm still in shock that it happened as it did, in a single day, though I've been writing about this subject for a couple of years.
It feels to me a lot like 9/11/2001 felt, but where we will go, as a nation, will be a far, far darker place.
(W)Hacked
Well, I finally got hit. My site was hacked, probably through one of the websites I don't maintain very aggressively.
Not too much damage, really, but I've killed some websites and updated this one. You'll note a few good changes.
First, the Contact Themon page uses a new plugin. If you want to send me a message, please feel free. The old one did the job, but it looked terrible, I never got around to cleaning it up, and it may have been the way in for the hackers. The new one has a Captcha, so I don't have to worry about bots trying to sell me Viagra.
Second, I've overhauled the comments section with new plugins. I never get comments — well, almost never — except for a bunch of pecker-heads who would use it to post spam: mostly trying to increase their link count for Google, I think, since the comments were long lists of packed web URLs. I responded by shutting down comments after two weeks on every blog post, since at the time, there weren't a lot of WordPress options.
Now there are, and the new, improved comments are kind of cool.
You can log in via your Facebook, Google, or Twitter accounts. Or, you can leave a comment without logging in, but you need to leave your e-mail address and respond to a Captcha.
We'll see if that makes the comments any more usable.
So the cloud of being hacked had a silver lining.
Maybe I'm just feeling grumpy today, but I ran across a YouTube clip of Neill de Grasse Tyson on GMO foods, and I have to call out Straw Man on his comments.
An ideal straw man argument is one where you stand up and utterly demolish a stupid argument that was made by no one, ever.
A more typical straw man argument is where you shift an actual argument from the real core of the discussion, to something that is deceptively similar, but unrelated and much easier to argue. I'm afraid Dr. Tyson did this very thing. Or perhaps he just doesn't understand the real concern, because it's been so poorly stated.
So let me frame, more precisely, the core of the discussion about GMO's. I'll phrase it as a question: Is the current trend toward targeted genetic modification of foods in the laboratory harmful to our food supply?
This is a more specific question than the ambiguous, "Are GMO's harmful?" But it has a much broader scope. It implies questions about technological risk, large ecosystems, farming monoculture, profit motives, government oversight, and large-scale epidemiology.
Let's focus even more specifically on just one tiny part of the question: Should we be eating Roundup-resistant strains of food?
No one cares about seedless watermelons, or whether they were produced by transgenics, gene-snipping, grafting, or black magic. No one cares about the "natural" progenitor of maize (corn-on-the-cob) — it's inedible. Lord knows, no one cares about long-stem roses. Except florists.
People do care about Roundup-ready food plants. That's what they usually mean when they carelessly say, "GMO's."
The first thing to note is that you don't plant Roundup-ready plants unless you intend to spray Roundup on them. In fact, you don't pay for Roundup-ready seeds unless you intend to spray enough Roundup to stunt or kill other (less expensive) strains of the same plant.
What is Roundup? Its primary active ingredient is glyphosate. Glyphosate is a broad-spectrum herbicide — plant poison — that interferes with the plant's ability to make certain proteins necessary for growth. It also affects certain microorganisms in a similar way, and other microorganisms (the ones that eat the stuff) in the opposite way.
The issue with "GMO foods" is not whether genetically-modified corn is inherently a Frankenfood that will cause us to sprout a third eye (useful) or a second anus (far too many of those around already), but whether its use is enabling and even promoting hazardous industrial agricultural practices that have adverse consequences for our food, our health, and our society.
No one will plant Roundup-ready GMO's unless they intend to douse them in glyphosate. So the more correct question is, Should we eat food sprayed with killer doses of glyphosate? If the answer is, "No," or even "maybe not," then what is the point of a Roundup-ready GMO seed?
Let's rephrase this more academically, and ask if the benefits of using glyphosate on food balance the risks.
Well, what is glyphosate intended to do? It kills weeds.
Why kill weeds? Weeds reduce food production under our current industrial farming processes, and it's a substantial cost to eradicate them manually (that is, to pick the weeds) — that's about it.
So without glyphosate, we would presumably produce somewhat less industrially-farmed food, or produce it less efficiently, which might raise prices. Of course, glyphosate isn't free, nor are the Roundup-ready seeds, so that also raises prices. There's some evidence that glyphosate damages certain essential microflora in the soil, rendering the soil less fertile over time, which means less food and higher prices, unless you pay for chemical fertilizer. Which, as I understand it, is wonderful weed-food, since "weeds" — especially the fast-growing kind — are specifically evolved to move into overly-fertile bare ground, like ashy forests after a fire.
We could call this the Monsanto Cycle: glyphosate -> fertilizer -> weeds -> glyphosate. With a side-business in Roundup-ready seeds so you can use the herbicidal war-zone to raise food.
This brings us to the real core issue underlying the whole discussion: should we trust Monsanto to keep us safe from harm through use of their products? The question isn't whether GMO's are safe, or whether glyphosate is safe, or even whether scientists, farmers, or the television psychics know the answer: the real question is whether Monsanto is safe.
There is a general perception that corporations cannot be trusted when their bottom-line is involved. It's not an unfounded perception. The tobacco industry concealed evidence that smoking causes lung cancer for at least two generations. The oil industry has been burying data about global warming for decades. Goldman Sachs sold securitized sub-prime mortgages by the carload to suckers investors, while simultaneously taking short positions against those same investments. In all cases, it's a matter of Profits First.
Would Monsanto tell us that it's perfectly safe to give our children a glass of Roundup with every meal? That would depend on whether they felt it would increase or decrease their market share. It would have nothing to do with sick or dead children: children are economic externalities. Unless they become a public-relations problem.
Would Monsanto go so far as to lie about research results, and pay professional doubters to cast a shadow on any "unfounded rumors" that their products might be harmful? Given that other industries seem to have had no problem with doing exactly that, I think it's supremely naive to think Monsanto would be any different.
So I would say, no, they can't be trusted. Their products might be harmless — but they could be very nasty, indeed. And once the product has become a steady and successful seller, they'll do whatever it takes to keep it high on the charts.
This has taken us a long way from the science of genetically-modified organisms, hasn't it?
In fact, we are now so far from the science that I'm going to propose a little thought-experiment, just to clarify the whole thing.
Let's ban glyphosate because it begins with the letter 'g'. We spun the Big Ugly Gratuitous Government Economic Restructuring Wheel of Fortune (BUGGER WoF), the letter 'g' came up, and we picked 'glyphosate' out of a dictionary. With a dart. We've just banned it forever and ever: a Schedule I Controlled Substance. Possession Is Death.
Apart from the screams of doom and despair from Monsanto (which we can easily solve with, "Here's a billion dollars, kid, now shut up and go away") — so what? What exactly is the great boon to humankind we've just thrown out?
We're all gonna starve? That's ridiculous. We're talking about weeds, not the Apocalypse, and they were pulling them up by hand in 1969, before Roundup was invented. And in 1869, and in 1069, and in 8969 BCE for that matter. Agribusiness will just hire more itinerant labor from Mexico and put them to work weeding in addition to picking and packing. They'll of course cry salty tears about lost profits (and demand a billion dollars, too, it's only fair), then they'll raise prices and reduce some benefits and raid a pension fund (if there are any left), and that will be that.
I'm not sure I see any benefit to Roundup that doesn't come down to a few more dollars in the pockets of big agribusiness. And from what I understand, it's mostly big agribusiness: the small farmers are moving toward organic farming, because "organic" commands higher prices1
The risks? Oh. My. God.
Granted, they are all low-probability. Like the Fukishima reactor failure.
We have large-scale epidemiological risks based on an entire population consuming glyphosate in small quantities through pregnancy and an entire lifetime. A small uptick in autoimmune sensitivities in ten percent of the population would be impossible to detect in the laboratory, and almost impossible to detect in the population. Yet it represents huge medical costs and unnecessary human suffering. At the opposite extreme, we discover that after a generation or two, chronic glyphosate ingestion causes widespread male feminization and sterility; our population crashes in a single generation, and our civilization becomes one of those Ancient Mysteries on thirty-first century late night television — The Americans: Why Did They Vanish? Was It Alien Astronauts?
We have similar possibilities from the GMO food itself. A plant is a complex system. Put it under chemical stress (dump Roundup on it), and its biochemistry changes. Reduce or enhance its ability to respond to that stress (gene modification), and its biochemistry changes. Any of those changes could trigger epidemics of low-level dietary intolerance in humans, or even increased instances of truly dangerous allergic reactions.
We have potentially huge ecosystem changes from glyphosate-contaminated runoff from farms. Kill the tadpoles in the swamps, perhaps? Followed by mosquito plagues, which transmit everything from malaria to zikka. All kinds of species could die back or die out entirely throughout large geographic regions, radically changing the ecoscape. We can go back to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, or the more recent story about the reintroduction of the wolf into Yellowstone, for dramatic examples of how small changes have huge effects. Some of those changes could desertify large agricultural regions.
Then we have the nightmare of hybridization in the wild, especially with some of the more reckless genetic modifications they've turned loose. The threat is not man-eating killer tomatoes. The threat is corn that won't tassel, creating a spreading blight that could recurrently wipe out the entire corn monoculture of the American midwest. The threat is hybrid species that are toxic to pollinators, like bees. The threat is the unexpected and the unforeseen and the potentially catastrophic.
Low-probability risks, perhaps, but with very big consequences.
Doing genetic research on all this stuff is one thing.
Turning it loose on the world through an utterly amoral corporate capitalist system dedicated to short-term profits above every other consideration, is nothing short of irresponsible.
Especially when the only real benefit is an uptick in corporate profits. For certain corporations.
I think there's a legitimate concern, here.
Since I have called out Dr. Tyson by name, I would welcome a rebuttal. Though I rather doubt he will see this. It's a very large Internet, after all, and I am only one small writer within it.
[1] From what I hear around here from people actually doing the organic farming, it's also cheaper.
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The Chaos Protocols
Several people mentioned this book, and I was intrigued enough to pick it up and read it. In one sense, it's a light read — I finished it in a day. In another sense, it's perhaps the most simultaneously delightful, horrifying, and challenging book I've ever read.
Religion, mysticism, and magic are intertwined in the modern imagination, but they are actually three quite distinct things. All deal with the unseen. However, religion seeks to contain our experience of the unseen, mysticism seeks to expand our experience of the unseen, and magic attempts to use our experience of the unseen for practical purposes.
This is a book about magic.
Unlike so many other magical tomes, it is neither academically dry, nor froo-froo fluffy. The writing is hard-hitting, no-nonsense, and practical. In addition, White's asides and turns of phrase are hilarious, and one of his chapter heading-quotes struck me as so funny and so in-tune with the tone of the book, that I have to reproduce it here:
I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum. — John Nada, They Live
Here's the funny thing about magic: often, in fact usually, the "unseen" is plain as day, right in front of you. It is unseen not because it is composed of ineffable spiritual corpuscles that can only manifest on our material plane under a full moon in July; it is unseen because you simply don't notice it.
Let's say that you need a trench dug in your front yard; you have a shovel, but your back is no longer strong enough to dig it yourself, and you don't have enough money to hire someone to dig it for you. So you do magic to get your trench dug.
One of the primary functions of magic is to change your perspective: after working your spell, you suddenly notice, as if for the first time, that your neighbor two houses down owns a backhoe. In fact, you've even complained when he parks it on the street. You just never thought to put his skill and equipment together with your need. You go talk to him, one thing leads to another, and in the end he's willing to dig your trench in exchange for you writing an article about him for the local paper. Or something else equally within your reach. Or maybe he does it for free just to be neighborly.
Did the magic work? Of course it did: your trench is now dug, and had you not done the magic, it very likely would not. Like it or not, that is cause and effect.
Most magic works this way: it's a disciplined way of messing with your own head to remove the truly formidable mental blocks that keep you from seeing opportunities and achieving practical goals.
One of the first steps, of course, is getting out of the head-space we've all been sold. The head-space we've been sold is not intended for our benefit. It is intended for the benefit of those who sold it to us, and while this has been argued (by the sellers) to be a win-win proposition, it has never really been win-win, and can no longer even be perfumed strongly enough to disguise the stench of deceit — if you can only see (and smell) clearly.
Seeing (or smelling) clearly isn't easy, and that's why magic is so useful.
What I found especially interesting about this book is how much White's magical advice mirrors the practical advice I gave my sons as they approached adulthood and independence.
In my father's time, coming out of the Great Depression and into the unprecedented economic stability of the post-War years in the US, the most viable route to success was the slow, conservative route: get a stable job with the government, or a big corporation, marry, have children, send your children to college, retire and enjoy your Golden Years.
That model was no longer sensible even for my generation, coming into adulthood in the late 1970's, and it was one of the major disconnects between my father's generation and mine. My father's model was worthless by the time I needed a model, and he did not understand the world I was entering. He could not really guide me into adulthood.
I recognized this same problem when my own children came of age. My father's world was literally inconceivable to them. My model of relative success had become useless by 2000, and I barely understood the world they were entering. I could not really guide them into adulthood.
What I did understand, and told them, was that they were entering into a world dominated by chaos, and that if they wanted to plot a successful course through it, there was no formula: they would have to embrace continuous, disruptive change, and to develop the instincts to find opportunity, weigh it, and to either follow it hard, or drop it cold and keep looking.
This is precisely how a Chaos magician views the world, as White describes it. This is interesting to me, because I'd never heard of Chaos Magic.
In many ways, I've been a Chaos magician — of sorts — my entire life.
That is why I have to caution that, although I found this to be "light reading," it's only because I've been unknowingly working with Chaos magic for forty years, trying to see (and smell) clearly, and I've come to most of the same conclusions that White has. I read this book like it was an old favorite.
I don't think most people will see it that way. The first chapter is going to stop most people cold, as it should. I'm not going to try to give a precis here. White does a brilliant job, and I'm not going to improve on it. Buy, borrow, or steal the book and read it yourself.
But I strongly suspect that anyone encountering this set of ideas for the first time is either going to avert their eyes and say (in varying emotional tones ranging from contempt to horror), "No, this can't be true;" or they will go into a shock of overwhelmed recognition, and will have to take a long walk and get an ice-cream cone or a shot of whiskey (or both) before they continue.
I recommend the book, but with a strong caution: it just might change your life.
Casting the Second Stone
And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto [Jesus] a woman taken in adultery; and when they had set her in the midst, they say unto him, "Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act. Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou?"
This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him.
But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not. So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her."
And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground. And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst.
When Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said unto her, "Woman, where are those thine accusers? Hath no man condemned thee?"
She said, "No man, Lord."
And Jesus said unto her, "Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more."
This has always been a centerpiece story of the Christian faith. It appears in the Gospel of John, one of the later Gospels — scholars tend to date it as being written sometime in the 90's, or perhaps as late as the 120's. It was a core piece of Christianity for at least two centuries before the Council of Nicea met and formalized the Christian Faith, and it survived that culling.
This story seems so terribly at odds with modern Christians' reputation — particularly US American Christians — of being moralistic and judgmental, exactly as the scribes and Pharisees are described in this story.
One of the twisted excuses I've heard revolves around the last five words of this story: "Go, and sin no more."
After all, the argument goes, Jesus said to sin no more. So what if she didn't do what he said to do? What if she went straight out and committed some more adultery? What then?
Well, the argument continues, she's basically disrespecting Jesus and God and the Holy Spirit. We can quote from other places in the Bible that the only "unforgivable sin" is to "blaspheme the Holy Spirit," and if totally dissing Jesus — Jesus Himself — is not blaspheming the Holy Spirit, I don't know what is. So there you have it. She's gonna roast in Hell. So go ahead and stone her. She deserves it.
Unless, of course, she later responds to an altar-call. Or goes to confession. Or offers up a two doves and spotless heifer. Then she's completely off the hook (again). She can go — and sin no more, this time for real.
Messed up again? Okay, that'll be another altar call/confession/dove-plus.
But it all turns around such a delicate subtlety of language.
Now I've read that some Qabalistic strains of Judaism had an interesting take on the literality of the Jewish scripture: their idea was that God made not only Jews, but also their language and their script. So — since God made all of these miraculously, in one piece out of one fabric, there's nothing odd about saying that you can contemplate the first word of the Torah, Bereshith, which begins with the Hebrew letter Beth, and infer from the fact that this is the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet that something hidden precedes the beginning of the universe — the mysterious Aleph, the thing before the Beth that initiates Bereshith. It takes literalism to a completely new level, and it works (sort of) because presumably God Himself spoke and wrote in ancient Hebrew. There could be all sorts of hidden messages and codes in the Torah, left like bread crumb trails.
No one has that luxury with English. Try to read Chaucer in the original English: and good luck with that. Yet Chaucer was writing in the relatively recent English of the 1300's, and it only gets worse the further back you go. There was no English language in Jesus' era, nor anything like it, much less at the beginning of creation, when God might (theoretically) have been making white Englishmen from white English chalk.
To be more specific: the passage as it appears above was translated into a now-archaic dialect of English from an ancient Latin translation of a Koine (Greek) translation of a story that might have been first told in a first-century Galilean dialect of Aramaic. Aramaic was, in turn, a language that stretches back to the Neo-Assyrian empire, a thousand years before Jesus spoke, and subsequently broke into a thousand different dialects, one of which is believed to have been spoken in first-century Galilee by a certain itinerant rabbi endorsed by John the Baptist. There are various Aramaic dialects still in use, and they are reportedly very poetic, metaphorical languages with many layers of meaning that shift according to context: it's entirely possible that Galilean Aramaic was also an imprecise, poetic language, a language that lends itself to parables, metaphor, and shades of meaning that come clear only after a thing has been said many times in many different ways.
"The Kingdom of Heaven is like…." How many times did Jesus use those words to start a new parable about the Kingdom of Heaven? And then, "Whoever has ears, let them hear."
If you want to parse commas in something "Jesus said," as it appears in the King James Version of the Bible, you are three kinds of ignorant fool.
My wife and I talk about translation frequently, because we both enjoy words, and she is a professional translator. She often comes to me to talk about idiomatic English phrases. What exactly does it imply to "make your bed and lie in it?" When someone says, "He hit a home run" in a romantic novel, exactly what does it mean? Try it, some time: translate any idiomatic phrase in English into a dry, literal, objective, universal meaning. It's always tricky — sometimes, it's virtually impossible.
Even worse, exactly the same thought can often be conveyed only by using completely different words. "His shit doesn't stink," is a bizarre statement if translated literally into Spanish, but the expression, "He pisses perfume" is a well-worn phrase with exactly the right nuance. "He's batshit crazy" is unknown in German, but "He has birds in his head" gets the idea across perfectly.
In particular, the little words — the if, the and, the but — carry a huge burden of significance in English. A misplaced comma can wreak havoc on a sentence: read about the Oxford comma. All languages have subtleties of this sort, but they are all different, and the subtleties often come between the words.
So I'm going to try out a retranslation of this final sentence:
And Jesus said unto her, "Neither do I condemn thee: go, for you sin no more."
Interesting, no?
In the modern, judgmental interpretation, that tiny word "and" is freighted with a ton of subtle meaning. The word "go" appears in the imperative, English shorthand for "you can/may/should/must go now," as a command that applies to the woman in the immediate future; this word "and" is generally taken to imply a second command, also applying to the woman in the immediate future, as "you can/may/should/must sin no more." That is a peculiarity of the use of the word "and" in this purely English construction.
Is that precisely what was said in archaic Latin? In Koine? In first-century Galilean Aramaic?
I'm suggesting we treat the "and" as a King James English way of connecting two Latin (or Greek, or Aramaic) phrases that appear in conjunction for a completely different reason — the first phrase is still an imperative, but the second clarifies the first by expressing why she is now free to go.
She can go, because no one can judge her sin, not even Jesus. If no one can judge her sin, then she has not sinned.
Does anyone really want to parse the word "and" this closely in King James English? Knowing that it's a translation of a translation of a translation of a poetic, metaphorical language?
What we need to do instead is, as in Aramaic, listen to all the stories told over and over in different ways, until the meaning is clear.
Throughout all the stories, Jesus was unflinchingly brutal in his treatment of religious leaders: the scribes and the Pharisees. He called them "vipers" and "whitewashed tombs." That's how it comes out in King James English, but this loses all the bite those words would likely have had in first-century Palestine. A slightly better contemporary translation might be "toxic cockroaches" and "perfumed sacks of shit."
Jesus was not being nice in these passages.
Religious leaders were pretty much the only people Jesus ever went after this way. He didn't go after whores, nor tax collectors, nor lepers, nor even bloody worthless Samaritans. He didn't even go after the Romans.
He only went after the religious leaders of his own people.
And all those sinners? "Your sins are forgiven." Over and over. That's what got him into so much trouble.
So I have to ask myself how it is that so many Christian leaders in the US have somehow decided that Jesus would have — for some reason that completely escapes me — drawn the line at homosexuals. That is, he can completely forgive an adulteress, but a homosexual?
Nah. Jesus surely would have cast the first stone in that case.
So, of course, these modern religious leaders — Jesus would never have called them toxic cockroaches — are free to cast the second stone.
Those who have ears, let them hear.
Steady-State Capitalism
In previous posts, I've offered a rather bleak prognosis for capitalism.
I've proposed a definition of capitalism that seems to cover the many kinds of capitalism we've experienced in the last five centuries. I've observed that the central flaw in all these forms of capitalism is the expectation of sustained exponential economic growth. I've noted that this expectation is based on the false premise that wealth is created rather than being moved and transformed, and that capitalism has been devouring the natural economy — the ecosystem that supports our very existence — in order to create our human economic wealth. I've pointed out the obvious fact that this isn't sustainable — certainly not on Earth, nor in a non-material "information economy," nor even if we develop starships and ravage the whole galaxy. I've suggested that capitalism is probably pretty close to its end, with the caution that it has been on its deathbed before, then gotten back up; it may well do so again, perhaps multiple times, before it goes down for good.
I'd like to explore a bit what might come after capitalism.
Note the following, in bold red letters:
We are now entering the time-honored tradition of purest speculation.
While I speak of "likelihoods," it's my opinion. I have no idea what will actually happen. I'd love to hear other people's thoughtful alternatives.
The Likely Scenario
The most likely way this all plays out is an extended repeat of the boom and bust cycles we've seen throughout our written history. Think of Babylon, Greece, or Rome. Think of the Mayans, or the Anasazi. Think of Easter Island.
Our future most likely holds the collapse of our global capitalist civilization into a world-wide dark age, followed by the rise of subsequent civilizations that make ours look — to the people of that future time — grand, in its way, but also primitive and violent. Just as we now view ancient Rome, or Greece, or Assyria.
Civilizations have a life-cycle. While every such rise and fall has unique elements, there is a common structure to most: a rhyme-scheme, if you will, for those of you familiar with the statement that history never repeats, but it always rhymes.
One of the common rhymes in the fall of societies and civilizations is the appearance of a huge and growing gap in status and wealth between the upper and lower classes.
One way of looking at this, to follow with the language I've been developing in this series of essays, is that the society's economic system, whatever it is, switches from an aerobic form to an anaerobic form — in the former, it really is creating human wealth for that society by taking it from somewhere else (Nature or other societies), while in the latter, it is simply going through the motions of wealth creation while, in fact, it is the rich stealing from others within the same society. This impoverishes the very people who provide the machinery for enriching the wealthy, and the society then becomes so weak that it either falls apart, or becomes prey to some other society.
Regardless of the mechanism, however, a large and growing wealth-gap between the rich and the poor is a strong indication that a society has peaked, and is ripe for decline.
This boom-and-bust cycle doesn't require capitalism by any means, else we wouldn't see it throughout history. However, capitalism feeds the cycle with enthusiastic abandon by attempting to expand the wealth of the owners at an exponential rate, leaving the other classes to suffocate as the economy turns anaerobic.
John Michael Greer takes this approach of boom-and-bust, and talks about our civilization being the first and most wasteful (and destructive) of a long sequence of rising and falling "technic societies," which is an interesting, and actually rather hopeful way to look at this cycle.
It's impossible to predict what greatness or depravity future high societies will embody, or what they will look like, after the intervening dark age. Will they build floating cities made of aerogels? Will they live in huge networks of self-sufficient rural villages linked by a solar-powered Internet? Will they form martial empires, or peaceful enclaves of philosophy, art, and music?
No one knows. It's rich ground for speculative fiction.
A few people have preached that the end of our current global capitalist economy is the End of Humanity.
This is based mostly on the belief that Our Way of Life is also the Only Way of Life Worth Living — which is both childish and absurd.
But there is the idea of "technological overshoot." This means that we do so much damage to the Earth's ecosystem using technology to sustain our unsustainable way of life, that when our society falls and we lose our technological edge, people can't find their way back to a simpler lifestyle. Soil is too damaged to farm, and fertilizer is no longer available; water is polluted at the source, and there is no technology to clean it; unprocessed air is unbreathable. In the extreme case, we trigger a cascade of extinctions that wipe out humans and other species, right down to the bugs, and evolution has to start over; or, if you're of a religious bent, God has to dip his hands into the clay again.
This has certainly happened in isolated cultures. Easter Island is a classic example, and it isn't the only example.
While global overshoot is possible, I personally think it unlikely. I believe our global civilization is a whole lot more fragile than people think. I believe we'll blink before all of Nature does: our civilization will collapse, and stop destroying the environment, which will slowly recover. Our descendants may spend millennia herding goats in a steamy, rainforested Antarctica, but there will be descendants.
My biggest objection to this story, however, is that it's not very interesting to talk about. Humans pollute their environment and go extinct. Meh. End of stories and storytelling alike. We can argue about whether Mother Nature's "human experiment" was a tragedy or a farce, though we have to adopt a transcendent viewpoint to make the argument on either side. What else is there to say?
The more interesting question is whether there is a way to climb down from the capitalist money-tree before the branches break off and tumble us into either a dark age, or extinction.
Exponential growth isn't part of the definition of capitalism. Perhaps we could have a capitalism that supports a more modest kind of growth.
The basic problem with any sub-exponential growth in a capitalist system is a scaling problem. Perhaps I can explain it this way.
If I want to invest $100, I'm expecting some return on that investment. If I want to invest $1000, I'm expecting roughly ten times the return. It doesn't matter whether I invest the $1000 in a single enterprise, or try to spread it out over ten $100 enterprises, or whether I'm representing ten different investors, each of whom wants a return on his $100.
Returns are expected to be proportional to the total investment. As I've explained at length elsewhere, proportional returns are one way of defining exponential growth. Proportional growth and exponential growth are two different names for exactly the same thing.
So if you don't have exponential growth, then returns can't be proportional to the investment.
My son was arguing for linear growth the other night, but once he grasped this scaling issue, he saw the problem. Linear growth means that the economy grows by a fixed amount each year: it generates (say) a total of $100 in new human wealth every year. So if you are the only person to invest $100 in the economy, you get a return of $100. If you are the only person to invest $1000 in the economy, you still only get a return of $100. If ten people each invest $100 in the economy, and they have to share the $100 return, then each of them gets a return of $10. If a thousand people each invest $100, each of them gets a return of ten cents.
With linear economic growth, all of the investors (and investments) are competing for the same fixed amount of wealth generated by the economy. Over time, as the investors' fortunes grow (albeit slowly), they will want to invest more of their money, but they are still all competing for that $100 in actual growth. Investing more reduces their proportional return.
There's no real point to investing $100 in such an economy, because the best you can hope for is your $100 back. It might make sense to invest $90, to get that $100. But if that makes sense, then lots of people will want to invest $90, which means the $100 gets split by lots of people, meaning the return is now far less than $90. The only way this could possibly be worthwhile as a financial investment, is if the number of investors is strictly limited.
The same is true of any sub-exponential economic growth. One of the examples I've used before is the science fiction concept of an expanding galactic empire that collects resources from entire planets and distributes the wealth instantly through teleporting star gates. The fastest this empire could grow, economically, is quadratically — that is, as the square of time, representing the surface of a sphere expanding at the speed of light (since new resources are only available at the frontier). This is faster than linear growth, but it's still sub-exponential. Investors are still going to see diminishing returns over time, unless the number of investors, and the amount they can each invest, is strictly limited.
So we might as well jump right in and ask how capitalism would fare in a steady-state, zero-growth economy with zero returns on investment — in the long run, this is what any sub-exponential growth looks like.
Can capitalism survive in a zero-growth setting?
The Owners in Steady-State Capitalism
We have to be careful with this idea of "steady-state." Nothing lasts forever. And just about anything, no matter how nutty or out-of-balance, can last a few years. So let's set an arbitrary bound of 1000 years. Anything that could last 1000 years, clearly doesn't have a systemic problem built into it, as capitalism does, though it still might fail for other reasons.
Thus, we're imagining a kind of steady-state capitalism that's going strong 1000 years from now, with no economic growth, no expectation of growth, and good prospects for running another 1000 years.
I've proposed that the only real innovation that capitalism introduced to the Medieval European idea of hereditary feudal landholdings, was the idea that entitlements could be bought and sold.
I believe the late Medieval period actually came to this point, even within the aristocracy: in the late 1300's, impoverished knights were quietly selling off their holdings and their titles, which they could no longer afford to support. In the novel The Count of Monte Cristo, written a few centuries later, we see a long section of gossip about whether Comte Edmond Dantès' title was inherited or bought. This still persists in the concept of "old money" versus "new money."
Medieval European feudalism, unlike our modern society, believed in steady state. God appointed the clergy, the clergy ratified the rulers, the rulers assigned the land to lords, the serfs were bound to the land and worked it for themselves and everyone else, and all the other professions, from hooper to whore to moneylender, worked within this static system. World without end, Amen.
So some kind of feudal capitalism, consisting of semi-hereditary fortunes with ownership trades among the owners, is not at all unthinkable. The House Atreides and House Harkonnen in the Frank Herbert novel, Dune, both come to mind for me. In fact, we already see modern corporatism headed in precisely this direction: Coke and Pepsi are, essentially, feudal estates, and their controlling shareholders, board members, and executives are the aristocratic court. The corporation holds market share rather than land, and the aristocracy holds controlling stock rather than titles.
Open acknowledgement that economic growth has ceased will, however, cause a few not-so-minor shifts in the economy.
Our current model of Federal Reserve and fractional-reserve banking will have to be replaced or radically revised. Fractional reserve banking is an odd beast, only a little over a century old: it loans money into existence, and demands repayment with interest, meaning that every dollar you have in your wallet is a promissory note that obligates you (or your descendants) to pay back more than a dollar. This is one of the root causes of both inflation, and the endless need for exponential economic growth. Such a money system simply can't survive in a zero-growth economy, because there is no place for the interest to come from.
We'll also lose the idea of the interest-bearing US Treasury Bond, which is the bank-note the Federal Reserve issues: the US economy won't be growing, so again, there's no place for the interest to come from. That, in turn, will force governments back into balanced budgets based on taxation, or (bad idea) borrowing money directly from the rich for really big endeavors, like putting on a war. I'm thinking now of the amusing and recurring situation between the Medici and the Popes in the 1400's, where the Pope requests a loan, both parties proclaim eternal admiration, gratitude, and friendship, the Pope glibly refuses to repay the loan, the lender lays siege to the Papal vineyards, the Pope excommunicates everyone involved, renegade priests defy the Pope and offer Mass anyway, and — in the end — the Pope coughs up the money with proclamations of kissy-kissy-friends-forever-again.
Municipal bonds will go the same route. These are currently a relatively painless alternative to voting for a municipal tax to support some community enterprise, like a water plant or a school. In a zero-growth economy, no one is going to buy bonds as an investment.
Commodity markets might persist, because they serve as a seasonal hedge for both buyers and sellers of commodities. But they'll change a lot, because non-renewable resources won't generally be commodities. Things like wheat, bananas, and pork-bellies will remain: things like oil and coal will not. There's more room for speculation as to how precious and useful metals will shake out, and whether speculative buying on margin will still work. What seems certain, however, is that speculating in the commodity markets will be even more risky than it is now.
Stock markets will vanish. Stock won't vanish — it is the new aristocratic title — but corporate stock will be more like real estate: not the mortgage papers, but the actual properties. Like land holdings in feudal Europe, they'll be valuable for the rents (dividends) they return, and the power they offer. Properties that are easy to acquire will be generally worthless. Valuable properties will not change hands often, and the trades will be personal, and limited. That trade will doubtless support brokers — but I can't see it supporting an open marketplace.
Overall, "investments" of any sort won't yield wealth. Investment will still happen, but it will cease to be about making money, and more about getting things done: more like Kickstarter campaigns.
In particular, corporations and the wealthy holders of controlling shares will use investments, not for wealth-generation, but for ego-feeding, political power, and even general social benefit. I'm thinking now of the funeral tombs of Egypt, the sculptures of Greece, the Medieval cathedrals, the artwork of the Renaissance, or the Italian and German patronage of music during the classical period.
The only way to gain more wealth in a steady state system is to acquire it from someone else.
That means there will be war. I'll return to this in a moment.
Commoners in Steady-State Capitalism
Let's look briefly at the situation of the commoner, the serf, in our steady-state feudal corporate capitalism.
The first issue is population.
People breed like bunnies: that is, exponentially, at least until they eat all the lettuce and starve, or become numerous enough to attract wolves. Modern people have considered this an intractable problem that leads to inevitable doom, but there's an odd thing: human societies have, in fact, been able to control their populations. One of the most astonishing to me is the little island of Tikopia, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, which can support no more than about a thousand people. They've apparently been there for at least a thousand years. So they clearly figured it out — they've proven it's possible (as have other cultures) to put limits on population growth.
Having a stable population, however, means cultural, legal, religious, and economic commitment to keeping the population stable. There cannot be an economic advantage to having too many children; if there is, there will need to be extremely strong legal, cultural, or religious taboos to counterbalance the economic incentive. That would require a very different culture than the one we currently live in, here in the US.
There also needs to be a good mechanism for dealing with "normal" bulges and troughs in population, such as our "Baby Boom" generation, or the Black Death in the fourteenth century in Europe, which so drastically disrupted the Medieval system. Zero population growth does not mean people can't have children: it means that, on the average, two breeders must have exactly two children that live to reproduce. But things will happen, and the population will rise and fall. The system needs to withstand this.
The current economic and cultural forces that drive people from one place to another, looking for work, in the process breaking up families and communities, will vanish: with no epidemic economic reason to move and keep moving, and stronger communities that lack our modern expectation that kids will go to a distant college and then move to a distant city to get a job, more people will simply stay put. Not everyone, of course: there will always be free spirits and malcontents.
Our current process of trying to prepare for old age, illness, and such through personal "investments" will vanish, since there is no economic growth to provide these returns. It's quite possible that the common folk won't even have access to banks: banks may be useful only to the wealthy. However, overall inflation should be zero, so if you put a coin in a box and bury it, then dig it up fifty years later, it will still be worth what it was worth when you buried it.
Our hyper-individualistic current outlook, as US Americans, sees this as leading to people hoarding coins, other people stealing those coins, brutal police forces and/or vigilantes seeking to get their parents' money back, and so forth. It's a well-worn plot cycle: kindly old restaurant owner is robbed by thugs of the Evil Triad Cartel, renegade Shaolin Monk appears from nowhere and defeats the bad guys and gets the money back, then rides into the sunset. You can set the same story in the American Old West. Or Gotham City.
In practice, this is romantic nonsense. In a stable system, you can't have the Dickensian horror of most old people dying as beggars in a dark alley, trying to keep warm, nor can you have the free-for-all of a lawless Old West with individuals stashing a few coins in a hidden box under a mesquite tree. What real people in real societies do is, in general, called a mutual aid society. US Social Security is an example, scaled up to the national level. Before there was Social Security, there were mutual aid societies, like the Odd Fellows, or the BPOE. Before that, there were trade guilds — or at the rural level, real local communities.
Beyond those basic features, I can't see too many constraints on the common life imposed by steady-state capitalism. There's room for all kinds and levels of social mobility based on skills and merit, room for technology (though not for wasteful extractive technology), room for all kinds of social conventions (that don't result in population growth).
On the whole, life for most people will be good, and satisfying. If it isn't, people will get restive, and the system will become unstable.
Ownership, in capitalism, is individual and sovereign, and in a world with a finite number of things to own — specifically in a zero-sum economy that is not growing and is not expected to grow — it is inherently competitive.
The traditional way of increasing ownership of this sort has always been to take it by force. If the current owner objects, you kill him. It's called right of conquest. It's also known as war.
The positive side of the capitalist innovation is that it gave people an alternative to war. Ownership of the critical resources could be bought and sold, rather than inherited or granted by divine right or taken by right of conquest.
The thing that free-market fundamentalists don't seem to understand about marketplaces, is that they depend on impartial law to validate and enforce ownership claims.
It's like the Medici and the Pope. If you lend money to the Pope, to what authority will you appeal if he simply decides to not pay you back? If you buy controlling stock from another aristocrat in a steady-state capitalist economy, what can you do if he takes your money and then refuses to turn over the executive washroom key?
If there is no such authority to appeal to, then our steady-state capitalism will turn into an unending series of wars among the owners, using commoners as soldiers. This is not a stable system.
If there is an overarching authority, with sufficient power to reign in any individual owner or small group of owners — a corporate government, if you will — then its courts, and its bureaucracy, will be more corrupt and intrigue-ridden than any imperial court the world has ever known. That opens covert routes to increasing wealth and power, and a kind of war in the shadows. The system will not long remain impartial. Again, I think the system will prove unstable.
I would be very surprised to see any form of steady-state capitalism last a thousand years. I'd love to hear others' thoughtful explorations of how it might be made to work.
In a subsequent post, I'd like to explore some alternatives to capitalism by playing with the concept of ownership.
The Shifting Sand of Context
"He has the right to defend himself from deadly force."
That's a line that gets tossed around a lot these days, particularly whenever a cop kills a black person.
It's a nice-sounding sentiment, but it isn't true. For instance, it doesn't apply to a citizen who defends himself when a cop pulls a gun and threatens to shoot.
So there's an asymmetry here. A context. "It was self-defense" applies to a cop who shoots a citizen, but it doesn't apply to a citizen who shoots a cop.
So, if we want to be clear, we have to say that a cop has the right to defend himself from deadly force. A citizen does not have the right to defend himself against a cop.
Let's broaden the context a bit. What if you shoot a cop who is off-duty, in plain clothes, who pulls a gun and threatens to shoot you over a matter of your dog pooping in his yard?
Well, your life is probably over, either way — if the cop doesn't kill you, then the lawyers will make you wish he had, and you'll almost certainly go to prison, even if you only winged him. But that's our current fuckup of a legal system. In theory, you would have the right to defend yourself. I think.
We would have to clarify again, by saying that a citizen does not have the right to defend himself against a cop who is doing his assigned duty.
Let's broaden the context a bit further. What if the cop's assigned duty is to provoke a violent response?
There used to be a concept of "fightin' words" — the idea that normal people can be provoked, sometimes with words alone, into a violent action. I don't know if this actually had any legal standing, but it certainly served to take the edge off a judge's sentencing in the past.
Think of that scene in the film Crash, when Matt Dillon's cop character is feeling up the black man's attractive wife while "searching" for weapons, just to try to provoke a violent reaction from the husband. It resonates, because we all recognize the asymmetry of power in this scene. The cop can do whatever the hell he wants, and get away with it.
"That's a movie, it doesn't happen in real life," is one predictable response. Uh-huh. That's exactly why the scene resonates so strongly.
"There are always a few bad apples," is another predictable response. "And they are prosecuted vigorously and drummed out of the … well…." Uh-huh. We see lots of that vigorous prosecution, and bad cops getting drummed out.
This is basically saying that no one assigns cops the duty of stirring up trouble. That just doesn't happen. Right?
Except when you look at a place like Ferguson, where the dim-witted city officials decide that they are short on funds, and decide to take up highway robbery.
Jaywalking? Fine 'em. Double parking? Fine 'em. Sleeping on a park bench? Lock 'em up and fine 'em. If they can't pay the fine, double it. If they don't show up to pay the fine, put out an arrest warrant and fine 'em again. If they can't pay that, put them in the prison system and get kickbacks, as well as giving the "perp" a police record that effectively ruins their life.
That's not stirring up trouble? Really? Before you make that your final answer, are you sure you don't want to call a friend?
The fact is, it is increasingly the official duty of police officers to enforce laws that stir up trouble.
In many cases, these laws are the legacy of our national history of racism and slavery: the laws are intended to enforce an inequality in society that was considered natural and just at the time — at least by those (white) people with legal voice and standing — which is now considered natural and just by almost no one.
In many other cases, these laws are merely intended to keep the poor impoverished, and out of sight. No one wants beggars on the street, or sleeping on park benches, and we've always had this strange, Puritanical, Calvinist belief that the poor somehow deserve their lot, so it doesn't matter much if we make their hard life harder.
The biggest problem is, of course, the disastrous Drug War, which has been going on for nearly a century. The Drug War was founded in racism, and resulted in the twisted vision of "law and order" that we see flourishing around us now: something that any American citizen from the 1800's would have viewed as standing in complete antithesis to the ideal of Freedom this country was presumably founded upon. Virtually every criminal law on the books regarding "drugs" is a legal abomination, and its enforcement is all but guaranteed to stir up huge buckets of flaming trouble.
Finally, adding spice to this unholy mix, we have the neoliberal economics of the last forty years, which has twisted our nation's vision from freedom, to "free markets," in which the whole of human activity and governance is reduced to competing against each other for money in the marketplace. Entire cities are being effectively defunded, though they are still expected to provide all the normal services. City officials have been reduced to extorting money from their citizens, and it is the cops who are officially ordered to go around breaking the knees of people who don't pay up.
So let's look at the question again in this still-broader context.
A cop goes to the door of a person who already lives on the edge of ruin, to serve a warrant that is going to destroy that person's life: force them to pay trivial fines they can't afford, take time off work that will cause them to lose their job, brand them with a police record that will make it hard to get a new job afterward, get them evicted from their home and have their children taken away, and — to top it off — all this in an environment where cops can do whatever the hell they want.
Even if the cops don't, they can. And everyone knows it, including the cops.
Is it any real surprise that someone might come to the door with a shotgun?
So it leads me to the question: when you hold the power to stop someone on the street and do literally anything you want to them, right up to killing them without consequence, and then deliberately provoke a fight with that person, holding not only their future, but their children's future hostage, do you give up the right to defend yourself from deadly force?
I'm not asking the legal question. I'm asking the moral question.
Go watch the movie, Rob Roy. This is not a new question.
"Honey, the tires on the casita are still flat!"
"They're not flat!" I replied. "I looked at them this morning, and they were still round."
"You haven't been outside the house since you got out of bed."
"Fine, I looked at them recently."
"They're soft, and it's going to ruin the tires, and then we'll have to buy new tires. Just put some air in them."
"Fine. Later. After I've had my coffee."
"Your first cup, or your seventh? It's already getting hot outside. Just go put some air in the tires."
I hate home projects. Virulently. Meaning — literally — like a virus. My dislike is actually contagious. If someone even mentions a home project in my presence, my aversion reaches out through the psychic aether and affects everyone nearby. The person talking about his home project starts wanting to hire it out. People who do that kind of project for a living start thinking about changing careers.
I especially hate little home projects. Because there is no such thing. Only puny expectations.
Put some air in the casita's tires. Fine.
Our casita is a little 8′ pop-up camper that has lived in our driveway since we moved into the house last December. As I inspect it, it seems that the tires have, indeed, gone a little soft.
The first thing is to get rid of the spider webs. We have spiders, here, and those little bastards can web over a doorway faster than Spiderman. They'd had a couple of generations to craft the little spider Manhattan in, on, and around the tires of the casita. I don't want to reach in and have my hand look like lunch to a city full of eight-legged New Yorkers.
I need to get into the garage to get the spider-brush. I don't have my keys. I search in three places before I find them. I unlock the garage. I find the spider-brush, which was (of course) right where I'd left it, but not right where I looked.
After evicting the eight million residents of Spidopolis, I need to get low enough to read the tire. My knees don't work like they used to, so I end up sitting on the ground. My hand sticks briefly to the cement as I lift it: there's a 100-foot pine tree shading the casita, and little drops of pine sap are everywhere. I wonder if I've ruined another pair of shorts.
Tires always have a big logo on them, telling you who takes credit for making it, but the PSI (Pounds per Square Inch) rating is, if present at all, in the middle of a long paragraph of specifications involving load distribution on a single axle mount under lateral shear from winds up to 30 MPH, provided you aren't at the North or South Pole, where gravity is slightly stronger. All of this is written in raised black-on-black, so if the light isn't exactly right, you can't read it at all.
And then, there's bifocals. Not only does the light need to be exactly right, you can't tilt your head to the side, or your glasses go wonky, and then you can't read the E on an eye chart at three feet.
I finally puzzle out enough of this black rubber vowelless Ogham to think it's calling for 80 PSI. Which is — for a tire — kind of high. I don't believe what I'm seeing, so I have to go check the other tire. First, evict Los Spidangeles. Then back down on the ground on the other side.
More pine sap.
It would be normal at this point to find out that I have two entirely different tires, with two different pressure ratings. But it appears they are both the same, which gives me pause: this looks entirely too easy.
It turns out, that would have been entirely too easy.
I have to hunt down the tire gauge, and find it exactly where it belongs in the car, giving me another twinge of foreboding. The tires are at 40 PSI, so they are soft — no escape in that quarter.
All I have is a bicycle tire pump. It should do the job, I think, since 80 PSI for a bicycle tire is pretty normal. I dig out the tire pump, which is also right where it should be, another bad sign.
This is when I get reintroduced to Boyle's Law, up close and sweaty. Bicycle tires are kind of, like, really, really thin. You know? They may have 80 PSI in them, but there isn't a whole lot of actual air. So I pump until I am sweating pretty hard, and check the tire pressure again. 45 PSI. I remember Boyle's Law. I do a quick calculation: if 20 vigorous pumps will top off a bicycle tire to 80 PSI, a tire with this volume, will, conservatively speaking, take about 20,000 vigorous pumps. Or maybe it's 200,000 vigorous pumps. I invoke Themon's Law of Large Numbers, which states that any two large numbers which apply to sweaty, physical labor, are equivalent.
"I'm off to the hardware store!"
Every home project, no matter how small, ends up at the hardware store, usually multiple times. I actually had a second, also-stalled, home project I needed something for, and thought it would be just grand if I could take care of that and get an electric tire pump, or at least one of the old foot-pumps like my father had in his car: those things have a big, fat air cylinder on them that can move a lot of air.
Three stores later, I come back empty-handed. No tire pumps of any sort. And the other project — well, I think it is going to be a custom design that requires a hand-crafted alloy of osmium, beryllium, and transparent aluminum. That's for next weekend.
It's lunchtime, now. So after lunch, I decide it's time to just get smart and take the stupid thing to the gas station and fill the tires. The tires are still round, after all. It can be towed.
But the lock on the ball-and-socket has been out in the rain since December. Oops. It opens, but I'm concerned it won't open if I close it again. So out comes the WD-40, the 3-in-1 oil, and a million paper towels. Now the lock works.
My wife helps me hitch the thing up. The hitch itself is where it belongs, the lights work once connected, and we're off. Just down the street a quarter mile or so.
"Stop!" my wife yells at me. "You need a license!"
Sure enough, the trailer doesn't have a license plate. That was a whole different story, from last June through December, dealing with the California DMV, and we actually got the plate a week after we'd already parked the casita against the fence. The plate is in my wife's office.
I look at the spot where the license goes, and there are no screws. There are no screws with the license plate, either.
So what kind of idiot takes the old license plate off the back of a trailer, and doesn't put the screws back in the holes?
Oh, right. I guess that would be an idiot like me.
This would, of course, have been the perfect opportunity for the second trip to the hardware store. It would have been, if my wife hadn't been involved.
We spend five minutes searching through the "screw box" containing every screw I've ever collected over the last fifty years, for something close to the right size. My wife pulls out two candidates. From traces of rubber and glue on the head, I realize they are actually the original screws from the old license. In the box with every other screw from the last fifty years.
I finally get on the road, and when I arrive at the gas station, I discover that the the air pump needs quarters. Guess where my wallet is. No, don't guess, it's obvious.
I drive back home, pick up my wallet, and return. I go inside to get quarters, and the clerk tells me I don't need quarters, the air is free. I give him a strange look, and ask how I turn it on. He tells me that I don't: he turns it on.
I go back out into the rising afternoon heat — it's well after noon, now — and the air machine is chugging away as advertised. So I finally — finally — put air in the tires.
Up to 60 PSI. The pump is for car tires. It doesn't even go to 80 PSI.
I return home, the job half-done with no real prospect of completion in sight, and wrestle the casita back into its spot, which involves a ninety degree turn at the end of the driveway. By this point, piece of cake.
A reasonably successful home project. Hey, the tires are up to 60 PSI.
The sad thing is that I'll have a work meeting tomorrow, and before it starts, people will compare what they did over the weekend.
"Oh, I put in a deck in the back yard."
"That's nice! I rebuilt the engine on my 1966 Mustang."
"Some buddies and I went hang-gliding."
"So Themon, what did you do this weekend?"
As God is my witness, I have no idea what to tell them.
Leave a comment Posted in General, humor


text:
Coatings Industry News
Smart Paint Signals Excessive Heat
New color-changing coating technology can warn when material or equipment is too hot to handle, signaling the possibility of malfunctions, explosions or burns, researchers say.
Referred to as "thermal-indicating composition," the material turns different shades of color from blue to red in response to a range of temperatures, starting at around 95°F, the New Jersey Institute of Technology announced.
The technology, which was awarded a U.S. patent in May, was developed in response to dangerous conditions in the desert during the war in Iraq, where soliders reported temperatures near munitions that exceeded 190°F—far exceeding the shells' design limits.
"We essentially modified commercial paints and introduced nanotechnology-based concepts to tailor the trigger temperatures," Zafar Iqbal (shown here), who led the research, explained.
The U.S. Army Armament Research Development and Engineering Center (ARDEC) at Picatinny Arsenal commissioned and funded the research.
"It would have been helpful to have had some sort of a calibrated temperature-triggered signal warning, 'Don't go near or pick up this shell!'" said Zafar Iqbal, a research professor in the Department of Chemistry and Environmental Science who led the joint NJIT/ARDEC research team.
Adding a Time Element
"We essentially modified commercial paints and introduced nanotechnology-based concepts to tailor the trigger temperatures," Iqbal explained.
Iqbal has collaborated with the Army since 1969, and was a research scientist for the branch until 1977. His current research came out of earlier work at Honeywell and Allied Corp., where he was a senior principal scientist and project manager for nearly 20 years before joining NJIT.
His earlier work led to a "smart coating" embedded with color-sensitive materials to indicate how long something had been exposed to high temperatures. According to NJIT, this technology has been widely used by the World Health Organization on vaccine packaging labels.
Iqbal plans to use this time coding element in his thermal-indicating paints for the final product for the Army.
According to Iqbal, there hasn't been a cost-effective way to tell if munitions have experienced critical exposures, including over a days-long period.
The technology has potential for other applications, including a temperature indicator for factory machines, household appliances and tools to signal that they have become too hot to use. The paint could also serve as a warning to firefighters as to the intensity of a fire on the other side of a door coated with the material.
The patent is jointly owned by NJIT and the U.S. Army. NJIT plans to commercialize the technology and said several corporations expressed interest in it at a recent expo.
ardec.army.mil
The technology was developed in response to dangerous conditions in the desert during the war in Iraq, where soliders reported temperatures near munitions that exceeded 190°F—far exceeding the shells' design limits.
Iqbal said his laboratory is working on developing inks related to the paints that can be applied by inkjet printers. Iqbal is also working on a related technology that would indicate whether a product has been damaged by force, shock or exposure to dangerous chemicals.
"A smart coded coating is like a smart skin—it will provide a visual or sensing signal to tell you if there is a problem," he said.
Prior Research
Coatings research has been inspired by color changing technology in various ways in recent years.
Earlier this year, the University of California, Riverside, announced new nanoparticle research produced a polymer that can reveal pressure points by changing color. The sensor film can be painted on contact surfaces to show stress distribution.
Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, announced progress in 2013 in their attempts to develop camouflage coatings that could shift color properties when triggered by the user's surroundings.
Also in 2013, the University of Aveiro in Portugal developed a corrosion-sensing coating that incorporates nanocapsules that can indicate corrosion under coatings by changing color.
Tagged categories: Coating Materials; Colleges and Universities; Exposure conditions; Nanotechnology; Research; Temperature; U.S. Army
Comment from MC Skinitis, (7/17/2014, 5:20 AM)
I marvel at the likes of great minds like Zafar Iqbal, and the teams that make these discoveries. Simply amazing and how lucky we are to have them in this great country we still call America!
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Pablo Roberto Herrera Barrantes (Vázquez de Coronado, 14 de febrero de 1987) es un futbolista costarricense, antiguamente jugaba como lateral izquierdo, en la actualidad se desempeña como extremo ofensivo en el Municipal Grecia de la Primera División de Costa Rica.

Carrera deportiva

Clubes
La carrera futbolìsitca principal de Pablo Herrera se inició en el año 2008 con el equipo de Liga Deportiva Alajuelense de la Primera División de Costa Rica.

En agosto de 2009 se incorporó al Aalesunds FK de la Tippeligaen de Noruega, equipo del que fue dado de baja en la temperada del 2011 debido a una lesión persistente en la rodilla izquierda, la cual le imposibilitó continuar con regularidad en el fútbol profesional por varios meses.

Después de su recuperación, en el año 2012 regresó al fútbol para jugar con el C. S. Uruguay de Coronado, para las temporadas 2012-2013. Su llegada al conjunto lechero significó un cambio de posición en el terreno de juego, pasando de ser lateral defensivo a ser un extremo ofensivo. Con este club marcó tres goles.

En 2013, fue contratado por el Club Sport Cartaginés para los torneos cortos del 2013-2014. Luego de haber desempeñado una posición más adelantada en su antiguo club, con el conjunto brumoso a seguido su juego como extremo ofensivo; inclusive algunas veces ha jugado como delantero '9', de ahí el número que lleva en su camiseta actualmente (#9). Con este equipo participó en la Concacaf Liga Campeones del 2013, anotando tres goles en su debut ante el Isidro Metapán de El Salvador en el Estadio Cuscatlán, siendo el primer jugador de esa institución en lograr un triplete en un encuentro de carácter internacional. En 2021 fue fichado por el municipal Grecia, en el que se encuentra hasta la actualidad

Selección nacional
A nivel juvenil, Herrera jugó en la Copa Mundial de Fútbol Sub-20 de 2007 en Canadá, donde estuvo en los tres encuentros disputados.

Herrera fue parte del equipo de la Selección de Costa Rica para la eliminatoria rumbo al Mundial de Sudáfrica 2010. Su debut fue en un amistoso contra Perú el 22 de agosto de 2007. Él anotó su primer gol en una eliminatoria contra Estados Unidos el 3 de junio de 2009

Goles con selección nacional

Clubes

Participaciones en torneos internacionales

Copas del Mundo

Concacaf Liga Campeones

Referencias

Enlaces externos
Estadísitcas de Pablo Herrera
 Página Soccerway
Página Transfer Market
Perfil en FIFA.com

Futbolistas de Costa Rica
Futbolistas del Club Sport Cartaginés

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
Q: Idle user when tasks are disabled/enabled with @tag I have 2 users with each assigned specific set of taskSets. When I run locust with --tag option with only 1 of the Taskset chosen, the second user will not have any tasks to run. It throws an error Exception: No tasks defined on AdminUser... See sample code below:
@tag('AdminPage1')
class AdminPage1(SequentialTaskSet):
    @task
    def admin_task1(self):
        ...
    ...

@tag('UserPage1')
class UserPage1(SequentialTaskSet):
    @task
    def admin_task1(self):
        ...
    ...

class AdminUser(HttpUser):
    tasks = [AdminPage1]

class EndUser(HttpUser):
    tasks = [UserPage1]

$ locust --users 2 --tag UserPage1
Is there another way I should be using the tag feature? What I need is to be able to choose which tasks are executed at execution time. I can see one way to make the error go away is to use just 1 user class for all tasksets.

A: That error is thrown when locust detect that there is no task property defined in the Locust User class but in this case I think that it's because the TaskSet tags are filtered by the tags specified on the command-line argument and also not checked that there is no tags available to run for the User and the TaskSet
From my PoV it's a bug and it's better if you report it at https://github.com/locustio/locust/issues

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
By Stan Greene
Observer Staff Writer
100% Vaccinated Crew of US Navy Ship Sidelined Due to Covid-19 Outbreak
USS Milwaukee, a Freedom Class Littoral Combat ship, is confined for the moment to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba
USS Milwaukee
The Milwaukee deployed from its home port in Mayport, Fla., on Dec. 14.
A navy crew that is 100% vaccinated against Covid-19, has been sidelined due to an outbreak of Covid-19. The USS Milwaukee, with 125 men on board, is now confined due to the coronavirus outbreak to the US Naval Base in Guantanamo Cuba, reports the Washington Post.
A coronavirus outbreak aboard the USS Milwaukee, whose entire crew was "100 percent immunized," has forced the ship to remain in port after a scheduled stop in Cuba barely one week into its deployment, the Navy announced Friday.
An unspecified "portion" of the Milwaukee's 105-person crew is isolated aboard the ship at Naval Station Guantánamo Bay, according to Cmdr. Kate Meadows, a spokeswoman for U.S. Naval Forces Southern Command. The Navy does not disclose infection counts "at the crew/unit level," she said in an email.
Some of the personnel who tested positive for the virus have displayed mild symptoms, Meadows said. Officials have not determined whether the highly transmissible omicron variant - which has demonstrated an ability to evade coronavirus vaccines, leading to a surge in breakthrough infections - is responsible for the Milwaukee's outbreak. Meadows would not disclose whether any of those infected had received booster shots or if Navy leaders may seek to require them in a bid to prevent future outbreaks during the deployment."Boosters," she said, "are not yet mandatory but recommended."
The USS Milwaukee during sea trials
Needless to say, the story resonates among the vaccine reluctant. From an "anti-Vaxx" website: The case of the USS Milwaukee: They are experiencing an outbreak of Covid-19 despite every single person on the ship being "fully vaccinated." This should be impossible if proponents of vaccine mandates were even partially correct. The "rare" breakthrough cases should not be able to manifest a full-blown outbreak on a ship without a single unvaccinated person onboard, yet here we are. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2021/12/24/uss-milwaukee-covid-outbreak/
The Milwaukee is 378 feet in length, about the size of a frigate. She has a crew of 50, with 75 people potentially as passengers. She deployed from her home port in Mayport, Fla., on Dec. 14. In a news release announcing the ship's departure, the Navy said that apart from the ship's crew, a detachment of Coast Guard law enforcement personnel was on board, plus an aviation unit responsible for operating embarked helicopters and drones. It was not immediately clear whether the coronavirus outbreak affected any of those passengers.


text:
using Parse;
using Parse.Internal;
using NUnit.Framework;
using Moq;
using System;
using System.Linq;
using System.Net;
using System.Threading;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using System.Runtime.CompilerServices;
using System.Collections.Generic;

namespace ParseTest {
  [TestFixture]
  public class SessionControllerTests {
    [SetUp]
    public void SetUp() {
      ParseClient.HostName = new Uri("http://parse.com");
    }

    [TearDown]
    public void TearDown() {
      ParseClient.HostName = null;
    }

    [Test]
    [AsyncStateMachine(typeof(SessionControllerTests))]
    public Task TestGetSessionWithEmptyResult() {
      var response = new Tuple<HttpStatusCode, IDictionary<string, object>>(HttpStatusCode.Accepted, null);
      var mockRunner = CreateMockRunner(response);

      var controller = new ParseSessionController(mockRunner.Object);
      return controller.GetSessionAsync("S0m3Se551on", CancellationToken.None).ContinueWith(t => {
        Assert.True(t.IsFaulted);
        Assert.False(t.IsCanceled);
      });
    }

    [Test]
    [AsyncStateMachine(typeof(SessionControllerTests))]
    public Task TestGetSession() {
      var response = new Tuple<HttpStatusCode, IDictionary<string, object>>(HttpStatusCode.Accepted,
          new Dictionary<string, object>() {
            { "__type", "Object" },
            { "className", "Session" },
            { "sessionToken", "S0m3Se551on" },
            { "restricted", true }
          });
      var mockRunner = CreateMockRunner(response);

      var controller = new ParseSessionController(mockRunner.Object);
      return controller.GetSessionAsync("S0m3Se551on", CancellationToken.None).ContinueWith(t => {
        Assert.False(t.IsFaulted);
        Assert.False(t.IsCanceled);
        mockRunner.Verify(obj => obj.RunCommandAsync(It.Is<ParseCommand>(command => command.Uri.AbsolutePath == "/1/sessions/me"),
          It.IsAny<IProgress<ParseUploadProgressEventArgs>>(),
          It.IsAny<IProgress<ParseDownloadProgressEventArgs>>(),
          It.IsAny<CancellationToken>()), Times.Exactly(1));

        var session = t.Result;
        Assert.AreEqual(2, session.Count());
        Assert.True((bool)session["restricted"]);
        Assert.AreEqual("S0m3Se551on", session["sessionToken"]);
      });
    }

    [Test]
    [AsyncStateMachine(typeof(SessionControllerTests))]
    public Task TestRevoke() {
      var response = new Tuple<HttpStatusCode, IDictionary<string, object>>(HttpStatusCode.Accepted, null);
      var mockRunner = CreateMockRunner(response);

      var controller = new ParseSessionController(mockRunner.Object);
      return controller.RevokeAsync("S0m3Se551on", CancellationToken.None).ContinueWith(t => {
        Assert.IsFalse(t.IsFaulted);
        Assert.IsFalse(t.IsCanceled);
        mockRunner.Verify(obj => obj.RunCommandAsync(It.Is<ParseCommand>(command => command.Uri.AbsolutePath == "/1/logout"),
          It.IsAny<IProgress<ParseUploadProgressEventArgs>>(),
          It.IsAny<IProgress<ParseDownloadProgressEventArgs>>(),
          It.IsAny<CancellationToken>()), Times.Exactly(1));
      });
    }

    [Test]
    [AsyncStateMachine(typeof(SessionControllerTests))]
    public Task TestUpgradeToRevocableSession() {
      var response = new Tuple<HttpStatusCode, IDictionary<string, object>>(HttpStatusCode.Accepted,
          new Dictionary<string, object>() {
            { "__type", "Object" },
            { "className", "Session" },
            { "sessionToken", "S0m3Se551on" },
            { "restricted", true }
          });
      var mockRunner = CreateMockRunner(response);

      var controller = new ParseSessionController(mockRunner.Object);
      return controller.UpgradeToRevocableSessionAsync("S0m3Se551on", CancellationToken.None).ContinueWith(t => {
        Assert.IsFalse(t.IsFaulted);
        Assert.IsFalse(t.IsCanceled);
        mockRunner.Verify(obj => obj.RunCommandAsync(It.Is<ParseCommand>(command => command.Uri.AbsolutePath == "/1/upgradeToRevocableSession"),
          It.IsAny<IProgress<ParseUploadProgressEventArgs>>(),
          It.IsAny<IProgress<ParseDownloadProgressEventArgs>>(),
          It.IsAny<CancellationToken>()), Times.Exactly(1));

        var session = t.Result;
        Assert.AreEqual(2, session.Count());
        Assert.True((bool)session["restricted"]);
        Assert.AreEqual("S0m3Se551on", session["sessionToken"]);
      });
    }

    private Mock<IParseCommandRunner> CreateMockRunner(Tuple<HttpStatusCode, IDictionary<string, object>> response) {
      var mockRunner = new Mock<IParseCommandRunner>();
      mockRunner.Setup(obj => obj.RunCommandAsync(It.IsAny<ParseCommand>(),
          It.IsAny<IProgress<ParseUploadProgressEventArgs>>(),
          It.IsAny<IProgress<ParseDownloadProgressEventArgs>>(),
          It.IsAny<CancellationToken>()))
          .Returns(Task<Tuple<HttpStatusCode, IDictionary<string, object>>>.FromResult(response));

      return mockRunner;
    }
  }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Beige Wandfarbe. Many thanks for stopping by here. Below is a wonderful image for Beige Wandfarbe. We have been looking for this image via internet and it originate from trustworthy resource. If you are searching for any different fresh idea for your house then the Beige Wandfarbe picture should be on the top of reference or you might use it for an alternative concept.
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text:
Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance III Project (FANTA)
Maternal and Child Health and Nutrition
Nutrition and Infectious Diseases
Nutrition in Emergencies and Management of Acute Malnutrition
Agriculture and Nutrition Linkages
Country-Level Nutrition Advocacy
Social and Behavior Change
Home > Research
Food Aid and Food Security Assessment: A Review of the Title II Development Food Aid Program (1994–2001)
This report highlights the main findings of an assessment of Title II Development Assistance Programs to determine whether and how well they achieved and reported on the food security goals set forth in USAID's 1995 Food Aid and Food Security Policy Paper. The assessment found that the Title II development program overall: showed greater focus on the most food insecure regions and countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa; increased emphasis on strengthening agricultural productivity and household nutrition, including a dramatic improvement in the design of Title II agricultural and nutrition programs; improved results and results reporting; and engaged in better collaboration among partners. The report also identified program weaknesses and made recommendations for strengthening its implementation.
Report of the Food Aid and Food Security Assessment: A Review of the Title II Development Food Aid Program (2002) 1.47 MB
Related FANTA Resources
Second Food Aid and Food Security Assessment: FAFSA-2 (2003–2009)
Related Focus Areas
About FANTA
The Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance III Project (FANTA) [2012-2018] was a cooperative agreement between the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and FHI 360. FANTA aimed to improve the health and well-being of vulnerable groups through technical support in the areas of maternal and child health and nutrition in development and emergency contexts, HIV and other infectious diseases, food security and livelihood strengthening, agriculture and nutrition linkages, and emergency assistance in nutrition crises.
This website is made possible by the generous support of the American people through the support of USAID's Office of Health, Infectious Diseases, and Nutrition, Bureau for Global Health, under terms of Cooperative Agreement No. AID-OAA-A-12-00005, through FANTA, managed by FHI 360. The contents are the responsibility of FHI 360 and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or the United States Government. © 2013-2018 FHI 360. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.


text:
This test suite is for checking compliance with W3C Screen Orientation API
specification:
* https://w3c.github.io/screen-orientation/

## Authors

* Lin, Wanming <wanmingx.lin@intel.com>
* Li, Hao <haox.li@intel.com>
* Wang, Chunyan <chunyanx.wang@intel.com>

## LICENSE

Copyright (c) 2013 Intel Corporation.
Except as noted, this software is licensed under BSD-3-Clause License.
Please see the COPYING file for the BSD-3-Clause License.


Given the following information, calculate the lifetime value and customer acquisition cost for a given company. Provide results in an easy-to-read excel spreadsheet.
Average sale price, clients signed in current year, total clients, quarterly churn, annual growth, gross margin, EBITDA margin, employees, cost per employee.
Good Day, I am aware of the fact that I have no experience. However, I am willing to learn, am motivated to work hard and will do my very best every day to help you to achieve your goals.