Chastised By A Bursting Bubble

No, the burned hand teaches best.  After that,

advice about fire goes to the heart.

- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Ours is an age in which there is frequently a great deal of confusion about what constitutes true wealth.  This is especially true in the United States, and has been historically true of this country for at least a century.  Therefore, when I learned about the recent collapse of much of the cryptocurrency "industry", I was not surprised.  A long time ago I started expecting something like this to happen.  (For more information on the collapse, see the Washington Post article "Crypto 'Winter' has come.  Will it become an ice age?" and the European Central Bank essay titled, Crypto dominos: the bursting crypto bubbles and the destiny of digital finance" also.) 

I was slow to hear about cryptocurrencies when they first made waves, and I never really developed any interest in them.  A big turnoff was that they seemed to me to be simply a vastly more complicated way of doing what regular money was supposed to do - namely to act as a medium of commercial exchange.  And the schemes for making money from investing in cryptocurrencies (or as those who were 'hip' and 'with it' called them, "crypto") seemed to me after a while to be more complicated than even fluid mechanics calculations like the Navier-Stokes equation.  I swiftly came to the following conclusions regarding crypto:

• It was a means of promising early "investors" the chance to get something for nothing.
• It therefore had no intrinsic value or essential use in the world.
• It was therefore the perfect material for blowing financial bubbles.
• One day the bubbles would pop.

The recent pop of these bubbles (along with the accompanying pictures of people being led away to jail) has confirmed all of my conclusions.  It has also confirmed my belief and assertion that we live in a moral universe, and that those who violate the moral standard of that universe sooner or later must face the outworkings of their own damnation.  You really do reap what you've sown.  This has been true of the crypto schemers who set up the schemes by which they sought to defraud others.  But it is also true of many of those who were defrauded, for they were hooked by the promise of easy money - that is, by the promise of obtaining something for nothing.  Had they themselves not been led astray by their own evil desire, they would not have fallen prey to those who were more clever in doing evil.  The fact that bubbles like these continue to be blown speaks volumes about our present society - both about its perpetrators and about its victims.  The fact that an entire industry has arisen out of the desire to use mathematics as a tool of swindling speaks volumes about our misplaced collective values.  Bubbles like crypto are an inescapable feature of a society whose economy is built on usury.

So for those of us who seek to build true and lasting wealth in the midst of uncertain times, what should be our strategy?  As I have said before on this blog, our strategy should consist of the following elements:

• Do not desire to get rich.
• Learn essential skills.  Or, to put it another way, learn to engage in beautifully good work to meet necessary needs, that you may not be unfruitful.
• Live simply.  Focus on the essentials.

Do these things and you will go a long way toward bubble-proofing yourself.  You will also save yourself from the ravages of late-stage capitalism.

The Forecaster's Eyeglasses

A major focus of this blog has been to try to guess the outlines of the future, and to outline possible strategies for preparing for that future.  People who try to guess the outlines of the future need a certain mindset if they intend to safely engage in the guessing game without making fools of themselves.  One essential characteristic of the required mindset is humility - the kind of humility which keeps the guessers from taking themselves and their guesses so seriously that they are unwilling to take on emerging information which may contradict the original guesses.  Another essential characteristic is curiosity - the kind of curiosity which dedicates itself to observing and tracking emerging trends.  Lastly, what is needed is precision - a rigorous logical precision in evaluating both one's guesses and one's observations, as well as logical rigor in evaluating whether one's observations confirm one's original guesses.  The scientific method is an example of this kind of rigorous precision.  

A large body of guesses about the future has to do with the effects of resource depletion and environmental degradation on modern industrial society.  As an example we can consider the many books written on the subject during the first decade of the 21st century.  Spokespersons such as Julian Darley, Richard Heinberg, James Howard Kunstler, Dmitry Orlov, Nicole Foss, and Raul Ilargi Meijer promoted the view that the world's supplies of petroleum were on the verge of entering a phase of declining output, and that this irreversible decline in output would trigger catastrophic changes in the world's industrial societies, or to put it more starkly, the sudden catastrophic collapse of industrial society.  Some of the predictions of these people seemed to leave the realm of fact-based analysis entirely and became instead the embodiment of the subconscious night terror of white Anglo-European society over the possible loss of their own dominance and control of the earth.

So how did the predictions of these people fare in the face of events?  The answer is decidedly mixed.  Many of these predictors were able to draw the correct linkage between the impending decline of global petroleum output and U.S. foreign policy under the presidency of George W. Bush.  And according to the analysis of the German Energy Watch Group, the world has indeed long since passed the peak of global conventional oil production.  However, the predictions of the "collapsitarians" failed to account for the technological innovations which allowed the petroleum industry to temporarily boost output of petroleum liquids by means of fracking, ultra-deep drilling, horizontal drilling and other unconventional means.  (Of course, the use of these techniques also led to widespread groundwater contamination as well.)  These predictions also failed to account for the innovations in solar pv cell production, electricity storage technology, and electric vehicle design which have occurred from 2010 onward.  (However, these predictors of collapse did manage to breathe new life into a genre of literature which had gone dormant after the threat of nuclear war seemed to recede from the 1980's onward - namely the genre of post-apocalyptic fiction!  Move over, John Wyndham, Brian Aldiss, Pat Frank, Stephen King, and Walter M. Miller - you've got new neighbors...)

In other words, while resource shortages have begun to appear, they have been partially mitigated by technological advances.  Thus, society in general has most definitely not collapsed.  Yet ordinary people - especially those who are not among the privileged - have found that the number of potential threats in their environment has multiplied.  We who are not among the world's privileged therefore must learn to navigate that threat environment.  This navigation will require us to identify both emergent trends and potential risks.  So I'd like to lay out a few of these trends and risks in the remaining space in this post.  Let's consider the following:

• Energy.  The global energy situation is a mixed bag at present.  As mentioned above, global oil production is definitely past peak right now, and I'd like to suggest that this includes not only conventional oil, but all petroleum liquids.  This is why oil prices had begun to rise in 2021 even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  What is more, global production of coal may already have peaked.  According to the Energy Watch Group, global production of uranium has also already peaked.  Therefore the outlook is not good for those societies and industries which rely primarily on fossil fuel.  However, the outlook for renewables - especially solar photovoltaics - is quite sunny.  (Pardon the pun.)  As mentioned previously on this blog, analyses conducted by the German Energy Watch Group show that the transformation of global industrial societies entirely to renewable energy conveyed by electricity is well within the capabilities of these societies.  That transformation was already in progress before the start of this year, and has only accelerated as nations have come to realize that they cannot allow themselves to become dependent on the resources of thug regimes with imperial ambitions such as Russia.

One wild card in the energy mix is the potential contribution from nuclear fusion energy.  Two weeks ago the United States achieved ignition for the first time in a laser-triggered inertial confinement fusion experiment.  What this means is that by using laser light to implode a fusion target, the experimenters were able to produce more energy than the lasers used to initiate the fusion reaction.  However, this does not mean that a practical commercial fusion reactor is just around the corner.  So far, most fusion experiments have focused on the deuterium-tritium reaction, which produces most of its energy in a form that is very hard to harness for electricity generation.  The reaction also produces a very high neutron flux, which tends to destroy reactor materials over time in addition to producing lots of radioactive waste.  The disadvantages of the deuterium-tritium reaction represent a serious engineering challenge.  It remains to be seen whether that challenge can be overcome.

• Material Resources. I don't have time today to do an exhaustive analysis of resource bottlenecks, but I can definitely say that shortages of key materials have begun to appear in a number of industries.  Taking the construction industry as an example, from 2020 onward there have been shortages of lumber and steel.  In addition, there have been increasing shortages and delays in obtaining finished construction assemblies such as electrical switchboards, switchgear and transformers.  The appearance of shortages need not be a catastrophic thing, but shortages will force the world's economies to shift to a more circular model.  This will force a shift in the ideologies of many right-leaning people in the United States, for instance.  The good news is that a number of heavy industrial corporations have begun to move toward embracing the circular economy.  However, the existence and increasing severity of material shortages may prove to be more of an economic constraint than the shortage of energy was supposed to be.

• Climate and Environment.  The events of the past three or four years have provided blatant proof of the accelerating pace of global warming and its resulting environmental degradation.  From the spectacular Russian wildfires (most of which were caused by humans) which took place every year during the last ten years to the massive wildfires and smoke events which occurred in the western United States in 2020 to the horrible extreme temperatures which were seen in the U.S. Pacific Northwest in 2021, we have begun to witness weather events which have not been seen on the earth for millions of years.  Moreover, recent studies show that the melting of the earth's permanent ice is happening as much as 100 times faster than scientific models have predicted.  Many have predicted that increasing alteration of the earth's climate will result in large-scale migration of "climate refugees" from more chaotic or inhospitable regions to more habitable regions of the earth.  The assumption has been that these refugees will be from among the world's poorest people.  But it seems to me - especially given the random distribution of extreme weather events over the last few years - that many of these refugees may come from the world's most affluent populations.  Think of rich retired snowbirds fleeing from Arizona or jet-setters fleeing coastal resort properties in Florida.  Perhaps the best prospects will belong to those people who are wise and savvy enough to make a habitable space wherever they may find themselves - even if it means making one's bed in Sheol.

• Social Justice and Human Rights.  It is in this area that the greatest threats have arisen over the last decade.  The poor and oppressed populations of the earth won a number of significant victories during the 20th century.  Those victories led to such things as the end of the British Empire, the liberation of formerly colonized nations in the Global South, and the establishment of polities of liberated people who were able to begin to build their own collective power in order to fulfill their own human potential.  A number of observers including both social scientists and science fiction writers predicted that this trend would only continue until the entire earth had become an egalitarian society in which each human being was valued equally and in which each human being could flourish.  However, such idealistic thinking failed to recognize the latent power and personality-disordered nature of the oppressors, nor did it take into account the fact that the oppressors began to organize themselves to take back their lost glory.  Thus many of us failed to notice the efforts - at first subtle, then more blatant - which began from 1980 onward in the United States to attempt to reverse all the civil rights gains achieved by the nonwhite in the United States from 1865 onward.  We failed to recognize the emergence of revanchists both domestically and globally.

Now we stand at a crossroads - especially those of us who are people of color in the United States.  Our strategy to date for dealing with the re-emergent threats we face has been inadequate, to say the least.  That strategy has consisted of joining ourselves to a "progressive" agenda which does not place our unique concerns first and foremost, because it was not set by us.  Those who push this agenda on us have instructed us to engage in a "strategy" which largely consists of begging the oppressor to be nice.  This hasn't worked.  We have allowed our struggle to be hijacked by people whose priorities are not our priorities.  And we who are people of color in the United States have allowed ourselves to be turned into the foot soldiers of someone else's agenda, in the hopes that we might be able to receive some of the crumbs which fall from the table of that someone else when they have accomplished their agenda.

We need to start constructing our own agenda.  That agenda must start with us coming together to create our own structures of self-reliance just as Gandhi did in India at the beginning of his struggle against British imperialism.  This will involve struggle and hard work.  We need to stop being afraid of struggle and hard work.  To quote from a certain book on strategic nonviolent resistance, we need to realize that "the guilt of falling into the predatory hands of [oppressors] lay in the oppressed society and, thus, the solution and liberation need to come from that society transformed through its work, education, and civility."  Or, to put it another way, if I get out of bed and go into the bathroom to brush my teeth and I find a wolf there, it is 100 percent the wolf's fault if I get eaten by the wolf, since most reasonable people would never have any reason to expect a wolf in their houses.  (That nasty wolf must have sneaked in!)  But if I live in a place where wolves are commonplace and are very vicious, and I know this to be true, and yet I take no precautions when I leave my house, it is still 100 percent the wolf's fault if I get eaten, because the wolf is an evil, predatory beast whose evil nature moved him to start chewing on me.  But in this case, it is also 100 percent my fault, because I knew that there were wolves near my house, and I knew what sort of creatures wolves are, and yet I did nothing to protect myself.  Chew on that for a while.

Note that this list is not exhaustive.  In particular, I ran out of time to discuss the emergence of potential pandemic threats and the threats to public health which have resulted from the spread of disinformation and denialism by the Global Far Right.  Nor did I discuss the geopolitical threat posed by national revanchism, although this naturally follows from a consideration of threats to human rights and social justice.  While Russia is a blatant example of a revanchist threat, it is by no means the only example.  And there is the question of how the emergence of artificial machine intelligence will evolve and how much of an impact it will make on our daily lives.   But I must leave these considerations for another day.

A Story That Illustrates: The Sea Goddess' Bloom

This weekend is once again one of those weekends in which I have very little time for anything except catching up on work.  So today's post will be extra short.  However, I'd like to recommend a story which was published recently in an online magazine/podcast combination known as Escape Pod.  The name of the story is "The Sea Goddess' Bloom" and it was written by Uchechukwu Nwaka, a Ph.D lecturer at the Alvan Ikoku Federal College of Education in Nigeria.  To me, the story and character arcs are a beautiful illustration of a point I made in a post on this blog titled, "How The Straight Subverts The Crooked."

The N-Soul Problem

In a couple of recent posts I discussed the phenomenon of megaprojects - that is, those large-scale, costly projects which are undertaken by a society when all of its members become united in the pursuit of  particular goals which the megaprojects are designed to meet.  The pursuit of the goal embodied by the megaproject alters the lives of everyone in the society undertaking the project, because it requires each member of the society to make a sacrifice in order to contribute toward the goal.  Perhaps the earliest historical example of a megaproject is the Tower of Babel mentioned in Genesis 11:1-9.  More recent examples of megaprojects include the war economies which were arranged by the various governments which fought World War Two, as well as the rebuilding of some of those economies which occurred in the aftermath of that war.  The U.S. space program became something of a megaproject in the 1960's when President Kennedy set the goal of landing an American on the moon before the end of the decade.  A much more prosaic example of a megaproject is the construction of the U.S. interstate highway system under President Eisenhower during the 1950's.

I'd like to suggest that megaprojects play a key role in the wholesale transformation and advance of a society.  I'd also like to suggest that there are three important conditions which must be fulfilled in order for a megaproject to realize its full transformative potential:

1. The leaders of a society must be wise in their choice of the goal which a megaproject is supposed to meet;
2. The leaders must present the vision and goal of the megaproject in a way that unites the souls of the members of society behind that goal;
3. And, the leaders must be wise in organizing the contributions of each member of the society in fulfilling that goal.

It is at points 2 and 3 that trouble can come.  Point 1 is also a place of potential trouble - if the leaders of a society choose an unrighteous goal, eventually their project will fail, as the builders of Babel found out.  But I'd like to focus especially on the pitfalls contained in points 2 and 3.  The success of point 2 depends not only on the wisdom and persuasiveness of the leaders of a society, but also on all the members of the society itself.  For instance, if the members of a society are generally unselfish and willing to make contributions toward a greater good, they can be more easily united behind a good goal.  If, however, the members of a society are rabidly selfish and individualistic, then it becomes much harder for any leader to unite them behind the sort of transformative goal that requires an unselfish contribution from each member.  The success or failure of point 3 depends on the humility (or lack thereof) of the leaders of the society.  The leaders will have the greatest chance of success if they recognize that the people from whom they are asking contributions bring not only their material wealth and the strength of their bodies, but also their minds (or souls) - that is, their unique ideas and perspectives.  Those leaders who set a goal and then "hire" the members of their societies "from the shoulders down" as mere drones to fulfill the grand plan of the leaders may find their grand plan failing.

Now one way to destroy a society's ability to conceive and implement megaprojects is to destroy that society's ability to combine.  This is what happened at the Tower of Babel when God confused the languages of everyone on earth because their unified goal was evil.  But it is also possible for evil agents to confuse the ability of a society to undertake large-scale transformative projects of good.  How is this done?  Simply by teaching or persuading a majority of the members of the society to become selfish, materialistic, and individualistic.  This has been the trajectory of American society over the last four decades under the influence of right-wing American media.  It should be no surprise therefore that the ability of the U.S. to engage in transformative megaprojects has declined as well (at the same time that loneliness and alienation in American society has increased).  There is an urgent need for the kind of transformative megaprojects that can enable the United States to weather the 21st century challenges of declining resource availability, increasing environmental degradation, and a changing climate.  But rigid adherence to free-market ideology and excessive reliance on private-sector solutions is hindering the emergence of the needed megaprojects.  A case in point is the success with which the American Right attacked the Green New Deal.

On the other hand, there are the societies of China and Singapore, in which the coordination between the State and private industry is much tighter, and there is still a fair amount of collective spirit.  As a result, China has the most advanced urban infrastructure in the world, and leads the world in rapid transit technology including high-speed rail.  In fact, China is now a major exporter of high-speed rail technology.  Similarly, the Chinese higher education system is the result of intense, goal-oriented State strategic planning which has begun to produce universities which are among the most prestigious in the world.  (Consider Tsinghua University, for instance, which is among the top twenty universities worldwide according to one metric.)  This is occurring at a time in which many American universities are declining in world rankings due to a lack of public funding for basic research.  And the story of Singapore is no less impressive, as demonstrated by the article cited at the end of this post.  But a problem arises in more collectivist societies if the leaders of those societies become insecure and hence begin to assert an unhealthy level of control over the initiative of their private members.  Hence, Chinese President Xi Jinping's actions and policies have begun to threaten the megaproject of Chinese transformation begun by Deng Xiaoping.

So we have two ends of a continuum: on the one hand, rampant, laissez-faire individualism which prevents people from combining in any way to achieve goals larger than the individual, and on the other hand, a central control which quashes individual initiative and stifles diverse insights.  The United States lies on one end of this continuum and is declining as a result.  China under Xi Jinping has begun to move toward the other end of the continuum and has begun to suffer as a result.  Physicists and astronomers sometimes talk about the n-body problem - that is, the problem of trying to mathematically describe the motions of three or more bodies in orbit around a common center.  I'd like to suggest what I call the "n-soul problem" - that is, how to organize people into groups that most effectively undertake transformative projects for good.  Those who successfully solve this problem will do well.  

For further reading on megaprojects, see "Megaprojects for Megaregions: Global Cases and Takeaways" by John Landis and the U.S. Department of Transportation.

The Activizing Literature of Jose Rizal

This is a "quickie" post.  Entrepreneurship is still keeping me very busy, as demonstrated by the fact that I worked straight through last week's holidays.  However, I want to take a moment to mention the Filipino author Jose Rizal, who was a key figure in the birth of the Philippine independence movement against the Spanish empire in the latter part of the 19th century.  Two of his main contributions to that movement consisted of his novels Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo.  It was the publication of these novels which led to his arrest and execution by the Spanish authorities in the Philippines.  The novels were also banned by the Spanish Philippine provincial government.  

I recently took a listen to an audiobook recording of both novels.  As I have mentioned before, audiobooks are a good way to consume literature while washing dishes, doing yardwork, brushing teeth, etc.  And if you want to do the same with these novels, you can find a free recorded reading of both novels at the website of a woman named Availle.  (No, Google, I did not mean "available," I meant "Availle"!  Fix your broken search algorithm...)  Some thoughts:

• Jose Rizal has an engaging literary style!  I like how he is able to weave humor into stories about very heavy times in the history of an oppressed people.  (For instance, you will meet a woman who torments her husband by yanking out his false teeth from time to time...)
• I like how he refutes the argument put by oppressors to their victims that the oppression is somehow necessary.
• I like how he illustrates the contradictions that arise in the societies of the dominated.
• I like the fact that his stories have a strong moral point.  His second novel illustrates especially well the main point I made in a post written last year for this blog.

Rizal is one of those authors who have lately illustrated to me the power of literature to make moral points, the power which good literature has to disturb the unjust peace of dominators by illustrating the contradictions in that peace.  This power is best exercised by those who have the talent and ability to skillfully use the tools of good literature in order to make a point with imagination, from unexpected and original perspectives, without falling into banality or dry preachiness.  Other examples of this ability can be seen in the magical realism of authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the "science fiction realism" of the crop of new post-90's Chinese writers such as Chen Qiufan or Hao Jingfang, as well as the social commentary of authors of long standing such as Han Song.  An example from the early 20th century in the United States who arouses my interest is Sinclair Lewis.  I am thinking that the next audiobook I listen to will be his novel Elmer Gantry.

In future posts, I might explore the subject of literature as an instrument of social change, and might also delve into some of the tools of transformative literature.  But if I do, I'll be sure to include a disclaimer that I am not a professional novelist!

Why Russian Power Must Be Destroyed

It's interesting (but hardly surprising) that some of the members of the incoming Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives are pushing for an end to U.S. aid to Ukraine as Ukraine fights to rid itself of Russian invaders.  What is a bit more disappointing is the presence of supposed voices on the American "left" who are clamoring for the same thing, and who are pleading for a "negotiated settlement" to the war in Ukraine.  

It is because of a failure on the part of decent people in the United States to organize that the Republicans won a majority of House seats in the 2022 elections.  It is because of a failure on the part of decent people in the U.S. that the voices clamoring for "negotiations" and an end to U.S. aid to Ukraine have gained any kind of traction.  But I'd like to remind the owners of these voices of a few things.  First, we can see Russia's invasion of Ukraine as part of a continuum of Russian actions designed to establish a global Russian empire.  Second, although Russia has set itself up as a leader of the Global Far Right and a champion of white supremacy, the invasion of Ukraine should teach those mouthpieces for "negotiation" and isolationism in the West that Russia does not even view all white people as equal.  By making a deal with the devil, these people may find themselves in the shocking position of being low rungs on a ladder whose rungs are stepped on and kicked by Russian feet.  When the deal with the devil sours, and these people feel the need to resist, they may find themselves targeted for mass murder in the same way that Russia is trying to commit genocide in Ukraine.

We must not forget that Russia has had global imperial ambitions for a very long time, and has pressed these ambitions aggressively even though Russia has nothing of substance to offer the rest of the world.  Consider the murderous narcissism of Vladimir Putin and of Aleksandr Dugin, and ask yourselves whether you want to be made into the rungs of their hierarchy.  If being even a Russian citizen is such a painful thing, how much worse would it be to be turned into a Russian subject?  Those who attempt to make deals with the devil eventually become the victims of the devil.

Russia must be driven completely out of Ukraine.  That means that Putin must be denied the chance to turn the war in Ukraine into a waiting game for Russia.  And Russian nationalists must be driven completely from power.  As long as Russia remains unrepentant, Russian power must be destroyed.

Megaprojects And The Curse of Babel

Today's post will be short.  I am zealously trying to guard my schedule because my business has three projects that are due within the next four weeks or so.  (This isn't much fun right now - I long to be an author of fiction sometimes, as I see pictures of authors with relaxed contemplative faces lounging at uncluttered desks...)  But I want to discuss the theme of last week's post a little more and offer a road map for further exploration.  

Last week's post discussed Elon Musk and his boasts that he will establish a colony on Mars.  That post described the physical challenges of trying to get to Mars via rockets whose thrust comes from chemical combustion.  Today I want to mention various estimates of the cost of such a venture.  According to a 2017 report by the Institute for Defense Analysis, the total cost of developing a manned mission to Mars is $120.6 billion in 2017 dollars.  According to former U.S. astronaut and ISS mission commander Steve Swanson, those costs would run from $100 billion to $500 billion.  Elon Musk is purportedly worth $195.6 billion at present.  He seems to have lost another $100 billion between the start of 2022 and now.  If he were to try to send even one mission to Mars out of his own pocket, I think it's safe to say that he would no longer be a high-flying celebrity afterward.  He might wind up needing to take a job as a shopping cart jockey or shelf stocker at a local supermarket.  (The Winco near my house is hiring, by the way.)

In other words, I don't think Musk has so much as a snowball's chance on Venus of sending anyone to Mars.  So why the hype about Musk and SpaceX, then?  That is a question whose answer will require a fair amount of research.  But its beginnings can be traced to the decision by the administration of George W. Bush to begin to privatize delivery of rocket-launched payloads into low Earth orbit.  Due to Musk's friendship with former NASA chief Michael Griffin, Musk's company was awarded the contract for the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program to develop commercial resupply rockets for the International Space Station in 2006, even though Musk's company "had never flown a rocket" before, according to Wikipedia.  This award is even more surprising, given that twenty well-established aerospace companies had also bid on the project.  

So it seems that from the start, SpaceX has been a beneficiary of corporate welfare.  And as a beneficiary of corporate welfare, SpaceX may well become a poster child of the effects of privatization on the ability of societies to engage in large-scale, transformative projects.  I'd like to suggest that privatized societies dominated by hyper-capitalists lose this ability over time.  I'd like to suggest further that societies which want to advance in substantive, paradigm-shifting ways need to learn to engage in megaprojects.  These megaprojects cannot be left entirely to the private sector.  Neither can they be entirely the province of governments.  Rather, both government and the private sector must learn to negotiate a healthy balance.  Where this balance is unhealthy, graft and corruption appear and megaprojects do not deliver on their promises.  Crony capitalism is a state of unbalance, and turning free market ideology into a fetish tends to turn societies into crony capitalist states dominated by large players with contradictory self-interests.  

The corrosive effect of crony capitalism on a society's ability to undertake large-scale projects is most clearly seen when a crony capitalist society is hit by a sudden challenge, test, or shock.  One example of this is the botched response of the Bush administration to Hurricane Katrina.  Another possible example may well be the botched response of the Japanese government and private industry to the Fukushima nuclear disaster.  (Author Haruki Murakami offers a surprisingly insightful criticism of the response to Fukushima in his book Novelist as a Vocation.)  For an example of the damage which a self-inflicted shock can cause to the systems of a crony capitalist society, we need look no farther than the failure of Russian military hardware and supplies during Russia's attempt to conquer Ukraine.  By the way, that failure is a fine example of the propagation of the outworkings of damnation in a society that ought to be damned.  Putin has reaped what he has sown - and he is not enjoying the reaping.  My hope is that things become even more unpleasant for him and for the Russian military. 

If crony capitalism has extended even to space exploration, I imagine that space itself will inflict yet another unexpected shock.  Lives will be lost.  Because Musk seems to want to portray himself as a doer of megaprojects, the rest of us must ask whether he represents a case of healthy balance between the public and private sector, or whether he is actually a case of crony capitalism.

It would be instructive to delve in more detail into the subject of megaprojects, their role in societal development, and the potential for forfeiting this development by means of privatization and crony capitalism.  But I'm out of time today...

You Won't Get To Mars That Way

Making predictions is hard - especially about the future.

- Ancient Internet Saying

Elon Musk has been much in the news lately.  Elon is purported to be the richest man on earth, and his corps of public-relations spin doctors present him as a man whose wealth is largely self-made.  Like Stephen Wolfram, Musk talks much about his supposed "genius."  Not only does Musk appear to be a "cerebral narcissist," but he also appears to be a "somatic narcissist" as well, based on the fact that he posted pictures of himself fighting a sumo wrestler and that he challenged Vladimir Putin to a fight.  When people make such grandiose claims as his, it's only natural for objective observers to want to put such claims to the test.  I'd like to consider myself such an objective observer (although some may disagree).  Today's post will examine the claims of Musk through my particular lens, and will try to show Musk as a typical case of a certain symptom of late capitalism.  Note: I am not interested in Musk's claim to be a bad sumo-wrestling dude.  Maybe he can sort that out with other contestants on some American "reality TV" show.

First, let's consider Musk the late-capitalism phenomenon.  To me he seems to represent the kind of "hero" who would have been quite at home in an Ayn Rand novel such as Atlas Shrugged.  That is to say, he is a poster child for the assertion by many of the wealthiest members of the Right that transcendent projects of human endeavor are best handled by heroes who have enormous wealth and not by governments or the collective efforts of societies.  Such assertions are the basis for claims that privatizing of government services leads to better service for the citizens who depend on those services.  Of course, the actual track record of privatization is horrible, and includes people whose houses have burned down because they could not afford the services of privatized fire departments.  Other notable side effects of privatization include the monstrous expansion of the private prison industry as well as the creation of professional mercenary corporations like Blackwater.  

Those who promote the benefits of privatization claim that it saves public funds.  Yet these are often the recipients of massive corporate welfare payments to rich people, also known as government subsidies.  In this, Elon Musk is no exception.  Musk started life with massive advantages already in place, as he is the wealthy son of a white South African family which built its wealth by means of the apartheid regime during its existence in South Africa.  And the companies which Musk has founded since he came to the United States have all been the recipients of corporate welfare, as documented in the following articles:

• "Elon Musk, Welfare King!" - Reason Magazine, March 2021
• "After Elon Musk criticized Bernie Sanders' brand of socialism, Sanders took him to task for taking billions of dollars in government support" - Business Insider, August 2020
• "'Total Hypocrisy': Elon Musk Rebuked for Hit on EV Subsidies After Building Empire With Billions in Taxpayer Funds" - Common Dreams, December 2021
• "Elon Musk's Growing Empire Is Fueled by $4.9 Billion in Government Subsidies" - Los Angeles Times, May 2015

It is an open question whether most of Musk's business ventures would have survived without subsidies and other corporate welfare.  This is particularly true of Tesla.

Now among the claims which Musk has made, one of his most spectacular is that he will boldly take mankind where no man has gone before.  This claim also includes the claim that he, a private individual with enormous wealth, will manage this feat even though the space agencies of various governments have not managed to do this.  Therefore his claim goes beyond merely putting people into space.  It also transcends merely going to the moon.  Nay, it reaches even to the planet Mars.  It is this particular claim which I'd like to examine in more detail.

First, a bit of background about space travel.  To send a spacecraft from Earth to anywhere else, one must provide that spacecraft with a certain amount of kinetic energy.  That kinetic energy is given by the equation 

Kinetic Energy = 0.5 x (spacecraft mass) x (spacecraft velocity squared)

At a minimum, this amount of kinetic energy must be greater than the potential energy represented by the distance from your target to the surface of the Earth (and to a much lesser extent, the surface of the Sun since the sun is much farther away).  Potential energy represents the energy you must supply to an object to raise it a certain distance above the surface of a body that produces a gravitational field.  If Mars was stationary with respect to the Earth, then in order to reach Mars you would need to supply only the minimum kinetic energy required to equal the difference in potential energy of the gravitational field of the Earth and Sun at the position of Mars relative to the Earth's surface.  But it would take you a really long time to get to Mars!  

However, Mars is not stationary, but moving in its own orbit around the sun.  So your spacecraft must have additional velocity in order to catch up with Mars and enter into orbit around it.  Supplying the energy to move from a moving Earth to a moving Mars is an expensive proposition.  If we therefore wanted to supply only the minimum energy required for such a trip, we'd need to inject our spacecraft into what is known as a Hohmann transfer orbit.  A trip from Earth to Mars using a Hohmann orbit would take 259 days, according to the NASA source in the preceding link.  So a manned mission to Mars would require a spacecraft capable of keeping at least four people alive for nearly ten months - unless you wanted to bring those people alive and safe back to Earth again after their mission to Mars was completed, in which case your mission would require another 259 days, plus the time required for the Earth and Mars to align in such a way that a Hohmann transfer from Mars to Earth would be successful.  We're talking about a mission that could last over three and a half years.

That's a lot of time, and thus a manned spacecraft would require extensive life-support systems on the same order of magnitude as the systems on the International Space Station.  But there are two further wrinkles: first, the effects of prolonged weightlessness on human bodies, and second, the fact that astronauts would need to be shielded from lethal radiation from both cosmic rays and solar storms.  It is well-known by now that prolonged weightlessness produces harmful changes in human bodies (see this, this, and this, for instance), so missions that use Hohmann transfers might need some means of exposing humans to near-Earth gravity on a daily basis.  This would require centrifuges, which would add mass to the spacecraft.  Radiation shielding would also add mass.

So let's talk about mass.  The International Space Station has a mass of 450 tons and can support seven astronauts.  But the ISS is also regularly resupplied from Earth.  Let's optimistically assume that a crew of four astronauts would need a spacecraft with a mass of 200 tons for a Mars mission.  How much fuel would it take to get them to Mars?  The answer to that question is found in the rocket equation, namely

Wet mass (that is, rocket + fuel) = rocket mass x exp((change in velocity)/(exhaust velocity))

So for a rocket that had a 200-ton payload and that needed to change its velocity by an amount needed for a Hohmann orbit, we could calculate the fuel required.  I leave that exercise to you, although I will give you the escape velocity of the earth: 11.2 kilometers (or 7 miles) per second.  I'll also give you another hint: Elon Musk has focused on rockets which burn a mixture of liquid methane and liquid oxygen.  An optimistic exhaust velocity for such a mix is 3,780 meters per second according to one source.  If you do the math (which I don't have time to do now, but which I may get around to in the next week), you will see what a sizable amount of chemical propellant is required to get your spacecraft to Mars.  And we haven't begun to discuss how to get it back to Earth again!  To get a glimpse of how someone else solved the rocket equation, consider Expedition Mars by Martin J.L. Turner.  He calculated that a spacecraft with a mass of 145 tons would need a total fuel mass of 5,000 tons.  That's 10 million pounds of fuel.  And that's just to get to Mars.  It would take another 400 tons of fuel to return to Earth.

Now you can travel faster than the minimum required velocity for a Hohmann transfer, but that will require more fuel, and the fuel requirement increases exponentially the faster you want to go.  If you switch from chemical rockets to rockets powered by nuclear fission, it is possible to save a significant amount of reaction mass.  But worldwide rates of extraction of naturally occurring fission fuel have already peaked, according to the German Energy Watch Group.  Making artificial fission fuel in breeder reactors has never yet been commercially viable, although the process has been used to create small amounts of plutonium.  But breeder reactors don't last long, as they suffer from neutron embrittlement.  Building a fleet of fission-powered manned spacecraft might therefore not have much of a future.  So Musk might barely be able to send a few people to Mars (although he might bankrupt himself in the process), but it appears that neither he nor anyone else has the ability to establish a colony there.  Speaking of colonies, the colonists would likely need to carry soil or expensive chemical processing apparatus from Earth to Mars if they wanted to live there long-term.  The ground on Mars is toxic to Earth-based plants.  So forget about becoming a Martian farmer.  And Mars has no free oxygen or natural shielding from cosmic rays or radiation from solar flares.  It would be a really hard place to try to colonize.

And Musk's boast has been that he will establish a colony there.  Musk's boast about Mars thus appears to be a boast without much basis in fact.  It may be that during the last ten years we have developed the ability to send a 150-ton or 200-ton spacecraft to Mars - but the journey would have been prohibitively expensive even for governments, let alone individuals, which is why no government has done it.  I think putting humans in such a craft and bringing them back again alive is still beyond our capability.  Making such a mission pay benefits that are worth the expense is even farther beyond our capability.  The challenges of such a journey appear to place a limit on the modern myth of the uber-wealthy hyper-capitalist self-made hero.  These challenges demonstrate once again that there are challenges beyond the powers of any individual, challenges which can only be met by the collective response of societies.  Such a conclusion may cause some of Elon's flying monkeys to choke a bit - but such is life.  As for me, I don't think he, much less "we", will be going to Mars anytime soon.  Maybe Musk would be better off wrestling Putin.

P.S. For more information on the life-support challenges of a manned mission to Mars, please see "Red risks for a journey to the red planet: The highest priority human health risks for a mission to Mars," Nature, November 2020.

P.P.S Today's post is an example of the kind of post that I can currently write with only a modest amount of pain and suffering, since I already have a fairly large background knowledge of the subject and therefore I don't need to do as much research.  I still owe readers some posts which I promised over a year ago, but those posts will involve high levels of pain and suffering, due to the large amount of research and analysis involved.  Just saying that I haven't forgotten...  Also, I'm really irked by the way so many websites that present technical information have dumbed down their content over the last several years.  (See this for instance.)  Their coverage of many topics has collapsed into mere titillating "soundbytes" full of cute pictures and sometimes baseless hype, and their web pages are now full of paid ads, which reduces one's ability to take them seriously.  This is a crying shame.

Focus On The Family Continues to Send Spam Email To People Who Don't Want It

I have to wonder how or why Google blithely gave my email address to people with whom I want no contact.  Why, for instance, have they given my email address to Focus on the Family, a right-wing white supremacist arm of the American evangelical church?  From the screenshot below, one can plainly see that FOTF does not care about religion per se, nor about the worship and obedience to Christ, but only about helping the Rethuglican Party during this year's midterm elections.  

Let me "speak the truth in love" as Ephesians 4 says - but I must warn FOTF that my love is tough love.  You thugs supported the presidency of Donald Trump.  You are utterly corrupt religious parasites and you have no business trying to tell me how to vote.  Don't call me; I'll call you if I ever want to hear from you.  But here's a hint - you probably shouldn't waste time hanging around your phone.

Why Is Focus On The Family Sending Spam Email To People Who Don't Want It?

It's odd, but over the last two weeks I have received a number of spam emails from Focus On The Family, a right-wing, white evangelical organization whose leaders were vocal supporters of Donald Trump and whose leaders have also been friendly toward Vladimir Putin in the past.  I have tried to unsubscribe from their emails, but this does not seem to be doing any good.  So let me use this blog to send FOTF a message: I reject you and your toxic and false brand of religion.  Please stop sending emails to people who don't want to hear from you.  You'll never convince me to vote Republican.

An Unsurprising Surprise (Coping With Nasty Weather)

There are two kinds of surprises in life, I suppose.  The first kind is the sudden event that no one could have foreseen, and the second is the sudden event that could have been foreseen by anyone with decent situational awareness.  Of course, the greater a person's situational awareness, the greater the proportion of events which the person can put into the second category of surprises.  Take lightning, for instance.  Anyone who is outdoors during a thunderstorm should know that he or she can be struck.  But sometimes lightning can strike out of a clear blue sky.  Before the advent of radar and satellite weather imagery, such events could be considered a genuine surprise.  Today, not so much.

Anyone who has watched the political climate in the world and particularly in the United States can see that we have been having some stormy weather.  The latest instance of this is the savage hammer attack against the husband of Nancy Pelosi by David Depape, a 42 year old male drug user aligned with QAnon, anti-Semitism, and right-wing conspiracy theories.  While shocking, such events as this are hardly surprising.  Unfortunately we live in a political climate which has been engineered to produce just such events.  Those who did the engineering are those defenders of white supremacy who are genuinely terrified at the prospect of the emergence of a world which they will have to share on an equal footing with all the other people in the world.  These people were energized into action by the gains of the American civil rights struggle of the 1960's, and have been working tirelessly ever since to roll back those gains.  Their energies were kicked into overdrive by the presidency of Barack Obama, as white supremacists vowed to themselves that they would create a world in which such power-sharing could never happen again.  

We know the result of their efforts.  Under Donald Trump, we got an acceleration of the social and environmental diseases which are typical of Republican, conservative governance: an increase of mass shootings due to easy access to guns, an increase in wealth and income inequality, a shredding of social safety nets, an acceleration of climate change (including life-threatening wildfires on a massive scale), a cannibalizing of government, an increase in persecution, oppression, and outright murder of people of color, and an increasing destruction of the ability of the United States to make large-scale coordinated responses to large-scale emergent threats.  This is why in 2020, so many nonwhite nations in the developing world were so much better than the United States in their response to COVID-19.  

Now the Republican Party is continuing to field political candidates who are nutcases.  We should not be surprised by the political violence we are seeing when we also see these nutcases openly calling for physical violence.  (See this, this, and this also.)  And the Republicans are trying to win elections by their usual strategy of lying.  They say that America is being swept by a dangerous crime wave under the Democrats, even though there is no evidence of this.  (In the city where I live, there are candidates for City Council who are trying to say that our city is suffering increased crime.  If that's the case, I haven't noticed.)  They say that the American economy is suffering under the Democrats.  However, this statement is refuted by the findings of institutions such as the Brookings Institute and the Center for American Progress.  They blame President Biden for the high gas prices we have seen across the United States in 2022.  However, their blame is dishonest, as the reality is that even without the consequences of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, global oil production cannot expand further.  In fact, Saudi Arabian oil production is either very near or at its peak.  And if we buy Russian oil, we finance the evil deeds of a would-be emperor, a dictator and murderer named Vladimir Putin.  The high price of gasoline (petrol for those who are British) should be seen as yet one more proof that the world is going to have to change its way of living very soon.

It could be asked how we who have been historically oppressed let ourselves fall into such a dangerous situation in which an organized group of narcissistic, fascist, supremacist oppressors could become such a threat to the rest of us.  Why, for instance, did we not organize ourselves for our own collective good to build our own nonviolent power?  Why was so much time wasted?  Why did we not create strategies to effectively deal with the increasing concentration of power - media power especially! - which took place from 1980 onward?  Fox News should never have been allowed to become such a powerful cult.  But asking such questions at such a time as this seems almost like asking too late - as if we were a party of golfers who had continued our play even as storm clouds gathered and we found ourselves stricken down by a bolt from heaven, a bolt we should have foreseen, and now those of us who survived were asking ourselves why we had been struck.  A more urgent question is the question of what we should do now.

I myself don't entirely know the answer to that question.  But I do have the following suggestions.

• First, have the right world-view.  According to the world-view which I hold, we live in a moral universe ruled by a righteous Creator who has promised that the soul that sins shall die (Ezekiel 18:4) , that everyone who exalts himself will be humbled (Matthew 23:12), that the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23), that whatever a man sows, this he will also reap (Galatians 6:7), that those who make themselves great by destroying or oppressing their fellow human beings will themselves ultimately be destroyed (James 5:1-6).  This is why I am confident that those who violently push white supremacy will ultimately fail.  Even now, I see the outworkings of damnation propagating through these people.  Some signs of this propagation I cannot reveal now - although those who read sociological analyses of American society can spot the trends.  Even secular sociologists and economists have lately noticed how those who pursue certain goals are  frequently destroyed by the very means they use to pursue those goals.
• Second, focus on building your own internal power so that you may reduce your dependence on the dominant society.  I am thinking of a passage from Recovering Nonviolent History by Maciej Bartkowski.  (Disclaimer: I really like Dr. Bartkowski's book, but I don't anymore like the organization which Dr. Bartkowski belongs to, namely, the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict.  If you want to know why, please check out some of the links in the sidebar of this blog.)  Page 18 of his book contains the following quote: "...the guilt of falling into the predatory hands of [oppressors] lay in the oppressed society, and, thus, the solution and liberation need to come from that society transformed through its work, education, and civility.  Victims and the seemingly disempowered are thus their own liberators as long as they pursue self-organization, self-attainment, and development of their communities."
• Third, and most important, maintain nonviolent discipline.  The filthiness of the Right has been made abundantly plain over the last several years.  This filthiness has become a powerful liability to them.  In order to remove this handicap, they have tried to claim that both they and their intended victims are filthy.  Do not give them any help in their attempt to blame both sides for a conflict which they themselves started.  By all means, vote.  However, no matter what happens afterward, do not answer the violence of the Right with your own violence.  Beware of engaging in protest marches, as these can be easily infiltrated by violent agents provocateurs from the Right.  Do not give these people any opening for casting blame on you.  Please do me a favor and read the posts I wrote on strategic nonviolent resistance under the heading "From Dictatorship to Democracy."

A Clarifying of Stance, Part 2

From time to time I check my readership stats, as I want this blog to be informative and I want to gauge its impact.  I noticed that over the last few days, people have been exploring some rather early posts in my back catalog.  I am flattered by your curiosity, although I must warn you that some of my perspectives have changed over the years, due to the acquisition of newer information which superseded some of my early assumptions.  So today's post is a bit of a grain of salt for you who are exploring those early posts.  As a sign I once saw on a co-worker's desk once read, "I don't always agree with everything I say."

Generally, I do agree with everything I have written from the end of 2016 onward.  I also agree with some of the statements of the very early posts of this blog, namely that the modern industrial societies of the First World are running up against limits to growth.  These limits consist of resource limits and the cumulative effects of environmental degradation.  No reasonable person can disagree with this.  There is one other theme that I explored in parts and pieces throughout various posts from the start of this blog until now, namely, that there is a powerful, well-organized movement among the wealthiest and most privileged people to roll back all the civil rights gained by the world's poorer people - especially those who are nonwhite - during the 20th century.  I'd like to suggest that this movement would have emerged regardless of the emergence of resource constraints and their effect on economic growth.  Therefore, those of us who have become once again targets of oppressors must learn to thrive while navigating a threat environment.  My posts from 2017 onward have largely explored the question of how to do this.

One last caution.  Many of the people who were writing about the impacts of resource depletion, climate change, and American fragility from 2007 to around 2015 were actually aligned with white supremacy, the Global Far Right, and the Russian government.  I am thinking of how many of these people aligned themselves with the candidacy and later presidency of Donald Trump.  I am also thinking of how their earlier suggestions for dealing with the emergent crises of the early 21st century all revolved around buying a large-acre doomstead somewhere in the western United States and stocking up on guns, gold bullion, and baked beans in preparation for the zombie apocalypse.  Let me just say straight up that these people were and are dead wrong.  Their hyper-individualist responses have actually made them and their society much more fragile.  Look at the hyper-individualist responses to the COVID pandemic in the United States, and compare our shamefully high death rate from 2020 onward to the much lower death rates in many of the more collectivist societies of the nonwhite world and the developing world.  And as for the Russians, I hope that my posts on Russia from 2017 onward have completely erased any pro-Russian bias that exists in my posts that are earlier than 2017.  Please see my post titled, "A Clarifying of Stance" if you want more detail.  Vladimir Putin is a thieving little man in a bunker, and Putin's regime is a good-for-nothing piece of garbage.

The Woodcutter's Dull Ax

If the ax is blunt and one doesn't sharpen the edge,

then he must use more strength;

but skill brings success.

- Ecclesiastes 10:10, World English Bible

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I signed up for a paid audiobook subscription during the waning months of the COVID lockdowns.  For the price of my subscription I get one credit per month which I can apply toward a free download of an audiobook, and I also get audiobooks at reduced prices if I decide I want more than one new audiobook per month.  At first I used my audiobook credits to obtain downloads of fiction (particularly Chinese science fiction), but lately I have been sampling some nonfiction.  So it was that this past month I stumbled across a book called Rest by an author named Alex Soojung-Kim Pang.  

As advertised on the audiobook website, Pang's book invites us to "Sit back and relax and learn about why overworking and under resting can be harmful to yourself and your career."  And the website also informs us that "If work is our national religion, Pang is the philosopher reintegrating our bifurcated selves."  Such statements intrigued me precisely because for the last seven months, I have been working like a dog.  While there are elements of entrepreneurship which I have enjoyed, overwork has not been one of them.  So I gave Mr. Pang's book a listen or two to see what I could learn.  Below are some of my observations gleaned from my listening.

First, a few observations about Mr. Pang.  It seems that he is a member of that sector of the economies of the First World known as the "advice industry."  This "industry" includes many "content" producers whose advice is aimed at aspirational members of the middle and upper middle class.  Some of their offerings are well-researched and contain original and valuable insights, but other offerings have a familiar snake-oil smell to them.  (Think of Norman Vincent Peale for an early 20th-century example, or Tony Robbins or Tim Ferriss for a couple of modern-day examples.  Note also the dissatisfaction which some people are now expressing toward the advice industry as they see its use as a tool of capitalism.)  

But let's get to Pang's book, shall we?  Rest is laid out thus: Pang's thesis statement is set forth in the introduction and the first two chapters.  Then the next six chapters describe the day-to-day setup of the  habits of rest in the lives of elite creatives, drawing on a number of historical examples.  The last four chapters describe the ancillary activities of recreation of these creatives, some of which can be fit into a day-to-day schedule, and some of which are larger activities which take creative people out of their daily routines for a while.

Pang's thesis statement is something that I think most reasonable people would agree with, namely, that appropriate rest is the necessary precondition for excellent work.  When we don't rest appropriately, our work suffers.  As he says, "I argue that we misunderstand the relationship between work and rest.  Work and rest are not polar opposites...Further, you cannot work well without resting well."  Pang rightly points out the contrast between the harried lives of most employees (especially "knowledge workers") and their employers versus the unhurried pace of the lives of the people who were responsible for some of the greatest discoveries and innovations of the modern industrial era.  

Focusing more closely on the harried lives of workers, Pang says, "As a result, we see work and rest as binaries.  Even more problematic, we think of rest as simply the absence of work, not as something that stands on its own or has its own qualities....When we think of rest as work's opposite, we take it less seriously and even avoid it.  Americans work more and vacation less than almost any other nationality in the world..."  Finally, Pang's thesis statement contains the following words: "Rest is not something that the world gives us.  It's never been a gift...If you want rest, you have to take it."

A problem arises when we move from Pang's thesis statement to the chapters describing the day-to-day routines of history's greatest creatives.  The problem does not lie in the efficacy of the routines themselves.  In particular, the observation that the best creatives spend no more than four or five hours a day working deeply on their craft has been validated by the research of K. Anders Ericsson and others who studied the role of deliberate practice in producing expert performance.  Similarly, there is abundant evidence for the benefits of establishing morning routines, taking daily walks in order to clear one's head, taking naps during the workday in order to recharge, and getting enough sleep each night.  The research cited by Pang also validates the larger ancillary activities of recreation which he describes in the latter part of his book.  (I really, really like the idea of sabbaticals!  I've got to get me one of those things...)

The problem with incorporating these things into the daily lives of a significant number of workers is that they fly in the face of the culture of late capitalism which has been created and is being maintained by the world's richest people at the present time.  Therefore, these habits and practices are countercultural - and those who seek to practice these habits expose themselves to the possibility that they will suffer for trying to do such things.  Take doing only four or five hours of deep, focused work per day for instance.  I can truthfully tell you that I have never worked for an employer who would have agreed to such an arrangement.  From the time I obtained my bachelors degree until the time I quit my job to start a business, every employer I have ever worked for insisted on at least 40 hours a week, broken down into at least eight hours every day.  In those workplaces where the technical staff were unionized, we were allowed only two ten-minute breaks per day and one 30-minute break for lunch.  In the non-union places, 40 hours a week was not enough.  I remember one coworker of mine who worked 50 to 55 hours a week on a regular basis and who was kept alive by regular doctor's prescriptions.  I worked for another office whose local client base was shrinking due to mismanagement, and whose bosses offered me the chance to keep my job only if I was willing to travel extensively.

Take naps also.  For a long time employers frowned upon employees sleeping anywhere within sight of their managers.  This meant that if you needed a nap, you sometimes had to get into your car and drive a couple of blocks away from the office to sleep.  Admittedly there has been something of a shift in corporate culture over the last decade, in that a number of corporate offices now have designated "wellness rooms" where workers can retreat in order to decompress.  However, the first time I worked in a place that had a wellness room, I was told that the big boss in my office would allow employees to use the room as long as they didn't sleep in there.  This restriction applied even at lunch.  What a doofus!

In other words, I don't think Pang's book adequately accounts for the functional, structural factors which have driven rest from the lives of many American workers.  To be fair, the introduction of his book does mention the structural factors of "automation, globalization, the decline of unions, and a winner-take-all economy."  He also mentions the continuous increase in living expenses (especially housing expenses) which makes people hostages to longer hours and longer commutes.  But the tone of his book - especially of the introduction - implies that our failure to engage in the kind of deep rest he advocates is a result of our own ignorance or wrong attitudes, as exemplified in the following quote: "When we define ourselves by our work, by our dedication and effectiveness and willingness to go the extra mile, then it's easy to see rest as the negation of all those things...When we think of rest as work's opposite, we take it less seriously and even avoid it."

Because the radical adoption of the habits of the creatives cited by Pang is such a threat to the present order (especially in the U.S.), I think Mr. Pang fudges a bit in his advice to people who want to apply these habits to their own lives.  When I say that he "fudges", I mean that he sometimes takes the radical embodiment of a radical idea and whittles it down to a size and shape that does not threaten the established order.  For instance, in his chapter on sabbaticals, the radical idea of taking extended time off is weakened by citing modern executives who take two weeks off per year and label these breaks as sabbaticals.  I had to laugh at this, as the first job I had after I served in the military as a young adult was an assembler at a defense plant.  The plant was a union shop and new employees got only two weeks off, plus one week of sick leave.  Big whoop-de-doo.  There are other examples of what I would consider fudging in Pang's book, but if you want to spot them, you'll have to read the book.  

A couple of last observations.  In his choice to cite those creatives who were gentlemen of means in Victorian England, Pang elides the fact that these people had time to set up their lives for maximal recreation and deep work precisely because they were the beneficiaries of a social and economic system which offloaded their dirty work onto the less fortunate members of the British caste system.  This point is made abundantly clear by the description of the lives of coal miners in George Orwell's book The Road to Wigan Pier.  I am particularly struck by one of the Victorian sons of privilege whose life was mentioned in Pang's book: Sir John Lubbock.  It is amazing to me that Pang cites him as a beloved reformer who saw the benefit of rest for all of British society when one considers that his "Early Closing Bill" restricted the working hours of British youth under 18 to no more than 74 hours per week.  Consider that this still adds up to over ten hours a day, 7 days a week.  What a joke of a reform.

However, having made my objections, I still think that the central idea of Pang's book has a certain merit.  (I'd also like to mention that Pang seems to be trying to organize a movement for good in this country.)  In particular, I agree with the idea that there is a certain cluster of optimum life arrangements which must be sought by those who desire to do groundbreaking intellectual work.  And I'd like to suggest something which was not found in Rest: namely, the idea that America is suffering an innovation crisis (see this also) precisely because the overlords of modern American society have driven rest out of the lives of most workers by making those optimum arrangements for rest impossible.  I think that will have consequences rather soon.

Man, You Got To Figure It Out Yo'self

(Pardon the title.  I've been listening to some old Billy Joel lately...)

I have been following Cosmic Connies' blog Whirled Musings for a while, and I really appreciated her latest post.  The first part of that post deals with Ginni Thomas, the crazy-mixed-up wife of crazy-mixed-up U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence (Uncle Tom) Thomas.  It appears that she got involved in a cult during her young adulthood, then saw the light and got out of the cult.  After leaving the cult, she did some very good personal work which helped to build an exit path for others who had been sucked into cults.  But much later, she fell into the present day cult of white supremacy and the conspiracies that have been manufactured to express the existential fears of white supremacists whose supremacy is now fading away.

A few observations.  First, I think that the cults which hapless rubes fall into tend to reveal a lot about the motivations and values of those rubes.  I am thinking of those who fall into money cults, for instance.  That Ginni Thomas could fall into the cult of Trump and the associated cults such as QAnon does not speak well about her inner motives and values.  But let's consider the issue of cults from a larger perspective.  It seems to me (having myself fallen into a cult once and gotten out of it after many years) that people who fall into cults are looking for a certainty in life that simply cannot be guaranteed.  Therefore they look for gurus who will show them the minutest details of a supposed "One True Way" so that they can regiment every aspect of their lives to fit this supposed "Way" without having to do any thinking of their own.  Gurus tend to be people who lay out every detail of all the steps which the lives of their followers should take, including what to eat, what to wear, whom to marry, and where to work.  The guru's false promise is that if you follow all the steps which he (or sometimes she) lays out, you will never make any mistakes.  Cults provide both leaders and followers with an illusion of control.

But life can't be controlled the way the cults promise, simply because although we can know the past and experience the present, we cannot know much about the future except in its broadest brush strokes.  In many cases, all we can do for the near and intermediate future is estimate possibilities and probabilities.  There are general principles (especially moral principles) that we can and should apply in navigating those possibilities and probabilities.  And we can be confident that sooner or later, the moral principles will always work themselves out.  But we can't always know in advance the precise details by which this working out takes place.  People probably shouldn't expect a voice telling them to buy a certain lunch from a certain restaurant on a certain day.  You'll have to figure that out on your own.  

So in my own post-cult life, I have had three main priorities.  The first is to un-learn the malignant ways which I learned in while in the cult.  The second is to figure out for myself the general moral principles which I should follow.  Let me explain this one a bit.  I am a Bible-believing Christian and I intend to stay that way.  But I have had to realize that most of what I was taught by mainstream American evangelicalism is completely false.  (How could it be otherwise, when so many white evangelicals refuse to obey the Sermon On The Mount, when they are armed to the teeth, when they vote for slimy politicians like Trump?)  So I need to construct my own theology.  It is a work in progress.   The goals of that theology are that I myself may become a decent person, and that I may not get fooled again.  The third priority is to recover some of what was stolen from me.  To borrow a bit from Shawn Colvin,

I have lost too much sleep

and I'm gonna find it.

And as for the one in five Americans who still believe in QAnon or the Americans who still belong to the cult of Trump, I can only say that by their own evil they have made themselves the willing victims of "a politician who has fallen into populism and begun to make impossible promises...Naturally, his lies will come to light before long." (The Courage To Be Disliked, Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga)  Some of the lies which have come to light have come from the anti-vaxxer and COVID denialist members of that group, many of whom are now pushing up daisies because they became victims of COVID.  Based on my reading of trends, I think that life is about to serve up a number of other painful contradictions of the things which these people believe.

The Exports of Grandma's House

In a previous blog post I mentioned my discovery of Chinese science fiction and how it has become a manifestation of a new cultural soft power.  As part of that discovery, I stumbled a few months ago on a delightful short story titled, "Summer at Grandma's House" (" 祖母家的夏天"), written by Hao Jingfang (郝景芳).  (See this also to get a fuller picture of Ms. Hao.)  The story is ostensibly about the process by which a young college student's struggle to identify his future direction in life is resolved during the student's summer stay with his grandmother.  The grandmother is not the central figure in the story.  However, she does play a major role, and thus we get a rather full glimpse of what sort of person she is and what she does with her life.  It is that glimpse which attracted my attention to the point that the young man's story became almost secondary to me.  For it is the picture of Grandma that illustrates some of the themes which my blog has addressed over the last four or five years, and especially during the last two years.  So let's go to Grandma's house together, shall we?

First, although it's only incidental to the story, let's take a look at the house itself.  The story describes the house as a "little two-story bungalow...at the foot of the mountain, its red roof hidden in the dense treetops."  As I tried to visualize the scene, the word "bungalow" caught my attention, as this was a word which I had heard in conversation from time to time over the years, yet whose definition had never been explained to me.  (To add a bit of confusion, it appears from Google's translation algorithm that the original Chinese phrase could also be translated "villa."  But in my mind, that translation ruins the picture somewhat.  What do computers know anyway?)  So I looked up "bungalow"... and discovered that the word has more than one definition.  The definition I liked best (which also matches the description of the house in the story) is "a small house or cottage that is either single-storey or has a second storey built into a sloping roof (usually with dormer windows), and may be surrounded by wide verandas." - Wikipedia.  Think of something like this, except that the roof color is wrong:

A rather ordinary house, no?  But let's consider the things Grandma did in that house.  For Grandma was a biologist/biochemist who had been a college professor before her retirement and who now had a lab on the second floor of her house.  In other words, although the house looked quite ordinary, there were extraordinary things going on inside it.  The manifestation of hidden extraordinariness extended even to the furnishings of the house, whose front door opened by pushing on the side closest to the hinges and farthest from the doorknob, where the oven looked like a refrigerator, where what looked like a table lamp was actually a mousetrap, ...

The extraordinariness of Grandma is seen most strongly in her lab and the experiments she does with things such as transposons and photosynthesizing bacteria.  Her research has implications and consequences which I won't get into now, in order not to ruin the story for anyone who wants to read it.  But there are high-level conclusions which we can take from Grandma's work.  Here is a woman who has devoted herself to learning to engage in beautifully good work to meet necessary needs, as Titus 3:14 says.  Moreover, the work she does requires the possession of rare and valuable skills.  As Cal Newport has pointed out in his books So Good They Can't Ignore You and Deep Work, it is the possession of rare and valuable skills that meet genuine needs that gives the possessor a certain social, cultural, and economic power.  (Disclaimer: although I have enjoyed Cal Newport's early work and writings, I think he has begun to go off the rails a bit during the last few years.  Being friends with people like Joe Rogan is morally sketchy in my opinion, to say the least.)

Therefore we see that the cultivation of rare and valuable skills in the pursuit of beautifully good work is the means by which people build their own internal power, and it is the means by which communities and peoples - especially those peoples who have been historically oppressed - build their own collective power.  And this power can be built in small spaces and ordinary settings like the second floor of an elder woman's small bungalow.  In fact, it can be built in spaces even tinier and more prosaic than this.  (Want examples?  See this and this.  That second link is from a Filipina accountant and describes her home business space.)

The cultivation of this kind of power is a big step toward individual and collective self-sufficiency.  But when we think of self-sufficiency, we must shed a bit of cultural baggage that has been introduced into the societies of the developed world over the last decade or so.  I no longer believe that self-sufficiency is achievable by going entirely off-grid, due to the fact that we must all live in societies whose members must each pay some of the collective cost of maintaining those societies.  Thus, I am not really impressed by the late Jules Dervaes and his family, nor am I impressed with their "Path to Freedom" house and the rather extravagant claims they have made about their lifestyle - a lifestyle which they attempted to support by trademarking the English phrase "urban homestead" in order to force people to pay royalties to them.  Moreover, I have never really believed in the claims of people like Tim Ferriss who boast of being able to achieve retirement before 40 by building passive income streams.  The promise of "passive income" seems immoral to me, as does the type of character who chases after such a promise.  Such characters frequently get taken to the cleaners during their quest.  (See this for a humorous take on the subject.  And don't quit your day job!)  Sooner or later, both people and societies come to realize that those who have actual power are the people who produce valuable things that people actually need.  This, for instance, is why nations dominated by "service economies" are potentially weaker than nations that are dominated by manufacturing economies, unless the services offered support the production of beautifully good and necessary work.

Therefore, those of us who want the power we need to live unmolested in a hostile world must give ourselves to learning, and to self-education when other avenues of education are denied us.  As the Good Book says, "And let our people also learn to engage in beautifully good work..."  We may have to give up a number of evenings and weekends in our pursuit.  And we must learn to protect the fruits of our labors in order to make sure that those fruits are not stolen from us.  For we live in an age of dishonesty.  Therefore we must learn to be strategic.