CDC would like everyone feeling sick to stand over here, on the big red X

"No big deal" a spokesman for the CDC said earlier today. " We just think it would help if anyone who might have swine flu just sort of stands over here, on the big red X, underneath the giant anvil."

the never ending wisdom of shakespeare

"Neither a borrower nor a lender be."- polonius, in hamlet

I was struck as i listened to yet another NPR article on how weird it is to be promoting debt accumulation in a monetary crisis by the fact that shakespeare anticipated our position in Hamelt. It has always seemed ironic to me that some of the most sage wisdom often quoted from Hamlet was conveyed through the mouth of Polonius.

Polonius is a derivtive of the old Comedia Del Arte character Dotore. Dotore was a cynical skewering of the idiocy of supposedly learned doctors of the middle ages. Polonius is portrayed throughout Hamlet as the old fool. He is long winded, pedantic, easily confused and often wrong. There is however, one bright moment for polonius, when he gives his son, Laertes advice before the young man goes off to college. It is in this speech that he gives the famous advice "to thine own self be true."

As i listened to the NPR article i began wondering if you could argue that, by putting the advice on borrowing and lending in the voice of the fool, Shakespeare might have been tuning into a modern economic truth. Our economists are now shouting at us to "Both a borrower and a lender be."

Lost in Teh Biosphere

If you liked my story the Dirty detective, or just want to see more of what I wrote, send me an email at mr qixo te @ gmail. com with no spaces. (I do that to keep the webcrawlers from grabbing my email.)

I will be glad to send you a copy.

It now has a new title. Dirty Detective was always a working title. The new title is Lost in teh biosphere. The main character has been renamed "The Finder". Also the second issue is now complete, and I think it is coming along like gangbusters.

Seth

A peek at the comic script I am working on.

Excerpt from
Dirty Detective #1 The Finding Part 1
By Seth Franklin Copyright sethfrank@sbcglobal.net, (310) 351-9395 1/24/2009 All rights reserved

Page 1
Panel 1
A street filled with garbage and no cars. It is pre-dawn. A lot of the garbage is made of strange creatures that are half animal and half appliance. It is as quiet as a big city street can be before people wake up.

Panel 2
A yellow sign begins flashing

“Warning: Goats! Warning: Goats! Please clear the street.”

Panel 3
A man is running out of the door of his apartment building. He is wearing only a fuzzy bathrobe. He is carrying an overloaded trashcan.

Man
shitshitshitshitshitshitshit!

Panel 4
He hurriedly throws the contents of the trashcan onto a pile of trash that is already on the street. The door to his apartment slams closed behind him.


Door
SLAM!

Panel 5
The man turns back to his door to find that he has locked himself out. The yellow sign has turned red. Noises are beginning to float down the street.

Noises
Clip clop clip clop Bahh-h-h-h. Munch. Crunch M-m-mmehhhhh

The sign reads in red flashing letters
“Warning: Goats! Warning: Goats!.”

Man
Oh SHIT.
Locked!
OH SHITTT!!

Panel 6
The man turns to look down the street with fear and apprehension bordering on panic.

Background noise grows louder
BAH-H-H-H-H!CLIP CLOP! M-M-MEH-H-H-H! MUNCH! CLOP CLIP!

Man
shit

Page 2

Panel 1
Large panel. A group of bioengineered goatlike creatures ranging form the very large to the very small are swarming down the streets. Their feet are brush like. The hair on their chins has been converted into shovels of varying narrowness to get into corners. On the goats spotted flanks is written “Transgenic Goat Trash Consumption: Property of the City of Los Angeles Department of Sanitation and Hair Removal. DO NOT FEED.” They are eating all the trash. The man is looking back and forth in a panic trying to get out of the way.

Panel 2
The man is subsumed in the swarm of goats. They are eating his bathrobe and his hair. He is cowering trying to reach out, but he is literally drowning in trash eating goats.

Man
SHIIIIITTTITTT!!!!


Page 3
Panel 1
Large panel - The street is now pristine. All of the trash has been eaten by the goats. And even licked clean. A single, very small goat is rushing to catch up with its siblings. A piece of what looks like the man’s hair sticking out of its mouth.

The sign is green and now reads
“ALL CLEAR. TRANSGENIC GOAT TRASH CONSUMPTION IS COMPLETE.”

The man is standing in front of his door. He is naked, covered in goat saliva. The goats have eaten his clothes and his hair, but left him untouched. He is spitting out goat saliva, and hair, and shaking himself off. He is holding the trashcan over his privates.

Panel 2
The man suddenly stops and stares at something on the ground a few feet away.

Man (quietly)
Shit

Panel 3
Large panel - Where one of the drifts of garbage had been, there is now exposed a naked woman’s body, facedown. She is absolutely and completely naked, even including her hair, because the goats ate it all. There are bruises all over her face, and one small deep hole between here eyes. Her arms are cut in a weird pattern of very very thin horizontal lines, almost like fish gills. There is some burnt crispiness around some of the thin cuts. There is also a similar pattern of cuts on her legs. The back of her chest has several ragged round wounds, and one flat wound. Her back is slightly caved in around the large wounds. One hand is badly broken. She was attractive, but not unusually so. She had a slight sag to her stomach, and her breasts were not perky. She has several Wicca symbol tattoos,and a pair of cherubs on either side of lower back over her but. The cherubs are holding up a ribbon a la the birth of Venus. She is definitely dead.





Page 4
Panel 1
A homeless man is walking down the street approaching a corner. His age is hard to determine, call it middle aged, but with many many lines on his face. He is very short, about 4 ft 10, dark skinned with a long, thick messy beard, the kind you might lose things in. He is wearing a long trench coat with many huge pockets. All of the pockets are filled with odds and ends. He is wearing a fedora that looks like it was pulled out of the trash (which it sort of was). He has on combat boots and workman’s pants. This is our hero The Dirty Detective. Around his neck he is wearing a symbol composed of crossed directional arrows. He is absent mindedly flipping a coin. He is ALWAYS lost. He can know what he is looking for, but never knows where he is in relation to the world. His name is lost to the world and to him.

DD mumbles
Where…?

Damnit been down this street a hundred times always found it before….damn city always moving.. shifting….

Panel 2
The naked man, clearly in a panic is still frozen staring wide eyed at the dead girl. DD, unaware, is still coming up to the corner a few feet away. He drops the coin. We are seeing it from the side, so that we can see both of them, but they have not yet seen each other.

DD
A good breakfast place is hard to find … but then everything is hard to find isn’t it…

Panel 3
The coin improbably rolls around the corner.

Panel 4
DD follows the coin trying to pick it up as it rolls. He is coming around the corner. He is doubled over reaching for the coin on the ground. He has not seen the naked man.

Panel 5
His hand catches the coin.

Panel 6
He looks up to come face to cheek with the naked man’s but. He is momentarily nonplussed. The man has a tattoo “Kiss here” ala spider Jerusalem from Transmetropolitan.

DD
??


Page 5
Panel 1
DD approaches the man, somewhat cautiously.

DD
You lose something son? Maybe I can help.

Panel 2
The man turns around and points at the girl. DD looks past him to the dead girl.

Naked Man
shit.

DD
Yes, Shit indeed.

Panel 3
The man seems to shake off his haze. DD, speaking to the man points at a door and mimes calling, he is treating the man like he is an idiot. The man is facing his body towards DD but can’t take his eyes off of the dead woman.

DD
You need to go call the Police… ok?

Man
can’t. locked out.

DD
Lost keys huh?
Panel 4
DD searches through his many pockets

DD
What’s your address?

Man
56 Dalkieth ave. apt 2B

DD
Ahh, no problem then.

Panel 5
DD produces from his pocket the key to the man’s apartment and holds it out. It is labeled 2B.


DD
Now, go inside and call the police.

Man
How do you have my key?

Page 6
Panel 1
DD smiles. It is the smile of someone who has been asked this question many many times. It is filled with understanding, and DD’s basic love of humanity.

DD
You ever lose your keys?

Man
Of course.

DD
I’m the one who found them. Now go call the police so we can sort out this poor dead girl. And…

Man
Yes?

DD
Pants. You want some pants.

Panel 2
DD kneels over the girl. He is very careful not to touch her. He has pulled something from one of his voluminous pockets. It is a hand sized, rectangular, insectile creature which has a huge multifaceted eye on its front and a flat, shiny carapace on its back. It has antennae or legs that act as buttons It looks like a cross between a fly and a camera. It in fact is a cross between a bug and a camera. It has a camera company’s name and the logo “Shutterbug” above the eye. He aims it at the girl.

DD thinks
Must be a runaway. Someone’s lost child.
That’s why the goddess brought me here.
I guess I have a new case.

A short treatise on right and wrong

Many people in modern society spend very little time on the subject of right and wrong, in the moral sense. Some consider these issues to be insoluble, and therefore of no consequence. Others consider themselves to be living in the age of the superman and see themselves as Beyond Good and Evil. Still others use the practicalities, or the apparent expediency of the everyday to perpetually distract themselves from issues that would otherwise threaten their complacency. Many people would say that the world is so filled with horror, casual and malicious cruelty, and inhumanity that to seriously attempt to live a moral life is a sure way to court disaster and madness.

Any or all of them could be right.

The issues of good and evil are beyond solution because their solution is a living breathing target, something that moves and shifts in between the ticks of the most accurate clock you could build. We can never know the full import or impact of our actions, so judging their morality can be said to be beyond the scope of our abilities. We cannot ever really know how our actions will impact those around us, yet we are bound to act. In other situations we can now see how our actions are part of massive processes which have catastrophic moral implications, such as when a person considers their own "carbon footprint" and how their lives contribute to destruction on a previously inconceivable scale. Yet, despite the culpability of an individual in their participation in this extinction level event, nothing that they as an individual can do will stop the event. We as individuals have infinite responsibility paired with infinitesimal capabilities to prevent the overall outcomes.

Simultaneously, our powers so vastly exceed those of our ancestors who established our social mores of right and wrong, that to judge by their standards is very much like trying to evaluate the morality of a person through the eyes of an ape. What could Maimonides frame of reference allow him to say about the comparative morality of the use of nuclear power? In his time, someone with the ability to affect a million people's lives would be closer to a god than a mortal. How then could we ask him about the morality of right and wrong on the scale of global warming? It would be fair to say that a human being who had access to things like the internet, air travel, supermarkets, and modern medicine, was in the process of transcending the state of humanity that Kung Fu Tze would have recognized. Our concepts and application of the moral codes of our ancestors necessarily no longer fits us, for the simple reason that we no longer have the same capacities and limitations.

And yet, anyone who has studied Nietzsche beyond the most superficial levle would tell you that there is no such thing as existing "in the state of the ubermensch". The ubermensch is as much a living target as right and wrong itself. As Nietzsche himself said in Thus Spake Zarathustra "The ubermensch is a bridge into the future." It follows then, that while we are beyond the good and evil our ancestors conceived, we are still undeniably attached to those ideas. Just as one end of a bridge might penetrate an unknown and undiscovered country, yet the other end must necessarily be firmly anchored on familiar shores.

These insights are not particularly unique or unusually revelatory. Many people have observed the unmanageable moral position of the human animal. The obvious response to this clear contradiction between our moral responsibilities and our capacities is also clear "So what the $%#% should we we do then?"

Moral questions are, by definition, those which we cannot avoid. They are the questions of how we should choose when we MUST choose. Since the broader levels are so inherently paradoxical many people try to resolve them by focusing on the strictly mundane practical questions which inhere in everyday activity. And this is a highly effective way to live, since it replaces the unanswerable question "Is this the right thing to do for the world?" with the much more pedantic question "Is this the right thing to do for me?"

Unfortunately, while this is a practical solution, it has the same weakness which demolishes many compromises, namely it fails at the original goal. In this case, by lmiting the scope of the question we have made it into a question that can be answered, but we have also removed the key moral component! Because there are larger moral questions, and since this solution chooses to avoid them, there is a serious moral failing in the simple act of framing the question in this way!

I like to use this image
"There was an ancient Greek town called Ethics. It had the unique characteristic that it was full of intersections in which, no matter which path you took, you found yourself outside of the town."

So what should we do? What is the right way to deal with ethical dilemmas? The answer is nearly as unsatisfying as those that precede it. We must do the best we can every day. We must constantly wrestle with the problems which seem insoluble, while remaining aware that our task is distinctly Sisyphean. This is the true bridge to transcendence, the true route to transcending the conflict of good and evil. We must plunge in, with the knowledge that success is impossible, and yet continue to push ourselves ever forward.

The greatest threat of immorality comes when we conclude that we have pat, predetermined answers for what will always be right and wrong, for then we cease to think, and that which we thought was the good dies, and begins to putrefy.

Futurism and Preparation for the Impossible

"I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it."

Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973)

Before the invention of the computer, who could have predicted the invention of the internet? Obviously, no one. And yet, without considering the impact of the internet, how could any predictions of the future have any relevance?

This is the danger of futurism. We base our predictions on current trends and current behaviors. We base our predictions on what seems impossible and the needs of the moment. For example, we know that the world energy economy MUST change. We can start to see that this change will include a broader spectrum of power generation methods. So, can we say anything about the impact of these changes? Sure, we can predict that solar power will be more prevalent in equatorial regions, and therefore ecosystems in those regions will likely be disrupted by the implementation of large scale solar farms. Can we go any further? Can we try to prepare for our own predictions? Do we get into some strange loop of constantly trying to account for the impact of our preparations for our predictions in our predictions? ouch. I just gave myself a headache.

Anyone who has tried to grasp what quantum theory means by a "collapsing probability wave" words are terrible at describing probability. We cannot talk about the future in terms of anything but likelihoods and chances. And yet, mathematical descriptions and scientific models sap the holistic nature of our world, in which there are no closed systems, nothing occuring in laboratories isolated from the world. The word Science derives from the Latin word scientia, which meant to distinguish, or separate, things from each other, and comes from the Latin word to cut. Science's power derives form delaing with one piece of something at a time. The whole point of an experiment is to isolate the cause of something. How then can we look to science for a rational, holistic approach to understanding a holistic, integrated world?

I believe that there is a new integration coming. A new form of knowledge has begun to emerge. It is a new form of class conciousness, but is more inclusive than Marx could have dreamed. It is more integrative than Hegel's Dialectic could have predicted. It is more self constructed than Piaget would have imagined. At the smae time it is concrete. It has a physical existence in space and time. It has physical and conceptual limitations, yet it contains a fractally complex collection of knowledge and processing power.

You are looking at it right now.

The internet behaves for humanity like a giant neural network. Each site acts like a neuron, or cluste rof neurons, pasisng on its charge and occasionally firing off. Collectively we have wired together the parallel processing power of humanity. We are not finished. There are many areas where our system does not reach. There are places where our collective neurons are tangled together to create innefectual neurotic communities obsessed with meanignless ideas. And yet, how is that different from the twisted biological wiring that produces human thought?

A new global entity has emerged, and it is more like our minds than we can directly percieve. You might ask, so, if the internet is so smart, why don't we see it's intelligence? why don't we see it speaking and talking independently? The simple answer is: We are too small. Can your neurons percieve your thoughts about breakfast? We are the medium of thought, and not it's masters.

I take great comfort in the hope that we evolved the internet at a time when we are facing our first extinction levle events. What did we do about Mutually Assured Destruction? It is beyond any individual human's ability to understand how to address the problems of the world. Perhaps by chance, perhaps by unconcious will or collective design, we have developed the perfect tool to address this problem. A larger consciousness. So now the question is, if we are all participating in this larger conciousness, whose ideas are too broad for us to individually comprehend, how can we take practical action to improve its functioning?