The most frustrating sort of song is that which is perfect, save for the fact that it’s far too short. This is a fantastic theme, beautifully composed and performed, and then left criminally underdeveloped.
Still: those Fastbacks sure knew how to make a pop tune.
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From the always-excellent, oft-disturbing Cyanide & Happiness.
…the world ends in ice. Or so you’d think, judging from the news coverage around these parts. Governor Gregoire has declared a state of emergency and 200,000 people east of Lake Washington are without power.
Despite the dire coverage, the situation here in the city is pretty tame. The roads are slushy but passable, and I’ve only seen one bus run into the ditch which is a better record than last year. The routes into downtown are in fair condition and unless you want to get up the steeper parts of Queen Anne, you’re probably fine getting anywhere you need to go.
Being in the tech industry, most of my team’s been working from home the past few days. Which works pretty well, except that a few of them live smack dab in the middle of the area that lost power.
This storm, as so many things do, gave me a chance to reflect on how awesome it is living in the future. Thanks to the Internet I can work from home, get my groceries delivered, order pizza, get realtime updates and forecasts. The Internet can connect me to anything I need to weather this storm, no matter how long it lasts.
Unless, of course, the power goes out.
So here’s hoping the power outage doesn’t spread, and best wishes to anyone caught in it. I hope you’re well-provisioned and in good company.
As for me, I have food, video games, warmth, and excellent companionship. Not a bad way to spend the apocalypse.
It snowed this morning. Big fat flakes wafted down for the better part of an hour and then immediately started melting. In most places in the country, this would hardly be grounds for comment, but snow in Seattle causes the whole town to be gripped with terror. You’d think an annual occurrence would eventually become mundane, but no, Seattle is Chionophobic1 to an impressive degree.
Being in need of groceries, I elected to brave the crowds fighting for provisions and head up the road to Trader Joe’s. I could have jumped into my Japanese-designed, American-manufactured car and driven, but it was a pleasant day out and Seattle drivers lose their shit when they’ve been spooked by a dusting of winter weather. So I walked.
The walk took me over the University Bridge and along one edge of the campus of the University of Washington. In the few blocks of walking by the campus, I heard students speaking in at least three distinct languages. A group of students that I think were Japanese threw snowballs at each. A young hispanic couple speaking in Spanish did their best to scrape together a small, soggy snow man.
By the time I reached the store, the roads were bare and wet. Despite that, I saw at least three cars drive by with chains on. Two were Toyotas, one was a Mazda.
I went to the store, did my shopping, and trudged home. I’m now snacking on berries grown in Chile and pre-packaged sampler of cheese from Spain.
Thanks to globalization we educate students from all over the world, eat fresh berries in the midst of winter, and can enjoy the best culinary and engineering accomplishments from any nation.
It’s unfortunate, then, that Seattle has such a strong anti-Globalization streak. We were, after all, the site of the WTO riots in late 1999. During the height of the Occupy movement, protesters, with the help of the local unions, shut down University bridge during rush hour to strike a blow against Capitalism. Unions are strong in this town and Seattlites tend to value a curious mixture of feel-good Fair Trade economics and trade protectionism. “Free trade” and “capitalism” are generally held to be self-evidently evil.
And yet, when the scourge of snow descends menacingly onto our streets, we chain up our sensible, high-gas mileage Japanese automobiles, head for Trader Joe’s, and buy fresh Chilean raspberries and Spanish cheeses.
For most people, I’m sure they find no cognitive dissonance in such positions, but I can’t help but wonder about a town that prizes the fruits of globalization while vociferously opposing the trend itself. Whether it’s ignorance, bad faith, or guilty hypocrisy I can’t say, but Seattle is a town in which the status-conscious pride themselves on their diet of exotic cuisine, their naturally-impossible year-round vegan diets, and also on their “enlightened” liberalism, complete with its anti-globalization and anti-capitalist stances.
1 – “chionophobia ( ′kīänə′fōbēə ) An abnormal fear of snow.” Thank you, Google!
It’s very gratifying to me that the pro-rights community has gotten to the point where we can make serious arguments about repealing the NFA. The NFA is the main piece of legislation that regulates the manufacture, sale, ownership, and transport of a wide variety of firearms and firearm accessories. It’s the law that makes silencers such a pain in the ass to acquire legally and it, plus later legislation that “closed” the full-auto registry, are what makes it nearly impossible and prohibitively expensive for civilians to own fully automatic firearms.
Why would a civilian want to own fully automatic firearms? Well, aside from “because I want to” and “they’re a hell of a lot of fun”, there are some practical uses:
This video, done by Oleg Volk, makes what I think is a pretty compelling argument. PDWs are kind of a sweet spot in personal defensive arms. Low-power, controllable, and effective. I don’t know that they’d be my first choice for home or personal defense, but they’re a solid option and one that people should have available to them.
The pro-2A community has come along way in just a few years. I am just barely old enough to remember when the Federal Assault Weapons Ban (which, contrary to popular belief, only banned usability and cosmetic features) was enacted. My father, a serious collector and shooter, was sure at that time that we were on a one-way ticket to reading the Second Amendment out of the constitution. I’m happy to say that almost twenty years on, the old man definitely called that one wrong. The AWB has expired, two important Supreme Court cases have finally struck down the ridiculous “group rights” theory of firearm ownership and re-constituted the right to personal arms, and legal firearm ownership continues to grow.
We are winning, and I’m happy to see that, no matter how bad other aspects of liberty have gotten in this country, at least one set of rights is headed in the right direction.
Robert Kunzig, writing for National Geographic, has an excellent essay about the rise and role of cities in the late 20th century. It’s a great overview of many of the reasons why urbanization is a fantastic trend and one that we should all hope continues as our global population increases. He also tells several interesting anecdotes about global Alpha cities like Seoul and London.
He notes in passing, however, an unfortunate anti-urbanism strain taking hold. He notes that the South Korean government is trying to intentionally break up Seoul, one of the major engines of their prosperity, in order to “spread the wealth around” and, I get the sense, to return to a more “authentic” culture and lifestyle. This is a truly unfortunate trend since, as Kunzig points out, cities are economically and environmentally superior to a more sprawling agrarian or rural lifestyle.
Being of a philosophical bent, though, I’d also argue against the idea that a rural life is a more authentic one. I believe that human nature naturally inclines us as a species towards life in the Polis. Aristotle said that the city was the natural habitat of the human being. The city is to a human being as the bamboo forest is to a panda. This is an attractive notion to me personally, seeing as how I love cities to an almost unseemly extent, but I think it provides a nice complement to the more practical arguments. Forcing people who want to live in cities, who freely gravitate towards a more densely populated urban environment, to move elsewhere isn’t just a bad idea, it runs contrary to human nature. People tend to react poorly to attempted violations or alterations of their nature and that can lead to any number of social ills. This is articulated very well in Thomas Sowell’s excellent book A Conflict of Visions and especially his discussion of the unconstrained vision.
To try and “encourage” people to abandon the cities to which they’ve freely chosen to migrate is a perfect example of the Unconstrained Vision, as it basically asserts that, despite people’s free personal choices to the contrary, a rural way of life is inherently superior. People may want to live in the city, but what they want is less important than what the government asserts they should want.
Of course Sowell’s point is that conscious quests to reform human nature are doomed to failure. Cities are an emergent expression of human nature and the only way to truly reverse urbanization is to act against that nature. One can’t reform it, it shows no signs of changing on its own, so the only way to counteract it is to do so coercively.
All the evidence that we have seen, from cultures all over the world shows that human beings will choose to live in cities when the option is available to them. As of a few years ago, more people live in cities than in rural areas for the first time in human history. This tipping point zipped by without too much fanfare, but I think it’s a remarkable milestone and one that should be celebrated. It means that, for the first time ever, more than half of our brothers and sisters finally live in their natural environment. More than half the human species is finally able to enjoy the fruits of one of mankind’s greatest developments: the city. This is truly a momentous milestone and we should be happy for that fact and looking forward to the time when three fourths, or nine tenths of people have that same opportunity.
That some people, mostly in the meddling class, see this tidal wave of people choosing to live in the polis as a problem is worrying, since their attempts to reverse the trend can only come to ill one way or another. At best they may waste (our) time and resources fighting the useless fight. At worst, they use coercive force to try and change the calculus. China, in fact, is already well on the path to this second option, having implemented an execrable system of internal passports, meaning that millions of people who want desperately to enjoy the benefits of the city cannot do so without risking imprisonment or death.
Ultimately, though, no government can truly stop the course of humanity. This, indeed, is one of the main points of Sowell’s book. The force of human nature, aggregated over the billions-strong population of the planet, is stronger than any attempt to hold it back. Cities are here to stay and urbanization will continue so long as people continue to strive to fulfill their own goals and desires. No government can stop that, but they can definitely make the process more painful than it needs to be.
Out Like Pluto, “Treaty”
A band of my fellow Amazonians write the ultimate Seattle breakup song. Not only is it one of the best end-of-the-relationship tunes I’ve ever heard, but it’s also a wonderful Seattle in-joke. Definitely worth the listen, doubly so if you’re a Seattle-dweller.
If you like that, they have an EP out, and a full-length record on its way soon.
Bassnectar explains dubstep:
Found via Giles Bowkett and pertaining to a twitter exchange I’ve been having with my friend Jonathan (@dtimesd).
I love big cities to an almost embarrassing extent. In so far as I have a religion, it takes the form of an ecstatic disposition towards my own trinity of music, technology, and urban environments. This little time lapse montage of Moscow set to a killer soundtrack is a nice little two minute sermon to that religion.
Москва’2011(Moscow/Russia) from zweizwei |motion timelapse| on Vimeo.
Found via Radley Balko over at The Agitator.
