Watch Without a Watchman

Lately I've been thinking quite a bit about electoral reform. The reason why is that it kind of pisses me off that I can cast my vote and, as a result of the way that our electoral system works, there is every chance that I wind up represented by a guy who I didn't even vote for. What's worse, though, is that the guy I did vote for is just the guy I happened to find the least odious.

It's enough to make me not want to bother voting.

So what would it take to make me happy? Proportional representation of course. My vote for the Crazygonuts Party is combined with every other vote for them across the party and they get a number of seats in Parliament that is proportional to the amount of the vote they received. That way, even though I live in Conservative Land, my vote goes to a party that I like, rather than getting flushed down the toilet. And what if I am a Green party supporter? Or a communist? I bet the Greens capture at least one percent of the total vote and I don't see any Green MPs.

Speaking of the Crazygonuts Party, one of the upsides of proportional representation is that there tends to be an explosion of specialized political parties. This means more minority governments with less power for the largest party and a corresponding increase of input into policy on the part of other parties with other points of view, a good thing compared to the one party dictatorship we have now.

I have a strong feeling that the possibility of actually being represented might do something about the sorry levels of voter apathy that we've been experiencing, which is very important. When barely half of the population bothers to exercise their franchise, it can't help but bring the legitimacy of the entire process into question.

Of course, I'm sure that allowances would have to be made to ensure that regions are represented on the national stage, but I don't really think that it is the all-consuming issue that the system of regional representation implies that it is.

Anyway, none of this is new thinking for me or anyone. What is new is the way I've been thinking of that could be used to approach the problem. It doesn't have a name, but I'm thinking mono-something, or micro-something.

So, my idea would be to form a party with exactly one plank in its platform: electoral reform, followed by the calling of a new election with a guaranteed turnaround time in the neighbourhood of days or weeks. The message is the same across the country and every candidate uses every opportunity to either trumpet that message or decline to speak. The laws and amendments are already written and hammered out by the candidates and just need to be voted in.

Of course, I'm sure that there are big problems with the idea and that it needs a lot more work before it is even truly fit to be discussed amongst drunken friends, but I think that it is a solid one at heart, and one who's time is soon. I really have the feeling that people are very dissatisfied with the state of the parties as they are now and that a major shakeup is just what the country needs. I mean, hell, my politics are a total mishmash that prominently figures atheism and a modified form of libertarianism and I'm thinking of voting Conservative just because the Liberals have gotten corrupt in the absence of strong opposition.

Is this representation?

Joel M.

Now that we've got two reporters who have been lying about their stories, Jayson Blair at the Times a year ago and Jack Kelly at USA Today four months ago, it's time for a little compare and contrast action.

When a white man screws up, it ignites a debate about the screw-up. When a black man screws up, it ignites a debate about race.

Joel M. (via www.thismodernworld.com)

Speaking of Reason, they've got what I think is a really telling piece on Kerry in the US presidential race.

SEN. KERRY: Number... Tim, what I said is true. I mean, you can go to New York City and you can be in a restaurant and you can meet a foreign leader. There are plenty of places to meet people without traveling abroad. Number two, I'm under no obligation... I would be stupid if I were to sit here and start saying, "Well, so-and-so told me this," because they have dealings with this administration. This administration doesn't talk about its private conversations, and nor will I.

I don't know what the Democrats were thinking when they dropped Clark and Dean. I mean Dean was different than Bush. He wasn't totallmealyly-mouthed and he managed to give the impression that it wasn't just all about the presidency. As for Clark, he might have been pretty far to the right for the Democrats, but he did have the promise of shaking things up by bringing traditionally right-wing voters across the divide.

Kerry, though? He's just Gore part two only he doesn't seem as smart. Totally wishy-washy. I predict that it's going to take a frickin' name tag for people to tell Kerry and Bush apart, policy wise, when it comes down to debate.

Joel M. (via www.reason.com)

Reason has posted an essay in commemoration of Earth Day that is pretty thought provoking, procided that their guy has his numbers right. I think that the following quote nails down the gist of it:

There's much to celebrate on the 30th anniversary of Earth Day. Indeed, one of the chief things to get happy about is that the doomsters were so wrong. Civilization didn't collapse, hundreds of millions didn't die in famines, pesticides didn't cause epidemics of cancer, and the air and water didn't get dirtier in the industrialized countries.

Naturally, Reason being the libertarian rag that it is, private industry is hailed for every improvement while regulations are reviled as inefficient and doomsayers are criticized as tempting fate by suggesting that industry needs brakes.

I tend to lean towards libertarianism, but, knowing what I know about human nature, I am reluctant to believe that there is something magical about private industry. Instead, I sort of suspect that many of the environmental improvements made by the private sector have had their roots in the warnings of doomsayers and the regulations of government.

As usual with matters as complicated as global systems, the truth is somewhere in the middle of the debate and impossible to truly know. In this sort of situation, I tend to think that regulations should simply lay out targets, carrots, and sticks, and then rely on human ingenuity to provide the details of how to meet them.

And then, of course, something sudden and horrible and totally unexpected will happen and we'll all be "dead, or at least very sad" to quote Kompressor.

Joel M. (via www.reason.com)

The other day I found out that my computer was infested with viruses. B'oh!

Anyway, today I decided to take care of the problem. I loaded up my handy dandy copy of Norton Antivirus (which I was a schmuck for not installing as soon as I put Windows on the new machine) and tried to let 'er rip.

Nothing.

Norton crashed, Liveupdate crashed, and when I tried to get into the registry to see if there were any viral registry entries, regedit crashed. Frustrating, yes?

Fortunately, I stumbled across a handy trick on a forum somewhere. I was told that the virus would just be running in the background and canceling any programs with certain names and that regedit would work just fine if I renamed it. And it was true! Next, I tried renaming Liveupdate and it started working too. Hooray! Unfortunately, I couldn't get Norton itself running just by renaming the executable and I didn't monkey around with anything else since I couldn't tell the executable that the files it was looking for were renamed.

Fortunately, Symantec has an online virus scan that has, so far, found a bunch of infected files on my system. Hopefully, this will let me pinpoint the exact virus that I am infected with so that I can download a specific fix and then get Norton working properly.

Anyway, now any people who ever actually look at this thing can't say that I never post anything practical.

Joel M.

Had an interesting line of thought today:

I was talking to my friend Allie on MSN Messenger and she was trying to tidy up after her kids at the same time and she said "Kids... They leave such a mess yet have such an aversion to cleaning it up"

At first, I smugly thought "yeah, just like oil companies," to myself, but then I kind of thought a little more while I was slaving away over the dishes that are so helpfully left as a thought aid by my loving girlfriend. Specifically, I wondered why it makes sense to kids, businesses and other borderline types not clean up after themselves.

And then I remembered the tragedy of the commons: it makes short-term economic sense to take full advantage of things held in common and to not look after them.

This leads to a conclusion that is just not as profound as I was hoping for when I started writing this: That the difference between kids and parents is that parents see the house as property, to be looked after, while kids see it as a natural resource held in common and therefore treat it as such. I suppose that this suggests that a way to encourage kids to clean up would be to give them a sense of ownership over the house and / or an idea of the sort of effort it takes to pay the mortgage or rent. Not that I would want to try it myself, mind.

Of course, not all parents are far enough along to actually be able to pick up after themselves, but you get the idea.

Joel M.

What's it worth to steal an election?

Lots.

And this guy is only talking what Congressional candidates might pay, figured as a portion of their overall campaign budget. What about if you figured it based on the kind of money a government contractor, organized criminal, or corporation trying to swing a shift in regulations or taxation? How much money has, say, Haliburton made as a direct result of W's presence in the White House with his specific policy decisions and personal connections? Especially considering that the Project for a New American Century's involvement with the administration pretty much guaranteed an eventual attack on Iraq.

Joel M. (via www.boingboing.net)

Pulled whole off of Die Puny Humans:

FUTURE UNDERGROUND

Tracking the future.

Susannah Breslin, mildly dislocated by jetlag, perversion and the London chill, grimaces at the elderly Vauxhall Bridge Road locals staggering around the smoky little pub in beer-smeared football-fan facepaint. Susannah's a writer, over here in her occasional role as a presenter for the Playboy Channel's SEXCETERA to cover an English bukkake shoot. Bukkake is a Japanese innovation in porn video wherein groups of men masturbate en masse over a single girl. A successful bukkake concludes with one brain-damaged woman looking like she's had a bucket of cake icing upended over her head. It transpires that most of the male participants pay to attend. Ninety pounds sterling to jerk off like an ugly ape in humping season along with a dozen other fellow middle-aged married businessmen who've probably all told the wife that they're off on a salesman training course in Slough. Bukkake made it to America a few years ago, and now it's here in Britain; the cutting edge in depersonalised, heartless, gutless sex. Which is why it fascinates Susannah. But Susannah tracks the future of commodified sex. In her head, she's already moved on.

She gleefully tells me of Rob Black, an American pornographer already in trouble with the law and facing an obscenity charge. He was apparently instructed by his lawyers to keep a low profile and behave himself. But he's a second-generation porno guy, and has the family honour to uphold. He has therefore invented what is termed The Ass Milkshake. This involves several men ejaculating into one woman's rectum, and then introducing milk and cream into the cavity with the aid of a speculum. The mixture is then decanted out of her backside into a glass, and presented for her to drink.

And you know that, somewhere, Rob Black is wondering how he's going to top that before his court case.

In Japan, of course, bukkake is history. Susannah describes to me the new fetish video craze there, which I can only term Dizzy Girl Spinning Eye Movies. A girl is set to spinning around on the spot in a bedroom. Around and around. Soon, she's too dizzy to stand up. She falls down on a bed. And the camera zooms in hard on her eyes, to see her eyeballs spinning around in their sockets, circles within circles. That's the money shot, in porn terms. Spinning eyeballs.

Susannah grins and takes another sip of German beer.

In Germany, of course, courts were coming to the conclusion that inviting cannibalism fetishists to your home, killing them and eating them does not constitute murder. Armin Miewes got an eight-year sentence for picking up a man on the internet with seductive enticements to (quoting from his Usenet posts) "eat your horny flesh." The victim came to Miewe's home, where Miewes hacked his penis off. They ate it together. And then the meal got into a warm bath and waited to bleed to death while Miewes sat in the kitchen and read a Star Trek novel. After a while, Miewes decided dinner wasnt dying quickly enough. So he stabbed the silly bastard in the neck and ate him.

"Eat Your Horny Flesh" is going to be a band name inside three years, I swear.

Sometime after Miewes decided it'd be too much like hard work to grind dead boy's bones into flour, the police came to visit. Being German, they came right out with it, and asked him directly if he had eaten human flesh. Miewes gave the classic answer: "I might have done."

Turns out that if you want to be eaten, the diner is, at best, guilty of manslaughter. And will be out on the street in four years, tops.

Welcome to the future. It's the world you're living in.

People are disappointed with the future they're living in. Since 2001, the refrain has gone up, louder year by year: "This is the future. Where's my flying car? Where's my fucking jet pack?" Pre-millennium, we were living in an unprecedented density of imagined futures, and we assumed it was all waiting for us around the corner. And here we are, around the corner, and none of it is standing here.

All that means, of course, is that 98% of our predictions have failed us. Which shouldn't have come as much surprise. We treat science fiction as predictive fiction, which it isn't and should never have been. William Gibson's NEUROMANCER loses none of its fictive power for failing, as Gibson himself recently said, to predict mobile phones. Mobile telephony has proved a technology of massive change -- not least of which has been in the field of fiction itself. Possession of a tri-band handset makes about a hundred years' worth of thriller plotting irrelevant. My own GLOBAL FREQUENCY graphic novel has fallen foul of the future. It's currently being adapted for American television, and we've run into an unexpected problem. When I developed the mobile phones that the members of the Global Frequency extreme rescue service carry, I was working at the hard edge of available technology -- two years ago. Today, a Treo 600 smartphone from Palmspring does pretty much everything the GF Phone does. So I'm having to consult with a futurist at Nokia to ensure the TV version of the phone does more than something you can pick up at the supermarket.

It's not the future we expected, being able to shoot video with a telephone and wirelessly beam it into someone's hand on the other side of the world. I don't know that anyone predicted that people could be driven to orgasm by images of a girl's spinning eyes. Evan Batailles would have looked twice at the Ass Milkshake. Somewhere, there's a mouse with a human ear growing out of its back, and a rat that produces monkey sperm. Mars is being explored by two motorised skateboards. Wernher Von Braun, who designed a Mars expedition for a crew of two hundred using available technology in the 1950s, would have shat blood in anger. Space, in his conception, was a heaven to be reached with power and glory. He would have sneered at the rocket sticks the rovers were launched on -- where were his mighty chariots, to shake the ground in their passing? -- and blanched to discover that his great machines and two hundred heroes had been dropped to make way for a couple of glorified rollerskates. He would have concluded that something evil had happened, and that this was not his future.

No nuclear space arks, no jetpacks. Robot skateboards and butterflies that glow green.

We all forgot that the future is yet to be written. No-one knows how it's going to turn out. The best we can do is track the future as it happens, and use our fiction as a tool with which to understand where we are.

By the time you read this, everything in it will be history. The future's a moving target. That's why it needs tracking.

Warren Ellis
Southend, England
March 15 2004

© Warren Ellis 2004

You're my hero.

Joel M. (via www.diepunyhumans.com)

Check out this entry on mocoloco. A modular, transportable house that can be flown around by a helicopter. Put it on a rooftop or a mountaintop!

Joel M. (via www.mocoloco.com)

Friend Scott sent me a pretty interesting link to the Chipmunkz Gangsta Rap. Funny! Low in carbohydrates! High in gunplay and grave pissing!

Joel M. (via Scott)