Christopher McKitterick

If you haven't yet watched Keith Olbermann's special comment on US Health Care Reform, you must watch this. He's a genius. He boils down the debate to the essentials. Anyone watching this cannot help but want "Medicare for everyone," as he defines it. It's a war against the insurance companies, and the battle is for everyone's health and life.

Watch:

Click the image to watch Keith Olbermann's special comment on US Health Care Reform.

Chris

I've been looking over the California Supreme Court's ruling on Proposition 8 (took me a while - it's over 125 pages long), approved by the majority of Cali voters last year, which added Section 7.5 to Article I of the California Constitution.

Okay, like many people, when I first heard about the decision, I was pissed off and started re-thinking the notion of California being a progressive state. But looking into the results a bit more got me thinking. Notes:

1. At the time of the ruling, there were 18,000 same-sex marriages in California.


2. This new article of the Cali constitution states that “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”


3. The ruling also suggests that same-sex couples should be afforded all the same legal rights that male-female couples get to enjoy... but they can't call it "marriage."


4. The ruling goes to great lengths to point out that Californians can change their constitution about as easily as most people change socks, noting how much more difficult it is to do so than it is to change the US Constitution.


5. The ruling states that people in existing same-sex marriages that were legally performed (before Prop 8 was in force) get to stay married.


6. That means 18,000 same-sex marriages in California are legal.


7. Therefore, 6 invalidates 2.


8. Therefore, this ruling says that - even though Prop 8 was legally pushed forward and Section 7.5 of article I of the California Constitution is legal and binding, it is meaningless and contradictory.

So my overall reading of the ruling is this: The California Supremes are giving the Prop-Eighters exactly what they asked for... whether it’s what they wanted or not.

And that's a good thing for human rights.

Now if only they could get as up-to-date as Iowa ;-)

Chris

Last night, I was talking with friends about things personal and things philosophical, likely kicked off by the Bill Brown talk. One topic that came up as it always seems to was, "What is the meaning of life?"

One friend said, "I don't know."

Another answered, "To spread our genes."

At first I dismissed the first answer. The second answer... well, it's absolutely true in a biological sense. When you get down to the root of everything, it's the real answer.

Earlier, I was walking home from work, passing under a leafless canopy. The bones of the trees were visible. Seeds everywhere. Students on the sidewalk, cell-phones in hand as they headed to their cars to drive off to play or study or build the future in which we will all live. And it struck me like lightning:

We are only hosts for our genetic material. Everything we do, everything we are, is dictated by the tiny machines that build us into thinking meat. We are products of our genes just as trees are the product of their seeds. Organisms - even thinking ones - are manufactured by the nano-factories called biology.

I envy the trees. They are not weighed down with responsibility or questions of right and wrong or considerations of the future. To them, "Why?" never crosses their minds. They do not need to worry about how to be the best tree they can be; they simply live. They are driven by the programming of the tiny machines within them, the machines that manufactured them and maintain them and dictate their future. Those machines help guide them as they encounter wind and drought; if they survive storms and Kansas summer, they produce new seeds. Those seeds grow into new trees that can survive what Kansas throws at them. They don't build civilizations or cities or universities; they don't engineer automobiles or cell phones. They simply live. And that is enough.

We, however - we humans - we are weighted with sentience. This mass of dendrites and other products of our machines make us worry about the future, about morality, about acquisitions. We form friendships and romantic entanglements; these endure or fade or explode in dramatic fashion, and then we write novels about our experiences or film movies or create other works of art. We talk about our victories and catastrophes with friends. With our friends and loved ones, we celebrate success and empathize with failure. We craft paintings, shoot photographs, post websites, write blogs, all in an effort to express ourselves. Our creative expressions consume years of our lives. We assemble bookshelves and paint the walls of our homes that others built and which we bought with money - a concept manufactured in the forebrains of economists - and call the people in our lives using electronics that are the product of centuries of industrial evolution. We talk and write and paint and run and climb and dance; we cry and laugh and drink ourselves into oblivion; we pour the years of our existence into making things, consuming things, building futures for others or destroying them. We believe we are good, or we are not evil, or we question what is good and evil. We describe what is right and moral, and then we question ourselves in the darkness of the night when we sit alone at our keyboards, wondering, wondering. We strive and we fail; we strive and we succeed.

But what does it all mean? Are we only acting out the over-complicated programming humming away within the hearts of our cells? We, products of the products of evolution; what are we? If we are only machines designed to produce more human machines of the type manufactured by the tiny machines that built us, then it is clear that our duty is to create more of those machines of our particular brand. We must prove the value of ourselves by making replicas of ourselves. The meaning of life is to pass our genes into the future. And to build a future best suited to protecting the new machines that we produce and which will carry our genes into that future. So we build civilizations and cell phones and put money in the bank. And when the banks fail or we lose our jobs or our houses are foreclosed upon, this quakes us to our cores, because the civilization we built is like the cradle for the future, the macro-machines that will provide for the human machines carrying "our" genes, and we have failed in our sole purpose.

An aside about owership: It is more true to say that we belong to our genes than that they are our genes. Does Chrysler Corporation belong to my 2004 Crossfire? Or my 1966 Newport? Absurd. Both were manufactured by the same machine (Chrysler Corporation), but in different generations. Yet they do not reproduce themselves, so this isn't a good comparison. Do the fruits on its branches belong to the persimmon tree in my back yard? Does the tree that dropped the fruit that grew this tree belong to it? Neither; it belongs to the genetic material that created the tree that dropped the fruit that contained the seed that grew my tree.

The tree's only reason for being is to survive the seasons, thrive through adversity, produce fruits, and - having survived and earned the right to do so - make more trees like it. It exists to perpetuate its genes. It is a framework and a resource for nothing more than supporting the gene factory that made it, the gene factory whose drive to thrive creates life itself.

This is God. God is within us all. God is the gene, the self-assembling matter of life. God is the biological nanofactory. There is no right and wrong beyond what allows the factory to thrive and continue to produce.

We live and laugh and cry, we build cities and laptops and torture ourselves with questions of right and wrong so that we may provide a lush cradle for the machines that made us in order to do nothing more than deliver those genes into the future.

Our sentience is a burden, something we must carry, something that gets in the way of itself. It is an unfortunate diversion along the road to our genes' future.

This is not a comfort.

This friend also said that the meaning of life is "to seek pleasure." Pleasure, I think, is merely our genes expressing to us that we're taking the right path to provide them with what they need. But sentience does not approve. We build ethical and moral frameworks that limit pleasure and define which pleasures are the correct ones, even when they feel uncomfortable; we define which pleasures are the incorrect ones, even when they feel best.

Either pleasure is not a good guide or sentience is a poor expression of our genes. Or both. And sentience doesn't feel comfortable with the idea that it exists only as part of the product of the machine to which we belong. Even that - the gene - is merely the product of its programming. It is the machine that operates on that programming, as we operate on the gene.


After slogging through all of this meaning and meaninglessness, the first seems the truest answer:

What is the meaning of life?

I don't know.

Chris

Also posted to my website.

Going from the ridiculous (my super-powers post) to the sublime.

A few days ago, I shared an essay that moved me to my core. Today I'm sharing a video by Keith Olbermann about Californians voting against human rights. This made me cry for the beauty of his words and the beauty of hope and love; it made me cry for the alone-ness we all feel in a universe where we all live in isolation from one another, misunderstanding and fearing and hating. The truth behind Olbermann's words is what drove me to write a novel, Transcendence (which I hope to see on the shelves next year - but I can't talk about that just yet!). What Olbermann talks about here is perhaps the central theme in my work. Hearing Olbermann express part of that truth about love and separation touched me to my core of my being.

Below I've transcribed a few lines from his special comment on love and marriage. Powerful stuff. To those who voted for California's Prop 8, which rescinded the right of gays to marry:

What is this to you? Nobody is asking you to embrace their expression of love. But don't you as human beings have to embrace that love? The world is barren enough. It is stacked against love, and against hope, and against those very few and very precious emotions that enable us - all of us - to go forward.

With so much hate in the world, with so much meaningless division, and people pitted against each other, for no good reason; this is what your religion tells you what to do? With your experience of life and this world, and all its sadnesses; this is what your conscience tells you to do? With your knowledge that life, with endless vigor, seems to tilt the playing field in which we all live in favor of unhappiness and hate, this is what your heart tells you to do?

You want to honor your God and the universal love you believe He represents, then spread happiness, this tiny, symbolic, symantical grain of happiness. Share it with all those who seek it.

All you need to do is stand and let the tiny ember of love meet its own fate. You don't have to help it, you don't have to applaud it, you don't have to fight for it. Just don't put it out, just don't extinguish it.

The video:

Chris

In this essay, Mike Selinker strikes a sad note in England's history, when they killed national hero and genius Alan Turing, thereby relegating themselves to the dustbin of history. It's a must-read.

One can see this tragedy as an opportunity for an alternate-history story. Has anyone written this: What if England hadn't forced Alan Turing into an intolerable situation? What if he had gone on to establish a British computer industry in the 1950s? What if computer science had flourished twenty years sooner than it did?

Questions that elicit answers that make Turing's death even more tragic.

Chris

God, this is beautiful. (And ugly. And heart-rending.)

I don't often have such a strong reaction to an essay. We read essays like this because they're emotionally true; we read this kind of writing and poetry and fiction, we listen to music that does this for us and watch movies that touch on truths we know inside because what the words express is so true for us. It's as if finally - at last! - someone understands well enough to speak for us honestly and with perfect clarity. It's as if our minds touch just for a moment. Being understood and hearing our inner truths expressed so well is cathartic. We are never the same again after veils of misunderstanding are pulled aside; when we look inside without filters or walls, we become someone different; after facing the truth about ourselves, ironically we are never the same.

This essay describes concisely and lucidly how it felt to grow up Gen X American. And this phrase nails exactly about how it felt to hear Obama accept the Presidency:

when we watched Barack Obama's victory speech on Tuesday night, we looked into the eyes of a real leader, and decades of cynicism about politics and grass-roots movements and community melted away in a single moment.

For my entire life, I've had to knuckle under to conservatives (yes, I count Bill Clinton as such); for the students I teach, it must have been so much worse to have mostly only known the fucking tragedy that was the Bush dynasty. Though I have vague memories of Jimmy Carter, I've never felt someone represented me in the White House. Seeing Obama accepting the Presidency... I just wept for joy. And now I'm wet-cheeked all over again. Here, read it:

( Essay text archived behind the cut. )

Fucking brilliant.

With hope,
Chris

PS: I've deleted five LJ icons re: Bush and cynicism. It's time.

Oh my gosh, this is the best analysis of the Middle Class that I've read, by copperwise.

Thank you, Sarah Palin, for getting the liberals thinking and writing about the nonsense you spouted last night.

Best,
Chris

I wrote this essay a few days after the 9/11/2001 attacks. I stand behind those feelings and beliefs, and still believe that what I called for would have been the correct response: Treat it as a police mission, not a call to war.

I grieve not only for those lost on that day, but for what this country has lost in the interim because of how our government failed to respond, how they responded in the worst way possible, and how they have polluted humankind's image of the United States of America.

I am also angry: Furious with the current administration, of course, but also with those who allowed the NeoCons to ruin our nation over the course of the last seven years. How can they live with themselves? Do they really believe people like John "Bomb-Bomb-Iran" McCain and Sarah "Sack O' Lies" Palin will do anything to restore American honor? Or has their guilt for keeping the Bushies in office long enough to nearly destroy our nation driven them deep into a pit of self-hatred that they cannot face, so instead they push for more evil to be wrought upon the world in the name of... I don't even know what they believe it's all for.

"The War on Terror" is the biggest load of crap. Ask any terrorism expert who hasn't allowed support-Bush guilt to delude him or herself, and you'll hear that you cannot fight terror with war. Let me amend that:

You can fight terror with war, but you will lose. You cannot beat terror with war.

Terrorism is a crime. Nations cannot wage effective war against terrorism by waging war; that only incites more acts of terror and grows the support base for terrorist activity. How do you fight crime? With police activity. You arrest the bad guys, break up the bad-guy rings. Meanwhile, you try to fix the society that breeds bad guys. For most people, it's as simple as ensuring that everyone has the basic rights that we in the US declared a couple hundred years ago to be self-evident.

The motives of psychotics will always be beyond our ability to comprehend, their behavior beyond correction. But we can help ensure that they don't get widespread support by helping remove the hopelessness inherent in many societies - especially in the Middle East. The absolute worst thing we can do for the forces of good - and the best thing we can do to assist psychotics to enlist the hopeless - is wage endless war. This creates fear, anger, sadness, loss... it breeds more hopelessness and it breeds hate.

If the goal of our administration's "War on Terror" is to build resentment against the United States of America, it's been overwhelmingly effective. If its goal is to ensure a endless supply of America-hating terrorists, they've succeeded.

In the essay I wrote right after 9/11, I suggested that the only way to stop this from happening again was, "Nations all across the world must join forces to capture every single terrorist and every single accomplice to terror."

We did not do that. Can we do that now, effectively? Yes, but it's a bigger job now, what with so many more people having been harmed by "The War on Terror" and so many fewer supportive of the US. But we can still do it.

It also makes a lovely "what if?" alternate-history scenario. What if we had mobilized the world's crime-fighting forces to arrest the bad guys instead of bomb the nations where they lived (except Saudi Arabia, of course)? What if we had spent the money we've spent on "The War on Terror" instead on reducing the hopelessness of those who succumb to the call to join terrorist organizations?

What if?

Chris

Clay Skirky at the Web 2.0 (yes, I also hate that label) Expo 2008 in San Francisco, gave a talk on "the cognitive surplus" that's driving the current revolution in our civilization. It's 16 minutes long, but if I sat through it from home, you can too... or just read some excerpts:

[The cognitive surplus] "is so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let's say that everything stays 99% the same, that people watch 99% as much television as they used to, but 1% of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual US consumption. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation. I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you?"

"Here's what four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for.

"Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change [like the Industrial Revolution, unlike flagpole-sitting]. Because four-year-olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unpack a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing, and sharing."

"If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus we now recognize we can deploy, could we make a good thing happen?"

This is what Shirky discusses in depth in his new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. (Thanks to starstraf for the tip.)

Damn. Here we are, in the midst of a cultural revolution. Y'all out there, reading this and doing your own blogging and editing Wikipedia and sharing photos and music online? You writers, musicians, and other artists finding ways to involve your audience? You're part of this revolution.

Best,
Chris

On NPR today, there was a story about Andrew Olmsted, an Army major serving in Iraq. He left a blog entry for his friend to post in the event of his death. Here's a photo of him:

Click the image to see the story.

On January 3, he was the first US soldier to die in Iraq in 2008. Here is his last post.

Best,
Chris