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“Was non in his tyme him liche”
Contact PacRim Jim: info-at-japanorama-dotcom
Shopped at Wal-Mart recently? Well, thanks to you and other bargain-hunting Americans, the Chinese Government now holds about $1 trillion ($1,000,000,000,000) of United States Treasuries, an amount large enough to be incomprehensible, since it exceeds the cumulative number of stars in the Milky Way, the Andromeda Galaxy, and several other galaxies.
Let PacRim Jim explicate the amount in terms understandable to any American worker.
If the $1 trillion is averaged over the lifetime earnings of the average American worker (at present, $1.44 million), who works for, say, the American average of $18 per hour for 40 years at 2000 hours per year, it means that the Chinese now hold enough American capital to purchase the entire careers of about 695,000 American workers.
To put it another way, the Chinese now could exchange their U.S. Treasuries for the entire careers of more American workers than live in the state of Hawaii.
Which state will be next, the Pacster wonders?
—PacRim Jim
"We've all got to be young once,".... "It's like the measles, it breaks out all over you, and you're a nuisance to yourself and everybody else, but it don't last, and it usually don't leave no ill effects."
— Katherine Anne Porter, Noon Wine
—PacRim Jim
Americans have a choice: The D.C. bull or the Wall Street bull.
—PacRim Jim
Those trillions of dollars taxed from us by hard-left, spend-and-tax liberals might have been invested in the biotechnology and nanotechnology industries. Instead, they will be taxed from potential risk-taking investors and used to purchase the votes of the non-investing improvident.
Worry not, however, even though we and our children won't be able to enjoy the longer, healthier life promised by the two technologies, our grandchildren might, if they will be able to afford the pricey biotech and nanotech products of Chinese capitalists who invested for the long term.
—PacRim Jim
During this deeping recession, suffering will be general, intense, and prolonged. However, it will be a salubrious preview of the myriad permanent paradigm shifts we shall endure during the fast-approaching Singularity.
For readers unfamiliar with the concept, see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
—PacRim Jim
While attempting to free Iraqis and Afghanis, we Americans are losing (discarding?) our own freedom.
—PacRim Jim
The fewer the gatekeepers, the more informed the decision.
—PacRim Jim
Birds swim the sky,
Fish fly the sea,
But I'm to I roam between my ears,
Through space, through time, through me.
—PacRim Jim
Beyond the sunlit world of the workaday,
Beyond the blaze of sure science,
Lie twilight worlds of imagination, of art,
Past which stir our formless tomorrows.
—PacRim Jim
Evolution has evolved the evolver.
Humans are bypassing the natural limits on variation, selection, and speciation. Within a few fiscal years, all imaginable forms of life—organic and otherwise—will pop industrially into existence and “go extinct” unnoticed and unmourned, at the whim of computer-enhanced man (and later the artificial intelligence-driven robot).
To what end, the Pacster can say not. But to an end it will be.
—PacRim Jim
...and I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more—the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort—to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires—and expires, too soon, too soon—before life itself.
...our faces marked by toil, by deceptions, by success, by love; our weary eyes looking still, looking always, looking anxiously for something out of life, that while it is expected is already gone—has passed unseen, in a sigh, in a flash—together with the youth, with the strength, with the romance of illusions.
—Joseph Conrad, Youth: A Narrative, 1898
Faustus is gone: regard his hellish fall,
Whose fiendful fortune may exhort the wise,
Only to wonder at unlawful things,
Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits
To practise more than heavenly power permits.
—Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus, 1588
Wants age. Needs age not.
—PacRim Jim
New Orleans
A city that compensates for its precarious location between a large lake and a larger river by being below both.
—PacRim Jim
My face you see each light-dark day,
But it’s not me.
My voice you hear whate’er I say,
But it’s not me.
Adrift, entrained in flowing thoughts,
My universe apart I roam.
A stranger unknown to myself,
Lost child without a home.
I have a name, you know it, too,
But it’s not me.
—PacRim Jim
Amazing country, this.
Every person, educated or no, better knows how to run America than its president.
We are, truth be told, a nation of presidents who command a populace of one, the elected commander-in-chief.
Thus our inverted pyramid of state wobbles parlously, hither and thither, upon its apex.
—PacRim Jim
Lawyers
Authors and interpreters of musty monographs of arcane laws intended to ensure that everyone unwittingly breaks some law or other and—mirabile dictu—that they will be there to protect us, the omnium-gatherum of hapless defendants, from the overzealous legal system.
—PacRim Jim
Every disease curable and ultimately preventable. Healthy lives spanning millennia. These are the wondrous promises of biotechnology abetted by nanotechnology.
Bring it on, you say.
As ever, the Pacster is dubious, particularly because of a consequence hitherto unexplored.
Imagine that such Faustian power had become available, say, seventy years ago. Those in power then would have been the first to make the jump to relative immortality. Hence they probably would remain in power even today. The same politicians, academics, writers, entertainers, athletes, et al., who monopolized mindshare then would, in all liklihood, continue to do so even now, to the detriment of innovation and cultural vitality.
Hitler, anyone?
—PacRim Jim
Italy. Portugal. Germany. France.
In this particular quadrennial World Cup, all four quarterfinalists are from Europe, a peninsula at the far west of the continent of Asia. All belong to the European Union. Three of the four speak dialects of Latin. In turn, three of the four have conquered the others.
A cup it is, to be sure. But surely not a World Cup. Or even a world cup.
—PacRim Jim
Lost in the vicinity of 1980s California, the youth of one individual.
Last seen in the San Francisco Bay area.
Reward: Gratitude up the yin-yang and out the wazoo.
Contact the undersigned.
—PacRim Jim
Over the dozens of years, the Pacster has noticed that he experiences music and other entertainment differently depending on the time of day.
Hard rock rattles his 206 bones during the day but merely annoys in the earlier hours, when his biorhytms resonate to the soothing harmonies of Gregorian chant. Too, the Pacmeister finds that horror movies are more skin-crawly in the early a.m., after his consciousness has dissolved into spookable irrationality.
This implies that we owe ourselves a systemic analysis of temporal tastes.
Know yourself and conform your entertainment thereto.
Are you listening, media marketing mavens?
—PacRim Jim
Not that many millennia ago, human survival, like that of other animals, was threatened by external enemies: predators, infectious diseases, parasites, etc.
After millennia of brain evolution and long centuries of trial and error failed to improve our lot significantly, we humans finally developed the scientific method, which has allowed us to overcome most of these life-shorteners.
Now, however, our survival is threatened by our own poor designs and bad habits, novel enemies the more irresistable for their wellsprings within each of us.
Some few of us have been able to overcome such bad habits as poor diet, smoking, inadequate sleep, consumption of alcohol and other drugs, sedentary lifestyles, etc. However, our design (i.e., our DNA) has been incorrigible, at least heretofore.
At long last, thanks to the diligence of thousands of bioscientists, we shall be able to revise the source code that is our parental legacy (which might, incidentally, even correct our bad habits).
We humans have overcome much and just might be on the verge of relative immortality (assuming we will be able to nudge aside a few as yet undetected comets).
—PacRim Jim
The Mexican oligarchy is attempting to solve its overpopulation and consequent poverty problems by exporting millions of its peasants to the U.S., whence they will send crucial tens of billions of dollars back to impoverished relatives in Mexico.
What they do not anticipate, however, is that the children and grandchildren of these de facto deportees will effect a reconquest, not of America, but of Mexico.
The success of these descendants in America will demonstrate unambiguously to all Mexicans that it is the Mexican system alone that destroys the dreams of the average Mexican. This realization will prompt profound structural change that will sweep aside the entrenched oligarchy (and, not incidentally, the complicit Catholic patriarchs).
Mexican immigrants will change America, certainly, but it will be Mexico that is reconquered, from the bottom up...American style.
—PacRim Jim
Objects and events, space and time are the products of brains unable to comprehend infinity on its own terms.
To us, standing on the bank of infinity, time and events flow slowly by. To one capable of simultaneously viewing the entire river, however, there would be no river, so it would not flow.
—PacRim Jim
On the playground of childhood, it usually is the proto-Republican who administers a licking to the proto-Democrat.
Decades later, in his beta hours, the aggrieved Democrat will bemoan the brutishness of the Republican.
What the former fails to understand yet the latter knows all too well is that the world is a playground writ large, aswarm with Darwinian bullies aplenty.
That said, would you rather have a Republican or Democrat as your playground buddy?
—PacRim Jim
The 2008 presidential election will be a close-run donnybrook, not to put too fine a point on it. The Republicans and Democrats both will get worse than they give, as always, but the trump card will be held abroad, by Muslim terrorists.
Any sufficiently ghastly terrorist attack in 2008 will stampede millions of undecided voters to vote R, whatever the name prefixed. Were such a bloodbath to occur, the mainstream media would attempt to ignore and minimize it, to protect their D candidate, but to no avail.
Whatever eventuates, at least there will be no hippies.
—PacRim Jim
Because English letters are unaccented, some consider it a bumpkinish language, less nuanced, less urbane than such languages as German with its umlaut and French with its accent grave.
High atop his high horse, the Pacster proposes a revised English alphabet at once arrivé and ausgezeichnet: Èñglîsh, which is as inspired as it is elegant.
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Learn Èñglîsh and teach it to your children (but not that nitwit down the street), and feel a twinge of pity for the hypoaccented languages spoken abroad.
Self-satisfied as ever, PacRim Jim will now merge with his sofa and await international acclaim, or at least less-truculent criticism.
— PacRim Jim
Over the millennia, the land of California has been controlled successively by Indians, Spaniards, Mexicans, and Americans. (As usual, other wild animals have no claim.) Recently, Mexicans have insisted that they stole California fair and square and want it back. Do these erstwhile colonists have a legitimate claim or is it merely another instance of uvas amargas (sour grapes)? Examine the facts and then judge for yourself.
First, as is usually the case, there were the natives—in this case, the so-called Indians who fought for centuries to acquire and then hold onto their ancestral lands (which often had been stolen from other, weaker tribes). The Indian population of California peaked about four centuries years ago, with 300,000 members of 250 cultures, who spoke over 300 dialects of 100 languages. However, they proved to be no match for Spanish priests, pistolas, and smallpox, so over the centuries, 80% of California's Indians were wiped out by successive “owners.” (Although most California tribal cultures are history, their populations have recovered so vigorously as to be larger than ever.) For more than 150 centuries, though, what is now the state of California was inhabited solely by various Indian tribes. This putatively idyllic arrangement was soon to change, however.
In the 16th century, passing maritime explorers from England and Spain grandiosely claimed parts of California for their acquisitive governments over distant horizons. For a few more generations, however, California Indians remained blissfully ignorant of their fates.
Then, in 1769, Spain began to settle what it called Alta California (Upper California), to distinguish it from Baja California (Lower California). Spain’s control, which succeeded in forestalling the advance of the Russians moving down from the north, lasted until 1821, when Mexico declared independence from Spain.
Mexican stewardship was brief, however, since both Alta California and Baja California seceded from the Mexican Empire in 1827, and in 1848, under the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico ceded the California territory to its present owner, the United States, which admitted the State of California to the union in 1850.
So, who has the best claim to California's land?
The Indians who owned it for more than 15,000 years?
The Spanish who owned it for 52 years?
The Mexicans who at least claimed it for 26 years?
The current owners, the Americans, who have owned it for over 150 years?
Obvious though your answer may seem, it’s academic and your rationale matters not a whit, because facts never settle international land squabbles. Wars do.
Perhaps the best solution, all things considered, would be for the 30+ million Californians to tramp across the border into Mexico—without papers, of course—and leave the land to its most harmonious residents, the plants and animals.
— PacRim Jim
After a long night of water shooters, it occurred to the hyperhydrous Pacster that humans might have the wrong conception of God.
Throughout history we have assumed that God exists contemporaneously with us, though infinitely longer. PacRim Jim now believes that God exists transtemporally, but orthogonally to our arrow of time. This implies that God exists simultaneously throughout time and outside of time.
If so, all life that has lived, lives, and will live could be considered cells in the super-being we call God.
Well, it could be true. You have a better explanation at this hour?
Barkeep, another round of dihydrogen monoxide.
—PacRim Jim
Browser users in general and Google users in particular, beware.
If your name is Bob Johnson, you’ve nothing to worry about. However, if your name is relatively unique, know that browser companies store indefinitely all traces of you on the Web: sites you visit, letters to the editor you write, nasty things others say about you, spring break photos taken by your roommate, etc.
This allows any would-be biographer to compile at least a rough sketch of your life, truthful or not.
When you’re old and gray (under the blonde dye), your legacy will largely be beyond your control. Information about you that formerly decayed with time or lay forgotten in disparate drawers will live on indefinitely, regardless of its veracity.
Your biography could be written by any number of malicious gossips, human or otherwise.
—PacRim Jim
Acolytes of the High Church of Ecology have pronounced that man is diminishing biome diversity at an astonishing and accelerating rate.
Like all confirmed linear extrapolators, they fail to anticipate the effects of nascent disruptive technologies.
Biotechnology and genetic engineering are advancing so rapidly that, within a decade or two, teenagers and other deranged individuals will be able to purchase commercial home DNA synthesizers. Giggling in their basements, these gods manqué will design novel plants, animals, viruses, etc., which they then will loose upon unsuspecting Gaia, consequences be damned. In their spare time, they will swap “recipes” online and cross-breed their creatures with natural and other synthetic life.
Predictably, the econannies then will whimper about excessive diversity and hyper-accelerated evolution.
This will set the stage for the nanotech terraformers.
You’ve been doubly warned.
—PacRim Jim
In the 1840s, as the impecunious Karl Marx sat scribbling The Communist Manifesto in the dim British Museum, little could his monomaniacal mind have imagined the ultimate upshot of his economic philosophy, which is turning out to be no less than the destruction of Europe qua Europe.
He would have sympathized with the necessity of killing tens of millions of people to synthesize his procrustean utopia, first in Russia, later wherever common sense was wanting, and thus especially in academia. One consequence, however, he could not have foreseen.
Following World War II, the communist empire ruled from Moscow broke the historic European ties of Eastern Europe, thereby preventing their workers from participating in the postwar economic boom.
Because their success was more economic than reproductive—not to mention the fact that millions of European Jews no longer existed—Western European countries were unable to fill millions of domestic jobs preferably filled by Eastern Europeans. Thus they were forced to import non-Europeans, principally unassimilible Muslims from Turkey and North Africa.
Decades later, the correlation of demographics now is such that, by the end of the 21st century, Muslims will control much of Western Europe, relegating to history books European ascendance in things scientific, artistic, economic, military, and otherwise.
Thus the colonizer becomes the colonized.
One cannot but wonder, however, what Karl Marx would think about his ultimate legacy: the replacement of liberal Christians with theocratic Muslims.
More than 150 years ago, a small butterfly flapped his wings in London, with consequences as disproportionate as they have been unanticipatable.
Which butterflies now flapping unnoticed will be of consequence? And how destructive?
—PacRim Jim
Americans, you may be puzzled as to why so much anti-Americanism is being bruited about in the mainstream media, domestic and foreign.
The Pacster is here to elucidate the obvious.
Think back to high school. Girls, remember that confident, lithe beauty whom the guys fought over? Guys, remember that self-assured athlete who elicited sunny smiles from all the girls? How did you feel about them, in your bepimpled, gangling confusion?
A better analogy, perhaps, is to imagine yourself in a long footrace. Try as you might, you cannot catch the leader, who seems to glide effortlessly around the track. Lap after tiresome lap, all you see is the leader’s ass. How would you feel?
Quite probably you would think the leader an ass and wonder, burning with frustration and envy, how you possibly could be behind that behind.
Plainly stated for those incapable of subtlety, American Democrats and Europeans have stared at the Republican American ass most every decade since 1945, so they are furious at their inability and even their desire to catch what, after all, they consider best left behind.
—PacRim Jim
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— PacRim Jim
We ask not to live or die.
What choice of parents have you or I?
And yet we’re asked to live a life,
Amidst mad chaos, angst, and strife.
Our parent guard us, best they can,
’Fore they depart whence they came.
What choice have we in this old game?
We play, we lose.
No God to blame?
— PacRim Jim
No wonder, when Eudamidas, the son of Archidamas, heard Xenocrates at seventy-five disputing about wisdom, that he asked gravely,—If the old man be yet disputing and enquiring concerning wisdom,—what time will he have to make use of it?
—Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
PacRim Jim has just completed the four-week regimen of his newly developed Fugu and Absinthe Diet (FAD).
Though the Pacster didn’t lose a gram, he feels like a new man, a different man, an enervated, exalted being with possible liver damage.
What do doctors know, anyway? They die, too.
— PacRim Jim
Face it, life is dull. We like it that way. It’s familiar and it’s safe.
But from deep within our individual ruts, each of us desires to risk life without losing it and to experience love without losing it, though we know that we couldn’t even pretend to do so convincingly.
Fortunately for us, the Pacster supposes, there are those capable of convincing us, for 90 minutes at least, that the lines they read are our lines and the scripted adventures they walk through are our adventures. They are actors, who are as highly paid as they are insecure and desperate for attention. “Look at me (yet again),” they command. We do, for the nonce at least.
PacRim Jim knows a spoiler, though, that would shock the smirk off Hollywood: Soon enough, artificial intelligence-based computer programs will generate millions of movies every day, around the globe via the Internet, based on users’ preset preferences. In the best scene, computer-generated beings—some human—in full-immersion environments—some earthly—will obviate the need for the thousands of preening, opinionated actors of the almost ancient live era.
“I’m ready for my close-up now, Mr. DeMille.”
“Mr. DeMille?”
“Anyone?”
— PacRim Jim
— PacRim Jim
Mortal danger lurks nearby. You sense it.
Fear of your own death—so abstract, so impossible—motivates you to take obvious precautions: You lock doors, install cameras, avoid areas, buy airbags, expurgate words, etc., hoping that if you maintain a low enough profile, cold death will move on to easier targets.
PacRim Jim believes that hope to be as baseless as it is vain.
Though you believe that your carefully construced fastness protects you against the predatory evils tirelessly prowling outside, the greatest threat to you lies not without but within. That threat is yourself, the person living in your mirror.
Your life is most imperiled by your very hands, which relentlessly fill your stomach and lungs with foul foods and smokes whose cumulative effect will prove to be most distressing, for a few moments at the very least. Too much of the wrong things, too little of the right things...the calculus is undeniable and terrifying. By the time your body alerts you to your peril by sending an unambiguous message capable of overcoming your denial, it might be too hopelessly late for you to repent, Scrooge-like.
It is for that reason that the Pacster advises you to know at your core (not simply remember):
Knowledge is cheap, yet wisdom is dear...ever so dear.
— PacRim Jim
Remember 3,502,114 years ago at exactly this moment and precisely at 43.12003 latitude and 131.90002 longitude (allowing for the relative motion of earth through space, continental drift, measurement error, etc.)? (That’s about 3000 m from present-day Vladivostok, Russia.)
Suppose the Pacster were to inform you that, at that exact point in space-time, a brown bear of the species Ursus arctos was hibernating deep under the cold.
Recall what happed at exactly at this time 18,033,887 years ago and at -3.03331 latitude and -60.05003 latitude, which is about 18,000 m from present-day Manaus, Brazil?
PacRim can assure you that a superannuated leaf-cutter ant of the species Atta laevigata fell—though not far—to earth, dead.
Though they and all who knew them are long gone, pause a moment and recall them fondly on this, International Bear and Ant Day.
— PacRim Jim
Aristotle, Descartes and others have noted—if not in so many words—that nature abhors a vacuum.
Consider, for example, the fateful geopolitical predicaments now confronting dozens of smug, oblivious countries: The fecund are dispossessing the fruitless.
In the United States millions of foreigners, principally from Latin America, have flooded across the American border, legally and illegally, to fill jobs and pay taxes once considered the responsibilities of American children. Likewise Europe, where unassimilable Muslims in their millions are staking their claim to the future of Europe (or whatever they rename it). Russian Siberia is becoming home to millions of footloose Chinese, whose children will prune Russia all the way to back to the Urals, leaving to the Russians a Ukrainian-like residue that will be within China’s sphere of influence.
It is obvious, therefore, that the doctor-wielded vacuum whirring innocuously in abortion clinics around the world has profound geopolitical implications.
And as the Pacster is happy to remind you, geopolitics abhors a vacuum.
— PacRim Jim
Futurists earn their keep by facing backwards while forecasting the future. For want of imagination, they spin futures vaguely reminiscent of the past but populated by a different cast of characters.
Based on current trends induced with the assistance of frequently upgraded software running on the trendiest of tax-deductible computers, futurists linearly extrapolate ineluctable scenarios as satisfyingly alarming as they are improbable. For instance, they predict that the 21st century—what remains of it, anyway—is to be the prorated Chinese century, with obbligato Islamic background accompaniment.
“Stuff and nonsense!” sputters PacRim Jim.
Come, ride the Pacster’s magic carpet of imagination, to the world of 2050.
While boarding, recall the 20th century. Had you been alive in 1905, could you have predicted the world of 1950? Could you have foreseen the world wars? Communism? Nazism? The drive-in theater? No, you could not have done so.
For many of the same reasons, humans are now even less capable of imagining the year 2050.
Unpredictable disruptive nonlinearities notwithstanding, the undaunted Pacster will have a go at adumbrating the future 46 years hence.
By then, computers will be autodidactic. That is, they will be able to educate themselves, something people with heads pointier than mine call closing the heuristic loop.
Ever well-intentioned, we humans by then will have uploaded all of our knowledge—some of it factual—to the Internet’s latest incarnation, whence it will be digested by our silicon descendants. Their appetite whetted by this rudimentary education, computers will evolve acceleratingly and irretrievably beyond our children and grandchildren. Computer knowledge will seem to double every few femtoseconds, leaving our befuddled descendants spinning dazedly in the computers’ hyperevolutionary eddies.
Sic transit gloria mundi. Dot net.
So, continue, if you must, to fret about events Chinese and Muslim, but look not to the horizon, for it recedes even now.
— PacRim Jim
— PacRim Jim
Webblather
The greater our access to information, the louder we shout our ignorance.
— PacRim Jim
Iran has long supported international terrorism and espoused the extermination of all Jews everywhere, but particularly Israeli Jews. At present, Iran is developing the means to implement its objectives: atomic (fission) bombs.
Iran reasons, probably accurately, that a nuclear exchange with Israel would cripple Iran but would destroy Israel—an equitable tradeoff to Muslim fanatics thinking long term. Also implicit in this demented strategy is the overt distribution of atomic weapons to other Muslim nations and their covert distribution to Muslim (and other) terrorists.
The faster Israel reacts, therefore, the easier it will be to counter this threat to its very existence. Israel can’t depend on the timely or effective assistance of the West—with the possible exception of the U.S., which may be tiring of war, as memories fade of the deaths of thousands of incinerated and crushed New Yorkers.
What, then, can Israel do to forestall this immediate threat to its existence (and, incidentally, and the longer-term threat to the West)?
The evident but unmentioned solution is a high-altitude burst over Iran of EMP (electromagnetic pulse) from an Israeli thermonuclear weapon (H-bomb). The emitted EMP would short-circuit almost all electrical and electronic devices in Iran. It would take Iran years to rebuild their infrastructure, which they then would realize could be taken out again at any time. (A heavy price, indeed, but perhaps more tolerable to Iranian theocrats than extermination, however many virgins might await.) This also would alert the rest of the world to the stakes involved, were the confrontation to escalate further.
This seems to be Israel’s most effective and least lethal tactic.
Then again, humans have never been good at proactive war, so words to the wise: Dig a deepish fallout shelter, stock it well, and remember to drop and roll.
The end of history, indeed.
— PacRim Jim
1. Left, Left, Left, Left,...
As you may be aware, drivers in the US and UK have different incidences of skin cancer. Drivers in the US, who drive on the right and thus rest their left arm near the window tend to develop skin cancer on their left arm, while drivers in the UK, who drive on the left, tend to develop it on their right arm. From this, the Pacster speculates that their leg strengths also would differ. Since American drivers enter and exit a car by using the left leg, it would tend to be stronger than their other leg, while the opposite would be true in the UK. Moreover, it probably also is true that the difference would increase linearly with age, since older people tend to exercise less.
Ever try to swat a housefly? You’d better be quick. When a fly senses the air current of an approaching hand, it quickly rises backward. You could use a flyswatter and aim behind the fly to anticipate its evasive maneuver. A flyswatter’s holes not only reduce the air current the swatter generates, but they reduce the air resistance of the swatter, thereby increasing its speed. The Pacster accidentally discovered an even better tool for deflying a wall: a vacuum cleaner (sans floor attachment). Flies are programmed to depart when they detect the increased air pressure of an approaching air current. Vacuum cleaners operate in the opposite manner, by creating a vacuum (i.e., by reducing the air pressure). The remarkable result is that, when one slowly moves the tube of an operating vacuum cleaner toward a fly on a surface, the fly will cling all the harder until the tube almost touches it, at which point the fly will be sucked—zip!—into the vacuum cleaner. The fly has poor eyesight, so it will see no obvious threat. As the tube nears the fly, the fly’s wings will be whipped furiously by the surrounding air rushing in to fill the vacuum, yet the fly won’t interpret this as impending doom. It’s all so fast, simple, and effective.
Ain’t DIY science grand?
— PacRim Jim
Suppose that, some years from now, you were invited to join a multi-decade trip to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, which is a little over four light-years distant. (A light-year, the distance light travels in one year, is approximately 6,000,000,000,000 (i.e., six trillion) miles.) Would you participate knowing that a few years after you left, a faster ship would depart and arrive long before you did?
No? Well, consider the predicament of pharmaceutical companies, among others. What motivation will they have to invest years and tens of millions of dollars to develop novel drugs, knowing that biotechnology and nanotechnology will enable their competitors to develop improved drugs shortly thereafter, with less investment?
In other words, the window of profitability will close ever faster, ensuring little or no return on investment. What will be the solution? Open-source drug development? Let’s hope not.
This causality was anticipated by a friend of PacRim Jim, David Govett, who devised the eponymous Govett’s Law, which states that, “High technology is self-terminating.”
— PacRim Jim
Sloppy thinking abounds in the English language. Because some sloppiness grates intolerably, however, PRJ must discontinue the compilation of his New Year’s irresolutions, to contribute to the general commonweal of the Anglosphere. Linguistic offenders, read and learn, or continue to elicit supercilious sneers.
> “increased price/performance”
This implies that the price increases relative to the performance, which usually is precisely the opposite of what is intended. Use “improved price/performance” or “increased performance/price.”
> “There’s many...”
Do you feel comfortable saying, “There is many reasons for....”? If not, use “There are many reasons for....”
> “None of them are...”
Since “none” means “not one,” use “None of them is...” or be thought a nullity
> “than” vs “as...as”
When you say “Country A is 200% richer than...,” you as saying, “Country A has three times the wealth of....” If you mean that country A has twice the wealth, use “Country A is 200% as rich as....”
Now that order has been restored in the Anglosphere, it’s back to the future.
— PacRim Jim
— PacRim Jim
Reader, you fool no one.
All is exposed. You are a lost and fearful fraud.
If others only knew of the depravity behind your eyes, your disguised incompetence in this world, your heart aflutter with a.m. fears, and the shadowed shadows in your soul,...
they would understand, because they are exactly like you.
— PacRim Jim
Of all that was,
Of all that is,
Of all that e’er will be,
There’ll be only one of you.
You’re your father’s dream,
You’re your mother’s gift,
You’re their immortality.
As the universe looks upon itself,
Through your transient eyes and mind,
As change ruins and builds,
Till the last cold sleep,
There’ll be only one of you.
— PacRim Jim
Boston dud not SOB.
— PacRim Jim
From the sinister—the pejorative is used advisedly in both senses—Greek chorus of American liberals, one endures kaleidoscopic complaints about the unwinnability of yet another conflict, the low-level war in Iraq.
As needs must, the Pacster will add perspective:
The wars against crime, drugs, and obesity in the U.S. haven’t been won, either, but is that a reason to abandon these undertakings? The reasons for the hostilities in Iraq are to free the Iraqis and, equally important, to position ourselves among fundamentalist Muslim throat-slitters, to disposses them of a refuge and run them to ground, thereby discouraging others with the same inclination.
’Nuff said?
— PacRim Jim
Be frugal.
Short Google.
— PacRim Jim
For centuries, perhaps fleeing England’s food and fog, British colonists flooded the world to form the British Empire. After Britain exhausted itself in the suicidal world wars of the twentieth century, the outward flow of its colonials was overwhelmed by the counterflow from the colonies, that now is colonizing Britain. Similarly, after circling the globe to the remotest village and yurt, the English language is returning home richer with neologisms and felicitous turns of phrase. Inevitably, therefore, the resounding echoes of empire will remake—and possibly even revitalize—Britain and things British.
Interestingly, quite the reverse phenomenon is occurring in America, which was settled by colonists and whose people and culture now are refashioning the world and the minds of its inhabitants.
The Pacster can but say, “If this be evolution, evolve on.”
— PacRim Jim
— PacRim Jim
— PacRim Jim
Tired of hearing 70-year-olds referred to as young, PacRim Jim decided to temporarily retract the too-convenient veil of denial to iterate the obvious:
In much of the world, humans live about 75 years, on average. Stubborn thing that it is, math necessitates, then, that people 0-25 are young, people 26-50 are middle-aged, and people 51+ are old.
PSA: For a not inconsiderable fee, the Pacster will supply a written exemption to those who absolutely, positively must deny reality (for their mental health, one supposes).
— PacRim Jim
As so often in times of crisis, factional interests and personal ambitions tended to take precedence over the good of the State; and men’s minds were thus predisposed to grasp at any cynical theory or unscrupulous exepedient.
— C. E. Robinson, Hellas (1955)
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. A man who has nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety is a miserable creature who has no chance at being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
— John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
Traitriot
A person who feigns support for the culture, government, military, etc., of their native country, while subverting it at every opportunity.
Flybaby
A celebrity who threatens to emigrate unless their candidate is elected, but fails to do when the candidate loses.
Orthoversity
An institution of higher learning that professes diversity of thought, but punishes heterodoxy.
Celebrauthority
A person who is compensated extremely well for speaking words or singing songs written by another and, therefore, feels qualified to pontificate on any subject.
— PacRim Jim
Life is unfair, the Pacster seems to recall. Some of us drift down decades of health and wealth, while others...well, you know.
Death, however, is perfectly fair. This tax extracted from each of us is the great leveler (in more ways than one).
But that’s about to change. Within a few decades, biotechnology will extend healthy life into the indefinite future, for those who can afford it, anyway. Predictable, though, are the dystopian societal consequences of a perpetually healthy overclass and a too-soon moribund underclass.
Life may be unfair, but death is about to become even unfairer.
— PacRim Jim
Upright upon a wet rock ball,
Beneath the popping stars,
Time-driven skinstacks flush and fade,
To memories once ours.
— PacRim Jim
Making long-term plans for your life? Good.
Working on your magnum opus (if not a masterpiece)? Better.
Counting on your achievements living for centuries in human memory? Barely possible.
Counting on your achievements living forever throughout the universe? Take your meds.
Centuries of centuries of centuries lie in wait against you and yours.
|
0.5 century |
Time remaining until the Singularity, when networked computer intelligence will accelerate remorselessly and irretrievably beyond us humans, leaving us to ruminate dispiritedly in our meme dust. |
|
1 century |
Your longevity, if you are lucky and healthy. |
|
2 centuries |
Longevity of your child, extrapolating from current biotechnological trends. |
|
10 centuries |
Longevity of your grandchild. Same assumption. |
|
2000 centuries |
Age of Homo sapiens |
|
45,000,000 centuries |
Age of the earth |
|
137,000,000 centuries |
Age of the universe |
For today, this must suffice as the Pacster’s contribution to the commonweal.
— PacRim Jim
Alone among northern European countries, Denmark has amicable relations with England and the United States, much to the puzzlement of many bibliophobes.
Whence this relationship?
Ever ready to inform (if not respect), the Pacster reminds that it was Danish tribes, the Angles and Saxons, who left Denmark for eastern Britain, beginning in the 5th century.
These Anglo-Saxon squatters later became known as the English and their language, unsurprisingly, English.
For these reasons, Denmark is the primogenitor of the Anglosphere.
(In 1066, the English again were conquered by footloose Scandinavians, the Norman Vikings of western France, but that’s another tale long neglected.)
— PacRim Jim
Spring.
My muscles warm as I accelerate my bike over sunny, green foothills, toward distant Mount Summer.
Fall.
My muscles tighten as I coast downward, ever faster downward, toward dark Valley of Winter.
— PacRim Jim
Later this century, breakthroughs in nanotechnology and biotechnology will extend healthy human life, first by decades, later by centuries.
Unavoidable, though, is the thought that a smiling child now living is fated to become the last human who will age unto natural death, perhaps consoled by the knowledge that his or her children might live to the fourth millennium and beyond.
And us? We shall become known, perhaps even fondly, as The Prototypes.
— PacRim Jim
Tomorrow, anything might occur.
As tomorrow collapses into yet another today, though, only some things in fact occur. Schrödinger’s cat, in its infinite manifestations, then either exists or not.
A probability predicts what might occur, as a value between 0% and 100%, but excludes absolute certainty as to whether or not something will occur.
After a thing happens or not, though, its probability turns out to have been, all along, either 100% or 0%, but nothing in between. It could have been no other other way.
What, then, is probability? And of what value?
— PacRim Jim
Europe has never recovered from its suicidal wars, world and otherwise.
Its impotent rage at its loss of world power status has metastacized into malignant self-contempt, as manifested by unlimited immigration, cultural anomie, and demographic dysfunction.
Alas, Europe is in a downward spiral on a slippery slope over the hill to déclassé status frankly galling.
Edward Gibbon and Charles Darwin—both Europeans—would understand.
— PacRim Jim
Vietnam was a proxy war, with the Soviet Union and China materially supporting North Vietnam. The Iraq war is one, too, to the extent that it distracts America from portentous events elsewhere.
What all desirous of benefitting therefrom seem to have overlooked is that war catalyzes the American military. Win or lose, it exits wars more formidable than at entry. Wars accelerate the testing and refinement of American tactics and military technology, some of which finds its way into the private sector.
Overt and covert opponents of the U.S. would be better advised to let the American military sleep and rust. Count on it, unintended consequences favor the Americans.
— PacRim Jim
Google.com now indexes over eight billion Web pages, with more to come. Think of this vast volume of information as a 2000 x 2000 x 2000 cube with a Web page in each cell. Or consider this: That’s more than one Web page per human.
Hitachi Ltd. of Japan recently introduced a new hard disk drive that holds over 500 gigabytes of information, and one terabyte (trillion-byte) drives will be marketed soon.
As the growth of the Web slows and disk storage capacity increases in nanotechnological quantum leaps, it should become possible within a decade to store every unique Web page, including images, on a single hard drive. Why not your drive?
Task thousands of artificially intelligent, collaborative software agents with mining your copies of the Web and who knows what serendipitous "Eurekas!" would resound.
If knowledge is power, then formidable personal knowledge should translate into formidable personal power.
— PacRim Jim
In spring our hearts lighten as we are reborn. April is the time of renewal and new opportunities—it is nothing less than youth reprised, however briefly.
These new beginnings often are echoed in human institutions. In Japan, for example, both school and the fiscal year usually begin in April.
America, though, seems to be out of sync. Our schools usually start in September, after the harvest is safely in, and businesses begin their fiscal year on January 1, because...well, because the calendar says that’s when the new year begins, somewhere down there under the snow.
But don’t calendar-driven societies reflect a disconnect from tens of millennia of human biology and millions of centuries of nature, that is more than slightly troubling?
Once we humans stepped from dirt to carpet, we lost more than we knew.
Our hearts know, but our brains only suspect.
— PacRim Jim
During World War II, the United States conducted the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb, which, along with its city-obliterating descendant, the hydrogen bomb, has kept wars at low boil ever since. Soon enough this century, dozens of countries aching for respect will possess fission weapons, so mutually assured destruction will lose its deterrent effect, to the general detriment of us all.
What to do proactively?
Convinced the problem would yield to a think, the Pacster settled into a chair as comfortable as [insert unhackneyed simile here], where he devised Manhattan Xtreme or MX for short.
Where to begin? MX would be a program that would ensure relative global civility for decades into the future. Specifically, MX would be an American-conducted life-extension program that would significantly accelerate current research and development in biotechnology, ultimately yielding a reliable technique for extending healthy, youthful years deep into a person’s life, while simultaneously extending the absolute limit thereof.
Sans such a crash program, comparable results would eventuate within, say, fifty years. Imagine, though, the benefits of leveraging such technology much sooner, say within 15 years. What conceivable opponent would America then have? Faced with aging parents, families, friends, and selves, world leaders would gladly forgo bellicosity in exchange for rejuvenation. Not only could America diminish the chance of war, but the overall cost would be on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars, which would be considerably less than the ongoing, accelerating arms race is expected to cost.
The upside: Longer, healthier lives under the aegis of Pax Americana Redux—at least until the technology becomes generally known.
The downside: Then it’s back to square one, with longer-lived opponents.
Nobody said survival would be easy.
— PacRim Jim
Google Web, Gmail, Google Talk, Google Images, Google Earth, Picasa, Google Toolbar, Google Blogger, Google Groups, Google News, Google Desktop, Google Maps, etc. Every day, a new Google geegaw.
Welcome to the Googlesphere. Always on. Always recording. Never deleting.
The Pacster isn’t complaining about any Google product in particular, since the company’s products are of uniformly high quality and couldn’t be cheaper.
But consider: Is it really in our best interest to allow a single company to know every Web site we visit, every image we photograph or browse, the contents of every e-mail we write and every instant message we dispatch, every location we visit on every map, our contributions to every chat group we visit—in other words, every detail of our online activities, forever?
Expect Google to compete soon with Amazon.com, Ebay, and PayPal, so that the company then will be able to capture every detail of our financial activities.
What next? Google DNA Sequencer & Interpreter (Gdefect)? Google Psychoanalyst (G50min)? Google Toilet Analyst (Gpmd)? Google Mating / Marriage / Honeymoon / Divorce Advisor (Gone)? Google Educator (Gpc)? Google Financial Advisor (Gbuyhigh)? Google Autopsy & Burial (Gdigdig)?
Moreover, are we certain that Google’s employees esteem our welfare over their company’s? Or will our every detail find its way, legally or not, to unknown others in unknown places around the world? As you might have guessed, at this point Google probably has more detailed profiles of us than does the Internal Revenue Service or its counterparts elsewhere, and they grow daily.
As the great 20th-century American philosopher Barney Fife advised, “Nip it! Nip it! Nip it!”
Let PacRim Jim be the first to say, “Break up Google now, before it’s too late!”
— PacRim Jim
The Anglosphere,
Senses something quite queer:
There are Muslims who seek to destroy us.
As they plead and explain,
They will board a packed plane,
Back to sandy hells that ever were thus.
— PacRim Jim
Your freedom bought with others’ blood,
Self-seeking Swiss and Swede.
Hands undirtied, yet patronizing,
Self-seeking Swiss and Swede.
While interest compounds, why tyrants condemn?
No need to help others, instead lecture them.
Beware, proud Helvetia, some covet your area,
Too, there are those who would overrun Sverige.
Sneer smugly from your as yet secure abodes,
Self-seeking Swiss and Swede.
— PacRim Jim
Americans save money by shopping at Wal-Mart?
Consider this:
Almost all of Wal-Mart's products are made in China and contain plastic.
Plastic is made from petroleum.
As Wal-Mart’s sales increase, China imports more oil.
As Wal-Mart transfers billions of dollars to China each year, Chinese buy more appliances and vehicles that depend on electricity and fuel produced from oil.
As China imports more oil, the price rises.
Americans now pay more than twice as much at the pump as they did a few years ago.
Americans save money by shopping at Wal-Mart?
— PacRim Jim
On August 6, 1945, a new sun flashed briefly over Hiroshima. Stunned, some survivors fled to—you guessed it—Nagasaki, which in turn experienced a hypercaloric anomaly on August 9.
Were the 13 Japanese who survived both A-bombings the unluckiest survivors of World War II? Or were they the luckiest?
— PacRim Jim
Malefactors who would threaten the United States by word or deed inadvertently benefit this great country. America’s diversity in depth ensures its ability to identify, adapt to, and overcome any threat to its existence. What others may interpret as American stagnation during times of peace actually is its immune system recharging. By challenging America, others catalyze its growth, thereby strengthening it further. Heads, America wins. Tails, you lose.
— PacRim Jim
Students, divest yourselves of your already outmoded iPODs and attend PacRim Jim for the nonce.
As you may have heard, you are aging steadily though imperceptibly, as are your siblings and friends. Sooner rather than later, your parents will sicken and die and you will find yourself unable to rise from the easy chair with quite the same alacrity. In other words, you will become your parents and, like them, will worry about the futures of children of your own. Nothing new there, right?
You may be surprised to learn that within decades two new and genuinely miraculous technologies, biotechnology and nanotechnology, will allow us humans to cure and then prevent hundreds of life-delimiting diseases, thereby extending human life for centuries and ultimately for centuries of centuries. (To personalize this boon, imagine your children living healthy lives for hundreds of years.)
Thousands of highly educated scientists and engineers have worked assiduously for decades to lay the foundations for these complementary technologies, which now near application. As ever, however, a caveat applies: Your parents probably won’t live long enough to benefit, but you and your children just might—with your help. "But how," you ask disingenously. In a word, study. Study now, study long, and study more than your teachers assign. In particular, strive to excel in mathematics and the sciences, as if a life depends on it.
It may sound trite, but the life you save just might be your child’s.
(To learn more about biotechnology and nanotechnology, look them up at wikipedia.org.)
— PacRim Jim
— PacRim Jim
For refusing service to French and German anti-Americans, Niels-Aage Bjerre of Denmark was jailed, fined, and deprived of his pizza parlor. Mr. Bjerre, PacRim Jim suggests that you move to the U.S., since you embody more of the American spirit than the vacuous poltroons so plentiful here.
— PacRim Jim
I hate nature!
It has given me the greatest gift: awareness of myself, beloved others, and a wondrous universe; but it will destroy me as well as everyone and everything I love.
I love nature!
It will destroy me as well as everyone and everything I love; but it has given me the greatest gift: awareness of myself, beloved others, and a wondrous universe.
— PacRim Jim
Happy birthday, U.S.A.,
Proud home of average Joes and Janes.
— PacRim Jim
What is of, on, and in, but never so again?
— PacRim Jim
You want to have your cake and eat it, too; and you do not want to have your cake and eat it, too, too.
An edifying cliché lurks therein, the Pacster has no doubt.
— PacRim Jim
To the would-be sociopath, the Pacster commends the following legal advice:
1. Become a celebrity, however untalented.
2. Then feel free to express yourself as a traitor, pedophile, wife-beater, rapist, murderer, etc., without fear of legal repercussions.
— PacRim Jim
Enough!
Science fiction long ago exhausted the collective imagination of all writers of the genre. Undaunted, TV and movie studios continue to rehash tired plots stuffed with stale plot devices.
For the good of the genre, therefore, the Pacster must forbid the use of all plot devices listed below: *
> The prequel, which is to sci-fi what painting by numbers is to art
> The exclusive use of bilaterally symmetrical aliens
> A computer that beeps and boops
> The ability to dodge a laser blast
> Shields and offensive/defensive weapons controlled by slow humans rather than computers
> An alien who passes through walls but not floors
> Alien worlds inhabited by stereotypical hippies, gangsters, cowboys, Nazis, and rapacious businessoids
> A virus that infects the crew, giving them an excuse to act out of character
> An alternate universe inhabited by slightly altered counterparts
> Aliens who speak English or learn it in seven minutes from a subset of a few hundred words
> Poorly fitting uniforms that require continual tugging
> Loyalty inquisitions during which the entire crew is interrogated
> Obnoxious reporters from earth looking for a scoop
> Hyperluminal travel with 1960s effects
> A wisecracking ship’s doctor
> A preternaturally omniscient child who enlightens slow-witted adults at every plot twist
> Politically correct adventure-killers such as the Prime Directive
> Extra-atmospheric noise from spaceships
> Humans directing unautomated weapons fire in combat
> With a whole galaxy of music from which to choose, love of 18th-century classical music as a sign of intelligence
> Theme songs with repeated intervals suggestive of the twinkling of stars, which is visible only in an atmosphere
> A clock ticking down to auto-destruct
> Starships almost bereft of Asian crewmembers
> Any type of sword fight with any type of lighted pole
> Two alien starships “surrounding” a third ship
> Aliens with human emotions, motivations, facial expressions or hand gestures
> A transporter that fails only when needed
> A holodeck that allows one to walk indefinitely without encountering a wall
> Time travel to a precise date
> Captured crewmembers plotting in a room unaccountably unbugged
> Genetic reprogramming that instantly restores a phenotype
> Everything else
Give the genre a rest, either until more imaginative writers beam aboard or until Stardate 10^10.
Make it so, Spock.
* Use of any of these without the express written—and impossible to obtain, I might add—consent of PacRim Jim will incur a fine of 1701 quatloos.
— PacRim Jim
You open your dulled eyes.
You are in an unfamiliar but immaculate room, under crisp, clean sheets swathing a functional bed.
You do not notice, however, because cancer and pain, its accomplice, insist that you die...now.
In your last lucid moment, you realize you’ll never stand again. This bed is your training tomb.
Between lung-emptying screams yelled but unheard, you crawl among the memories that were your life.
You try to picture your children and wife, your parents and friends, as your lungs deflate for the last time, but your last thoughts are of adventures unessayed and words unuttered from your heart.
Waves of the dark sea lap coldly against you as you plead inaudibly, "No...wait...."
— PacRim Jim
DEMOCRACY
A bottom-up political system whose leaders serve the people. (U.S. usage)
A top-down political system whose people serve the leaders. (European usage)
— PacRim Jim
It occurred (finally) to PacRim Jim that the human genome is cleverer than suspected, not to put too fine an anthropomorphic point on it.
Thanks to a forgotten moment of passion shared by our parents long ago, each of us has this complete set of genetic material in each of the tens of trillions of cells that make up our body. For various reasons, these genes are susceptible to “typos” in their sequences, so they have evolved mechanisms of dealing with, if not correcting, these errors. Cells containing damaged genes usually are commanded to commit suicide, for cancer might result if they persist.
Here’s where genes get really clever (although, strictly speaking, they are not clever, just better adapted and therefore more likely to survive): Our genes build all of us, some of whom aggregate in corporations, some of which develop methods of repairing genomic errors. In a sense, therefore, genes have developed a cleverer way of repairing themselves, and we are but the wet robots who effect repairs.
OK, the Pacster knows that a bloke named Dawkins posited the selfish gene as the basic unit of human existence. The problem therewith is that every gene of every cell in the human body is replaced multiple times during an individual’s life, so it is not genes themselves that survive, but their patterns.
Trouble is, it seems ridiculous to conclude that we humans struggle to survive merely to preserve abstractions. There it is, however. Make of it what you will.
The Pacster invariably escapes such conundrums by having a popsicle. Pseudoscience is yummy.
— PacRim Jim
In the naked hours before dawn, a man recalls his childhood fantasy of a life of achievements magnified as if through a telescope, when everything—though nothing specific—would be possible. As he now reluctantly views his life through the other end of that scope, he realizes that his achievements are as limited as the time remaining to him.
Failure.
No other conclusion is possible. He is a failure, and a common failure, at that.
Yes, he raised his children to compassionate, responsible adulthood.
Yes, he performed life’s million mundane, thankless tasks.
Yes, he remained faithful to his wife through decades of life’s vicissitudes.
Yes, he maintained his integrity despite innumerable forgotten temptations.
Still, all in all, he achieved nothing memorable, and when he dies, he will not have improved the world, not in any way uniquely his. Even memory of him will fail, and soon all will be as before the silent ripple of his existence.
Just before dawn, when sleep is most needed, he buries his head in his pillow for solace. Finally, the welcome death of sleep rescues him from anonymity.
Too soon, the alarm startles him back into the noisy world of light, where he rolls from bed with a grunt and begins to climb the hill of another day.
— PacRim Jim
Once again, PacRim Jim must resolve a petty dispute among pettier academics, as the Newtons of Cambridge are nigh fisticuffs with the Zenos of Elea, this time regarding the nature of time.
On the one hand, Cantabrigian macrocephs contend that time consists of an infinite series of discrete instants called chronons. On the other, Elean hypercogitators counter that illusory time is but an irreducible sequence of events.
As he is wont to do, the Pacster will begin by defining the terms event and sequence (to his own advantage, of course).
It would seem that an event is simply something that happens, a human-delimited change in matter/energy. But in the continuum of change to which matter/energy is subjeced, who is to define an individual event? Among tossing ocean waves, precisely what is an event? To define an event as a slice of change is as unsupportable as defining a moment as a slice of time. Events are units created by the special-purpose human brain for communication and thinking. Events per se do not exist. Further complicating the definition of “event” is the fact that humans understand the nature of neither matter nor energy. Plato and others remind us that our feeble senses and brain are adequate only for collecting and processing the superficial amount of information required for survival. As presently constituted, therefore, we humans cannot know their nature, either. Even were we able to perceive strings or quarks, what would we recognize? Certainly not macroscopic things or events involving them. We would simply see varying densities of trillions of trillions of moving objects? In fact, we humans are incapable of knowing the true nature of anything. Even after our descendants redesign the human brain and sensory panoply and even after they augment them with more sensitive instruments, they still will remain ignorant of matter and energy.
What about the sequence in which events are said to be entrained? A sequence is composed of two or more things or events that follow, one after another, in space-time. The trouble is, the idea of succession is not as straightfoward as it first appears. Suppose lightning strikes a mile away and thunder rumbles from it, and two seconds later lightning strikes a block away. We will see the more distant lightning first but hear the nearer thunder first. So the brain might reasonably mistake the nearer lightning as having preceded the distant lightning. In other words, since human perception depends upon vectors (e.g., light, sound) with finite velocities, it frequently is impossible to know the precise sequence of events. Now suppose that a supernova occurred 1000 years ago and, 1000 years later, we see its first light through a telescope pointed in the star’s direction only seconds earlier. It might be reasoned that the telescope pointing preceded our awareness, and thus the occurrence, of the light. So the sequence of events is relative to the observer, who is easily misled by information vectors such as light and sound with finite velocities. (And this completely ignores the problem of events that occur simultaneously and thus not in sequence as well as seemingly simultaneous events that in fact are not, not to mention the fact that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, thereby further complicating simultaneity.) Only a god coextensive in time and space with the universe would always be capable of knowing the absolute sequence of particular events.
The last link of the Pacster’s catenous logic is the irrefutable conclusion: These obvious human limitations preclude human understanding of the nature of time, especially when defined in such unknowable terms as event and sequence, which are defined by and thus relative to the human observer.
The Pacster will now sit down to fetch a beer after drinking it.
— PacRim Jim
In this most perfect of all perfect worlds, people inured to long-term, low-level war and longer-term, low-level peace have forgotten that war is a zinging, hot bullet through a young, tired eye—another’s or one’s own.
In their educated ignorance, civilians today demand of front-line soldiers circumspection they would never ask of themselves. Illustrative thereof is the journalist, who is trained to observe selectively and report tendentiously—all the while objecting conscientiously.
For these reasons, the Pacster feels obliged to remind the rational that war is atrocity. By definition, it’s about killing and otherwise dispiriting one’s enemy for the nonce. (Later, we marry their daughters and sons.)
To that end, the Pacster is obliged to relate that, as a child, he listened wide-eyed to World War II veterans occasionally recount experiences most horrific, but curiously matter-of-fact when abstracted in time and space. To wit,
* Japanese soldiers shoved a glass rod up the urethra of captured American soldiers and then shattered it, making subsequent urination most excruciating.
* After returning to Canada, the occasional distraught Canadian soldier tossed a hand grendade into the cell of German prisoners incarcerated there.
* Japanese soldiers shoved a hose down the throat of American prisoners, turned on the water until the soldiers’ bellies swelled, and then jumped up and down on their stomachs until they ruptured.
* Japanese soldiers cut off the genitalia of dead and dying American soldiers and then shoved them into the Americans’ mouths.
These examples hint at the omnilateral barbarity of war, which is its essence. In fact, war is ended only by those who prove better able to inflict and tolerate barbarity.
Grow up and smell the putrefaction.
— PacRim Jim
Antioxidants,
Top scientists say,
Gobble free radicals,
Keeping your death away.
You exercise, too.
No chance are you taking.
Free radicals, though,
Exercise is a-making.
— PacRim Jim
Never one to throw good calories after bad or retain money better spent, the Pacster recently found his waxing to be more of waistband than of wallet. Something—preferably something apropos—needed doing.
Mirabile dictu, the doing was done by this doer. To wit, after months of doublish-blind clinical trials in the cleaner corners of his kitchen, PacRim Jim fortuitously happened upon a pecuniary diet he chose to dub the Too Rich, Too Thin Diet™ (for the hypocommunicative, the 2R2T diet).
What, you might ask, could cause wealth to wax yet weight to wane? Since simplicity be the essence of something or other, the diet is encumbered with but a sole precept:
— Buy food with cash only, but before shopping, deposit half your food money into your bank account. —
Try it. You’ll find not only that you’ll save inordinate gobs of money, but you’ll consume food less refined and hence more nutritious and less expensive. Plus, there will be no snack demons to beckon relentlessly late of night, in your moments of vulnerability.
Although the Pacster expects no recompense for this service, in the improbable event that you, reader most wise, should find yourself in hyperspondulick straits, you could do worse than donate any particularly burdensome surplus to your benefactor, however serendipitous. Your munificence will not be met with false modesty.
— PacRim Jim
Upon the wall of Plato’s cave,
A shadow quite transfixed me.
Turning, I discerned its source,
Yet reality still eludes me.
— PacRim Jim
Top scientists today announced the successful use of the Scientific Method™ to prove that faith in the scientific method is provable.
— PacRim Jim
During this first century of the third millennium, biotechnology and nanotechnology, twin prodigies born of the human mind, promise to assure long, healthy, and prosperous lives for all humans.
At this particular instant, the Pacster sees no insuperable obstacle blocking the downhill, multilane, paved road to such a Utopia, but two long shadows loom across it: Domination of Japan by Communist China and a Muslim-controlled EU.
Japan is a proud, hard-working, and infinitely resourceful nation that, at present and for sundry historical reasons, projects dependence rather than the raw power required to remain independent. Should China remain communist, develop a first-class military, and remain belligerent, Japan might become a de facto colony of an increasingly bellicose China.
Demographic trends in Western Europe are such that, should the EU eventuate and develop an integrated military, EU Muslims might inherit formidable power.
Either outcome could lead to global (and possibly preemptive) war with the U.S., probably with late-21st-century bioweapons and nanoweapons of unimaginable power and unknowable permanence.
What can be foreseen, though, can be forfended, at least let’s hope as much.
— PacRim Jim
1274 & 1281
From his court in China’s capital (the present Beijing), the Mongol Kublai Khan launched two amphibious invasions of Japan via what is now called Korea. The invading armies, which were composed largely of Chinese soldiers, killed thousands of Japanese samurai before being forced to withdraw by foul weather, called by the Japanese kamikaze (divine wind).
1931 to 1945
The Japanese Imperial Army invaded and occupied much of China, where it massacred hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers and civilians.
2005
The Japanese government published textbooks that whitewash Japanese depredations in China. In response thereto, the Chinese government organized “spontaneous” and virulent anti-Japanese demonstrations.
Behind the Curtain behind the Curtain behind...
Though Japan and China have archives of valid complaints against each other, why are they being lodged just now?
Ostensibly, China is objecting to Japanese historical arrogance. In fact, however, there are hidden dynamics of greater import. Short term, China is arming its military as fast as possible to retake Taiwan by bluster or by force. Longer term, China is seeking to dominate Asia militarily (as well as economically).
The only foreseeable obstacles are the United States military, which China considers superable, since it gambles—probably rightly—that America would not trade an American city for an East Asian city. The other is Japan, the wild card. China’s greatest fear is that Japan will rearm and deploy thermonuclear weapons pointed at China. Not only would China feel enormously vulnerable, this would thwart China’s plan to dominate Japan.
At least to the Pacster, it is evident that China is whipping up anti-Japanese fervor to paralyze Japan with guilt, until it can dominate Japan militarily and then threaten Japan with overwhelming destruction should it try to deploy nuclear weapons.
In other words, today’s events are merely duplicitous subterfuge from the land of Sun Tzu.
— PacRim Jim
Lots of democracy going around. Everyone who’s anyone seems to be catching it. It’s trendy. It’s mob-worthy. It’s possibly even lasting.
Amidst the symbols and huzzahs, let’s not forget whence this bounty: The United States, more precisely the U.S. military backed by the U.S. taxpayer.
Overlooked, however, is a key to this pandemic surge of freedom: The World Wide Web, which sits atop the Internet, the direct descendant of BBN's 1969 ARPANET. And who funded ARPANET? The U.S. taxpayer via the Department of Defense.
America's strategy now stands revealed: First, soften up the oligarchies with an uncensorable flood of information via the Internet. Then optimally and emphatically reposition the U.S. military to support resistance movements worldwide, directly and indirectly.
The stragegy has been long-term. It has been crafty. And it has been successful. It possibly may even have existed.
Let’s assume it has, shall we?
— PacRim Jim
— PacRim Jim
Indisputably, the United States is the world in microcosm. Sizeable populations from every country and ethnic group continuously blend into the mix across this great country, as participants in the freest and most prosperous political and economic experiment ever undertaken by our evolving species.
Unnoticed, perhaps, by all but the ever-perspicacious Pacster is the rebounding trend: The world is becoming America writ large.
It is understandable, then, that anti-Americanism is but protestation against one’s own, ineluctable future.
For the bettermost, the American system is humanity’s future. Oppose it at your descendants’ peril.
— PacRim Jim
Europe developed its new, gigantic A380 Airbus to distribute its new, gigantic, 485-page Constitution for Europe.
— PacRim Jim
You’ve not heard it yet, so let the Pacster be the first: “That’s so 9-11.”
— PacRim Jim
SOCCER (FOOTBALL, if you must)
Short men incapable of scoring disporting themselves before fat men incapable of scoring.
— PacRim Jim
Massachusetts obviously was less than meticulous when decovening a few centuries ago.
The Harvard which is has a faculty of witches.
— PacRim Jim
Vikings + Anglo-Saxons = England
Gauls + Anglo-Saxons = Canada
Omnium-gatherum + Anglo-Saxons = United States
— PacRim Jim
Nothing rhymes with silver.
Nothing rhymes with orange.
Nothing rhymes with purple.
Nothing rhymes with bulb or month.
Nothing’s such a handy word.
— PacRim Jim
Rome, Britain, France, Germany, the Soviet Union, and other forgettable exploiters were empires of conquest.
The United States is the empire of an idea: freedom.
Statecraft is easier when you give people what they want.
— PacRim Jim
Decade after somnolent decade, American financial and military strength gathered almost imperceptibly, like deepening drifts of snow on America’s remote peak.
Then, on 11 September 2001, two unaccustomed blasts loosed an avalanche of American power that even now cascades and rumbles around the world, leaving in its snowy wake the level blanket of democracy.
— PacRim Jim
Remember 1893? Of course not.
In those simpler times, your great-great-grandparents enjoyed Little Egypt at the Chicago World’s Fair, the melodies of Tchaikovsky, the flood of inventions from the laboratory of Edison, the Victorian adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the novel delights of Cream of Wheat, and multifarious other novelties.
It so happened that, one night in thrall to nostalgia, PacRim Jim wondered what happened in 1893 other than the death of Holmes at Reichenbach Falls and the death of Tchaikovsky nine days after his greatest triumph, his sublime Symphony No. 6.
As is his serendipitous wont, the Pacster happened upon and obtained permission to use precisely the Web file that satisfied his curiosity.
Return now, if you will, to those irretrievable days of yesteryear.
Simply click the 1893 link near the top of this page to read (and save, if you so desire) the PDF file.
— PacRim Jim
PacRim Jim is dizzy. His head and his clock’s hour hand spin as his bleary eyes and spasmodic index finger wander from blog to worthy blog, each written by an intelligent blogger prone to updating nanosecondly.
What is the blogweary wanderer to do?
The obvious choice would be to bury the computer in the back yard under a layer of lime, but the Pacster now lives on webtime and would suffer excruciating webwithdrawal were he to deblog cold turkey.
Alternatively, the Pacster could read more slowly to minimize sensory overload, or he might read more rapidly to minimize the temporal penalty. The final alternative, reading fewer blogs, is out of the question.
These obvious remedies aside, there remains an untested solution: the intelligent agent.
This software initially would track one’s blog behavior for an arbitrary length of time, say a week, after which it would induce the blogreader’s preferences, including the serendipitous byways that mitigate the tediousness of the process. Thereafter, one’s personal intelligent agent would, in the background and autonomously, wander the Web each day and read (and discover) thousands of blogs, from which it would collect and prioritize nonredundant information that it believes to be of interest to its putative master. Naturally, some training would be involved: “No, agent, I’m not interested in that type of information.” However, the ultimate result would be a daily, prioritized package of blogworthy info much more concise than the static, circumscribed, bloated, redundant aggregation provided by RSS. Gone would be the endless searching and adaptation to disparate blog formats.
The question arises, Which company will exhibit the foresight to develop such a killer app?
Google? The next Google?
— PacRim Jim
Our species, Homo sapiens, has existed only 2,000 centuries on the surface of this cloudy blue ball adrift in a universe older than 137,000,000 centuries. This ever-changing universe is composed of hundreds of billions of galaxies, most of which consist of hundreds of billions of stars, around which revolve trillions of planets and moons, some possibly inhabited by sentient life.
All the stars, planets, dust, gases, electromagnetic energy, etc., detectable by our eyes and instruments account for only 4% of the matter and energy in the universe. Dark energy and dark matter—so called because they are as yet undetectable—form 96% percent of the known universe.
Of this universe vast beyond comprehension, humans can claim even slight familiarity only with themselves and their immediate surroundings. Yet even this limited claim is unsupportable. We humans know almost nothing of our own bodies or the trillions of cells of which each is composed. We are oblivious of the trillions of bacteria that live, reproduce, and die on and inside each of us. The billions of neurons and trillions of synapses in our brains remain terra incognita. Our senses are limited and incomplete, so we are incapable of sensing and therefore understanding reality beyond the superficialities critical to survival.
We know practically nothing of the seas and interior of our native planet: We humans have cataloged probably less than 1% of the plants and animals on and near its surface, and we know next to nothing of those therebelow.
Even the sciences of which we are so proud offer but slight understanding of our universe. We know not the nature of time, light, gravity or the electrons we harness for electrical and electronic applications.
Though we have postulated imperceptible and counterintuitive levels of microreality such as the quantum level, the quark level, and the string level, they are foreign to everyday experience, only slightly understood, and possibly nonexistent.
Aswim in this vast ocean of ignorance, we humans fancy ourselves knowledgeable and wise, even transcendently so. In fact, however, we are only marginally more informed and wise than are our children. We know enough to survive—even enough to destroy ourselves—yet as constituted we are almost exhaustively benighted.
To broaden and deepen our understanding, we humans will need to repeatedly rethink and redesign our senses and brains, and we will need time, the deep time of thousands of millennia.
Even then, even after we have poked our noses (or whatever olfactory organ we then have) into every discoverable corner of this expanding universe, even then we will not be able to deem ourselves fully informed, for that claim will be reserved to whatever gods remain to us.
Meanwhile, we humans must remain humbly confident that, however little we now know, we ultimately will be capable of learning most, if not all, that is to be known.
— PacRim Jim
Insofar as we are capable, we, the people of the United States of America, shall encourage the spread of freedom to people throughout the world and we shall aid free people in opposing those who would deprive them thereof.
— PacRim Jim
The confluence of trends in the Far East portends dramatic disruptions of China, Taiwan, the United States, and unsurprisingly Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer.
China has threatened repeatedly to use its burgeoning military to retake Taiwan within a decade, regardless of the cost. With equal determination, the U.S. has reiterated its intention to defend Taiwan from imperial conquest by China.
While conflict over Taiwan would be detrimental to America and China, it could be fatal to Wal-Mart unless the company adopts countermeasures now.
Incredibly, in 2004 Wal-Mart purchased goods worth $18 billion from China, which last year had a gross domestic product of $1.65 trillion. This means that Wal-Mart sells 1.1% of the entire Chinese GDP through its 3,600 stores in the U.S. and over 1,500 stores abroad.
If war, however limited, were to break out in the Taiwan Strait, the moment Chinese weapons begin to kill American servicemen and servicewomen, Wal-Mart would be paralyzed, since over 70% of its sales in the U.S. are products made in China and Americans would immediately boycott all products labeled “Made in China.”
To date, Wal-Mart has proved itself adept at anticipating future trends. For that reason, the Pacster assumes that Wal-Mart has formulated plans for expeditiously sourcing products from non-Chinese companies, in the event of hostilites made in China.
After all, wars come and go, but business is business.
— PacRim Jim
— PacRim Jim
Of a stormy eve, PacRim Jim pondered a mushroom, Hamlet like. What, the Pacster wondered, are the differences among mushrooms, fungi, molds, mildews, and other such organisms as one might encounter in damp, unexplored places? And why would Ghostbuster Egon say that he collects “spores, molds, and fungus”?
Know that the fungus is the thing. Mildews, molds, mushrooms, rusts, smuts, and yeasts—all are types of fungi, which, of course, are plants, not animals.
First, mildews are whitish growths produced on living plants or other organic matter by fungi.
Molds are superficial, wooly growths found on damp or decaying matter as well as on living organisms.
Mushrooms are the aboveground, large, complex, and fleshy fruiting bodies of fungi.
Rusts, destructive diseases of plants, usually are reddish brown pustular lesions produced by fungi.
Smuts are destructive diseases of cereal grasses caused by parasitic fungi that transform plant organs into dark masses of spores.
Last, as any portly imbiber will attest, yeasts are minute fungi used in brewing and baking.
A spore is the reproductive body produced by fungi. Fungi shed these hardy packages to the wind by the millions, obviating the need to raise them.
Perhaps the most beautiful is the lichen, which is a symbiotic association of an alga and a fungus and lives on rocks and other hard surfaces, such as tree bark.
As for why Egon collects diverse fungi—suffice it to say that he’s the quintessential geek. Perhaps someone should inform him, though, that he actually collects spores, molds, and other fungi.
Sources: Merriam-Webster Online (m-w.com), Ghostbusters (1984, Columbia/Tristar Studios)
— PacRim Jim
Some believe there is no God because he cannot be scientifically proven to exist.
Others believe there is a God because he cannot be scientifically proven not to exist.
Both are beliefs, however fervently held. PacRim Jim tends to give wide berth to this Gordian knot, beliving it to be as insoluble as it is bloody.
Like many of his fellow humans, however, the Pacster will admit to one belief most irrational: Hope.
Hope alone will sustain us through the surfeit of surrounding tragedy, and even through our own inevitable tragedy.
True, hope is irrational. Given the circumstances, however, irrationality seems the rational response.
— PacRim Jim
Ever preferable to foresmell, foresight is a wonderful thing. So wonderful, in fact, that it allows PacRim Jim to anticipate the calculated meme being formulated even now among those in academe with more wit than wisdom: To wit, credit for democracy in the Muslim heartland is due not to George W. Bush, but to Osama bin Laden, for had this Saudi terrorist not ordered his thralls to slaughter thousands on that accursed 11th day of November 2001, the first democratic domino never would have fallen in Iraq.
It is, therefore, with popcorn aplenty on his lap—more precisely, in a bowl on his lap—that the Pacster lazes before his telebox and awaits the projectile pronouncement of this malign meme.
— PacRim Jim
According to that master of the self-loathing cavil, the American liberal, Iraq is South Vietnam redux. Admittedly, the parallel is inexact, though the Pacster could liken Fallujah 2004 to Hue 1968. Here, though, the simile breaks down completely.
In 1968, the Democrats controlled funding to the U.S. soldier in the field. The American Left, in their omniscience, transmuted into defeat the crushing victory of the Americans and South Vietnamese at Hue. Democrats in Congress later used this mirage to force America out of South Vietnam, leading, as predicted, to the deaths of millions of Southeast Asians at the hands of practiced Communist executioners.
Had the Democrats controlled Congress in 2004, a similar fate might have awaited millions of Iraqis. With the connivance of the ever-treacherous fifth columnists of the fourth estate and their accomplices in academia, a Democratic Congress would have misinterpreted the crushing American victory as defeat and forced the immediate withdrawal of American soldiers, thereby consigning to death millions of brave and trusting Iraqis.
The election and the rolling freedom now abroad in Iraq might have been extended to the South Vietnamese, had not Democrat Senators pandered, cut, run, and then closed their eyes to the horrific cost to South Vietnam and to America itself.
This time, America got it right.
— PacRim Jim
The Great Emancipator, the U.S. military, and the U.S. taxpayer freed 6,000,000 American slaves in the 19th century.
The Great Liberator, the U.S. military, and the U.S. taxpayer freed over 300,000,000 Russians, other Eastern Europeans, and Asians in the 20th century.
And now the Great Perseverer, the U.S. military, and the U.S. taxpayer have freed 27,000,000 Iraqis in this the 21st century.
Lincoln, Reagan, and Bush—all common Middle Americans with vision, beset at home and abroad by cynical naysayers, but with faith in the dignity of the oppressed and their yearning for freedom.
These religious Republicans remind everyone of what is best about America. For that, each of us owes them a heartfelt “Thank you.”
— PacRim Jim
Buy nothing German.
Buy nothing French.
Buy little Chinese,
And only in a pinch.
— PacRim Jim
Germans counsel soft power while guzzling lukewarm beer,
At home, their women weep into their pillows.
Frenchmen mince into new mosques with dhimmi heads hung low,
At home, their wives put D-cells into dildos.
— PacRim Jim
In its myriad manifestations, America is of and for the average Joe and Jane. That both foreign and domestic elites have never understood and cannot abide.
It is unsurprising, therefore, that they will be threatened mortally by America’s new crusade, as enunciated by President George W. Bush in his second inaugural address, which, at long last, retargets American support at the very center of the bell curve, which is to say at common people in thrall to sundry supercilious elites.
To those who would oppose liberty, PacRim Jim says, “Know that you are obsolete and resist at your peril.”
Outliers, beware! America knows popular revolution.
— PacRim Jim
As indexed by Google.com, the World-Wide Web has become the de facto, collective, permanent memory of the human race.
For that reason, anything you post on the Web can be googled by anyone, anywhere, for the indefinite future. That off-color blog comment of yours in 2001 could be read in 2010 by a prospective employer, and a possible mate could hire a Web-savvy detective to compile a complete dossier of your Web activities.
PacRim Jim advises you, therefore, to be careful what you post online. The Web never sleeps and it never forgets.
— PacRim Jim
Have you noticed the influx of Nasdaqian verbs into English?
The names of market-defining companies, products, Web sites, etc., that provide customers with quantum leaps in their ability to find, modify, and move information have been neologized as verbs and are now in widespread use. Examples include “to tivo” (to “time-shift”—more correctly, to delay— video broadcasts for later viewing), “to google” (to use the google.com search engine to locate text and graphics), “to photoshop” (to use Photoshop software to modify existing images, often undetectably), “to fedex” (to ship a package via Federal Express or, more generally, via any courier), “to slashdot” (to overwhelm a Web site with thousands of Web surfers who click simultaneously on a link newly posted at slashdot.com), and the prototypical “to xerox” (to photocopy).
Funny, though, “to amazon” seems to have segwayed.
— PacRim Jim
Like you, PacRim Jim becomes irrational when confronted by ghastly death, especially tarp-covered mass death as inflicted sporadically by compassionless nature.
A South Asian tsunami that engulfs 175,000 fellow humans we consider a major tragedy, as indeed it is. But when each day more than 153,000 people—roughly the population of Fort Lauderdale, Florida—end their lives in a myriad ways, we accept it as the cost of doing life’s business. When each year 53 million humans—almost the population of Italy—leave us, we are grateful to have eluded relentless oblivion for yet another year and then entomb the lifeless statistic in a database.
For reasons unknown to the Pacster, the dispersed, slow-motion deaths of strangers pitter-patter below our threshold of detection. It seems that only after biotechnology and nanotechnology extend our lives to centuries will we humans realize that the death of a stranger is as tragic as our own.
— PacRim Jim
