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“Was non in his tyme him liche”
Contact PacRim Jim: info-at-japanorama-dotcom
—PacRim Jim
The purpose of life is to determine the purpose of life.
The purpose of the purpose of life, however, remains elusive.
—PacRim Jim
Of all kinds of credulity, the most obstinate and wonderful is that of political zealots; of men, who, being numbered, they know not how nor why, in any of the parties that divide a state, resign the use of their own eyes and ears, and resolve to believe nothing that does not favour those whom they profess to follow.
— Samuel Johnson, The Idler, No. 10, 1758
Those who have attempted much have seldom failed to perform more than those who never deviate from the common roads of action;...it is, therefore, just to encourage those who endeavour to enlarge the power of art, since they often succeed beyond expectation; and when they fail, may sometimes benefit the world even by their miscarriages.
— Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, No. 99, 1753
Every government...is perpetually degenerating towards corruption, from which it must be rescued at certain periods by the resuscitation of its first principles, and the re-establishment of its original constitution.
— Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, No. 156, 1751
We are all prompted by the same motives, all deceived by the same fallacies, all animated by hope, obstructed by danger, entangled by desire, and seduced by pleasure.
— Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, No. 60, 1750
Never, ever, was I
The youth I used to be.
Yet a laughing boy runs yet,
Through sunlit memories.
—PacRim Jim
To escape pain, one must become young or dead.
The former being impossible, the Pacster chooses pain.
—PacRim Jim
I drift with secret purpose,
From then to now to then,
A mote amidst but for the nonce.
Transfixed, I stare through eyes awash
With second-hand light from a second-rate sun
Of provenance unknown.
—PacRim Jim
The Romans, like others, as soon as they grew rich grew corrupt, and, in their corruption, sold the lives and freedoms of themselves, and of one another.
— Samuel Johnson, Review of Thomas Blackwell's Memoirs of the Court of Agustus in Literary Magazine, 1756.
All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it. — Thomas d'Urfey.
Love gilds us over and makes us show fine things to one another for a time, but soon the gold wears off, and then again the native brass appears. — George Etherege
Varnished over with good breeding, many a blockhead makes a tolerable show. — George Etherege
To name and number all extant within purview,
To trade today for tomorrow's something new,
To do this, yet not a thing,
To understand, yet not,
To each of us befalls this lot.
—PacRim Jim
There's no escape into the future.
There's no escape into the past.
In truth, there's no escape at all,
So make the moment last.
—PacRim Jim
Only in the USA could one sail through life without direction, without ambition.
—PacRim Jim
We, to unknown purpose put,
Chafe in unrestriction.
Think what we will,
Do what we must,
We find ourselves at the last door,
Which we open to Earth's womb.
—PacRim Jim
Whatever for's
A metaphor?
If one's another,
Then there's no other.
—PacRim Jim
'Tis better to be laid off,
Laid into, up, and low,
Than ever, preposition-less,
Not to be laid at all.
—PacRim Jim
A gift once given, snatched away.
Thus is the gift ungiven.
Nature recalls our great gift, life,
But cannot be forgiven.
—PacRim Jim
Such as is done
is best done today,
For naught's ever done
on the morrow.
—PacRim Jim
With assiduity, with perspicacity, anyone can write a novel—but not a novel novel.
—PacRim Jim
Relieved I was to learn today,
I needn't die, I needn't die.
For dead I am already, so
I needn't live, I needn't die.
—PacRim Jim
Henry James for P.G. Wodehouse—an equitable trade, indeed.
—PacRim Jim
In a pensive mood, PacRim Jim observed that a society, like a human body, is vigorous when young, with optimally functioning organs called institutions that senesce with age.
Before dying, however, a society gives birth to a perfect, new version of itself, as the British Empire gave birth to the U.S.
This, however, begs the question, What legacy will America leave before it ineluctibly surrenders to the assaults of time?
The Pacster believes that that legacy will be strong-AI-driven worlds in virtual reality, which would rapidly evolve in accordance with their own, unique rules.
While alive, all people in all societies would be able to replicate themselves in VR, knowing that they would remain in peak form—within spec, so to speak—over the presumed eons to come.
Not much of legacy, admittedly, but at least it would—will—be novel.
—PacRim Jim
A life is too long to live.
A moment, not.
—PacRim Jim
Over a fence
and under a tree,
Lies a shady spot
that is waiting for me.
A few more trips
around mother sun,
Then spot and I
shall be as one.
—PacRim Jim
The game lasts long,
Much longer than its players,
Who stir the dust
Of others they replaced.
The game lasts yet,
But the players despair not,
For now they know,
They can end it with a thought.
—PacRim Jim
I haunt my life,
From the inside out,
A shell-less snail
Wandering underfoot.
I flee my life,
From doubt to doubt,
Over grounds unshadowed,
Till the last breath out.
—PacRim Jim
PRJ has noticed that the Internet abounds with free information that informs people how to get jobs that require charging others for information.
Does no one else see the irony?
—PacRim Jim
Reluctant day unshadows night,
But only for the nonce.
For having splashed about loose light,
It pauses for response.
—PacRim Jim
suru suru (Japanese verb)
To use "suru" + noun for all verbs, instead of native Japanese verbs.
—PacRim Jim
Fast avalanche of days
Overtopping my all,
And jumbling my moments,
None of which I recall.
About me they freeze
Slowly, forgotten mid flight,
Around a head cuddled
By the old song of night.
—PacRim Jim
'Twixt was and will be,
Light unmates from dark,
A whirlpool of womb,
Ejects life's dimming spark.
From then that is now,
Form outwits chaos.
With unheard protest,
Though, soon nothing is lost.
—PacRim Jim
Rambo Redoes D.C.: And This Time He's Undiplomatic!
—PacRim Jim
The moment deflates;
Soon swells another.
Tired catalyst
Of nouns and verbs
That mate, then drift apart.
—PacRim Jim
No matter what
You do or don't,
No matter what,
You will or won't,
Time slabs will topple
In silent rows.
To distant ends,
Nobody knows.
—PacRim Jim
The question nags,
Incessantly.
What is the point?
There's none, you see.
An more than this:
Whatever is,
Will soon not be.
'Tis all a joke,
On you and me.
—PacRim Jim
1 day + 1 night = 1 day
—PacRim Jim
There are folks alive who were born in the 19th century.
That's before the iPhone, the PC, the Internet, rock-'n-roll, the TV, the airplane, the automobile, the telephone, the movie,...even electricity.
More unsurprisingly, everyone alive now was born before immortality.
—PacRim Jim
Work or worry?
—PacRim Jim
Two wrongs don't make a right.
Ten wrongs, however, more than suffice.
—PacRim Jim
Why is it, do you suppose, that minorities, women, artists, writers, and others—the very groups most persecuted historically by authoritarian governments—are now most supportive of expanded government control?
Has nothing been learned from history?
Has it been forgotten that the larger the government, the smaller the citizen?
—PacRim Jim
If not now, when?
If not here, where?
If not you, who?
—PacRim Jim
America's persistent curse is that, for historical reasons, its two centers of power are confined to essentially the same tiny area of the East: Wall Street in New York City and the U.S. Government in Washington, D.C.
This deprives the rest of the country of participation in the financial and political governance of the country.
For that reason, PRJ would recommend moving the government and financial center to, say, Dallas and Boise, were it not that he has too much respect for the two cities.
In any event, the move is long overdue, though it should be to middle-American cities far from the two coasts (and each other), because the East Coast is beholden to accursed Europe, and the tag-along West Coast is beholden to the East Coast.
—PacRim Jim
Dangerous When Sober
Light is life. / Heavy is death.
—PacRim Jim
Americans educated since 1970, read and learn:
1830s President Andrew Jackson of what became the Democrat Party was reponsible for the forced relocation of 45,000 Cherokee and other Indians, thousands of whom died en route.
1861 When antislavery Republican Abraham Lincoln became President in 1861, Southern Democrats launched the Civil War to retain 4,000,000 slaves.
1865 Ku Klux Klan founded by Democrat soldiers of the Confederate Army.
1942 Japanese-Americans interned in concentration camps by Democrat President FDR, at the recommendation of Democrat Attorney General Earl Warren of California.
1963 George Wallace, Democrat Governor of Alablama, blocks a doorway, temporarily preventing black students from registering at the University of Alabama.
1964 Democrat Senator Robert Byrd filibustered against passage of the Civil Rights Act. Bill passes only because of overwhelming Republican support.
—PacRim Jim
fatdebt
What becomes of a person who saves his money on his body rather than in a bank.
—PacRim Jim
The bad trip of the 1960s will finally end on February 20, 2013, when a pro-American adult will be sworn in as President.
—PacRim Jim
China minus Turkey equals Greece.
—PacRim Jim
porcelit
Bathroom reading material
—PacRim Jim
For sale: Undo You™
Description: A wrist-worn Multiverse transporter that delivers one into a random placid universe, moments before one's life in this universe is perturbed.
Price: US$1,499.95 (payable in advance)
Limit: 1 per customer
— PacRim Jim
Q. Why Jonathan Pollard?
A. Baraq Obama.
— PacRim Jim
We humans merit little save,
We carry sadness to the grave.
— PacRim Jim
Prodded am I,
Tugged through narrowing new days,
Among reciprocating shadows.
Wherefor this tired, mad game?
Wherefor this forced march of puzzlement?
Wherefor?
— PacRim Jim
Feel old?
Hollywood is moribund. Long live Hollywood!
Over the coming decade or two, software tools will become available that will allow thousands of auteurs manqué to create professional-looking movies at home, and then distribute them over the Web.
The artificial intelligence-based software will generate the script, score, etc., according to set parameters. Avatar modules will be available for thousands of movie actors, past and present, which will realistically simulate their voice and behavior. (Avatars of oneself and one's friends also could be included.)
Imagine Gone with the Wind, starring the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields.
Such "movies" could be set to unfold differently each time "watched," with a different cast, different plot, different music, etc.
Ultimately, connection would be directly to the human brain, so the "viewer" would experientially become a character in the Gesamtkunstwerk gestalt of a movie.
Given the optimal experience, why return to real life?
Feel old yet?
— PacRim Jim
Novels take so long to write because there is so much to leave out.
— PacRim Jim
The purpose of life is to ascribe a purpose to life.
— PacRim Jim
Life is killing all my friends,
And has me in its sight.
This way, now that, I dodge, then hide,
From twilight into night.
— PacRim Jim
Humiliating a German
— PacRim Jim
A civilization that feels compelled to boast of its achievements has achieved little.
— PacRim Jim
— PacRim Jim
The only good thing that comes out of the human body is another human.
— PacRim Jim
The future looms,
With widening scope,
With deepening hope,
But not for you or me.
— PacRim Jim
Never again?
Probably never again.
Possibly never again.
Again?
Why us, again?
— PacRim Jim
Buddhism is the desire to extinguish one's desire.
— PacRim Jim
The lake of life shimmers around,
Informed by spreading ripples.
Dull eyes behind a wizened face,
Stare not unto its shore.
The moments pass but add to nil,
No end of nothing to await.
A life soon passed, a face tilts up,
A prayer ascends for more.
— PacRim Jim
PF = 1/G
where:
PF = personal freedom
G = size of government
PF is undefined when G = 0
Thus, the larger the government, the less the personal freedom, and vice-versa.
— PacRim Jim
Obama is as naive as he thinks he is clever.
— PacRim Jim
There is a morrow I shall not see;
A day gone bright with childhood’s laugh;
A day grown dim with habit.
Faster my shadow in minds grows old.
It lingers longer till....
— PacRim Jim
With Obamacare, Democrats have finally extracted revenge against Republicans, who ended Democrat-supported slavery by precipitating the Civil War.
Problem is, by enslaving all Americans to Obamacare, Democrats have again demonstrated their moral corruption and have wilfully precipitated the Second Civil War. They will lose again, but not before naturalizing 10-20 million Democrat-beholden illegal aliens and vitiating the American military worldwide, thereby jeoparding the security of the United (?) States.
The Pacster hopes the victory will be more than Pyrrhic.
— PacRim Jim
Before buying yet another geegaw made in China, the Pacster asks you to please consider that, though the product might seem cheaper, in the long run it actually would be much more expensive—to you, to your children, and to your country—considering the following partial list of drawbacks:
* Production in China entails the loss of American manufacturing jobs.
* Fewer American manufacturing jobs means lower wages, which ripple throughout the economy.
* Fewer American jobs means poorer Americans, and thus a higher welfare burden.
* Poorer Americans means a higher crime rate.
* Poorer Americans means greater dependence on the government, and thus reduced personal liberty.
* Sending money to China means Chinese dictation of American economic policy.
* Sending money to China means Chinese dictation of American domestic and foreign policies.
* Sending money to China means higher taxes to pay for a stronger military to defend against a better-armed and more belligerent China.
If you insist on buying foreign-made goods, buy Mexican goods. At the very least, increased demand for Mexican goods would improve the Mexican economy and slow the flood of illegal aliens into the U.S. (and onto U.S. welfare rolls).
Next trip to the emporium, make your purchasing decisions as if America's future depends on them, because it does.
— PacRim Jim
We humans appear to have two eyes. This, though, is but a Newtonian illusion.
Let the Pacster explain:
Gaze at yourself in a mirror.
Two eyes, right?
Wrong!
Approach the mirror until the tip of your nose touches it.
Now how many eyes have you?
Right, only one quantumly superposed, spooky-action-at-a-distance eye.
QED
— PacRim Jim
When looking for a snack in the refrigerator, if you look long enough, you will find one last box or can of it, however hopeless the quest may seem at first—and it's usually behind the pickles.
— PacRim Jim
— PacRim Jim
Though not all comes,
All that comes, goes.
— PacRim Jim
Apropos absolutely nothing, the Pacster has long resisted reading James Joyce's Ulysses for four reasons:
* Not Irish
* Not Catholic
* Not alcoholic
* Not masochistic (but then I repeat myself)
— PacRim Jim
Too much time. Too few watches.
— PacRim Jim
Why, the Pacster wonders, is it that those who benefit most from a society are the least appreciative and supportive of it?
— PacRim Jim
To worms, trees are sky-roots.
— PacRim Jim
There is too much to know,
Yet too much not to know.
— PacRim Jim
I am not who I am.
Am I?
— PacRim Jim
When writing the letter i, PRJ never fails to scrupulously apply the dot before the descender.
The rationale?
He'll never have to dot his last "i"—an accomplishment of sorts, so it would seem.
— PacRim Jim
Ordered dust born of failure,
Builds somethingness from ranging light.
Quick blinks of now but obscure,
Then remants flee back unto night.
— PacRim Jim
Dubai cameras have disclosed why Israel has been working so diligently on robotics and artificial intelligence for lo these many years:
Hitbots.
— PacRim Jim
* Solar Singularity
When a single supermassive star reaches the end of its short, furious life, fusion stops and the star collapses almost instantaneously into a dimensionless point, called a black hole, whose gravity is so powerful that not even light can escape (hence the name). Thousands of these lurk throughout every galaxy.
* Galactic Singularity
At the center of every galaxy is a voracious black hole that has swallowed thousands of suns and crunched their masses to a point whose density is almost infinite.
* Space-Time Singularity
The infinitely dense point that expanded 13.7 billion years ago to form space-time (i.e., this universe).
* Technological Singularity
The runaway acceleration of technology beyond human understanding, which is predicted to occur within the next few decades.
Now you know.
— PacRim Jim
As the Pacster ages, he realizes that his alloted life span is like the fuel gauge in his car:
The supplies of time and fuel seem to be consumed slowly at first; in fact, they seem inexhaustible.
About halfway through, however, consumption seem to accelerate, to such a degree that the second half seems to vanish at twice the rate of the first half.
If by design, to what end?
If not, what the hell?
— PacRim Jim
1. Sentient existence
2. Children
3. Mate
4. Parents and siblings
5. Freedom
6. Health
7. Pets
8. Friends
9. Books
10. Foods
11. Music
12. Nature
13. The Internet
— PacRim Jim
1. Begin life.
2. Postpone achieving one's life's dream until tomorrow.
3. If not dying, go to 2.
4. Regret not having achieved one's dream.
5. Die.
— PacRim Jim
Those who can, do.
Those who can't, teach.
Those who can't teach, teach.
— PacRim Jim
— PacRim Jim
Across eons,
Across dark deep,
What is, wasn't,
What isn't, will be.
Unremarked.
Indefinitely.
— PacRim Jim
A point is defined as having dimensions of zero.
Why, then, can any number of them be concatenated to form a line having length?
— PacRim Jim
We come, we go
With much to-do
And linger in between,
Where water-eyes
Roll to behold
What can be but unseen.
— PacRim Jim
Never shake hands with a right-handed teenage boy.
— PacRim Jim
English pride
In England
Died.
— PacRim Jim
— PacRim Jim
English is the only language in which one can say,
"English is the only language in which one can say."
— PacRim Jim
The worth of your life
is what you achieve
despite the doubt,
despite the odds,
despite futility.
—PacRim Jim
If history teaches us anything, it's that history teaches the Left nothing.
—PacRim Jim
All good things come to an end.
True enough.
But never to a good end.
—PacRim Jim
Being rich has an obvious advantage: You're not poor.
Being poor, too, has an advantage: If you're young, at least there's that.
—PacRim Jim
Apropos the U.S. Constitution, a big document cannot survive a small people.
Apropos the antics in D.C., a well-meaning nitwit is a nitwit notwithstanding.
—PacRim Jim
In the late 18th century, the United States was formed as a union of sovereign member states. In the late 20th century, the sovereignty of the 50 individual states passed to the federal government in the city named after the single American most opposed thereto.
In the mid 20th century, the European Union was formed as a union of sovereign member states. In the late 20th century, the sovereignty of the 27 individual states passed to the federal government in the city whose name is reminiscent of an overachieving vegetable.
Why? you ask.
Could it just be to control hoi polloi, you and me, the common citizens who exist solely to work and pay taxes that enable the implementation of the grandiose plans of our "betters"?
Was the ultimate object of the American Revolution to reimpose a permanent, supercilious aristocracy?
Have these federal power-grabs necessitated a Second American Revolution and a First European Revolution?
—PacRim Jim
Democrat Party
Where the unemployable power-hungry are abetted by tattletales of the media and show-offs of Hollywood.
—PacRim Jim
Ever wonder why younger people tend to be Democrat while older people tend to be Republican?
The Pacster knows.
During their teenage years, youths are programmed to escape from the seemingly arbitrary domination of their parents, who oppose their plans with increasing frequency and force (and usually with good reason).
Meanwhile, having no responsibilities, their contemporaries evince a more laissez-faire additude, under the all-encompasing rubric "whatever, dude."
Which political party, then, acts like parents, saying "No" when deemed necessary, and which always says "Yes," however detrimental to the individual and the nation?
Exactly!
—PacRim Jim
American Idle: The Search for an Unemployed Superstar
A reality competition to find unemployable voters with no discernable talent, created by the Democrat Jobkiller Union.
The program debuted on NBC in January of 2009, and has since become one of the least popular shows in America.
It aims at discovering the worst workers in the country, through a series of nation-wide auditions and subsequent viewer voting.
The contestant age range is currently 13 to dependence on the government.
The series employs a panel of judges—none of whom has ever held a private-sector job—who critique the contestants' performances and solicit their votes.
—PacRim Jim
nexplanation
an explanation that better explains a given phenomenon
—PacRim Jim
The force of gravity is directly proportional to one's age.
As one ages, it strengthens.
—PacRim Jim
— PacRim Jim
New year, new ideas.
To wit: Publishers of books, movies, TV programs, and music are furious that, despite copyright protection, their content is being stolen (and possibly resold) willy-nilly by Billy BitTorrents the world over, because digitized content is vulnerable to abstraction via the Web.
Nobody profits, nobody publishes, nobody gets published.
True—as far as it goes.
Consider, however, some advantages of stealable content:
First, it virally infects possible customers, without cost. Millions who otherwise would live their lives unsullied by attractively packaged cultural effluvia would, in effect, become advertisers thereof.
As important: What they steal is modifiable, particularly e-books. Each week, authors, for example, could add value by rewriting existing scenes, adding new ones, modifying plots, deepening characterization, etc., perhaps based on suggestions by fans on blogs dedicated to the worlks.
The fast cycle time would keep publishers—often the authors—ahead of sundry pirates, which is to say: profitable.
True, there would be neither ISBN number nor copyright protection, but have those any utility in a digital age? The Pacster thinks not.
The same applies mutatis mutandis to other forms of digitized content.
Sound like a good idea? The Pacster thinks so.
—PacRim Jim
Holmes and Watson,
Leaphorn and Chee,
Poirot and Hastings,
And Travis McGee.
Orphaned detectives,
Unfortunately,
Now without cases.
Why? A mystery.
—PacRim Jim
It occurs to the Pacster that if someone were to construct on the Web a virtual world for each year of the past, complete with faithful cultural and physical environments, we humans would be able to visit (or re-inhabit) any past year of interest, in the form of our avatar. The motive: curiosity, pleasure-seeking or, at times, refuge.
Eventually, after our brains are directly linked to the Web, our virtual lives might become preferable to our "real lives."
I'm packing my bag—rather, my avatar's bag.
—PacRim Jim
Underfoot,
the dreams of ancient brains now dust.
the exhaled hopes of soon-old children.
Overhead,
Around,
they rarefy to nil, to nil.
Around,
—PacRim Jim
Like you, the Pacster wants to know a lot but doesn't want to learn it. For that reason, he's a fan of mnemonics (memory aids) such as the following:
Q. How can one tell the difference between a crow and a raven?
A. The crow has a curved tail, like "c" in "crow," while the raven has an angular tail, like "v" in "raven."
Q. In a cave, which is the stalactite and which is the stalagmite?
A. "Stalactite" contains "c" as in "ceiling," and "stalagmite" contains "g" as in "ground."
Q. Which camel has one hump, and which two?
A. The dromedary camel has one hump, like "D." The Bactrian camel has two humps, like "B."
Q. What is the top-down hierarchy used in biological classification (Linnaean taxonomy)?
A. Remember: "Kings Play Chess On Fat Girls' Stomachs," the mnemonic for "kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species."
Class dismissed.
—PacRim Jim
Before rushing into the second decade of the 21st century, PacRim Jim would fain pause a moment to consider the top ten human achievements of the first decade:
* Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org)—Ignorance is an excuse no longer
* YouTube (www.youtube.com)—I'm more normal than I thought
* Sequencing of the human genome by the Human Genome Project—What's left of our ancestors
* Universal adoption of digital and wireless portable devices—We are become net nodes
* Liberation of 30 million Iraqis—You're welcome
* Discovery of water on the moon—Future portal for exploration of deep space
* Rover exploration of Mars—Save for your down-payment, as the planet will be terraformed late in the century
* Obsolescence of intellectual property rights—Why create?
* America's and Europe's discovery of the incompatibility of freedom and Big Government—Yet again
* Technological Singularity—Fast-approaching and most-significant inflection point in human history
—PacRim Jim
PRJ has a simple plan for your future:
* Adopt the daily constitutional, a one-hour brisk walk, which will relax you while toning your body.
* Spend less than you earn.
* Eat more fruits and vegetables than fats and sugars.
* Improve your mind by reading books in a variety of genres.
* Help others when you can, without being asked, and without expecting anything in return.
* Say something nice (but deserved) to someone every day, as if it were your last.
You won't become immortal, but you'll become what you were meant to be.
—PacRim Jim
This Thanksgiving, the Pacster is particularly grateful to Middle America, America's ballast, because it reflexively preserves us from the dogma and degeneracy of the littoral loonies, who should know better and should be ashamed of the damage they do to this land of the average Joe and Jane.
—PacRim Jim
For 8,000 generations,
For 200,000 years,
Parents worried about their children,
The parents of the future.
For 8,000 generations,
For 200,000 years,
Children worried about their parents,
The children of the past.
8,000 generations.
200,000 years.
Only worry has endured.
—PacRim Jim
Up, blue,
Down, brown,
All around me, green.
Now, am,
Then, was,
Lost gifts in between.
—PacRim Jim
An inverse correlation exists between exposure to sex and the number of children born.
To wit, the more omnipresent sex in its manifold forms, the fewer the number of babies.
—PacRim Jim
If the Left's hatred for Sarah Palin seems irrational, consider:
Males of the Left loathe her because she's everything they'll never have.
Females of the Left loathe her because she's everything they'll never be.
Corollary: The Left being what it is, the aphorism applies mutatis mutandis with regard to sex.
—PacRim Jim
Ever notice how the acceleration of science, technology, and culture have outmoded hippies (1960s), disco dancers (1970s), Devo (1980s), even Y2K (1990s)?
Human material culture, too, has evolved at an accelerating pace. Remember rotary phones? No, really, there were phones with finger-spun dials.
It has occurred to PacRim Jim—as does all, later rather than sooner—that we are anachronizing culture at increasingly shorter intervals.
The implication: We humans shall be subjected to profoundly disorienting cultural change—driven by disruptive technological innovations—every few years, then every few months, then every few hours, then....
"Humans will not be able to adapt to such change," you protest? Not as presently constituted, admittedly. But synchrony will be achieved by means of yet another disturbing development, mirabile dictu: Humans will redesign themselves so as to remain synchronized with the pace of technological and cultural change.
Real-time adaptation. Sum ergo cogito.
The Pacster can't wait.
No, literally.
—PacRim Jim
The current recession, the cruelest trial since the Great Depression of the 1930s, is grinding down the self-esteem of millions of American families, to whom the American Dream now seems a cruel, receding hoax.
What can we Americans do to alleviate such suffering of our relatives and neighbors?
The answer is simple: Be compassionate.
If you have a job that provides you with disposable income, don't waste it all on frivolities that are forgotten as soon as they are "consumed."
Instead, without patronizing them, locate and aid a suffering family near you. This might require some investigation because most American families are reluctant—i.e., too proud—to ask for help, often to an end exceedingly bitter: homelessness, divorce, starvation.
Your help could allow that endangered family to survive intact.
Not only that, but you would become a better human.
THAT is the American Dream.
—PacRim Jim
From wet womb dropped
Into box unbounded,
Invisible to young, blind eye.
Of its cold walls others whisper,
"Better you—Oh, yes!—than I."
Darkened by those forgotten behind them,
Closer, closer still they close.
There, now here, I ride time's wrinkle,
To gain an unobstructed view.
But light expires as walls enclose me.
I struggle from my womb of fate.
Yes! I escape with exhilaration,
Back into churning womb of crawling earth.
—PacRim Jim
whinority
a minority that continually whines about mistreatment, real or perceived
—PacRim Jim
Long ago, there was a castellated hill upon which lived a Ruler and his happy extended family. Below, in the valley, were busy fields dotted with villages inhabited by hard-working people.
Though not particularly happy—in fact, their lives were brutish and rather short—the villagers obeyed their Ruler because only he and his brave knights could fight off aggressive neighbors who, according to the Ruler, envied their prosperity and their possessions, meager though they were.
In exchange for the Ruler’s protection, the villagers submitted to an Agreement that stated that the villagers were to remain among themselves—they were not allowed to socialize with or marry into the Ruler’s family—and they were to deliver to the Ruler a portion of the products of their labor.
Under this Agreement, life changed little over the centuries until, one day, the Ruler modified it, claiming the right to decide the religion of the villagers. The Ruler proudly announced that the Agreement was now even more perfect.
Many villagers resented this claim. What right had the Ruler to decide what a villager thinks? Some even organized into groups and fled their villages, leaving behind those who preferred the certainty of chains to the possibility of death.
The emigrants struggled for months over sea and land, the survivors ultimately reaching a vast wooded land with soil rich to the horizon, where there they founded the New Villages, which were much like the ones they had left (for they knew only one kind).
Here, too, neighbors menaced on every side. What differed, however, was that the New Villagers had no Ruler for protection and—this is new and noteworthy—had no desire to have one.
Each New Village sent a representative to a meeting atop a nearby hill, where they drafted a new agreement that simply stated that all New Villages were to contribute to mutual defense, but that all other decisions were to be made by the individual New Villages, to ensure the individual freedom of each New Villager. Their rationale: it was commonly accepted that only the New Villagers knew best how to live their individual lives.
Thus the New Villagers lived free, generation after generation, teaching their children the uniqueness, precariousness, and responsibilities of their self-determination.
By then, the Representatives had decided to remain, the year around, high on the hill, far from the everyday lives and labors of common new Villagers. That is how it came about that, one day, they concluded that they knew better how the new villagers should live their lives.
The sincerity of the Representatives eventually persuaded most new villagers that if they, the Representatives, were allowed to manager the lives of all new villagers, their lives would be more easy, more safe, more healthy, more moral, more efficient, in fact more everything.
The upshot was that the villagers one day elected a Ruler who promised easy perfection in a wondrous New New Agreement, called by some simply the Agreement.
Miraculous to say, the villagers now lead lives perfect in every way—for the Ruler says so.
—PacRim Jim
Rich and powerful Democrats within the D.C. Inner Circle have a primary, unstated objective:
Tax and regulate average American Joes and Janes, so that they cannot become rich and powerful.
—PacRim Jim
Back in the 1990s, when the World Wide Web was new, people paid for lists of e-mail addresses, however obtained, which they then aggregated and sold as bigger lists to hucksters of every ambition.
Now that the biotech revolution is proceeding apace, look for the same to happen with our genomes, epigenomes, proteomes, omeomes, etc.
Yours, PacRim Jim's, and those of the dog sniffing the hydrant will be added to bandwidth-challenging lists marketed globally (and expensively) to Nigerians or whomever, who will then deluge us with offers—bogus and otherwise—regarding how to avoid this or that burst of artery or invasion of cells.
The Pacster is saving his money even now.
—PacRim Jim
PacRim Jim often visits a small university town in Northern California, that is home to six registered Democrats for each scorned Republican.
Before and after the presidential election of 2008, Obama was marketed on every other auto bumper and microlawn sign—next to the For Sale sign.
Of late however, the Pacster has detected nary one such hopey/changey attestation. Not a single, sappy logo.
It was, perhaps, Thomas Carlyle who in the 19th century first juxtaposed "courage" and "principles."
But that was long ago.
—PacRim Jim
The less it costs to access a communications channel, the less worthy of attention are the goods advertised via the channel.
Consider the World Wide Web.
—PacRim Jim
Long ago, helpless humans in an indifferent universe invented—evolved?— religion, which posits an off-world paradise after death.
Recently, desperate brains brighter—read "younger"—than mine have discovered an escape clause: the Singulartity, which posits an on-world paradise instead of death.
Count the Pacster among those with faith—that the brain can ultimately solve any problem it can formalize.
—PacRim Jim
First, there is reality.
Then there are authors' internalizations of reality.
Then there are the authors' novels, which are based upon their internalizations.
Then there is a critic's internalization of these novels.
Then there is the critic's book based upon these internalizations.
Then there are the readers' internalizations of the critic's book.
Then there are the readers' reviews at Amazon.com, based upon their internalizations.
Seems that, by now, readers are so far abstracted from reality that their comments are meaningless.
—PacRim Jim
plastic poor
n. unfortunate people hopelessly indebted to credit card companies
—PacRim Jim
PacRim Jim finds it ironic that Obama, whose name is the abbreviation for "OB (obstetrician) of the AMA (American Medical Association)," is attempting to bureaucratize medicine.
— PacRim Jim
— PacRim Jim
Democracy: Unrestricted rule by the majority
Constitutional republic: Limited majority rule, without power to infringe individual rights
Socialism: State ownership of industry (i.e., production and distribution)
Communism: State ownership of industry and society
Do you know which applies to the United States? (Hint: It's not the first, third or fourth.)
Are you willing to sacrifice it for a coin and a smile?
—PacRim Jim
— PacRim Jim
to obama
n. to bestow an embarrassing excess of unearned honors, prizes, money, etc., simply to make a political point
—PacRim Jim
While strolling through a well-tended neighborhood park yesterday, PacRim Jim happened by an old man and a young boy sitting next to each other on a shaded park bench, crying softly.
One person crying in public is rare, but two is a curiosity, so I asked, "What's wrong? May I help?"
The old man looked up at me with wet eyes and said, "When I look at him I see the boy I was."
The boy then sobbed, "When I look at him, I see the old man I'll become."
"Goodbye," I mumbled as I hastened away to conceal my warm tears from myself.
—PacRim Jim
Does no one see the parallel between the bread and circuses of ancient Rome and the economic stimuli and Olympics of Emperor—I mean President—Obama?
—PacRim Jim
* Fraidy Ghost
A neurotic ghost haunts a secluded house—but at such a distance that the wacky family living therein never spot him.
* Fraidy Bat
A vampire terrified of the dark decides to sleep through the night and prey on victims during the day. Not surprisingly, this spin-off runs for a single episode only.
—PacRim Jim
Chi - ca - go,
Al - Ca - pone,
Al - Bun - dy,
O - ba - ma
—PacRim Jim
America is fast approaching the abyss of a depression-triggered, freedom-stealing revolution, as the following unfavorable trends inexorably converge:
* trillions of dollars of American debt owed to China and Japan, whose enormous interest will be paid by our children and grandchildren, and will consume more and more of the national budget, allowing foreign piper-payers to call America's tune indefinitely
* institutionalized Congressional profligacy, as politicians print increasingly worthless dollars night and day, to purchase their own re-election
* the first American president who exhibits European-level contempt for Americans and their institutions
* the easily bamboozled electorate, graduates of a sham educational system that discourages critical thinking based on available facts, who happily vote for a promise, a coin, and a stricken pose
* ineluctible hyperinflation, which will destroy the purchasing power of the dollar—more zeroes on the dollar, anyone?
* increased control of Americans by all levels of government, "for public safety"
* Muslim terrorism in America's neighborhoods, as American soldiers are withdrawn to fight in America's streets rather than in a distant, dusty "-stan"
* emboldened economic and military opponents of all weight classes, itching to step over—not without a little kick—prostrate America
* ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
The America that will emerge from this crucible will be a dispirited, self-doubting, recrimination-filled America—a mere shadow of the land entrusted to us by our ancestors.
The jig is up. The Sixties won.
—PacRim Jim
Obama inexplicable?
Recall that he is from Chicago, the brute capital of institutionalized corruption.
Understandably, Obama believes the rest of America to be as depraved as his hometown.
Hence his contempt for America as a whole.
—PacRim Jim
Pity the triply hexed resident of Sacramento, California, U.S.A.
A basketball player is mayor of their bankrupt city.
An actor is governor of their bankupt state.
A basketball-playing actor is president of their bankrupt country.
Indeed, this is the Age of the Spendthrift Amateur.
—PacRim Jim
My empire lies in ruins about me,
Though I hid it well from time.
The universe endures without me,
And empty of life I'm.
—PacRim Jim
Since Obama's betrayal of Poland, Poles tell American jokes—and with good reason.
—PacRim Jim
Rare America.
Slowly built; hastily ruined.
Our ancestors weep.
—PacRim Jim
Pacrim Jim entreats the U.S. Government to urgently consider new projects for priority spending:
* Anti-Aging Project, which would benefit all
* Desalination Project, which is desparately needed by farmers
—PacRim Jim
Within memory, mothers grew babies by consuming local foods that tied their babies to their birthplace.
Now, however, much food consumed by mothers is grown in distant soils.
Their babies, it follows, are no longer identified with any particularly locality, making them babies of everywhere (or nowhere).
—PacRim Jim
Deep inside, we humans know ourselves to be losers.
Else why do we acquiesce to death, every last one of us?
The inescapable conclusion is that we are disposable prototypes who run with eyes closed toward the abyss.
Losers, in other words.
—PacRim Jim
Sad to say, American democracy is too precious to be entrusted to easily beguiled voters who, given time, would give away their liberty in exchange for a smile and a coin.
Tears don't express the Pacster's sadness at the thought.
—PacRim Jim
Apropos the recently reported 18-year kidnapping of a girl in California, PacRim Jim recalls—not without a shiver—a prophetic conversation between Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson in The Adventure of the Cooper Beeches, by Arthur Conan Doyle:
All over the countryside, away to the rolling hills around Aldershot, the little red and grey roofs of the farm-steadings peeped out from amid the light green of the new foliage.
"Are they not fresh and beautiful?" I [Dr. Watson] cried with all the enthusiasm of a man fresh from the fogs of Baker Street.
But Holmes shook his head gravely.
"...You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there."
"Good heavens!" I cried. "Who would associate crime with these dear old homesteads?"
"They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside."
"You horrify me!"
"But the reason is very obvious. The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard's blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser...."
—PacRim Jim
Back in 2036—as human dimorphs used to number earth's trips around the sun to track their wars and deaths—we learned how to extend human life.
Since then, so well have we learned to prolong our lives that few of us have sickened and fewer still have died for over 25,000 such years, fortunately for us.
Unfortunately for us, the Thoughtmasters have just verified what religious prophets have propounded for millennia: Heaven does indeed exist.
In our wisdom and with the best of intentions, we have succeeded only in delaying—and possibly avoiding—reunion with thousands of generations of our mothers, fathers, and others, who patiently await us in an infinite paradise suffused with time-spanning love.
What to do?
—PacRim Jim
The best way to extend your life is to delay your birth as long as possible.
—PacRim Jim
An individual's vision of paradise is a society's vision of hell.
—PacRim Jim
PacRim Jim just finished reading The World We Imagine by the late literary critic Mark Schorer (1908-1977).
This forgotten but unforgettable collection of essays analyzes the works and lives of the leading American writers of the early 20th century, among them Sinclair Lewis, Hamlin Garland, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemmingway, Sherwood Anderson, Truman Capote, et al.
Would that the Pacster could have met Mr. Schorer for an evening's chat. He would have said, "Thank you for your myriad labors. Thank you for your delighfully limpid prose. And thank you for making me appreciate the value of a master literary critic."
—PacRim Jim
The 21st century will see the first adult civilization.
Until the 18th century, civilizations were childish, with caesars, emperors, kings et al. in loco parentis.
With the American Revolution, adolescent civilization arrived, with all the awkwardness and immaturity characteristic thereof.
In this century, an adult civilization will arise. When and in what form even the Pacster knows not. Perhaps it will be run by artificial intelligence interfaced with each human via a descendant of the Internet. Ultimately, however, it will be global.
By the end of the 21st century, however, AI will have evolved far beyond us humans, however we might modify ourselves to keep pace. It will be of no avail, so humans will become the figurative cockroaches scurrying between shadowy recesses of the AI empire.
We humans will have a glorious past.
—PacRim Jim
Twixt now and then no danger lies.
Twixt here and there, no reaper.
For these and more live behind eyes,
To keep alive the sleeper.
—PacRim Jim
In a sight of inflash, it occurred to PacRim Jim that the elderly already know what it's like to travel near the speed of light.
Not only does time dilate from the perspective of oldsters, in that time seems to pass faster for the superannuated than it does for the young, but distance shrinks (in the z-axis).
Dubious?
Ever met an old-timer who complains about the slow pace of time while hopping up and down excitedly?
—PacRim Jim
We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.
— George Orwell
America, 1860:
The white U.S. President tolerates the indefinite confiscation of the earnings of 4,000,000 black workers, making them de jure slaves.
America, 2010:
The black U.S. President tolerates the indefinite confiscation of the earnings of 150,000,000 workers of every hue, making them de jure slaves.
What a difference a sequicentennial makes.
Ironic? Yes. But at least the irony is symmetrical.
—PacRim Jim
The worse the economy, the more the tens of millions of Democrat sheep will look to the federal government for help, the worse the economy will become.
Is this downward spiral eluctable?
—PacRim Jim
We are vexed that they should tread on our heels, as if to urge our departure.
—Michel de Montaigne, Essays, 1580
Want some modern sci-fi. I'll give you some:
Zoom, boom, wow!
Zoom, boom, wow!
Kiss, kiss.
Zoom, boom, wow!
Zoom, boom, cool!
Sequel hook.
End
—PacRim Jim
This morning a baggy-eyed stranger stared at me from deep within my bathroom mirror.
I know how I look and he wasn't me.
He looked much older, with high-def wrinkles and gray-scale hair.
Who was that man?
Gaudeamus igitur
Juvenes dum sumus.
—PacRim Jim
America, America, that toddlin' town.
America is now Chicago. Not Al Bundy Chicago. Al Capone Chicago.
—PacRim Jim
Term: gadzooks
Meaning: an expression of surprise
Example: Gazooks, Yolanda! I seem to have an arrow in my neck.
—PacRim Jim
Each year, between late-morning and early-afternoon naps, PacRim Jim determines the highest-rated agency for Japanese patent translation, based on content fidelity, on-time delivery, and affordable rate.
This year the Japanorama Prize is awarded to...wait for it...the industrious folks at Japatent.
Between mouthfuls of popcorn, the Pacster proclaims, "Huzzah and omedeto!"
—PacRim Jim
During this year, the 60th anniversary of the publication of George Orwell's (Eric Blair's) 1984, the Pacster has but one abiding thought thereupon:
If the effect of 1984 has been so salubrious, why do free people continue to vote away their freedom?
Implicit in man's complicity in his own servitude is the inescapable conclusion that there is something ineradicably perverse about us humans; that what we deserve, we get.
—PacRim Jim
Mad spenders of trillions infesting D.C.
Ensure that tommorow Zimbabwe we'll be.
To our children, their children, in poverty,
The American Dream will a memory be.
—PacRim Jim
What happens to others won't happen to me.
It won't. It can't. Can it?
—PacRim Jim
Aspiring writers, lift your bleary orbs from your writer's block and attend. Pacrim Jim has identified trends that will steer your career, for good or ill:
Trend 1:
Young people are too preoccupied tickling mobile geegaws to read a whole book for pleasure or edification.
Trend 2:
Publishing companies are hurting and will downsize, due both to Trend 1 and PDF piracy of their now-portable publications.
Trend 3:
Most importantly, however, though your potential domestic audience might be shrinking like a Wall Street salary, you will be able to sell your Meisterwerks to a worldwide readership, via such Web-based e-book publishers as Scribd.com, which already publishes tens of thousands of e-books, or Google.com, which has announced plans to publish millions of e-books, most of which will no doubt be worth the paper they are printed on.
Dyskarmaphobic writers appreciative of the Pacster's career advice will now uncramp their blocked hands and click on the oh-so-subtle tipjar at the top right of this page. Or not.
—PacRim Jim
No life? Have less and less to say to more and more people?
The following social networks will happily relieve you of actually living your life:
AdultFriendFinder, Advogato, AmieStreet, ANobii, aSmallWorld, Athlinks, AvatarsUnited, Badoo, Bahu, Bebo, Biip, BlackPlanet, Broadcaster.com, Buzznet, CafeMom, CakeFinancial, Care2, Classmates.com, Cloob, CollegeTonight, CouchSurfing, CozyCot, DeviantART, Disaboom, dol2day, DontStayIn, Elftown, Epernicus, Eons.com, Espinthebottle, ExperienceProject, Facebook, Faceparty, Faces.com, Fetlife, Filmaffinity, Flixster, Flickr, Fotolog, FriendsReunited, Friendster, Frühstückstreff, Fubar, GaiaOnline, GamerDNA, Gather.com, Geni.com, Goodreads, Gossipreport.com, Grono.net, Habbo, hi5, HospitalityClub, Hyves, imeem, IndabaMusic, IRC-Galleria, Italki, InterNations, itsmy, iWiW, Jaiku, JammerDirect, kaioo, Kaixin001, Last.fm, LibraryThing, lifeknot, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Livemocha, LunarStorm, MEETin, Meetup.com, Meettheboss, Mixi, mobikade, MocoSpace, MOG, Multiply, Muxlim, MyAnimeList, MyChurch, MyHeritage, MyLOL, MySpace, myYearbook, Nasza-klasa.pl, Netlog, Nettby, Nexopia, Ning, Odnoklassniki, OkCupid, OneClimate, OneWorldTV, OpenDiary, Orkut, OUTeverywhere, Passportstamp, Pingsta, Plaxo, Playahead, PlayboyU, Plurk, quarterlife, Ravelry, Reunion.com, ResearchGATE, Reverbnation, Ryze, scispace.net, Shelfari, Skyrock, SocialVibe, Sonico.com, Soundpedia, Stickam, StudiVZ, Tagged.com, Talkbiznow, Taltopia, TravBuddy.com, Travellerspoint, tribe.net, Trombi.com, Tuenti.com, Tumblr, Twitter, VKontakte, Vampirefreaks, Viadeo, Vine, Vox, Wasabi, WAYN, WebBiographies, WindowsLiveSpaces, Wis.dm, WiserEarth, Xanga, XING, Xiaonei, Xt3, Yammer, Yelp,Inc., Youmeo, Zoo.gr
(Courtesy of Wikipedia)
—PacRim Jim
America has been hijacked by Marxware and is barely functional.
—PacRim Jim
The Pacster misses Bobo and Brain Guy and Torgo. Life just hasn't been the same without them.
—PacRim Jim
To their everlasting shame, Americans have forgotten that, merely three back-to-back lifetimes ago, the United States was founded with a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people." (This unprecedented relationship is implicit in the very word democracy, which derives from the Greek words demos (people) and kratia (power).)
For a variety of selfish though shortsighted reasons attributable to the ignorance conferred by a degraded educational system, Americans have chosen to cede their hard-won freedoms for the illusory security of government omnipotence.
It remains to be seen whether the government will be equally ready to restore power to its rightful owners: the American people.
—PacRim Jim
Quantum physics bugs Pacrim Jim. It abounds with nonsensical incantations unverifiable if not patently untrue.
Take, for example, the following two contentions:
* Each choice a person makes splits the universe into two parallel universes.
Suffice it to say that making a choice is not a discrete phenomenon confined to a particular instant, whatever that might be. Exactly when is this split supposed to occur? When the chooser considers making a choice? When this is reflected in bound consciousness? There is no precise instant a choice is made, so the contention is irrational. Q.E.D.
* According to the Copenhagen Interpretation, Schroedinger's cat collapses into a definite state only at the exact moment it is observed (i.e., subjected to quantum measurement).
When, precisely, is an observation made? Is it the moment light from the formerly smeared cat strikes the observer's retinas? The moment the electrochemical information reaches the observer's visual cortex via the optic nerve? The moment the cortex-processed information is bound into consciousness? The word moment itself is ambiguously nonlocal.
How, I ask you, can the Pacster take seriously a discipline so sloppy with its terminology?
—PacRim Jim
Millions of us Americans are unemployed, frantically worrying about how to pay for food and shelter for our children.
Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., our elected representatives argue about the morality of interrogating alien terrorists, in between lavish dinners and first-class world tours.
With the best of intentions, we Americans have become a people of the government, by the government, and for the government.
—PacRim Jim
Q. Of what value is life?
A. It spares one the humiliation of infinite nonexistence.
—PacRim Jim
It has been observed that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged. If so, expect the deepening recession to yield millions of conservatives.
—PacRim Jim
Something for nothing for me = Nothing for something for you
—PacRim Jim
Agriculture + Semiconductors + Software + Movies + Television + Aerospace + Biotech + Nanotech + Universities + Tourism
+ Democrats = Bankruptcy
—PacRim Jim
Beyond new eyes wide and stumbles unto earth,
Beyond slow lessons and labors slower,
Beyond burdens as onerous as forgotten,
Beyond doctorly solicitude,
Beyond these and more,
I return my first breath, but borrowed for the nonce.
—PacRim Jim
In their academic certitude--not to say arrogance--that they alone are wise enough to decide how individuals should lead their own lives, the Left has long sought to transform democracies to statist institutions, in the guise of Socialism, National Socialism (Nazism), and Communism. Once imposed, these bloody control mechanisms provoked in these countries a deep revulsion, an immune response so powerful that the Left despaired of reimposing total control.
Nevertheless, the Left persisted, finally hitting upon the expedient of multiculturalism, and what better culture to import than Muslim cultures? All Muslim states were failed states, so they provided a unlimited supply of fecund emigrants seeking economic opportunity in the West (and, incidentally, to impose the Muslim religion wherever they went). If stubborn citizens would not acquiesce to absolute rule by the Left, then the Left would import Muslims, peoples long accustomed to submission to the absolutest rule: Islam. (It is not for nothing that "Islam" means "submission.") Muslims would support the Left, while reproducing at a rate that would displace the native citizens.
Brilliant! Muslims will allow the Left to retain absolute power indefinitely. Even after Muslim majorities eventuate in mid century, Muslims will support the Left, unless the Muslims decide to....
—PacRim Jim
Govett's Law of Epistemology: Words mean precisely what is obscured by their utterance.
Corollary: Understand them otherwise and be thought an imbecile.
—PacRim Jim
I miss your mastery, Maggie T,
Though England misses more.
Thirty years ago, on your frail shoulders,
You England's burdens bore.
—PacRim Jim
It occurs to the Pacster that he has repeately mischaracterized Democrats as "tax-and-spend Democrats."
Mea culpa.
As their behavior has once again demonstrated, they are "spend-and-tax Democrats."
—PacRim Jim
Q. What results when a deep recession entails massive debt, sharply higher taxes, runaway inflation, and incompetent leadership?
A. Yes.
—PacRim Jim
There exist two types of people in this world: Those who excogitate dichotomies...and those who don't.
—PacRim Jim
Funny things, sports.
They involve passing a spherical object through a circle (basketball, golf, Aztect ball (Tachtli)) or through a rectangle (baseball, soccer, tennis, lacrosse, cricket, shuffleboard); or an aspherical object through a rectangle (football, rugby, hockey).
For some unaccountable reason, however, there seems to be no sport that requires passing an aspherical object through a circle, unless hanging is so considered.
—PacRim Jim
Compared with Sarah Vaughan, Susan Boyle is an unexceptional singer. Compared with what was initially expected of her, however, she shone.
The discrepancy between her humble appearance and behavior and her professionally controlled performance accounts for the startled reactions.
As Pacrim Jim sees it, the lesson here is to set expectations low, so that one will be able to handily exceed them, to the surprise and chagrin of cynical others.
—PacRim Jim
PRJ:
Boye, thank you for sparing a few moments to answer a couple of questions that have puzzled me for 40 years.
First, how do you pronouce your name, Boye Lafayette De Mente?
Boye:
The accepted [family-preferred] pronunciation of my last name, De Mente, is Deh-Men-tay. The original French spelling was apparently De Mentier, which Anglo-Saxon-Americans couldn’t say, so a number of spelling versions came into use, with De Ment or De Mint being the most common.
PRJ:
As America’s Basil Hall Chamberlain, you have explicated practically every facet of the opaque gem that is Japan. How came you to team up with the Tuttle publishing company in Japan?
Boye:
I first became acquainted with Tuttle in 1953 when Tex Weatherby was the chief editor. I went in and applied for a job, but fortunately wasn’t hired!
In November 1959, Tuttle became the distributor of my very first book, Japanese Manners & Ethics in Business, published by East Asia Publishing Co. (In a subsequent printing, the title was changed to Japanese Etiquette & Ethics in Business (which is still in print at McGraw-Hill).)
In 1962 I set up a small press in Tokyo with two imprints: Orient Holiday Publishing Company, and Simpson-Doyle Publishing Co. Under these imprints were brought out around a dozen of my own books, all distributed by Tuttle. One of which was Bachelor’s Japan, which became an instant bestseller, with more foreign female residents than men buying the book during its first months on the market.
I sold these imprints when I moved out of Tokyo in the mid 1960s, and thereafter Tuttle published a number of my titles, including slightly updated version of Bachelor’s Japan.
Tex Weatherby resigned from Tuttle in the early 1960s and co-founded Weatherhill Publishing in Tokyo, which later morphed into Walker Weatherhill in New York, which published my The Japanese as Consumers: Asia’s First Mass Market, in the mid 1960s.
In 1966, when I was staying at the New Otani Hotel, the Japanese-language edition of Bachelor’s Japan was the topic of discussion on a television show with a panel consisting of a famous actress, a famous baseball player, a comedian, and Japan’s best known sociologist.
When the four were asked to sum up their opinions of my book, the sociologist said, “Everything De Mente-san wrote is true, but I wish he hadn’t written it!”
Somehow, the news media learned that I was a guest at the New Otani and my phone rang until about 3 a.m., with people asking for live radio interviews. I finally consented to doing one.
After my book The Kata Factor: Japan’s Secret Weapon came out in Japanese in the early 1990s, I was invited to lecture to some 300 Japanese professionals from all fields. During the question-and-answer session that followed, all of the Japanese who spoke up, except one, expressed amazement at my use of the kata to explain the Japanese mindset and behavior—something they had not thought of.
The one who disagreed with the book, Japan’s premiere Shinto authority, said, “Everything Mr. De Mente said is wrong! Shinto, not kata, is responsible for how we Japanese think and behave! He does not mention Shinto at all!”
When he added that, I knew he had not read the book all the way through, because I had attributed much of the early core of Japanese culture to Shinto precepts.
When The Japanization of America came out in Japan as Nihonka Suru Amerika, it had a pretty good run, but at that time the Japanese were so sure that they were going to Japanize the whole world that it was not such a big deal.
After Nick Ingleton took over as the editor-in-chief at Tuttle (in the 80s), he asked me to do a whole series of small books—which I did—and was only partly pleased with the results because the distribution and marketing arms of the company had degenerated.
After my old friend Charlie Tuttle died, his wife’s nephew, Eric Oey, bought the company and merged it with his own imprints: Periplus and Berkeley Books. Eric turned out to be a very good publisher and has evolved the company into a major house; he has brought out some 12 of my titles in the past several years, several of which now have foreign language editions.
PRJ:
Any recent publication news?
Boye:
Although I have been published by over half a dozen Japanese companies, none of the books caused more than a small ripple. A couple co-authored with Michihiro Matsumoto and published by Kodansha made the Amazon.com bestseller list for a few days!!!!
Profile of Boye Lafayette De Mente and list of his publications, formally submitted to the Government of Japan
—PacRim Jim
Four pirates threaten on the sea.
A Seal's bullet; now there are three.
Three pirates yet; a motley crew.
Hot lead leaves Seal; now there are two.
Perhaps the end is evident.
Pirates to hell will be Seal-sent.
—PacRim Jim
Pity us humans. Confronted with the persistent and awful unknown, we humans coped by inventing religion, a kind of extended childhood that confers meta-parental protection. Who is the worse for that? We humans know not whence or whither we have come or shall go, not to mention why we are here, or even why here is here. Given our predicament, given the horrible, infantilizing reality, is superstition maladaptive? Given that denial comforts us vis-a-vis our ultimate exigency, of what value is truth? Ask yourself: Why do the dying call upon their long-dead mother and their possibly nonexistent God? Why, indeed.
—PacRim Jim
Bad music plays longer than good music.
—PacRim Jim
Nature has been unfair in distributing humans around the globe. Some are diluted by continents, while others are closer to their neighbors than to their mates.
Because this warrants fair reallocation of land, Pacrim Jim proposes the following redistribution plan:
The approximately 149,000,000 square kilometers of rock lapped by the oceans are inhabited by about 6,760,000,000 sapiens of the Homo persuasion, which means that about 45.4 humans tend each square km beneath the summer moon.
So, if all humans were spread out evenly over the entire globe, how would the populations of the world's countries change? The following table gives an idea:
—PacRim Jim
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
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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o› |
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 4,000,000 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
