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“Was non in his tyme him liche”
Contact PacRim Jim: info-at-japanorama-dotcom
Birds swim the sky,
Fish fly the sea,
But I'm to I roam between my ears,
Through space, through time, through me.
—PacRim Jim
Beyond the sunlit world of the workaday,
Beyond the blaze of sure science,
Lie twilight worlds of imagination, of art,
Past which stir our formless tomorrows.
—PacRim Jim
Evolution has evolved the evolver.
Humans are bypassing the natural limits on variation, selection, and speciation. Within a few fiscal years, all imaginable forms of life—organic and otherwise—will pop industrially into existence and “go extinct” unnoticed and unmourned, at the whim of computer-enhanced man (and later the artificial intelligence-driven robot).
To what end, the Pacster can say not. But to an end it will be.
—PacRim Jim
...and I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more—the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort—to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires—and expires, too soon, too soon—before life itself.
...our faces marked by toil, by deceptions, by success, by love; our weary eyes looking still, looking always, looking anxiously for something out of life, that while it is expected is already gone—has passed unseen, in a sigh, in a flash—together with the youth, with the strength, with the romance of illusions.
—Joseph Conrad, Youth: A Narrative, 1898
Faustus is gone: regard his hellish fall,
Whose fiendful fortune may exhort the wise,
Only to wonder at unlawful things,
Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits
To practise more than heavenly power permits.
—Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus, 1588
Wants age. Needs age not.
—PacRim Jim
New Orleans
A city that compensates for its precarious location between a large lake and a larger river by being below both.
—PacRim Jim
My face you see each light-dark day,
But it’s not me.
My voice you hear whate’er I say,
But it’s not me.
Adrift, entrained in flowing thoughts,
My universe apart I roam.
A stranger unknown to myself,
Lost child without a home.
I have a name, you know it, too,
But it’s not me.
—PacRim Jim
Amazing country, this.
Every person, educated or no, better knows how to run America than its president.
We are, truth be told, a nation of presidents who command a populace of one, the elected commander-in-chief.
Thus our inverted pyramid of state wobbles parlously, hither and thither, upon its apex.
—PacRim Jim
Lawyers
Authors and interpreters of musty monographs of arcane laws intended to ensure that everyone unwittingly breaks some law or other and—mirabile dictu—that they will be there to protect us, the omnium-gatherum of hapless defendants, from the overzealous legal system.
—PacRim Jim
Every disease curable and ultimately preventable. Healthy lives spanning millennia. These are the wondrous promises of biotechnology abetted by nanotechnology.
Bring it on, you say.
As ever, the Pacster is dubious, particularly because of a consequence hitherto unexplored.
Imagine that such Faustian power had become available, say, seventy years ago. Those in power then would have been the first to make the jump to relative immortality. Hence they probably would remain in power even today. The same politicians, academics, writers, entertainers, athletes, et al., who monopolized mindshare then would, in all liklihood, continue to do so even now, to the detriment of innovation and cultural vitality.
Hitler, anyone?
—PacRim Jim
Italy. Portugal. Germany. France.
In this particular quadrennial World Cup, all four quarterfinalists are from Europe, a peninsula at the far west of the continent of Asia. All belong to the European Union. Three of the four speak dialects of Latin. In turn, three of the four have conquered the others.
A cup it is, to be sure. But surely not a World Cup. Or even a world cup.
—PacRim Jim
Lost in the vicinity of 1980s California, the youth of one individual.
Last seen in the San Francisco Bay area.
Reward: Gratitude up the yin-yang and out the wazoo.
Contact the undersigned.
—PacRim Jim
Over the dozens of years, the Pacster has noticed that he experiences music and other entertainment differently depending on the time of day.
Hard rock rattles his 206 bones during the day but merely annoys in the earlier hours, when his biorhytms resonate to the soothing harmonies of Gregorian chant. Too, the Pacmeister finds that horror movies are more skin-crawly in the early a.m., after his consciousness has dissolved into spookable irrationality.
This implies that we owe ourselves a systemic analysis of temporal tastes.
Know yourself and conform your entertainment thereto.
Are you listening, media marketing mavens?
—PacRim Jim
Not that many millennia ago, human survival, like that of other animals, was threatened by external enemies: predators, infectious diseases, parasites, etc.
After millennia of brain evolution and long centuries of trial and error failed to improve our lot significantly, we humans finally developed the scientific method, which has allowed us to overcome most of these life-shorteners.
Now, however, our survival is threatened by our own poor designs and bad habits, novel enemies the more irresistable for their wellsprings within each of us.
Some few of us have been able to overcome such bad habits as poor diet, smoking, inadequate sleep, consumption of alcohol and other drugs, sedentary lifestyles, etc. However, our design (i.e., our DNA) has been incorrigible, at least heretofore.
At long last, thanks to the diligence of thousands of bioscientists, we shall be able to revise the source code that is our parental legacy (which might, incidentally, even correct our bad habits).
We humans have overcome much and just might be on the verge of relative immortality (assuming we will be able to nudge aside a few as yet undetected comets).
—PacRim Jim
The Mexican oligarchy is attempting to solve its overpopulation and consequent poverty problems by exporting millions of its peasants to the U.S., whence they will send crucial tens of billions of dollars back to impoverished relatives in Mexico.
What they do not anticipate, however, is that the children and grandchildren of these de facto deportees will effect a reconquest, not of America, but of Mexico.
The success of these descendants in America will demonstrate unambiguously to all Mexicans that it is the Mexican system alone that destroys the dreams of the average Mexican. This realization will prompt profound structural change that will sweep aside the entrenched oligarchy (and, not incidentally, the complicit Catholic patriarchs).
Mexican immigrants will change America, certainly, but it will be Mexico that is reconquered, from the bottom up...American style.
—PacRim Jim
Objects and events, space and time are the products of brains unable to comprehend infinity on its own terms.
To us, standing on the bank of infinity, time and events flow slowly by. To one capable of simultaneously viewing the entire river, however, there would be no river, so it would not flow.
—PacRim Jim
On the playground of childhood, it usually is the proto-Republican who administers a licking to the proto-Democrat.
Decades later, in his beta hours, the aggrieved Democrat will bemoan the brutishness of the Republican.
What the former fails to understand yet the latter knows all too well is that the world is a playground writ large, aswarm with Darwinian bullies aplenty.
That said, would you rather have a Republican or Democrat as your playground buddy?
—PacRim Jim
The 2008 presidential election will be a close-run donnybrook, not to put too fine a point on it. The Republicans and Democrats both will get worse than they give, as always, but the trump card will be held abroad, by Muslim terrorists.
Any sufficiently ghastly terrorist attack in 2008 will stampede millions of undecided voters to vote R, whatever the name prefixed. Were such a bloodbath to occur, the mainstream media would attempt to ignore and minimize it, to protect their D candidate, but to no avail.
Whatever eventuates, at least there will be no hippies.
—PacRim Jim
Because English letters are unaccented, some consider it a bumpkinish language, less nuanced, less urbane than such languages as German with its umlaut and French with its accent grave.
High atop his high horse, the Pacster proposes a revised English alphabet at once arrivé and ausgezeichnet: Èñglîsh, which is as inspired as it is elegant.
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Learn Èñglîsh and teach it to your children (but not that nitwit down the street), and feel a twinge of pity for the hypoaccented languages spoken abroad.
Self-satisfied as ever, PacRim Jim will now merge with his sofa and await international acclaim, or at least less-truculent criticism.
— PacRim Jim
Over the millennia, the land of California has been controlled successively by Indians, Spaniards, Mexicans, and Americans. (As usual, other wild animals have no claim.) Recently, Mexicans have insisted that they stole California fair and square and want it back. Do these erstwhile colonists have a legitimate claim or is it merely another instance of uvas amargas (sour grapes)? Examine the facts and then judge for yourself.
First, as is usually the case, there were the natives—in this case, the so-called Indians who fought for centuries to acquire and then hold onto their ancestral lands (which often had been stolen from other, weaker tribes). The Indian population of California peaked about four centuries years ago, with 300,000 members of 250 cultures, who spoke over 300 dialects of 100 languages. However, they proved to be no match for Spanish priests, pistolas, and smallpox, so over the centuries, 80% of California's Indians were wiped out by successive “owners.” (Although most California tribal cultures are history, their populations have recovered so vigorously as to be larger than ever.) For more than 150 centuries, though, what is now the state of California was inhabited solely by various Indian tribes. This putatively idyllic arrangement was soon to change, however.
In the 16th century, passing maritime explorers from England and Spain grandiosely claimed parts of California for their acquisitive governments over distant horizons. For a few more generations, however, California Indians remained blissfully ignorant of their fates.
Then, in 1769, Spain began to settle what it called Alta California (Upper California), to distinguish it from Baja California (Lower California). Spain’s control, which succeeded in forestalling the advance of the Russians moving down from the north, lasted until 1821, when Mexico declared independence from Spain.
Mexican stewardship was brief, however, since both Alta California and Baja California seceded from the Mexican Empire in 1827, and in 1848, under the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico ceded the California territory to its present owner, the United States, which admitted the State of California to the union in 1850.
So, who has the best claim to California's land?
The Indians who owned it for more than 15,000 years?
The Spanish who owned it for 52 years?
The Mexicans who at least claimed it for 26 years?
The current owners, the Americans, who have owned it for over 150 years?
Obvious though your answer may seem, it’s academic and your rationale matters not a whit, because facts never settle international land squabbles. Wars do.
Perhaps the best solution, all things considered, would be for the 30+ million Californians to tramp across the border into Mexico—without papers, of course—and leave the land to its most harmonious residents, the plants and animals.
— PacRim Jim
After a long night of water shooters, it occurred to the hyperhydrous Pacster that humans might have the wrong conception of God.
Throughout history we have assumed that God exists contemporaneously with us, though infinitely longer. PacRim Jim now believes that God exists transtemporally, but orthogonally to our arrow of time. This implies that God exists simultaneously throughout time and outside of time.
If so, all life that has lived, lives, and will live could be considered cells in the super-being we call God.
Well, it could be true. You have a better explanation at this hour?
Barkeep, another round of dihydrogen oxide.
—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?”