mindlace

The hardest part about living, for me, is when I am in a ‘forced choice’ situation where all my choices are potentially or definitely hurtful for someone I care about. It gets extra hard when some subset of those choices are things I very much want to do.

Usually in this situation I do everything I can to defer my choices; often life is kind enough to simplify the problem for me if I just wait long enough.

If I can’t do that, I generally pick the most “critical” choice. When I was younger, and life was harder, the critical choice was often something as obvious as the one that would provide food or shelter. I’m not living that way any more, and so my forced choice scenarios have stopped being so clear cut- usually what’s on the line is someone’s emotional state or desires.

If anything, the reduced severity for me makes it harder to decide. It is especially complicated when other parties have more at stake than I do. On the face of it, the fact that the situation isn’t utterly critical for me suggests that I pick the choice that hurts me in favor of those I care about, yet I’ve learned over the years that repeatedly picking the self-abnegating choice eventually leads me with nothing to give, emotionally or productively. Plus, my well being isn’t just mine any more.

Since the forced choice invariably involves putting someone out, it creates this “Rob Peter to pay Paul” factor; who among the parties is it “best” to put the hurt on? Again, when I was younger, my solutions to this usually involved blowing the whole situation up and starting over. Not really a place I’m interested in going these days.

I generally hedge things somehow- I do something extra to ameliorate the bad fallout – but sometimes no matter how I spin it there’s no silver lining or silk purse in the situation, and I just have to stick it to someone.

The thing is, we knew this about you a long time ago.

He pauses for a moment and the snink of a zippo fills the small black room. The sparks sear tracers in your eyes, for it’s the first light you’ve seen in days. The flame moves up towards his face, illuminating the first human face you’ve seen in weeks like a small angel falling to earth. Shadows of his smallpox scars carve his face as if it were limestone. He inhales with the deep breath of a lifetime smoker long deprived of a drag. Dropping your eyes, you realize you are naked, bruised and lacerated, bound loosely to a chair. A deep ache wells in your bones.

Your teen-age ramblings first came to our files through those chat channels you whiled away your hours on; but then another administration got in the way.

He inhales, and the red glow lights up the crags of his cheekbones and the points of his suit collar. You realize you have no idea who you are, or how you got here. You wonder why you can’t feel your feet.

No, it took twelve cubed to make us realize the real enemy was among us all along.

Another glow as he inhales, a malevolent eye winking. What’s the joke? There’s never been anything but this room, and the dark, and the pain. You must be the joke.

It’s a hard thing, fighting terrorism. It turns out that terrorism is in the mind; it’s like a mental disease. All it takes is twenty pissed off guys and some basic flight training or five angry engineers. So we knew we had to get into your minds.

He leans over and puts his elbow on his knee, the acrid smoke of his cigarette searing your parched nose. It reminds you of the smell of … sulfur. A hot springs! You remember a hot springs! And something more …

Turns out, your type tend to be a little maladjusted, not so much going with the flow. The Five had fairly extensive school records, psych evals… most of the little bastards were in therapy since they hit puberty. So we knew we had to dig back into our archives and see if we could find any more burning fuses we could snuff out before more people died.

Something was good at that spring. Something to do with eyes.

We pulled all the federal, state, and local archives together and used them to generate profiles to flag data flowing through the Global Packet Filter. You, my friend, were the reddest of red flags. You were communicating with a wide variety of other reds using very strong encryption.

We wasted a lot of perfectly good man hours trying to get at what you were saying to each other, but in the end, you did yourself in publicly. You know our economic system is the bedrock of our security as a nation, yet you predicted its demise in post after post.

He takes another drag and blows the smoke in your face. Your eyes sting, and you blink. Vision! It had something to do with vision. People burble up in the smoke, and you remember laughter, dance, lust and play, surrounded by kindred spirits. The memory seems fantastic; everyone and everything was glowing and sparkling like heaven. You remember the hope, the joy, and the feeling like all the strife was almost over.

It never seemed to matter that the labor participation rates kept falling, or that our intercept rate started to diminish. The President for the Emergency declared “Victory over Economics” the day after the unemployment rate dropped to half a percent.

But then it became clear that our society, our Democracy, was being hollowed out from the inside.

We know that you’re no ring-leader, or even much more than a hanger-on, but we’ve learned a lot since our fumbling days of disappearing Intel engineers. We know now that you can’t win a war against an idea by making examples: you have to treat it like a disease.

The Vision party, to celebrate New Years Eve 2020… You remember weeks of frenetic planning, patience fraying with your chosen compatriots, everyone shirking on ‘official’ responsibilities to get their art, or their experience, or just their kit together.

When we discovered your “alternative” network, we knew we were onto a conspiracy deeper than a few disaffected white men. We knew we had to move carefully. After months of traffic analysis, we were able to find the key nodes participating in the system. It’s fiercely difficult to localize those black-market ultrawideband transceivers, but if you deploy enough antennas, you can narrow it down… especially with the perps publicly mocking our attempts to save Capitalism.

Which brings us back to this;

From his jacket he pulls a Window® and unfolds it. It’s showing an invitation.

He snaps it shut.

You posted this. On the public Internets. You, and thousands of others. We redacted it, of course.

What’s left has been simple; you were all quite foolish to gather in so few places.

He leans back laconically in his chair, and idly flicks the cigarette past your head, smiling at your flinch. You notice a faint glow starting to come from the lower walls.

There’s not much left we need of you. You’ve really been quite cooperative; there really hasn’t been much you wouldn’t talk about for some time now. In fact, you’ve been telling us anything you think we want to hear.

Unfortunately, I’ve been given clean up detail. For obvious reasons, most of what we wanted to know was historical, but I wanted to ask you about a party.

You remember your lover; you’d just met not a few weeks before, thanks to the matchmaking urges of your spouse (Married?!). The experiences you shared at the party were a paean to the most extravagant sybaritic hedonism you can recall. The glow has risen; the room is revealed to be white, inoffensive, clinical; a nine foot cube with a door.

Ah, I can see you do remember. Good.

He picks up the small pile of clothes next to him and tosses it in your lap.

Get dressed.

You pull your arm from the straps and put on your shirt, your stiff and swollen fingers trembling. The strap-marks on your wrists look almost like bracelets. Your legs don’t seem to want to work, so you pick them out of their ankle restraints with both of your hands.

He looks on, impassive. You slowly put each foot into the pants and pull them up, using your arms to lever your butt up enough to get in. As you sit back down you begin to feel stabbing pains in your feet as they begin to wake up.

Our task here is complete. You see, every remembering means you take apart the memory and put it back. Only now, you can’t put it back. Anything you have remembered since you’ve been here is gone forever.

A stranger smiles at you, smelling faintly of cigarettes, and offers his hand to you. You take it, with gratitude; you feel so tired. He walks you out of the room, out of the hospital, and into the sunshine.

You’re free to leave

He says, and walks away.

Brad DeLong is an economist I started reading when the NY Times put Krugman behind a paywall. He is erudite and a card-carrying member of the realist school of economics, you know that whacky version where you have to pay for the things you spend money on.

Anyway, he frames the debate well; you should read DeLong’s post. However, Mr. Wilkinson, currently teaching national security at William and Mary’s college, makes a connection that I wish to high heavens would be sounded to the rooftops:

I think we went into this war not too much unlike the way we went into the Spanish American War with the Hearst press essentially goading the American people and the leadership into war.

Vika and I just got done watching Equilibrium, the movie that should’ve had the mindshare that the matrix stole.

I particularly appreciated the role of the protagonist; he was an inside man, raised and honed to be a tool of the machine. Most importantly, he commits atrocities on his way to understanding, and in the end all he wins is chaos.
These days I’m feeling fairly far from equilibrium, a concept itself so inextricably rooted in panhellenic mythos I can’t help but feel it’s part of the game.

No equilibrium, no spiritus vitae, no bloody fucking humours.

I seem to be an agent within a vast and largely senseless machine whose macroscopic behaviours are positively atavistic.

I see all these ways to make the parts fit better together, but I fear that all I would do is make it a better monster.

It is available in web plugin form and universal binary ; for mac only, at the moment.

Ok, this one has some different rules:

1. Clicking on lines of 3 or more beads causes them to be destroyed; these count towards your “count”.
2. You can only match beads in a horizontal or diagonal line. It counts from whichever bead you click on, so asterisk patterns are the best.
3. Matching more than 3 beads gains you energy.
4. If you click on a bead that is not in a line, it becomes selected. You may then swap it for any other bead; mouse over another bead to see the energy cost of swapping. Be careful; clicking on a target bead that is already in a line will destroy the pattern, not swap the bead.
5. You can hit spacebar after all the beads stop falling to get to an “inner shell”.
6. Going into the inner shell costs energy; initially, 25 points (all you have).
7. Destroying beads in the inner shell will destroy “outer beads” of the same color.
8. Hitting spacebar again will take you back to the outer shell.
9. Energy points deducted for “going inside” are returned when you go outside.
10. If you wait to hit spacebar until after you’ve destroyed some beads, getting to the inside costs less energy.

Ok, so that’s not really the important part… My BFF Sean Stevens was paid $300 by a sub-contractor of Turner to magnetically attach LED pictures of a cartoon character at specific locations in Boston to promote a new movie. Two weeks after he first started hanging them, he was arrested for doing so because the authorities of Boston decided the signs were likely to be explosives.

I went down to represent, yo, and one nice reporting crew actually used some of my verbiage; watch the video on the right.

They misspelled my name, of course, but whatever; and really, the real heroes are Sean and Peter, who kept their sense of humor through the whole bizarre process, and held one of the best press conferences in history.

Update-Update: The media is reporting that charges have been dropped, but Sean hasn’t been notified that that’s the case, so we’re still waiting on that part.