Pockets' Den of Iniquity

I've made a drink I decided to call the Kallisti Cocktail.


Apparently Kallisti Martini was taken, but my first choice was The Chaos cocktail. Also taken.

So, this one is:
1 oz Absinthe
1 oz Allspice dram
3 oz ginger vodka
ample drizzle of honey
Ice

Shaken, up.

It's a confusing little drink that sort of starts to make sense once it hits you. Woof.

Approaching my next big birthday.  Only three more years to go in my base-12 scheme beforeI hit my mid-life crisis.  Of course, 'mid' is laughable at that point.

Just saw a weird, wonderful little film.

Now I have another favorite line from movies:

I name you Hope, I name you Ended, I name you Friend.

That was simply beautiful.

I finally got around to seeing 'I am Love' with Tilda Swinton in it.

It's such an amazing and wonderful movie, the best I've seen in quite a while.  I weep for the souls of the poor critics who could see that and not feel their soul moved by the piece.  Sadly, there are some, getting lost in technicalities of pacing and story.  Perhaps they were just not in the right place to be able to open their hearts to the awakenings held within.  I can hope that they get another opportunity at a point in their lives where they'll be able to open themselves to the artistry.

I read the article on Wikipedia on it afterwards.  As articles go, I think it does a fair job of dispassionately describing plot, actors, details and critical reviews.  It's amazing to see the story given such a treatment, laid out as the bare skeleton of facts and advancement of plot, because the description seems so sparse in comparison to the lush river of nuance and realization that I just swam through.  It's accurate, though, except for the elevation of the birthday party as anything more than the place the story begins, half of the frame that it lives within.

The ensemble was a delight, giving themselves over to being this family, dwelling in the characters and making their home there.  I keep wondering at all the hints of other stories just waiting off in the wings - were Eduardo and Antonio lovers, or was the connection there just my imagination? 

Anyway, I was deeply moved by the work, and felt like expressing that somewhere.  I tries to talk to someone about it, but they laughed and said I cry at movies 'a lot'.  I know sometimes being able to feel so deeply when experiencing good art can be painful, but I can't even imagine how I would come to think that it wasn't worth it.  Such joy, wonder and reveries to be had, even in the harsh, hard or sorrowful places.

So, when I look over this plotline that sketches out sparse facts, I can see those unfortunate critics I mentioned before saw nothing more contained within, lost in details of film-making.  Where they saw a pretty piece with lovely sets and views and acting, but set in a simple story about the life and times of a family through parties, deaths and weddings, I saw something entirely different.

To me, this movie was the story of a young girl who meets a man and leaves her home country to go to Italy and raise a wonderful family with him, caring deeply for their children and supporting him and his business, slowly becoming not much more than the competent mother, wife and companion she needed to be, running the household with style and skill, who comes with her family to a place where change comes amidst the inevitable diaspora of children to their own lives and finds her way as a mother to see the abiding wisdom of their life choices.  Then, unexpectedly, joy wakens her to find a place for this wisdom to grow within her own life and give her a chance at another.  The price is tragically dear, but she finds, in the end, an affirmation from most of those she loves and the bravery to stay her course.

Ten years ago Sunday.

Wow.

I just got back from a lovely steak (and scotch) dinner with one of my all-time favorite authors!

Was a wonderful experience among good friends.

Over my adult life, I have been a student of human behavior, a witness to marvels and atrocities, and somewhat an outside observer, since I have many reasons to comfort myself by holding myself somewhat apart from the trials and tribulations going on around me.

I have seen over the last few decades that several voices in my home country have had a lingering effect on our psyche, helping to shape for good or for ill the path we take on shambling, staggering aggregate.  The minor voices speak to our fears or secret desires, mostly, dragging the collective discourse down to the crazy dysfunctional places that offer them the most personal advantage at great cost to all those around, but several examples shine through of people who have a place in time when they strike deep enough or in the right place at the right time to shunt us all one way or another.

We have listened to voices for too long that convinced us that it was perfectly OK to own our greed and fear and lust, give in to them and wallow in them, for surely everyone else doing the same will get ahead of us if we do not give in!  We have listened to the dangers of terrorism, drugs, illicit sex, corruption of the youth, unbalanced trade, nuclear winter and illegal immigration, but have turned a blind eye on the dangers of poverty, disease, environmental impacts, and radical fundamentalism since they do not involve clear methods for profit.

A few voices like your own, Mr. Stewart, speak out with the language of humor to seek after some sensible method of finding a way through this tainted thicket of our own basest motives and desires to point the way forward, but just as many or more use those methods and more to keep us lost in those woods.

Over these last few decades, I have found myself drawn time and again back to the lessons of other times when the world went crazy in similar ways, and one thing keeps catching my attention as an example of something which seems from our view so far beyond that it might have made a difference.  The work of Voltaire, specifically Candide seems to be an example of a kind of social commentary that appears again and again in these worst of times, seeking to pierce the pomposity and rationalizations.  I suspect you'd agree and I feel that you've been seeking this sort of thing all along, using the purest satire to hold up a reflection of ourselves that we have a hard time truly ignoring or dispelling, but I wonder if the efforts so far have been pure enough.

Getting a hit comedy show and a large audience is a good way to get a largely effective message across, but in the modern world, many are using the perceived identification of the show or others like it as just being 'liberal' and fundamentally biased as an excuse to just tune out and immunize themselves from that message.  I keep returning to the altar of Candide and wondering if it isn't the best example of the kind of silver bullet we need to kill the slavering beast we've allowed ourselves to become - the purity of the satire is such that I still to this day can'r really see a preference by the author as to one extreme or the other which is presented - Candide's idealistic, naive profundity or Cunegonde's shallow, pragmatic narcissism.  I think other minor characters personify differing axis of extremes, but the message I take from the work is that we shouldn't ignore the fact that we have these things within ourselves, but still seek the middle ground where our lives can be lived in relative sanity.

I wonder if we could find a modern Voltaire, someone who can speak to our extremes but not be seen as favoring one over another, pierce the worst of them and allow them to deflate from their own overblown self-importance?

But then, truly, what are those things that need to be targeted for this treatment?  I'm not sure that the real culprits are out in the open enough to be skewered so, just yet.  Our fear of science, our fear of our potential, our fear of other cultures, of the next generation, of our neighbors, of ourselves.  Our laziness, of our doubts and secret fears that everyone can see our weaknesses as well as we can when we're not ignoring them.

Our fear of change, basically, and of self-awareness.  We hide in secrecy, privacy, national pride, baseless moralities, presumed dangers and threats while ignoring the real ones all around us that we'd have to step into the light to deal with.

We pick the unwinnable fights so that we won't have to risk true failure OR success, and tilt at windmills like drugs, sex, and crime, when we're mostly just inventing or exaggerating the problems.

I like that we've seen recently that hope isn't dead, but I do worry that the seeds of its growth in the winter to come haven't really been laid in as yet.

My sweetylove got on here, so I did the same:

www.formspring.me/PocketsCoon

I Am A: Neutral Good Human Bard (6th Level)


Ability Scores:

Strength-13

Dexterity-16

Constitution-15

Intelligence-16

Wisdom-18

Charisma-17


Alignment:
Neutral Good A neutral good character does the best that a good person can do. He is devoted to helping others. He works with kings and magistrates but does not feel beholden to them. Neutral good is the best alignment you can be because it means doing what is good without bias for or against order. However, neutral good can be a dangerous alignment because it advances mediocrity by limiting the actions of the truly capable.


Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.


Class:
Bards often serve as negotiators, messengers, scouts, and spies. They love to accompany heroes (and villains) to witness heroic (or villainous) deeds firsthand, since a bard who can tell a story from personal experience earns renown among his fellows. A bard casts arcane spells without any advance preparation, much like a sorcerer. Bards also share some specialized skills with rogues, and their knowledge of item lore is nearly unmatched. A high Charisma score allows a bard to cast high-level spells.


Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail)

I thought I might post a bit of a rant that's been coming on for me for some time.

We have a growing problem in the USA that is part of a system of idiocy that has been ebbing and flowing for a long, long time now, and I thought I'd stake out a position and express my feelings on the subject.

The issue is moral certitude, essentially - the fallacy that collections of people and some individuals that feel they represent them are inherently vulnerable to that leads them to believe that in collecting equality, freedom or liberty in larger aggregations, they change the fundamental equation that often puts liberty and equality and freedom in direct conflict with each other.

They don't really even think it through that much, it's just the most reasonable and rational way to distill the essential message that is put forward by a few utterly absurd atrocities of modern invention or re-invention.

To put this all much more simply, a 'War on X' is stupid.  Wars are able to be prosecuted in limited engagements for particular purposes against a known and coherent foe.  Any other military engagement is utter and immense idiocy, as has been known by military experts since the time of Sun Tzu,   That's a long time, by the way.  Wars on Drugs, on Terrorism, on Smut, on Immoral Behavior are worse than doomed from the start - not only are they a huge waste of resources, counterproductive and ineffective, they cause such an inordinate amount of collateral damage as to be reasonably termed a Crime Against Humanity, if were were sane about that term.  Quite some time ago, we codified the rules of engagement for wars on an international basis, and this crime against terminology has never met those standards.

Another fun 'tactic' in these cultural wars that once more attempt to assert the power of the supposed majority to impose poorly conceived and almost certainly outdated concepts of morality on the remainder of a populace that could never agree on WHAT 'moral behavior' was is the concept of 'Zero Tolerance' policies.

They don't work.  Can't, actually.  If we reduce it to a mathematical problem, we can run the equations in the stark light of abstract numbers, if you want - they'll show that it Just.  Doesn't.  Add.  Up. 

Human behavior is not such that increasing the penalties for a specific behavior has a commensurate impact on the incidence of the behavior.  There is a rapid drop-off, due to a variety of reasons.  We disbelieve we will pay the penalty, or do not understand the risk, or do not believe we are committing an offense, or believe we are invulnerable, or protected, or that we are innocent, or engage in a multitude of rationalizations that increase quickly.  Risk versus Reward is not a linear equation.  We have built-in needs to deny authority, feeding more energy into the forces that seek to deny the perceived risk. 

On the other hand, the COST to society of greatly increased penalties for perceived offenses, moral or otherwise ALSO goes up rather rapidly.  When you take draconian measures to maximize penalties, the burden on society is not simply increased in a linear fashion. A month's sentence for an offender impacts them, mostly - a month's salary lost, a chance to miss rent.  Double that and double it again, and family members may be evicted due to the loss of wages or the presence of a family member.  Bring it to a year or two, and you have brought in possible emotional problems with children and spouses.  The loss of productivity for the economy is more than just the single worker - all of the support personnel dedicated to that inmate are not adding to GNP in a significant way - the impact is purely negative.  Bring that to ten years, and the person affected, assuming they were young at the time can no longer EVER hope to be a productive member of society.  

At some point before then, you will have created a criminal whether or not there was one before.  Many of the offenses that we do 'Zero Tolerance' with are nonviolent offenses, or ones where we have arbitrarily categorized them as public safety issues without any real scientific data on the subject.  Where there was not a problem before in at least SOME of these cases, we have created one.  The costs continue to skyrocket.

Going the other direction to more minuscule systems with Zero Tolerance involved - work or school instead of jail time - we have a similar pattern.  Where minor offenses are 'taken seriously' in this fashion, we end up with a landscape littered by unnecessarily ruined careers, both academic and commercial.  On an economic front, we take potential high-value workers and downgrade them for perceived social flaws, either from an untested assertion that the offense hurts morale or productivity or that they are a danger to themselves or others.  If we PROVED these things by scientific or statistical studies with some rigor, that might be a situation where we could balance those risks with their potential impact against the real and measurable negative impact of the policy, but WE DON'T DO THAT. 

Often the simple assertion by someone 'in charge' or even in a delegated position of minor authority rules where hard data and common sense should.  We have policies by the millions that include these tar babies, and they get defended by their creators or inheritors mindlessly.

We need to STOP bending over to people who do not know what they are doing when crafting policies of these natures.  We need to challenge each and every Zero Tolerance policy, War on Anything-other-Than-A-Country-By-A-Country, or 'Enhanced Penalty' and any of their clones whenever we see them because they are inherently flawed and bankrupt and have NO chance of having a positive impact on society or any organization that uses them.

If you see one, tear it down - attack it, remove it, challenge it, disperse it, ridicule it.  They are the enemy.  Suggest sanity, offer reasonable alternatives, work for social change to address the underlying issues, but pass up no opportunity to express vociferously that each of those kinds of policies are STUPID, WRONG, and EVIL.

Treatment programs, rehabilitation programs, or addressing social problems - good.
Failing to realize that denying hard-coded human behavior for a particular kind of morality cannot be done by escalating punishments - bad

I can follow up with suggestions for any specific instances of any of these types of policies if anyone wants - not that I expect anyone's listening to or reading this text.  Still, perhaps someday someone will uncover this in an archaeological survey of the internet and say 'Why didn't they listen to him?' and I from my grave will respond oh-so-quietly 'Nobody reads that stuff, silly!'