The Exoteric Singularity

2011-02-21T07:16:00.000-08:00

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/16/945768/-UPDATED:-The-HB-Gary-Email-That-Should-Concern-Us-All

Mittens, we coulda told them all about this years ago.

Sock Puppets are now a danger in the real world. Rainbow Jim's ilk are now able to make scads of money doing for profit what they used to do for fun.

Poem for 1/1/11

2011-01-01T05:16:00.000-08:00

What's in God's wallet? A three dollar bill,

a receipt from Bed

Bath

& Beyond (the only

one to ever make a purchase from the Beyond)

and two business cards. One is yellowed

vellum, hand inscribed in tiny Gothic Latin and

signed Anselm. On the back in rough graphite

(a carpenter's pencil? Probably) is a scrawl, nearly

illegible, a telephone number. The area code is 666.

The other card is mother of pearl and stamped in

gold, simply, I AM. It was a gift from a Parisian lady,

given while He sat shiva for Descartes. (He opted to

forgive the debt from a certain wager made in cold

blood. No one knows what happened that hour but

the owner of the cafe and Yvette. She said they were

old acquaintances.)

--1/1/11

(thanks to Miss Mittens for the inspiration)

FB vs Blogging

2010-11-09T13:33:00.001-08:00

I just realized I have written 11 "notes" on FaceBook that are essentially what I started this blog for. Since I cannot seem to cut and paste... Yo, Mittens! Join the Dark Side!

The Sun King and the Outlaw (prose poem)

2010-07-14T09:24:00.000-07:00

The Sun King and the Outlaw

King Louis in his finery, the pearl and grey of his raiment satin
in the shade, luxurious in his bound empire, hemmed in by Alps
and Channel of plastic net bound to fenceposts by cable ties.
Robin (the Hood they call him, for he covers his shoulders and
his tight-feathered head with brown as if to conceal the red blazon
on his breast, and to no avail his yellow-rimmed eyes) tilts his
head and asks with half-parted lips What's this, What's this I see
behind the forest of grass and the high hard fence?

The emperor
answers not, the fat worm of his scepter still on the grass, not
waving high and flicking tailtip back and forth. A still as if he sees
Robin not, as still as if he is unaware that this outlaw fills him with
arrow-strokes of contempt. The king lays and lies as he lays, feigning
sleep or illness, his humors balanced behind slitted eyes. There is
no swaying of rump or setting of hind claws in the earth. He is inert.
Robin hops closer, closer to the thicket of grass behind fence. Cocks
his head again, looking to me observing from the England of my deck,
and back at the sun-stunned and pent king. It can't reach me? Robin
the Hood asks. Then I shall have some fun. He hops closer and closer
to the fence.

The Sun King sleeps in his private Versailles. A hop and a hop
closer, a tilt forward. The twisted spring of His Highness uncoils, an
explosion in three dimensions, and he is through the weakness at the
corner of the fence, sleek and gray. He strikes down Robin with a blow.
But Robin flies. The King's claws were pulled by the treaty that brought
him to the throne. Robin flees for the safety of his home country the sky
while earth-bound cat and bemused human sit in the capitals of their
Lilliputian nations, and laugh or snarl as to their natures.

Last Night

2010-06-09T06:49:00.000-07:00

Last night I was playing around with Wikipedia. I've been hanging around there for the last month or so, reverting vandalism, making minor edits to articles, and generally making a nuisance of myself. I had intended to go to bed by 12:30 or so, but got sucked in (working on an article about my friend Lief Jonker's film "Darkness: The Vampire Version") and around 2:00 went outside with our friend and housemate F to have one last cigarette before turning in. As we stood and sat there talking in low tones, a guy walked past on the other side of the street.

Then he turned around, went to my neighbor's vehicle, punctured the tire with one swift sidearm swing, and ran. F and I sat there for half a minute, essentially frozen. F called out "Hey, what the f%$#?" but the vandal didn't hear him. I don't think he was even aware we were right there watching him. I called the cops. After talking to them for a while, I got a ride in the back of a cop car to go ID a suspect. I'm 80% sure it was the same guy (I didn't see his face, but his clothes and build and hair were the same) and F was 90%. Turns out he was underage, drunk off his ass, not a local, and had a warrant out.

One vandal off the street. My neighbor wasn't happy this morning, but at least the cops caught the guy -- and the neighbors will be pressing charges. Hope I don't have to testify in court, though. I will if I have to. I feel bad for my neighbor. I helped him with the tire and drove him to the tire store so he could get a new one.

I know why I didn't chase the guy down myself -- he was armed and had already shown himself to be violent, at least to innocent vehicles. I'm not going to risk getting stabbed over a tire -- "I'm a lover not a fighter" -- but for a few minutes, at least, I felt like a bit of a coward.

But justice, I think, will be served. And boy am I sleepy this morning.

Manic Eponymous Recedes Temporarily

2010-05-11T15:43:00.000-07:00

Stalled. Stalled cold. No reason. I'll blame it on finals and a cold May.

Should be back soon. Bisy Bakson. Meh.

Here's something cool to look at until I return.

On-the-fly rewriting

2010-05-03T10:59:00.000-07:00

Cutting cop/killer story back to 2 short pieces.

Started, scrapped, and restarted second P.I. story. I was reading an article by Orson Scott Card (who frankly I am conflicted about, when he's good, he's good, and the rest of the time, most of the time, he bores me to tears) that rang true. He was talking about an early novel that he had written as a group of novellas. He identified the problems with that, and I realized I was doing the same thing.

That may be fixed. This second P.I. story brings threads and characters from all the pieces together. I'll have to do a significant rewrite of the ending of the criminal story to get everything to mesh. That's good, the current climax is as little weak anyway.

Nothing a giant explosion won't fix ;)

Short Takes

2010-04-27T18:10:00.000-07:00

The internet was made for people who hold grudges.
*******
Got a good start on killer cop story. Continuous minor edits on the other 2 pieces to get them to mesh as a novel.
*******
Deleted 85 instances of the word "my" from the P.I. section. Thanks, Mittens!
*******
Test on Islam Friday. Guess I'd better read the textbook Thursday. Heh.
*******
The 10-15k word novelette is a great format to work in -- long enough to have some room to play and let things develop, short enough to allow consistent pacing.
*******
I don't want to do my speech in Communications class. But I will. It's worth 2 letter grades. Tee-dubya-oh. I'd be willing to bail on the class and take a B, but not a C.
*******
Tuesday nights are a little dull if you don't watch "Lost" and everyone else in the house does. On the other hand, I've spent many an hour screwing around on the computer on Wednesdays.
*******
30,000 words.
*******
Ever read something on the web attributed to George Carlin that isn't by him? Me neither.
*******
Does Blogger have a hit counter widget? Or have they decided that my need for external validation is annoying and they have decided to break me of it?
*******
I believe it was Stephen King who said that writers are masters of revenge. Or was it Harlan Ellison? No, now that I think about it it must have been George Carlin.
*******
Spent half an hour researching a company that irritated me last fall. Looks like I'm not the only one. Don't buy anything from www . unbeatablesale . com.
*******
Can't wait to get over to State.
*******
******
*****
****
***
**
*

27,000 words

2010-04-25T13:13:00.001-07:00

Not counting schoolwork and deleted/rewritten scenes, and not counting the first chapter of the SF novel, I've written 27,000 words this month. Two novelettes linked by setting, tone, and a few characters.

I'm pumped. I have to write a paper today (about 3000 words on the modern Mormon church, not about the dogma so much as the business and politics of being a religion on the cusp), and then I can get started on the next piece.

I haven't decided if it's going to be a cop story or a contract killer story. I read a bunch of Block and watched Grosse Point Blank over the last couple days so I won't end up covering terretory that's already been done. Maybe I'll make the cop a contract killer. Pretty good cover for him, if you think about it.

I've been writing in bursts of 1000-2000 words/day. Get up in the morning, read over and make minor revisions on the piece I'm working on, then either continue from where I left off or scrapping the previous night's work and totally rewriting it. Break for school and whatever else needs doing, then work from where I stopped before lunch. It seems to be working for me as I've only had to scrap a night's output twice. Bith times it sucked, but I was able to save a couple hundred words.

If you count schoolwork, those false starts, and the SF, my output for April is probably in the neighborhood of 40,000 words. I can live with that. That's probably the highest output of decent work I've had in my life.

It will be interesting to see if I can maintain it, if I've established a new pattern or if, when my mood swings back to black, if I'll go back to nothing for months on end. Somehow I doubt that. One of the things I've been learning in school is how to perform on demand. Professors don't accept writer's block as an excuse for not doing aan essay. Why should I accept if for my personal work? I've always been my own worst critic -- now I need to be my own best teacher.

Clipping Right Along

2010-04-20T05:52:00.000-07:00

Finished the pulp noir picaresque "The Toes You Step On Today". Sent it off to Mittens, and she likes it.

So do I. It's not perfect, nothing I write ever will be, but that's OK. The perfect is the enemy of the good, and that's something I've let hold me back most of my life. Done with that.

Started another noir piece. They are amazingly easy to write. (Still letting my subconscious work on the next chapter of the SF novel, hope to get to that this weekend). This one's "Red Mask", and it's almost a parody of the hardboiled PI pulp -- but not quite. I'm not interested in mocking the form, I want to play around with it, turn the conventions and cliches on their heads.

I'm heading down to the library between classes today to pick up a copy of the latest Writer's Market. Let's get this little fledgeling out into the world. Somewhere, there's going to be someone that wants to pay us some money for the right to share it with the world.

I'm in full-on manic mode right now, and intend to ride it as far as I can. Averaging 1500-2000 words/day -- not including schoolwork. Working 5 days a week that's 30k/month -- and that means a novel in six weeks. 3X slower than Spillane, but (I certainly hope) much better than what he published.

Juices they do flow

2010-04-13T14:48:00.000-07:00

So, while waiting on part 3 of 4 of the crime story (which I believe would be classified as a "novelette" according to Wikipedia's chart of lengths), I've been playing around with a long-delayed science fiction novel. I find I am an iceberg writer, with pages and pages of notes, charts, sketches, and vignettes that may or may not ever make it into the story itself -- but I need that background, that depth of field, to accurately describe what's going on.

Our friend/relative/housemate F really helped by reading the first two pages of narrative and telling me to go on. I was having trouble with how to get started (from a story perspective), how to select the exact point at which the narrative should begin. As Iain M. Banks says in his fun non-Culture space opera "The Algabraist", you can reach backward as far as the Big Bang if you want, but that's not really practical: you have to select some arbitrary point in time as the beginning. This is true in any fiction, really, but seems especially true for science fiction. When your story is set on an artificial planet a billion years old, settled by humans generations ago, after a thousand-year (subjective) space flight from a future Earth that has since suffered a political cataclysm... where, exactly, do you begin?

With the point at which your main character's lives change is when. That moment from which there is no turning back. There will be plenty of time to fill in the backstory -- I'm planning on interpolary chapters to tell the story of the voyage, and of Earth (at least as much as needs to be told).

The thing that really made it all pop for me was, while discussing the planet with F, I suddenly realized everything I needed to know about the ultimate purpose of the planet, the design of its creators. I knew what it was, and how it worked, but did not fully comprehend the why, and whether or not the why is part of the story or not (I rather suspect it will be) it is a vital piece of that deep background I referred to earlier.

Physical laws in science fiction are like grammar -- you are only allowed to bend them if you have sufficient reason to do so, and you cannot simply throw them out or you are writing fantasy, not SF, just as you would not be writing in English without grammar but in your own language using English words. My construct does not break any laws, but whooboy it bends them.

Whining

2010-04-13T06:45:00.000-07:00

I really, really, really don't like one of my classes. It's a required class, so I have no choice but to take it, and I can't slack off on it, because I need to keep my GPA, both for prctical reasons (a 4.0 is going to help me with financial aid, class placement, and moving forward in school) and for personal (I have to prove to myself that I can do this, that I can not only succeed but excel at it).

But this class irritates me. I went into it with a bad attitude and that has not changed. I feel like it's a waste of my time and money because I am neither learning anything nor having any fun. Either of these suffices for me -- I have another class where I don't think I am learning anything, but at least the material is enjoyable.

With more and more non-traditional students like myself in school, I think it needs to be acknowledged that we don't need some of the basic classes that kids fresh out of high school require.

I'll go to class, and do my best, and hope for an A. But I'm going to complain about it.

Constant Reader

2010-04-08T10:43:00.001-07:00

Thinking about what Stephen King says in "On Writing" about the Constant Reader. We all have someone who, even if we don't specifically write for them, has in important influence on the finished form. J is my collaborator, so I don't count her as my CR. No, the person whose opinion I've come to respect over our years of friendship is none other than... Mittens! (Whose blog is linked over to the yonder on the right there, go visit. I'll wait.)

This is of course presupposing that anyone other than Mits is reading this blog. If you are, thanks. It helps to have an actual as well as a potential audience.

I've come to the end of the second drafts on the first 2 stories in the 4-part noir piece I'm working on, and am almost finished with the third. J is working on the putline and plotting for part 4, and will be redpenciling 1 and 2 in the next few days for the third and hopefully final draft. I've also passed it along to a couple other readers who I trust to give real feedback (Hi there, Mary!) if they choose to.

The second draft of story/story element #1 (I describe it that way because there is a very strong probability that once we are done we'll put it together into one piece, as that is what they really are -- #2 and #3 don't actually stand up alone, and the character development of Rex inthe first three means we would have to do a lot of recapitulation in #4 if we were to try to make it stand alone. Yes, for the first time since our sales back in 2004 we're beginning to seriously contemplate trying to publish!) will be printed in my college's literary magazine soon. Exciting, in one sense, to be in print. A curious letdown in that I won't be getting paid, and I assume the requirements for acceptance are a little lower than they might be for a pro mag. It's still a credit, and I'll be happy to see how people recieve it.

These crime stories, this pulp fiction, is dealing with sexuality issues as well as heists. It's difficult for me to find that line where I am letting the reader know enough about the intimate lives of these characters without bludgeoning them with it.

Thank you, Mittens, for your reading, your editing, your encouragement (and more importantly, your discouragement when I do something stupid. Fawty foa murda does, indeed, suck.)

Once J has worked these first three parts over and given them her touch (and once I've worked over the fourth and given it mine) they will be by W.E. Rifin. Good deal.

Story Notes/Activism/Apology

2010-04-01T18:45:00.000-07:00

J has found the worst of the flaws in the second story, so I'm holding off on finishing the third for now so we can go into rewrite. So these stories will be W.E. Rifin joints. Cool -- they will be much better for her work on them.

Over the last few years I've learned to face that I am not as good a writer as I would like to be -- or thought I was. Together, though, we complement each other's strengths. Fortunately, as far as we can tell, we don't have any major shared weaknesses.

Another iron on the fire is the Ignorance Awareness Walk I'm working on with my friend Pierce. We did some brainstorming tonight, hopefully we can pull off a public consciousness-raising anti-discrimination event this summer. It's her idea from the start -- I'm adding input and organization. Because I do have organizational skills. Just not many...

I had a gadget on the bottom of this page, a Hallowe'en Countdown. Somehow it got a malicious script in it and caused this page to redirect to ads for who-knows-what. It was not infectious, as far as I can tell. Apologies to you, Dear Reader, I shan't allow any more of those sorts of things here.

On a roll/school musings/an amusing anecdote

2010-03-29T19:00:00.000-07:00

Just wrapped second story. Looking like a series of four linked pieces. This one was fun to write as the main character is both bigoted and not all that bright. The lesson from Joss Whedon and Jayne -- everybody thinks they're the hero of the story. It's fun to tell a series of events from different perspectives in different voices. (Pssst, Mittens -- I'll email them to you if you are interested in reading them, just for fun (I'll accept critique if you are so moved, but really I just want to share them with ya ;) ))

It's been too long since I wrote anything serious. It's time. J and I have plenty of stories to tell, and I think we'll be able to tell them better now than we could before.

I have advising day coming up soon for State college, followed by registration a couple days later. I need to talk to an advisor, as I'm a little bit torn right now -- do I go for a B.S. in Community Psychology, or do I get a Bachelor of Elective Studies, which will allow something along the lines of 2 majors, a minor, and a couple elective courses? Decisions, decisions.

So this afternoon a car pulls up in front of our house. J sees the driver give a passenger money, and the passenger gets out and walks to a nearby house. Gets a nervous/guilty look when they see her watching. So F and I and our guest P go sit on the front porch to smoke. When the buyer leaves the house, rather than get in the car, motions to the driver (who has been sitting in front of our house with the engine running for 5-10 minutes by this point), walks to the end of the block, where they drive and pick them up. I mean, come on. Can you make it any more obvious what you're doing? Just drop the buyer off and drive around until a predetermined pickup time, or pull up to the house you are visiting and everybody go in for a few. My problem is that they involved me. If something were to go wrong, then I have to deal with the fallout in front of my place, or if they get busted, they might think I'm the one that called it in, which I didn't. But how could I prove that? Leave me out of it, people. Please.

Been a while

2010-03-27T10:36:00.001-07:00

I just submitted a short story to the college Literary Magazine. It's a bit of pulp noir set in the fictional city J and I have been constructing background on for the better part of a decade (1 trunk novel that died in rewrite, a few thousand words of assorted vignettes and fragments, and a piece we're playing around now with that may become a novella, a script for a comic, or a screen/play). This story serves as a sort of prologue to the longer piece -- the main character of the long piece is a supporting char in this one, and we'll probably have some reference to the aftereffects of this tale.

We're really leaning toward the pulp, the noir, the caper. It's a fun genre to write in, and the conventions are so well-established that you can find ways to push them and still keep the intellectual rigor of the boundaries.

The writing I've been doing for school seems to have primed the pump. Good deal.

Great turns of phrase

2010-01-07T07:56:00.000-08:00

"It's like I died and went to Hibbing."

Here's one that will ring true for any book lover, from Lukyanenko's _Twilight Watch_, from a scene where Anton is looking at the witch Arina's book collection:

"A lot of them are just lumber."

Who among us doesn't have a lot of just lumber in our libraries? We love all our books, but when it comes down to it, only 5 or 10 or 15% are really prizes, treasured friends or uncommon editions with intrinsic value or just hard to find -- there's a lot of filler rescued from charity booksales, garage sales, acquired in a stack from the used bookstore because they looked like they might be worth a try. Even the ones that are not great, don't mean anything personally, medioce books in fair condition that if you were to sell them would only be sold by the inch or the bag -- we keep them, because we can't bear to part with them just in case we might want to read them again, or pass them on to someone who might appreciate them...

Status Update

2010-01-04T11:26:00.000-08:00

J and I are working on a new story. We're in our best work mode -- she does characters, plotting, dialog, I flesh out narrative detail, structure, and extra brainstorming when needed. It's interesting so far and I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes, as the eventual length is still undetermined.

Our friend/cousin F just moved in. We're enjoying having him here. He seems to like it as well.

Since 8:00 am, the house has been full of contractors winterizing. It was -15 when they arrived. Four guys filling up the empty spaces in the walls with insulation, and so far one of them has almost fallen through the laundry room ceiling and they misplaced the clipboard with the work order on it. They seem to be a fun group of guys, but I may start drinking as soon as they leave. The cat is trippin' as he's spending the day in the bathroom.

School started for Bucky today, mine starts next week. The house would seem empty without him -- except, of course, for the contractors. Kinda glad he's out of the house today as I am not sure how he would deal.

Ready to go back to school, see if I can pull it off 2 semesters in a row. I need to get my application for State in this week. I am putting it off because I'm a bit intimidated -- not by the school, but by the application itself, as it's aimed at high school students, not at guys in their 40's trying to make the most of a second chance.

Trying to see if I can get a job at F's place as a popcorn slinger. Little or no money in it, but better than the big fat nothing I'm looking at when unemplyment runs out. I have no idea how much unemployment I have left -- about 6 weeks worth if I don't get another extention, but I don't know what the dates are and if I even qualify. Afraid to look. Procrastination as a talisman, if I ignore it maybe it won't go away.

I'm thinking about conceding the sprouts game I have going -- I am sure that I will lose at this point, and better to go out with my dignity intact.

I've been playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Very good game, lush well-realized world. This is the game that Divine Divinity was trying to be. The character leveling system is interesting, especially the way that dungeons are set up to always be close to your level, so there's no "Oh, I'll just go knock over an easy one for supplies". If it was hard at level 3, it's going to be harder at level 13. One thing it seems to lack, fortunately, is the incessant "get this to give to this person so they will give you that so you can take it to them..." booooring quests, the kind that killed Zelda: Mask Of Majora and Baldur's Gate. So far the quests I have done have been rescuing people, recovering artifacts from deep and scattered dungeons, stalking NPCs, and combat missions. I've been able to spend about 2/3 of the game time dungeon diving and the other third wandering around talking to people, picking plants for alchemy, and exploring the world to find the dungeons. There's an Unofficial Elder Scrolls Wiki that has a lot of good information and organized in a way that lets me find out important info (like, for example, which dungeons are NOT related to the main quest so I can safely delve without risking messing up something I may need later) without being spoilers. Knowing that Devastated Mine is full of bandits or that Caerbannog Cave is home to the Black Beast before going in is something I could have conceivably learned if I was actually living in this world, but I don't look at the maps to find treasure chest locations etc. Also, the game itself is perfectly named, for it is Oblivion, mental rest and recharge before next week when I'll be learning Oral Communications, Psychology of Women, Comparative World Religions, Diversity and Social Justice, Critical Thinking, and American Literature About War. Guess which two I think I don't really need to take? I'll have to watch that and make sure I don't slack off on them, as it would suck to ruin my GPA out of arrogance and laziness -- been there, done that.

I have sworn off all FaceBook game applications. No more Mafia Wars, FarmVille, or Vampire Wars. They are too little fun for the amount of time they consume. I quit FarmVille some time ago, when it started to be too much work for no reward of any kind -- I suppose that does make it an accurate simulation of real farming...

That paper on money I've been working on

2009-12-13T10:21:00.000-08:00

Uncommon Cents:
Solutions Beyond the Zero Bound

1: Defining the Problem
The economy of the United States is currently under the greatest strain since the Depression of the 1930s. The natural boom-and-bust business cycle, combined with reckless financial speculation, the real estate bubble, and a so-called crisis of confidence has overwhelmed the safeguards of our system and put us all at risk. But is this the whole story, or is the ultimate source of the problem deeper, something fundamentally awry with the system itself? From before the founding of our nation, scarcity of money has hurt us individually and collectively by creating unemployment and poverty in the midst of abundance. There may be a way out of this recession, a way that has been proven to work, but it seems utterly nonsensical and a violation of the accepted conventional wisdom.

This perception is in part because the average person finds economics and monetary theory intimidating and overcomplex. In a recent New York Times article, N. Gregory Mankiw states, "Recessions result from an insufficient demand for goods and services". This is true, but ignores a basic assumption. In today's recession, as in past economic panics and crashes, the problem is not that people don't want or need available goods and services, it's a lack of money – goods and services are in oversupply, and no one has the resources to buy them. The net effect of this is people being thrown out of their homes because there are too many unsold houses. The counterintuitiveness of this clearly shows that it's time to take a different approach to the problem, an approach that begins by seeing money for what it really is and reimagining money in a way that adds fluidity and utility to currency. During past economic troubles, communities have successfully introduced and used local, negative interest currencies to create sustainable economic conditions, islands of prosperity in the sea of economic depression. This alternate form of money, when properly designed, avoids some of the systemic flaws that are currently disrupting civilization.

2: Background – The Nature of Money
Before attempting to solve the problems of the money supply, money itself needs to be understood. What is money? Although money and wealth are frequently conflated, the most common economic definition is as medium of exchange. According to fin de siècle economic thinkers Hugo Bilgram and Louis Edward Levy, money is "a consensus of the members of the community to accept certain valuable things, such as coin and certain forms of credit, as mediums of exchange" (qtd. in Greco Money 25). Nietzsche describes money as "the crowbar of power" (qtd in Greco End 10). Many modern economists and economic thinkers define our current monetary system as debt, because of the way new money comes into circulation. In 1969, in a controversial legal case in Scott County, MN, a bank president states on record, in reference to a $14,000 mortgage, that "the money and credit first came into existance[sic] when they created it" (First National Bank of Montgomery vs. Jerome Daly). According to Modern Money Mechanics, a pamphlet by economist Anne Marie L Gonczy published until 1992{1} by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago,
The actual process of money creation takes place primarily in banks....checkable liabilities of banks are money. These liabilities are customers' accounts. They increase when customers deposit currency and checks and when the proceeds of loans made by the banks are credited to borrowers' accounts (3).

Community economist Thomas H. Greco Jr analyses this paragraph to describe how banks create the vast majority of money simply by depositing it into customer's accounts. He addresses the role of customer deposits by stating these deposits represent money created in the form of a loan to some person, business, or governmental entity who you then recieved it from (Money 5-7).

International money expert Bernard Lietaer, one of the creators of the Euro, goes one step further and presents the parable of "The Eleventh Round" to explain how this leads to the corrosive effects of positive interest. In his parable, a community with a barter-based economy is introduced to currency (by an outsider, in the form of loans) as a means of simplifying market transactions – a medium of exchange in the form of a stamped, round piece of leather. Each of the eleven families in the village is issued ten of these leather coins, valued at one chicken each, under the condition they pay the outsider eleven leather coins one year later. In order to do this, the villagers were forced to compete for coins, rather than cooperate as they always had. The introduction of interest-bearing currency required either one or more families lose coins, or the economy had to grow enough to allow the villagers to borrow enough to pay the interest with further loans. This, Lietaer asserts, is the elephant in the living room of the current monetary system – "When the bank creates money...it only creates the principal....when you pay back interest on your loan, you are using someone else's principal" (Lietaer Future 50-54). The monetary system in use today inevitably creates winners and losers and requires constant, uninterrupted growth for its survival. As long as we depend exclusively on this system, we are locked into the Red Queen's Race, where we have to run as hard as we can to merely stay in the same place, a paradigm of perpetual growth in which stability is economic disaster.

The key to the flaw in this system is positive interest. When banks create money, they charge the borrower for the use of this money. There is no economic advantage to anyone in this system save to the bank. In the absence of interest, the debt basis of money does little if any systemic damage: when money carries negative interest, it flows through the economy rather than concentrating wealth in the hands of the few. The creation of money from nothing at all is not a problem in and of itself provided the money created represents value rather than debt, provided it stabilizes or increases rather than decreases the money supply. The debt-based money in use today decreases the effective money supply simply because, according to Greco, "the available supply of money...is never sufficient to enable all debtors to pay what they owe"(End 55).

3: Thoughts on Rational Currency
In 1729, Ben Franklin published a broadside about the utility of paper money. He understood that the scarcity of money "discourages Laboring and Handicrafts Men" and devalues domestic production, including land (Modest). He advocated the issue of a paper scrip without inherent interest, but did not go so far as to speculate about negative interest, saying merely that "A plentiful Currency will occasion Interest to be low..."(Modest). Economist Irving Fisher describes the next great leap in the theory of currency in his 1933 pamphlet "Stamp Scrip", named for the negative interest currency developed by German economic thinker Silvia Gesell and put into use in Germany during the post-WWI depression (Ch. 4). The key to stamp scrip is that it rewards circulation and punishes hoarding. Fisher describes a theoretical municipal scrip. He begins with the premise that a town issues $1000 in paper specie with two conditions: the town will redeem each $1 of scrip for $1 in legal tender at the end of one year from the issue date and, each Wednesday, each bill must have a stamp affixed, costing $0.02 and purchasable from the city.

The town issues this scrip by spending it – in Fisher's example, the town uses it to hire workers for a new municipal job. The third requirement for this stamp scrip to work is that it be accepted by both the workers and a critical number of town businesses, allowing it to circulate. Although there is no ordinance requiring scrip to be accepted, normal market forces will lead to near-universal acceptance, for if Shop A accepts scrip and Shop B doesn't, Shop A will have more sales and Shop B will lose business. At the end of the year, the city has sold $1040 worth of 2-cent stamps, and can easily redeem the scrip for federally-recognized money (Ch. 3). In Germany, a stamp scrip based on Gesell's work called wära (with a 1%/month stamp) in circulation since 1919 with limited acceptance and utility became, in 1931, the prime currency in the village of Schwanenkirchen. Fisher's associate Hans Cohrssen describes the experiment in an article in The New Republic, extensively excerpted by Fisher. The owner of a closed local coal mine reopened the mine by paying his workers in wära. The local businesses accepted wära because it was, at the time, the only game in town – Germany as a whole was in a cataclysmic depression – and the money circulated from workers to vendors to their vendors to creditors and, in many cases, back to the mine where it was taken in payment for coal. In the case of Schwanenkirchen, the original funding of the wära was a 40,000 mark loan taken by the mine owner. If he had paid the workers directly with these borrowed marks, the mine would have been rapidly closed and the town returned to its dire economic straits because the marks would have been hoarded rather than circulated. The wära, losing value on a predetermined schedule, circulated rapidly as no one wanted to be the person who had to buy the next monthly stamp (Qtd in Fisher Ch. 4).

Fisher then continues by discussing how the use of wära with this sort of full community support sparked an economic renaissance in this village of 500 and was beginning to spread beyond the borders as businesses and banks nationwide began to accept wära. The experiment ended because the German government, after failing to prove in court that the wära was an illegal currency, legislated it out of existence, destroying the burgeoning local economy of Schwanenkirchen (Ch. 4). Senior Federal Reserve research economist Bruce Champ discusses how a similar plan was implemented in the Austrian city of Wörgl (pop. 4300) in 1932 with some success until, like wära in Germany, the alternative currency was shut down by the government (2-3). In the case of the currency used in Wörgl, it was not tied to the legal tender of Austria, rather, it was simply issued (by spending) and accepted as payment by the city (Stamp Ch. 4).
Fisher describes several stamp scrip experiments in the U.S. in 1932, ranging from $300 issued in the 2000-person city of Russell, Kansas to a plan by the city of St. Paul to issue $100,000 in municipal scrip as soon as authorized by the state legislature (Ch. 5). These scrip plans differed between locations and had varying degrees of success, but none became permanent. Champ states that they all failed, in the long run: many communities used scrip that was stamped at transfer rather than on a schedule, in effect discouraging exchange; and when the overall economic picture improved, the additional work involved in use of stamp scrip made the use of conventional currency more attractive (3-4). In the case of Schwanenkirchen and Wörgl, however, the currencies did not fail – they were shut down by the government. The reasons for this vary by the worldview of the ones doing the explaining; alternate currencies are fertile ground for conspiracy theory. {2}

Given that the current monetary system consists of bank debt and money is, by that definition, always in short supply, how can an alternative currency help? The examples of Schwanenkirchen and Wörgl prove that the proper use of negative interest currency can amoreliate economic troubles on a local level. One of the problems of a strictly local currency is the need to have another currency for use on a larger stage – one cannot expect the federal government, for example, to accept tax payments in CloudBux. Currently, the government taxes barter and exchange systems by valuing the currency of use in dollars, requiring people using those systems to have a source of legal tender (IRS.gov).

There is no reason the government cannot issue currency, rather than giving credit to banks in the form of bonds and then borrowing against that credit as is now done through the Federal Reserve System. The paper currency Ben Franklin lauds is directly issued by the government. According to Gonczy's Modern Money Management, money is "A tool used to facilitate transactions...readily accepted in exchange for goods, services, and other assets...."(1). Therefore, money, in the modern conception, is not a physical object that can be exchanged 1:1 for a valued commodity, as all money once was{3}. Any entity can create money, provided someone else accepts it as such. In practical terms, this means it must either be directly accepted by the government or easily convertible into acceptable currency.

At this time, one of the stumbling blocks of alternative currency is that it is not accepted by the government, and is actively discouraged today just as the Wörgl scrip and the wära were in pre-WWII Europe. Ellen Brown, a lawyer and currency reform advocate, describes the rise and fall of a 21st century alternative currency in America. An organization began issuing a commodity-based currency called the Liberty Dollar, which was redeemable for gold or silver held in a private facility (in order to assure its acceptance). In 2006, the equivalent of $20,000,000 was circulating in Liberty Dollars. In November 2007, the assets of the organization were seized by the FBI on the grounds that the organization was counterfeiting, even though Liberty Dollars were not duplications of U.S. currency. A spokesman for the government stated, "The United States Mint is the only entity that can produce coins" (339-340).

4:A Model for Survival
How can a negative-interest currency be implemented in a way that helps solve the economic problems of the nation as a whole? One of the weaknesses of any national currency is that it can be devalued by external influences. Brown mentions the British practice in the 1770s of wholesale counterfeiting of Franklin's paper currency, the Continental, and alludes to international speculation in national currencies including the practice of short-selling to devalue currencies in modern times(43).

The optimal currency for a nation would be accepted for payment of civic debts, would be directly issued (spent into being) by the government, and would not come into being with interest due. This would increase, rather than decrease the money supply. There is an example in American history of a zero-interest national currency. Brown relates how during the Civil War, President Lincoln had $400,000,000 printed in the form of United States Notes, which were "receipts acknowledging work done or goods delivered" and were used for federal wages and to purchase war materials(83). This paper money was distinguished by the use of green ink on the back – the Greenback{4}. This extra money, created out of nothing but the agreement by the government to accept it at face value, financed the war and stabilized the economy while avoiding the debt burden of bank-issued currency.

In the information age, it is no longer necessary to have physical specie. A national issue of negative-interest currency would increase the money supply without increasing our collective debt. Although there would be benefit from a new issue of Greenbacks, combining this with the attributes of negative interest would allow us to pull ourselves out of this crisis by our own financial bootstraps. Since negative-interest currency devalues on a regular schedule, it will not be hoarded – it is designed to be a medium of exchange, not a medium of savings. This devaluation was historically accomplished by purchase of a stamp, but with a primarily electronic currency most of the "stamping" can be done by pushing a few electrons, the same way that most debt money is created today. American Enterprise Institute Fellow Alex Pollock hints at how this mechanism could work by comparing it to ATM fees, stating how a $2.00 ATM non-customer surcharge on a $100 withdrawal is effectively -2% interest.
Scarcity of money is the direct cause of countless human miseries. Having the right amount of money available, and that money circulating freely, is the definition of a viable economy. The current system of privately issued debt money is no longer serving the interests of the people – if it ever did. A national, government issued negative interest currency would not only solve the current crisis by fully funding the economy, but might lead to a new Renaissance. There are few societal problems today that are not in one way or another related to the scarcity of money – solving this scarcity leads the way to abundance on all levels.

{Notes}
1 Brown speculates that the Federal Reserve stopped printing Modern Money Mechanics in 1992 because it "revealed too much". (169) It has been cited in multiple court cases, and remains available online.
2 My first exposure to alternative currency was in the Illuminatus! trilogy by philosopher Robert Anton Wilson, an 800 page farce on the theme of conspiracy as truth and the 20th century as a struggle between secret societies for control of the world. One of the groups finances itself with flaxscrip, a zero-interest currency, and another with hempscrip, which is Fisher's stamp scrip with a counterculture twist.
3 See Greco's "Money" for a thorough description and history of commodity money and the evolution of the idea of money that leads from barter to Collateralized Debt Obligations, and beyond.
4 I was born and raised within a few miles of Greenback Lane, a major thoroughfare in the Sacramento area that runs from Folsom (fabled in story and song) to Rio Linda (at one time home to Lee Greenwood and Rush Limbaugh, among others). It was laid in 1864 and given its name because the original landowner was paid in United States Notes, over his protests that Lincoln's Greenbacks were not "real money" – but he eventually accepted them for payment, and there is no record of his having any problem spending them in turn.

Works Cited
Brown, Ellen H. The Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth About Our Money System and How We Can Break
Free. 3rd ed. Baton Rouge: Third Millennium Press, 2008. Print.
Champ, Bruce "Stamp Scrip: Money People Paid to Use. (Cover story)." Economic Commentary (2008): 1-4. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 8 Oct. 2009.
First National Bank of Montgomery v. Jerome Daly. Justice Court, Township of Credit River.
9 December 1968. Web. 11 October 2009
Fisher, Irving. Stamp Scrip. New York: Adelphi, 1933. N. pag. Web. 17 Nov. 2009

Franklin, Benjamin "A modest enquiry into the nature and necessity of paper currency." Modest Enquiry into the Nature & Necessity of Paper Currency (2009): 1. Primary Search. EBSCO. Web. 8 Oct. 2009.
Gonczy, Anne Marie L. Modern Money Mechanics: A Workbook on Bank Reserves and Deposit Expansion. Chicago: Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, 1992. Web. 17 Nov. 2009. .
Greco Jr, Thomas H. The End of Money and the Future of Civilization. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2009. Print.
---. Money: Understanding and Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2001. Print.
Lietaer, Bernard. The Future of Money: Creating New Wealth, Work, and a Wiser World. London: Century/Random House, 2001. Print.

Mankiw, N. Gregory "It May Be Time for the Fed to Go Negative." The New York Times 18 Apr. 2009. Web. 8 Oct. 2009 .
Pollock, Alex J. "Why Not Negative Interest Rates?." The American The American Enterprise Institute,
21 May 2009. Web. 8 Oct. 2009 .
United States Internal Revenue Service. "Barter Exchanges." IRS.gov N.p., 2009. Web. 28 Nov. 2009.
.

Midgame progress

2009-12-05T13:43:00.000-08:00

17+ (Peltier*-RichardsFink)
1(18)1[2-9], 1(19)18[10-13]
10(20)19, 13(21)20
10(22)10[11,12], 22(23)13
13(24)21, 23(25)24
14(26)14[15], 15(27)26

WGOSA

2009-11-24T08:47:00.001-08:00

I just joined the Worldwide Game Of Sprouts Association. It's a great game that I have been playing for years. Here's the first two moves of a game I'm playing with a fellow in France. Gotta love the internet!

Homework Sunday

2009-11-22T13:10:00.000-08:00

I am up to my elbows in money today. Unfortunately, it's all theoretical money. Studying a few "academically acceptable" sources, and about a million anonymous, pseudonomous, and a few attributed blog and other web sources that won't end up in my paper. I just started following David Boyle's "The Real Blog", seems like a pretty good source for the debate on the other side of the Atlantic.

The field of money is fertile ground for conspiracy theory. It's so fertile, in fact, that it's hard to find the real story. I cannot prove that local negative-interest currency has been stamped out (pardon the pun) by banks who are both jealous of their prerogative to create money, and wealthy enough to buy legislation. Of course, if you by your nature create money, you can make the government do your bidding and prevent competition, all the while pretending that the Holy Market is a free one.

There is no such thing as a free market. Never was.

I'm trying to get this paper done before December, as that will give me more time to work on my group psych project -- and so I can move on from money and into my next area of independent research, game theory. I don't want to have too many irons in the fire. Anyone who knows me will say that it's too late for that...

Geometry of the Soul

2009-11-19T15:12:00.000-08:00

Just this:
An equal plus an equal is
Never unequal.
If a line divides a plane into two parts,
No part is less than the other: they are
Equal (in accordance to the rules of

Infinities).

Length times depth times breath
Of a prism gives the
Volume.
Every time.

Y is part of an
Ordered pair. Let me map the
Universe onto this plane with compass and four colors.

Hitting the Wall (prose meander)

2009-11-12T19:09:00.000-08:00

In every human endeavor that goes on long enough, you hit a metaphorical wall. At that point, you either pull it together, or you fail.

I will not fail for lack of trying.

Looking back over the last two weeks, I realize that I have hit that wall. The first half of the semester, I worked on my more challenging courses first, then played on the internet or read or watched a movie or whatever after completing each assignment. Then I would reward myself with English or Ethics.

For the last two weeks I have been slacking. I'm a week behind in my science, I'm utterly lost in math, I have a psych assignment due tomorrow that's only 1/3 done, I haven't read the ethics text for tomorrow, the only class I'm ahead in is English, and only a few days ahead there.

Realizing this is winning the first half of the battle. I shut off the internet and quit making excuses this afternoon -- I'm only able to type this entry because I am done with tomorrow's math homework. I have a movie here I am dying to see (Leif Jonker's "Darkness") sitting on the shelf, and I am not going to watch it until I am done with psych. Tomorrow I am going to get fully caught up on my science homework. Sunday I can get ahead on next week's load.

I will climb the bloody wall this time. I will not let it climb me. If I fail this time, it will not be for lack of trying.

For many years, there was a voice in my head urging me to fail, and prove to the world I was a failure. That voice has been stilled by time. I have a different voice now, one that tells me to succeed, and prove to myself that I can do any damned thing I set my mind and my will to.

I will do this.

Never again will I put myself at the mercy of an uncaring employer simply because I can't prove I have the qualifications to get a better job. Never again will I strive to climb a corporate ladder, only to have it kicked out from under me for a variety of reasons (some my fault, some the system's fault).

This time I am going to do it right.

And I will not give up when it gets a little tough, or boring, or confusing. I will push through.

Wildecho stuck a note on the whiteboard calendar where I track my assignments. It's a scrap of paper that I wrote a quote on, years ago. She kept it, and posted it right when I needed it. It's Tom Hanks, speaking in "A League Of Their Own":

It's supposed to be hard. If it wasn't hard, everyone could do it. It's the hardness that makes it great.

Economics and English (prose meander)

2009-11-11T21:52:00.000-08:00

Larry Niven says, there is no cause so worthy that you cannot find a fool following it. I've been working on a paper for English class about negative-interest currency. There's plenty of material out there about it, but... there are a lot of cranks out there who have problems with the monetary system.
And the cranks make the reasoned thinkers look like deluded fools. It's like speaking out about fluoridated water -- immediately, everyone thinks you're going to bomb Russia to preserve our Purity Of Essence.
There are a lot of thinkers out there who look at the current monetary system, see its flaws, and try to point them out and suggest real alternatives. And then there are those who see the flaw, and push their argument past all logic.
There's a legal case I reference in the first part of the paper, to illustrate that money is actually nothing more than bank-created debt. It's a case that occurred in MN back in '68, where one J. Daly sued to prevent a foreclosure. The original basis of his argument was that the debt was illegal, because the bank did not loan him someone else's money, but instead created the money out of thin air.
This part is absolutely true. The president of the bank testified in open court that it is true. The Federal Reserve used to publish a booklet saying the same thing. (And there are plenty of people out there saying they quit publishing it because it told money's dirty little secret. There are others who try to discredit the booklet by saying the Federal Reserve chose its wording poorly. I don't know about you, cobber, but I find an argument that the system is fine because the Federal Reserve is incompetent do be less than convincing. Anyway...)

But it's what happens next...
The court is a local Justice Court, with a Justice of the Peace presiding. The justice has very specific limits on what kinds of cases he can try, and this case is outside those limits. Not only does he ignore a higher court injunction, but he goes so far as to declare all bank debt null and void because it's unconstitutional on the grounds that private banks cannot create money. This penny-ante JotP claims to have a legal opinion worth more than the Supreme Court. When the higher courts come down on him, Daly is his attorney. Faster than you can say conflict of interest, Daly was disbarred. Justice Mahoney died within 6 months of the case, and didn't the conspiracy theorists have fun with that! And this is my point.

Because some loud people think that Mahoney was killed, and because a tax-dodging lawyer tried to find legal justification for his actions by indicting the Federal Reserve, any discussion of money that cites this case has to either ignore, defend, or deflect accusations that have nothing to do with the merits of the important part. And, because Daly has been painted as a crank (I just did it myself, and I never met they guy) it makes anything he says suspect.

The important part of this case, as far as I am concerned, is that the president of a bank stood up in court and, on the record, said that his bank created money out of thin air.

But that simple but important fact is tainted because a couple of the players pushed it too far, and a few nutjobs put their shoulders to the wheel of insanity. It's no secret that I am a conspiracy buff, to a certain extent. I disbelieve a lot of conventional wisdom about a lot of things. That doesn't mean I swallow every new conspiracy theory whole. I just feel there are important questions that have not been answered to my satisfaction (like where exactly is the plane? If you know what I'm talking about, you know what I'm talking about; if you don't, it wouldn't help either of us for me to explain).

We were doing peer-editing on a paper this week, a compare/contrast paper using 2 sources on the same subject as our final. At least one person refused to even try to edit my paper because they felt the subject material would be beyond them. They didn't understand that they didn't have to know anything or care about the subject -- they just needed to see if I did a good job comparing, contrasting, and most importantly, citing my sources. This person asked my why I wasn't studying to become an economist. "Because I'm fascinated by it, but I don't want to make it my career. And because the very first thing they would do, would be to drill all the heresies out of my head, or fail me if I clung to my belief that the system is profoundly dysfunctional in and of itself."

In and of itself. Hmmm. This has been a common thread in discussions lately, I think I've used this phrase 6 or 7 times -- 15 or 20 if you count rough drafts.

In my previous post I tried to put together a poem centered on a comment I made because I had been thinking about the old quote by James Branch Cabell (who is frequently referenced by Larry Niven, btw, thus lending a pleasant circularity to this entry) "An optimist believes we live in the best of all possible worlds, a pessimist knows this is true". I dont think it really captured the point I was hoping to make. So here's the line that started it all, the bit that was lost in translation from aphorism to acrostic:

What a terrible world this would be if there were no room for improvement.

Heaven and Hell

2009-11-10T15:28:00.000-08:00

For we do not live in the best of all possible worlds
And some refuse to learn the
Lesson that Belief in Nothing is not the opposite of Believe in
Something.
Everyone is not

Doomed by an accident of birth (
I
Cannot bring myself to believe in gravitons).
How terrible it would be to live in a world where
Only consequences matter!
Today, live your life as if it's almost
Over, they told
Me
Yet only in room for improvement is hope.

Autobiography of Red

2009-11-09T19:08:00.000-08:00

My English instructor recommended this book to me, saying
You may enjoy this.
She's a poet, and
The pieces of hers I've read, I've
Enjoyed. Anne Carson's "Autobiography of
Red" is interesting. Not something I would have picked up on my own,
Yet, something I enjoyed.

Outwardly, its
Format is described as a Novel in Verse.

Definitely peotic prose rather than prosaic poetry. It's something that's
Effectively ouside my experience. It's two stories layered, or
A case of one story
Twined and twinned -- an update of the story of
Hercules and Geryon. If anyone else has read it, can you illuminate it?

Beginnings

2009-11-09T12:56:00.000-08:00

How do you start a weblog?
In my case, a placeholder post, devoid of content.
Truly,
However, content is
Everywhere,
Really, if you look context in the
Eye.