It is a challenge to imagine the moral life of a gun-runner - at any rate, one who sells to the highest bidder regardless. But it isn't impossible. With a little imagination, the idea of profiting vastly while inflicting distant suffering is easy enough to grasp. One can, at least, picture the gun-runner as a member of the same species as you and I, with some self-awareness: 'yup, I sell guns and people I'll never meet are going to die, and that's fine and dandy, thank you for asking.'

But this is a painless feat of mental gear-shift compared with trying to see through the eyes of a library book soiler. I have an example here in my hands: a book's-worth of biro-work by one of these supremely self-serving little twats. Line after line scrawled with blue pen - pen! - so that this nobhead can get the facts a little more firmly established in their unimaginably vapid little mind. How must these creatures see the world? Entirely as a source of material to be chewed up for their own ends; a slime-mould-like solipsism is their modus operandi. In the famous moving words of Anakin Skywalker, I hate them.

It makes me angry. Only one other thing makes me angrier: the mannerless conspiracy of barstaff and pub customer to usurp the ancient natural rights built into the fabric of every English pub. There is an order to being served, and everyone should damn well make sure they're socially aware enough for a collective bar of beer-seeking agents to achieve a fair and gentlemanly emergent serving system. It's not hard, it really isn't.

But no. No-one cares any more. We're jauntily nudging each other off to Hell in a wheelbarrow. There's a line that runs through biro-weilding university savages and cow-eyed 'gimme beer n I don't care how I get it' selfishos: they're both polluted with the foamy green cancer of 'me me me' and its eaten out all remnant of fellow feeling. And as more and more have turned the Thatcherite Turn, the very weave of our once-great society has come to cotton shreds in our ha...

Sorry.

Well, I am having a fun evening! Started the day happily making some relatively coherent-sounding plans for the PhD, and reading about the jolly arguments the Austrian and Historical schools were having about 'the economic calculation problem'... but then, then, I took a look at this Three Toed Sloth post, via its Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts tag. This led onto all sorts of terrifying things, such as this little outline of a conference from five years back now. Here's a lovely chunk:

Another thing about climate change (which, sadly, pushes me towards the 'Que Sera Sera' school of action): as a species, we're not built to deal with change on this kind of scale. Various despots may have made shouty commitments to a thousand year reign, but then they've failed. Its not so much collapse or survival that intrigues me. It's just that the kind of time the planet lives in is on such a different order of magnitude than anything we can grasp, either individually or as a community. It's as if the permanent resident bacteria on our skin started a campaign to to stop us showering next morning. A lovely piece of writing on the permanence of the planet's skin:

Such mountains surround us like some fundamental border between the homeland and the strange land. Life springs from them, flows out and down and away to the weary plains but they remain, altering at a slow pace that enables us to make them our symbols of permanence, if not of eternity. Sheep graze them bald. Their lower slopes are trenched by prairie-buster ploughs, then blanked over with the dark trees of government. A duke or a queen commands the servants to blast a scar of a track across the mountain's face so that the rich may lurch across it in the autumn and leave the grouse dying dabbled in their own rowan-red blood... The mountains are neutral about all this. We gut them for their congealed metals, rive off whole masonries of limestone or slate, tread their weaknesses into running sores that will never heal while our civilisation lasts... They are above it all.

Guy#1: You should be more careful what you write. You never know when a future employer might read it.

Guy#2: When did we forget our dreams?

Guy#1: What?

Guy#2: The infinite possibilities each day holds should stagger the mind. The sheer number of experiences I could have is uncountable, breathtaking, and I'm sitting here refreshing my inbox. We live trapped in loops, reliving a few days over and over, and we envision only a handful of paths laid out ahead of us. We see the same things each day, we respond the same way, we think the same thoughts, each day a slight variation on the last, every moment smoothly following the gentle curves of societal norms. We act like if we just get through today, tomorrow our dreams will come back to us.

And no, I don't have all the answers. I don't know how to jolt myself into seeing what each moment could become. But I do know one thing: the solution doesn't involve watering down my every little idea and creative impulse for the sake of someday easing my fit into a mould. It doesn't involve tempering my life to better fit someone's expectations. It doesn't involve constantly holding back for fear of shaking things up.

This is very important, so I want to say it as clearly as I can:

Fuck.

That.

Shit.

From XKCD but someone else typed it out.

Two liquid facts to put next to each other:

1. On an average day, the gross quantity of interbank transfers is $4 trillion. (from voxeu).

2. Assuming a drop of water is 0.025 ml or 25 micrograms, it would then take 10 olympic size swimming pools to hold 1 trillion drops of water. (from Wikipedia).

Also: "Finally, note the rather amazing fact that during normal times the banking system uses $12 billion to engage in $4 trillion in daily transactions. That is, on average a dollar in a reserve account is used more than 300 times PER DAY."

From voxeu again... Yikes. I have absolutely zero idea what any of this really means.

Firefox 2 has a nifty feature in its search box that dynamically checks what you type and gives a list of suggestions. Mine's tuned into Google. I just started with 'what causes...', and it turns out this is the list of things people most want to discover the cause for:

Global warming, hiccups, high blood pressure, thunder, acne, autism, kidney stones, acid rain, earthquakes and cancer.

Awesome. I can imagine a story where some poor sod ends up afflicted with all of these. That'd be one hell of a day. Hic!

...

Responsibility, a heavy and cautious responsibility of speech, is the easiest thing in the world; anybody can do it. That is why so many tired, elderly, and wealthy men go in for politics. They are responsible, because they have not the strength of mind left to be irresponsible. It is more dignified to sit still than to dance the Barn Dance. It is also easier.

G.K. Chesterton

I recently read Flowers for Algernon, a very powerful, involving little 1966 book. From Wikipedia:

The story centers on Charlie Gordon, a mentally retarded janitor who volunteers to take part in an experimental intelligence-enhancing treatment. His progress parallels that of Algernon, a laboratory mouse who had been "enhanced" earlier. The story is told from Charlie's point of view and written as a journal, in progress reports (or progris riport as he initially spells it), which he keeps as part of the experiment. Succeeding entries trace Charlie's ever-increasing comprehension and intelligence in the aftermath of the treatment, as he passes through "normalcy", and then reaches super-genius level, becoming vastly more intelligent than the doctors who invented the procedure (he learns 20 languages, reads books at one page per second, writes a piano concerto, and disproves the hypothesis of the experiment that he was the subject of, among other accomplishments).

I've been sitting here today thinking, gosh - I think I go through a similar, but more compact, swing on the Algernon scale myself. Which is to say, I never accidentally learn twenty languages, but I can often look at code I've written the day before and think, 'oooh shit, that's just a bunch of letters and numbers... wtf???' There is one factor, one magic elixir that can turn the seemingly random string of coloured text back into a shining machine of organic perfection: coffee. Its mildy alarming how true this is. I think I'm going to have to get used to the notion of self-medication, for without coffee, I am nothing. Nothing, I tell you.

This cartoon is in appalling taste. Its not funny at all. I am posting it here as a timely reminder of just the sort of thing that one should not find amusing.

...

[Cook] called it Cape Tribulation because it was here that the Endeavour disastrously lodged on coral some twelve miles off the coast [of Australia]. Severely holed, it was in imminent danger of sinking, but Cook had with him a seaman who had once been in similar straits on a ship that had been saved by an unusual process known as fothering - in effect bandaging its underside by running a sail beneath it and pulling it tight to cover the hole. It was a desparate measure, but miraculously it worked.

Cook nursed the ship to shore a few miles around the headland. The crew spent seven weeks making repairs before sailing off to England and glory. Had the Endeavour sunk, and Cook failed to get home, history would of course have been very different. Australia would very likely have become French [they got there only just after Cook] - an eerie thought to say the least - and Britain would have had to adjust its colonial ambitions accordingly. No part of the world would have escaped its effects. Melbourne might now stand on African plains. Sydney could be the capital of the Royal Colony of California. Who can possibly say? What is certain is that the global balance of power would have changed in ways beyond imagining. On the other hand, we would almost certainly have been spared home and away, so its not as if it would have been an unmitigated disaster.

Bill Bryson, Down Under, p.293