Since I had recently been reading about the Oak Island thing, the notion of simple substitution ciphers using graphics–and how simple they are to decode for anyone with any small interest–was in my head.

So, I thought it would be funny to whip up my own simple graphic substitution cipher, and leave encoded notes behind whenever I changed seats between sessions. Since the audience was entirely composed of highly technical people with solid analytical skills, it seemed likely that anyone sitting down would recognize that there was a coded message, and would be able to decrypt the code with a little effort. So, part message in a bottle, part altruism–giving the other attendees something to distract them for a few minutes during boring sessions.

When I got back I dropped into FontStruct and whipped up a font mapping the symbols from my cipher, so that I could easily generate messages. (Boy, I love that FontStruct.) I’m tempted to print out a couple of pages of coded messages–maybe Zen koans–and leave them around the city in an act of benevolent surrealism (like the physics warnings).

Hence the last message–it was slightly more tricky than most substitutions because it was a small sample of ciphertext and not in English, but on the other hand the punctuation was a pretty broad clue to that.

After the jump, a bigger sample–four parts of one document (in English), which should make it possible for anyone with a bit of nerd puzzle fascination to figure it out.

On the off chance that someone comments with the plaintext before I get around to telling the story, I will send them a $20 Amazon gift certificate or something like that.

The remainder of this post is for the gentleman who, when challenged by me today asked me with a straight face “You don’t need proof that 1+1=2, do you?”

For those of you who don’t speak formal logic, you may translate this reply as “Actually, I do. And you want to believe that if I won’t take 1+1=2 on faith, then I’m certainly not going to give any credence to whatever crap you happen to think is ’self-evident’ without at least a whiff of rational evidence.”

Well, the two have met, as illustrated in MIT’s Technology Review this month, in Bostrom’s article, Where Are They.

Bostrom suggests, although he doesn’t put it in these terms, that the reason we haven’t met the aliens yet is that Drake’s equation is missing a Doom Constant that models some sort of filter tendency that causes a (probably very high) percentage sufficiently advanced societies to self-immolate.

The more disconcerting hypothesis is that the Great Filter consists in some destructive tendency common to virtually all sufficiently advanced technological civilizations. Throughout history, great civilizations on Earth have imploded–the Roman Empire, the Mayan civilization that once flourished in Central America, and many others. However, the kind of societal collapse that merely delays the eventual emergence of a space-colonizing civilization by a few hundred or a few thousand years would not explain why no such civilization has visited us from another planet. A thousand years may seem a long time to an individual, but in this context it’s a sneeze. There are probably planets that are billions of years older than Earth. Any intelligent species on those planets would have had ample time to recover from repeated social or ecological collapses. Even if they failed a thousand times before they succeeded, they still could have arrived here hundreds of millions of years ago.

At a high level the article is Bostrom hoping we don’t find any evidence of any other life, since the longer it looks like we’re the only one, the more likely it is that we’ve already won the Great Filter lottery, rather than being on the doomed side of it.

As an aside, I find it amusing somehow that Bostrom devotes significant space to dealing with the possibility that the aliens are there, but hidden from us, but he never gets near the possibility that the “Great Filter” might actually be intelligent, outside action, rather than a self-destructive tendency. He neither considers the Heechee hiding in their black hole, or the Assassins and their inimical actions–and it’s too bad, since there’s some fun thinking to be done on those scenarios, even if they are less likely than what Bostrom is playing with.

The piece is worth a read for science fiction fans and those interested in the Fermi Paradox.

Tired of paying through the nose, Americans try praying at the pump
“Lord, the prices at this pump have gone up since last week. We know that you are able, that you have all the power in the world,” he prayed, before former beauty queen Rashida Jolley led the group in a modified version of the spiritual, “We Shall Overcome”.

“We’ll have lower gas prices, we’ll have lower gas prices…” they sang.

At the weekend, Twyman had led a group of around 200 people in prayer at pumps in San Francisco, where gas is touching the four-dollars-a-gallon mark.

Yup, that’s got to be the most important thing we could ask the Divine Creator for. Can’t think of anything higher priority.

The point is that (little-t) truth is a matter of definition relative to the grid one is using at the moment, and that (capital-T) Truth, metaphysical reality, is irrelevant to grids entirely. Pick a grid, and through it some chaos appears ordered and some appears disordered. Pick another grid, and the same chaos will appear differently ordered and disordered.

Fnord.

One particular area where this is true is financing for the small–by North American standards–loans that entrepreneurs in third world countries need to establish or grow their businesses. It seems obvious that funding for this kind of endeavour could result in economic growth in less privileged areas, that could in turn result in improvements in the quality of life. Maybe it’s not a gigantic effect on a global scale, but for each individual case it’s pretty gigantic for that person. The journey of a thousand miles, etc.

Of course for this to work, there would need to be someone who was qualified to determine which people were good candidates for success, so that the default rates on these loans would be low.

And even though these loans would be small compared to commercial loans in North America, they might seem like a lot more money that most people who were inclined to help out might have around. $300 or $1000 isn’t a very big loan really, but there probably aren’t a lot of people around who would happily front that much money to someone halfway around the world.

This is where the Internet and modern technology kicks in. This is what Kiva.org is all about.

How it works is simple: Kiva partners with microfinance companies in the regions where these entrepreneurs are. These partners pick out candidates who will be able to repay the loans. The loan requests are posted on Kiva.org. People who can afford to loan some money come to Kiva, and assign their money to various loans. I might put $25 a month into my Kiva account, and assign that $25 to be part of any of hundreds of loans. When enough people have committed money to any given loan to fund it, the loan is disbursed. The entrepreneur pays the money back on a schedule. When the loan is paid back, you get your money back (there is no interest–the recipient of the loan will pay some to cover the costs of the microfinance company, but this is not a profit-making endeavour for Kiva contributors), and can loan it out again.

So Kiva uses the Internet to match people who can lend to people who are vetted by microfinance companies (the overall default and lateness statistics for Kiva would absolutely shame most North American credit providers) around the world. And it aggregates small loan amounts from lots of lenders to fill these loan requests, so even people with only a small amount to contribute can make a difference.

I put some money in for the first time late last year, and I’ve watched the money I’ve got out in three loans come back in like clockwork. When those loans complete I will certainly loan the money out again. And I’ll stick a little more in there whenever I have some kicking around.

I’ve got some money out to a farming couple in Peru–they’re 28, with a 3 year old kid, and a loan of $275 (some of which came from me) is letting them improve their lives. When I think about my three year old, I feel pretty good about helping out, especially since it’s such small amount of money to me, making such a big difference to their lives.

I’ve got some money out to a mid-60s Azerbaijani who owns a pomegranate orchard. He looks like a hard-working grandpa. It’s amazing how much more real this kind of thing feels when you can see exactly who your money is going to.

I’ve got some money out to a Ukrainian clothing salemsan who started his own business to get out of a dead-end career in coal mining, and who wants to grow his business to make some money for his wedding.

All of them are on time with every payment.

The best part of this system though, is that my money can help more than once. If I put in a couple of hundred dollars, then loan it out, when the loans are paid back I can loan that money out again without putting in any more. It obviously doesn’t replace other charitable giving, but the fact that the money never really goes out of the system means that over time I can build up quite a pool on money in the Kiva system–adding small amounts here and there.

By aggregating these small amounts, Kiva is moving a truly massive amount of money into places where it is needed. Most loan requests are funded in less than three days. Right now a loan has been funded every 37 seconds so far in 2008.

Anyway, check it out, read up on how the system works, maybe check out some of the loan requests, and see if it’s something you would be interested in.

Me, I’m going to put some more money in. And I’m going to send my Mom some Kiva gift certificates for her Mother’s Day present, since she doesn’t need any more stuff.

In applying this analogy, the catch stands for the body of knowledge which constitutes physical science, and the net for the sensory and intellectual equipment which we use in obtaining it. The casting of the net corresponds to observation; for knowledge which has not been or could not be obtained by observation is not admitted into physical science.

An onlooker may object that the first generalisation is wrong. “There are plenty of sea-creatures under two inches long, only your net is not adapted to catch them.” The icthyologist dismisses this objection contemptuously. “Anything uncatchable by my net is ipso facto outside the scope of icthyological knowledge. In short, “what my net can’t catch isn’t fish.” Or — to translate the analogy — “If you are not simply guessing, you are claiming a knowledge of the physical universe discovered in some other way than by the methods of physical science, and admittedly unverifiable by such methods. You are a metaphysician. Bah!”

—Sir Arthur Eddington in The Philosophy of Physical Science

Not his most famous quotation, but the one that is challenging my thoughts tonight.

There was no hair-raising event, no near death experience, nothing dramatic. Just a realization that hit me during a very long drive, when I had some time to think about what it meant. Harlan Ellison is partly to blame.

Obviously I’ve known this intellectually for a long time. And it’s been non-theoretical for a long time (at least since my father died, getting on to a decade and a half ago). I’ve been able to discuss it, and philosophize about it.

But I don’t think I really believed it until today.

The good news is that this realization hasn’t made me clutch at any religion or counter-rational belief systems. (At least so far–it really only hit home about four hours ago, but I think I’m OK. Heh. I’m still comfortable with my extant philosophy and don’t feel the need to justify any post-life schemes.)

The bad news is that suddenly my wife and child are not just “hostages to fortune” in the sense I’ve always thought of it–my happiness depending on nothing terrible happening to them–but also in the closer-to-what-Bacon-meant sense that if I’m not immortal then my death could have serious negative repercussions for them.

I’m not going to get weirdly obsessive about this, but if I suddenly really believe I’m mortal, and I’m an adult, then I’ve got to change a couple of things. It’ll be interesting to see if this realization lasts, or if I rationalize it away after a short time–I am, after all, an expert at that.

Beesley’s paper is definitely worth the time it will take you to read it, if you have any interest in the history of that time period at all, and especially if you’ve ever been interested in the idea of a “hobo”. Mike Drake, I am looking at you.

Beesley also includes a hobo jargon glossary toward the end of the paper (which I’ve reproduced below), which triggered another of my special fascinations: jargons, slangs, cants, etc. Someday I’m going to do a massive post or series of posts on that subject, and I’ve queued up the hobo jargon for inclusion in that.

The paper also got me thinking about hobo signs again–you know the things I mean: those little symbols that hobos used to scratch in charcoal or chalk to send messages to each other about various places. (Something that I suspect is probably rooted in the patrin of the Roma, but that’s a whole other post.)

You might also recall that this kind of old school tagging had a bit of a resurgence earlier this decade in the form of “warchalking“.

Doing a bit of a search for “hobo signs” turned up a ton of examples, and also turned up an exhibit at the NSA of all places (well, the NSA’s museum, but still).

A couple of interesting notes from the writeup accompanying that exhibit:

In some places, hobos who drifted into town were not always welcome. In other places, they found those who were friendly and willing to help. Knowing where to go or whom to avoid was important to these travelers. However, hobos’ paths crossed infrequently, so the hobo community developed a written communication system of signs. Mysterious and temporary, these signs helped hobos move more safely around the country looking for work. A symbol on a mailbox, fence post, signpost, or tree told other hobos what to expect in the town or from the homeowner.

What’s interesting to note, as Liungman points out, is that the system developed at all. Hobos, in general, travel alone and enjoy their independence. And yet, they still congregate in hobo jungles or travel with an occasional partner only to split when they decide to go a different way. Despite this preference for solitude, they still feel a certain camaraderie with their fellow hobos, an obligation to assist their brethren – thus, the creation of the signs and symbols.

The signs were intentionally temporary. Hobos used chalk or charcoal to mark an immediate location. The signs wore off in time. This may have been because situations were frequently in flux. A farmer may initially be helpful, but later, as resources or work diminished, he may order the hobo away. A woman who first took pity from a hobo’s sad tale may become hardened after hearing too many.

Interestingly not mentioned in the piece is the essentially dynamic nature of the code–as “locals” discover what signs mean, they would start to tamper with the communication channel, either erasing them or putting up misleading ones, so the “current” code had to constantly change. And to keep up with the latest code you would need to meet up with group of other hobos. So not only is the fact that the system arose interesting, but there’s a weird dynamic where its existence keeps powering the need for hobos to meet up regularly in order to “keep current”, and that ties into the whole altruistic-and-yet-self-interested currents that would power this kind of system. The romantic in my does love the idea of the “current” codes passing hand-to-hand, although I love it even more in its perfect science fiction form.

I usually travel with some tire chalk², so I should totally learn some of these signs and leave them on my travels. Someone else might come along and recognize them. You never know. And maybe I’ll meet up with someone who will whisper the new codes to me.

After the jump: the glossary, and a table defining some common hobo signs.

Glossary

Ballast

The gravel used for rail beds.

Bay Horse

Brand name of rubbing liniment for horses. Similar to bay rum.

Bindle

A bedroll.

Blind

Front End of a baggage car.

Bridge and plank gang

A railroad maintenance crew.

Bridger

A hobo who rode both steam-powered and diesel powered trains.

Bull

A policeman.

Canned heat

Strained Sterno consumed for the alcohol content.

Catch the westbound

Die.

Cinder bull

A railroad policeman.

Consist

All the cars that make up a particular train.

Couplers

Fixtures at the ends of train cars used to connect one car to the other.

Courtesy call

A night’s stay in the town jail without being arrested. An opportunity to get in out of the cold and to eat a meal.

Crummy

Caboose.

Dick

A detective.

Drag

A slow freight train.

Dumpster diving

Rummaging through dumpsters for food or other needed items.

Freddy

Flashing rear-end device on the train. It has taken the place of the caboose.

Gay cat

A person on the road who, when the going gets tough, can afford to purchase a ticket (Irwin 84).

Go in the hole

To pull onto a siding to allow another train of higher priority to pass by.

Gondola

A train car with low walls and no roof.

Gun boat

An empty can used for cooking. Usually a coffee can.

Harness bull

A policeman in uniform.

Helper

An extra engine added temporarily to a train to assist in pulling it up a steep grade.

High iron

The track in a railroad yard that serves as the main line or through line.

Hooverville

Shantytowns built of junk and cardboard by the poor. Named after Herbert Hoover, the 31^st president of the United States of America (1929-1933).

Hotshot

A fast train.

Jackrollers

Thieves who often targeted a hobo who had just received his pay.

Jocker

A man who travels the road with an underage boy.

Jungle

An encampment where hobos stayed for brief periods before moving on. “To jungle up” is to stay in a jungle.

Jungle buzzard

Someone in a hobo jungle who tries to avoid sharing in the work and expense.

Knee-shaker

A handout on a plate at the back door of a house. Eaten on the back steps while balancing the plate on one’s knees.

Knuckle

A movable joint in the coupler.

Live train

A consist of railcars with engines hooked to it. A train that could move at any time.

Local

A train that makes many stops and does much work in a short distance.

Lump

A handout which is packaged to be taken along on the road.

Mission stiff

A bum that spends much time in missions.

Mixed freight

A train consisting of a variety of cars.

“P” farms

Farms where prisoners worked.

Pearl diver

A dishwasher.

Punk

A young boy travelling on the road with a younger man.

Rattler

A long train rattling along the tracks, resembling a rattlesnake.

Red cards

A membership card of the International Workers of the World (IWW).

Reefer

A refrigerated freight car.

Rods

The steel structural bars that were below the old boxcars. A very dangerous and difficult place for hobos to ride.

Rule of the match

An insulting gesture of handing a match to someone. It is the same as saying. “You are not welcome around this jungle fire. Go build your own someplace else”.

Scoping the drag

Looking for a good ride on a freight train as it slows down.

Seam squirrels

Lice.

Sit-down

A meal given as a handout with the offer to eat it in the comfort at the kitchen table.

Specks

Fruit with spots beginning to form. Farmers and groceries were often willing to give it to hobos.

Stack train

A train made up of topless, low-sided cars which carry large containers sometimes stacked two high.

Streamliners

Railriders that travel with light gear and on fast freights.

Walking dandruff

Lice.

Wobblies

A short name for the International Workers of the World (IWW)

Yard dick

A railroad detective.

Hobo symbols

Symbol	Definition
	Alcohol in this town.
	Authorities here are alert.
	Bad water.
	Barking dog here.
	You can camp here.
	Courthouse.
	Crime committed here. Not safe.
	Dangerous neighbourhood.
	Be ready to defend yourself.
	Doctor here won’t charge.
	Doubtful.
	Fresh water. Safe campsite.
	Police frown on hobos here.
	Owners will give to get rid of you.
	Good road to follow.
	Go this way.
	A man with a gun lives here.
	Halt!
	Good place for a handout.
	Hit the road.
	This is a well-guarded house.
	Ill-tempered man lives here.
	This owner is in.
	Jail (or prison).
	Religious talk will get you a meal here.
	A judge lives here.
	A kind lady live here.
	A kind gentleman lives here.
	Kind woman lives here. Tell a pitiful story.
	There is nothing to be gained here.
	This is NOT a safe place.
	There’s no use going this way.
	An officer of the law lives here.
	OK.
	The owner is out.
	Free telephone.
	Keep quiet.
	These people are rich.
	The sky’s the limit.
	Road spoiled. Full of other hobos.
	There are thieves about.
	Hold your tongue.
	Good place to catch a train.
	Trolley stop.
	A vicious dog lives here.

(Canadian Geographic also has a table in a more pen-and-ink style.)

1. The paper is hosted by northbankfred.com, a site dedicated to trains and the hobo experience. Be sure to browse around and check out some of the other articles, photographs, or if you’re really hard-core, the stories!
2. For any emergency veve that needs creating. Don’t ask.

• It’s lovely that the Internet can bring me an interactive beer and food matching guide. Sadly, it uses a different algorithm than I do–resulting in far more matches with “see through” beer than my scheme would generate.
• Speaking of beer, I love the idea of beer haiku. My favourite so far:
  

  You will never know
  If it is the glass too much
  If you don’t drink it!

• That same site brings a round up of lots of other beer-and-food pairing pieces.
• It’s nice to see someone take on the idea that only kids with no extra-work life can be valuable employees in the computer industry.
• The logical conclusion to Bush’s effect on US currency.
• Yes, I believe this may actually qualify as the geekiest band in the world. (As an aside, aren’t the people who have nostalgic memories of the C-64 now mostly outside of the vaunted 18-35 demographic?)
• Here’s your most-likely-to-break-my-brain YouTube of the day. And a context link.
• So absinthe doesn’t make you mad, it just makes you really drunk. Fine with me. Death in the Afternoon is still a recipe for… well for disastrously bad decisions that you don’t really remember making. And sometimes you need that.
• “Any leucocratic tonalite, esp. one in which the plagioclase is oligoclase.” Yeah, some of those definitions in the OED need some… well, apparently they need some translation into English. I guess I was wrong about what that E stood for. (And if you knew what word that definition was for without clicking through, slap yourself. No really. Slap yourself.)
• Is it wrong that I find the Australia apology song and video really rather touching? Well tough, because I do.
• I should design a computer language, so I would have an excuse to never shave again. I bet I would look cool with a ZZ Top beard.
• OK, the idea of residents of Lesbos suing to make lesbians stop calling themselves lesbians cracks me up. I bet there’s a good number of people on the island also enjoying the ludicrousness.
• And no link list would be complete without a link to a really dumb criminal.

We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear—fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting down-sized or fired because of the plunging economy, fear of getting evicted for bad debts or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a Terrorist sympathizer.

—Hunter S. Thompson

A great power sets its sights on a smaller, strange, and faraway land — an easy target, or so it would seem. Led first by a father and then, a decade later, by his son, this great power invades the lesser country twice. The father, so people say, is a bland and bureaucratic man, far more temperate than the son; and, indeed, it is the second invasion that will seize the imagination of history for many years to come. For though it is far larger and more aggressive than the first, it leads to unexpected disaster. Many commentators ascribe this disaster to the flawed decisions of the son: a man whose bluster competes with, or perhaps covers for, a certain hollowness at the center; a leader who is at once hobbled by personal demons (among which, it seems, is an Oedipal conflict) and given to grandiose gestures, who at times seems incapable of comprehending, and at worst is simply incurious about, how different or foreign his enemy really is. Although he himself is unscathed by the disaster he has wreaked, the fortunes and the reputation of the country he rules are seriously damaged. A great power has stumbled badly, against all expectations.

—Daniel Mendelsohn, p.78 of the 4/28/08 New Yorker,
describing the Persian Wars in the course of reviewing a new edition of Herodotus’s Histories

That’s the video for the World Party song Is It Like Today?.

The reason it’s here: it’s explicitly inspired by, and intended to be a precis of, Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy.

Lyrics after the jump:

Is It Like Today? - World Party
Many years ago he
Looked out through a glassless window
All that he could see was Babylon
Beautiful green fields and dreams
And learn to measure the stars
But there was a worry in his heart

He said,
How could it come to this?
I’m really worried about living
How could it come to this?
Yeah, I really want to know about this
Is it like today?

Then there came a day
It moved out across the Mediterranean
Came to western isles and the Greek young men
And with their silver beards they laughed
At the unknown of the universe
They could sit and guess God’s name

But they said,
How could it come to this?
We’re really worried about living
How could it come to this
Yeah, we really want to know about this
Is it like today?

Then there followed days of Kings, Empires and revolution
Blood just looks the same when you open the veins
But sometimes it was faith, power or reason as the cornerstone
But the furrowed brow has never left his face

He said,
How could it come to this?
We’ve living in a landslide
How could it come to this?
Yeah, we really want to know about this
Is it like today?

Then there came a day
Man packed up flew off from the planet
He went to the moon, to the moon
Now he’s out in space
Hey, fixing all the problems
He comes face to face with God

He says,
How could it come to this?
I’m really worried about my creation
How did it comes to this?
You’re really killing me, you know

It isn’t just today
Is it like today?
Is it like today?
Bang!

Many years ago he
Looked out through a glassless window
Didn’t understand which what he saw

And yet somehow I’ve found myself thinking, quite frequently, over the last month that this whole “food shortage” thing somehow “snuck up” on me. It seems like in order for it to be as serious as it is at this point, that there should have been more forewarning, and more signs at less serious levels of the problem.

I’m not saying the signs weren’t there, just that even with my efforts to stay tuned in they missed me.

Here’s just a few examples of the pieces that have be causing me this dissonance:

Food crisis threatens security, says UN chief
The UN secretary general issued a gloomy warning yesterday that the deepening global food crisis, in which rapidly rising prices have triggered riots and threatened hunger in dozens of countries, could have grave implications for international security, economic growth and social progress.

Food Protests Start in Bangladesh and South Africa
“In Bangladesh at least 15,000 garment factory workers went on strike earlier today to call for higher wages to cover the soaring price of food. In South Africa, the country’s main union has kicked off a series of protests over increasing food prices. In recent weeks food riots have also erupted in Haiti, Niger, Senegal, Cameroon and Burkina Faso. Protests have flared in Morocco, Mauritania, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Mexico and Yemen….Here in the United States, food inflation has reached the highest level in seventeen years, and analysts expect it to get worse.

U.N. Panel Urges Changes to Feed Poor While Saving Environment
The prices of basic food like rice, wheat and corn have been rising sharply, setting off violent popular protests in countries including Haiti, Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Ethiopia, Uzbekistan, Yemen, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia and Italy. The unrest has resulted in tens of deaths and helped lead to the dismissal on Saturday of the Haitian prime minister, Jacques-Édouard Alexis, and the increasing cost of subsidizing bread prices is a major worry for key American allies like President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt.

Japan: Where has all the butter gone?
Where is the butter? — cry Japanese consumers who have been hunting everywhere for the dairy product. The drastic reduction in raw milk production, complicated by hikes in the price of grain as well as changes in the global patterns of dairy product consumption, have caused a serious butter shortage in Japan. Empty shelves in the dairy section of grocery stores across the country have not seen a shipment of butter for days, and stores are posting signs apologizing for the shortage.

Global warming rage lets global hunger grow
A new Cold War is taking shape, around energy and food. The world intelligentsia has been asleep at the wheel. While we rage over global warming, global hunger has swept in under the radar screen.

A Drought in Australia, a Global Shortage of Rice
The Deniliquin mill, the largest rice mill in the Southern Hemisphere, once processed enough grain to meet the needs of 20 million people around the world. But six long years of drought have taken a toll, reducing Australia’s rice crop by 98 percent and leading to the mothballing of the mill last December.

UN report demands urgent action on soaring food prices
The global food crisis became official yesterday when the UN called for urgent intergovernmental action and farming reforms to tackle the soaring prices that are plunging millions of people into potentially deadly poverty.

Grains Gone Wild
But it’s not clear how much can be done. Cheap food, like cheap oil, may be a thing of the past.

The Krugman piece above makes it clear that consequences are going to be global, not just localized to countries that North Americans don’t typically care about. In fact, the effects are already being felt locally, where panic, stockpiling, and in some odd cases peer-to-peer exporting, are causing temporary shortages and rationing.

Toronto feeling effects of global rice shortage
The ripples of the global rice shortage have reached Toronto, as many of the city’s immigrants are under pressure to dig deeper into shallow pockets to send more money and bags of rice home to relatives in the hardest-hit countries.

Food Rationing Confronts Breadbasket of the World
Many parts of America, long considered the breadbasket of the world, are now confronting a once unthinkable phenomenon: food rationing. Major retailers in New York, in areas of New England, and on the West Coast are limiting purchases of flour, rice, and cooking oil as demand outstrips supply. There are also anecdotal reports that some consumers are hoarding grain stocks.

World food crisis hits home
Media reports are starting to trickle in about grocers limiting some food purchases, while Costco Wholesale Corp. is seeing higher-than-usual demand for staple foods such as rice and flour as consumers appear to be stocking up.

I’m not particularly sensitive to pricing for grocery items, but apparently a shift is already underway there across North America:

Recession Diet Just One Way to Tighten Belt
Spending data and interviews around the country show that middle- and working-class consumers are starting to switch from name brands to cheaper alternatives, to eat in instead of dining out and to fly at unusual hours to shave dollars off airfares.

Though seemingly small, the daily trade-offs they are making — more pasta and less red meat, more video rentals and fewer movie tickets — amount to an important shift in consumer behavior.

Just for the record, I’m not going to be surprised when the energy shortages hit. I’ve seen some warnings of that coming:

China down to 12 days worth of coal
CHINA only has enough coal for 12 days of consumption, three days less than a month ago, state media reported Wednesday, sounding the alarm bells over the nation’s most important source of energy.

In certain parts of China, such as densely populated Hebei province in the north, reserves are down to less than a week, Xinhua news agency reported, citing the China Electricity Regulatory Commission.

(Ironically the normal government move when one kind of fuel is in short supply is to loosen regulation on dirtier methods. One wonders what you can do when you’re already down to burning filthy Australian coal, and you’re running out.)

The rising cost of gasoline is already having an effect in North America also. This might actually be a good thing, if it gets more public transit infrastructure in place, or leads to more research into more sustainable consumer vehicle engines and fuel systems:

Gas May Finally Cost Too Much
For years analysts have been surprised that gasoline consumption continued to rise even as prices kept climbing. Now that consumption has finally slowed, it remains to be seen if Americans are driving less just because the economy is doing poorly or if they are altering their behavior in a lasting way. Certainly consumers seem to be at a psychological turning point. Fuel prices are rising faster than incomes and show no sign of slowing down. Being green is trendy, and the war in Iraq has fanned concerns about U.S. dependence on oil from abroad.

Also interesting, when considering how both grain and oil move from supplier to demand area is the current shift in economic policies worldwide that are making the world less “flat”. For the economics wonks, there’s a good Brad Setser piece at RGE Monitor that lays it out in pretty clear English:

Borders still matter; “the world isn’t as flat as it used to be”
But with food prices rising, more and more countries seem to be adopting the same policies for their rice and wheat that Saudi Arabia and Russia have adopted for their oil. They only export what cannot be sold domestically at a price well below the world market price. That helps domestic consumers at the expense of domestic producers.

It also is a way – per Rodrik (”if you are Thailand or Argentina, where other goods are scarce relative to food, freer trade means higher relative prices of food, not lower”) — of assuring that the consumers in a food exporting country aren’t made worse off by trade.

Actually, in the current case, it is more a way of assuring that consumers in exporting countries aren’t made worse off from a shock to the global terms of trade that dramatically increased the global price of a commodity. But the principle is the same.

Such policies have produced a more fragmented world. Beef is cheaper in Argentina than in the rest of world. Rice is cheaper in rice-exporting economies than many rice-importing economies. Oil is cheaper in oil-exporting economies. And so on.

During the heyday of what was billed as the Reagan Revolution, sometimes as the New American Dawn, or the “unfettered free market,” I could discover no common cause among the several degrees of of rightist separation (conservative, neoconservative, libertarian, reactionary, and evangelical) other than the moral lesson invariably found in their one and only cautionary tale: money ennobles rich people, making them strong as well as wise; money corrupts poor people, making them greedy as well as weak.

—Lewis Lapham

(From the opening essay in the current issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, about which magazine I may have a lot more to say later.)

I live near the abyss. I hope to stay.

–Theodore Roethke

Yes, I quite like that. A little bit Nietzsche, a little bit Billy Joel. It, at least to me, says something about an artistic way to live.

Actually, and this is probably sharing too much, this brings to mind another of my “pop culture epiphanies”. About a million years ago when I was still in my teens I watched all the episodes of a short-lived sitcom entitled Camp Wilder. I can’t even really remember what the premise was–I really only remember two things about the show. One was I watched it because I had a crush on Hilary Swank. The other was that there was a scene with dialogue that went roughly (and I am deeply paraphrasing though the mists of memory) like this:

“How can you always live your life on the cliff’s edge? Don’t you worry about falling off?”
“But the view, {character name}, the view…”

I’m sure that first line is wrong, but you get the sense of it. It was kind of a throwaway scene, but the notion that people who lived their lives less sensibly got something back from the universe in return for that–that you get the best view when you’re standing on the edge of the cliff–was one of those notions so perfectly captured by the image that it’s been in my head ever since.

(Oh, and on the “once in a while you get shown the light, in the strangest of places…” theme, I think the line was delivered by Jay Mohr, who probably overacted a totally hackneyed part in what was probably a pretty terrible show. Still, even in the midst of that, there are things to learn.)

Anyway, the Roethke quote is one I could chew over for a while, finding different things to reflect on about ways to live.

Of course the all time best example of a single line that can support sustained meditation is still the quotation Nicole Blackman chose as the epigraph for her collection of poetry, Blood Sugar, the Ingeborg Bachmann line:

“I am writing with my burnt hand about the nature of fire.”

I don’t know the context Bachman originally used the line in (and I don’t want to–no context could improve the line as it exists inside my head right now), but for me that sentence captures everything important about the relationship between experience and art. I can sit and think about it for hours.

Annotated Lyrics: Scarlet Begonias, Ripple, Uncle John’s Band, and Tennessee Jed. The other track, Me & My Uncle, is a cover.

So, why these songs?

Scarlet Begonias is probably the Dead song I come back to most often–it’s fun to listen to, and there’s something in there for me to chew on. “Once in a while you get shown the light, in the strangest of places, if you look at it right.” Despite how cornball this may sound, that line actually caused me to have an epiphany, the after-effects of which are still occurring in my life fairly regularly. I’d try to explain it, but I think it’s a “kick from the knee” thing–the explanation doesn’t make sense until you already understand it. (My epiphanies seem to often come from the least likely places, which I guess, makes this a meta-epiphany.)

Me & My Uncle is the paradigm case of poker songs. I once had a pretty good poker player tell me that I’d be quite a good player if I only had that killer instinct (I’m pretty good at the math, lying, and psychology bits). I’ve never really developed it–I’m a softie at heart, I guess–but when I need to simulate it for a little while, I just keep this going in my head. Note also that this song is the source for the subtitle up at the top there. (Not the Terence, the other bit.)

Ripple is another of my favourites, and one I threw in there just to mess with the Grateful Dead haters–it’s probably the closest thing to what they think the Dead is, a little too stoner philosophical. Still, I think there’s a lot in there that resonates, not least of which is this verse:

There is a road, no simple highway
Between the dawn and the dark of night
And if you go, no one may follow
That path is for your steps alone

Uncle John’s Band always reminds me of my days as a blue (polyester) collar worker, when we would work late into the night cleaning up a commercial kitchen and listening to Workingman’s Dead. Cumberland Blues was probably a more appropriate tune for that scenario, but we were a pretty happy crew, and much more into peace, love, and talking ’bout thing by the rising tide. We didn’t have time to hate.

And that leaves Tennessee Jed. It has a talking dog. What else do you need to know?

I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

That’s a highly decorated general writing in 1935, from his book War Is A Racket.

You can still buy a copy of that book today. Or you can read a ten page summary online. (Or a two page version, if you lost your attention span in the 90s.)

Does it sound familiar?

In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows. [Please note these are 1935 U.S. dollars. To adjust for inflation, multiply all figures X 10 or more]

How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?

Sound familiar?

What’s that old saw about learning from history?

The World War cost the United States some $52,000,000,000. Figure it out. That means $400 [over $4,000 in today's dollars] to every American man, woman, and child. And we haven’t paid the debt yet. We are paying it, our children will pay it, and our children’s children probably still will be paying the cost of that war.

Sound familiar?

I kind of like his plan for putting an end to profiteering, and I suspect making any decision to go to war a much higher barrier (not to mention likely speeding the end of any war):

The only way to smash this racket is to conscript capital and industry and labor before the nations manhood can be conscripted. One month before the Government can conscript the young men of the nation – it must conscript capital and industry and labor. Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our munitions makers and our shipbuilders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all the other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted – to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get.

Let the workers in these plants get the same wages – all the workers, all presidents, all executives, all directors, all managers, all bankers – yes, and all generals and all admirals and all officers and all politicians and all government office holders – everyone in the nation be restricted to a total monthly income not to exceed that paid to the soldier in the trenches!

Let all these kings and tycoons and masters of business and all those workers in industry and all our senators and governors and majors pay half of their monthly $30 wage to their families and pay war risk insurance and buy Liberty Bonds. Why shouldn’t they? They aren’t running any risk of being killed or of having their bodies mangled or their minds shattered. They aren’t sleeping in muddy trenches. They aren’t hungry. The soldiers are! Give capital and industry and labor thirty days to think it over and you will find, by that time, there will be no war. That will smash the war racket – that and nothing else.

Yeah, I bet that would work. You could never get the law passed without massive (and I mean MASSIVE) reform of the current system, but if it did somehow get passed, I bet it would work.