The Serpent's Wisdom

There's this idea that has been injected into the cultural narrative that "job creation" happens something like this: a person comes up with an idea, but they need money to make the idea happen, so they go to a bank or a rich investor to borrow the money. Having borrowed the money, they are now able to start a profitable new business that will employ people.

The problem with this narrative is that money does not start its life in the pockets of rich people. Nor do jobs come from the minds of entrepreneurs. The reality is something more like this: what creates a "job" is economic demand for goods and services. Part of what creates that demand is money in everyone's pocket. But only part; actual physical needs or wants supply most of what constitutes demand, but economically speaking, 'demand' exists when someone is willing and able to pay for something.

Does your body produce needs? Does your brain produce wants? Do you spend money for goods or services to satisfy those needs and wants? If so, congratulations: you are a job creator.

What happens in an economic depression is that everyone has less money, so they spend less, which causes jobs to become more scarce, which causes people to have even less money, which makes jobs even more scarce. When prices start to go down there's a danger of the economy entering a deflationary spiral.

Anyway, the scenario described above does describe one way by which jobs can come into existence. It is not, historically speaking, the primary way. Banks did not even exist as we know them today until about four hundred years ago. Mostly it's happened like this: someone starts producing goods or offering services on a very small scale. They sell these things on the street or to family and friends until more and more people want them; the money people get from this they invest in expanding their operation. Most business ventures in the history of humankind have been on the scale of Etsy storefronts.

The implication of all this therefore is that if there is more money in everyone's pocket, there will be more jobs.

What causes there to be less money in people's pockets? A huge factor in this is exploitation. The technical definition of exploitation is paying someone a wage that is less than the marginal revenue product of their labor - the additional value created by working one more hour. The less precise way of saying that is that exploitation is when you pay someone less than you make off their labor.

Exploitation is practically a virtue in our society. It's considered synonymous with making a profit. What actually makes a profit is that bread is worth more to people than a pile of flour. A car is worth more than a pile of car parts. You do not need to exploit your employees to make a profit. If everyone were paid what they were worth, there would be more money flowing because the multiplier effect on money spent by the middle class is higher than the multiplier effect on money spent by the rich (because they spend their money on different things).

It is not a coincidence that this depression and its miasmic "recovery" happens at a time when "real wages" (wages adjusted for inflation) have been stagnant for thirty years.

Right now the minimum wage in the US is $7.25/hour and the president has proposed raising it to $9/hour. The argument against is that it will lead to fewer jobs being created. I've just laid out an argument as to why I think that assertion is completely bogus. It is true that minimum wage hikes in the past led to a slight increase in unemployment among teenagers, but I'm willing to bet that's because it made more adults find minimum-wage jobs attractive enough to apply for them. If a job pays too little it's actually not worth taking because one can usually find other, less strenuous ways to eke out a living, and the minimum wage is close to that point as it is.

I was thinking this morning too about the prospect of 11 million undocumented immigrants suddenly becoming legal residents of the US and having the legal agency to demand wages closer to what they actually contribute. There's a lot of fear that the products and services they provide would become too expensive people couldn't afford them anymore. There would be some tumultuous readjustment but consider for a moment what 11 million people suddenly making a living wage rather than a pittance could do for the economy of the US. They would all be able now to buy better clothes, better food, houses, cars, iPhones... they would be better off, and so would we all.

I didn't really keep a journal during Hurricane Isaac. Perhaps I should have. Parts of it are kind of blurring already in my memory.

Tuesday, August 28. The wind picked up gradually over the course of Tuesday afternoon. Tuesday evening the wind was blowing a bit harder when we lost power at around 7 PM. We gathered in the kitchen, which came to be like our living room for the next several days. It was like a family night by candlelight; we played board games until we got bored of those, and then we headed off for bed. The people upstairs played guitar and generally had a party.

Sleep was elusive. Normally I sleep with a CPAP machine as treatment for apnea, and without it sleep is more like a sequence of dreams that suddenly end and I'm awake. Gusts of wind would occasionally wake me up, the temperature was tolerable but the air was still in the bedroom with no fan or A/C.

Wednesday, August 29. I recall being awake Wednesday morning before the sun came up with the storm going full blast. Wind was blowing the rain more or less horizontally. We opened the kitchen door to see debris in the back yard, leaves and small branches, pools of water (the water never got high, though we later learned that Isaac dropped nearly twice as much rain on NOLA as Hurricane Katrina). The moon was full or nearly full which gave the storm an eerie glow, by which we were able to see what was happening outside. While we stood there by the kitchen door I watched a branch snap off the tree across the yard from us; I looked up at the swaying trees right above us and then looked at R* and said, "It's time to go inside. Now."

A. informed us that his bedroom had sprung a couple of leaks, and he'd moved his bed out of where water had been dripping on him. We had to catch a few of these leaks with buckets, some in places where water had never come through before. We had been worried about water coming in under the door, but it never got that high outside.

We spent most of Wednesday eating canned food cold and hanging out in the kitchen. R*'s phone still had charge so she would read occasional updates on the storm's progress; the center of it had essentially parked about fifty miles away. We caught naps when we could sleep. That evening we played Rummy until folks were sleepy.

Candlelight was not bright enough to read by, so night became a long stretch of boredom, laying alone with my thoughts while being too hot and sweaty to sleep. The bed was absorbing my heat and just holding it there and it got so I felt like I was laying on a heating pad. Eventually some sleep would come. Wednesday night, I was still awakened by occasional wind gusts; the tropical storm was still in the neighborhood.

Thursday, August 30. Thursday we were able to go outside and look at the damage done to the neighborhood. Not too bad, considering; a few trees down, but most looked unscathed. Branches down. Power lines down. The road had a large puddle near the storm drain, which had become blocked with debris. We took a walk down the block to the levee and stood looking at the river and canal while the wind and rain came down on us, still strong. The Coast Guard had posted a pair of boats in the canal nearby. R*'s phone lost its charge, but she found an emergency radio, so we listened to that for a while. Thursday night, sitting around in the kitchen no longer felt like family night; we were just exhausted and hot and bored at this point, eating the last of our canned meals and trickling off to bed. Unable to sleep, I came back out into the kitchen and sat there with my thoughts a long time. R* took to sleeping on the floor, having noticed that the tiles were cooler than anything else in the house. I wound up doing the same that night. I was able to find a position that wasn't too uncomfortable and eventually was able to get some sleep. I'd wake up in the middle of the night and it was totally still, and warm, and quiet, and pitch black.

Friday, August 31. Friday the sun came out and it got significantly warmer. A heat advisory had been issued, meaning that the heat index was 105°. We'd heard on the radio on Thursday that the National Guard was giving out ice, water, and MREs at a place just across the canal from us, so we headed out around 8 AM on Friday to get some. We stood in line with people who were mostly patient, though one guy got a little testy with the guards, complaining that the line of cars was moving much more rapidly than the line of people standing in the sun. He was probably right but not by much, and it mattered little in the end because we were the last folks to get water and MREs and they had to turn everyone after us away. (We heard they restocked and reopened a bit later, but that didn't help the people in line then.) From the radio we learned that some of the outlying rural communities had flooded, and there were concerns of a possibly imminent levee break affecting people on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain. Another big point of contention were the lingering power outages. Without power, businesses couldn't get running, and people were running out of the stuff they'd stocked up on before the storm. People used precious gasoline running their cars to use the AC to get a little relief from the heat or keep medicine cool.

The MREs were fairly hearty fare, certainly a bit better than eating food from a can, and perked us up a bit. We had bottled some water before the storm but it was starting to taste a little stale; the freezer and refrigerator had lost all their coolness by this point, so the ice was very welcome. We put chunks of ice in hand towels to keep ourselves cool, and took cold showers. Words cannot convey how thoroughly damp and muggy the air had become at this point; anything that got wet would not dry. We wore clothing soaked through with sweat; changing to fresh clothes would bring a half hour of relief. Our hair became a mess of sweat and grit that washing only cleared up for a short while. Mold grew in places that hadn't even gotten water on them. Ants of all types were coming in the house now, too. I slept on the floor again, getting somewhat better sleep for a change.

Saturday, September 1. Saturday was much the same, and is the day that is most blurry in my memory. Still no power, and another heat advisory day. I got a nap in the middle of the day, falling over on my bed exhausted. After waking I was able to study for a bit -- my classes start next week, but I have my books and wanted to get started. We took another walk around the neighborhood in the evening, and what we saw was not encouraging; standing on the levee we could see that most of the Bywater, Ninth Ward, and even the West Bank across the river were still dark. We were too hot to even eat the MREs at this point; we drank ice water and fanned ourselves and did as little as possible.

Sunday, September 2. Sunday I suggested we go to Walmart. As I said to R*, "I can't believe these words are actually forming in my vocal chords, but I think a trip to Walmart would lift our spirits." It would be an alternative to staring at the walls (we were too hot to even read at this point) or sit outside to be eaten by mosquitoes, which have become very active since the storm. Walmart is a long trip for us, requiring two buses, but we weren't in a hurry, having little else to do, and the buses were air conditioned. We ate at Walmart and shopped very, very slowly, still in no hurry. I could tell, looking at the people around us, which ones were still in hurricane crisis mode (they had water and ice in their shopping carts and had a haggard look to them) and which were restocking. I was kind of shocked to see the fruit, vegetable, meat, and dairy sections of the store so barren; they had probably had to throw out their entire stock after losing power and had not yet gotten in much to replace what had been lost. Finally we left the store and made our way back home. On the bus ride I noted a number of business that had gotten their lights back on since we'd passed them that morning, including the store just across the canal where we do a lot of our shopping - not yet open, but now lit. A neighbor told us a bucket truck had been spotted a couple of blocks away in the neighborhood -- the best thing we'd heard all day! I fell asleep on the bed, probably with mild heat exhaustion; I'd dipped a tee-shirt in ice water and draped this over me, but it was only cold for a few seconds. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday had been heat advisory days. I was woken up by the buzzing thump of the power coming back on around 6 PM.

Today we've been killing mold and fire ants and washing sweat-soaked bedsheets and drying them in the sun, which is blazing hot today.

So today the announcement was made that, to the degree of certainty particle physicists consider rigorous enough to claim "discovery," the Higgs Boson has been discovered. There is still more detail to iron out of course, but this is pretty momentous.

The Higgs field is what enables things to have mass. Without the Higgs field, which stretches throughout the cosmos, the universe would be simply a massless soup of particles, atoms, and molecules, never combining together to make even a speck of dust. The Higgs boson is a particle manifestation of the field that only has mass itself at very high energy levels, which is why it has been so elusive.

Today I am also reading the Apocryphon of John and the hair goes up on the back of my neck as I realize that the Invisible Spirit, the ineffable Parent of All described at the outset of this text sounds an awful lot like... well, the Higgs field. Check it out:

He is pure, immeasurable mind. He is an aeon-giving aeon. He is life-giving life. He is a blessedness-giving blessed one. He is knowledge-giving knowledge. He is goodness-giving goodness. He is mercy and redemption-giving mercy. He is grace-giving grace, not because he possesses it, but because he gives the immeasurable, incomprehensible light.

How am I to speak with you about him? His aeon is indestructible, at rest and existing in silence, reposing (and) being prior to everything. For he is the head of all the aeons, and it is he who gives them strength in his goodness. For we know not the ineffable things, and we do not understand what is immeasurable, except for him who came forth from him, namely (from) the Father. For it is he who told it to us alone. For it is he who looks at himself in his light which surrounds him, namely the spring of the water of life. And it is he who gives to all the aeons and in every way, (and) who gazes upon his image which he sees in the spring of the Spirit. It is he who puts his desire in his water-light which is in the spring of the pure light-water which surrounds him.

ETA. This has me wondering (and giggling over the very idea) if the Higgs field theory can accurately be thought of as a particle physics reflection of phallogocentrism. That's going pretty far afield I think though.

Looking back over the "my beliefs" tag, what I find is kind of interesting and sad all at once.

What makes me sad is all the bitterness, anger, and resentment I see there. I understand why I had it, but the blessingcurse of journaling is that you took time several years ago to articulate and share your thoughts. But I find a lot of muddiness there and disclarity, and dancing around what seems to be the obvious point to me. Or maybe I was just less aware back then and didn't realize I was dancing around the obvious, still mistaking the map for landscape.

I stopped posting here because I felt I'd said just about all of what I thought I needed to say, but I see now that this statement, while perhaps true a year or so ago, no longer applies.

What I find interesting is the relative silence about a class of views or ideas which has over time become the real centerpiece of what I believe and how I understand the cosmos. (Hint: whenever I use the word "cosmos" as opposed to the word "universe," I'm implying a view of the all-that's-manifest as a system rather than as a mere collection of stuff.)

The seminal post I made about this was written fully seven years ago:
Ruach as Holomovement: David Bohm, Neil Douglas-Klotz, Thay Hanh, Bucky Fuller, and others

I wrote a lot about the holomovement and interbeing in 2004 but have not mentioned this much since, and I realize that anyone who's followed my journal could reasonably have the impression that it was merely a passing fad in my religious exploration. On the contrary, I have remained since those days fundamentally a monist. God, consciousness, matter, all fundamentally one, though not necessarily in the "material reductionist" sense. In this view flows are more fundamental than matter, and each flow is a voice in the chorus of cosmos.

This notion of all as movement, God as verb, wind as breath as life, has been growing like a seed in my psyche ever since. I would now say it is the centerpiece of my spiritual views.

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There are no safe answers, as they all have mixed records. I'm going to go with Abraham Lincoln, with honorable mentions for Thomas Jefferson and Franklin Roosevelt.

Lincoln's record as president is certainly mixed. He suspended certain civil liberties during the American civil war, and there were instances of corruption in his administration. But he ended slavery, an extraordinary achievement considering how much of the nation's economy had been structured around it.

Jefferson, aside from authoring the Declaration of Independence and establishing the country's first diplomatic relations with France, was a strong advocate for religious freedom, and presided over the first transfer of power in the nation's history, a particularly delicate test in any democracy.

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Cultural movements that celebrate and promote willful ignorance.

Sorry. That isn't a *fun* sort of pet peeve, I'll start over.

The toilet paper "under" orientation.

I keep coming back to a definition of freedom offered by Marx and Engels: the ability to "contemplate oneself in a world one has created." In other words, one is not free if one merely has the ability to choose between life-options offered to her by society - one is free if she can live in the world she conceives and acts to bring about.

The riots in London (and in many other places around the world over the last couple of years) have been on my mind, because I dreamed I was involved in the destruction of a concrete park bench as an act of dissenting vandalism, and found myself in the custody of the Archons, one of whom, in the guise of an authoritative-looking man, held both my hands and interrogated me calmly but firmly. "What do you think it accomplished? What good did it bring about? How is the world a better place as a result?" He wanted clearly for me to feel that my participation had accomplished nothing positive, but also seemed genuinely to want to know my thoughts and feelings.

"People need more outlets," I said. Paraphrasing slightly the rest of my reply: "Okay, destroying the bench accomplished nothing good, but I wanted to express my dissent and that was 'the only train leaving the station.'"

Even my wording though demonstrates the enclosure of the word-fence. People need more than "more outlets" to express frustration. They need to be able to change those parts of the world that frustrate them. I believe that the average person is willing to expend honest effort for honest return. I also believe that most people want to feel as though the effort they expend is leading to something meaningful, some eventual good thing that is brought into the world as a result. How many of us get to feel that our daily work lends to some improvement to the human condition?

I propose, though the matter deserves further investigation, that all of us could select tasks that lend to improvement of the human condition, and live in prosperity. So I might turn the Archon's questions back on his own implicit support for the current financial-industrial order: what good does it bring about? How is the world a better place? We have to be free to ask the next question: can we do better? While humankind has achieved many improvements, it is worth asking whether we are getting less than we might be from our efforts. Why do we have a skewed system with endlessly deep pockets for making weapons, while bridges are collapsing from disrepair and schools are crumbling? Stock market tricks so arcane that even people with a Ph.D. in finance can't understand them reward investors with billions in profits while millions of people have no shelter or food security, and while illness is almost guaranteed to bankrupt a family.

As good as we have made things, we can do better. Silent complicity and empty dissent are not the only trains leaving the station. Every day brings anew the potential to reframe the debate.

Entertainment is factory-made these days, and the best we can hope for out of it is the occasional glimmer of meaning. This week cowgrrl and I went to see "X-Men: First Class" and agreed it may well be the best superhero movie yet made. That praise may be fainter than it sounds, considering that the genre exists primarily as an excuse to give us elaborate CGI action scenes featuring muscular men and svelte women wearing skintight costumes. This movie, at least, makes a coherent statement about oppression and the mistreatment of minorities (and even at that level, its treatment of this issue is problematic).

The movie, though, is a retelling of a story that's already been told, and as such the story could not have deviated on any of the major details. And so we're left with nonsense such as Angel Salvatore deciding on a lark to join with the scary bad guys who just broke into a CIA compound and killed every last non-mutant in the building. Why? Well, because she was a bad guy in the comic books, of course.

This isn't storytelling; it's ritual re-enactment of an established myth. By the end of the movie, things have to be in their proper place, the world must have its established and familiar shape.

There's more I could say about the movie, but it would take me off the topic I originally set out to write about. Consider, also, that 2013 will be the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who. There, too, we have a franchise straining under the weight of its continuity - an especially tricky continuity in this case centered on one single character, and which spreads out across time and space and even into multiple universes. (Multiple universes/timelines is a trick that has been used in numerous long-term continuities to enable writers to keep telling stories - DC and Marvel comics, Doctor Who, Star Trek, you name it.) Lately attention has turned to "reboots" as a way of keeping alive just a while longer the viability of an established intellectual property.

We can cast this net even wider and include video games, which no one even really pretends is an artistic medium, but which is also stuck in an established-franchise rut. As David Wong writes,

Everybody complains about sequels and reboots in Hollywood, but holy shit, it's nothing compared to what we have in gaming right now. For instance, each of the Big Three game console makers took the stage at E3 to show off their biggest games of the upcoming year. Microsoft led off with the aforementioned Modern Warfare 3, which is really Call of Duty 8 (game makers like to switch up the sequel titles so the digits don't get ridiculous). Next was Tomb Raider 10 (rebooted as Tomb Raider). Then we had Mass Effect 3, and Ghost Recon 11 (titled Ghost Recon: Future Soldier). This was followed by Gears of War 3, Forza 4 and Fable 4 (called Fable: The Journey).

So, just how much blood can you squeeze from a stone? The "why" is obvious. Creating a new genre franchise is extremely difficult and risky (when development of a movie or video game costs hundreds of millions of dollars, how much of a risk would *you* take on an unproven concept?), whereas the established stories are a safe bet -- the established fans will turn out, will keep watching, will keep buying, even if they complain bitterly about the most recent content. But as a continuity continues, the more iconic it becomes, and from there, and the less likely it becomes that you'll be able to wring a meaningful, original message out of it.

I work for a university, and have a wonderful perk in that I can take two classes per semester for almost no tuition and fees. I didn't, however, count on the hidden costs of going to school while continuing to work full-time. I've been working essentially 60 hours a week since the summer of 2009. Doing so has had a deep impact on my health - just since last fall for example I've developed a repetitive strain injury and pinched a nerve in my shoulder (requiring drugs and physical therapy), lost untold amounts of sleep, experienced at least one panic attack, and found myself in tears waking up one morning to realize that a third of my hair had fallen out.

We are still in a depressed economy and a lot of people are choosing mid-career to return to school. So - for anyone over 35 who is considering a similar course, I offer my hard-earned words of wisdom. These sound like basic things, but those are the first things you will overlook when you get overwhelmed, and these are *not* things you want to overlook. I wish I had been paying attention to them from the beginning.

1. Take extra steps to avoid repetitive strain injury. You will likely spend a lot more time on the computer than you're used to, or at least your computer routines will change. A more ergonomic setup at home will save you a lot of grief in the long run.

2. Schleeeep. I can't stress the importance of this enough. Sometimes you may have to trade a letter grade on an assignment for proper sleep. Choose the sleep when you need to. Seriously.

3. Vitamins. Take them even if you eat well... which, due to demands on your time, you won't anymore, unless cooking reduces your stress level. You're demanding a lot more of your body than it's used to.

4. Self care. Whatever it is that reduces your stress level - do it. Prayer, meditation, reading, hanging out, exercising, hiking, clubbing, hosting orgies, whatever it might be, make sure you do it at least once a week.

5. Try not to let your social life wither on the vine. It might anyway. But it's kind of awful to look around at the end of a term and not know when was the last time you saw your friends.