Kaksitoista ateistista askelta

Olen lähtemässä AA:han pohjautuvaan päihdehuolto-ohjelmaan. Koska kuitenkin olen militantti ateisti sekä individualisti, ne kaksitoista askelta siellä pohjalla eivät oikein sula sellaisenaan. Niinpä kirjoitin ne selväkielellä, ja oikeaan aikamuotoon omalla kohdallani, ikään kuin muistilistaksi.

1. Myönnän, että olen riippuvuuteni edessä voimaton, ja että se on tehnyt elämästäni hallitsematonta.
2. Ymmärrän, että tarvitsen ympäröivän yhteisöni apua tervehtyäkseni.
3. Päätän antaa tahtoni ja elämäni laajemman yhteisöllisen hyvän sanelemaksi.
4. Teen rehellisen ja kokonaisen inventaarin moraalistani ja luonteestani.
5. Myönnän itselleni ja läheisilleni tekemäni vääryydet.
6. Tulen valmiiksi antamaan yhteisöni todella auttaa minua.
7. Pyydän nöyrästi yhteisöni apua tervehtymiseeni.
8. Teen listan niistä joita olen toiminnallani vahingoittanut, ja hyväksyn että minun tulee sovittaa tehty.
9. Korvaan tai muuten sovitan vahingon henkilökohtaisesti, silloin kun se on mahdollista toisia vaarantamatta.
10. Jatkan säännöllisesti itsetutkiskelua myöhemminkin.
11. Oppimalla, tuntemalla ja välittämällä tulen paremmin tietoiseksi yleisen hyvän vaatimuksista, niin itselleni kuin muillekin, ja aidosti toivon että pystyn toteuttamaan sen mikä noin osoittautuu tarpeelliseksi.
12. Tällä tavalla herättyäni tilanteeseeni, pyrin edelleen auttamaan muita riippuvuuksista kärsiviä, ja soveltamaan uutta ymmärrystäni myös elämään yleensä.

Gun kata

I'd really *really* like to advice on a gun kata sequence. I love the work Kurt Wimmer did in Equilibrium. But I think I could also elaborate on the theme. For example, there's little pleasure in watching all of the bad guys die at the same time. Much better to get them one or two at the time, with the rest of them doing their best, yet utterly failing at the job.

So, at least one choreographic sketch is in order... Let's see...

The protagonist does a basic basketball move, which starts the bad guy's arm moving. Then movement back, and the bad guy just misses. Next, a quick tap with the handle of your now empty gun to the exposed wrist, diagonally, breaking it, and the other guy's gun starts falling. The gun in the other hand has just missed the other way around, because of the bandit's handedness, so you slide the other way around, flicking the still handed gun into auto. When the bandit fires, suddenly the recoil surprises him, so while sliding and spinning around you both take the feet from under the bad guy and switch hands, and then cause the recoiling gun to hit the bad guy over the forehead, plus with a minor inwards twitch then kill two extra bad guys to the first one's rear. All the while you're catching the first, falling gun, but with the opposite hand from which you started with -- and immediately thereafter you're ready to both kill guys from your now-right side, and to go for a stopped spin over you back, and back up, quite possibly with two loaded guns from the bad guy, instead of the one, empty one you initially had.

This sort of kinetic shit is a *hoot* to come up with!

What would you do if you were a spook?

The other night I started thinking about what I would do if I had full access to lots of other people's communications. I mean, if I had a million personal lines of communication at my hands and wanted to be as nefarious as it gets.

If you're a spook with that kind of ability, you certainly won't want anybody to know the deck you're given. Harassing a single troublemaker amidst the many ain't gonna buy you anything nice. So given largesse in access, you might not be properly incentivized to report small infractions at all. This dynamic is also borne out in most of the news that comes out of the intelligence community and even the much smaller, private, citizen watch-groups: everybody goes for the big fish first.

At the same time, the real threat nowadays lives amongst the small fish, and there's very little incentive to catch those. This is precisely why 9/11 became possible, and why it remains possible even today.

So how about going for the big fish with intelligence, and decapitating the threat before it bears fruit in the first place? Well, in this case you could divide the problem in two. The small scale, concerned citizen-like circuits probably care enough to report the thing if they see it. Yet they rarely see it because they don't have the access to the overall spook-datafeed.

The larger operatives, they do have the access, but then, they actually have a really good motive, and the means, to turn any such operator to their benefit. Which then adds to the total intelligence load against the general public. The same general argument works regardless of whether the spook is the NSA/CIA/FBI/military-industrial complex (hate that word with its political leanings btw), or if it's your local, friendly Walmart or McFranchise (and I'm saying that as a hardcore libertarian as well).

In the information market it seems that the usual rules, norms and intuitions cease to hold. For the longest time I thought that market too, at least basically, worked the same as the rest of them. Evenwhile I also told other people about the benefits of not treating copyright the same way ownership is being. And while other people like the late cypherpunks warned me about the paradigm shift that is coming. But it still took me some time to understand how fundamentally different and counterintuitive an information economy can actually be.

So my message? Be forewarned. Data don't work as you think it would. Not societally. Not psychologically. The economics was just the first warning sign, and even that is bound to go on its head. Beware of data.