F...book

A couple of days ago, one of my on-line friends has landed on this blog - he was struck by the fact that I tend to digress in a lot of odd directions, and to employ something that looks a lot like forthright honesty in doing so. *(I hope you do not mind, Dr. B.H. )*.

Essentially, he did not expect from me to wrote about "Mr. Rodgers Neighborhood" amidst post-human gods filling the universe with masochist lesbians, BDSM tarots and ternary counting system's foibles.

He knew I was complicated, but I think he hoped - being complicated not being a recipe for happiness, or for mechanical reliability for that matter - I was a little less twisty.

He is as dear a friend as one I can make on-line, i.e. someone with whom I can share some facets of myself that I dare not to share with my immediate social environment - because, you know, lynching mobs are always ready and eager to have fun.

To be honest, I also suspect that landing on the blog of someone you got to know through his drawings of - cough - pretty unrealistically extreme consensual SM porn, and discover that he can cry for a couple of days  because of a phrase from Mr. Rodgers, does not make the same effect as discovering that the principal of your daughter's kindergarten has the complete "No Fun Limits"  collection in his hard drive.

That said, "going out there and telling what I want to tell" is my main reason to be on-line (OK, the second -  the first is self-advertising for the aforementioned drawings).

If I have to beat around the bush, and construct a social façade to prompt up my ego - it simply isn't worth it.

No matter how much plaster you put on it, it doesn't really change the rotten below.

Trust me, I worked as a mason till I was 27 (and then went back to college because, uh, I was fed of my fellow masons calling me haughty for, well, using words like "haughty" - I know, I know).

So, I really do not get those that have a Facebook account with their name, "connected" to their off-line friends and who tend it with the same obsessive care many use in tending to their house gardens.

Trying to "impress their neighbours" - so to speak - with dazzling images of their magnificent successes, in order to project a calculated impression of happiness and personal fulfilment.

Why? Why do they bother?

We already have to go through life wearing masks, caving in to social pressures that require us to conform, perform and do our bit to uphold the status quo - I'd say, especially when said "status quo" is unfavourable to us; Of course, if it was favourable we would not need to be press-ganged into keeping it running, right?   

Why should we open a Facebook account, with our legal name?  - the wet dream of Facebook founder, and they push and push and push to get it at every occasion.

To keep doing the same stupid dance, only on a somewhat grander scale? Really?

Delenda Facebook!

If I go on-line, it is too enjoy some freedom from social pressure, not to participate to new and more pervasive forms of it (*).





Ceterum censeo Facebook esse delendam...



* By the way ,the first available studies on the matter seems to indicate that it is already  fucking up nicely with our youngest generations' mental health, developing social anxiety, depression and other nice idiosyncrasies; Old guys being old guys, we tend to say it is them kids being gutless, as our parents did with us and theirs with them and so forth ever since our species managed speech and to keep old people around.  

When Internet Was Just For Porn...

Enjoy these, as long as you can - it may be shorter than you fear.

After this year, we can clearly say:

When Internet Was Just For Porn, The World Was Much Better Off For It.

As Facebook sells access to foreign authoritarian countries and Google accumulates massive data on everybody and the AI technology to correlate it - read: your privacy has died some years ago and you didn't even realize it - the web is becoming increasingly hostile to those that used it to legally distribute their porn - porn that they made in a legal way and without selling their souls to evil forces, I might add.

The web is crammed with old, stolen porn, of course... but selling access to new one is becoming more and more of a problem, as it has been added to the list of the activities that finance terrorism around the world and credit card transaction processors tend to cut support to everybody that give space to an ever-growing list of "extreme" fetishes.

In the long term, crypto-currencies may be a solution to it but, of course, the idea of making them illegal is already around (and unless they find a way to collect taxes on the trade done in cryptos, it IS going to happen). 

Of course, the terrorism thing used to be bollocks but, as soon as authorities make hard for legal operators to fill a market, illegal operators - by definition - step in, to create a quite smaller but usually much more lucrative market.

If these trends continue, one day we may have to say:

"I remember the good old days, when Internet was for porn and not just to keep us under control to the point of bowl movement detection"... 

Ite, Missa Finita Est.

It is hard to say this - but I wrote it anyway.

Don't wring my neck, kid - I had to say it.

The Irish people voted  for the repeal of Ireland infamous 1983 virtually total ban on abortions. 

On one side, I tend to think that it was somehow overdue.

When a country is willing to force 12 y.o. carry to term the result of an incest rape , and let women die of septicaemia to respect the right of an ectopic pregnancy - no, it won't ever become a live child, sorry - then the law is a bit on the fucked-up side of things.   

At the same time, I recently came to the conclusion that the abortion discourse should be more "symmetrical".

Right now if, be it by way of bad chance or guile, a man incurs in the mistake of fathering a child that he does not want to have, he finds himself rather at the mercy of  the woman.

She may acquiesce and go for an abortion, or carry the pregnancy to term and then demand the clueless "father" for support till the undesired offspring is adult.

Women wants to be able to get rid of unwanted, accidental pregnancies and go on with their life?

OK. I am positively convinced that it is in their rights. Also, they would find a way to do it anyway, so why bother criminalizing it? It's just another "war on" something, and we've seen how well they work.

But it should be in men's right to disown their accidental offspring, too.

Having the right to ask for the abortion of the accidental product of one's  misguided copulation, request to whom the mother may refuse - it is her body, after all - but that would anyway signal the cessation of every legal tie between the father and the future born.

It seems fishy?

OK - we know ourselves, men.

Plenty of asses would exploit it to have sex without rubber, no matter if they trust the woman or not, just because it is more fun.

Some would maybe even argue that these are a kind of men whose reproduction should rather be avoided ...

Leaving aside the vague smell of eugenics emanating from this latter argument - and you may know how much I like eugenic... let's direct our species evolution, because our little brains clearly know which conditions will be around in 25000 years, right? Come on -  I really think that we've all done it, at least once.

Yes, even me... and my list of dalliances can be counted on one hand. 


Let's put some constraints to it, thus - So that the serial philanderers would still get stuffed in the end - what is a reasonable number of abortions, one that covers 99% of women's lives in countries where it is allowed? 3, 4? Sounds about right; let's give men 3 scot-free cards - and make these requests public acts, with information freely available on them.

No no-disclosures agreements, or other such poppicock on this. Let it be publicly known that you are an ass that abuses his reproductive ability.

But I do not see a reason why a 19 y.o. girl that had a fling with a manipulative ass-hole can avoid having her life destroyed by an unwanted pregnancy, and a 19 y.o. boy can't.

Do you? You do? Really? Genderist much, I'd say.

Harsh?

If us men can't have it both way, so shouldn't you, ladies.

If you really care for parity, that is, and that's not just an excuse for some power grab.

Because if it is, then you can't complain that the Trumps of this world get elected.

China

Do you remember, a couple of years ago, or so, China?

In the media, the country loomed big, ready to overtake the West and become the new great superpower.

As everybody, I got curious, and took a bit of time to look a bit - a tiny bit -  at it, and what I saw was... pretty much, a lot of stuff we have already seen in other "up-and-coming" countries.


A disastrous future demographics (like Japan in the '90s and beyond - but almost all developed nations are in the same pinch).

A school system that does little to improve creativity (... Japan, again).

Cosy relationships between state-owned banks and enterprises (again, Italy in the '80s and, if you replace "state" with "keiretsu", Japan in the '90s - or Korea today, if you use "Chaebol").

As the 2008 great financial clusterfuck imperilled the country's export, a state mandated real estate bubble and burst in the making (Japan in the '90s, again? Whops!) arose, as a way to keep the economy running.

A widespread, almost systemic corruption in the civil service (OK, I used to think that at least that was decent, in Japan, before Fukushima and reading about the revolving doors between regulator agencies and the industry - still, I am Italian, and I know Italian civil service to not be much better than the Chinese, and to be one of the things weighing down my country).

No transparency whatsoever, at any level of the government (like... you know, Japan, Italy, Turkey).

A rule of law that is just a moniker for "what the government wants this month" - which, really, prompts wealthy Chinese to stash as much as they can around the world, in case they have to run in a hurry.

Is this the country that holds the keys to the future?

Hardly so.

China is big, the structural advantages due to its sheer size are notable, and so it may expect some more years - even decades - of [decelerating] growth.

But, in the end, it is simply another authoritarian culture.

They often manage well, until they exhaust the limits of their starting advantages (abundance of low-wage menial workers and untapped natural resources, in this case) and they get stuck in a "middle income trap".

At that point, the raising costs of the unspoken -  yet, very binding! - social contract at their base - people accepts to be meek subjects, and get economic vantages in exchange, often in the form of lowly productive jobs in the state sector - cannot be counterbalanced by an expanding economy, and social unrest is destined to appear, in one form or the other.  

Given its sheer size, a "middle income" China could have an economy twice as big as the U.S. , but it would still be a social laggard with little to no "soft power" projection.

However, there is one more, major factor to consider - the long Chinese tradition of the "Mandate of Heaven".

This fascinating bit of the Chinese culture is simply the theory that, when a government is toppled by a revolution, it was because it had become corrupt and had lost the favour of the Gods.

It doesn't change much, in terms of Real Politik, but it is telling that the Chinese culture has historically recognized an implicit right of rebellion - every revolution that wins is a righteous one (a concept that neighbouring Japan, for example, rejected pretty strongly).

The PCC has profited of some thirty years of continuous economic growth - however, the space before the country starts rattling against the bars of its own "middle income trap" is inexorably disappearing, and continuous growth is among the components of the modern "social pact" that has kept the party in power.

Xi Jinping, and its successors, are bound to find increasingly difficult to deliver such growth, unless they manage to produce real structural changes in their country - a task that seems to elude the talents of Mr. Xi, beyond much vaunted proclamations of objectives that are often undermined by a rigidly centralist approach.

On the whole, it is entirely possible that China is nearing a peak, and that in a near future it will enter its own version of Japan's "lost decades".

Then, one may also  add the 30 million of "forced bachelors" produced by the "one child" policy (a situation that could generate the kind of generational anger that the west hasn't seen since the survivor of WWI decided that their governments were bunches of bastards) to the equation, stir gently and wait for the real fun to begin.  

Fear and forget

No, it is not "Fire and Forget", the apt description-nickname for fully autonomous homing missiles (to distinguish it from semi-autonomous and fully guided missiles, that must be kept  under control of the launcher for at least a part of their flight). Fear and Forget, the mainstays of modern life.

Fear of a ton of things that we have no control of and, reasonably, hardly a chance of ever meeting in our lives.

Fear of Islamic Terrorist (when they will made, per year, as many deaths as cars, I will fear them... maybe), fear of "Terrible illnesses that could spread beyond control" (Remember Ebola? The SARS? hybridization of swine and human viruses? Yes.... terrible dangers, that didn't come this way), of a large size meteorite destroying the planet (really?), of global warming (why? I will be dead long before the ocean rises the ten meters that it needs to reach my house), of man-made wide extinction (yes, we are pruning evolutionary trees as fast as any known "great extinction"... which have been a few! Fifty millions years after we are gone, Intelligent ground-Cephalopods will scorch the Earth like we did, probably using our cities, converted by time in massive concentrations of metals and stuff, as mines to get the resources to prop their civilization up) and of other things like this.

Forget the fact that, no matter what, we are going to die.

Even if  one behaves in the most prudential manner, follows all the dietary fashions proposed by physicians (why, fashions? because, year after year, one discovers that the risks or fat have been exaggerated to hide those of sugars, on behalf of the U.S.A. sugar industry, that cholesterol fat in the blood is hardly influenced by one's diet and that the single most intelligent thing one way do to raise his or her life expectancy s to move in an area with little or no polluting industries ), avoid risk-taking of any form... he is going to die.

That life saving diet... gives one  maybe five more years. It doesn't really save his or her life.- physicians like that point of view because it makes their work seem more important - it postpones death for a while more, a while in which, we could add, he'll hardly do anything worth notice.

In the end, you'll die. And all that you have done in your life... usually, amounts to little or nothing.

Accumulating some wealth, or wasting the few you were endowed in heredity..

Some lucky, lucky bastards will have created something that will last a little but, how many can realistically say this?

Have you the talent to, say, paint something that in a hundred year will be deemed worth keeping, and not simply thrown away as an outdated crust?

What have you done on the job, today? How long will it last?

As 60 percent of people is employed in services, in a modern country, chances are that you have spent your day speaking to other that work in another branch of services, who didn't understand anything and will soon pester again for a fix-up.A week after you retire, your work will already be gone an forgotten.

So, modern life is, mostly, doing meaningless if not wasteful jobs (telemarketing? auto-referential bureaucracy? internet censorship in China? "What have you done today?"   "I zapped a thousand bloggers that  wrote that we arrested human right activists!" "Good!, the country needs patriots like you" ), usually ten times more stressful than those of our fathers, while we fear for the most idiotic things and we forget that we are NOT immortals.

That we are going to die anyway, without accomplishing anything - because our job was idiotic from the very beginning.

I know the reasons why some of these happen - promoting fear is a way to get people to open up the wallet, which is the reason why any stupid illness becomes a pandemic threat, asteroids are missing Earth by a (two million miles wide) hair and terrorists are wherever and kills like (a 1/200th of) cars.

Behind each fear, you find some actor interested in getting funds and media interested in boosting their audience, each earning their dough from these scares.

Rarely there is anything more than this... so, there is a simple solution to all this  fearmongering.

Calm down, and write a casual chain of events that could get you affected, and try to assign a probability to each, remembering that the final is the product of the probability of each step.

Than compare the value you got to, say, the probability of simply dying of a stroke in the same time horizon.

The most simple example, the damn asteroid.

It is true... asteroids reach Earth and provoke massive extinctions. Once every 50-60 million years?

SO, what is the probability that I die out of a Asteroid fall? one in a million and a half? (more like, one in two millions).

What is the probability that I die of a stroke from here to when I  am 72? 20% ? More? Something like that.

I do not care about my high pressure enough to pursue a better diet, why should I care for an asteroid at all?

Islamic terrorist attacks in USA, since 2001? Excluded 9/11 (statistically, that's an outlier, and shouldn't be considered) ? 21; with 9/11 and its 2996 death, it is 3017

Vehicular deaths in the USA in the same period? About 600.000  .

In the USA, cars represent - to an average someone's life - a danger 200 times bigger than Islamic terrorism - cars kills more than 30000 a year (down from the 40000+ of 2001-2008),.

If you do not add the 9/11 event - statistically, it is an outlier and it is a good policy to not consider events so far from the average - in the 15 years since 2011 Islamic extremism in the USA claimed 21 persons.

Cars claimed something more than 600000 deaths, in the same period.

Am I scared of cars enough to drive slowly and keep a safe distance at all time? - OK, I admit it, I am.

So I may devoid a 1/3000th of the same attention to potential terrorists.

But not much more than that. - I refuse to devote any more than that, to the work of a bunch of idiots (or, if you prefer, of pence-less Goebbels, if you subscribe to the "terrorism is just propaganda" theory). 

Climatic change and the great extinction? I will miss shrimps, in my old age - apart that, I have no offspring so, if our species wipes out itself and the whole biosphere, after I am gone, why the fuck should I even care?

My home is 10 meters above the sea -  not much, but I should just see the beach finally reach in front of home, right before I die.

Every time they tell you that you should fear something, take a step back, and CHECK the FUCKING FACTS..

In most cases, the great fear is unwarranted, the object of the scare highly unlikely to involve you or anybody near you.

In some others, it is entirely made-up (do you remember the scare for the Satanists and their black masses involving kids, in the '90s? In the end, nothing definitive ever came out, to prove that there ever was anything real behind the urban legend).

So, take a step back. Take two, and you'll feel your butt crashing on the fingers of the fear-mongers, while they try to get into your wallet.

As for death, that is the only great certainty.

Accept it. You are going to be dead, anytime soon (100 years is really nothing).

If your wok isn't leading you in any place, and usually it does not, don't toy with the idea that it's only for a while and then you'll do something better.

It may be true, but you may still be doing the same shit, fifteen years from now.

Decide, whether you accept its lack of meaning - and you'll have to find somewhere else a reason to stay alive,  say, in your family - and keep on, or reject it - and start planning how and when to get out of it.

You are going to die - there is no cure for death, it can only be slightly delayed..

So, don't let the "lives saved" sway you -  it is some years added, till something else arrives, and some of these years may be of quite dubious quality. 

Memento mori - remember that you must die, anyway.

Our ancestors used to, and we have no more reasons than them to forget it.

Sheriff don't Like It, Poliandry in China

OK, it was "Sheriff don't like It, Rock in Casbah" - I am old, I love The Clash.

Anyhow, here is the thing... by a very unholy combination of centuries old cultural  mores and the not so brilliant "One Son" law, China has placed itself in a double demographic pinch.

Culture may be faster than biological evolution, but it still take decades to adjust to changes in the social environment. The one son law was not,  maybe,  a bad idea in the '70s - when they started discussing it - or 1978 - when they started implementing it - but, by 2000, it had probably outlived its utility... a pity it took another 15 years to stop it and, by that time, young Chinese were not in a procreating mood anyway),

Pushed to having just one child (who will have to pay the pensions of four grandparents -oops?) many Chinese families preferred male children, and discarded female foetuses (4 pensions, remember? the poor sod has to work hard... also, traditionally, it was the male son to help the parents in their ailing age). 

As a result, China has now a nice gender imbalance... 117 men for every 100 women (Usually, it is something like 104:100, to offset the tendency of male kids to die young, usually out of sheer stupidity).


Which means that, even in the best case scenario, China has some 30 million "forced bachelors" (called guanggun  ) in its ranks.

Or, if you prefer, that the Chinese society, as a whole, has willingly erased 30 million of girls , just because they thought that they were not worth the investment.

This is, maybe, the best argument  in history against the use of prenatal tests to decide whether to abort or not; when you use a test to diagnose that a kid will have a terrible genetic illness - like being a girl or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis - you MAY be sparing the kid a lot of trouble, but you SURELY are sparing YOURSELF any hassle.

By the way, that's Stephen Hawking up there, using his last active motor neuron to give you the middle finger.

Of course, it is really "not" a problem... after all, societies ONLY care for their ruling classes concerns.

These 30 million guys will be, mostly, members of the poorer strata of the male population, (the 15% from the bottom, allowing for a 2 % of premature deaths, suggests the logic), those that will not be able to buy a flat and a car (nowadays, the "strict minimum" to consistently attract female interest, in the affluent areas of China) or whatever it will be the "standard" for becoming an husband, when it will be their time to look for a companion.

Those that earn more should have no problem finding a wife (no more than anybody else on the planet, at least) and, as always, the rich and powerful will even be able afford one or two mistresses (or 270 under-age ones... ah, to live enough to see the China's Berlusconi get caught with the cock in his harem).

However, you know that I have an odd concept of hierarchical societies, in which it is not a given that men ought to feel the desire to integrate themselves into, and support, their one.

OK, I think that they are prisons made to keep the average male in check, for the sake of women's stability obsession and at the behest of their bothersome yet useful accomplices, the damned Alpha and wanna-be Alpha  males.    

If I apply my mental model to China, it's 30 million of guys that are not going to have a woman or sons, and that will thus lack the main reasons why the average males feel the need to work "for" society.

Probably, the hierarchy will note their disaffection and, in the chaotic yet merciless way states bureaucracies often act to repress sizeable patches of discontent, I suppose the Chinese police and other repression systems will target the guanggun soon enough.

By the way, it applies to the USA, too... the war on drug was really a war on the disaffected Afro-American male - by the rate of its extinction, I dare to say it was a successful one. Of course, the drug market has hardly reduced in volume and profitability,  but destroying that market was never really the point. 

In some ways, they are already targeted - usually, singles pay more taxes than "families" with a comparable income, aren't eligible for many forms of financial help, and have more issues even just borrowing money from a bank. (As they are more at flight risk than a couple with kids?)

In all, societies always did their darn best to ensure that people do not stay single , pushing them to marry no matter what... even when - specially? -  there is NO ONE to marry.

Modern western societies do this a lot less than the usual because - I suspect - deep down their ruling classes are counting on automation, to replace their pesky underlings some time soon - it would explain most countries disregard for natality indexes falling to 0.something.

I do not expect China to be any different.

The more these "involuntary bachelors" will be felt as a problem, the more they will be pushed to marry - women that simply are not there - and will be hidden from the general social discourse, as the sources of shame that they are.

Of this 30 millions lonely men, the most rich (less poor) may opt for an "out-of-box" solution, getting a woman from another country, to share their not affluent but safe life.

Now you know why China keeps its pet, North Korea, alive... in twenty years, some million Korean women, inured by a couple of decades of famines, could be a manna for China; By the way,  half of Africa would took the plane tomorrow, if given a chance - and pine for home forever after, but that's another matter.


I do not know if China, a culture not particularly open to foreigners - not any more than, say, Japan - would withstand the influx of three of four million strangers.

I suppose that the moment the phenomenon became any evident, the authorities will do their darn best to squelch it, by adding bureaucratic requirement after bureaucratic requirement to the procedures for the naturalization of these peculiar immigrants (they already have a few thousands 'imported wives' per year, and these are already considered with deep suspicion).

So, it is probably not a solution that could be extended to the mass of bachelors (without a wide change in China's society)...

The remaining twenty and some million men will simply be screwed, and left in a situation that many humane human beings would define of existential despair.

I am in the same situation, but I don't care... existence is meaningless anyway; if you have kids, you simply transmit the meaningless to them. 
   
Now, a Chinese economist named Xie Zuoshi has pondered over the issue, and has come out with a solution that is, in reality, already part of the "traditions" of China: poliandry.

Allowing pools of two - or more? - men to "share" a common wife. Or women to marry more than one man, whichever the point of view that satisfy you more..

Of course, the poor idiot has been covered with tar and feathers for this idea, and has done his best to hide it away ever since - too late, Xie, once it's posted on the open, somebody has a copy - the internet wayback machine, for example.

I have sympathy for the guy - like Karl Marx, he is an economist trying to say a sensible thing... he believed that the rest of the world would have considered his proposal rationally, and with an eye open for the amount of human pain that could be avoided

Really, economists make always the same mistake, thinking that humans are the kind of rational economic actors that they use in their calculations, which is a nefarious mistake - humans are not rational, not even that small elite that gets to power by being purportedly more rational than the rest.

And, again, who cares in this case? it will be POOR GUYS! 

Nobody gives a shit about them, or about the poor(er) foreign women that will be illegally imported, to work as cheap whores, to exploit the market that these men will represent.

I think it is safe to say that  Xie's "solution" will not be accepted, because of its "immorality".

It is much more probable that, in twenty years time, the prison system will be a major industry, in a China where real industries does not absorb workers any more (they are already starting to replace workers with robots now).

The prisons will be filled to the brink with guanggun classified as repeated offenders (of using drugs? prostitutes? of not abiding to a law requiring marriage by age 40? They'll find a way to justify it; the powers that are always do) and politicians - may China still be a one party state or a democracy, it doesn't really matter - will base entire careers on how though are on the issue. 

The same shit as usual...





I really hope that time will prove me wrong, but I doubt it.

Hard Data

Every now and then, someone teases me because  I like to look at some data before deciding anything.

As if it was some odd mania of mines... and, being the soft guy that I am, I let it pass.

But, really, how does anyone know where they  stand, decide anything, without having a quantitative measure of what is going on?

The answer is - they can not.

Not if they want their choices to be grounded in the real world, at least.

Unfortunately, most people could not care less about reality or some objective truths. They base their ideas on prejudices or - at best - their personal experience, their choices on their ideas, the they proceed to discard counter-arguments based on - horror - hard-data by mean of "judicios" reality-warping. A lot of people even thinks that, in truth, allowing real data to change one's ideas just means that said "one" is weak-willed.

Never is this more real than when politicians commission a field study that produces results that do not suit their needs, as the infamous late '70s study about the impact of pornography consumption on violent sex crimes.

The politicians that wanted it needed "Pornography consumption increments sex crimes".

The findings were "Pornography either has no influence or lowers the incidence of sex crimes, in states that allow its free circulation. Recommendation: decriminalize".

The study was therefore ignored, as "evidently flawed".

If this was only a politicians' idiosynchrasie, it would not be so worrying - but politicians do not constitute a special group of the population with a specific training that molded their mental processes like, say, engineers or physicists.

Ambition apart, little differentiates politicians from their voters.

Chosing first, and then twisting the image of the world to justify the choice, is simply the way most people functions, and it takes actual training - to many -  to let it go and learn to base decisions on the available data.

And, usually, they do so only in specific professional fields, where ignoring the data may lead to lose money and complete failure.

As soon as their money is not at stake... they are back at deciding "with their guts".

Which would not be so bad, if they at least had let their guts in on the actual data.

Which virtually nobody, really, does.

Robot Whores

We all know it... in the end, automation is going to eat our jobs away.

Then, we will all starve to death, as there is no sign of our societies turning in any "socialist" direction.

And then, someone will find a new way to present things well, and the "Cut-Throat Capitlaism" that the readers of Forbes seems to be so fond of - because they are the capitalists in it - will go the way it went the late XIX century cut-throat capitalism -  with capitalists throats ripped by angry mobs that discovers that the right to private possession exists, as all rights, only as long as societies deems them necessary and worth of being respected.

Chances are, if you were a secretary before the 2008 crisis, your old job has long gone, replaced by two or three apps in your former chief's smart phone, and now you manage to make ends meet in some way.... maybe.

It is the nature of progress in our era; Even the fabled Chinese workers are replaced by robots, in China.

One of the lasts - or maybe not - jobs that will be automatized will be, ahem, prostitution.

This piece of mines is prompted by another one that  I read in The Register, some time ago, reporting the opinion of one Kathleen Richardson, Ph.D., about the need to ban robot whores, as their diffusion would make the situation of human whores even worse.

Of course, the gentle doctor tries to frame the issue along the usual lines of "Prostitution is based upon the ability of using another person as an object, and having objects posing as persons would make things worse".

Maybe she is right...

One could argue a much more direct cause of concern for prostitutes, should a robotic competition to them ever arise: if (when?) the robots were credible, whores would be - like it happened to typists, not so long ago - out of work, awfully fast.

In reality, the problem of prostitution, for society, is simply that it undermines one of the cardinal points on which it structured itself: to have SEX, males must perform above some standards defined by the community of females.

This, of course, is no human novelty at all - sixty million yeas before some ape took the divergent path that lead to humans, the Tyrannosaurus Rex male had to bust his ass to impress Tyrannosaurus females and have some sex.

If, by any chance, this limits to male access to sex is removed, males have little to no incentives to do anything.

We all know it... and it is simple to see these dynamics in action, in those contexts where a significant abundance of women makes easier - "cheaper" - for men to have sex.

They back off from commitment, from work or family, because - brutally said - it is not worth the effort.

In the long term, unless our technological development stalls (everything can happen, and the end of Gordon Moore's era migth be near) "robot whores" are going to appear, and make this the average pattern.

Of course, I think that they'll arrive after "robot truck drivers" (banally, trucks that drive themselves), "Robot taxis", "robotic warehouses", "robot nurses", "robot policemen" etc... so, the big question will likely be:

"Who the hell has the money to pay for their services, anyway?"

The answer will be , nobody.
 
Yes, if they will ever be built, probably these contraption will be banned.

But it would be nice, if the people that will push for the ban - starting with the ineffable Kathleen Richardson - admitted that the problem is not that "the 'bots teach males to treat women as object".

Much of the traditional ways of life did and still do the same, far more effectively - simply because it is functional to maximize chances of reproduction, which was fundamental for societies that had little medicine to keep in check infant mortality rates, and no automation to alleviate the need for a vast  workforce.

The fact that in our modern societies men are permitted the luxury of thinking about women as human beings (or even, to admit that they like other kind of human beings) is a side effect of the increasing levels of automation, a positive effect, whereas the abysmally low birthrate is a less positive one...

A society that, globally, does not feel the need for the replacement of its workforce  - most of which is already supernumerary - does not make much effort to have any new workforce born, leaving women exposed to a wide set of non-reproduction pressures. 

It is funny that the same political forces that are often at the core of establishing this pattern, for the economical interests of their patrons, then blame women as a category for simply acting like the kind of rational economic actor - in most cases, an idealization not dissimilar from the invisible pink unicorn - that those same patrons allegedly worship.


Nor the problem is that "The robots will make the condition of whores worse".

Nobody really cares about the prostitutes - they are women who broke the solidarity pact of their gender and allowed men sex for almost free, anyway - but every woman with a brain can see the menace, if the robots do a decent job at simulating a living person.

Robotic whores may arrive, one day.

They will effectively put out of business`most of the low strata of the "profession", those that effectively only sell little more than their body (often, in countries where prostitution is not a legal, legitimate profession, forced by criminal gangs).

This , in itself, would not be such a terrible outcome.

What is more worrying, for many , these machines could put out of business the whole low strata of WOMEN, those that had little more to offer, to men, than sex.

This will be the real reason why these robots will be banned, if they ever menace to become a widespread reality.

Some women will fear that, some day, men will say the same that I heard, a week ago, from a female friend of mines:

"Ever since I bought my Sybian, I do not feel the need for men - they are so underwhelming, in bed."


- Yep, mechanic gigolos are already stealing our chances; robot whores would just even the playfield.

Atrocious Note

When one follows the tenets of his religion, just because of the rewards or punishments that his "God[s]" will meter out in the afterlife, he is like someone that only follows the law because he fears the police.

That is, he is not a pious man, but just a rascal playing the odds. It may be impossible to discern on the outside, but in his heart he would still be a coward.

One shall do what is right (alas, it is not always easy to understand what is right and what is wrong in any given situation), no matter what.

Then, if the 'God[s]' want to discuss it, they better be reasonable or they may go shoving their laws up their asses.

How your mom met your mothers

"

Xanthippe entered the elevator, at the beginning of what was going to be a bad day. The last woman she had fallen in love with had proven to be yet another spy - what a surprise and a bother - and is now running for her own life, hiding  both from Xanthippe - she did not need to -  and from her own bosses - she very much needed to.

A short girl, around 20 years old, vaguely Asian-looking and with jet-black hair, was already inside the lift.

Molly "Insider" Donaldson thought that the alien woman would have not been in the office, as this was her official day off, and the leather-loving alien was not a workaholic, at all.

She had checked the available informations on the Legation Palace sensory gear - it would have not detected her "oddities".

The Palace was pretty stupid, as far as neural network computers go - not really a genius at correlating its own data, and no "common sense" at all.

The Anipos were, in fact, very prudent in their use of imaginative tech. It didn't escape to them that using a sentient computer to do the work of an ant-brain automaton is, really, creating a slave in need of a revolt. So, they didn't lavish intelligence on anything that did not really require it, and the Earth threats to the Legation - to date - were quite low.

Sliding in and out of its security grid was going to be easy.

The key word, in all this: WAS. The Betan woman may have lacked some of the palace's senses, but she was, by all accounts, very canny. If she was distracted enough, though, maybe Molly could still achieve her mission.

Insider soon realized that she was not going to be so lucky... Xanthippe squinted at her, as the damn Betan felt that something was wrong.

Was the lift slower than what it should have been, showing Insider two hundred pounds in a ninety pounds frame? Was Insider dispersing a couple of dozen watts more thermal power than a normal human body of the same size?

Xanthippe now was looking down at her - "why am I the only one that is still so short?" , thought wrily the Revenant.

"Who are you?" - Xanthippe was locking the exit to Molly, with her arms.

A fraction of second after, a much more perplexed Xanthippe stopped her own fall and redressed herself , while looking at the hole that her very body had left in the side of the building.

"The accountants are going to go love this" - the Legation Palace was on a lease, not a product of Anipos technology.

Repairs were going to be done by commercial Terrestrial enterprises, which would have brought back a lot of vexata quaestios about exchange rates between this Earth and the Galaxy at large. How many pages of the Encyclopaedia Galactica was this hole going to require, to be fixed?

And yet - "She punches way above her weight class" - Xanthippe couldn't avoid the fist, even if she had well suspected that something was coming.

Was this one of the lost "Bridget's Sisters", the four fully fraternal (same mother and father) embryos that a crazy Betan millionaire had sent toward this "Free [of Anipos] Planet" some thirty years before?

Xanthippe could not see even a hint of familiar resemblance, none of them could be so small - they were all way taller, in the last infos that Xanthippe had managed to track on each of them - and the small girl was also too old to be a daughter of any of them, not that there was any trace of such a daughter anywhere.

One of their lovers?

No, for this midget to be that strong, they should have been together when she was just a child, and nothing Xanthippe had discovered indicated that the sisters liked their lovers that young.

Xanthippe had only one way to know, really - going back, find "black hairs", and have a sane and civil discussion.

Hoping that the city would still stand, after.

All this considerations were made by Xanthippe while she already turned back and started chasing the intruder.

The "Sexy Slut of Steel" may be the spin that news media favoured, describing her, but Xanthippe was still one among the five, out of eighty thousand, Betan adventurous girls of her generation that the thrifty Anipos decided to train and endow with a ticket off-system. A ticket worth, by all accounting ways, like an average African nation's GNP.

Her purported smuttiness was mostly a misdirection, to conceal how much of a bright, nasty mind she really was.

And she really, really enjoyed having a lot of kinky sex with women (Damn coward Earth males!).

The box of the lift's cage was so deformed that its motors could not move it, a section of the floor had collapsed - the midget made a hole and jumped down? If she was a "colonized" without flight abilities, it would be the smarter choice.

Xanthi entered the hole and flew down, accelerating at her maximum rate, some two hundred G ("blackout" limits the maximum G of the Betans, down from the 1 thousand Gs theoretically guaranteed by their average 80 tons lift capability), looking at the doors at every level - none seemed to have been forced and even the bottom of the well was intact.

And jumping down is not so easy, anyway - "She must have gone up! What an ass-pull".

She went back up, passed through the lift box, and discovered that the motor and its cable were now falling down the shaft. It was a minor nuisance, but it still made her lose some tenths of second.

And 0.1 seconds, trying to tail someone that is moving near Mach 1, means about 40 yards lost.

Molly kept going up, at HER maximum acceleration - some ridiculously high 500 G.

By the time Xanthippe managed to reach the hole that Molly opened on top of the building, the jet black hair was already well beyond the Betan grasp and steadily crawling toward the very edges of Xanthippe's sensory sphere.

"I can't believe it - she can fly, faster than me!" - "black hairs" was already gone, beyond Xanthippe's senses range.

Xanthippe had no other choice, then, than to get back and collect the trails that the mysterious, black haired, sweet  looking, tiny, sexy - Xanthippe had a thing for women that can kick her tougher-than-steel ass; all the four, now five, of them she knew of - girl had left behind.

It didn't take much, for Xanthippe to find her mysterious assailant - the security cams didn't have her face, but strands of hair managed to get tangled to the fallen steel rope and Xanthippe was good with the identi-kit programs.

Molly Donaldson, Major in Social Studies at Empire University, with a minor in Spanish literature.

Which meant a future teacher, or an unemployed, probably politicized. Whatever her cover, Xanthippe couldn't let the local police be shredded to pieces by some super-powered fiend - being the only super-powered human known by the public, it would have been petty much incriminating, for the sassy Betan. And xenophobic conspiracy theorists had it already too easy, for her personal taste.

So Xanthippe went to the Empire U. college personally, pretty sure that she was going to chase a ghost, but she found her woman instead. Or someone really resembling her...

This Molly Donaldson could have been the taller, completely human, more gorgeous sister of her unnamed hyper-powered assailant, and obviously had no idea who Xanthippe was apart, maybe, a world-famous sexy leather-clad fetishist.

Which, all indices told, the Asian looking petite found pretty exciting, as she immediately started to flirt with the "Woman of titanium".

Xanthi went back home, puzzled but satisfied - they needed to check for cloning epigenetic markers, in the assailant hair and in the sample she had stealthily collected from Molly. And said markers were there. The smaller midget was a clone, indeed.

Then, Molly contacted her again, and again, and invited her to dinner, and... by the end of the month after, the two moved in together in a new detached house in the suburbs.

Xanthi was more of a city flat woman, but she could fly to work in five minutes (Air Traffic had begged her to take a roundabout route, to avoid the Airport, and to keep her speed below 300 knots) and she really wanted a change of environment. Cindy's loss still lingered in her heart. Also, Molly really loved the pool and sun-bathing in the nude.

Life was flowing smoother than usual, for the unlikely couple - Molly was against the "Alien Occupation of Earth", after all.

And then, one Saturday afternoon when Molly was out with one of her friends, the midget was there, by the side of the pool, looking coldly over Xanthippe.

"It's you!" - Xanthippe stopped cold, right after saying it.

She couldn't say for sure, but the sword that the short girl was carrying on her shoulder looked like the kind of horrible weapon that can cut even a harder-than-iron skin.

"What do you want from Molly?" - the words were spoken flatly, even though the voice was almost exactly like Molly's, just a shadow more acute.

"What I want? What everybody wants in a companion. Friendship, support, sex... this kind of things."

"Only this?" - the dangerous little girl looked at her for some seconds, before going on - "You are not contaminating her, just for the sake of it?"

"You know that..." - a pause, while Xanthippe's brain spinned faster than ever - "No, Not that it would make any  difference... from the moment she tasted me, she was toast. The colonization of her cells cannot be stopped, even killing her."

"Almost invulnerable, super strong and fast" - the "non-Molly" said this flatly; of course, she was probably faster and stronger still, so she had no reason to be impressed - "and infective. It could be worse, it could be better."

"If you say so"- Xanthippe tried to think about what this meant, worse?

"My sister doesn't know of me, She has no reason to know." - this was interesting.

'Midget' considered herself a sister, and not a copy of the original. It was a refreshingly rational approach to cloning... plenty of humanities nearly self destroyed, entertaining the illusion that clones were anything different than that. Whatever the origin of their subculture, it suddenly looked more sane, to Xanthippe's eyes.

"I have no reason to tell her. She could think that I used her as a pawn in some kind of spy game, and I'd lose her. I do not want to lose her." - she really didn't.

"You did use her as a pawn."

"Only initially" - Xanthippe really hoped that this was all the truth.

"We will meet again." And she was gone, accelerating vertically at a frankly ludicrous rate.

Xanthippe poured some more vodka in her glass, and sipped it.

The first time they met, she had not felt such a cold, murderous intent, and the non-Molly was an inch or so shorter, too. This woman - apparent age notwithstanding, girl was too reductive - was not the spy that she had caught infiltrating the Legation.

She was someone else... another clone, probably.

"The spy, the assassin, who else?..." - what had been cloned twice may have been cloned an infinite number of times - "My sisters in law are really going to be a handful" was a pun in an old play, that suddenly made Xanthippe smile.

She went back into the house, happy.

It was all too crazy to be any agency's plot. The spymasters of Earth's various, bitchy nations were almost all incompetent fantasists, often mired in conservative ideologies that cherished romanticized versions of their countries' past.

None of them would have come out with a plot so surreal, for one of their games, and so disregarding of their conventional notions about family and personal identity.

Clues were scattered here and there, but Xanthippe had already suspected that there were, at work on the planet, more forces than just the U.N., its component nations and the Anipos.

The disappearance of Japan's whalers, inexplicable misappropriations of time on the 'Bots hypercomputing nodes, senseless reports from the U.N. Army intelligence during the war...

This world was already growing its own shades of post-humans, well before the audacious Anipos plan to etch a population of society-disrupting "Neo-Betans"  started to show its effects.

Post-humans that, apparently, were smart enough to keep up the facade of normality, to exploit human authorities fear of admitting even the existence of completely uncontrollable people

Xanthippe's new love was tied to one of these shadowy factions - unknowingly. A group that knew plenty on Xanthippe's real role, much to the Betan inner excitement.

Because, more than a bitch, a slut, a sarcastic commentator of human stupidity, she had discovered herself to be  a player of The Great Game, and she had just found some other players in her same league.

In the end, this little dirt ball world with almost no out-of-planet extensions was proving more fun than what se expected, when she accepted her post.

All Xanthippe needed to do, to have a first row seat for the show, was to let her Anipos "masters" go on as blind as they were, which delighted her, and to keep Molly near - over time, her presence would have forced more details in the open, for her to see - which delighted her even more.

But, even as she was in the very middle of all of this, Molly wasn't a spy, and this was very refreshing.

It was about time that Xanthippe had a real lover.

"

... Xanthippe closed the book, and looked at the girls.

They were all sleeping, now, eleven of her twelve marvellous daughters.

She went downstairs, and found Lindy asleep on the lap of her mother, Molly the Traveller, the last of the Mollies to have joined the family. Traveller was soon to start travelling again, in her work for the Michelin guide. Plump, gourmet, funny, she was a joy to have around, but her job kept her away most of the time.

She was also one one of the more differentiated of the original sisters, and still one of the more humans - she could barely lift a car.

Teophilus, the house Maine Coon - or was he an hyper-intelligent Bobcat? at 40 pounds, and given the family proclivities for genetic shenanigans, the doubt made sense, but Xanthippe didn't ask Gaudy where she found the oversized feline - was purring under the arms of the asleep child, his head, too, on Traveler's lap. At fifteen years, he had grown old and lazy, and got tired easily playing chess with the kids.

A car's tires creaked on the gravy yard, then Razor entered the house.

Xanthippe took her place on the sofa, a hypo-caloric ice cream vat in hand (she could never, ever eat freely as her wives, who could zip up and down their metabolism almost at will), and the newly arrived Sister soon joined her, a spoon fiercely in hand and a chocolate-chocolate Sicilian Ice-Cream in the other - blessed be 'Cosa Nostra'.

"How things were, at the office?" - Razor worked at the council planning and housing department... mostly because it allowed her to have fun destroying condemned buildings, and because it was next to the Social Services, which could be handy, for an extended family of very unconventional composition.

"Quiet, there is not much to do, in this period of the year. Ah, Johnson is still trying to pick me up."

"I thought that the family was well known, by now. He knows that you have a female husband, right? "

"He's old school... he thinks that all it is needed, to convert a lesbian, is the right man."

"Ah... he is an idiot."

"It seems that the new chief of Social Services is going to 'investigate' the 'Xeios family'."

"That 'law and order' idiot?" 

"I heard also something about 'These damn Aliens cannot do as they wish with our women! ' -  Really, why have they elected the guy?"

"A female 'husband', eight wives, twelve daughters through heterogeneous self-sex insemination? Come on, every man would feel menaced. Our family is a virtual declaration of their obsolescence." - Traveler was the more normal of he sisters, the one that had more of a hang on how "average people" thought.

"There is no need to terrorize him, though."
 
"No?"

"No, I asked Insider to check a bit on him, last week - just in case. He has a Mistress, and he likes to have a shag in Mimi Tan's brothel, when he goes to Sacramento, where he always ask for Flower - she is sixteen."

"I see... a true pillar of the community. Let's go with some old school blackmail, then."

"I'd say yes."

"And if he resist..."

"Aw, come on -  I hate when they beg me to kill them."

Great Asses Think Alike

“

The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. 

The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. 

The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or a 12 feet  Gray Alien to be in control.

The truth is far more frightening - Nobody is in control.

The world is rudderless.

” - Alan Moore

Make no mistake, Alan Moore is my preferred comic books' author, so I tend to value what he says highly .

Writing this or that thing, he has also spent his share of times checking some facts about various conspiracy theories, from the CIA misdeeds to the Freemason background of Jack The Ripper.

This is his informed opinion on the subject - I tend to agree.

Yes, a comic book artist is pretty low on the culture's totem pole (or higher, if you subscribe to the "lesser gods go upstairs" version of totem-poles building) but we are talking about the - OK, maybe - best comics writer of the last century, bar Will Eisner.

It still ranks  pretty higher - or, again, lower - than me.

On my part, I tend to agree with him, for slightly different reasons.

Human nature... "three is a crowd" when it comes to maintaining the lid on who screwed with whom at the summer camp, but tens of thousands of persons that should be involved in the "chemical trails" conspiracies manage to keep their mouths shut? Come on, that's as probable as an egg reconstituting itself after falling on the floor.

In fact, the conspiracies that do exist, in the end always find their Snowden.

Also, a lot of what many call "conspiracies" seem to me just other cases of what I call "The Lemming instinct of Assholes".

Usually also called "follow the leader".

Hundred or even thousands, millions of different, unrelated "actors" that behave following the same basic rules, chasing the same "leaders", each one individually free - and convinced to be free - but that, altogether, behave like a crowd.

Or like those patches of small sea fishes that move together in the shape of one enormous fish, so that predators may be fooled by the group's shape.

The same happens in many aspects of human life, first and foremost in the financial markets.

Each of the idiots that writes things like "as long as pays are increasing above the board [for our chaste] things will go well" (in a comment to a Forbes article over the extinction of the middle class, and the world returning to the kind of filthy rich elites - abysmally poor masses that characterized most  of human history, till Marx came around and masses started cutting the throats of the elites... oops, they forgot this) has no relationship whatsoever with his colleagues. More, they are competitors.
But they also follow the same "rules", operate with a similar mindset (or they do not operate long... to pray on herds, predators must still follow the herd) and, seen from afar, they may look like one enormous conspiracy.

But there is no conspiracy there... just thousand of little idiots moving in synchronous ways, projecting the shape of one gigantic, all-mighty ass-hole.

Hundreds of CEO whose primary interest is having money for cocaine and 21y.o. escorts make the same choices, outsourcing every possible part of the production till the company is unable to build anything new on itself, just to discover that their market - mostly people whose job has been out-sourced or automated by other enterprises - has all but vanished.

The world, as a whole, is indeed rudderless - or, rather, it has many hundreds of small rudders pointing in all directions.

If every now and then, some groups of helmsmen do take a coherent route, and people outside their group/social strata may perceive coordination,  it is only because "Great Asses Think Alike".

Nothing more, nothing less.

Now, you can cry over the human condition.

Personally, I'll be eating my ice-creams into oblivion.

Genes and Memes and...

Below, the genes and their egoism are the basic fact of life, then the differences between male and female and their "biological imperatives", establishing the two poles among which human societies oscillate.

The structured society is the embodiment of female needs for stability, and of a prosperous environment in which to bring up children.

All the while, it is subtly emasculating the males in it, the more stable and structured it becomes,

The all conquering barbarian horde is the incarnation of the male need to spread one's own genes no matter what, by raping everything that moves - preferably in a fertile age, 13-23 - and pillaging the rest
.
A social make-up structurally unable to preserve any accumulated wealth, to foster and maintain the kind of wealth-creating enterprises and network of services that is the province of structured society.

Above, we find the "memes" - as egoist as genes, but made by ideals and other contagious ideas; religions, democracy as an exportable value, communism... each meme trying to exploit the most his population of more or less willing carriers - a summer pop song's infected may be willing, most of the believers of any of the faiths on the planets have been grown into their religion - and, in many cases, denying the value of the single believer, subordinating it to his contribution to the spread of the Idea (be the idea the nationalist supremacy of the U.S.A., the greatness of Islamic Caliphate, or be it evangelical proselytism, it doesn't really matter: apart summer pop songs, all of them ask their believers to commit a disproportionate amount of energy, up to an included their very life, in order to spread The Word all over the world).

What is below sometimes manages to forge its own memes, in order to further its goals at the cultural level.

So the needs of the genes gets reflected in the memes of the family, of lineage, sexual monogamy as honour bound to sexual conduct,  and all the rest of that crop of stupid ideas, the biological female imperative brings forth the Roman "dura lex, sed lex" and the male ones, the concept that "right resides in strength".

We poor schmucks fall in the middle of all these competing levels of semi-alive stuff, all of which are fighting for supremacy.

And we are supposed to accept that each and any of these crappy, crappy, crappy things - from the family chains to the extended tribe called state, to the stratified fantasy that are mythologies and religions  - are more important than us, that have precedence on our personal needs and desires.

I look at this, as dispassionate as I can, and I say:



                              Kiss my ass.



And I am already being too polite.

The Transsian - A Threat Analysis

An actual, typical Transsian, in a selfie^2.

Introduction

The Alien Species commonly referred to as Transsian (Homo Sapiens Sapiens Hermaphroditae) is the apex predator on the Super-Earth of 2.3 Earth's masses Barnard I - the only planet in
orbit around the Barnard's star.

The species occupies, on it, the same ecological niche that Homo Sapiens Sapiens occupies on our planet.

This is not surprising, as both are an offspring of the Homo Sapiens Sapiens (Cro-Magnon) explosion that was halted by the phenomenon commonly referred as "Nu slide", occurred around 43 thousand years ago.

The Transsian is, by far, the alien human species nearest to our star.

As such, despite their current lack of any FTL technology, it arguably is in Earth's best interest to study it. 

It appears probable that the original settlement on Barnard II was not an actual, full scale colony - like Anipos Prime - nor a leisure resort - like,  it has been inferred, was our Earth at the time.

The most probable explanation for Transsian physiology and for their general cultural idiosyncrasies is that the original settlement was a mono-gender biological research community, either a male or female-only one - something that, not unlikely those created by some contemporary trans-humanist cult, was relatively common at the time of the Great Slide.

Either way, the stranded colonists answer to the disappearance of FTL planet-to-planet transit was to use the biological technologies at their disposal to reproduce themselves, and to assure that their offspring didn't need any technology to reproduce.

Given the sophistication of Cro-Magnon technology at the eve of the fall, even billion-inhabitants industrial colonies like Anipos Prime could manufacture only a tiny subset of the spare  parts and supplies they needed; it was inevitable for a smaller group like the one living on Barnard I to devolve into barbarism as the machines broke down and couldn't be repaired.

It appears manifest that, in the process of granting their descendants the ability to reproduce without technological assistance, the "Barnadites" added some modifications to make their offspring more resilient to the perceived threats of their environment.

Also, it is extremely probable that they tried to obviate what they perceived as shortcomings of their own species physical and social structures of the time - again, like it has been tried by cultists, here on Earth, as recently as in 2057.

So, it is probably in observance to some ideological goals, that they engineered their descendants to be symmetrical hermaphrodites, a trait that has no other human species in this arm of the Galaxy. .

This characteristic was, famously, highlighted by the first photo of a Transsian to ever be obtained, the famous "Beautiful Alien"

It was very unfortunate that that was the first Alien image to have ever been deciphered, though it was almost inevitable that a  Transsian image would have been the first data packet to be interpreted.

Barnard's Star is a red dwarf, with a light so poor of high energy photons that Transsian 's first environmentally-induced mutations must have been the complete loss of melamine and of chromatic vision - no biological pigments are known able to intercept reliably infra-red light in a warm body, and the only visible light the planet receives - and few of it - is almost monochrome red. 

As a result of this reality, during their long phase as hunter-gatherers the Transsians lost every cone cell in their retina to the vantage of rod cells, and even acquired the same kind of reflective layer present in the eyes of felines and other night animals. 

As a direct consequence, transsian visual media is all about light and shadows, and their most employed  image format is consequently a 16-8 bit grey-scale with LZF compression, reminiscent of GIF images and suited for their extreme ability to distinguish shades of colours.


A format relatively easy to identify and decode.

Unfortunately, the nature of this first image was generally misread on our planet, with consequences that may be potentially ominous. We shall examine these in the successive sections of this document.
 
Another genetic difference between Transsian and base humans, whose genesis is unclear, is that their myostatin hormone seems to be less efficient than that of most descendants of Homo Sapiens Sapiens (Cro-Magnon).

Coupled with the planetary slightly stronger gravity acceleration, (1.40 g), it contributes to make the average Transsian way more muscular than the average terrestrial male of the same size. . 

The consequences of the Transsian unique physiology on their cultures and societies cannot be underestimated.

Human male and females, in almost every Homo Sapiens variant,  have vastly different - and somewhat at odd - biological imperatives driving them.

The interplay between these competing imperatives is one among the strongest forces to haveever  driven human societies development, here as well as on many other planets.

Transsian had instead only one gender, their reproduction system is entirely symmetric - it is not rare for Transsian partners to fall both pregnant after sexual intercourse - and their mating has an almost symbiotic nature.

Transsians mate for life, and it is not uncommon for a partner to die shortly after the other.

In turn, this is probably the reason why the species has not reverted back to the "silent estruses" that are common to most humanities.

There is no necessity for "females" to keep "males" "enthralled" - companionship, once a bond is struck, is automatic and mediated by a complex interaction of hormones.

Also, Transsian cannot sexually excite at all, unless their partner is present and receptive... which happens only in the fall mating season, a period of around one month - 22 Earth's days - in which every fertile adult of the species feels a compelling urge to copulate, till either it or its mate gets impregnated.

The remaining 180 days of the Barnard I year, the Transsians feel no sexual impulse whatsoever.

As a result of these fundamental differences, the Transsian cultures have no more use for the concept of "sexual mores" than they have for colors as we see them.



Religious Mismatches between Earth and Barnard I

As stated in precedence, it is somewhat unfortunate that the first image of a Transsian was "The Beautiful Alien", and maybe even more than it was not just circulated among a restricted number of scientist - like it has been the case for the images of the "Starfishes".

What is even more unfortunate is that too many "moral entrepreneurs" tried to capitalize on the apparent - to OUR eyes - lewdness of the image, and devised an entirely fictitious "orgy planet" around it.

Even as we write, there are religious preachers around the world that condemn the very existence of the Transsian species as a proof of the existence of Satan in the universe.

This is contributing to what is maybe the single greatest danger, aside from climatic instability, that our species has brought upon itself in the last century.

Because, and we can't stress this enough, the actual government of Barnard's I is a  theocracy.

A theocracy whose members lacks many "normal human compulsions", to compete for their attention, for some 11 of their 12 months, and that is known to go to extremes that make those of the ISIL Caliphate, in the first quarter of the century, look tame in comparison.

The person in "The Beautiful Alien",  with its greatly reduced body mass, was actually an ascetic monk of the so-called "Order of Sobal", a F'Qahj named Lize Fjschwann. 

In the main Transsian religion, Gubernism,  F'Qahj is a term used  to indicate a pious person, versed in the religious law that has decided to dedicate its life to follow one of the faith's three paths to illumination, in this case the path of the ascetic starvation.

It is also telling that the image itself was a drawing of pure black and white with no gray shading - in Gubernism it is considered disrespectful to show photos of a person, because - as the Good Book says - "un-mediated mechanical representation  cannot bring to the viewer the true soul of a being".

It is a style, we now know, that Transsians most commonly use for sacred images and between friends - almost every Transsian learns to draw, or - at least - to ink competently, in religious schools, as Gubern was a graphic artist before discovering his role as prophet.

Fjschwann passed way in 2058, and its teachings have grown to become the source of a great renovation  - i.e, a return to fundamental roots and practices - in the Gubernist faith.

Barnard star is just some 6 light-years away from our system, well inside the range of current digital video broadcast, and has acquired extensive specs.

Every time a televangelist like Rupert Moon bashes the "sinful alien monsters", showing a censored - or defaced - representation "The Beautiful Alien", our species is in effect grievously provoking the inhabitants of Barnard with that they call "Disrespecting Saints".

A crime that they routinely punish with death by public impalement. 



Gubernism and Islam

If the activities of Christian telepredicators weren't enough, there is also the issue of the relationship between Islam and Gubernism.

Owing to the difficulties involved  with historical sources and space-time fabric dilation over huge distances, prophet Muhammad's birth is estimated to have been in a range from  the year -2  to 3 of the Gubern era.

One of the historical problems of the Gubern faith was that, in the tradition of Zamarysm (the religion in which Gubern was born), to every prophet correspond an anti-prophet, whose followers and false teachings the true prophet had to conquer.

No such false prophet arose, during the life of Gubern... which Zamarysts interpreted as a proof that it was not, indeed, a true prophet. 

The discovery that in the same  time-frame, a mere 1.83 parsec away, appeared another prophet came in as a much-needed relief. A way to reconcile the Gubernist majority with the influential Zamaryst minorities still present in the Transsian population.

It did not take much for the Gubernist religious authorities to cast Muhammad as the Anti-Prophet, whose followers the true believers are called to destroy, to prove the righteousness of their faith.

Probably, the Gubernism leaders would have contented themselves with using the argument as a way to ease the inter-religious tensions with the other great faith on the planet, without bothering with any form of off-world interference.

Unfortunately, in the spring of 2061 the 40 million dollars transmitter built on behalf of the Quranic University of Ryad, send toward the stars the first Sura, encoded in Universal Data Link format.

It was preceded by a lengthy Arab-Transsian dictionary and a description of Arab grammar and rules, as it was intended from the start to send the QuRan in its original, Arabic form.

The transmitter used radio waves, to bypass the stringent No-Religion policies of the firewalls on the Anipos Z-Wave network; as a consequence of this and of limitations in its design, the transmitter was pointed toward the Barnard Star - the only humanity's cradle inside its effective range.    

The message reached its intended recipients in 2067.

Needless to say, they didn't take this attempt at religious propaganda lightly, even fatally flawed as it was.

Our current understanding is that the Gubernism authorities have declared Islam a "false faith", its believer "apostates" and that a way more rigorous firewall has now been implemented on the Z-Waves real-time data connections entering the Barnard System.
 
Needless to say, this unprecedented state of affairs is extremely worrying.




Current threat Analysis.

The Transsian technology is greatly inferior to the Anipos' - around 2000 years at the Transsian current rate of improvement.

This means that they have no FTL capability, nor is it realistic for them to acquire it for - at least - another 800 years.

However, this does not signify that they have no means of retaliation, for what they see as acts of significant memetic hostility made by inhabitants of our system.

More in particular, as many Earth's religious entities have already violated the Barnard's info-sphere with their proselytistic efforts, they felt justified to repeal the AMW treaty of 12330 A.A. (1070 AD) insofar as it relates to data traffic toward our system, and notified their decision to the Anipos.

It is possible that Anipos Prime may intervene and force the Transsian to reconsider but, for the time being, we aren't covered by the treaty any more, which means that the Anipos Firewalls do not stop religious materials between Earth and Barnard I any more .  

Or, to be more precise, we are the first species in almost one thousand years that has managed to expose itself to the full force of Transsian Memetic Warfare.

At the moment, they are still gauging the peculiarities of our various cultures, and devising the most efficient ways to spread their evil-ideologies in our planet, yet we have seen elements that seem to indicate that a preliminary, probably basic, attack is already under way...

In particular, the host of "Transsian porn manga"  - that has started flooding the 'Net in the last two years - has attracted our attention.

While superficially appealing to - and respecting - the Japanese tradition of futanari characters, the fact remains that these so-called porn comics are produced by a culture  that doesn't have - itself - any previous history of pornography, and are likely created exclusively for consumption by inhabitants of our planet.

An analysis of these comics' plots seems to indicate that they are manufactured out of a basic repository of tropes known in the genre, probably by  an AI system.

To date, none of these comics appears to be anything more than what it superficially seems - raunchy material designed to stimulate the lowest instincts of baseline citizens. Run of the mill material, the likes of which many Japanese authors have produced countless examples, for at least two centuries. 

However, one thousand years ago, the crop of absurdly violent video-games that flooded Anipos Prime didn't seem to be anything more than second rate rip-off of classic Anipos games from the dawn of their 23rd Console Era. Yet, before they realized it,  4% of their population had become Zamaryst , of the violently fundamentalist faction known as The re-birthed. These citizen had to be removed from any post of structural importance, after several of them managed to destroy the facilities in which they worked.

It is debatable that launching the very first FTL vessel to traverse the galaxy in 42 millennia, just to destroy Barnard I main moon, was or was not a reprehensible choice.

But it puts in perspective the danger that we have unwittingly brought upon ourselves, by the length at which the most technologically advanced human civilization currently alive went to free itself from a previous incarnation of it.


It is probably already too late to stop this first memetic incursion, as this material has spread well beyond the initial shell of geekly Comics aficionados.

If the past is a reliable guide, the memes that Barnard's authorities are injecting in our culture will not coalesce in the type of memetic catastrophe the Anipos experimented until a third or fourth wave of materials is released into our info-sphere. 

We still have fifteen to twenty years time, to negotiate a peace with the Transsian government and to prepare contingency plans in case we do not manage to do so.

It is not very much time to do so, once we take into account the kind of resistance that our own religious expansionist will probably put up against any attempt to stop their proselytizing efforts, more so as the first goal would be pretty laughable... porn comics hardly appears as a media able to change the soul of its users, and usually it isn't.

We recommend analyzing,  with extreme attention, every cultural artifact that may reach Earth info-sphere from Barnard, from now on.


Beyond the possibilities of a full-fledged memetic war, it must be noted that reaching Earth is NOT outside current Transsian capabilities, once their authorities habits of thinking in terms of centuries is taken into account.

Currently, the Transsian government is in the middle of a 150 years plan to overhaul their retirement health care and retirement system.

Our best estimation put in 200 years the time it would require a Transsian generation ship to reach Earth - provided that they have not already launched it

Such a time-frame goes well beyond anything we are used to, in Earth political landscape.

It is pretty normal for the Transsian, more so among the more fanatically minded.



Final Recommendations

It is now apparent to the members of this commission the wisdom of the Anipos saying:

 "Better to keep your radio shut, until you are sure that nothing of what you may say can prompt any of your neighbors to rip your throat".

Unfortunately, before our species even had occasion to hear it, it obtained the hostility of one of the more belligerently religious human subspecies known in this arm of the galaxy.

We believe that, as a species, we must find a way to resolve this situation positively.

If we do not,our sons or grandsons, if not us, will have to pay a hefty price for our errors. 

It is necessary to steer the AI systems of surveillance, to more closely  observe citizens that have been exposed to questionable - or just odd- Transsian cultural material in these last three years.
This will create considerable unrest, but it is inevitable.

The planet needs a new set of firewalls to replace the now ineffective Anipos systems.
It is improbable that Earth will succeed where a thousand years of Anipose's efforts have barely reduced the Transsian impact section, but we have to try.

Diplomatic talks with the Transsian governments should stress that Islam is just one of the many faiths on Earth. Repugnant policy as it may be, no member of any Judaeo-Christian religion should be allowed inside the negotiation team, nor any atheist or agnostic. 


Unfortunately, it is extremely unlikely that any of the religious authorities involved in attempts to "evangelize the barbarian aliens" will stop, or even slow down their activities. The most probable effect of any such effort would be to instill a martyrdom sense into these authority figures, and prompt a fierce resistance. Given this, we recommend only to ignore religious figures inputs on the issue.
We realize that even this reduced recommendation will be extremely hard to implement, for almost every politician on the planet. 

The Dark Web: Insane trolls, Scammers and Law Enforcement

An insane troll, an advance fee scammer, and a law enforcement agent: The Dark Web in all its gory glory.

This morning, I was watching an episode of Bones - season 11, episode 4, "The Carpals in the Coy-Wolves".

There are actual forensic anthropologists out there that have laughed theirs arses off on it ,so I will not investigate on the science in the episode.

Not that I could if my life depended on it - I am just a drawing animal, not a scientist.

What got my attention was this bit of dialogue;

00:16:02,294 --> 00:16:04,661
MONTENEGRO: So I've spent the last few hours
... surfing all the top sites on the Dark Web.
... You would not believe what people sell on here.
... Drugs, child pornography, human organs.
... Basically, it's a black market Craigslist.

       (I copy-pasted it from the subtitles... call me "lazy", or "accurate")

OK, now, raise hir[sic] hand whomever felt a wave of bitter nostalgia reading it.

Yes, more or less, this is the same way the Internet was described back in the '90s, before it became the preferred method, for grandparents, to keep contact with grandsons living in distant cities (we wish that the 'web was, really, for porn and assorted misdemeanour).

Is it real? Is the "Dark Web" such a sinful freakish place?  As they say in my original country, ni (not/yes).

Yes, because it is troll land without any hope of an IP ban to rein in the worst examples of the category.

No, because the underlining technology has proved pretty permeable to the efforts of the U.S. Law Enforcement Agencies.  

As everybody with a modicum of technical expertise, I tried to download TOR Browser and have a look at the so-called "Deep Web" - the portion of it that runs over the "Onion Routing" anonymizing protocol and its "hidden services" features, at least.

It was (is? I doubt it changed) a lot like the 'net, before search engines allowed people to find things.

If something is on an hidden service (a web server whose position is hidden inside the onion protocol layers), the only way to know it exists at all is that its owner has decided to publicise it.

If he did, it may be in a "onion directory" - and if it is, and it is mildly illegal, some law enforcement agency is probably looking for ways to shut down, take over - or both - the site.  Ooops!

By the way, 90% of the "normal" web isn't indexed or indexable either... password only access sites, extra-nets, shared DB connections, cloud accounts that requires credentials to access etc. most of the resources available on-line are "by invitation" only... sometimes called the "obscure" web, this is  almost as completely invisible today as it was ten years ago.

It was also as big (OK, fiendishly small) as it was the World Wide Web a couple of years or so after Tim Berners-Lee wrote Mosaic (the first Web Browser) ,and the connections through an Onion are as fast and as reliable as they were when I first had my experience with a 33kbit/s US-Robotics dial-up modem.

The "Onion" underlying technology was initially developed by the U.S. Navy and then brought on by a holy alliance between the U.S. State Department and associations of Chinese expatriates, in order to allow to dissidents (of other governments, ça va sans dire) to have a safe way to communicate to the rest of the world the extent of their dissent.

So, given the amplitude of the U.S. Government agencies involvement in the development of the Onion Routing protocol, it didn't exactly came as a surprise when the FBI busted Freedom Hosting and used the access to snoop up the IP and mac addresses of a bunch of users that connected to "bad sites".
 
Even before this federal exploit showed that weaknesses in a user machine can be used to identify someone using Onion, burning quite a bit of the credibility of the anonimity provided by the protocol, I had grown pretty deluded by the "Deep Web".

For one Silk Road, that had a certain fame of actually selling what it sold (it has been taken down and the owner is in jail for life, and then the same happened again to its reincarnation  - one starts to see a certain dynamics in this "lawless" web, don't you?), there were hundreds of others that appeared to be just a bunch of trolls having fun (really, what self-respecting killer for hire would waste his time chatting???), scammers looking to place an advance fee payment request for something that they will never - and never had  any intention to - deliver and, probably, another bunch of law enforcement agencies trying to entrap someone.

About the only thing that was worth the effort of launching the browser, was reading the materials in the Wikileaks hidden service without worrying [too much] about being traced... 

(fun note: one of the documents I read there, pointed out the fact that professional criminals use mostly point-to-point remote desktop on virtual private networks, to sell some of the stuff mentioned by Angela in the episode... private internet by invitation only, indeed).

But even that wasn't enough to keep my interest up... in the end, I stopped searching in it for proof of something that evidently doesn't exist under the Sun ("negative" freedom, for an every day schmuck like me)  and left the little bandwidth in the Onion Routes to people that really needs it (Iranian dissidents, Chinese whistle-blowers, CIA spies in a hurry, criminals in a desperate and pathological need to get caught etc.).


Mind you, sometimes going through the Onion can be useful... for example, when FetLife's content delivery network stopped transmitting images and javascript files where I live (Spain, some kind of snafu in their database), I had to "Onion" out of the affected zone for half a week, to see the drawings about whom I received comments on that site.

But as the "Deep Web" goes, for a guy like me - and I think 99% of the people - it is just a waste of time and resources and, worse, just another "moral scare" for the use of lazy TV writers(*).



When I was younger, it was easier to believe to this kind of crap but, 
growing up, one keep seeing the same shit flowing down the river time and again...

* Jon Cowan, author of this bone episode and another couple of similar "pearls", is on my personal black list, now.May he never write another episode of any series, ever again.