Sitting outside the coffee shop eating my banana and drinking my coffee I speculated on that. Not that people are normally rude to me but just that the relaxation of people on this day made them so genial, so comfortable with a stranger. I think it is just that today everyone feels OK doing nothing. It doesn’t really matter if you celebrate the holiday or not, but that society gives us permission on this one day just to be out and about without a mission. It’s as if that permission allows people to stop, to breathe, to notice how wonderful it can be to be alive.

Nice.

“The ultimate goal,” Friedman says, “is to open a frontier for experimenting with new ideas for government.” This translates into the founding of ideologically oriented micro-states on the high seas, a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons.

There I am, sitting in a cafe, reading, listening to the sounds of other people singing, moving around, walking, driving all inside the lawful and occasionally law abiding city of Vancouver and I read this: and think “I wonder what will happen when the first child with cerebral palsy is born”.

The quote is from an article called The Billionaire King of Techtopia by Jonathan Miles.

Peter Thiel rose to fame by launching PayPal and funding a little upstart called Facebook. You’ll find his fingerprints on—and his seed money in—everything from DNA manipulation to Hollywood movies along with any silicon valley enterprise worth knowing about. Now the 43-year-old gay libertarian is embarking on his most ambitious venture: a start-up country on the open ocean that will be governed by his Ayn Rand—inspired ideology. Will it be Thiel’s crowing achievement or the biggest bust since Waterworld?

Whether it is a terrible example of urban-planning or not…I don’t care really. I do want to know about that first child with cerebral palsy. No welfare, OK. I presume, since he is an Ayn Rand inspired Libertarian, he does not feel obligated to the yet-to-be-born child? The family will have to cope? And if they can’t? What about the kid? Flipped overboard? The community will step in and help? Isn’t that what welfare is? It’s OK if it is voluntary? And if it isn’t? The kid goes swimming?

I really would like a few answers to my questions.

Thanks James for posting this to FB.

If you read literature sites I’m sure you’ve heard of the the new Harper “moral clause” which gives the publisher the right to boot bad-acting authors out the company portals, whilst denuding their pockets simultaneously. Le Guin wrote a “letter” to Mr Murdoch as a response. It is called “A Riff on the Harper Contract.”

It is stunning really the idea that Rupert Murdoch, the head of state that owns HarperCollins, should include a morals contract by which to judge authors. If he’d been subjected to the same kind of thing, he’d own nothing. In fact he’d be so far in debt he’d still be famous.

An author’s options? Don’t sign with them. Refuse to sign with the clause intact. Refuse to sign unless the contract is bi-lateral. This last is my favourite option. Then an author could invoke the clause on any day (if Murdoch’s behaviour remains consistently atrocious) after the advance cheque was cashed and demand several more in lieu of writing the book at all.

(Hattip to litopia for having a thread where this “moral” clause is being discussed.)

1:29-1:35 – way to go Gates!

You know I’ve always thought that the parents and families of those children that suffered as a result of Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy should think about swearing out a class action suit against the pair. Of course the parents could be counter-attacked for their own stupidity, which resulted in not only the endangerment of their own children but also the rest of the population.

I used to be a big mystery fan, but read very little fiction these days. I had, and still have, a very particular taste in this kind of novel: strong female protagonists. Don’t really care if they kick ass through magic or fists but I do want them to be ethical, smart, fierce and independent. Lucky for me I was reading Ricki Tannen’s book and through that heard of Blanche White; I ordered a copy of one of the Blanche novels through my library and picked it up the morning of the day the flu sucked out my life-force and flushed it. Unlucky for me there are only four “Blanche” books and I just finished Blanche Cleans Up which only leaves three to go.

Blanche is the best kind of kick-ass woman I know. She’s fiercely independent but capable of loving; she’s nosy but ethical; she can tell the difference between justice and revenge; she’s realistic about how rotten-god-damned-awful “true believers” of any sort can be. I’m in love.

So much so that I asked my bookseller to find copies of all four so I can get my Blanche-hour when I want or need it.

Blanche is a maid/housekeeper/cook/chatelaine of the major-general type. The added bonus for me is the racial content. Blanche is black; her employers are white. It was really interesting to me to see the invisibility laws in action through the eyes of the author of the Blanche novels. I recognized many of them since the same “laws” work with Indian-white relations. Learning how to live with contempt pointed at you is a major pain-in-the-ass, but if it can be done without exploding or imploding, it can create the Blanches of the world. I have to say one of the reasons I like Blanche so much is that I am still struggling with the 3rd option (that is living with it instead of imploding or exploding). I really do appreciate the road map to success given to me via Blanche.

And here’s the real kicker – Blanche is a liberal, but one with common sense. She’s pro love and not anti-gay, pro choice not anti-woman, pro justice and not anti-white (or anyone in particular). Her one apparently absolute requirement is that people act with compassion and the recognition that we aren’t just individuals, but that we are also members of a family and of a society and should act with that in mind—and for women, that they aren’t just members of a family or of a society, but that they are individuals too. Her other “requirement” is that people act. Move through the world and see, sure. But also act.

There are things that can’t be changed but that doesn’t mean you can’t do something against it. There’s a bit in the novel where Blanche describes finding the kiddy-porn stash of a previous client. Now she knows she can’t do much against the guy (racial/class politics being what they realistically are), so instead she pours ammonia on his pictures and walks out on the job. Then she lets it go and moves on to the next job. Sometimes the people-world sucks and it makes it so that public justice is almost impossible to obtain, but to stay sane, to stay human (the way Blanche would describe it) means you have to take a stand for justice and refuse revenge. The “ammonia stand”, I now think of it.

Anyway, love, love, love Blanche.

The thing that I find so very funny about the apocalyptically-minded is not really the vast hubris of seeing the world as about us, but the total sincerity with which they take for granted that the sweet spot in history, and in time and space generally, is reserved for them. Oh, the glory of being a solipsist.

Here’s the starting quote from chapter four:

A Cambridge professor who is in the habit of addressing his students most pointedly as ‘Gentlemen!’ proceeded to his lecture room on Ash Wednesday, to find only the ladies present. With head erect and eyes riveted on the opposite wall, he announced, ‘As there is nobody here, I shall not lecture today,’ and with stately dignity made his departure.

I am an educated woman, have somewhat of a temper, have no class at all, and can barely imagine the outrage these gentle ladies must have felt. And although I do not know this, I suspect they said not a thing to the professor as he left the hall. Not that they should have / I doubt very much if I could have contained myself. They were in a delicate situation. Those ones out there that thought women’s education an atrocious waste of money and time as well as a real danger to women’s health and the well being of society itself, those people often controlled the doors to academia. So the ladies in the classroom had to sit still for it. Had they thrown their reticules or skewered the bugger with their parasols, the conservative pundits would have crowed and suggested that the retaliation proved the point of the unsuitability of women to education.

I so deeply admire these women’s ability to press against such callous disregard of their humanity. It’s because of them that I was not doomed to clean floors or work in a shop, as my class would have made appropriate.

And there is still so much of this. It’s appalling really to think of the number of cases today where such disregard still rules the minds of the majority. And not just with respect to gender either. Think of the inhumanity of the normal workplace as an example. But back to the book…

Bluestockings is one of those books that I have difficulty keeping all the names and players straight. There is so much information, much of which I did not know. Yet from the first page I felt a part of the “family” that these women make. I think that is in part because education, knowledge, and the right/power to pursue my own mind means so very much to me, but it is also the author’s writing style. It is friendly, warm, compassionate and yet clearly welded to the facts and not to her personal interpretation. This ability to be both deeply attentive to the facts of the world, and still flexible enough to achieve narrative lucidity, this is what it means to be an educated woman. At least to me.

This is a book I will buy because I know that the stories it tells are more than just about the fight women had to gain access to a decent education. It is about what it takes to refuse the little box cultural habit sometimes wants to impose: not only passion, but also self control. I can imagine myself pulling it off the shelves for an hour’s read when things get hairy and I really want to kill someone. Thank you Ms Robinson. You may have saved me the cost of a good defense.

Perhaps it was the crows that made me think of it. Where the store is positioned, the parking lot is under the crow highway. Waves of birds, hundreds of them, fly in from the north west and their water-side hunting/working sites and head to their roosting tree. Every dusk: the crow commute. I wonder sometimes if there is really any fundamental difference between the minds of those who commute in cars and the ones who commute on wings.