Desert Blue: we were somewhere around Barstow

When the time is right, I’m a real sucker for those quirky low budget 90s movies, and Desert Blue is the latest one that I heard of but couldn’t find online. It’s one of those stories that doesn’t make sense on so many levels, which usually is a recipe for something really bad or pretty good. It’s all meta, because I haven’t seen it, but when it comes down to it: does it really matter?

The story takes place in the desert in town that has the largest ice-cream cone in the world. A woman passes through town and possibly some other lost souls. A dangerous chemical is spilled on the roads going in and out. The FBI is called in to investigate. People are locked in the town and that’s where much of the story takes place.

At heart it’s about a community that’s cut off from the rest of the world, which is magnified because it’s already a desert town. It hints towards Under the dome, which hints towards other works of fiction. It’s more than just that, because it’s also about the desert, that vast region, that vast nothingness, that empty space. There’s just something about the desert where it borders on an actual physical place and a state of mind, the place that’s most hostile to life, which then becomes much of the reason that people go there, or they cast themselves out to a place as such. 

This links back to Westerns, with some bad elements and a stranger rolling into town to set things straight. Who ends up in the desert anyway? Prospectors, maybe. Merchants selling picks and hoes, maybe. Misfits, maybe. On some level it’s all a variation on a theme, with the desert as a state of mind, a last refuge and all that stuff, but when you stretch that notion up: so is life, if you think about it. 

I’m currently reading The Dark Tower, I’m down to book 5. The story takes place in a desert where people from different places and eras have ended up. It’s a good enough story, but with most of King’s books, there are vast parts that can be left out without any harm to the overall story. In my opinion book 2 and 4 are completely skippable and are just not interesting. But that’s on a side-note.

Ulro, then, at least: my definition thereof

William Blake described the desert as Ulro, an empty place, a sort of last refuge. Ulro is a state of mind that comes down to being in a spiritual desert (one among many interpretations). This is where we should go to figure out our next move, and it’s where we should commit ourselves to the future and choose one thing over the other. 

And it’s all between the lines, it’s all things unsaid. It’s visceral, it’s hitting rock bottom and doing what seemingly comes as a flash of insight, but by the same token comes down to a sort of condensed instinct. 

On some level it has Nietzsche written all over it, where extreme nothingness will ultimately give you a sense of purpose and direction, where you strip everything away and then figure out what remains after all that. Is this existential? Very much so. Is this the material of the quarter-life or the mid-life? In some way. 

I recently started following this channel on YouTube: it’s about a guy who sunk all his life-savings into an abandoned mining town in California. That’s exactly this story, it’s the desert, it’s the nothingness, and the weekly 40-minute episodes narrate the process, the findingness, the nothingness, the everythingness, but also the direction and purpose in defining and figuring out a next move. 

All that lies in the desert, be it literal, be it physical, be it a state of mind, or the notion of a desert on some far off real or fictional planet. The desert is always there. It’s always vast. It’s always unforgiving. It might just be what we need from time to time. And we might get something out of it for a while, much like Cerro Gordo produced half a billion dollars worth of silver, and now and in its future history it’s a place of imagination, both because of the proximity of extreme physical hardship in a prior past, but also extreme riches.

We were somewhere around Barstow,

And this is also more or less where it touches on other works of self-obliteration and exploration, where Thompson drew up the rest of the line, and where Barstow spins off towards some bender, and a binging in that big desert town that used to be grand, and that has literally been emptied out since the plague came around in recent times. 

One of my all time favorite movies that I rewatch every now and then is Rum Diary. It’s one of Thompson’s stories and it narrates the lives of a group of misfits that have taken a job at a local newspaper in the turmoil of the sixties of Puerto Rico when it was colonized by the Americans. Somewhere after that time the official language seized to be English, the resistance is palpable, but it’s still a place of opportunity, but also self-obliteration, and at the far end of that, self-destruction. 

Rum Diary is a whacky story, and in a way that line that was slung out in a far-off desert applies to life on a small island as well, and also the notion of the weekend-junkie that plays a more prominent part in The Bird Man, in an attempt to understand how essential great places can fall through their knees, when guys with dictatorial tendencies take control, and a lot gets destroyed in the process. 

I still believe in that story, especially against the 2020-background, even though it isn’t literally mentioned, but it does go down that same hole, much in the same way as Rum Diary, much in the same way as that notion of Ulro, buying a mining town, the gunslingers from The Dark Tower, and all of such things. 

How it continues, that Barstow line: 

,on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.

I guess that it was another place, another time, another era, and another notion of what was needed to hit that old rock and that old bottom. The location is spot on though, on the edge is where it is, because it might be solid advise to have one foot in each location, else you might just about loose your grounding. 

That’s why that channel of that guy in the mining town works: by documenting, by interacting, by building community, by creating a place that people will want to go to, he kind of has that bridge between those two places, where you can dig deep and strip everything away for a while, only to return. 

That’s why, ultimately, Rum Diary is a reminder of a time and place, but it doesn’t move beyond what it is, because it doesn’t connect to any larger narrative, be it literal, visceral or any other way. I believe that we always look for silver linings, that small sliver of hope that shines through, that makes us believe that we live in a just world, and a world that makes sense. That’s at least what I aimed for with The Bird Man, and on some level I think that’s what all good stories are all about.

The most recent confirmation of that is the most unlikely place to get any of that: a country-song by Tom Green. I used to be a huge fan of his comedy skits in the late 90s and early 00s, but it wasn’t exactly more than what it was: it was all at the surface. 

This song, Right now is the right time is one of the best songs that I heard in a good long time. Where did he find inspiration you ask: the draught and the dust, the nothingness and the everythingness after spending weeks on end traveling the desert in a van. 

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Dystopian theories: the social controversy of global problems in relation to social equity issues
On what dystopian science-fiction movies can teach us about the social dilemmas that we're facing right now.


Axis pandemic-recession: how to solve social inequalities
On the real problems that the recession has unveiled, and how we as a society might turn all of that around.


Arecibo Observatory
A tribute to the soon to be demolished Observatory, and its importance in scientific and popular culture (Rum Diary is mentioned as well).

Bitcoin rush: similarities with the 1929 stock exchange crash

Towards the end of 2020 it seemed that there might be a quick turn-around of the pandemic: the projections all over were for the vaccine to be rolled out for the most part by the end of 2021. But that’s just the vaccine. 

What will return much later will be the one to a degree of normalcy as we knew it from before the pandemic. We will be more cautious and the pandemic will stay on our minds for a long time in much of the same way that other eras of hardship have stayed with other generations long after. Think of wars, think of periods of famine, think of dictatorial regimes, think of other outbreaks of rampant disease.

These are all areas that can be both quantified in numbers, but at the same time they can’t: cases of infection can be counted, but the way things have impacted can only be measured to a very modest degree. Still, it’s in the actions that can be measured that we tend to return to. It’s also where politics can be effective, most notably where it comes to the distribution of wealth to most people. Ideally, that is. 

Money then

To maintain a degree of normalcy you need two lines of normalcy: routine in life-style and routine in income both for yourself and those around us that we interact with on all levels of society. To some degree this is money, but more than that it’s a fair distribution of wealth that can function as a cushion in times of hardship. And that means that there need to be systems in place that streamline all efforts that are needed to do just that.

What if that system is in a jam? What if, let’s say the projected inflation is about 15% per year for a period of five years? What if that means that you would loose half of the value of your assets at the end of those five years? And what if there was a way to dodge all that?

I guess that you can figure out what will come rolling in, blazing in all its glory, after it has been picking up momentum for about a decade. There you have it, the coin of the bit, of which it seems that it has attained critical mass. It’s vast enough not to fall over just like that, and it’s small enough to be able to pack on heat. 

And yes, this has to do with money, because creating wealth is a money-act. Just like acquiring and holding on to assets for yourself and future generations is a money-act. Just like the labor that we perform on a daily basis is ultimately a money-act. You may like it or not, but the simple fact of the matter is that money will always be part of the equation.

Bitcoin has been around for a decade; why will this year be so important?

The short version is that we live in extra-ordinary times. Usually when things go South, it comes down to human meddling and human error. Covid-19 might be man-made, it might not be, but if it was man-made, then its release was most likely an accident. The more likely scenario is that it was transmitted by animals, which is also what was confirmed by experts that it was very unlikely that it was man-made. 

In other words: what we have before us right now is something that will probably not come around for a good long time (the one before this one that had a similar scale, the Spanish flu, came around more or less one hundred years ago). The current pandemic already caused a deep recession that may later be categorized as a depression and it has unveiled social inequality throughout all societies. 

And this is what most people don’t realize: once most people have been vaccinated by the end of 2021, the worst of the recession is far from over. Depending on who you ask, there seems to be a consensus that this recession will last anywhere between 3-5 years. 

The reason that this recession is so deep has to do with three things: money printing (the government assistance), massive job loss and little to no effort of global governments to kickstart the economy by investing in vast projects that will create massive employment.

Things might turn around a bit, but based on what we have seen this last year, it’s probably too late and too little. It also falls right in line with the trend toward right-wing and leaning-towards-dictatorial-regimes of governments that operate as the ultimate corporation that only serves itself: the good of most is not in the interest of such governments, because it would shift the balance of power against those that are in charge.  

To make a long story very short: the bad times are far from over, which means that money-printing will continue, which in turn means that digital assets like bitcoin become a more interesting alternative. 

The good about bitcoin

There are the amazing facts: bitcoin is an asset (like gold), not money. This means that it’s good as a store of value, but not to pay small goods (this is also the area of fiat currency). There’s a limited amount, which means that there’s no inflation (unlike fiat money and gold). It has similarities to an adiabatic system (heating up = money added, siphoning off small amounts doesn’t much decrease its energy significantly unless done to an extreme extent, more on that later). The system regulates itself (there is no human meddling, no ceo taking extreme bonuses etc etc).

At the same time, I can’t help thinking of that old movie Hackers (where a group of hackers were siphoning literal fractions of cents from all transactions in a bank), plus the very simple question of motive: would anyone make something like bitcoin ‘out of the goodness of their heart’?

Then it hit me: if I would have created bitcoin, then I would have kept a good deal of it for myself. And that’s exactly what Nakamoto did: he (or they) own 1 million bitcoins. With this being a public fact, it immediately becomes clear that the underlying technology needs to be functional and almost impossible to compromise. 

That’s as far as it gets to being legit, and that’s also as far as it gets by being an impartial global entity. This far it has lived up to its promise: the blockchain hasn’t been hacked, just the exchanges where coins were stored online (instead of a more secure off-line hardware wallet).

The fact that it’s completely unregulated might be a problem still, but it might also be what eludes 99% of the people. Then there’s only one logical way to go about this and that’s to take a good look at a historic event that has definite similarities.

Similar times leading up to the 1929 exchange crash

For about the last half year or so I was bombarded by this ad on YouTube promoting an online broker to help me invest in Apple, Amazon and Google. The only one missing besides those three would be Tesla. It seems that almost everyone is buying these stocks these days, partly because these are the dominant online forces, but also because it’s almost a hobby or a pet project to buy stocks. In a way it’s just something that you do at some point in time, or something that people just want to do.

The only question then is: do most people understand how the stock market operates? And by the same token: does anyone know how the blockchain, and for that matter, blockchain-technology, operates? 

And that’s exactly the way a lot of folks roll into this: anyone can be an acolyte of any of those four (Amazon, Apple, Google, Tesla) without understanding one bit of any of their technologies. All that is not bad in itself, but understanding a technology will go a long way in figuring out whether something makes sense and whether investing in this or that is a good move.

In the 1920s the situation wasn’t much different: it was the decade after ww-1 (and the Spanish flu), and after that time of hardship it seemed that things were looking up. People bought stocks all over without understanding much of the machine behind any of it, except that the market was bullish (expected to keep going upward for an extended time). 

Then the market collapsed virtually overnight on October 25, 1929

What had played a big part was the fact that stocks were sold off so quick that prices dropped incrementally fast, which caused a spiral in which a lot of value just disappeared. In the 1930s mechanisms were installed as a response and countermeasure to suspend trading to level out any case of rapid decline. 

That’s mostly what was done after, but leading up to the crash there was a lot of speculation (leading to over-valuation), and little regulation. People started investing heavily in stocks, and private individuals even started borrowing money to invest in the stock market. Towards the crash, the bubble had become so big that the debt was as big as all the money that was circulating in the economy. 

As it is with bitcoin, there might be an extent of over-valuation because the first bitcoins had no value compared to the more recent value of $34,000 USD two weeks ago (currently it’s down to $30,000 USD). 

The same might be said about gold (apart from the fact that gold might have been immediately popular because it’s a nice shiny object). More than anything, the recent value of $34,000 USD might be a reflection of the trust that people have in the blockchain and bitcoin just happened to have become the biggest.

What makes bitcoin distinctly different from the 1929 crash conditions is that vast amounts of bitcoin can’t be bought or sold in fractions of seconds. This, besides the public ledger, might be one of the key mechanisms that ensures that the value of Bitcoin will become more stable over time. 

Then there’s Micheal Saylor

Around the New Year videos started popping up in my YouTube feed of this CEO named Michael Saylor who supposedly bought hundreds of millions of Dollars worth of bitcoin in the fall of 2020 (on an unrelated side-note: this guy looks and talks like Stephen King). 

Then afterwards he let himself be interviewed by basically anyone who was willing to hear him out. My initial take was that this guy talked sense, although once he revealed how much he had supposedly invested in bitcoin ---- it kind of looked like he was trying to get the word out there to increase the bitcoin value. 

A lot of my initial take on this guy changed when I started listening to what he had to say, because these interviews turned out to be one of the best iterations of what bitcoin is and also how we should approach it in the larger framework. 

The ideas: money as energy, but most of all the logic of the blockchain as a closed system (related to similar engineering systems) that heats up, picks up momentum, and from which you can siphon small amounts without significantly decreasing the momentum of the machine (the value of Bitcoin). 

The idea just seems to make sense on a gut level: when more money (energy) is added to the system, the more momentum it gets and the slimmer the chances that it will slow down any time soon. 

As mentioned before, with the delay in buying and selling bitcoins, it’s harder to artificially manipulate the price of bitcoin. More than that, this guy stated a couple of times that cryptocurrency is no currency, but an asset. That’s why you shouldn’t want to use it to buy goods, but just as a store of value. 

As it is, the projected inflation for the current period of about five years will be about 15% per year. After that period of time the amount of goods that you will be able to buy with any amount of money in five years, will be less than half of what you can buy today (0.85^5 = 0.44).

When you have a vast amount of cash that you don’t want to spend right now: bitcoin is a loophole and an easy way out of a messy (political) situation. But that’s all it is, because as it is there are still the more traditional assets that will serve a similar function, albeit with slimmer margins (houses/offices to rent, gold, silver, lithium). 

Compared to Tesla, investing in Bitcoin is also something else: it’s a way out, when there seems to be no effective allocation of liquidity. Which raises the question: isn’t this just another amassing of extreme wealth with the sole purpose of amassing extreme wealth? (see this recent article that I wrote in December for more on that). 

When would Bitcoin seize to work

All this is nice and all, but it all seems a stretch so far. Most of it comes down to some of the facts that were already mentioned earlier: it’s unknown who made bitcoin and its value is based on a speculation on exchanges. The bigger ‘how’ as to why it still works hooks in to what really isn’t there at this moment: a global government.

In science-fiction movies the governments of planets always operate as one. There’s always a Klingon High Council, a Vulcan High Command and Earth Government. In itself it is a simplification to get a simpler story-line, but at the same time it  makes sense that a planet has some sort of governing body, beyond an organization that does this without actually being able to govern on a global level.

In the second installment of Gaze wide, aim far, I proposed that ideally the UN would develop into this world government. When it comes to that, there’s a long road ahead still, because in times of hardship the tendency of people is to become more nationalistic, rather than less. Nothing is impossible though, because the EU has also started out of strong ideals and with very little governing power, but the recent Green Deal is drawn up in legislation in the European Union and it looks like this will be leading the way on the global stage. 

To go back to bitcoin, fast forward fifty years with the UN as the world government: would bitcoin still be around? I would say that most of us would say ‘no’, because the reason that it exists today has in part to do with the fact that local governments don’t know how to deal with a global currency (besides designating it as an asset). Then the other fact is that it has already become to big to outlaw, exactly because it’s almost impossible to ban an online force when it can just be run on a foreign server or something as such. 

Final thoughts

Bitcoin will definitely be around for some time to come: at least for the next 3-5 years, but it’s very hard to predict whether it will still be around in ten years. If you look at other online forces, then it’s usually the quick seconds that see the opportunity of a new technology, but they identify the shortcomings of the first on the market. 

Bitcoin was the first and for a good long time Ethereum was the second, but it seems very unlikely that Ethereum will overtake Bitcoin any time soon, if at all. Compared to Bitcoin, Ethereum seems overly complicated to the point that it’s almost convoluted: it lacks bitcoin’s simple elegance. 

But hé, there’s no time-constraint here. For now bitcoin is the big one. Will it always be that? Very unlikely. There definitely still is room for a second to seize the market (which is also what 4000 other cryptocurrencies haven’t been able to do).

These may be some of the shortcomings of bitcoin that a quick second needs to solve: problem of anonymity, both who created the bitcoin and its users. Problem of open-source, finances are ultimately too sensitive and too important to be susceptible to a technology that’s public knowledge. And again, these problems can only ‘really’ be solved by a world government. 

Until then, enjoy the ride for the next 3-5 years….! But be safe. Only use money that you don’t need (1-3% of your assets), store your bitcoins off-line in cold storage and don’t buy too many bitcoins at once (because of unstable prices due to speculation). 

Continue reading

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Axis pandemic-recession: how to solve social inequalities
On the real problems that the recession has unveiled, and how we as a society might turn all of that around.


Prioritizing my life: goals and priorities are needed to succeed
On what it takes to realize New Year ambitions and any other time you might want to turn things around.

Shrink (2009)

I saw this movie in the movie theater when I lived in a city of a million souls that’s much like the city that’s portrayed in this movie (Los Angeles). It’s the kind of city that’s more idea than a place where you would actually want to live: over-populated, all concrete and out of proportion. It’s a story about a guy who’s on a path of self-destruction, but ultimately he’s after self-obliteration through too much drugs and too much booze. 

What I liked about this movie was both that notion of self-destruction that we all turn to on and off, but also that profession that I have played around in my head with and that I never quite gotten around to: it’s about a shrink. And not just that, it’s about a shrink who’s struggling to keep it together himself. 

At heart, this movie is a drama, because the main character struggles to get over the death of his wife (who committed suicide). Where the story gets really interesting is where he takes on a pro-bono case: a teenage girl who’s struggling to come to terms with the death of her mother, and whom, it turns out also ended her own life. 

It’s not a light movie, but it’s about a tough part of life and the way we struggle to deal with those tough parts. Junkie-ism is one end, but that’s not where it ends. 

Trailer

When to watch this movie

- when you live for a stretch in a big city, and you’re trying to figure out how people keep it all together in a place like that.

- when you’re tired, stretched thin and you’re leaning into booziness and all that.

- when you’re asking yourself what it would be like to be a successful therapist, and in general what life is like on the other side.

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Manhattan and Wild Strawberries in terms of narrative identity

Two classics, analyzed using one of my favorite ideas.


The Big Lebowski, Shrink and Lions for Lambs
Three classics in terms of 90s and post-90s.


90s: The X-Files, Blade Runner and The Matrix
Three movies that defined the 90s.

Prioritizing my life: goals and priorities are needed to succeed

This is the first article of ‘21 and that’s what makes the subject of this week’s article that more relevant. I know that it’s almost a cliché that people set resolutions for the New Year that they either don’t stick to or only stick to for a few weeks. In this article I want to explore why and how you can go about setting the sort of resolutions that you can actually stick to. And we will do this by looking at the most common New Year resolutions; those about diet and drinking habits.

First off: let’s not even assume that these habits are massive, and the little nudge that there’s always a social element involved where it becomes very hard to stick to a diet or non-drinking. The essential question that you have to ask yourself is: why would I want to change my diet and drinking habit?

And there is more going on here than you might initially think: health is its own moral instrument. No one in their right mind will deny that being healthy is better than being unhealthy. 

That makes being healthy and sticking to a diet not just good, but also the right thing to do. This is also where it creates the sort of moral imperative where it’s expected of us to change those habits. In fact, it should make it much easier to change those habits…. Why then is it so hard to stick to healthier ones? 

Okay, so this is not my choice?

This all means that it’s not even the question as to why you should stick to a healthy diet, because a lot of what roots for it is already lined up as it is. To make it work you would need to dig deeper to see if you can figure out how deep this root actually runs. 

If you have read any other of my articles, then you know that I’m a firm believer in this principle: look good, feel good, do good. I like this one, because this is where the health element is no longer limited to physical well-being. This is where it extends to include such things as our personal and professional lives.

Of course to look good doesn’t just have to do with diet, because it involves much more than just that. It has to do with lowering the amount of stress in your life, it has to do with getting enough rest and exercise, and it has to do with building the kind of life that you genuinely feel good about. 

That’s a lot to take into account, and it’s a lot to turn around if you haven’t got everything going for yourself right now. Here’s the deal though: to change all of that, you have to start somewhere and then branch out. 

When you have stuck to a diet for four weeks, expand to include exercise, or if you’re already exercising: step it up a notch. Meanwhile, read far and wide, read this site, read Gaze wide, aim far, read all over, read The Bird Man, watch YouTube and try to get a handle on what it means for you to build a better life. That’s when you start to apply the same line of thinking to the larger aspects of your life. 

Start with the end in mind

What you end up with is most likely not something that you had never considered: most of the time you already have a good understanding what you want out of life, but it’s just a matter of taking the right steps to get where you want to be. This in itself will be as much what you will get out of reading far and wide.

There is one thing that I can’t stress enough though: when you undertake anything, it will save you a lot of time and trouble if you start with the end in mind. This will give you direction and something to aim for, with chances being less likely of you getting side-tracked or running out of steam. 

This is where another essential element comes rolling in: you will have to mentally prepare yourself that things will probably take some time. During that time it may seem that you’re going after the wrong thing, at least that’s what folks around you might say. Your spouse might start nagging, your kids might be getting difficult, and there will be times when you yourself will be the only person that believes in what you’re after.

In the beginning it will all take a lot of time, you will struggle, you will not get things right the first time. That’s all to be expected, and it’s all part of the process: highly successful individuals all started somewhere and failed many times before they made it big. The playing field might be a little skewed for some individuals, with family money and a family business to move into, but other than that: the field is the same for everyone. 

The hard part is to see an opportunity for what it’s worth. When you plan to move into a certain career or when you have certain investments in mind, you will have to take your personal talents, interests, capabilities, character and all that into account. 

Don’t start big, start small

But hé, it’s just the beginning of the year, and there’s no need to rush into anything. There’s still the pandemic to consider, and that will give you some valuable time. The question is valid still though: why change your diet and drinking habit?

One last remark though, because this question kind of implies that you need an answer before changing your diet. That’s hardly the case, and that’s where you can compare this to other life changes. The answer to questions like these is fluid: you will find an answer over time, but its scope, heft and all that will shift. And that’s just how life works: we can talk about it, but when it comes down to it, it can hardly be summed up in so many words.

If your dream is to become a market gardener and you keep telling yourself that you will get started once you have saved enough cash to buy a piece of land, then you’re making excuses not to get started. Life rarely works like this: you don’t need to do this-and-that in order to do so-and-so. Instead: you can start doing this-and-that while doing so-and-so.

When you have the prior way of thinking, you will end up not doing anything. And that’s sad, because if you look back five years from now, you will say: if only…. 

Don’t be that person. Start today, whether it’s getting healthy, getting back in shape, or starting that new career. 

Key points

- most people make resolutions about diet after the New Year, and most people fail.

- the way not to fail is by digging deeper, and figuring out why you would want to change your diet.

- one way to succeed in a diet and anything else, is by starting with the end in mind.

- expect struggle and failure, and in the end: success.

- just get started, don’t wait for this-and-that.

Continue reading

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