Law versus Common Sense

Something occurred to me just now. I was reviewing my email and came across yet another obvious spam phishing piece of crap. The 'from' line says "Bank of America" and the 'subject' line says "Unauthorized Activity." The email address says "plukqb at accounts dot net." From this information I can glean it's spam. Predominantly because I do not have an account with Bank of America, and if I did they would not contact me via "random letters at generic word dot something other than com." However, this sort of email fools people all the time, even today. A spammer philistine can spam thousands of email addresses with little to no time or resources spent on their part, and they only need one fool to fall for it, for it to be worth that small investment.

I've said this before, but wherever I said it is lost so I guess I need to document it again here: shouting fire in a movie theater, when there is no fire, should not be illegal. It is an expression of free speech and therefore should be protected by the first amendment. However, the repercussions for such behavior have repeatedly in the past proven to be a detriment for the citizenry of a democratic republic, and so We The People generally agree to give up our freedom in this regard, in return for the security of being able to sit in a movie theater without getting trampled on by the thoughtless words of some mischievous malcontent who abuses inalienable rights.

We all agree to this. However, we give up a slice of inalienable rights when we do so, because we can't trust to police ourselves and all choose not to do something so malicious to one another. When we give up even a little of our inalienable rights, such rights stop being inalienable. What does inalienable mean? It means they can't be taken away - they are supposed to be inherently ours, but if we choose to give up a little bit, then common sense dictates it's possible that the rest can be taken away. So the word inalienable loses its meaning and purpose. That's just common sense.

There are laws on the books in which it is against the law to pose in public as a law enforcement officer. However, there are times when such behavior may be excused. A costume party for example, or perhaps a stripper in a club can wear an outfit for purposes of fantasy. However, even then it is expected that the person not behave in such a way as to purposefully fool others into thinking they have the authority of an actual policeman. If one takes advantage, there's a line that is drawn in the law and if caught, one can expect serious repercussions. Police don't take kindly to their authority being usurped. There are of course other forces out there who think the police have too much power, and maybe they'd pose as a policeman to tarnish the police reputation or otherwise undermine their efforts to impartially enforce the law. Some could argue there are people who are legitimately wearing the badge and the blues, who inadvertently undermine already.

Still, I can imagine legitimate reasons why someone who is not a policeman might pose as one, to harmless and perhaps even beneficial results. However, I can't for the life of me imagine a single scenario in which it would be somehow beneficial or at least harmless to pose as a financial institution. Are there laws on the books making it clearly illegal to pretend to be a bank in a virtual manner? There must be. If there are laws dictating how unacceptable it is to function in society yet undermine its law enforcement efforts, surely there's laws against undermining our economy.

Of course, how do you police that? If we sent to jail everyone who has purposefully or accidentally undermined our economy, we'd have to start with the last several executive administrations of the US government, and work our way down from there. I fear in one way or another, we're all guilty. How many of us can't afford to repay our debts in a timely manner? If one can't physically make enough money, bills don't get paid. The companies that expected those bills to get paid have to tighten their own belts, and spend even more money trying to collect those debts. This may lead to that company having less revenue than it needs to stay in the black and so it falls into debt to those it borrowed money from. It's a vicious cycle. No one wakes up in the morning saying they'll undermine the economy, but in one way or another we all do. If you own a credit card, you may be in debt and not even consciously think about it. That realization puts the insignificant spam in our inboxes in a bit of perspective, doesn't it? In our day to day lives, we have to police our own activities and those of the ones around us. We do our best to pay our debts and juggle our finances so as to hold up our little end of a very big monstrosity. It's never as easy as it looks.

We delete our own spam. We don't expect the government to do it for us. We try in our day to day lives to make the best choices we can for ourselves and those we love. It would be nice if the government could police these trouble spots for us, but sometimes the government is part of the problem. I'm sure it doesn't mean to be, but too many laws bogs down the system, and perhaps there are forces out there purposefully creating a need for more laws, because the more laws you have, the more you think you need, and any political system eventually grinds to a halt, encumbered by its own set of rules.

It would be nice if we didn't need these laws. It would be nice if every individual could choose to do the right thing because common sense dictates it's the right thing to do. However, allowing an anarchist state in which everyone just rules themselves leads to chaos and confusion, and a lot of jackasses screaming fire in movie theaters just cuz they can, and a lot of people getting trampled on just cuz they were in the way.

There's a level of existence that's below the radar for fat government intervention. There's a point where each of us must police ourselves as best we can. However, at that level we have little to no power to actually enforce such policing, especially if our fat government has already intervened in personal freedoms so much as to effectively leave us politically impotent. So a balance must be reached and that balance is ever precarious and fragile. It doesn't take much to sway rights and mights one way or the other. In fact it could happen right under our noses and we wouldn't even realize what we've lost. Laws are supposed to evolve out of common sense, but when they stop doing that, they start conflicting, and that's where it becomes harder and harder, within the confines of Man made Law, to truly be human.

What lies in the shadow of the statue?

A fellow Tweeter named Bram1977 recently made his very first tweet on Twitter this question, and it got me to thinking, that's quite an open question, isn't it? Those of us who watch the show from which this question came are presuming it's the statue of a four-toed, long-haired hippie named Anubis, but there's a lot of statues in the universe. Should we be so presumptuous?

Yet another recent conundrum has entered into the minds of we the teeming masses addicted to ABC's television series Lost. Eventually it is theorized that the writers and producers of Lost will answer that question for us. A few years ago they gave us a similarly cryptic question: "What did one snowman say to the other snowman?" The answer was of course, "smells like carrots." We say "of course" now, but back then it was a head scratcher.

Here's some possible answers you can throw at people if they smugly walk up to you and ask "What lies in the shadow of the statue?" I make no promises any of these answers will keep the questioner from knocking you unconscious with boating equipment.

1. Pigeon poop
2. A pile of missing socks
3. Carmen Sandiego
4. The off ramp from I-423 to the Basingstoke turnpike. Which leads to cake.
5. the temple. duh.
6. Anubis' farts, and he just ate a bunch of fish tacos.
7. All that imaginary revenue that movie companies and music businesses insist they've lost since Internet Filesharing became popular.
8. Manhattan. If you're referring to the Statue of Liberty. By the way, I'd like a Manhattan. Where's the nearest bar?
9. Seashells she sells by the seashore.
10. The operative word to that question is LIES.
11. Cake. Which is a lie.
12. A Starbucks that's about to be 'downsized.'
13. Whatever it is, I'm as "ahnk"sious to find out as you.

My money's on five, by the way, but since I have no money of which to speak, that's not very important.

There Goes The Twitterhood

Well. It's official. Oprah Winfrey has formally joined us on Twitter. At the moment, you can go to http://tinyurl.com/5tkvaw and see just how many normal people (people like you and me who aren't as rich or famous as Oprah) are talking about it. From the time I started this post to now there are currently 509 new realtime results ...no make that 519. ...uhm. I mean 534. My search twitter thing updates every ten seconds. ...551.

Over at http://tinyurl.com/ckllw3 a sweetheart named Leighann (whom I will probably find myself reading more than Oprah Winfrey's posts in the days to come) isn't taking this too well. She blames all this on Ashton Kutcher, who is another celebrity that is far more rich and famous than you or I will ever be. He recently stirred up a littls shitstorm of free publicity by announcing if he could get a million Tweeple to follow him at @aplusk before an allegedly popular @cnnbrk tweeter hit a million followers, Ashton would spend whatever money it took to save the third world of malaria by sending them mosquito nets. Yes that reads a little surreal to me too but presumably his heart's in the right place.

The thing is, having a million followers doesn't necessarily mean you have to follow a million people. So Mr. Kutcher is banking on the fact there are a million people on this planet who want to hear what he has to say, without being able to get him to hear what they have to say.

Leighann has a public message for Ashton Kutcher. "Let me tell you what is wrong with your plan for world domination," Leighann says very clearly and succinctly with no trace of irony, "Twitter is a two-way street."

Actually, it's not. It has this remarkable ability to grant the illusion of a two way street, but what we're all really doing in Twitter is shouting into a void, and if someone happens to choose to walk over to that void and listen for Tweets that may be of interest to them, then you get a possible two way connection going. However, then they have to choose to tweet back at you, and they have to know how to do that properly so that the convo can continue. Twitter's a new beast and not everyone's down with its complexities. The ignorance can make one think they're a part of the circuit when really they're not.

Let's take Oprah's first tweet for example. You can check this out for yourself over at http://twitter.com/Oprah but lemme save you the click. She said "HI TWITTERS . THANK YOU FOR A WARM WELCOME. FEELING REALLY 21st CENTURY ." Now there's a number of glaring errors I can point out. The first one you probably see for yourself. She's typing in all caps. Apparently someone made her aware of the faux pas because her following tweets were all lower case.

Another error she made was referring to Tweeple as Twitters. It is currently acceptable to call those who use Twitter as either Tweeple or Tweeters, but Twitters would be multiple Twitter accounts, not the people using them. Twitter.com itself is ambivalent. It's a thing. It's a tool that is used by Tweeple. It's the Tweeple that will respond to Oprah's presence in a spectrum of nonambivalent ways. See how that works? In order to keep from confusing ourselves, we can't refer to one another as Twitters. We're Tweeple, and Twitter is a separate entity.

A "Twitter" is a webpage on twitter.com, like say for example http://www.twitter.com/ZachsMind That's one Twitter. Two twitters would be http://www.twitter.com/ZachsMind and http://www.twitter.com/wilw (who is Wil Wheaton by the way). Two examples of Tweeters or Tweeple would be me and Wil Wheaton, because we both use Twitter and have Twitter accounts but aside from that we don't have a lot in common. I read his Tweets on occasion and I doubt he's ever read mine.

Another error Oprah made was not referring directly to the person or persons to whom she meant to convey her message. Now in this case, she can get away with it, because essentially she's talking to anyone who knows that she's taken this historic leap as a rich and famous person and placed her personage upon the ambivalence that is Twitter; because Twitter.com itself is, as I said before, ambivalent. This error she made in her first Tweet does not become evident until her second and third Tweets.

Oprah's second Tweet was entered thusly: "hi jimmy order a reuben for me." Notice how quickly she's adapting by switching from upper case to lower case. Good for her! However, she is asking someone named Jimmy to order her a Reuben. This only works if 1) The Jimmy she is referring to is looking directly at her Tweets right now, and 2) he's within driving distance or has some way to remotely order a reuben sandwich and have it delivered to her door. Chances are this Jimmy she's referring to is like a producer or intern or someone under her employ, in which case shouting at him across the room asking for a reuben might have been more appropriate than if she sent a Tweet to the void anticipating he'd telepathically know she sent it.

A better way of producing that Tweet might have been "hi @jimmy order a reuben for me." but this would only work if @jimmy were actually http://www.twitter.com/jimmy and it's not. That Tweeter is Jimmy Naylor, a self-described "skinny" photographer living in London England who has better things to do with his time than go get Oprah Winfrey reuben sandwiches.

So, clearly, Oprah is shouting out into the Twitter void for purposes of the camera and the novely of it, but her actions reveal the truth; she has no intention of ever listening back. Nor does Ashton Kutcher. He has a million followers maybe, and hopefully he'll stay true to his promise and a lot of kids who could die from malaria in the future will now be saved thanks to the attention he's bringing to a serious problem in the third world. That's all well and good. Their hearts are in the right place.

However, they prove in their actions that Twitter is not a two way street. It's a void. You have to invest the time and resources to make it a two way street, and no one has the time or resources to invest in building a million two way streets in that virtual void. You can opt to shout at Oprah and Ashton all you want via new technologies. Please just don't lose sleep over the fact you won't get any shouts back, because they're not listening. Please don't take that personally. Not that I have any personal experience in this arena, but based on my research, I can say with confidence, being rich and famous is a full time job. Just ask Wil Wheaton. ...No wait. Don't. He doesn't promise to Tweet you back either.

You Don't Know Jack

I do plan to use this space in the future to talk about more than Lost, but with the latest episode (Some Like It Hoth) still weighing heavily on my mind, and the season five finale looming over our heads in the near future, I wanted to take a moment to unload my opinion regarding a character for whom so many fans of Lost seem to have the most polarizing emotions. You either love the guy or you hate him. Very few of us are objective here. I like to think I can be objective, because I try to approach shows like Lost from the perspective of an aspiring writer, or rather, a bitter rejected writer who gave up years ago trying to make it in the world and envious of those who can.

When it comes to Dr. Jack Shephard, I'm unable to be objective. Furthermore his continued presence on the series makes me realize I'm not able to be as objective as I'd like to be about any character on any show, and when I think I am, I'm only fooling myself. On the surface I think, and have thought since about halfway through season one, that Jack is a tool. He's a douche. He's an asshole. I think the writers purposefully invented a character that we'd fall in love with from the get go, and then the more we learn of him the more we find he's a rimjob. However, first impressions are very powerful. A woman falls in love with a man who later starts abusing her, but she's so enamored by who she thinks she knows he really is, that she tries to get past his flaws and tendencies to cause her pain, because she believes deep down he's just as honorable and likeable as he was on the surface when they first met. In the case of Jack, I don't think there is a soft gooey center. I think deep down he's empty.

When we first meet him, he's all over that beach. There's scores of people dead, dozens of people injured, and he's quite objectively the only person within shouting distance qualified to handle the situation. People have argued at length that he has some kind of hero complex, and the tv series itself has admitted that Jack has an obsession with fixing things. I don't fully fall for that line of psychological pandering. I think in the moment on the beach after the crash, Jack was not trying to be a hero. He was simply reacting to the situation.

If you're a doctor, and have enough experience under your belt to be called a Chief Surgeon at a prestigious hospital in a major metropolitan area, you have served more hours than you'd probably wanna count in the ER. That's where they cut the teeth of new recruits in the medical game, and that's where old veterans go to die. When you pull several twelve hour shifts in the Emergency wing of a large hospital, you're gonna see your share of emergencies, and you're going to learn how to deal with them as they come in much the same way a kid learns how to swim or ride a bicycle. You keep doing it till you get it right, or die trying. You do it until you get muscle memory for it, till you can do it in your sleep, cuz sometimes you are. There's no rest for the weary when you're under the gun and on the clock in an ER. From a domestic fire to a gang war to unanticipated problems at a construction site, whatever the cause of the injuries is not relevant - all that matters is you got a body in front of you that doesn't want to die and you patch it back together so it won't - or you fail and a life is lost. Then you move on to the next one.

When Jack Shephard ran out of that jungle and saw bodies strewn about all over the shoreline, he just went into ER mode. It's what his muscles knew to do. He was fired up on so much adrenaline that he barely stopped to notice his own injuries until everyone else was stable. Does that still make you a hero if you've been programmed since medical school to be one?

Since that day, most of the rest of the survivors just instinctively turned to Jack as their leader. Why is that? For the same reason he turned to ER mode when he saw injured. We as human beings are independent thinkers but we are also instinctively creatures of habit. Jack's performance that first day gave the other survivors an illusion of security. They thought a man who behaved like Jack did, personally attending to their wounds and instinctively working up near future plans for how to survive the immediate crisis, would naturally mean this was the guy qualified for getting them off the island. They were wrong. Jack had been trained to take care of immediate pressing issues, but he had no tactical experience in long range plans with unspecified enemies and dangers. He made choices and people followed his orders and he was wrong and they were wrong.

Jack suggested they all move to the caves, without thinking to see if they were even structurally sound. Jack antagonized the native population of the Island when he should have been diplomatically negotiating a truce. Jack promised to get everyone rescued and he was only able to save six of them, and even then not for very long. His behaviors have proven reactionary, with little to no thought. I think when he tried to commit suicide on the bridge, that was ultimately what he had come to terms with - every action he had made since that day had been wrong. He hadn't thought things through, and he was fully unqualified to be the leader of the survivors. It had never even been his choice to make. He was never even given an opportunity to say no. Just as he became a doctor because his father told him to be a doctor, the survivors unofficially chose him as their leader and he just went along with it. Why? Cuz that's all he knows. Jack's not a leader. He never has been. He became Chief of Surgery and he became the leader of the Losties for the same reason: he's following his dad. He's following Christian. He became a leader because he's a follower.

The only good thing he's done recently is to back off and watch Sawyer dig himself into a hole by doing exactly the opposite: Sawyer's now essentially the leader of what's left of the Losties. He's trying to solve their current predicament through guile and cunning and subterfuge. Why? Cuz that's what he knows. That's how he's been trained since youth - to be a con man. The really funny thing? He's not doing a lot better than Jack did.

Lost versus the Temporal Paradox

Both online and offline, I've found myself, geek that I am, repeatedly in a similar argument with other geeks and more mainstream fans of the ABC tv series Lost. I attribute this to decades of television shows like the Star Trek franchise, Quantum Leap, Voyagers, Time Tunnel, Doctor Who, Red Dwarf, Sliders, Outer Limits, Twilight Zone, Tru Calling, and most recently, Heroes. I also blame the Terminator franchise and the Back To The Future trilogy. What all these shows have in common is the use of what some (not all) Quantum Physicists (perhaps predominantly the ones who like cameras and audiences more) would call the Many Worlds Theory of Quantum Mechanics, because of temporal paradoxes.

In a nutshell it goes something like this: in your future you view a webpage that shows you how to make a time machine. You build said time machine and go back in time where something so terrible happens you don't want to experience it, so you travel forward in time to the day when you first learned how to make a time machine and convince yourself not to make it. That way, you'll never go back in time and you'll never experience that horrific event. However, that horrific event was the impetus that caused you to tell yourself not to go back in time. So if you never made the time machine, you could never have experienced that horrific event, and therefore you wouldn't know to stop yourself from making the time machine.

With the Many Worlds Theory, what actually happened was you went forward in time and met yourself and in that instant, you entered an alternate reality. Some theorists think the event of meeting yourself would cause a 'rupture' in reality and others say that reality was always there waiting for you, identical in every way but your arrival to it. The thing is, when you meet yourself, you experience an alternate reality and that other you is not you, because you don't recall meeting yourself in your past, and this other you never makes the time machine. So it's impossible to change your own reality in this manner. Were you to go back in time one second prior to the furthest past you've been, and then immediately return to the exact instant that you left, in theory you'd be back at your original reality (or at the very least, a reality so close to your own that you'd probably never notice it wasn't exactly the same one).

But think about this a moment: For this to be possible, we are not talking about a finite number of alternate universes. There would have to be literally an infinite number of possible realities existing simultaneously omnisciously throughout all of time and space. Perhaps some realities were so similar that at certain causation points they'd have to merge causing some historical innacuracies among those who travelled through time, but people experiencing the universe on a linear temporal causation vector would have no idea that when you went back to change history that any change to history had ever been made, provided it was a relatively small change and in the big scheme of things universally, ANYTHING happening on Earth would be comparatively insignificant.

Some writers would dismiss the causation loops and merges. They'd treat their time story as if there were one final outcome reality. They wouldn't waste time trying to understand the ramifications of their lucid approach to time travel. No wonder speculative fiction, particularly time travel stories, rarely interest a mainstream audience beyond novelty: they never make any sense.

Now many who have been watching Lost are expecting that critical climactic moment when Jack or Locke do something significant that changes everything, and all the sudden (for one possible example) they will have never crashed on that Island because they never had to. However, the writers and producers of Lost have gone so out of their way to avoid this and have even telegraphed to the viewers that they are not going to do this, that it frustrates me more and more when I find myself in a message or a phone conversation or over drinks at a restaurant and this topic inevitably comes up.

I talk Lost. I'm a geek. So?

The writers have clearly pointed out that whatever happened before on the show, even if it was in the future, it happened. It's not going to un-happen. This is not your grand-daddy's time travel story. Everything is in stone. Whatever happened happened. They even made that the title of a recent episode. How can they make it any more clear? When Sayid shot young Ben, in an attempt to keep Ben from growing up and turning into the jackass that has been causing trouble for our heroes since they first landed on the Island, he inadvertently started the very chain of events required to turn Ben into the (once and perhaps again) leader of The Others. One can argue that had Sayid not shot Ben, eventually he would have defected to The Others anyway. That was obviously the child's goal at the time, but it could have also been a phase he was going through. Arguing over whether or not Ben would have become the man he is without Sayid's interference is not relevant. Sayid shot young Ben. That always happened, because whatever happened happened.

There is not an alternate reality here in which other events occurred in a different order. There's only one reality and that's the reality they have shown us thus far. Notice that they have purposefully told the story out of sequence, but they are holding true to a very detailed timeline. Furthermore, they very rarely show one scene that immediately overlaps another, unless it's all part of the same internal narrative. The first 180 days on the Island, we think we know everything that transpired from the moment they crashed to the moment the Oceanic Six escaped, but if you back over the television series carefully, there are a number of opportunities for the writers to go back and invent events that occurred which would explain things happening later.

Claire's disappearance for example. What we know is that Miles, Sawyer, and Claire were alone in the woods. Miles told Sawyer that Claire followed Christian into the jungle. We saw Claire wake up and witness Christian holding Aaron. Sawyer and Miles found Aaron abandoned at the base of a nearby tree. There's several ways to explain these events from a writing perspective, but the writers (prior to Some Like It Hoth) purposefully avoided telling us for purposes of suspense. Also perhaps because they're not entirely sure themselves but purposefully left a lot of information vague and ambiguous so that they could fill in the blanks later. They could not have done that had they not kept the events of that night open to interpretation. Furthermore, when they explain that night, they will do so in a way that keeps more holes open that they can opt to fill in later. They may show us what happened between 3 and 4 am but we won't know what happened from the point immediately after they all fell asleep to the moment immediately after Claire left Aaron behind. There'll be time (even if it's just moments) unaccounted for. This is by design, so they can add more events later if they need to explain why a future event doesn't mesh with a past event.

From the standpoint of an aspiring writer, witnessing this unfold is brilliance in action. In essence this means the tv series cannot have any temporal paradoxes. The writers aren't allowing it. Notice how little information the characters seem to share with one another. Again, this is by design, so they don't have to later explain why character X didn't stop Y from happening after being cautioned about it from character Z. The more in the dark most of the characters are, the better, and in some cases the more in the dark we are the better.

Another argument I'm finding myself in, though not as often at least yet, is whether or not Ben knew that our Losties were going to visit him as a child. When Ben had been captured and was pretending to be Henry Gale, he did not seem to recognize Sayid. That's been explained away for now as trauma due to his injuries. However, back at the end of season two, Ben purposefully had Michael bring four specific Losties to him at the pier. Those four people were Kate, Hurley, Sawyer, and Jack. No one else. It had to be those four. That just happens to be the same four (not including Miles, Faraday, or Charlotte who hadn't arrived yet on the Island) who later found themselves back in time living with the Dharma Initiative.

But were Jack, Kate, and Hurley ever meant to leave the Island? YES. However, they couldn't remain off the Island, because there was historical evidence (the photograph hanging on the wall in the old Dharma office for example) that proved they had been on the Island in the past. When Locke tells Jack they were never meant to leave, that's misleading. They were always meant to leave, but they're also always meant to have come back. In fact, had they never left, they never would have been on the 316 plane which led to their journey back in time. So, not only does everything that happened have to happen, but everything that will happen did happen.

This inevitably leads to the question of predeterminism versus free will. That opens a whole new can of worms.

Wow..

How long has this been here and I'd completely forgot about it? I used to have my own domain; zachsmind.com. That's gone. Long story. Not worth dwelling on. Let's see if I can start using this as a place to leave pieces of brain so that in theory I can find them later. I lost all the brain parts I'd left behind on the web before. Perhaps they're somewhere in Web Archives. It's probably for the best that they're gone altogether. I don't recall having left anything substantial. I'd been doing the Online Diary thing since September of 1997 when my wife said she wanted a divorce. A lot has happened since then, but none of it really significant in the grand scheme of things. After having poured my heart and soul into that previous attempt at a website for close to a decade, I now have absolutely nothing to show for it. I used to think I had so much to say, but the older I get the more I know I know nothing, and the less I feel I have to offer humanity. I feel small and insignificant and I think I always was that, but it's one thing to be that, and it's quite another to know.

Ants don't know how insignificant they are. Moreover, they don't care. Perhaps they're better off.