Welcome to my first ever Movie Trailer Premise Review. Due to a confluence of recent events (ticket prices are going up/banks are no longer lending) I can no longer afford to review actual films. So, I’ve decided to watch TV trailers for upcoming titles and review the premise of these movies instead.

Today we’ll be taking a look at James Cameron’s AVATAR. What I’ll attempt to do here in a few thousand words is live up to the concise genius of Southpark, which was able to sum up everything I have to say with a mere three: “Dances with Smurfs.”

Yeah, this movies is “Dances with Wolves,” except the natives are blue. The gist is that a tribe of peace-loving aliens, living in harmony with their environment, are sitting on a goldmine of precious resources. Civilized man, with all his corrupting machines, wants to wipe them out for some little jewels. So they send in a specialist to learn from these noble savages, determining the best method for smuggling in their smallpox-laden blankets. The man “goes native,” falls in love with one of the girls (after initial spats), and eventually helps the peace-loving people rally with their primitive tools and beat the everliving shit out of the dirty men with their dirty machines.

(Damn, I just realized “The Last Samurai” has the exact same plot.)

As a premise, I have to give this one zero out of five stars. And not because it has already been done (to death), and not because “The Return of the Jedi” would have been better with Wookies, rather than Ewoks, but because this premise is built on a fallacy that creates much heartache and confusion. It’s the fallacy of the noble savage. The idea that humans are born good and perverted by society. Not only is this an outright fabrication, it’s a dangerous (I will argue: evil) idea.

It doesn’t take a deep survey of human history, nor much time with the Discovery Channel, to see how nasty and brutish primitive humans are/were. The myth that man lived, or even desired to live, in harmony with his environment is complete bunk. Take the history of Easter Island. You know, the little spit of land with all the stone faces on it. Know why those people went extinct? Because they denuded their entire island of trees, primarily to make rollers to move around those statues. And the island is so small, the dudes chopping down the last tree could not have been in doubt that they were, indeed, doing something no Easter Islander would ever get to do again.

Without material for their homes, or to build boats for fishing, they moved into caves and slowly starved to death. These were hunter-gatherers that could not live in harmony with their land, nor did they show any awareness of such a process, or drive to discover it. They did what all animals do: grab as many resources as possible and stuff it all in their gullet as quick as they can. It amuses me that people use Easter Island as a warning, as if this should be a lesson to us for future catastrophes. Yeah, that’s why modern loggers replant trees. The lesson here is one of optimistic improvement, not dire jeremiad, people.

How about “Head Smashed In,” the aptly-named cliff used by Aboriginal people to drive entire herds of bison to their grisly, twitching deaths? Massacred by the hundreds, this ingenious method of resource extraction included dressing up like Wiley Coyote to urge the animals to their demise. So now we have primitive peoples committing genocide and lying to animals at the same time. Simply horrific. Of course, modern anthropologists still attempt to see this as some sort of “balance,” pretending the excess meat was used for the winter months. I’m certain they are right. Herds ranging from 100 to 400 somehow served the same goal. I can see the tribe leader with his Wiley Coyote disguise jumping out at the last minute, waving off the several dozen bison at the back of the herd. “Wait!” he would say. “We have plenty! Go and be fruitful and multiply!”

Yeah, right.

What puzzles me most about the worship of early man is that it is most frequently performed by those that should be most outraged by primitive behavior. These same, clueless folk purport to know and love the natural kingdom, but look at the natural kingdom! Most animals live in a state of constant warfare with their environment. Eating and killing each other, growing spikes to ward off the hungry, developing toxins to poison the same. The only balance in nature is the evolution of aggression and defense. The antelope evolve speed to get away from the cheetah, which is evolving for more speed. One lives in fear and the other on the verge of starvation. You really have to love it when these people rationalize the brutality by pointing out how much “stronger” the herd gets as the sick and the lame are culled. Hitler couldn’t have said it better.

The other night, I showed my wife a picture of a bacteriophage, an incredible little organism that actually does to bacteria what many bacteria try to do to us: take over another being’s living processes for its own. Not only is the brutality of nature broad, it’s also deep. Even bacteria have smaller things that prey on it! Violence in nature seems to be not the exception, but the rule.

The denial of nature runs deep with those that pretend to love it. Even though rape is not uncommon in the natural kingdom, these people still contend it’s a human invention. Even when it’s caught on video. Yeah, the oft-worshiped bottlenose dolphin gang-rape their females. Lovely, right? In zoos, they won’t mix dolphin species because the male bottlenose will torment and rape the females. These are the mammals often cited by nature-lovers as “probably smarter than we are.”

Great.

How about the diving beetle? Its method of procreation is to half-drown the female, holding it under water until it’s so exhausted it can’t put up any defense. Sounds like a keg stand, doesn’t it? What about the infamous preying mantis, with its demonstration of ultimate girl-power? Among spiders, death, rape and reproduction form a common threesome. And birds aren’t just violent with their sex, they are also devious. Cuckold rates among some bird species run into the 30-40% range. And I’m not even going to get into the various penis structures used to remove the last rapist’s sperm before inserting one’s own. The corkscrews and barbs and hooks … okay, that’s enough of that.

What about war? Well, we know insects war with one another, but how about something closer to mankind? Good golly, primates do it?! Jane Goodall, say it isn’t so!

Damn you, Jane! What’s really telling about her speech, and really listen to it, is that her colleagues told her she shouldn’t have published the accounts. I repeat (or hit the “play again” button), Jane took heat for distributing scientific truth! And that’s what we’re up against, people. Those that worship at the altar of nature (and know jack-shit about it) think whatever happens in the animal kingdom is “good” and “virtuous.” They live by the naturalistic fallacy, which means they have to cover up nature, lest they take its many examples of barbarism as intrinsic life-lessons.

Just as AVATAR’s premise is wholly flawed, so is the naturalistic fallacy on which it’s based. There is no reason to suppose that nature has things figured out, or that the behavior among other organisms is righteous. None at all. In fact, the strident clinging to this arbitrary premise, and the desire to ignore data and pervert science in order to maintain it, makes nature-loving nutjobs the mirror image of the religious fruitcakes they openly loathe. Irony almost as delicious as the 500 million dollar budget and advanced CGI it takes for James Cameron to tell us that modernity sucks.

What about war? Surely, since civilization corrupts the noble savage, we should find that war is ever on the rise, right? Oops. Even with the famous worldwide conflagrations of the 20th century, it turns out that war, and its brutal methods and techniques, have been on the decline over the entire course of human history. Admit it, your brain just twitched inside your skull, right? Now you’re probably wondering how I doctored that Jane Goodall video. Once again, you can deny the facts and live in a world of your choosing, or you can explore the data and see where it leads. War is on the decline. Even today.

The UN’s Human Security Report looked at more recent trends (treating WWII as an aberration) and found conflicts from 1992 to 2005 shot down a whooping 40%. They also looked at trends from post-WWII up to modern times, with even more positive news (albeit slanted; starting from the worst years and looking forward is bad science). Even better, however, is the overall picture. If you look from primitive man to the present, the chances of dying at the hands of another human have steadily gone down. Check out what Stephen Pinker had to say about these studies (and dig the recommended reading list below).

What really bothers me about AVATAR, and all the uneducated nutjobs that come down hard on modernity, is that they get it completely backwards. It makes their viewpoint not just ignorant, but evil. They promote a mode of life that is worse for all humans. Life with ritual sacrifice. Life with environmental destruction more absolute than industrialized society (check out clear-cutting by primitive farmers vs. the modern logging industry). Life where women were raped, especially those won by conquest. Life where infanticide was common (as it still is in our primate cousins). Life where resources were always scarce, starvation a looming threat, and war far more common. They worship a life where infant mortality is higher (and the death of the mother as well). Where disease was rampant and almost untreatable (the vast majority of native Americans died from mere contact with Europeans, not from warfare). Life full of superstition. Life that didn’t, on average, last as long.

I like to keep the Hopi Indians in mind as a lesson on how not to live with our environment. Excessively cruel to animals, Hopi children used to (and still do, for all I know) tie birds on a string and swing them around. Reporting to anthropologists they admitted, “sometimes they get tired, and die, but nobody minds.” Worse, the Hopi played a game with live chickens where the body is buried, they run (and later ride horses) by the bird, trying to grab it by the neck. Once the head comes off, there’s a mad scramble over the body and the victor goes to the participant that comes away with the largest piece. If you are a Michael Vick fan, you’ll love that the Hopi used to kill dogs and pigs at dances for sport. Not to eat, but for entertainment.

Asked if these animals didn’t feel pain by Brandt, an anthropologist that lived and worked closely with them, they were quick to say the animal probably felt a great deal of pain. “Was this pain different than your pain?” Brandt asked. “No,” they said. “I sure wouldn’t want to be that chicken.”

So what do we make of these celebrations of more primitive, and far less ethical modes of existence? Mere ignorance by their proponents? Dissatisfaction with one’s own life mixed with a bit of old-fashioned nostalgia? A perpetuated myth, verging on the strength, complexity, and persistence of a formalized religion? I think it’s a lot of these things, perhaps a mix of all of them. What’s most annoying about the adherents of this religion, those that worship at the altar of nature without knowing the first thing about her, is that the world keeps getting better. Our ethics improve, our treatment of each other improves, and yet we pine for a return to our barbaric past. It isn’t just wrong, it’s evil.

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Recommended reading:

War Before Civilization by Lawrence Keeley

Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage by Stephen LeBlanc

The Origins of War: Violence in Prehistory by Jean Guilaine

The Blank Slate by Stephen Pinker

My post on Capitalism

The following statistic: 99.99% of all Earth creatures are now extinct. That’s what they do.

Don’t forget: these are future fiction stories.

I’ve watched the video several times now, and the movement is so uniquely human that I find myself empathizing with the robot. How weird is that? Watch it one more time and tell me if you don’t feel a tinge of emotion when the unit is shoved, and regains its balance. Or if there isn’t something in you that says “enough” when showing the max speed it can attain.

It’ll probably be within my lifetime that we have a walking, talking robot that looks almost completely human. The ethical dilemmas that creation will pose should be quite interesting.

I’ve had an interesting series of conversations recently with people that are coming down hard on capitalism. The argument was that this evil system of economics is directly responsible for the current global economic downturn.* There’s two things interesting about this argument. First, none of the people I spoke with seemed to understand what the word “capitalism” means. Second, it is the very features of our system that defy capitalism that led to this mild mess we’re in.

What is capitalism? Simple. It’s the economic freedom of all people. Seriously. Wiki it. And hurry, before somebody edits my entry.

All capitalism means is that the people own their own stuff. We can possess our own land, we can start our own business, we can determine the price of goods we create, and we can enter into binding contracts with one another. That’s it. This is a system that creates economic freedoms of potential (if not outcome). How can people be against freedom? Because they don’t like the choices other people make and would really like to have complete control over someone else.

Before we get into that, let’s talk about why the US economy goes through a constant cycle of boom-and-bust. It’ll also explain how very un-capitalistic our economy is at the core. That’s right, the most basic and fundamental elements of any capitalist economy do not exist in the United States. And that’s the value and valuation of currency.

A side-note on what money is, for those that seem to hate or distrust it. Money is a token used to represent work. It’s the stand-in, the go-between, for a cobbler and a butcher. One man trades shoes for another’s sausage. Even when they don’t need each other’s wares at the exact same time. Hating money is like hating trade between two free peoples, or hating the idea that a person’s work has any intrinsic value. I usually find that people who hate money are misplacing their hatred of greed (or expressing their own envy and materialism).

When the Federal Reserve tinkers with interest rates, they alter the valuation of money. They dictate what a dollar is worth, rather than allowing the markets to decide (read: “people” for “markets.” Same thing). When they want the economy to go into a boom phase, they lower interest rates. To zero, if need-be. What is the effect of this government interference in the market? People learn that they are fools to save. Money in the bank earns no interest. Besides, money is so cheap to borrow, you’re crazy not to grab as much as you can and gamble with it somewhere. If you can buy a tech stock, or flip a house, or move some Florida property and make an easy 15%, well you’re borrowing at 5%, so you might be insane if you don’t jump onboard.

By aiming for economic excess, politicians that know nothing of economics create a boom that will later correct itself. People applaud the booms as if they’re good things, but they are the problem. Downturns and recessions are the solution.

Here’s what would happen in a purely capitalist economy: A new investment fad pops up, the tulip-craze of the decade. Fiscal idiots (the first to react. Always) rush to their banks and borrow tons of cash to invest in this fad. The interest rate, which had been at a sensible 7%, begins to climb. Why? Because demand has gone up and supply has gone down. Money is being borrowed at a faster pace as these early-adopting bozos grab cash at seven and make fifteen on the second wave of suckers. But, as the rate climbs all the way up to 12% or 15%, the margin disappears on the wild investment. There’s no easy cash to be had. However, since rates went up, moderately minded fiscal rationalists flock to the bank to save away their cash. Now they are making an easy 5% or 7% on the backs of the gamblers.

With a floating interest rate, all booms would temper themselves before fiscal conservatives found themselves tempted to join. The saving rate would be much higher, and we would enjoy slow growth, rather than a boom and bust cycle. The Federal Reserve knows this and they attempt to perform the movements in rates themselves, but a quarter jump every three months, when what we might need is a five percent jump overnight, creates a problem. And, this highlights what anti-capitalists miss. We live in a MANAGED economy. A PLANNED economy. It is the un-capitalist features that get us in trouble.

“But what of the Bernie Madoffs and the Enrons?” you might ask. To which I say, “What do those people have to do with economic freedom?” That’s like saying human liberty sucks because some people commit murder and others steal. There is nothing capitalist about robbing people. That’s a violation of someone else’s economic liberty. Any trampling of someone’s liberty should be punished, just like any other violation of the law. This also goes for insider trading, collusion between government and business, subsidies, tariffs, inequities of taxation, etc… None of these are features of capitalism; they are the antithesis of it!

The current thinking on economic freedom seems to be this: Human liberty occasionally results in abuses of human liberty. Free people often use that freedom to trample the freedom of another free person. In order to make sure the latter has freedom from the former, we need to remove ALL human freedom. That is, in order to make sure nobody murders anyone ever again, we need to all be locked up in our individual cages. This is what’s best for mankind.

That’s the argument being made by otherwise intelligent people these days. The only way to have economic freedom is to remove it from everyone. Place it in the hands of a few, even though the power they already wield is the very thing that got us in this mess!

I have a better solution. Let’s fight to ensure that everyone has as much economic liberty as possible. Any violation of that liberty will be prosecuted with extreme justice. Let’s not bail out big banks, but leave them free to fail. Let’s not bail out the auto biz, but leave foreign car makers free to out-do us. Let’s not tax goods from other countries, but leave them free to prosper if they can out-compete us. Let’s stop paying farmers to not grow crops, let’s get rid of the tax incentives to have big houses and lots of babies, let’s let interest rates go up so we’ll learn to save, and let’s allow gas prices to soar so we’ll learn to walk.

And let’s stop being so envious. The very people who say, “Money can’t make you happy,” seem to be the ones miserable over other people’s wealth. Who cares if a board gives billions of dollars to a CEO? Let that guy ruin his life with cocaine and Ferraris wrapped around telephone poles. If those billions were generated by free people willingly purchasing billions of iPods, the board can do whatever they want with it. Stop being motivated by envy. Prosecute those stealing, whether it’s your cubicle-neighbor taking office supplies or Bernie Madoff building a pyramid. Learn to distinguish between freedom and tyranny instead of assuming it aligns with losses and profits.

Remember: Capitalism is synonymous with human liberty. Freedom for the little people. It’s something we could use more of, not less. Seriously, Wiki it. And hurry.

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*Okay, I typed “crisis,” and then deleted it and used “downturn” instead. It’s hard to be both a pessimist and a historian. Ten percent unemployment? That’s what many European economies have as a baseline in the best of times. And everywhere I go, people seem to be overweight and lugging shopping bags and babies. Sorry, but I use “downturn” loosely.

The rumors have been swirling for most of this year: Barnes and Noble has an ebook coming. With a massive catalog of digital books at their disposal, and market share evaporating (and condensing around Amazon), they needed to do something.

What they’ve done is re-imagined the e-reader while the devices are still in their infancy. Let me explain what other e-reader manufacturers have been working toward so you’ll appreciate the brilliant dual-screen nature of the Nook.

E-readers are great for long periods of reading because of the new display technology they use. The black and white text isn’t backlit, instead you have an electrical sandwich full of ink that moves around thanks to an electrical charge. It’s called e-ink and it is viewable from ambient light, meaning you can read it in full-on sunlight, just like a printed page.

This technology makes reading a screen as gentle on your eyes as regular ink. Hence the name and hence its use in e-readers. The display has several problems, however. The transitions between pages require a bit of delay, in order to make the screen touch-sensitive, the overlay blurs the text, and color is EXPENSIVE.

Here’s how the Nook solves a few problems common to other readers: By adding a second color touchpanel using traditional technology, they give you a fast, touch-sensitive, color interface for choosing books, going through menu options, searching documents, displaying cover art, etc… Other e-readers try to incorporate the menus into the e-ink display, giving you a delay between choosing options, fuzzy text thanks to the touch-screen, and prohibitive expense if you want better graphics. By trying to do both, the screens do neither function well.

The Nook’s solution is so elegant (and in hindsight, obvious), that it isn’t surprising to see the combo being utilized in at least two other devices (that I know of). I’ve got a real good feeling about the Nook. It’s snazzy, it has the backing of the right company, and shoppers will be seeing these in their favorite bookstores, making them trust the device as a complement to their usual reading, not some digital monster to fear over the internet.

I love the story of Srinivasa Iyengar Ramanujan, the Indian genius who taught himself mathematics and went on to create sublime proofs, capturing the attention of the world’s greatest mathematical thinkers. One-in-a-million prodigies like this seem to be sprinkled throughout time and geography, their distribution as random as it is sure. Just as a few people are born that grow over seven feet tall, the far reaches of the bell curve flashes with the odd Newton, Mozart, or William Kamkwamba.

Never heard of the last? Born in Malawi, and unable to afford formal schooling, young William took to breaking INTO class while so many of his worldwide contemporaries are struggling to break OUT. He was barred from school, so he turned to the local library, and their wealth of free information.

One day, he came across a book of windmills, and started dreaming about having electricity in his home. Power remains a rare commodity in William’s country; a mere 2% have it, and it’s unreliable, at best.

Using junk rounded up from around his village, William created his first windmill, pushing electrons into his house where it was regulated by a car battery. The constant flow of juice kept lights powered up at night, and ran the pump to irrigate new crops during the day.

In the great tradition of natural-born tinkerers, more revisions followed. And the people who thought the kid had lost his mind, soon wanted to know more about what he was doing. His story is featured in a new book, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, but first — you need to watch the video below.

What delights me most about this story is knowing that a few energetic, bright people could rebuild civilization from scraps, if they had to. One of the hardest steps is knowing what’s possible. As long as that survives, whether by book, or memory, or physical example, the fear that our progress could be stopped by a single cataclysm seems far-fetched. We went from hunter-gatherers to landing on the moon in just tens of thousands of years. An eye-blink to geologists, biologists, astronomers… hell to all but amateur climatologists and expert politicians. Just imagine how quickly that would go with scraps of useful metal lying about — and a few people like William.

The Star Trek Communicator became the Nokia RAZR, yet people still mock sci-fi for being too “out there.” What makes us uncomfortable in fiction soon becomes a necessary crutch in real life. I found out yesterday that a friend of mine is having his knees replaced. I wasn’t surprised, just asked how long the re-hab would be.

“A few weeks,” he said. “Then they’ll last ten to twelve years before they need to be replaced.”

Like rubber tires. Which must have seemed just as unusual to buggy aficionados. Which probably looked strange to the plains Indians on their horses. Which coastal tribes probably mistook for two-headed monsters when Europeans splashed ashore atop them. And so on.

THE DIAMOND AGE, one of my favorite sci-fi novels, featured a book with digital pages. Flexible displays and e-ink make the centerpiece of this fiction a near-reality. And now the staple of robot fiction: augmented vision displays, are already in the prototype stage. Seriously. Contact lenses with LEDs that get their power via broadcast RF signals. Today we can read and marvel:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/bionics/augmented-reality-in-a-contact-lens/0

But in fifteen years, you’ll go in for an upgrade and they’ll tell you you’re still inside your contract window and don’t yet qualify for the 2.0 version at $999. If you want Super-Hi-Def at 60 FPS, you’ll have to wait until March.

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