If we’re to believe one of these condom-company PR surveys, Seattleites have a lot less sex than the national average. Just an average of 75 encounters a year, compared to a national average of 82. Maybe the feds shouldn’t have shut down Rick’s strip club.

A few days after my 53rd birthday, the hallway outside my apartment began to smell. It wasn’t a forceful smell, just an unpleasant one, like that of rotting food.

A few days after that, I learned why. I came home to find a policewoman in the hallway. She said the man in the unit at the end of the hall had died, alone. The building managers had just discovered him. The policewoman said there was no immediately known cause; it could have been simply “old age.”

He was three years older than me.

Some commentators have claimed Rand Paul’s not really a libertarian.

They say his way-beyond-the-bounds-of-acceptable-discourse thoughts on corporate rights, including the right to discriminate and the right to pollute, aren’t what libertarianism’s really about.

I believe they are.

I’ve had arguments with big-L and little-l libertarians at several occasions over the past couple of decades. They’re particularly plentiful on the Microsoft campus, where the idea of a pro-corporatism that doesn’t want to ban pot smoking is popular.

And yes, a few of these gents and ladies believe there should be as few restrictions as possible on what businesses can do. In an ideal world, they feel, there would be no such restrictions at all, except when they would unduly infringe upon the rights of other businesses.

So yeah, by these folks it should be quite all right for restaurants, hotels, gas stations, and stores to refuse service to nonwhites.

And oil spills? Unfortunate, and wasteful, to be sure. And they do infrringe on the rights of other businesses, including those in the fishing and tourism industries. But, this line of reasoning goes, that’s no reason to seek vengeance against any poor li’l oil company—a company that didn’t mean any harm, but was just trying to make a buck.

Being “only in it for the money” is some libertarians’ all purpose guilt dissolver. In the mid ’80s I had a spirited chat with an ad saleswoman, about some international arms dealer who’d been accused of funneling weapons to Iran or Libya or such. This woman insisted he’d done nothing wrong, because he hadn’t personally taken sides for or against these countries. He was just out for the money. Nothing wrong with that, right?

In the past two or three years, some of us have learned there can be a lot that’s wrong with that.

The U.S. ruling philosophy of “I Got Mine, Screw You” is older than the second Bush Presidency. Heck, it’s older than the first Bush Presidency. And it needs to be replaced.

Here’s one potential replacement ideology: Bertrand Russell’s Ten Commandments.

Someone named Fred Clark (no relation) ponders the phenomenon of right-wing hotheads who’ve denounced the idea of empathy toward others, and how and why the rest of us should express empathy toward them.

An essayist with AOL News wishes to praise “America’s Most Diverse ZIP Code.” You’ll never guess where it is.

No. C’mon, guess.

The American political/cultural landscape is To Sir, With Love.

Obama is Sidney Poitier.

The tea partiers and the far-right wingnuts are the classroom rabble.

The middle-of-the-road Democrats are the other teachers, cowering in the faculty lounge, willing to put up with the abuse until retirement age.

Timothy Harris says Seattle should NOT follow a trend from San Francisco! (Specifically, its virulent crackdowns against the poor.)

From Hollywood warpaths to new-agey shamans, Joseph Riverwind deconstructs the “Basic Indian Stereotypes.”

TheDailyBeast.com claims Seattle is America’s 19th Craziest City. The site’s list of 57 metro areas is based on psychiatrists per capita, drinking levels, and the amorphous criteria of “stress” and “eccentricity.” Portland is #17. Number one? Cincinnati.

(Warning: This installment is going to ramble even further afield than usual.)

A few days ago, I wrote something critical of Jaron Lanier’s rant against digital culture, You Are Not a Gadget.

In one part of his book, Lanier blamed the economic crash of ’08 on the computer technology that had made the housing bubble’s suspect “investment products” possible.

I wrote that blame for the bubble shouldn’t be laid on Net tech, but that it might instead be laid on Net business culture, on the “Get Big Fast” mentality of unalloyed hustle seen in the first dot-com mania.

What really went on on Wall Street and the other global finance capitals is a little more complicated than that. But not much.

Several commentators have noted links between the speculators and the philosophies of Ayn Rand. “The great recession is all her fault,” alleged Andrew Corsello in a GQ essay last fall. Slate’s Johann Hari, reviewing two recent Rand biographies, blames “this fifth-rate Nietzsche of the mini-malls” for the speculators’ sociopathic levels of selfishness, and even for the Bush-Cheney Republicans’ highly organized cruelty (“…by drilling into the basest human instincts”).

Some French radicals, meanwhile, have created a movement they call “Post-Autistic Economics.” Their premise, as best I can figure it out (I’ve always been lousy at understanding Euro-intellectual theorizing) is that geeky math-heavy economic and political planning is the enemy of any attempt to build a more humane society.

Some critics of the P.A.E. gang have apparently alleged that to call the global elite’s machinations “autistic” is an insult to real autistics. I’d agree.

It’s also an insult to those who love math and abstractions and game theory and techy or trivia-y stuff, a.k.a. nerds. This is a group in which I consider myself a member (despite my lack of prowess at software coding and my indifference toward Dungeons & Dragons).

As Benjamin Nugent expresses in his new book American Nerd: The Story of My People (a great and funny tribute to braniacs from assorted times and places), a guy’s inability at the unwritten rules of social engagement does NOT mean he’s insensitive or that he doesn’t care about people. It just means he’s lousy at communicating his care.

And care, ultimately, is what will get us out of this mess. It’s the only thing that can.

Which brings us to yet another book.

Jeremy Rifkin’s The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis attempts nothing less than the re-direction of how the whole planet thinks and relates.

Rifkin (himself an experienced economics and history nerd) sees social networking and Web 2.0 sites as helping to bring people together—a togetherness he thinks we’ll desperately need if we’re going to save the planet, reduce poverty and disease, etc.

In geekess supreme Arianna Huffington’s interpretation, Rifkin’s book…

…challenges the conventional view of human nature embedded in our educational systems, business practices, and political culture—a view that sees human nature as detached, rational, and objective, and sees individuals as autonomous agents in pursuit primarily of material self-interest. And it seeks to replace that view with a counter-narrative that allows humanity to see itself as an extended family living in a shared and interconnected world.

As the Elliott Bay Book Co. prepares to leave Pioneer Square a business neighborhood without an “anchor tenant,” the Square’s major retail industry, big rowdy bars, is also in decline. The J&M shuttered altogether (it’s rumored to be reopening under new management as less of a bar and more of a cafe). Others are rumored to be in trouble.

I remember the glory days of the Square’s nightlife scene. I remember that milieu’s signature street sound. You’d stand in front of the pergola around midnight on a Saturday. You could hear, from five different bars, five different white blues bands, each cranking out a mediocre rendition of “Mustang Sally,” each band slightly out of tempo with the others. It was a cacophany only avant-garde composer Charles Ives could have dreamt up.

That scene was already waning before the infamous 2001 Mardi Gras melee gave the Square a bad PR rep.

Fast forward almost a decade. Today’s loci for bigtime drinking are Fremont, Pike/Pine, and especially Belltown.

Belltown’s bar scene has its own signature street sound. It’s the arhythmic clippety-clop of dozens of high-heel shoes trotting up and down the sidewalks of First Avenue. Creating this sound are many small groups of bargoers, small seas of black dresses and perfect hairdos.

These women, and their precursors over the past decade and a half, are the reason Belltown won the bar wars.

In my photo-history book Seattle’s Belltown, I described the rise of the upper First Avenue bar scene:

“After the Vogue proved straight people would indeed come to Belltown to drink and dance, larger, more mainstream nightclubs emerged. Among the first, both on First Avenue, were Casa U Betcha (opened 1989) and Downunder (opened 1991). Both places began on a simple premise: Create an exciting yet comfortable place for image-conscious young women, and the fellows would follow in tow (or in search).”

To this target market, the Square was, and would always be, too dark, too grungy, and too iffy. The condo canyons of Belltown, in contrast, were relatively clean (if still barren) with fresh new buildings and sported (at least some) well-lit sidewalks.

The state liquor laws were liberalized later in the 1990s, leading to more and bigger hard-liquor bars. Casa U Betcha and Downunder gave way to slicker fun palaces, all carefully designed and lit, with fancy drinks at fancy prices to be consumed while wearing fancy out-on-the-town clothes and admiring others doing the same.

And, aside from the occasional Sport, nearly all these joints sought to attract, or at least not to offend, the young-adult female market.

You’re free to make your comparisons here to the high-heeled and well-heeled fashionistas of HBO’s old Sex and the City.

I’d prefer a more local comparison, to Sex In Seattle. In case you don’t know, that’s a live stage show that’s presented 17 installments since 2001. Its heroines are social and career strivers, less materialistic and less “arrived” than the Sex and the City women.

And they’re Asian Americans. As are Sex In Seattle’s writers and producers.

As are a healthy proportion of the clientele at Belltown’s megabars these days.

These customers want many of the same things Belltown residents want. They like attractive, clean, safe streets with well-lit sidewalks.

They may make a little more noise outside than some of the residents want to hear.

But we’re all in the same place, geographically and otherwise.

(Cross posted with the Belltown Messenger.)

There’s this guy named Jaron Lanier. He was part of some of the earliest virtual reality research, as he’ll repeatedly tell you.

Now he’s rebranded himself as a cyper-skeptic. While he insists he’s no Luddite, he sure talks as if he thinks everything wrong with modern society could be traced to the Internet, to its imperfect technologies, and to its even more imperfect business models.

He’s compiled some of these screeds into a book, You Are Not a Gadget.

It’s subtitled “A Manifesto,” but it’s less of a single structured argument and more of a package of rewritten magazine essays.

In them, Lanier blames the collapse of just about all old-media businesses on the Web’s inability to command a price for content.

He blames what he calls the sameness of modern pop music on the bad influence of discrete synths and samplers.

He blames lousy software on open-source collectives that just can’t innovate the way individuals and strong-leader groups can.

He blames 2008’s economic collapse on inscrutably arcane “investment products” that could only have been devised with the aid of advanced computer technology.

He blames what he calls a devaluing of the individual in today’s world on Web 2.0 sites’ obsession with collective anonymity, with turning humans into abstracted collections of likes and associations.

I’m not convinced.

Yes, the legacy ephemeral-media businesses (broadcast TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, and so on) are in huge trouble. But the whole concept of the mass audience, upon which these businesses had relied, has cracked, probably irreversably. The Web has only some of the blame/credit for this.

Apple, Amazon, and others have proven people will pay for content delivered as electronic bits, under the proper circumstances. I believe the iPad and machines ike it will only help commercial e-media grow.

Meanwhile, the decaying remnants of the big record companies (there are only four of them left, none US-owned and only one (Sony) still tethered to a major corporation) continually try to stuff the musical genie back into the broken mass-market bottle. They promote decreasingly distinctive works, issued under the names of professional gossip-mag celebrities. In the 1980s, folks such as Sub Pop founder Bruce Pavitt predicted corporate music would end up in a recursive death cycle. It’s happened now, and it ain’t pretty, but it was inevitable.

Open source software didn’t grow out of mistaken techno-hippie idealism, as Lanier claims, but out of mainframe-era computing administrators who shared pieces of code as a professional courtesy. From the start, it was all about insider geeks helping find better ways to solve existing problems. So it gives us insider-geek tools like LINUX and better-mousetrap stuff like the Firefox browser. If the truly innovative tech stuff always comes from individuals and top-down groups, as Lanier alleges, it’s because that’s where the make-a-name-for-yourself incentive is.

As for the financial bubble, Lanier’s closer to where I believe the mark is, but still misses it. The fatal link to the reckless speculators wasn’t from Internet technologies, but Internet business models. A decade after the first dot-coms arose, large swaths of business and most of finance had adopted dot-com mindsets. Enron was only the first prominent example. We can make millions, billions, fast! Not by old slowpoke return-on-investment models, but by devising really clever schemes and then selling them as hard as humanly possible—no, even harder. The whole of the global economy was wrested by the same smirky tall white guys who’d given us such surefire success stories as Flooz.com, Kozmo.com, and MyLackey.com.

And then comes what I see as Lanier’s most important allegation, that being online is degrading what it means to be human. No. It’s really the marketing business that wants to either lump us all into an undifferentiated mass or to wall us off from one another on the basis of demographics and buying habits. Social media, at their best, help humans reconnect to one another on other bases—political/social organizing, religious/spiritual questing, shared cultural memories, or just being alive and having something to say.

You already know about the hit blog/book Stuff White People Like. It’s a gentle satire on the ways and mores of the upscale NPR/Starbucks/REI subculture.

One guy named “Macon D” has taken the same premise, cut out the funny business, and created a serious examination of modern ethnic attitudes.

As he explains,

I’m a white guy, trying to find out what that means. Especially the “white” part.

His site: Stuff White People DO.

At The Atlantic, Don Peck ponders what could happen if high unemployment for the non-rich sticks around for years to come .

I’m old enough to have seen that very thing, during the Boeing slump of the early ’70s.

What happened was a lot of emotional depression, a lot of moving away (Seattle proper lost about 10 percent of its population), a lot of depressed home values, and, eventually, a lot of entrepreneurism, as desperate folks got up and tried to rebuild their lives with or without a paternalistic big employer.

In a video of a TED conference lecture, Bennington College prexy Liz Coleman articulately argues a point I’ve been trying to express all these years—that society needs generalists as much as specialists, breadth as much as depth.