911 My First Day on the Job

He looks good in relative terms now, but I never did like George W. Bush. The whole John Kerry, Bush pere et fil, all in Skull and Bones. Arrogant pricks therefore. Made men. For no reason that I'm aware of, I watched Netflix' Turning Point about the Cold War. Then I watched Katrina: Come Hell and High Water. I learned about the 911 documentary from my son-in-law.

I find myself imaging what if we ever had a President who actually knew and understood our history. Of course I realize that such a thing is not in the job description. But for sure, Jesus Christ could never become president. Imagine someone wondering out loud why these people hate us as much as they do. What had we done to them? Imagine trying to understand motive, and trying to find a way to bind the world together instead of blowing it apart.

There was, according to the first Front Line documentary I watched, an actual opening for Russia to join NATO back when the Soviet Union dissolved. But we couldn't let go of our enemy. And then we couldn't understand why Bin Laden conflated us with the Russia which had destroyed Afghanistan. They knew our motive was oil. But it wasn't possible to be straight with the oil-addicted American people about that. They bunched up the imperialists in the same way we bunched up the terrorists. 

Imagine how much more peaceful the world would now be if there weren't cocky and angry Rumsfeld and Cheney cackling into feckless Dubya's ear. He did know his role to channel the anger and confusion of the American people. To call them terrorists would be to dehumanize our attackers against a background of good and innocent Americans. That's precisely the medicine which power requires.

No wonder now all we get from politics is hatred. All we get are angry and disgusting people on all sides. There is no-one left to call out the good. We the people ape our feckless leaders. Imagine that!

And now as I write, in a virtual sense since it takes me so long, Charlie Kirk is assassinated. I wish life were so simple that we could just kill off the bad guys as our leadership is programmed to do. All that ever does is to compound the victory of the so-called terrorists against us. The mayhem we exacted against ourselves post-911 is utterly astounding. Except there is no us anymore. We've clearly turned against ourselves, with almost no agreement about what our as-yet aspirational polity really means. 

I was nervous on my first job as a contractor for the Catholic Church. But shortly after my entry to the rectory which housed computers in distress, the women - churchladies - who ran the place called me in to watch the attack on the World Trade Center towers as it was happening on their little black and white TV. I'm pretty sure I completed my work, checking in with family along the way. The hour-long ride home was filled with a desperate search along the airwaves for why there was a plume of smoke over Buffalo. 

Finally, the local NPR station announced that it was an accident confirmed to be unrelated to terrorism. That heroic announcer slept at the station for at least two weeks after 911, so bound were we all to NPR. Yes, the very same network the Administration now seeks to silence. 

Since when did Conservatism become conflated with authoritarianism? Since when did it become OK to silence your political adversaries by way of the government? How can that possibly be American? Is drill baby drill (guns and machines) all we know anymore?

I'm asking.

The Story is Over, Really

I woke up today to a kind of paranoia. I'm certain that I had plenty of company in that. I woke up today to this notice from Quora.com. It adverted to a book "by Chinese colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, from 1999, Unrestricted Warfare: China’s master plan to destroy America." Conspiracy theories are always plausible. They just hide their premise; in this case that China wants to destroy the U.S.

The original book is easy enough to find on Chinese Amazon. There is no such subtitle. As far as I can tell, it's in a line of books, including books on non-violent resistance and the overall obsolescence of war, which have been written for a long long time. Destructive weaponry is, of course, the least likely way to defeat the US. That doesn't mean that China set up this current mess just so that they could take over the world, even if it ends up that way.

The more interesting story is only beginning.

I don't believe for a second that China plotted anything to do with what's going on right now. Nor do I tend to agree with some on Fox News - the real fake news - that we should (as if we could) disentangle ourselves from China.

But the Quora post was bracing, somehow. It was a reminder about how increasingly unlikely it is becoming that we will ever return to the way it was before COVID 19.

I doubt the virus will kill us all, but the economy will have collapsed. For the moment, it does seem obvious that China will come out on top.

I'm glad that people like Benjamin H. Bratton try to understand what's going on, and continue to deploy their superior brainpower for the sake of good. But I don't believe for a second that their good sense will prevail. I doubt that they do either.

We are much more likely to be taken in by a feel-good story which requires that we do nothing. Oh wait. That's the story we've been living. The one that's over. The End.

As one lively comic noted, we insist on democracy in governance when we go to work for corporations which are run the way that Genghis Khan ran his armies.

Well, we are hardly insisting on democracy now, but it would be hard to believe that Bernie's prescriptions are sufficient anymore. That sort of socialism was a long dream for those of us well-read enough to know that the story we have been living couldn't end well. We never could believe that such policy would be voted in.

Now we exist in a state of exception, and most of us are only wondering what those in charge are going to do. Will they think of eminent domain over empty hotels and motels so that we have enough sick-wards. Will they commandeer the negative pressure isolation units that we have been calling RVs, like documented private ships in times of war? Will they finally begin to test all grocery and pharmacy and delivery/postal workers and provide public notice of where infected vectors touch?

Will they even do the simply obvious? Our scientific community understands stochastic sampling. Combined with protecting those who deliver essential services, this should be easier than knee-jerk setting up of drive through testing which quickly has to be shut down.

Could we possibly do worse than the upside-down manner in which teams are being set up now? Can't we please place an expert in charge? I mean someone who knows how to run a team to get the best results. You have to allow team members to speak truth to power. I have this on the highest authority.

Apparently, we don't even have enough testing capacity for any but hospital workers and the very sick to be tested. The rest of the world has done better, though there is no point to complain about that now, any more than there would be any point to berate myself for not selling of my meager stocks when I knew they were flying too high.

Our financial choices won't matter because I don't think that our familiar economy is ever coming back. For one thing, if it does, it will still never be prepared for states of exception. I don't think China is the case to follow, though. Of course their authoritarian government was prepared. Of course we don't wish to emulate them.

I have quit plenty of jobs when my boss wouldn't let me do my work, but wanted me to be subservient to their orders. I have had plenty of other jobs where the decisions were made at the level of the knowledge, and I found those satisfying. There was never any distinction in the nature of the work, or even how nice the boss was.

Given the openness of our networks and the freedom of our speech, it seems unthinkable that we can't find a way to ensure that decisions about this virus are made at the appropriate level. Our leaders don't have time and likely aren't qualified to monitor the media and spread the best ideas. Their organizational training seems to be contrary to our aspirations for our politics. The literal idiots are in charge.

Some workers these days are made to be robots. Their productivity is relentlessly surveilled, and rewards are for efficiency. In my personal experience, such jobs would include account inquiry servicing, insurance claims evaluation, fast food servicing, shipping (driving and delivery), along with many many more.

The division of learning has meant that I've never had to endure such jobs myself, or maybe it's just that I've aged out from that economy faster than it's been virally spread.

There is a different trend that could be as good as it could be bad. The new gig economy encourages contract workers to own their means of production again, and manage how they accomplish efficiency. Just now, it seems to be devolving toward slave labor and the undermining of established businesses. But that doesn't have to be the was it always stays. The leaders of such businesses have been something less than inspiring. We seem to be letting them get away with something. They're too damned young.

I just know that there are far better cooks and salespeople and delivery people and inquiry responders than the ones now treated so poorly by their overpaid managers working for massive Wall Street backed brand names.

Now might be the time to take back our lives and write our own stories. We have to start by putting sensible laws in place. None of us should be characterized by the surveilled behaviors of a slice of us we can't control.

Badges for the immunized - and the immune by virtue of recovery - wouldn't be a bad idea. They should not become permanent is all. The tech can help with that. The behaviors captured would be in the category of no-fault behaviors.

Now that they have dominated our economy by predatory methods backed by Wall Street speculation, the giants of Amazon, Walmart, Google, Microsoft and Apple, among many lesser gods, will do the right thing. That example will encourage the rest of us to take heart.

And then we need to reconstruct our government so that such predatory behemoths are never again allowed to appear. The destruction of creativity in the name of creative destruction has been unfathomable. We never took proper warning from the collapse of Wall Street back in 2008ish. It was not different from what is happening now.

The earlier collapse of our economy is framed similarly as an act of nature; something periodically inevitable if we wish for capitalism to work. But we never did ferret out the forces of evil represented within that system.

The evil was benign, in the sense that those perpetrating it must have largely talked themselves into feeling that what they were doing mattered only locally. From earth's perspective, the COVID 19 virus is benign as well.

Sure Daniel Defoe's Journal of the of the Plague Year might be as much a novel as true reporting. But it's still instructive to note how little has changed. Work for Amazon - cart off the dead bodies - until you can get your jobs back.

But it's different this time. The difference is that we are globally aware. The angels of our better nature are about to take flight. Even the obscenely rich know that the incentives are misaligned. That know that Wall Street needs tweaking. They know that massive socioeconomic divides will spell their own doom. They know that chief executives have to stand for something good and not just the short-term bottom line.

We are not yet the best America that we can be. But we cannot let this experiment fail.

I have to say that I find China to be a largely benign force. But they define themselves in recialist fashion, have largely closed borders, and don't have anything near the freedom of speech that we do.

Our trouble is that in net result, we don't actually speak. We drown out thought that matters, much of the time. I don't believe for a second that China suffers any absence of freedom of thought that's much different than ours is.

Consider this: On Chinese Amazon there has been a dedicated tab for the Three Body Problem for well over a year (likely much longer, but I haven't been paying that close attention). It's a fabulous book, and full of challenging thought (I haven't read the English translation). But what is going on with that? Can you even imagine one single author with such dominance here? Can you imagine a leader for life?

I hope not.

Smart Devices

What an incredibly exciting time to be alive! Well, OK so I'm especially excited because my daughter just learned that she can go to Yale Law School if she wants, or she can accept a scholarship to the University of Chicago, or a few other not-so-shabby choices. It's also nice to think that maybe she was accepted at least in part because of her evident devotion - proven by track record - to public service and not just self-promotion.

But that's all just backdrop to my effusive mood for the day. Among my hobbies is to follow the developments of Information Technologies. Careful readers will understand that I consider the term "information" highly problematic in this construction. Having occasion to read a bit of Marshall McLuhan again, I'm struck by how much more expansive his rhetoric is than would be possible now these few short decades later. And he was the guru then about what's happening now!

As much as we can be better informed, we can also be distracted by the sheer volume of what's out there. Here in the vicinity of LA now, I am awash each day with movie news leading up to the Oscars (how many more contests along the way?) The coverage is dense enough that I can also learn of the small-audience indie movies being produced, some on incredibly important and interesting subjects.

But it's hard to avoid the imperative to catch the drift about the blockbusters. And with only so much time in any given day to read or watch or otherwise digest the news from the global village, it would be hard not to conclude that the blockbusterish information pretty much crowds out almost everything else.

My mind simply can't either catalog or remember which of those indie movies I'd wanted to see, and they're not really all that likely to be offered on pay-per-view or at the local theater.

Ditto re reading material, although in that case at least the "mass market" is a bit more refined, and so I worry less that the Big Books will crowd out the interesting stuff. While I might waste my time watching good entertainment in the theater, I'm not all that likely to waste reading time on something Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck wrote, regardless of whether I agree with them or not. Plus, I have to spend real time re-learning to read Chinese now that I might be employed again. And overall there's so much good stuff so easy to find.

I confess I do enjoy having a "smartphone." Truthfully, I can't even imagine being without it now. Remember when the answering machine solved a big problem with staying in touch, but then each day coming home from work you'd have to be sure to check it? And then there's that call screening function. Or planning ahead and leaving phone numbers, and having to apologize for being stuck in traffic after the fact. Now I have a traffic monitoring GPS. Or Internet in the park!

Sure, it commands my attention in ways that could be annoying socially if I were to let it (sometimes, I confess, I do). And it probably keeps me from paying attention to those complicated thoughts I really have to get to work on.

But, you know, that problem will be solved by having a job, or could be solved by having a discipline within which to work. Except for my sense that these darned over-elaborated disciplines are part of the problem. Each one now has its technical vocabulary and cultural norms which envelope an entire professional life-time and pretty much rule out the kind of overarching thinking accomplished by the likes of McLuhan. No wonder we still don't know what to do with what he wrote.

Sure there are public geniuses, people we like to read or watch up on TED, but I sense that they all elaborate on one big overarching metaphor, drawn from a discipline where they have established cred. There's no room for unauthorized new thinking from the bleachers. We have spotlights. We have superstars. The world is trivialized thereby.

But that's life in the village, global or local, and it's the overarching galaxy which is the most important. The shape of things. Here, I think, microcosm is as elaborated as macrocosm, and the superstars as shallow, ulitmately, as that guy with a toupee who MCs at your local high-school when the road show comes to town.

Now back down to that micro-ecology where the smartphone sits. I find it incredibly exciting, really!, that there remains quite a variety of Operating Systems for the hardware on which they float. There's Google's Android and Apple's iOS of course, but there's also Windows Phone 7, and the new WebOS from HP, and Blackberry and the fading Symbian and Palm and that nameless one I've still got.

Their competition drives the hardware now, to where the screens are rich and readable in any light. They respond with alacrity to touch, and inside these tiny boxes are two-way radios for voice and data, including WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS and in the case of my phone even FM for music and NPR!!

Where's the satellite radio? What about TV? Well, you know, eventually, it will all come down to packet data, and whatever ways there are to get it. As news outlets now rediscover ways to charge for their mediation of "information," I suspect that access to the web will approach a cost of something like nil. Which could mean that we start paying full price for hardware as well as content. Which could get interesting.

No question Apple has the lock on hot hardware, but so far the cost differential hasn't reached Maserati vs. Volkswagen proportions. Or wait, maybe it has? VWs cost a pretty penny nowadays, and the outrageously priced cars somehow don't seem so utterly out of reach when ordinary folks have to pay at least a quarter of a $K to get a family car.

I like a keyboard, as you can see, and I don't much care about the rest of it. Sure if I would interact more by talking to people instead of writing to myself, I'd have a less cranky approach on things, but I have to say that it's only by interacting this way with what I read that I can make any sense of it. And for that I'm really really glad for cheap access to the Internet. For me, it's a two-way street, though yeah as you can tell I'm not much paying attention to who might care to pay attention to me.

Anyhow, HPs apparent strategy is to develop a software/hardware mixed infrastructure on which can ride all sorts of apps and devices which they sell. Their stable includes an incredible variety of medical instruments as well as enterprise-grade PC servers and consumer-grade entertainment PCs. On top of any of these there can  now be a WebOS sandbox in which to run their apps. Or for their apps to run their hardware. It's all a two-way street!

I can buy Google apps now which will run in Chrome, the browser. Shortly, I'll be able to buy an even cheaper but more alacritous laptop loaded with the Chrome OS! And presumably these apps will run across all their devices, or in their sandbox running on other devices. And of course, there's iTunes though it's still more of a store than a platform for the moment.

I'm still waiting for the day when I could conveniently use iTunes in sync with non-Apple hardware. Or I'd almost accept Microsoft getting a clue with Media Player and the way it integrates with my phone (not so well, sadly). I mean, I don't really care all that much about music, truthfully, mainly because it's too damned hard to drill down through the payola on the air and over the 'net and so for the moment I'm perfectly happy with Pandora's read of my genome. I can't retrieve my audiophile roots enough to care about fidelity, and I figured out how to trick my phone into accepting an ill-fitting version of Pandora's software which they officially don't make,

Sure, yeah, I'd like to be able to read my books on any and all devices, and not to have to care about which outlet I get them from. I come pretty close with my Kindle, but it won't handle Chinese without a hack. Maybe I'd like to have a bit more flexibility with movie watching, and maybe I'd like to be able to ignore the wide pricing swings from free-with-ads to $5 bucks per view to full ownership.

Ultimately, I'd like to "own" media, the way I do books on my Kindle, but retain the rights to lend them out. It seems DVD rental places might not have to pay royalties back to the content owners once they own the physical disks. Surely this will be a thing of the past? And maybe artists will retain rights to their physical works after they get sold if they get resold?

Or, you know, maybe I could "rent" new books on demand the way that I can borrow old books (the new ones always have an impenetrable queue) from the library, without having to pay so much up front. These things can all be worked out by IT.

But of course, the ecology of money would have to change in ways to upset the current monopoly plays orchestrated by the financial institutions.

We all learned from the recent sale of the New York Stock Exchange, that nobody trades in stocks anymore. Instead, it's all nano-microsecond trading in complex futures and derivatives, whatever those are. (I'm pretty sure it's all a conspiracy among newly conscious machines to preserve the advantage among those who already have it, who provide the luscious host for the viral growth of anti-human dangerous memes - out-of-control wealth provides the machines' and the machine-thought which they embody with their nutrient bath, in strange mockery of that movie Matrix.)

I'm warned that the cost of law school will inexorably whittle down my daughter's resolve not to go for the gold. That must be how the price is set. Some sort of guarantee for the ultimate triumph of machine-thought, now defined here as that thinking which rationalizes greed as though it were good for humanity.

But you know, there's hope. And for today, at least, I find it in the palm of my hand, among devices which have now brought down a dictator in Egypt and might yet defeat machine-memes a few more times. Life as it ever was. Down and dirty and difficult and uncertain, but humanity will prevail. If we care to.

My Smartphone!

Microsoft will now "come out" with its new Windows 7 Mobile OS. It won't matter how good it is, only how many apps get created for it, if it doesn't get in the users' way, and if they don't succumb to the temptation to bottle it up with Microsoft-branded services. It could be a winner. Well, unless it still takes as long or longer to load than my Windows 7 laptop.

I use a version of the Windows Mobile OS which nobody likes. But I can't figure out what's not to like. It hardly ever crashes compared to the previous version of Windows Mobile I had. It does Google just fine, and I can pretty much ignore Windows Live, though it would sure be nice to have everything slick and interlocking. Or not. I'm not terribly interested in controlling my house, watching TV on my phone, or Microsofting my entire lifestyle.

It does have fewer useful apps built-in compared to my previous Windows Mobile smartphone, presumably because of some intellectual property battles or squabbles with developers about stealing thunder: My old phone used to be able to announce by voice who was calling, which was actually useful on the job, but pretty embarrassing socially. It had one single app which would read documents, images, and seemingly anything else without installing endless other specialized apps to do stuff you're never going to do on a phone. For instance, it would read Adobe Acrobat, or MS Office, or browse pictures or the web, all from one single app, but you couldn't edit. Fine. Perfect. And its memory management, which is probably why it crashed more often, wouldn't always be closing open apps in the background to drive me crazy. But other than that the newer OS is a strong improvement over the old one!

The big problem with Windows Mobile overall is that the one I use still has a pressure-sensitive touch screen. I thought that's what I wanted, having grown up on the Palm OS, but now I'm just so jealous of the iPhone which seems so much more, you know, alacritous in response to my fingers. The new Windows Mobile will have capacitive touch, so don't worry about that. The lawyers will figure out about pinching and multi-touch, in the background. Money will change hands.

So, OK, fix the touch, fix the memory management, make it multitask so that you can do one thing while waiting for another to finish out of sight, but mainly you're going to have to fix the politics, since Pandora won't bother to support my Windows Mobile phone, and neither will Skype, even though Verizon promotes cost-free unlimted Skyping, or at least they used to.  Hmmmm. I wonder if I should sue Verizon over that?

Then there's the whole 4G thing. The real excuse I need to hurry up and wait.

I definitely endorse cutting Steve Ballmer's bonus, but considering his salary is but a drop in the bucket of his investment earnings each and every day, I have to wonder how he really responds to symbolism. Or maybe that's all he responds to? I'll just bet they can't resist going head-to-head against Google.

They could take the high road, but that would be a first. If they did, and made their phone work just as well with Google's cloud services as Android does (I swear my current Windows Mobile can make that claim) and if they were to somehow force the issue of iTunes on Windows Mobile, and if they were to subsidize the production of all those apps now ghettoed out (I mean really, if you want market share, you have to buy it!), it would be the perfect platform.

Microsoft let go of the Zune competition to the iPod, even though the iPod powered Apple's actual competitiveness in Microsoft's neighborhood. If it lets the phone go, it will be toast. Toast! Well, that's been said before too.  Microsoft's toast and I'm a bejillionaire. Maybe the game's just fixed. I'm pretty sure that the Zune was a technically superior platform, but why would I bother to find out? The crowd was moving another way, and my daughters would have been crestfallen if I'd done the test on them (I only get to try these things after my kids grow out of them).

OK, so here's the biggie. They should just convince Verizon, my carrier du choix, not to burn in some image. They should leave it wide open so that I don't have to start with what they bundle, and so that I can upgrade the quickly obsolete apps they bundle it with, and so that I can just do whatever I want with the phone. But that would be so un-Microsoft. And come to think of it, so un-Verizon.

Well, maybe I should spend some time thinking about things that really matter. Yeah, I'll try that. Tomorrow.

Power, Control, Metaphors and I'm Beat

President Obama came to town the other day. I wanted to mount my bicycle and ride over to check out the crowds, but instead I learned that Mom would be out for the afternoon, giving me my chance to do the family's bidding and get Dad's car keys from him. I'd taken him to the doctor on Monday, after having gone driving with him several days before, and the verdict was clear.

This was not fun. It felt about like murdering someone you love, who is using every single non-violent tactic in the book to get you to stop. We drew a truce. He gave me the keys just to get me out of his face. I had the legitimate threat to have his license revoked to make me unanswerable. It wasn't exactly a fair fight.

Now I've just returned from a trip to Albany where I hope that I was helpful to a fellow traveller in the game of divorce your feelings. Home again, I notice that the Preakness stakes are about to run, and having somehow gotten snared by the Kentucky Derby, I'm snared again, rooting, of course, for the winning horse and jockey combination; hoping for the odds-defying triple crown. Not to be.

I read of a fellow China watcher, who also watches the blogging and freedom of speech scene in China, who observes that the nature of Chinese blogging is the same as blogging all over. Lots of self-disclosure, blah blah blah.

Of course, I engage in lots of self-disclosure, and it would seem I'm just another Lonely Girl, wanting people to pay attention to my life. But, of course, I prefer to think that I'm developing yet another form of performance art, where the random happenstance of my every day is disclosed as some sort of context for the events of the day on the larger stage which I feel compelled to write about. I say compelled, because, honest, I wouldn't be writing if it weren't that I feel that I have something of some importance to say.

That doesn't mean that I'm saying it here and now and that there's something wrong with you if you don't see it. It means that I feel the need to practice, to work it out, to learn how to write, and, I suppose, to develop what I hear gets called a "voice" to my writing. I'm not sure it's going too well.

It's my sense that "self-disclosure" might lend a kind of credence to what I'm writing about. It tells both why I'm paying attention to what I pay attention to, and relates myself as microcosm to the larger scene. My feelings, after all, count toward my slant on the events on the large stage, and I figure that if I disclose those feelings, and in particular how they might relate to what's going on in my life, then what I write about will be less contrived and abstract and ideological.

Needless to say, I'm not a great believer in logical "truth", truth in any kind of abstract, nor in understanding as an even possible outcome of argument or study or dialog or discussion. I'm disturbed by the certainty which people seem to lead by, as they enter into arguments, take positions. It seems clear enough that there is almost never any grounds for certainty on ideological or scientific or depth of preparation grounds.

There might be, however, grounds for certainty on various emotional grounds. I'm reasonably certain, for instance, that we should stop raping the earth. I'm certain that I would prefer that there weren't so many miserable people on the Earth, and I'm pretty certain that the lack of imagination among those of us with the power of choice have a lot to do - at the very least by our omissions - with the plight of so much of humanity.

The means for amelioration are very very debatable, and I'm always amazed at the certainty displayed by so many people about what means are best. Especially in the face of what is clearly the randomness at the root of most historical sequences.

So, it seems clear to me that my Dad need not attach so much significance to his ability to drive a car. It is clear to me that if he were still reasonable, he would be able to stand beside himself, as it were, and agree that it's just not a good idea. He would do that if he were blind. But in this case, it's his cognitive abilities which are lacking. Plus some real deficits in what might be called reaction time. There is some horrific Catch-22 at work here. He hasn't the sense to discern the irrationality of his demands.

For Europeans and Americans north of the equator, and increasingly for people everywhere, to own a car means to be a free agent. There is no way that the Earth can support this collective compulsion toward such an extreme manifestation of such personal freedom, but each of us who has it seems loathe, ever, to give it up. The very economy is organized to make it seem as though our vehicular freedom not only makes economic sense, but is even economic necessity. You can't even get to the first square of making a living without one.

So, in that sense, we are, as a people, as irrational - as embedded in our own personal Catch-22 - as is my Dad. He isn't 'with it' enough to understand why he must not drive. He only knows that something very important is being taken away from him. He also knows that he's a good driver. In terms of body memory, that remains true. But he can't find the right pedals if he thinks about it. Only if he doesn't.

Now, I know you think I'm going to attempt some kind of environmentalist case about how each of our cars must be prised from us in the same way that Dad's was from him. But I'm not. I wouldn't give that enterprise a snowball's chance in hell.

No, what interests me now is how certain we all are that the Chinese, for instance, are just simply dead wrong in their censorship of what we call "free speech." We are certain that such censorship will doom their form of capitalism, just as we labor to bring them fully into the Western regime of intellectual property protections. They not only censor free speech, but they tacitly encourage theft of intellectual property, in the form of industrial knock offs, but most prominently, in the form of software theft. Media theft. General laxity about copyright and copy protection

Perhaps this is just as evil of them as their artificial pegging of their currency to the dollar, instead of letting it float freely according to market forces. I guess that they like to manipulate the directionality and quantity of import/export flows. It all just seems unfair. As though they are able to get for free what the rest of the world must pay for., As though they have inputs to their economic engine which they have not properly earned.

Well, no-one earns their winnings. No one earns the natural resources they are lucky enough to find under their ground. No-one earns their smarts of the social capital they started their schooling with.

Just today, I learned from the radio, some on this side of some great divide are celebrating this new piece of stealth software which is being deployed by hand to hand combat in Iran against the totalitarian regime which our American narrative insists that they have. I'm certain that theirs is a god-awful regime, but I'm not entirely sure about how this software achievement should be received.

For a long while, there have been ways to skirt around firewalls and censors by going through anonymizing proxy sites, and by using encryption. But this product offers to go a few steps further, so that you don't even have to go so far as to disclose your intentions in the first place by heading over to that wrong part of the Internet town.

Since it can't be downloaded, for obvious reasons having to do with the censors spoofing or infiltrating the download site - in the target country, the censors presumably  have privileged access - the idea is to distribute this software hand to hand from trusted person to trusted person. They were very public about making Iran 'target regime number one.' They were coy about which country would be number two, but only a fool wouldn't bet on China. (Although you can easily see why naming China as a part of any 'axis of evil' would get a little dicey really quickly, since, well, they hold all that debt of ours)

OK, so even apart from the liklihood that dissident Iranians (or Chinese, for that matter) will actually trust that this software is somehow pure, coming as it does from the U.S. of A. Hell, even apart from the liklihood of you or I trusting that it hasn't somehow been concocted by our own government's secret services as a stealthy way to infiltrate and co-op the friendly to the U.S. ranks of these targeted countries. I mean, who really knows about the viruses attacking the Afghani opium crop, you know? And even apart from the simplicity with which the target regime could insert their own stealthy code for use in rounding up the usual suspects (that's a hack so trivial, even I could accomplish it)

Even apart from all that, what I want to know is why this kind of software is any different from all the various techniques now out there to aid and abet the criminals among us who would steal digital property by sharing files and keygen cracks and pictures and music and all the rest. It's the use to which the software is put that gets celebrated.

Fact is, of course, that the reason we sell so much more software around here than gets stolen is purely ideological. Well, OK, there might be a little bit of fear of getting caught thrown in, but our narrative about why the Chinese don't speak freely about their government would have it only because they are afraid to do so. Even while we marvel at how fully co-opted the Chinese intelligentsia have become, we seem to think they would speak freely if only they weren't afraid to.

Supposedly, the Chinese self-censor because they are afraid of government sanctioned consequences, and it is this fear which tones the language well on the inside of some kind of shifty and only partially discernible barrier.

But is it fear which keeps us honest, or some kind of true belief in the fundamental validity of intellectual property law? If we win, we want to be able to keep our winnings. If we come out with something first, then we want to be able to lay claim. Even though this approach, like all and every one of us owning a private powered vehicle, will doom us all collectively. We equate intellectual property rights to the chastity of our spouse, the inviolability of our private space and the ownership of our bank accounts. Well unless our stuff is ill gotten, in which case, all bets are off.

Let me ask you. Do you think it's fair that farmers who don't police their land to be sure that no stray patented seeds are taking root should be sued for patent infringment (our courts do)? Do you think that someone surfing for adult pornography should be held accountable when some site slips in child porn which is then discoverable on that hapless lonely person's hard drive? Do you think that users of health insurance should be accountable to understand all the rules before getting sick, on threat of being financially accountable for expenses incurred as ordered by expert health care practitioners (I have stories to tell)?

The Chinese arrange things a little differently is all. I imagine they never did learn anything about the inviolability of private space, and chastity was always more about pledges than romance, and well, as to the bank accounts, until recently, private wealth was never a real possibility.

My guess is that the most dangerous move the Chinese government has ever made was to open the possibility for personal ownership of automobiles. This was as calculated risk, since the automobile has been the engine of vibrant economies the world over. And it would be hard to stop it without stopping the exuberance of the Chinese economic miracle altogether. But the danger of the automobile is that it will embed notions of personal autonomy, the inviolability of personal and private space, and the priority of individual rights and possession over all else. Demands for free speech will follow, right?

It's not, in other words, that the Great Firewall of China won't be able to keep up with the quest for freedom of thought and speech craved by the newly wealthy and emboldened citizenry. Rather, it is that the citizenry will forget about its individual responsibility to labor in concert with the interests of the whole. It would be as though the entire U.S. populations collectively and suddenly decided it would be alright to "steal" digital property. It would be like the futile exercise of trying to get people to stop smoking dope, or before that, to get them to stop drinking alcohol. Not gonna happen.

OK, so I've got to find some way to wind this up. Over here, we are getting all exercised that Google would sneak up on us, Facebook would give away our privacy rights, ignorant that it's all a grudge match against Bill Gates' company, because of what he once did to the leaders of these newer upstart companies. They have tried and tried to brand themselves as something other than the goon-squad of Microsoft's marketing engine, and in the end look rather, well, evil.

But this stuff is trivial and almost meaningless up against what agribusiness does in defense of their patents over genetically modified crops. This is as nothing against the consequences of our mono-culture when the bee population risks collapse, and global starvation is one virus away from a genetically neutered food production regime. The powers of natural evolution have been stopped dead in their tracks by the American Intellectual Property regime, which has ensured that most of the food the world over is dependent on both petroleum and a very very few genetic lines. Not quite as few as were allowed for stem cell research or as get used for cancer research, but you get the idea.

Nature requires diversity in the face of stresses. Especially such global stresses as are being applied by humanity against the entire planet. Intellectual property law now is like Nature rewarding the winners of some evolutionary contest with rights in perpetuity against all possible variants. Sure, the intellectual rights are termed, and I can read my Melville free, but for Monsanto or ADM, they have all the marbles, and are pretty much guaranteed to be able to keep improving their patented varieties of whatever mono-cultural corn is most effectively produced on the back of cheap oil. The term never runs out for so long as there is "innovation" once you have the monopoly. Another Microsoft lesson.

So here I am very nearly favoring Chinese censorship over freedom of speech, for so long as freedom of speech is constrained by copyright and intellectual property law. I do so for the sake of the planet. Of course, only an idiot ever really believed that there is any such thing as free speech. Speech is one of the most dangerous tools at our disposal. Just try talking your Dad out of his car keys. But wait until he's too old to hurt you.

Meanwhile, if they had any sense, good farmers everywhere would do the bidding of the patent holding companies. They would boycott agribusiness altogether, plant biologically diverse crops using proven techniques for combatting pestilent hoards of insects and smaller organic enemies. We would all refuse to purchase any digital product that is copy protected, or protected by any sort of digital rights management. We would disclose our full identity and particulars over the Internet, just like the Chinese make their citizens do. And we would work assiduously within the constraints of powers deployed against us to be sure that we are never ever placed in the position of utter powerlessness to know which actions of our own are consequential and which are not.

I'd say it's a toss up which regime is more dangerous in that regard. As I drive, I must remain ever vigilant of the tricky speed limit signs. As I submit my written work to the academy, I must somehow first use the same tools my professors will use to check for snippets which might, by happenstance or perhaps by some workings of my subconcsious, match those of published authors from whom I will be assumed, by default, of stealing.

Google now will do this for me, and remove from exposure anything I might have seemed to cut and paste. Will they soon learn to discern the idea that was never mine in the first place, and remove my very thoughts? Or will I learn to game their system, submit my writings first to the 'hand me in' engines, change a few phrases until I pass, and then fool the professors into thinking I'm that much smarter than I am. Catch me if you can . . .