On Invention; I Am Become Irony, Interpreter of Worlds

By rights, this post should be in response to a question posed on Quora, asking about "invention." The asker seems to betray ambition to invent. Sometimes, when I'm not quite in my right mind, I take such bait, but not often. There are lots of questions like this one on Quora, and the ones I might be inclined to respond to generally imply, to me, utter ignorance in the context for the question.

No expert myself, I still feel qualified to comment on ignorance.

I am myself quite ignorant, of course, which is likely why I never respond to most questions. I would rather be thought a fool than to open my mouth and remove all doubt, sort of thing. 

Anyhow, those who do feel that they possess sure knowledge seem always to teach me something that I didn't know. I don't even know if there is a realm where I feel any sort of expertise. Competence, perhaps, but expert status, rarely!

But here I go, on what is, by far, a less public forum. Mine. I am the only expert here. So expert that no-one dares to comment.

The term "invention" always implies an individual coming up with something de novo and changing the world thereby. But even the roots of the word are more about discovery than invention, as the word "invention" is deployed in common usage. 

Discovery implies, of course, much ground being laid ahead of time by many many more people than the discoverer. Our fixation on fixing who's first and giving them a Name is much more about our particular Western ways of viewing history than it is about anything real. 

We value individuals and we value individualism, when we value anything at all. Our economy values individualism. Our constitution enshrines it. 

As I've commented here before, it is patently absurd for Jeff Bezos to call himself an inventor, and then to claim personal responsibility for all the value-added that he attributes to Amazon. Fine, give him credit and lay at this feet the cost of all the "creative" destruction that he unleashed by simply being that unbound by scruple of any sort. 

He certainly never thought of doing good for the world, unless one wishes to make those thoughts continuous with getting us to Mars. That would be abandonment. He is a garden variety capitalist marauder is all, writ a little bit more large, and with a little bit less concern for lives of his (ever temporary) workers. It would be hard for me to ascribe anything like genius to his moves. And harder still to find any value added. The world changed, and now we can't do without Amazon. Brilliant! Give me a patent on climate change!

Many ascribe the interstate highway system to President Eisenhower. But at least he warned us about the Military Industrial Complex that it subserved. The excuse for building it was to have a way to mobilise troops across our vast continental expanse, in case of invasion. 

Now try to imagine anyone succeeding in blocking such a massive public works. In hindsight, attempts to block it might be based on the environmental destruction that so many cars unleashed would wreak upon the land. But with military and economic imperatives aligned, of course there would be no way to succeed in any blockage. Indeed high speed limited access roadways have since covered the earth. They must have been inevitable. They surely made many of us enthusiastic about long distance car vacations, obsolete though those might be just now. 

In effect, that massive public expenditure offloaded onto the public the larger cost of the private vehicles and motive power. And we were happy to afford our cars - thanks Big Anti-Semite Henry Ford! - for the sense of independence they provided. Building high speed railways would surely have been cost-prohibitive and would never have provided the engine to the economy that family motoring would.

I descend from a line of inventors and players in these transformative developments, from both sides of my family. West Point, Westinghouse, the computer math behind miniaturized electronic circuitry, the limited access highway, radar . . . 

Guilty! I would be an inventor as well, except that invention has been exposed finally as fraud. Says me. Not quite so much credit should accrue to one just lucky enough to arrive first at a solution that looks inevitable in hindsight every time. 

And anyhow, it's always a mixed bag. The prizes should go to the ones who set out the best moral path to take in taking advantage of the inventions. I'm sure that Albert Einstein would take back his contributions to making the Bomb real, if he could. 

I would highlight the irony: That we celebrate the very thing that we deny. We deny that we can deflect progress, and see our advances as inevitable even as we celebrate individuals as though none of it would have come about without them. 

I declare that our own celebrated age of innovation is, in fact, stuck in a paradigm which should have shifted long ago. Indeed I can date the shift because I might have caused it my very own selfie-self. I failed to cause it. I feel guilty, truth be told. What an arrogant shit that makes me!

The trouble was and is that nobody wants this wonderful paradigm to shift; the one where individuals invent stuff and we celebrate those individuals with riches beyond imagining, and that is right and good and just. Even though it resembles the middle-ages for the power structures that we put back in place all over again. How much rent do you pay to the new rentiers, hein? You think it's free?

Truly no-one wants to listen to anything new which doesn't increase human agency; still against nature. Even though that agency is owned by so few. It's the principle that counts.

Responsibility for our inventiveness devolves to the people as a whole, and is by and large postponed on excuse of the incredible pace of improvements to knowledge and understanding. We shall be so much more ready to take responsibility in the future. We are still but children.

In fact we are afraid of choice. We want only agency, and our belief structures dictate - dogmatically - that our choice is subsumed by the agency afforded by our discoveries. There was no choice about the Bomb. There was no choice about the limited access highway system. There was no choice about radar. These things were just simply so intrinsically good that one could not get in their way. Hmmmm. Is there really any order to our operations?

And so the next great discovery will likely never happen until it's far too late. Global warming is a far far more terrible destroyer than the bomb could ever be. And we must shrug just as Ayn's Atlas does. I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today!

None of our inventions have been ontologically inevitable. Not one. We choose what becomes real. That doesn't make us as gods. Gods make rules. We make choices. As George Will says celebrating the man who celebrates the man who signed my diploma.

"[baseball] would emerge stronger, however, for the commissioner’s office had come through a difficult test with its absolute powers affirmed, and the principle established that no man, no matter how exalted, was above the game itself. For Giamatti, the whole episode had been about two things: living by the rules, and taking responsibility for one’s actions….

Which rules might we live by now? Does all invention become insurrection, then? Now? George Will gets his digs in on the "Nanny State." He is, after all, 'to the manor born.' As was A. Bartlett Giamatti. As am I. Sort of. "Just the manor missed," as I quipped to my fellow elitist headmasters once upon a blatantly racist conversation. I was rather appalled. 

Our constitution has been misinterpreted to death, by the very partisan political processes it was meant to guard against and override. Can we ever repeal the Second Amendment, now that it's fully decontextualized? Will we cancel the First? Surely Donald Trump has been the Pete Rose of  our constitutional Game of Life. Is that what George Will is saying?

We will just keep on keeping on, until the shift is upon us. And we suddenly see that the Emperor has no clothes, while the inventor is long dead and gone and voiceless. It was a minor invention at best to see that reality is not a game. That winning is not everything. That the meek will prevail in the end. As we cry out meekly, "this is not fair."

Hard Fail; Accident

Pondering Elon Musk's playful idiocy, as he expends the resources only he can have to realize childish SciFi fantasies, I must return to the ground of accident that is the only ground that counts. Just like the electrical ground that I struggle truly to understand before I undertake the tough stuff on This Old House on which I labor. Accident is the only safe constant.

Elon is Trump's twin as he leads us down the road away from accident. Those who suffer accident are, in Trump's terms "losers." He is, of course, quite correct in that. His mistake is to consider himself beyond the reach of accident. As do all of us who remain alive, his evidence is that he hasn't really suffered many. Accidents, that is. Or at least, apparently, he hasn't suffered enough of them. A winner like him can only be the Fool.

The accident ratio, of course, leaves a person far better off if he is white and rich, which is itself demonstrably goad to idiocy; the idiocy of self-congratulation for one's superior merit. Narcissism by any other name.

But the Trumpsters are onto something. They embrace accident, especially the sorts of accident most likely to emerge from the barrel of a gun or the carbureted or electronically fuel-injected barrel of an internal combustion explosion-containment chamber. 

Now Ol' Elon champions the electrical kind of motive power, just as he seems to imagine that the brain is a complexly wired container for our selfie-self. Perish the notion! The ground for all of us is accident, and the future is precisely that which we can neither project nor imagine because it always overtake us by surprise.

As we work to protect our selfie-selves, or to deny reality - take your pick - during this pandemic, our selfish genes are surely doing their own thing by managing to persist. The choices are among cucarachas, viruses, and perhaps still for just a moment longer whatever it is that could be meant by 'human.' 

If Trump suffers - heaven forfend - some unfortunate debilitating accident (prior to his ultimate demise, which can surprise nobody who hasn't internalized some fiction of immortality here on earth), that will cause no permanent harm to his ilk. Trump-alikes are apparently as numerous as Republicans now. They are the efficient causes - the 'engines' if you will - of our continued evolution. I suppose we should celebrate them for that. Pardon me while I puke out my guts.

The ground, remember, is accident. Life is an accidental direction away from entropy. It simply cannot be directed. No matter how much intelligence gets mustered, accident will prevail, and life will move the way that life has done for eons, which is, of course, in the direction of love. That's what love means. 

Intelligence is fine when it gets used properly in service to the comfort of our fellow humans. So often it gets used to engineer warfare and the death of those we deem to be on some 'other' team. As Dawkins so reliably demonstrates, those contests are at best only metaphorically related to what happens at the level of life's evolution. To treat them as contests between life and death is to make a categorical error. Genes are always grounded. Contests at any higher level can only cause sparks. Sparks are not alive, though heaven knows they may instigate life from time to time.

Intelligence cannot express love. Intelligence cannot channel love. Intelligence cannot in and of itself provide any basis for merit. Intelligence can only serve love, which it must do on the basis of exquisite balance. Our way of life demonstrates that beauty is the more reliable token for merit. Just ask Trump. 

We have surely crossed a tipping point in service to an excess of wealth that is more grotesque than whatever the First Emperor of the Chin Dynasty arrogated in attempt to obviate his mortality. Now there's a loser's game! 

Well over half of my stored energy for retirement is held on my behalf in hazardous bets - they call them equities - about the future of our economy as presently construed. Now that interest rates have descended to near zero, cash is a fool's reserve, though I can only try to enjoy the sport of my future being whipsawed by the stock market. 

Still, it's only half. Right? None of us is more than half right. But the amounts that evaporate in any given instant are stunningly beyond what I might need to live on during any given day. And I'm talking a mere multiple of three of my life-time's highest annual salary, which is right about at the median of income where I live, which is no place you'd aspire to. You do the math. I'm in the 50 percent, though - mostly by virtue of whiteness - I am immersed in the social capital of the one percenters.

I try really hardly to share my wealth in ways that don't lead to my being a burden on my progeny. For some reason, I just hate to work for the man, but I also have to admit that I hate that a little less than I would hate to be the man. It's a tough balance lots of the time. 

So, I give away my labor freely, now that I'm too old to work. Ironically enough, the labor I give away is precisely the sort that underlies the presumption of the need for a retirement battery. My donations are mostly physical, aided by tools. The logic is not linguistic logic. I make bad mistakes if and when my 'mind' is clouded by emotional charge. I have to love and to focus on the object that I'm fashioning. Mostly by hand. Without distraction.

How very ironic that labor with and by means of my body feels less painful than laboring with and by and through language! Both sorts deteriorate badly, though in some sense I am doing my very best work now. I am more motivated, apparently, to handle the more literal tools. My mind and my body have become one. Thanks God for that! I have some sense that I once did lack. I hope.

I do now actually prefer an electric bicycle. Go figure! I hope never to drive a Tesla, praying for streetcars in their place. Apple's so-called AI battery management really sucks. The batteries in my little mobile house are dying as we speak. I'm winding down myself. 

I labor for love, despite the evident fact that my motive undermines any and all appreciation for what it is that I provide. That is an unfortunate accidental side-effect of the sort of rampant unregulated capitalism that we still practice in these United States. Troglodytes!

What sort of fool am I? I am a fool for love. So is Trump, but his definition for love has a very low denominator. I think Biden may be my kind of fool. There are plenty of people whose work I admire that I can't really much agree with much of the time. That's OK. I love them anyhow. 

At my age, I'm less afraid to fail, and I guess that's how it should be. I must nurture my genes which are now contained in my progeny, right? They are my betters, though I wish they'd take more of my advice about what would be good for the planet. Electric better. Trolleys better. Cars bad. Diversity better. Race bad. Winning is not possible in love. Only losing. Love must be tested to be true. Intelligence is no foil. Alone and bitter in touch with truthiness and an audience of one. Time to get to work!

COVID-19 Was Started by a Pun!

I don't do puns. It's a brain-wiring thing. My brother in law can't help himself from punning. It's amusing until it becomes annoying, like anything that hides behind a front of 'I just can't help it.'

Much behavior in China derives from the punning which seems to descend from the way the written language constrains the number of phonemes to something like an order of magnitude fewer than are available to speakers of English. 

I know that it's linguistic dogma that the written language doesn't infect the spoken, but there you go. Mandarin is pretty much a concocted language, and it has a perfect one-to-one correspondence with written vernacular Chinese. That was never true for all the languages which used the Chinese writing system. In practice, that meant that literacy was reserved for those who understood and could use a written language that diverged from their native tongue. That was the case in the West as well, before we started writing in the vernacular. 

I digress. 

In my observation, there is a stunning increase in visits to traditionally Chinese temples in China. I don't think the particular variety of temple matters, but there is a very familiar pattern to what goes on. Incense is lit, bows are made with clasped prayerful hands, and names may be written on elaborate tokens. The prayers are for wealth and happiness.

On the trunks of many of the cars which circulate in China is fixed a chrome gecko. It puns with "avoiding misfortune" or avoiding an accident. It's pretty much the same as those St. Rose of Lima dash ornaments you see on car dashboards over here.

Now they don't really do God in China, at least not the way we do. Over here, we seem increasingly divided between believers and non-believers, and that is reflected in our increasingly dysfunctional adversarial system for achieving truth, justice, and American democracy. I know it's dysfunctional because Richard Dawkins told me how, in evolutionary terms. Of course I'm including on the non-believer side those who say that they believe, but really don't.

This has clearly become insupportably dangerous for the planet.

So, as is my habit, I go looking for what is most general about what is going on. You could call that the lowest common denominator - like punning as a basic form of humor, or, for instance, laughing at public farts; the lowest common denominator for humor in that case, or anti-scientific behaviors in the other. 

The low denominator is that people look for magic intervention in the workings of the world to make things better for themselves. Now in my cosmos, such selfieness is a form of evil. But it is just lowest common denominator enough so that it can be harnessed for many many purposes. For one, it's how our economy works. 

Both our economy and our politics work as though it were a zero-sum game, like football is. Let's make a deal; you lose, I win! It's more like you pay what you think is next to nothing and I claim nearly everything for myself. The religion of going for the lowest price is making lawyers, finance workers, tech titans, and WalMart seriously seriously rich. The rest of us not so much.

Frankly, I think that's why Dawkins' insistence that evolution is about selfish genes and not selfish individuals is so important. In general, that's why science is so important. The scientific method leads us to certain kinds of understanding that really must be believed, no matter what language you speak, or even if you read or write. It undergirds our technology. You may say that you don't believe it - if you're a creationist say - but you don't act that way most of the time.

Anyhow from this cosmically distant frame, it becomes easier to see why Trump has overtaken what was once an ideologically based political proclivity. We should all agree that it's a very bad idea to have a selfie obsessed person in the office of the President. But we don't. That's because about half of us are selfie-obsessed. We think it's the only way to be. We make a religion of it.

I'd say it's about half of each of us as individuals, though, and so it's an internal battle too. Without something like God in our sense of reality, we end up feeling lost. Happiness just doesn't quite cut it as the meaning of life, the universe and everything. But sometimes humor does. Lots of the time, really. Anybody remember George Carlin? He was so cynical about Americans ever sharing an understanding of what's actually real, that he had to reach for dark humor to reach any of us at all. Pretty clever of him, I'd say.

But back to what is really batshit crazy. In Chinese the word for bat can be composed into many many puns for prosperity, long life, and all the good things. Now some Chinese folks will eat ground up rhinoceros horn for virility, because of the obvious horny pun. It only stands to reason that they'll eat bats in one form or another. Girls in China use software to trim their selfie stick photos so that they all look like the ideal. Like Plato came in the back door, pun intended. 

Over here, we know it's our broken immune system which is killing us. But we've got the self-interest thing upside down and backwards. I mean come on now, how is it functional in time of plague to ascribe conspiracy theory style blame to China? What fucking difference does it make? We're killing ourselves here, people, because we really don't know who to trust. We don't act as though we trust the scientists. But why should we? They can be as selfie-motivated as the rest of us. But we should at least trust the science. And elect a president who's instincts are to bring us together with calm authority.

And speaking of selfies, what do you think happens to consciousness when we saturate our senses with pictures of ourselves all trying to look our best as movie stars?

I'll tell you what I think it means. I won't elaborate right here and now, so don't you worry, but consciousness works like this: Your brain does not contain your self. Sure, you destroy your brain and you're dead, but that would also be true if you destroy your heart and lots of other parts. The thing is that there's no artificial replacement for your brain. But your brain is not your self. Your self is all that you experience, and mostly your mind is outside your body. Your proper experiences are identical with the perceptual objects you've experienced. 

Our experience of consciousness has been located in the most primitive regions of the brain. That's the part we share with reptiles, and the seat for our affective response. Believe it or don't but you can destroy your brain's conscious functioning and still experience consciousness. Your affective center just happens to be more efficient at making the right choices when matching present perceptions to past experience. Generalizations about, say, a lion, are matched against a real lion right in front of you and you just run before you can even think about it. Even a reptile does that. Feelings come before thinking. Duh!

You don't impute malevolent intent to the lion unless you're telling stories. You just simply know what the lion will do to you. Now is not the time to be telling stories about who's at fault or who has malevolent intentions. Now is the time to get real about who has your best interests in mind. We can work out our differences later, but no, I won't be talked out of believing in the fact of evolution. 

I also won't ever eat a bat or a rhinoceros horn in any form, unless I'm tricked into it by a practitioner of fake Chinese medicine. No, I don't mean that Chinese medicine is fake, but some of it is when it relies on puns. Like "signatures" for our folk healers. Life is never so simple. Wouldn't it be just grand if it were??

So giving vent to selfiness is never a good idea. It's of a piece with racism, xenophobia, gender binary bigotry, and all other forms of self-indulgence which might rest on false beliefs in idols. Especially when that idol is your selfie self.

But I don't know if we who are on the right side of things (which would be the left, unless you're sinister) should be so intent on doing away with belief in something bigger than mankind. So long as it's not a personal God, and so long as it's not science in service to the economy. Heck so long as the God you believe in isn't just there as some kind of insurance policy which is written in your name, I can't see any harm to it. So long as it doesn't interfere with science, and so long as it doesn't pretend to give you some advantage.

I suppose I'm making a distinction without a difference, but I do have a hard time believing in any God or scientific truth which is true only for me. That doesn't mean I won't use scientific knowledge to my own advantage. It's a survival tool, most of the time, and we all collectively benefit from it even while we benefit individually. But if I save myself at your expense, we end up at each other's throats.

God used to help with that. Not any more. Neither God nor evolution has ever taken sides. It has never been a zero-sum game, though now we make it one. 

 

Reading Up on Psilocybin in the Age of Trump

In my usual scattershot way, I got turned on to Michael Pollan's recent book called How to Change Your Mind when I turned on a holiday re-run of a 60 Minutes segment about research into psychedelics for addiction, PTSD, and terminal cancer despair recovery.

Silly me, I thought 'oh yeah, so that's the solution!' People dissolve their egos, realize that the main cosmic force truly is love and then we reform humanity as part of, rather than apart from, nature. A sort of reversion to the hive forms of social creatures with presumably less impact on the planet.

These excursions can excite dormant parts of my memory, which also always reminds me why I can and could never be a scholar. I just don't have the mind for it, always dropping more threads of thought than I can track; leaving go of promising directions for my unguided research and then really quite forgetting about them.

It's all a good reminder than ones own personality is really the only reliable organizing principle, which really explains why all the excitement about the transformative qualities of psychedelics has mostly led - via computer technology, perhaps - to an acceleration of already settled trends, whether those be good, bad, or indifferent.

So tech moguls seem to harness their psychedelics inspired insights into the godhead of the cosmos to enhance their own abilities to expand their personal impact. Sort of like the way the Ivy League works now, where there are diminishingly few graduates anymore who went for the education, per se. Some might graduate and want to do good, but that always seems attached to the ego enhancements that is the actual purpose of the Ivy leagues to confer.

I'm an Ivy Leaguer who has remained a schlump, and that somewhat deliberately. There are plenty of us. We regard ourselves vaguely as failures, even while being somewhat proud for not selling out. Perhaps I would be a more proper Ivy-grade self-huckster if only I were able to be that certain of something that I might have that might be worthy. I'm not against being conventionally successful in principle, despite the moral burdens that might entail.

My life's work, as it were, is to understand what the fuck is going on, and in general I feel pretty successful with that. Less successful with communicating what I've found.

Like lately my project has been focused on what the fuck is going on with Donald Trump. I don't mean the man himself, and I don't mean finding some intellectual framework to understand the sociological phenomenon. I really just mean that I'm trying to understand why so many people are bent on giving him a pass for being such a narcissistic and sociopathic asshole.

I'm not helped in this endeavor by my diffident social recessiveness. I wouldn't go around announcing what I'm up to, in the guise of a writer or a journalist, perhaps, like Michael Pollan. But I do have an easy time talking and connecting with a wide variety of types, which certainly does include Trumpsters. They hardly ever offend me personally, even while their representations might, from a distance.

I guess that Trump's evident success in politics might have something to do with a personal magnetism that many sociopaths display. He is certainly about display. But in the end, I think it's more about our collective beliefs about what it means to be human.

We are really attached to individualism. We reward individual talents and personalities extravagantly in the arena's of sports or cinema, say. We reward individual beauty, genius, financial rapacity (department of redundancy, in the charge of Captain Obvious) and so on. Ordinary wage-work sloughs off the self-actualization bandwagon along with all the other uglies and what Hillary calls deplorables.

But the main thing is that we enshrine individualism in our one person one vote dream for democracy. We remain, in principle, equal, despite vast differences in privilege and socioeconomic clout. Of course those dreams of democracy can't work when money combined with technology can so easily manipulate the vote. But that hardly loosens our grip on the dream.

I find hope in this, in the sense that this set of understandings enables me to understand Trump in a positive light. Of course people want a talented leader. They want to believe that there is someone competent enough to make the right decisions all the time. And only someone like the Real Donald Trump is so unhinged as to make that claim about himself.

In other words, much like the way I view our dependence on fossil fuels, these have been a gift from the cosmos. While we seem mostly to have squandered the gift, not knowing what to make of the transformations its energy storage has enabled, there's no denying the explosive transformation of our world that fossil fuels have effected. I'm just waiting for the quantum shift in consciousness that should and must accompany such transformation is all.

And in that sense Trump  spells the end of our dangerous fantasy. There is no further to go in the downward slide from Reagan through Dubya to Trump. They were all empty vessels for our projections along with the projections of the moneyed and self-aggrandizing powers that are really in charge. I'm not talking about any sort of deep state. I'm talking about the obvious.

Trump spells the end of the descent into the dangers of a cosmology of human individualism and the implicit assumption that history ends with it's triumph in the approximate form of individualistic peak consumers. Living the good life on a virtual private yacht with lots of nubile babes to fuck. Not much different than our projections onto what those self exploding Jihadi others long for. We literally can't imagine another way to be our best selves. Note that women are entirely left out from all of this as objects, just as they are strangely absent from narratives about psilocybin.

The enlightenments from psychedelics are just grandiose versions of the enlightenments form motherhood, it would seem to me. Visions that MEN would have who wish to come back down to earth to lead some movement. Some disruptive transformation.

Under these conditions I think it would be useful to offer something that's equally accessible by everyone rather than an amplifier for male grandiosity. Or lets say accessible by anyone who's somewhat literate. Literacy is a two-edged sword, for sure. In my cosmos, it is both the mechanism for subsumption into a power structure developed mostly for the benefit or one or another form of patriarchy, while it is also the mechanism to break free of that, in communion with some communicable "truth." In my usage here, "truth" only has to do with being trued to other words and not to some ultimate Platonic god-form. So no-one gets to be the expert guru leader type, even while someone might get celebrated for a discovery of sorts.

So that's my life's work; to find those words. I mean I have found those words, but I haven't been able to find a way to lead anyone to read them in their proper sense. Were anyone to do so they also would realize that same set of marvels revealed under the influence of LSD, magic mushrooms, toad venom, whatever. But the realization would be more permanent and more transmissible/transferable.

It is my fervent hope and sense that there can and will be a sort of catalysis, where one single understanding spreads to become quickly universal. I'm hoping for at least the speed that went from Einstein's discoveries toward the end of Henry Adams life (an amazing read, that I had just now) to the actual release of those massive sums of energy which his theories enabled. The term of merest youth.

But the goal now is not to entrust the transformations to some elite cadre of, in that case, physicists and their administrators, who may not be in the best position to make the decisions. The transformations have to transit the populace or we end up with 'in Trump we trust,' in one form or another. I mean he wouldn't even listen to the physicists, or at least not for their truth value. He'd go right to the punch and deploy the power for his own personal ends and damn consequence to the rest of the planet.

Here's how I got to my words, roughly. First off, I died, and had that signal experience of my life passing before me in an instant, in full detail. That tends to warp one's sense of the meaning of eternity.

Next, I hazarded into the twin pursuits of Chinese language (starting with the classical written language) and physics. It turns out that I had a talent for each of those, the twinning effectively preventing my delving too deeply into either.

The Chinese provided antidote to the Platonism still ruling the Western mind. That's what gives us God as the eternal perfect form for human, and the crazy notion that ideas are expressed after first being formed in the mind. Which leads to insanities like virtual reality, dreams of cyborgs and immortality, truth in and through words, and such-like.

Chinese creativity seems to work on the stuff of existence rather than on ideas. The artist starts with an uncarved block and not with some vision which requires outering. The limits to the mind are not even transcendable in principle, nevermind in practice. That doesn't mean that the random stuff beyond understanding is meaningless, but only that it can't be known and understood.

There is beauty in each of these disparate cosmologies and many ways that they might be mapped onto one another, but there is also fundamental disparity. Just as there is with the writing systems. Chinese writing has a connection to the cosmos that is prior to language. Western writing is always a record(ing).

So perhaps it was easier somehow for me to make the leap through particle physics to a shift in cosmos. A cosmic shift, if you will. I mean you won't but I did when I was lots younger. My insight was simple, informed as it was by having gotten outside the set of metaphors that govern even physics.

Perhaps I started with the candy-colored metaphor that gravity is love. I know I was trying to make sense of meaningful coincidence in my life. Many people settle for Jesus or another form of religion for those answers, and move on. I have been more struck by the importance of accident to both my life and to life in general. Evolution moves by accident.

At the opening of the atomic age, Henry Adams was moved to understand force just as the physicists and disrupted religionists were. There wasn't yet the notion of bosons, I don't think, but there was already a sense, as he called it, that motion and matter were identical. There remained the mystery of why it was that the Virgin moved the world as much as the locomotive did. How was one to understand the differences in those motives?

Anyhow, while living aboard the wooden sailboat that I'd rebuilt as my home, it seemed trivial suddenly one sleepless night around 1982. If there were no definable forces, then matter would be the disposition of some primordial mind. I wasn't concerned about brains, just about mind preceding matter as a cosmic descriptor.

Forces implied eventual impingement of matter upon matter and would happen mind or no. But movement without force could only happen in the mind, and it did seem obvious to me that such motion could be reduced to what we call emotion.

And so, of course gravity started to look precisely like love in a metaphorical sense at least. Way back in 1982 we were already embarked on the quest to find the boson mediating the force of gravity. I thought that would be impossible given Einstein's general theory of relativity. That posited the equivalence of gravity and acceleration. Space curvature was entailed and later proven, seeming to make the force of gravity a descriptor (like mind) rather than some discoverable exchange of tangibles. There was enough instrumentation already in 1982 - before the CERN supercollider - to make "tangible" a very fuzzy notion. We have gravity waves, but as yet we have no graviton. A matter of time, perhaps?

For me, at least, the quest has lost its interest. As far as I know, I'm still the only one to have paused on definitions for mind and emotion that require no further discoveries. That's not to nullify the possibility for endless investigations to build our collective understanding of our cosmos. But for me, at least, it does change the tenor of such investigations.

What that mainly means is that those investigations can no longer be considered amoral, or inevitable, or always leading to understanding that is not automatically wedded to power. There is really nothing left to be understood in those terms. The only thing left is to be manipulated.

We have recently entered into a dangerous endgame of confusing the enhancement of human agency with understanding. We have yet to uncover how evil that is. Intelligent young people now simply assume that our hoped for technological breakthroughs won't happen before we burn everything down.

I have more faith in life than that. We will wake up to the fact that agency is not understanding and that what we mean by "truth" can only be distorted thereby. We have to stop projecting ourselves onto "nature" is all. In just the way that the human mind is only metaphorically centered on a CPU - and the metaphor is very parochial - the ability to do something is not the only measure for understanding, good measure though it may sometimes be.

Even if you don't follow the argument that scientific understanding has jumped the shark in a way, it should be trivial to reach agreement that the solutions to our problems are more political and sociological than they are technological. We just don't have the collective will to do things right. We are culturally trapped into wanting a strong man (and I mean MAN not woman) to deploy force confidently. That will end us as a species.

Fortunately, life will prevail. Love will prevail. And if our biological species does survive, we won't recognize it, so what's the worry? I will always have fonder memories of the rainbow homecomings than I could ever form at Burning Man. Those people don't even know that it truly is a celebration of an ending. The new beginning is happening where people don't trumpet themselves so.

Negotiating Price - Conclusive Proof of Conspiracy

Lots of people these days find that just as they were about to poke their nose above water, something bad happens. The car breaks or the furnace needs attention. It's as if there were a conspiracy, with rising prices calibrated to hit your cynicism button. Like when I moved out into the country and my auto insurance rates went up. "Well, that's just what the computer shows" and I read some stuff about how rural roads are actually more dangerous than city streets, and then forgot about it.

Yes yes, we all know that there's a conspiracy against us, but who can we be righteously angry at? What person can we stick in what bullseye, and then throw outrageous darts at? And once they take that spot, well, is it really just a matter of how much they're worth? Can our anger be gaged by the price of the target? Why not, right? What other metric can we possibly have.

Moving back into the city now they want to nearly double my auto insurance rates. It can almost make a guy hopping mad. But who do you get mad at, exactly? Not the nice woman on the phone. Not at her computer. Just like when gas prices were going up, and so everything else had to raise dependent prices at the same time. Sometimes calling it a fuel surcharge, just to outsource some petty rage.

And now the Governor here in New York State has had to cancel payments to local school districts since he can't print money he doesn't have. As if that cut won't get passed along too. It makes you want to go back on all the little deals you made where you accepted logo value for the real thing. As in, how does that price get computed anyhow? Isn't it simply what you're willing to pay, based on some calculus of desire? Weren't we all out buying iPods and making a lifestyle out of it? And then paying the breakdown insurance fee becauase they're not really supposed to be repairable. And then somehow thinking that Steve Jobs is the more cool-friendly dude at the top, up against dweeby cloud warriors like Steve Ballmer or Eric Schmidt.

Jobs runs his job like a fascist dictator, and has his own cult-like following. We don't even resent that he gets his new body organs from the head of some outsourced line, since he's so crucial to the workings of our economy. Well, hell I'm almost certain I'd like him a lot better than I would Bill Gates. I mean, for anyone with a sense of humor who reads Dr. Suess, Mom is the consummate fascist, and she's pretty nice. And Steve manufactures cool, while Bill just makes money, right? Or gives it away to folks who think like he does.

But these are all the guys at the center of the conspiracy to set price just at your breaking point. Um, I think that's what capitalism means. Even though universal healthcare would save more businesses than it could possibly destroy, the business community fights against it. Even though an even and well regulated playing field for doing business would liberate corporations from being forced by business logic to act like really bad citizens in their bogus role as "legal persons", they rail against more regulation.

Well, ultimately, you have the choice to buy or not to, right? Except when it comes to certain things, and those things now raise their prices I guess just because they have to. The economy's bad all over. But it never is quite clear whether the incredibly falling prices or the incredibly rising prices are what constitutes the biggest danger to our economy.

The falling prices are built on the fictional cost of oil, which is subsidized by simply mortgaging our future. Only the cost to extract and for political baksheesh gets factored in, and never the actual cost of the decimation of our commons; our common heritage. Never the cost of war. Never the cost to those we exploit, who aren't resourceful enough to slow our extraction of their resources.

The rising prices are built on want or greed or desperation moves to stay in business despite fallen demand. But sometimes new things, like iPods, can be compared to the incredible cost they would have had were that same "functionality" to be introduced the year before, and they can seem like falling prices even when they fill a category which never even had existed.

So, in the end it can seem marvelously conspiratorial when you find yourself right on that edge if something happens, and certainly over it if you lose your job or get sick. And none of us knows how to fly as escape from free fall.

But this conspiracy is surely between you, the consumer, and those who present stuff for your conspicuous consumption. There can be no real mystery about that. Price means to set you near your edge, which is fine until you lose your confidence or balance, and then the game is up.

Everyone steps away, and like those Chinese who we thought once were being all taught to jump off their stools on some cue to focus a shockwave down to the Big Apple, say, more effectively than a nuke could be delivered; everyone steps away from their edge and the economy reels from the shock waves of it. As if not one chance Chinaman could be counted on to have second thoughts. As if it's all a confidence game.

Because those cappos at the center of the financial economy were caught up in new ways to manufacture confidence and deliver the certainty of high returns by simple math which by any other name would be called a Ponzi scheme. Selling futures at a discount. So long as the future can be pushed off into seeming eternity. Which it can't. I'll insure you insuring me and we're all happy until we're not.

And so now how is it that we can keep full employment without the automobile, say, no matter how powered, to take up that much of our paychecks? How can we keep the economy humming without people playing perpetual musical houses on some bizarre notion that the price of real-estate will keep magically rising just because, what? There continue to be more and more of us? That's gotta stop too.

It would seem that we could and must bring things back down to earth. If the cost of oil were to reflect, truly, the cost to replace it. If the cost of parking were to reflect its true value, and not the reverse-protectionist scheme of if you charge for it no-one will come.

If the actual labor cost for goods were to be some significant fraction of what are now the distributed logo-costs, the shipping costs, the marketing costs, the free-parking costs, the salesperson costs, the stocking costs, all of which are in competition with the free-of-them-all-but-shipping cost of goods from the virtual shelving of the Internet.

The fact that there is not a greater disparity in price from store shelves and price from the Internet does beg one great big question, don't you think? As in, where does the real subsidy come from? Could it be, simply, the roads and the parking and the fact that none of us factor in the cost to own our cars? It might turn out that labor represents the almost nil actually built in to final price. It might turn out that there really is a conspiracy of price fixing which has nothing to do with anything at all but your desire.

But where will people work when this all collapses? Can there really be enough jobs after the big box stores shuffle down their cardboard walls, and all those underpaid workers go back out into the local stores where the clerks once could earn enough to raise a family? When physical widgets get manufactured locally without physical danger to children or smokestack effluent to spoil the air, will there be enough actual jobs for handy people without the desire to prove it in college?

Why not, right? I mean, if you do the math, there's enough money right now going to the center that if it were to be redistributed out would generate enough tax revenue to even silence Glenn Beck about his trillions that he can't conceive.

I'd say maybe. I'd say it might be worth the investment of some hope, which costs precisely nothing. What if instead of doing everything ourselves, according to the massive educational infrastructure of lego-style DIY home improvement, we were to actually learn, once again, to trust our neighbors, and pay the ones with that kind of genius to build and to repair our houses? Could it actually be that the price, rid of all those externalities of centralized design copyright costs, would drop to where we might wonder how we ever could afford the extravagant cost of widgets sent from distant shores?

Could it be that we could end up with houses worth living in, and minds not all ticky-tacky identical? Where design flowed more naturally from workers trained as apprentices, and who understood local conditions and materials? Where the distance from source to market was actually walkable? Bicycles in a pinch?

Not to mention the food, which we've already learned to never cook ourselves, as though the cost of servants was ever so extravagant as the cost, including the externalized health-care cost, of eating out perpetually and rapidly. Julia Child compiled her guide to French cooking for servantless Americans. Well . . . .

Not to mention the dialing back of war overhead. Not to mention the re-creation of tourist destinations worth visiting since they aren't all variations on the very same theme park. They could be so interesting that it might be worth threading them together across a slow walk, like beads on a necklace, making the flyover far too boring to be worth its expenditure of however little time and inconvenience.

This extravagant vision is as near to hand as ceasing to hand over all of our power to those Ivy generated thinkers who have been allowed actually to believe that their particular brand of genius - the kind which gets measured by IQ - is the only kind which counts. They are naked now, with nothing to show for their supposed intelligence apart from a very clever deflowering of our mother earth.

So, I'm also extravagantly hoping that our very fine community organizing president has surrounded himself with so many Ivy Leaguers simply because he knows that they represent the actual power elite; and that he has that much confidence in his own powers of persuasion that he can convince them to relinquish their strangle-hold on what gets considered for publication. That he understand that one must hold ones friends close, but ones enemies even closer.

That once the power elite are convinced that they too will feel the pain of the least among us, whether transmitted along with the rampant and indiscriminate disease vectors of poverty, or the indiscriminate desolation of living on a despoiled planet; that once this seed-core of sourdough thinkers and doers and lever pullers sees that they actually are naked emperors, then the catalytic outspread of better living actually can change the world, so to speak.

Because, of course, scant readable publications do come from the Ivy. The good stuff all comes from somewhere else; the music, the literature, the interesting architecture, the theater, the painting. All that comes from the Ivies is power. They train for the voice of power, the assumption of power, the supposition of power, and they populate elite museums with meaningless art removed from the context of any life. They fill the elite concert halls with music which never can quite remove itself from the age when cardinals actually did wear red and jewels and screwed around and wielded power behind their curtains.

And these folks are the ones we allow to represent us in the halls of power? And Glenn Beck is the enemy? It really can be hard to know which are the more powerful delusions, but it does seem clear that the mutual suspicious between intellectuals and people whose genius is elsewhere, might be the most corrosive actual divide in our actual Republic.

I retain some real hope that this divide can be crossed. Rock and roll has made its way into the halls of power. Powerful stories sell better than refined literature. Good wine can still be had. What the hell, eh? Size really does matter, as does height. Some things are just too high, and must come down, like Tiger Woods, for the sheer pedestrian weight of being human. Some kinds of genius are simply over-compensated, as are some shortcomings overcompensated for. And no matter how perfectly composed are your publications, reclusive and exlusive geniuses of my world, I'll take mine live and local. Every time.

Breaking up Logjams

Like most of us, I'm guessing, I'm pretty sick and tired of certainties. It just seems that folks are embedded in their thinking, whatever kind they indulge, and that nothing short of systemic meltdown will get them out of it.

There are those of us who decry corporatism, and just simply don't understand that people on the other side don't get it. But the people on the other side have their own horror stories about government which we don't get.

And the believers in Jesus have their certainties about what their faith has done in their lives, but they just don't get either how the rest of us have such a hard time with what so clearly is a fabricated tale of the supernatural and fantastic.

But you know, it's hard to deny the staying power of that Jesus story, and so what if people think they have to pound you with idiotic certainties to get out their own story about what Jesus in your life could do for you, if only you would believe.

But what if, as I really do suppose to be the case, government and really really big business just simply have a symbiotic relationship. Well, OK, that's so obvious as to be just patently true. But then isn't all our yelling at one another simply feeding the beast? More patent obviousness?

But really, the statistics for corporate welfare make the kind we allow to impoverished people seem like so much spitting in an ocean. And still I can understand why folks on the other side get angry when someone keeps hanging on to their free ride.

If we really wanted people to be able to climb out of poverty, wouldn't we offer genuine education, and jobs which pay a living wage? Maybe they serve a purpose by just acting and being poor and dumb, to validate the system which feeds so happily off the rest of us.

Most of us are too scared to question the system which employs us. We're too proud of the credentials granted us by the government franchised free and public education system. We hold on too closely to our private accomplishments if we're already in the non-public elite, as though we somehow chose our parenting and privilege.

There was a time, not too very long ago, when middling folks would call in someone of their acquaintance to fix their roof or even mend their socks. Pretty much like fast food, our habits all are changed now, and can you even imagine someone darning socks? I guess we hire people to work on our roofs, since they're so scary and high, but we don't trust them to use our toilets and just hope we won't be implicated when the border control police round them up.

The rest of the time, we're all about doing it ourselves to save a buck. Or getting rich enough to hire the ones you can trust to use your bathroom, which means pretty much that you have to work for one of the big box entities and swallow all your prideful independence.

I would love to have my government back, just as I would love to whistle while going to work on my neighbors' houses. But it ain't going to happen any day soon. Meanwhile, we should work on ways to stop yelling at one another.

Left Behind - conscientious objection to the workplace

Those two of you who read this will know by now that I enjoy making fun of anyone who's gearing up for some kind of "rapture". Any kind of rapture, whether religious, geek-style, or just some kind of new house new car ain't life grand hyper wedding cake return to what almost all of us never really ever had chance for in the first place except in our dreams - dream.

As a pretty casual observer of the political arena, I can't help noticing that among the people who need to have some sort of safety net, people like me are never included. If you haven't been layed off, you can't get help with health insurance or with unemployment insurance. I'm not even sure the unemployed by "choice" will be thought of in what comes out of the shouting match health care "debates." Will we just deserve our diseases too when they hit us?

Whatever the latest rapture might be, I know I'll be left behind, and made to feel that it's my own damn fault. Well, I object. On your behalf, I object, because for myself there is no more choice. I've had it with this grind. And I've gotta say, I'm pretty happy with what's come about. So don't worry about me. Worry about yourself!

I can't collect unemployment, because I chose to leave my job. I love my kids as well as I do because I decided to have them. I pay my own full COBRA costs because I really don't want to burden friends and family with whatever illness I might contract, and I get no stimulus help.

I have no retirement to speak of, so that particular rat race is not even worth worrying about at my age. I chose to leave my marriage too, come to think of it, though utterly without rancor or resentment. As my ex and kids now must fully agree, there was just too much span between us - although it did take an extraordinary set of shocks to cut us loose from one another.

Still, I'm meant to carry the load of guilt. And the buyer of my dream house will get all the first-time buyers' stimulus funding that I never did get and won't be eligible for anymore since I've already had my first time experience.

I would never have survived zero tolerance for anything at all in this life, and I'm damned proud of it. There's almost nothing in life you're gonna get right the first time, and we ought to be encouraged to experiment, to learn, to grow, to thrive.

When I was in the market, shady appraisers were being sent around to jack up the value of the houses they were checking out, just to stimulate more borrowing. We all know now what was going on with those scams. And I shouldn't complain, because I got myself a no-money-down house, which I never could do today even with Uncle Sam's $8K of booster.

I guess I'd be as guilty as the next guy for stealing your money, except that I've never had to go bankrupt or get foreclosed on. I turned out to be a lucky bet.

But so I'm walking away from my dreams to follow my bliss, and I don't think it would be a bad idea to stimulate that kind of thinking too. What better time to try new thinking than when the old is working so miserably?

And I want to know now what it could possibly mean when the bank still sends out its appraiser even though the fellow buying my house is putting down half in cash! What do they know that we don't?

I don't think it would be a bad idea to make it easier for people to walk away from work which is grinding down their souls. I don't think it would be a bad idea to ease the Main Stream Media fear-mongering which makes us all think we can't live without the goodies we're still encouraged to claw after; that job one is to keep the job you have, because life without it is that unthinkable.

I think that's not too different from the kind of Church-based fear mongering which encourages thoughts of eternal life or hell. Or history's terminal uplifting by some magic Rapture. I don't even think it's very different from the Jehovah's Witness style 'abandon hope that we can ever clean up our miserable act' push toward more technology, as if that will fix everything that possibly could go wrong with spaceship earth.

There is no possible solution, so look to heaven, look to the masters of technology, look to the democratizing Internet, but meanwhile hang on to your life-raft, your house you car because it's a stormy scary world out there.

No it's not. Well, OK, it's not for me. I have friends and family who love me, and who are plenty willing to put me to work at least for my dinner. I have big ideas which might make a small difference in the world, and I think it might just be my obligation to put them into practice. I have an Ivy league education, and I even speak Chinese for when they become our masters.

If I'm susceptible to fear mongering, I can only imagine that you are too.

I do like to dream about what might have happened if all those trillions pumped into the same-old economy to replace the trillions which went up in smoke were pumped into new thinking instead of back into the same old furnace.

I wonder what might have happened if instead of the direction of misogynists like Larry Summers, things were directed by the likes of yet another recent Noble winner (I'm thinking of Larry's boss) like Muhammad Yunus who also sports a Muslim sounding name. He directs most of his loans to women, who are in the best position to make a hundred flowers bloom with their local efforts.

Really, what if encouragements were made to real risk takers instead of people who are taking risks only with other peoples' money. What if money were given to people who have no real choices but who are chomping at their bit to make a go. Like most of the women of the world, up against the wall without real choices and needing only small amounts to open a store, a salon, a cleaning service, an empire?

So I declare I will not feel guilty for choosing to be out of work, for choosing to sell my house, for choosing to drive my car right into the ground. But I really don't think I should be left behind either for my healthcare needs or unemployment safety net. I think I should be encouraged to try my wild ideas on the marketplace.

Again I have to say it. This is not about me, since I'm going to do it anyhow. This is about you. You should have choices too. You'll need to speak up though, or you're gonna be left behind.

No Bikini Atoll

I must warn you in advance, gentle reader, that this is a roller-coaster read. I want to tag subjects normally not strung together in a single piece. To be honest, I'm having a lot of trouble writing it, keeping what I want to say under control and steady in my post-modern jumpy mind.

I'm going to try to help you out by hyperlinking all my reference jumps, but to keep you on the same page, I'll make them pop up in a different tab - you do have tabs, don't you? - and you can see where I get some of my thinking from. I mean, if you care to. And I do just have to say this writing in the ether now is almost as fun as my already-ancient-when-I-inherited-it IBM Selectric (r) typewriter used to be. Yay technology!! Finally something new under the sun since movable type and word processors.

I want to talk about intelligence, about what it is and isn't, and about the real prospects for making simulated artificial thinking. I will remember along the way that statistical regression analysis got fully developed with IQ testing actually. By that same species of damned lies which helps computers to act like thinking machines, or determines relative position for unpinnable particles.

I want to point out the time when some fictitious quality called little g got reified; as if the act of measurement could conjur metaphoric tenors into actual existence. As if intelligence is not something dialogic, communal, emotional, and real. You'd think we'd have learned our lesson from the big G already.

I'll write also about the mistakes made still even now in the supersized IT industry, and among the sprawl population of first worlders on planet earth. Much of our activity still seems premised on the quaint notion that all good people must always want slaves to do our work.

People still buy snake oil. Hucksters still get rich on it. Work is not necessarily a burden, and no-one will ever live forever. You wouldn't even want to, trust me.

Most of us been awakened to the fact that race is not a proper taxonomic category - relevant for breeding maybe, but not for evolution, where miscegenistic true love might give us our best shot.

We still live in a modernistic hangover, excitedly hoping that by making machines which we don't care for, we can get them to do our work without compromise to our moral integrity. Maybe we can grow meat without sentience. And maybe our perfected Turing contraptions can be made to think for us too, without our ever having to care about them in their learning.

I need to write about why we can't have it both ways, why when we let machine processes do the hard part of our thinking and decision-making, we've already lost a large part of what it means to be human. That sometimes even paying someone for their work robs them of their dignity.

I want to have some fun too, at your expense and mine, regarding machine sex which as everybody knows, or ought to, is still a part of what drives technological innovation. That, along with warfare. OK, maybe music too.

And I will identify myself at the outset as someone who does wonder if things are really getting better anymore. I don't believe in golden ages, that's for sure, and am not looking to go back to something we might once have had, or thought we did, since at least some among us projected it - the apple pie living - from their public selves, whatever they were really up to in private.

I will relate how, late in the twentieth century - that bloody century during which everything changed - I was a young and dumbly innocent headmaster for a tiny school called Calasanctius, in Buffalo, NY. Buffalo was then already descended to Rustbelt status, which made it an un-cool venue for this path-breaking experiment in global education for "gifted" children.

St. Joseph Calasanctius is a patron of Catholic education. By the time I joined its faculty, Calasanctius, the school, had very little to do with Catholic anything, except for some lingering and kindly, mostly irrelevant, old priests. There might have been some malingering too among semi-retired faculty still living on campus, or so the jealous teachers' union thought, and at least one young priest got stared down into moving on.

I only learned details of St. Joseph Calasanctius' life well after the school had closed for good. It seems the Piarist Fathers, founded by St. Joe, provided some foreshadowing of late second millennium Church history. A recent book called Fallen Order details early pederasty scandals in the time of Galileo, when the Piarists were on a school development and expansion spree.

The Church decided right from that beginning to protect Christ's Body above His spirit. Karen Liebreich, Fallen Order's female author, had to pass by the kindly Cardinal Ratzinger, keeper at what used to be called the Inquisition, in order to access partially preserved documentary evidence about those earlier scandals.

This may even have been when school as we now know it got its start; open to everyman and not limited to the elite as it always had been previously. How ironic that the American "common school" movement was inspired at least in part by a desire to marginalize dangerous "papist" schooling. How very obvious that these young innocents would be preyed upon, since they had no good family to protect them.

My school thrived in the age of Sputnik, where to be gifted and bright was thought to be good for the country, and necessary to cultivate. But by the time I got there, "everyone was gifted" and Buffalo's infrastructure far outpaced its shrinking population. We were another untaxed property in competition for dwindling elite dollars. The city fathers, with whom I so carefully populated our board, had to let some institutions go.

It must be difficult for the Church to negotiate these difficult times for its Institution. You have to credit their commitment to more openness and light in at least this case of allowing the young author to complete her investigations. Though they do so much better statistically by following conservative or even reactionary directions. The liberal Dioceses shrink and must import seminarians from South America, say, while arch conservative districts grow and thrive.

The Piarists were also friends of Galileo, who was on the outs for different reasons. You also have to credit the third millenium Church for tangling honestly with such difficult topics as get brushed aside by think-by-numbers Big Box Church Creationists. Though both seem to be splitting the same infinity when they use science as authority for demarcation of life's conception.

As with the hackneyed Church now, so my school formed a sort of strange amalgam of freethinking Progressivism and Chicago-school Allan Bloom Great Books retro chic.

Toward the school's final year, willing to try most anything, I found myself in negotiation with Bruce R. Powers, Professor at nearby Niagara University. He had convinced me that we could redesign our curriculum around something he had introduced to me called media studies.

Dr. Powers was a friend and collaborator of Marshall McLuhan, the erstwhile public patron saint of WIRED! magazine. You'd think I'd know this stuff, since I've been laboring in the tech support galleys for maybe fifteen years already. I've never known if I was cool or just a geek, but I did know that WIRED! was just too hot to touch.

I don't do fashion well, and WIRED! set out to normalize the world of geekiness with cool. I felt like I should read it, which is a kiss of death for someone raised on guilt in the Catholic context of Buffalo.

Medium as message had already become old before my time, just post-psychedelics, just post free-love. I think Bruce was attracted to Calasanctius' path-breaking commitment to a cross cultural and global curriculum. We emphasized instruction in a wide array of languages.

Media Studies was a way to run a fiber through all the curriculum, much in the way so many Charter Schools now try to counter the never-ending proliferation of topics for full coverage of detailed state-sanctioned curricula.

Experimental schools now take on themes, like technology, maritime trades, even fashion - imagine investigations of cool as the basis for a curriculum! Hell, I did. By providing that kind of lens, I believe they demonstrably get children further in toward the various traditional disciplines than was ever done in my time. I went to school when almost all teaching was abstracted from anything students might be interested in, and only college bound types like me were destined to succeed, in school if not in life.

I started as Calasanctius's Chinese language teacher, a talent I discovered on one side track from my own many droppings in and out from courses in Physics or Engineering. We'd been among the very first schools nationwide to offer Chinese Language instruction, as well as Advanced Placement testing. There'd been a lapse, and I brought new grant funding to restart this "critical language."

For our final graduation I invited Harpo Hanson to be the speaker, a man instrumental in the development of Advanced Placement testing and curricula. I was proud when he accepted, and he even remembered the school well, though I was and remain deeply conflicted about the direction of acceleration for what intellectual giftedness might mean.

The school was deep in trouble then, having barely weathered the great post-stagflationary warm up recession of the 1980's. Buffalo's economy was in very much worse decline than the nation was more generally.

Dr. Powers and I thought we might bring the school back some life. He also thought that there was more to McLuhan than was being credited at that time.

I was more than game. I got that we could not do everything; neither the students nor the budget could stretch across our ambitions. We made room, critically, for "field study" which meant rambling real-world school bus expeditions of discovery and exploration across our land. All the School met weekly for "Colloquium" which meant teachers and students sparring as equals on reads of writings which no one was good enough to pin down. We tried for all the AP courses, in an Upper School now dwindling well below 100 students.

Media Studies made a perfect fit, if we were to accept media as the superset for technology as just one aspect. Words, then, are also technologies to extend our human reach. It matters lots how you fix them, and how you let them flow. Science as the method, words trued along the way, with techniques resulting for getting acts together.

Unfortunately, Dr. Powers and I were both a little bit ahead of our times. Not because we were prescient or precocious. We just were. I understand Chinese language teaching is now in great demand. And who knew then about WIRED! around the corner, and McLuhan's partial rehabilitation toward the coming Geek Rapture.

Who knew then that our skin had already been blown off, and our souls released from slimy bodies? Who knew that the bomb that had already exploded was not the one we were struggling MADly to contain.

Who knew that all that could be revealed would be those obscene plasticized real bodies, advertised now at the Buffalo Museum of Science? Television spots highlight discreetly unveiled shots of over-bare dancers' bodies, weightless breasts showing perfectly in fuzzy silhouette. I doubt I'm the only one to notice, even consciously, the choices the advertisers make.

Sex always sells, as we know from the pornographic profit margins which power our blessed Internet. It's what cutting edge technology has always been powered by, along with advantages in warfare.

I, for one, can still not decide if the museum display is itself obscene. Sure, these people, or so once they were, all signed off. But still, I think it might be my privacy that's being invaded, not really wanting to look that closely inside, myself. In the event, I was made queasy, and found nothing more amazing than livid cadavers, expertly flayed and posed. Kind of puts me back a few ages I know.

Well, I understand the public spaces are suffering now more than ever, and have to sell sponsorships to businesses, and tickets to special events. A well off fellow I recently met had to leave behind his fund-raising business, because, so he told me, ever since 9/11 parents won't let their little leaguers travel door to door. I feel his pain.

And who really believed way back in the 20th century that the bikini costume, already so diminutive, might actually define naked better than naked did? I mean, we all knew that, but who knew about the implants? We have now perfected the internalization of that bikini superstructure, so that the skin inside the supports can be moved to their outside. And pussy beard shaved away to make primitive all powerful and all knowing ayatollah share his simple smile.

Architecture had been moving the other way for some time already, putting its skin on the inside, though who outside some ivory tower could tell what Postmodern might come to mean?

Who knew then that we would all learn to buff our bodies if we wanted to get ahead; to look better clothed and more powerful while naked - or imagined naked - than royalty once did fully draped? That social distinctions could also be that fully internalized to distinguish government subsidized corn sweeteners from the less refined and perversely more expensive kind. That personal trainers would one day be required - as personal dressers and groomers once were - to define our socially constructed and reconstructed still stratified new roles. That branding our equipment could set off our inner elite, but branding our very bodies might leave us Mini Pearl.

Until branding our bodies got expropriated too. Who can keep up with cool?

Would patron Saint McLuhan call the Internet both hot and cool? I might be the only one now to browse these pastures with a machine not capable of video. I am that kind of broke, and opt for Open Source not quite so much because it costs nothing as because I can make it work on garbage picked machines. Which cost, well, nothing. Stripped down nearly naked.

I'm not really sure if it's lack of personal trainer, the wrong taste in food, eating only what the government subsidizes, or Buffalo beer tastes in aperitif, but I came by my big gut naturally, the old fashioned way, with age. I'm not that into naked really, and think we could all stand a unionism comeback, speaking of beer guts and not cool. I agree with almost everything Michael Moore stands for, come to think of it.

That's how I started at my school, president of a teacher's union which was run way more democratically than those so recently scapegoated. Those just imitate what they're theoretically adversarial to, I guess. In any case, we should be careful what we mock, or it might come around and bite us in our tail. I don't think its very funny that we have recently had so many pretenders in our thrones, King George whatever-number-you-were.

I like Microsofted chic just fine, might sport body art if it wouldn't look so stupid on me, thank you very much. You wouldn't care for it either. I don't sport logos, don't brand my body or pierce its parts, and still think patriotic for America means anti-elite, depending on where and how you place the boundaries.

But I don't think intellectualism is elite at all, and if anyone tells you it is you tell them I'll have my honors student beat up their sports star any day of the week. Provided weapons are allowed. Elite is as elite does, I'd say.

Way back then as head of that misunderstood wannabe elite school, I found myself at once too young to have quite caught on to Dr. McLuhan's message (sic) and way too old to want to frequent those places where the heads all turn to see how much time I've spent looking as though I've spent none.

As if to resurrect perfect hotness from its carny sense of style, Buffalo now is floating up, like those weightless breasts on that skinless upthrust downfalling dancer. Relatively speaking, compared to everyone else's collapse, we're standing still and the world drops all around us. Our bubble never really did inflate; the gas too well contained beneath our flaccid once buff now aging skin? I'm pretty happy to be without athletic injuries, nor injuries to class, come to think of it.

But now when Google helps China "protect its citizens from porn", we should all at least wonder which profit margins it's defending and on whose labor. Which power structure calls which shots? When I write emails to my closest friends, and notice Google's ads off to the side reading my mind, offering to sell me Chinese language texts in Chinese when I complain that my favorite Chinese bookstores were no longer there in Toronto's Chinatown. When I sign on to do my search, and care little about what noise I'm injecting my identity into, just simply because I don't live in China or in South America. . .

. . . it might be time to pay some more attention to what's really going on.

There was much hype, way back when, about movable type and then about fixing peoples' thoughts. You'd think that old printing press would have wiped out completely already the Latin preaching relic of monarchical elites, the Church. Or is that Reformation still not complete, and it's the Superstar which still awaits dethroning? How very odd that it would take still fuller disclosure of deeper and darker secrets, to finally bring that Church right to its knees.

And now plenty of people have noticed that printing circuits on silicon chips in those CPU maker's commodity fabs, looks a lot like Gutenberg redux. This time the people get to publish and not just read mass reproduced tracts. There's supposed to be hope in that.

This time the reading before your reading gets done by machine, code on code, Hardware on software - though who can tell the difference anymore - so people get to talk. For free? Really? Then how come loudmouth psychopaths yelling "fire" in our crowded theater of love get all the airtime? Why haven't polite people been able to talk back?

Is there even room for earnest any more? My favorite new author, David Foster Wallace, introduced to me only too lately, also wanted to know. Well, Mistah Wallace, he dead, and it's a damn crying shame. He was probably the reigning champion of irony, and he died pleading for earnesty in writing.

Back at my school, I used to muse that measuring intelligence was about as dumb as measuring, say, beauty. We used the codes appropriately most of the time I think. It was a way to find those troubled souls, whose acting out in school might be symptomatic of some trouble with a stupid system. And some fit well with our more challenging aspirations for them. For most, the trick was to treat these children as human beings, as likely to be right as were their teachers. Imagine that! They've done pretty well for themselves, I now can know through Facebook.

It always did sadden me back then when some of the kids took to heart their "genius" designation. They learned that trick of never committing, lest their own dark fear become real: That they were only ordinary, and troubled, and without useful discipline just like, well, their teachers.

I wonder why that never happens to the athletes, the gymnasts, or even the gifted and talented musicians. Why must intelligence be singled out for suspicion? There must be some hidden motive, right?

Now that the software hardware equations have turned all inside out. Now that the printed hardware violently and with unthinkable passion interprets the stagnant code. Now that exoskeletons equal alien terror, while too soft skin must be protected from even the sun's blankened stare. Now then, what are we to do?

I understand most beauty queens are practically the opposite inside. Perhaps like poor and dear young Michael Jackson, they must out perform and perpetually remake themselves to feel any good at all. How great is great in a world of superstars and everybody else?

Intelligence, it seems, is also in the eye of its beholder. And I can only imagine what grotesque monsters would be created if we were to abide by some beauty score in our breeding games, the way we do in school. School so utterly disconnected in its measures from performances in life. Hitler once foisted his insanity on an entire people by taking full advantage of confusion between breeding and evolution. It's the environment, stupid, and not your will upon it. We now have self-inflated talking heads who do the same with shortcuts to thought, fanning the idiot winds.

Take Bill Gates, for instance, or Steve Jobs. They never finished college. No, I mean, please take them! I think they have far too much power for my liking. I'll take David Foster Wallace, with all his mis-schooled brains, keeping quiet with me in an old-school read. Taking on even Infinity, with charm and readability. Our economy too would heal itself, if only we'd leave off trying to patent even our genes. (Jeans make us naked too now, have you noticed?)

If the term media can be made to encompass all technology, as I think, praise all saints, it can, then the message has become us. Our skin has been off for some time now. Our boundaries all transgressed.

Here in the West, I'm sick to death of Big Box Churches, Big Box Stores, and Eating manufactories, where even our food is logoware, where even God has become some kind of trivial icon. God, who is a now a perfect reified object, precisely like the object of IQ testing, the general intelligence factor, "g".

That doesn't mean that God doesn't work. Hell look at how the Mormons and the Scientologists invented theirs out of whole cloth. By all evidence, He works as well as the Christian God, especially for bimbo actors. I'm pretty sure that the Scientology protocol makes for pretty good method acting. Almost human, these machines become.

It is no wonder that the thinking which now controls the earth with its master narratives' master control is all machinelike, with buttons to push and usage guides to consult, for things like grace and love and passion. It is no wonder that the freest among us are ready to strap themselves with bombs rather than to submit to technocratic controls over what they might believe. It is also no wonder that we stand, most all of us, terrorized inside some cage, checking out the outside now and then, from our womb's still flickering view.

Inside truly has become outside in this topsy-turvy mediated world of always new. It is the ticking of my very heart which terrorizes me most now, having no reset button for it. How long before people prophylactically insert the mechanical kind, or has that begun already, and I just wasn't paying attention?

It hardly matters, does it, if the picture is highly defined or fuzzy? Does it even matters if the signal is mediated by some cloud or by some wire? I frankly simply wonder why I would spend that much more money to despoil my illusion that the airbrushed face is the real one. I wonder how many more pixels it can take before the differences between analog and digital become a zeno's paradox distinction without a difference. Or is it the other way 'round?

Who the hell really does care what's meant by earnest cool? We do already know which powers hold which buttons, and the limits to what David now can do against which Goliath.

The very first of McLuhan's Thunders was East poised versus West. I believe that in that book they collaborated on - I must have left it behind along with what else of my personal belongings got auctioned off on the school's behalf, oh woe is me, for I can't find it now - McLuhan and Powers find us back at that beginning. The West visual. The East acoustic. drawing toward the final punctuation mark (must it be warfare?) which was the turning point always, of these mediated epochs.

I was able to hone my keyboarding skills on a word processor long before you were born. A friend in the industry, let's say, lent me his CP/M machine, factory demo, well before its time. Right before the Mac. Right before the decades long fiasco of pretenders endlessly becoming leaders. Or was it merest travesty? Projected life becoming real.

And what I found then still holds true now; that East and West will require some truing before they can be joined (back?) together.

I carried myself away back then (I'm so much calmer now!), comparing Western metaphor to the root Chinese poetic figure, the couplet. In Chinese tradition, I would later tell my students, there is no need to impose random meaninglessness on what exceeds the mind. Connections which can't be made causal need not be therefore accidental. There isn't necessarily a pointing, either, to what must remain beyond words. So no-one really expects any there there where nothing, really, is.

There is no need to point, metaphorically, in some ultimate direction. There are, rather, scintillating couplings of nature-written patterns - language in the largest sense - which alone are neither here nor there. The Chinese form of writing makes these relations come more readily to mind. There's less acoustic coding, and more cognitional gestalt.

The couplet enriches what could be read or seen or realized without it. A word for God was never needed in that language - the classical one I studied in school - and everyone knows the Eastern cosmos cycles, where our Western one has beginnings and endings.

Much later, in the West, at about the same time that we discovered speed to be the actual limiting static quality of flailing reality out there - a constant among relative motion - we found that the measurer could not be removed, even in principle, from what he measured.

Leaving the relationships, well, radically undetermined.

And so, Dr. Strangelove, our bomb was born, and our medium's message got delivered.

But I did notice then, as you must now, that these conceptual relations, which must be therefore held in some mind before they get collapsed into that outer reality by touch, do also and must exist outside ourselves, just as, well, our words do.

Or our hair, or our toenails, or even, if you cut them off, various other body parts, which however, often leave behind their phantom feelings.

So, while I think it might be true that we can go on rocking and rolling into some night for just a little while longer, these machines we meant to be our slaves will never do our thinking for us. They are only big long levers, giving us better grip on what we could destroy. Or save in its true season.

In my book, thought is but rationalization for what was felt beforehand. Functional MRI now proves that our brain had already made its move, before we made our conscious decision. Our feelings fish from schools of stimuli beyond imagining, for those which fit our pre-conceived patterns.

Our emotions are thought to be inside us, somewhere beneath our skin. Very gifted researchers seek that seat in our brains, and are making, so I understand, lots of very fine progress. Our feelings - metaphorically, and not the ones mediated by our literal skins - are all about the relations between and among things. Music of the spheres, for instance, or immeasurable love as interconnection. It's my body which rocks, I understand, to music that I care for.

When our skin is off, then, what happens to our feelings? Boundary issues, for sure, like borderline personality disorders, where saying the wrong thing the wrong way might set off a murderous response. There are no longer any defenses.

Or maybe there are no feelings at all, and so deadpan we might walk off to jail, considering the deal a pretty good bargain, all in all, after seventy some years of making off with other peoples' money. Or other peoples' lives, as that strangely normal BTK guy did.

The beats I like go right through my skin, and need no tympanic internal membrane to mock them. My body moves of its own accord, turn off, dear brain, allow it. If only I had the discipline to get in line with qi.

But our words still do intertwine, and implicate us each among the others. There's something different between cool implied and militant cool imposed. Over in China now, they're dealing with all different kinds of meltdown. Perhaps the Middle Kingdom's center will not hold, although let's hope it does. I think they need a little heart back in to their renewed state religion.

We here in the West are no less subject to promises of riches in return for keeping docile, still grinding away at meaningless work, anticipating easier times ahead.

I wonder if the promises of technology are a dream already gone up in smoke, when calculations are done now only in service to various kinds of gaming of various systems. I think that's how Google makes its money. It sure is how Walmart is making its.

Or are there only a very few among us would take advantage of the rest. Why do we let them, I wonder? Why do we follow our own lowest common denominator moves all the time?

I don't think there's any better form of American authenticity than "color" gotten from black v. white. Digital moves but it doesn't rock. For that you need stage presence. You need touch. You need something beyond the perfected Turing machine (apologies, dear abused Alan, deepest apologies).

And I'm very sorry all you media moguls, but I just can't feel that digital freeloading is any kind of equivalent to theft. I recognize your power, and will do my very best to stay your kind of legal, but give me a break already. I'll pay for live, and you can only make me want it more no matter how perfect is the reproduction.

The elites are almost always wrong, and vested in whatever system made them so elite. Sometimes they condescend, though. When not gaming with your money, they're certain to be lecturing you on why it would be wrong for you to get something for nothing. It's the system, you see, which needs you to behave. Prozac is cheap. Mind altering drugs will land you in jail. Corn will addict you to the medical industrial complex.

Oh crap, now I'm sounding like one of those nutjob crazies who get all the readership.

Well, I'm keeping my clothes on, and laboring for that kind of polite which represents the best of each of us when we raise our beings to the level of artifice. I'll leave naked authenticity to the young ones. Again, according to old McLuhan, it was the enclosure of our private parts which stimulated our very first catastrophe. Sounds almost Biblical, doesn't it?