A Resolution for a New Year

I have this old car, which isn't old enough to lack the universal connector which throws the codes which tells the mechanic which is the part which likely needs replacing. The part was replaced, but the light show now goes on and off, and I despair that there will ever be any definitive resolution which doesn't implicate rats eating the wiring harness. 

I have a new porch with a new light which has two bulbs. Each bulb is the minimum brightness that an outdoor LED light may have, or so they told me at the electric wholesaler. The light is more pleasant when only one of the bulbs is lit, but now randomly the second goes on. Is it even worth the trip up the ladder with head bent back to troubleshoot? This was installed by an extremely competent, experienced, professional but old electrician. Like me, he may not have enough experience with the on/off workings of digital replacement reality. 

At night my bed is a little bit cold for comfort. I could turn up the heat, but I bought a heated mattress pad instead. The documentation in this case is sufficient to the usage, and I am well pleased. I still don't understand why natural gas costs nearly half of what it did last year, given the war in Ukraine, and then there is the mildness of the weather. I need not be so concerned.

I am urged to purchase a new car, since I've poured so much money into this one. But it would be a betrayal of my soul to drive an automatic.

Our Earth now is blanketed in electronic debris in outer space, and I manically binge For All Mankind wondering, has it really come to this? Which this?

So many people observe that we are like Wile-E-Coyote, having crossed the point of no return, legs still churning in the comic gap between over the edge and the realization of gravity.

Meaning simply that we inhabit a seventeenth century world and lack the instruction manual to live in the twenty-first. Since we have never been modern, we can never be post-modern. All that we can do is to accept irony as our final stance. Both/and is not the same as on/off.

Our world is so much better now, and yet the oppressed remain oppressed. The wealthy are, effectively, more wealthy than ever in earth's history. They own all of our enthusiasms, which is plenty to keep us down.

I make the modest proposal that our resolution is social, and hardly technical. We already know better than to imagine that we can, as a species, triumph over whatever mysterious evolutionary processes brought us to this point. And yet we already know that our failure is certain if we continue to allow our lowest common denominator to prevail. Call it the artificial intelligence of money. Where greed replaces love as the prime mover.

Yes, of course, we continue to evolve. We trick ourselves into thinking that our evolution is continuous with all that came before. That ours is the natural elaboration of those processes and that our injection of intention to the quick is right and proper. 

Which would be so, truly, if our thinking had ever progressed from Newton's. Who dissected dogs while they still lived, so certain was he that they weren't sentient. Whose object was still God and not the Truth. Who is credited with triggering all of this accelerating development, which is geologically explosive in its form. 

And yet across this particular New Year - the first that I remember which I transgressed without remarking it, even internally. Having been preoccupied with other things. Like picking photos for the slide show for Mom's funeral, some of which turn sideways by the undocumented internal workings of the cheap projection system on which I watched the Bills win, excitingly, nail-bitingly, and barely,  yesterday afternoon. My excitement was enhanced by the fact that my little portable but great-sounding battery powered speaker system, which works on boat, in trailer,  and even in the rain and was very cheap, like me, was either no longer charging or the charge indicator light went out. 

Black box.

Which is likely also why spell-check no longer works. I supposed Google has gone all AI, because that's the overall trend, and they are now so clever than I can no longer click to repair, but have to type around their over-sophisticated suggestions. My mattress pad delivered on New Year's Eve, late, after the game. Could we even have imagined this world when I was but a child?

Nope. 

And yet there is nothing unfamiliar about it, though there should be. 

Not even a heated mattress pad provisions my night for sleep, though I was asleep before I heard the midnight noise too close nearby. Which hardly awakened me. It's not commotion which keeps me awake.

This morning, on New Year's Day, the New Yawk Times offers a week's worth of fine and tested resolutions of the energy loss from sleep deprivation issues that each of us now, apparently, faces. I have zero hope that any of these will work for me, but hey, I'm game! I slept so easily and naturally until my frequent flying to and from China. I still blame the dietary rather than time-zone upset.

I shall likely not be able to let the attendees at Mom's funeral know quite how much I loved her. It was never with my Dad that I could discuss all that was on my mind. She was always my champion, no matter how negligent I was and remain about what I did was doing to her. Dad made all the decisions, and was uptight for that. Not someone you might talk with until we took a sailing trip blind across the Big Lake in his old age. In an old-style wooden boat. 

Which might have been a death pact of mutual trust. We "landed" by dead reckoning, which is all we had, within the plot where we found ourselves marked out on the charts as "restricted" by reason of ordnance testing, from which we laughingly hightailed out. We could espy the shore by then, and knew right were we were. 

And so, sure, my dead reckoning does espy the resolution to our contemporary madness. It's rather post-modern, if you can stand that. I'm a mid-century modern man myself, contaminated now by Mom's decorating effluence, which tended colonial as does, well, this post-colonial house.

We shall never populate Mars, but not for lack of cleverness. Our trouble is that we've definitively cut ourselves off from cosmos, which is the deeper meaning for digital. The conflagration on whose tail end we live is identical in form to the instant Trinity test by which Oppenheimer's success was meted out and then away. I am no big fan of Christopher Nolan's scientistic fantasies, but he nailed this one. Has he grown a literary heart? Doubtful, but hey!

Each of us has outsourced by now the better angels of our nature to the good graces of ambitious people. And what's wrong with ambition? Daniel Dennett has it in spades, as do those Mars rovers for all mankind.

What choice do we have? Who among us would arrogate the resolution of important matters to ourself? Who among us would consider themselves to have that expertise? If I can code, you might still pay me very well, but you'd be paying me for the blinders I wear about the bigger picture. Which is identical to C-level corporate compensation. Watch only the bottom line, and learn to speak to the boardroom the way that Steve Jobs spoke to the world. Coders are paid well to have no ambition beyond the code. C-level requires Ivy-grade networks. A death-pact of mutual trust.

Reconnecting with cosmos requires humility. And the realization that we've never been apart. Most of our human brainpower is "meant" to be social and not intellectual. Mom was never allowed to make the big decisions, though she had the real intelligence in the family.

I still can't find the baby Jesus for Mom's stylish Christmas crèche. No worries. It's someone in one of the boxes, I'm sure. Someday I'll have the energy to open the rest of them,

The brain is neither isomorphic nor coterminous with the mind. The mind is spread, though perhaps the brain acts, metaphorically, as a kind of microcosm for the all. Not a receiver of cosmic emanations, though that metaphor might get you pretty far. But an ironically social and intellectual nexus in a kind of living thinking swamp of humanity. The irony is that while we have never been more individually named and free and potentially heroic, we have never been so subsumed in and by the human All. 

The novel I would write, if I could write, would be the last novel. The hero disappears. I have the whole thing in plates. Never to be finished. The protagonist . . . 

There is No Merit to Merit

Perhaps like many people, I am sick and tired of explaining to people why their invidious observations of particular black people justifies their implicit racism. I believe that this kind of behavior is the purest instance of what is now popularly called confirmation bias. 

The trouble is that it's very hard to find a way to penetrate the idiocy. Racists are stuck and unmovable, especially when they have no actual personal interaction with those they consider congenitally inferior. Sometimes it's still true even when they do. 

When I was growing up, and sometimes even still, I was thought to be extremely intelligent. Observations about my intelligence were often followed by predictions about how wealthy I would become. Now I was a shy kid who truly hated it when some friend of my parents would compliment me (or so they thought they were doing). Why just the other day I got angry to the point of shaking when friends of mine, both immune to anti-racist arguments, wondered aloud and to me why I wasn't wealthy. 

I understand money as a kind of virus which infects the soul, and I no more want money than I want recognition, which just makes me weird, I guess. Well, sure I would like to have lots of money, but I'm not about to waste my time working for it. And I would like sufficient recognition to be able to join in to wider intelligent conversations. But as with wealth, it's not worth, apparently, twisting my thought to be recognized in some disciplinary slice of academia by virtue of an advanced degree. I'm well aware that my fundamental whiteness will still and always provide for me in any emergency. And there is finally no erasing my own fundamental racism. So there! I am a scoundrel and a cheat. No wonder I have no wealth to speak of. Oh!

We all know that some people are more intelligent than others in any given realm. The trouble is that we also believe that there is something like disembodied "merit" to the extent that some people are better or more deserving than others in some general sense. 

But the term better, when applied to people, is generally understood to have a moral dimension. Our usage for terms like "merit" tends in a neutral abstracted dimension. We would otherwise not tolerate the excessive wealth of the one-percenters. We would see such wealth plainly as a kind of mark of evil. An absence of fellow feeling. Ebenezer Scrooge hoarding. A desire for recognition which is pathological and not healthy. Kind of like getting a degree from Trump University (was there ever really such a place?)

Without any grounding in the dismal science of economics, I make the observation that each time the economy, stupid, crashes, there is a kind of ratchet effect which pumps yet more wealth to the top. Generally by way of the central bank refundingt the losses at the top to keep this ship of state afloat. Inflation, for instance, is clearly of service to that same process. And there is, as yet, no relief valve for the pressure of all our money concentrating at the top. I think that's because our treatment of money as a neutral politics-free entity makes it so. If it were water, we would worry about the bursting. Water is more political than money. Water is life, or so say many of the palliative Black Lives Matter signs. Money is merit.

Once upon a time we freed the banks from having to own the assets they were lending. The savings and loans which made for a Wonderful Life were crushed. The Cajas in Spain lost their cajones. The world was washed in American Warbucks. I lived through this at the side of my board of trustees worth well north of a billion actual dollars when a billion was a lot of fucking money. They sat angry on bank boards, some of them, as their banks went under.

My good and fine informant Adam Tooze makes the bland observation that this particular round of inflation is not so much marked by wage/price spiraling as it is by an historically unprecedented expansion of corporate profits. They need those profits to fund the yachts of their C-grade leaders. The private jumbo-jet flying yachts too. 

In a world where the media's job is to keep the economy pumping, there is now a general plague of confirmation bias. That's what got us blimpo Donald Trump and his leveraged jumbo jet. He must have merit, else how would he have gotten so high? He rides high on confirming the confirmation bias of people who know in their bones that they are being lied to and pandered to by the MSM which always hides the real story about wealth. Just like Elizabeth Warren is capitalist to her bones, I also know that I am being lied to.

The real story about wealth as we treat it is that wealth is melting down the planet in just the way that Nazis rendered Jews. Adam Tooze is also the informant of a young professor from Yale at Georgetown who tries to put the politics back in money so that we can do something about our apparently crashing democracy. Getting money out of politics amounts to the same thing as putting politics back in to money. So says young Stefan Eich.

Now it is absolutely true that I did serve as the headmaster of a school for gifted kids whose antics would make even Kurt Vonnegut cringe. I was about Eich's age. (I can't, for the life of me, remember which of Vonnegut's novels concerned such a school in Ilium, which is a realm I've crisscrossed more than he did in his life.) 

I chafed against our use of IQ testing for admissions and thereby alienated many in the community. I did think that such testing could be useful to pluck otherwise invisible, let's say, black kids from a crowd. But it wasn't really such a great way to find those kids who might thrive in our quirky school. Kids who were curious and irreverent and who required no-bullshit smart teachers who treated them as immature equals. Often, they were kids who didn't do well in school. The rewards there didn't work for them, and maybe school felt like prison as it did to me. I did think and still do think that all schools should work the way that mine did.

I also think that for a kid to believe that he has special merit can only be destructive.

Our administration consisted basically of me, the lowest paid and likely most overworked independent school head in all of New York. I had hardly anyone to whom to delegate almost anything. And yet I loved that job far more than Elon could possibly love his, if he even has a job. I guess if Trump had a job then Elon has a job. Fuck them both.

Schools have become places which limit what kids can learn, often with the excuse that they have to be protected from foul matters. That's even as they live in communities where foulness is on display everywhere and all the time, and where school is no longer even a safe place to leave your kids for the day. I mean, if you're going to teach kids how to handle guns, shouldn't you also teach them Marx? We did.

Along with reading (the good stuff) and writing (I learned to read and write myself only after getting my degree, though it would be hard to press my case in this forum, staying half a step ahead of my students as teachers do) and certainly disembodied and abstracted 'rithmetic. It was a damned good school whose grads identify with it more than they do with their universities. 

I only wish I could feel at home in the alumni gatherings. But I'm a public-school kid who therefore hated Yale from where I keep up with almost no-one. Ditto them with me.

So, the only thing that the Left and Right will ever agree on is that we shall perpetually live in the best of times and in the worst of times. I count the awful stuff and strain toward a progressive future, in an almost reciprocal way to how right-wingers strain to keep the good stuff from slipping away. 

Life sucks and then you die. Or alternatively, when you gamify it, life is a lot of fun and then you Peter out and off the field of play. To either extreme you must deny that there is anything cosmic to life, and especially to your life. But there is. So there!

A Dream of the Good Old Days Before Juneteenth was a Holiday

Just now, like many of us, I'm holding my breath that Agent Orange won't carry on to drop his COVID nukes in Tulsa. The day after Juneteenth. We celebrate today, for tomorrow we may die. I wish all my black sibs the happiest of Juneteenths, the newest Federal holiday!

I'm also trying just now to restart my entire read-through in Chinese of the Dream of the Red Chamber. This is a book which many Chinese count as their North Star for what it means to be human on the planet. I remember thinking that as well. Like reading Tolstoy, I don't quite remember why. I only know that it changed me.

And I remember very well driving out to Madison, Wisconsin as a grad student of classical Chinese literature. I was going to attend the first-ever international conference on "Redology." That's the term for academic study of this singular Chinese novel. 

Along the way, I dropped off my friend at the University of Iowa where he was attending the renowned writing program. His father, Parker Po-fei Huang, a well-known poet among Chinese, and a low-ranked but highly esteemed "native informant" at Yale, where language instructors were not professors - his father had told my friend that he had no business writing; he hadn't truly lived. I could relate. My own father was stern that way too. 

But we all loved Professor Huang. I guess we all have our less good sides. 

I was allowed to sit in on a class. I don't remember the notorious tear-down masculine ethos that got the program so many celebrated and mostly male authors. I do remember wistfully feeling that I was not of that crowd.

How well I also remember driving north to arrive at the beautiful campus on Lake Mendota at Madison. It was summer, and the coeds (code for women in those days) were sunning themselves on the grass all over campus. A northern and wooded grassy California beach. I was somehow shocked. Never had I seen so much brazen skin. This was not my conception of what 'midwest' means. Not my crowd either, for sure!

The opening reception was held on the panoramic top floor of a circular tower. All the younger westerners were glued to the windows, gazing out over the beautiful campus to hide our social awkwardness. Very few of us were expected, after all, to have some bit of expressive performance queued up for presentation on demand, as all Chinese are. All the senior Chinese scholars were looking inward toward friends, and new acquaintances they had already mostly read. 

In the buffet line for dinner I chatted with David Hawkes, the premier English-language translator of The Dream of the Red Chamber, or as he properly called it, The Story of the Stone. All of us were waiting with 'bated breath for his completion of this life's work. I was a bit star-struck. I chatted up a different professor who was into using computer technology to analyze classical Chinese literature (he confessed that he couldn't really read it himself). That was according to the dictates of the structuralism which was then in vogue. The science of literature. Looking for stable patterns across works. 

But what I wish to write about today is our economy. I'm old enough to remember the 'good old days' when the local hardware store was manned by knowledgeable clerks who raised families on their salaries. Our store stocked everything from model airplane engines to lawnmowers, and all the parts and tools in between.

Milk was delivered in heavy refillable bottles then, and Grandma would sometimes send one of the kids down to the ice cream store with a crock, reminding us to have them pack it tightly so that it wouldn't melt along the walk home. 

Now I buy things from Amazon, and watch the prices creep up to cover the free shipping, while the quality seems increasingly indifferent. Caveat emptor and read the editorial reviews. That old hardware store would never tarnish its good name the way that Walmart always does, or Home Depot, or Amazon, by allowing shoddy goods along their shelves. They couldn't afford to. What happens when all the minimum-age hardware helpers age out?

My friend, a structuralist himself, and brilliant professor of Chinese met us at the conference. He took me - well, I took him since he didn't drive - to visit his old college friend who lived just north of Madison. This was a talented young man who'd forsaken an academic life to start a business. 

He had designed a refined set of mountain climbing chocks, and had set up a very high-tech and sophisticated manufacturing process which he explained to me in detail. The process ended up with nicely anodized pieces which were color-coded for size and usage. They felt wonderful in the hand, and apparently - by virtue of angles, metallic composition and surface treatment - held wonderfully in the field. 

Again, who knows what such a business was doing in Wisconsin, but he enjoyed showing me all the steps, partly because I understood them, and likely mostly because I was so googly-eyed. I especially appreciated the step where the nearly finished pieces were blasted with glass beads to provide golf-ballish micro-divots.

Speaking of which, I've only swung a golf club once in my life, and that time the ball went exactly where I was aiming it, to my absolute horror. It sailed right across the neighbor's long back yard, across the street and over the next lawn right into the "picture window" of the hardware store owner who lived around the corner. This is a sin from which I shall never recover. It taught me to always fess up (which I didn't do that time). I was a natural Zen archer, I guess, as I remember the magnetic pull of window to ball. 

It definitely wasn't my doing, although come to think of it I got three bulls eyes the first time I held a bow and arrow and the first time I fired a .22 rifle. I should have known better. But then I was never able to repeat those feats. Story of my life. 

Anyhow this wonderful climbing hardware manufactory was set to go out of business before it even sold its first chock (I received a bag of them as souvenirs). The poor fellow hadn't realized that even the niche sport of climbing was controlled by the one large manufacturer who determined which products could be stocked on pain of withholding all the others. This was just when even sporting goods stores were turning Big Box, and before distribution channels got disrupted. 

Just as is now the case with movie theaters, R.I.P., it doesn't matter how good the product is if you can't get it on the shelf at eyeball level. Money changes hands, as I learned later in the beer retailing business. Smaller brands have got to cheat to win: You have to brazenly follow the big boys and swap the shelves when no-one's looking.

I hadn't heard of WalMart or maybe it hadn't gotten started yet, but I did get an education from that young entrepreneur near Madison about how "Wall Street Money" will pay to overstock shelves with goods sold at a loss for the sole purpose of forcing competitors out of business. I also learned that such practices were illegal in Germany, say, among other countries. 

Some long time later, circumnavigating the continent in all innocence on my little Harley, I happened into Bentonville, Arkansas, where I took a break in front of what looked like the old five and dime hardware store I grew up with. 

Inside, a very nice old man who looked the part gave me a kind of personal tour. It was a museum disguised as a store. I knew something was amiss when I saw a photo of Gerald Ford shaking Sam Walton's hand. Sam would get the Presidential Medal of Freedom later from George H.W. The same medal that Rush Limbaugh just got.

So we give out medals to those who destroy the very fabric of our society now?? People on Wall Street - investors - make a bet on what will be the next blockbuster. But it's really not a bet. It's a sure deal that an entire industry will be disrupted, which means destroyed, by predatory marketing practices. Along with the industry go unions, local ownership, and knowledge of the sort built up over years of purchasing decisions and getting to know the people. 

Gone now as the cost of doing business is so much else that we once did value. Local eateries. Doctors who make house calls. Packaging that isn't killing the planet. Short hauls from farm to table. Local craft beer. You know, the stuff that's coming back, if you're white and well off. At least we got the wholesalers out of the way. Hmmmm. 

Frankly I think black lives have gotten more and more marginal during my lifetime. Our celebrated progress with civil rights hasn't translated into main street lives simply because those aren't the kinds of businesses that we value anymore. 

When things are created digitally - where there is no marginal cost for each additional widget - mountains of investment will be piled into whoever gets the most eyeballs. The losses equal the mountains upside down until the existing players are fully destroyed to leave a sole monopolist. The monopolist is never guilty of the syndicate-style behaviors which anti-trust regulations were designed for. 

These are all nice and mostly white and mostly male youngsters who want to hit it big. Well sure, sometimes they cut corners and act ruthless. Young blonde women beware. Anyhow, the consumers fall like flies in their belief in falling prices. Those falling prices are themselves a temporary illusion, but life is short. 

And it's not as though Google is providing their services for free! Read Surveillance Capitalism, please! We are not the product. Our behaviors are. We all work for the Man for free now. Click to agree, and Yahoo!!

Eyeballs or ears, it's an easy bet that Rush Limbaugh or Howard Stern will get most of them. Pornography powered the Internet. Any hit to our most basic emotional plexus. And this is how we want to engineer our future? Well, I guess it is, now, isn't it?

Plastics, Benjamin, plastics.

You have to imagine a world without plastics to imagine a sustainable future. That's a fact. It's hard, but not impossible, to do. Wooden boats are more fun to own than the plastic sort. And they last longer. But you have to enjoy the actual work to own one. You don't need toxic paints - water based or oil - when you can use linseed oil and so forth.

Plastic bags were invented as a way to support the industry which would otherwise have been too expensive for the car companies. That's a fact. Black lives keep getting reinvented downward from slavery to jail (Watch 13th please!) so that we can have our capitalism and eat it too.

This is no way to live, people. We have to bring our economy back down to earth, and use the digital stuff to compute optimal infrastructures according to the data from our now fully instrumented planet. Sure, we need to have the entertainment side - the plastic baggies - to support that overhead, but it's already a done deal.  We just have it all upside down and backwards again is all.

Digital and plastics are fine in small quantities, so long as we pay up front for all their externalities. Short of that, bakelite is pretty good. Natural rubber and steel. Stuff that requires skilled workers to maintain. Writing on paper.

We will always require good writers. My apologies. I can fix a lot of things, but I don't seem to be able to fix my writing. Sorry!

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. 

 

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.

How Sick Am I?

Not sick enough to worry about it, but sick enough that the "medical underwriters" will likely consider me to have a pre-existing condition and not give me any health insurance after I move. I had an accident, right? I sat too long in my car and got a clot which traveled to my lungs. So the docs prescribed Warfarin - rat poison - but people on Warfarin are not considered good risks. Should I be worried? I thought the medicine was supposed to make me all better. Catch-22, right?

Plus I seem to have had another clot, on the completely other side of my circulatory system where it passed through my brain to produce symptoms of a TIA. And then there's my genetic condition which got uncovered. That super-secret private aspect of myself which only I should be allowed to know. Now it's hanging all out in public like my credit score. I tell you I can't for the life of me figure out what was so great about the health care reform I heard all about. But what I really can't tell is why anyone wants to turn it back to what was still worse before it. Weird.

So now what do I do? Should I negotiate the TIA down to a migraine? It might have been an ocular migraine, but you can't be too careful.  Maybe I should sue them for a needless diagnosis which now becomes a part of my permanent record. How dare you overdiagnose!!

At least someone's not holding out against life-saving procedures until I show proof of ability to pay. Not yet anyhow. I've had a lot of tests, and they all come up clean, but not clean enough to be insurable? Can I trade my genetic inclination for clotting for their genetic idiocy on the open market, or can we share? Don't they want payback on the tests? These things might be remediable, you know? I'll teach you how to reason, and you pay for my rat poison. I've been tested clean, I tell you!

It's kind of like if you make a claim on your homeowners' anymore, then your rates go up and so most of the time, according to what people I know say they do, you still have to decide if it's "worth" making that claim. If it's really catastrophic, you have no choice, and then you end up paying for it on into the future. Same with car insurance.

Maybe instead of a credit score, we should all get a morality and decency score, you know, the way they give buyers and sellers ratings on eBay. Then you could get insurance if everyone you deal with likes you, or if you're the head of eBay you can follow the body builder into office, who followed the Hollywood actor who followed the son of the former guy who lived in the house that Jack built. I'm telling you, there's no conspiracy! This is the way God meant for things to be.

They say there's a lot of insurance fraud. People wanting and getting more than they need or what about being careless driving or playing with matches or with the deadbolts? We could just have a sliding scale, or wait, isn't that exactly what we do have? Just try being poor and see how easy it is to get what you need, and nevermind healthcare. Ands it's always your own damn fault for not knowing how to behave yourself, you genetic deviant you!

In my case, there was never any choice on offer. There was no-one giving me some assessment of my odds, and so I got the same set of tests as if I were mortally ill and on death's door. Which I was, of course, but once they knew what it was that nearly killed me, the actual treatment could have been really cheap. But really cheap was never on offer. And now I apparently have to run around hoping nothing else happens since I can't get any insurance I can afford unless I stay put. Well, that horse already left the barn. But looking ahead with hindsight, I can see what more sensible people would do.

This is really really weird in a country which doesn't like to restrain trade. At least that's the story. Restraining the movement of workers is apparently not a restraint of trade? The "system" ought to prefer unafraid nimble workers who are willing to take risks. But to risk going commando - without health insurance - is to risk not death exactly but financial ruination because the healthcare system doesn't have any reasonable options. You're either all in or you're all out, and how many people forgo sensible healthcare for the same reasons and in the same fashion that they don't bother to make claims against homeowners' policies?

Everyone knows that the political system is controlled not by "the system" but rather by that subset of huge corporations or interest groups which can tilt the research and the flow of information and the fear mongering and even the electorate against our general interests. What's good for the health insurance industry is hardly ever what's good for you and me, but somehow they've got an entire Tea Party thinking that it actually is. Weird!

I'd like to be a tea partier myself, since it's obviously time for another revolution. But I'd like to be part of a positive revolution which looks forward instead of a scared revolution that thinks you can turn back time. Don't they get that you can't go backwards in time, Humpty Dumpty??? And I surely don't want to have the flames of my emotions fanned by interested parties who know exactly how to push my buttons.

I just don't think it's all that mysterious what's going on here. You might suppose that it is all some kind of grand conspiracy concocted by the MSM, or the Richie Riches or the fat cats at the top of some empire, and that would all be true. But in the end, each of these powerhouses is composed of people so glad to have a job that they all say Yes Sir! about the company program. Reporters just want to get their writing sold, and editors pick among stuff for what will be the most eye grabbing, and folksy folks like Glenn Beck just know how to get your attention and keep it, pushing buttons including their own.

And in the end all the different ways that have been invented to check on our health and to find serious conditions which might be latent and all the profits to be made on all those ways - all these things pretty much do compose a grand conspiracy. If you're scared, you want to know, right? I mean, who among us is willing to say aw shucks go ahead and take care of the next bloke and let me go. I'll take my chances against the odds and against the laws of nature.

And if you're in a car accident, you don't want them checking your wallet before they save your life. But on the other hand you don't necessarily want to be stuck with the bill either, considering that there aren't really any boy scout first aid options on the menu, even though that might be all you need.

So we're all in this grand conspiracy against each other, but the ones that have the resources keep getting more of them, and you and I keep getting stuck in a kind of state of perpetual terror, not exactly about the monsters and the dread diseases and the slings and arrows of outrageous ghosts since life has never in the history of mankind been more mild-mannered as it is in these United States; but it's like we can't ever get ahead and enjoy a minute of Mom and Apple Pie anymore.

We live in terror of being stuck without health insurance, or stuck with a house underwater or stuck without the ability to pay for the car insurance, and then we end up just plain stuck in jobs that we might hate, except we can't leave them because our pre-existing condition might prevent us from getting covered elsewhere. This is no way to live.

How is this good for the economy?? I know it's good for a few sociopathic aggrandizers of  epic portionsof wealth who can use and abuse and take full advantage of our slave labor, when they can't for whatever reason take the work offshore where there really is real terror. But how is it good for the whole?

I'm just asking . . . I'm a reasonably intelligent person, but damned if I can figure it out. And damned if I can figure out why people want to give back any gains we've gotten.

Buffalo Bloodline

Although I'm not settled enough to be a subscriber, sometimes I think the Buffalo News is written exclusively for me. The other day, I saw a notice for the Boom Day ball drop. I rode my bicycle along the breakwater which goes under the Peace Bridge where I was pretty much the only one to watch the event. I'd expected at least a small crowd. What people had come were all dignitaries on the Fireboat, but I still felt the hosing was all for me!

WHAT A HOSER, EH?

Then yesterday, I decided to see how hard it would be to bike down to the Small Boat Harbor, since the News had indicated that one of its new draws is a bike path. Along the way, I found that I could ride up to the top of a parking ramp alongside Pilot field, and watch the ball game as though I'd bought a ticket. Whoops! Coca-Cola field. I find on Wikipedia that I've blown right by Dunn Tire Park. Well, anyhow, it's the home of the Triple-A Bisons. Whoops, I guess that's "International League." I'm so out of touch. Or do even names just go to the highest bidder now?

From my perch on the parking ramp, the stadium looked pretty empty. I had a blast zooming back down the levels, although it sure did look as though the beams were going to clip my head off. You can't ride your bicycle over the Skyway Bridge anymore, so if I wanted to get to the Small Boat Harbor, I was going to have to do the drawbridge thing. It made me a little nervous, since I'd bicycled down there the other day to the General Mills plant, where they make Cheerios, and the young guard told me "you can't be here" even though it looked like a public road. They must have worried I would be secretly counting rats or something.

I'm a little skittish about these things, like the other day when I pulled aside to let the siren by and then the cop figured I must be guilty of something so she followed me off to the side. You know, you try to do the right thing . . . like I eat Cheerios all the time for my high cholesterol. Why don't they want me hanging around?

So I ended up biking down this long and really lonely, and very wide thoroughfare, feeling like I'm in a Hitchcock movie, knowing all the while that this used to be bustling with factories and businesses of all sorts. The one newish and clean  looking plant had a realtor's sign on it, which can't be a good, um, sign. I checked on my handy smartphone, and sure enough the place had been closed down upon buyout. I guess this is more evidence of the efficiency of our capital markets.

Eventually, I did get down to the Small Boat Harbor. It's a Sunday, and the weather is fine (although thunder storms had been called for), but there isn't exactly a crowd there.

But there are people in Dug's Dive, and there is a bike path. It's still early. I'd learned from the News that the Harbor had been opened two weeks early because of our fine spring, and I guess the boats were still on their way in:

You know, it's actually a bit tricky to follow the designated bike paths around Buffalo. Some places have signs, and sometimes you can see the faded outline of the bike path on the roadway - washed down from the famously harsh winter - but then sometimes it just seems to end, and you find yourself on a road where no-one else seems to have ever thought of biking.

The same thing happened in reverse when I biked past the Small Boat Harbor. This time there was a brand new asphalt bike path, which still has yet to be completed and doesn't have it's painted striping yet. I followed it along, past the smoking fishermen - I think that might be a reason to escape to such places; you can smoke in public. Well, it would be public if anyone else were around.

I ended up at the old headquarters for the long since closed Bethlehem Steel Plant, which looked far worse up close than it does from the highway, although its grass was mown.  It is a beautiful structure, and I was struck again how much the old business edifices, striving for a kind of legitimacy, look the same as schools from the era, striving for the same.

I sat there for a while, chatting on my cellphone, feeling very much as though I was still in the Hitchcock film, in some nowhere crossroads, with some catastrophe impending. The building is right next to some offices for the water authority, which did seem to be populated on a Sunday. Since these are Homeland Security protected sites now, I wasn't sure about getting pulled over again. I remember once or twice in Taiwan, innocently taking a picture only to have some guard appear seemingly out of nowhere, becuase I'd managed to take a shot of some infrastruture installation. I think they were paranoid about having targets identified by mainlanders.

Well, that ship has sailed, but still it seemed as though I should keep moving. Heading back along the trail, I couldn't help wondering about the legislative process which created this path, apparently just for me. There was landscaping and new planting, and the bases for what promised to be some nice lighting, although such signs as there were all seemed to indicate "closed after dusk." Government decision-making can be so confusing sometimes.

ROAD TO SOMEWHERE?

See, there's Buffalo rising in the distance. I did notice, on my way out from the Boat Harbor, that there is another paved bike path which would take me down past the Tifft Nature preserve. I almost can't imagine that anyone else would ride this one, but there it was, just for me.

I decided to keep going, heading into South Buffalo. By now, I'd gotten familiar with the expectation that the bike path would end, but I was pretty sure that I could make my way back home along South Park Ave., and that it wouldn't be much longer than the way I'd come. Perhaps less desolate?

But there is a really long stretch of Fuhrman Boulevard where I did actually pass another biker, though he was walking his bike along with fishing gear and looked to be heading to where I was coming from. Another view from another bridge of another way in to Buffalo:

TRACKS WHICH USED TO GO SOMEWHERE?

Anyhow, along I went, catching the flag on the huge South Park high school through someone's back yard. This one doesn't look quite so stately as the Bethlehem Steel offices - it must have come along at some more modern period of efficient production. I used to supervise student teachers in this facility, and let me tell you, there is a kind of martial efficiency going on in there.

Well, further along was an older, more stately school, where the kids had a bit more freedom

Still, you can see the direction of things. Now, a lot of the schools I rode by are special "charter schools" where the thing to do seems to be to find a theme and move backward along the liberating assumption that all kids would benefit from general education, and maybe try to fit them sooner into whatever it is they're most fit for. The funny thing is that this just seems to leave the ordinary public schools whose purpose still is general education full of those kids who aren't fit for much. Anyhow, I'm sure glad I never had to decide about my fate that early. Otherwise, I'd be stuck in it right now, you know, having a clue about what I'd like to do for the rest of my life. 

Well, I have lots more pictures, and thousands upon thousands more words. I really wanted to paste up here the pictures from a recent canoe trip when I saw the other side of all these things from the perspective of the Buffalo River but paddling a canoe in the city is even stranger than riding a bicycle, and you'd probably get really really bored. Or maybe it's just me?

Anyhow, it's really really hard to see any sort of renaissance amid all this vacant space where things used to get made. I even saw the offices of the massive hydroponic tomato greenhouse complex which was being put up during one canoe trip, and magically disappeared before the next one. I should have been reading the Buffalo News every day, and then I would have known what the heck was going on, you know? The headquarters still looked pretty spiffy. Maybe they sold all that glass to Dubai or Abu Dabi or something. Like they need greenhouses in the desert. Oh.

Well, there it is. My city. It used to be a thriving place, just like I used to be a young man. You have to squint really hard to see a bright future. For the city, I mean. Obviously, I won't be getting any younger. You know, we're all doomed by our astrological accidents, like who we chose for parents, what the great roulette wheel in the sky had in store for us, whether we're on this side or that of some border or other.

These are all the accidents of birth. Sometimes they become the accidents of death and dying. Sometimes it's how you look at things. To tell you the truth, when I ride (or paddle) through Buffalo, I see lots of possibility. It's like a blank slate. We could try other things besides letting global capitalism put labor against the wall of too cheap to meter. We could take the oil out of most production processes and bring the work back home. We could make it really costly to commute out to the lawn-belt, and by mixing it up a little better, make it really safe to live in cities. Modern industrial production doesn't even need to be hazardous or exclusive of kids who might want to learn.

These are choices, which bloodlines are not. Or maybe we really don't care about what got us here anymore. Well, at least the cars did stop to let a few geese across the road. If you squint, you can see the chicks. Peeking out behind the old grain elevators are windmills. It's easier to see possibility in Spring, don't you think?

Stupid Economic Theories

Yesterday, watching the evening news on PBS, I heard this really dim-witted fellow from some misleadingly named organization called something like "numbers-usa" debating the "immigration issue." He made the seemingly obvious claim that since we are short maybe 20 million jobs and that "illegals" now hold 7 million of the jobs that exist, we need to kick them out so that we citizens can reclaim those 7 million jobs. This guy clearly knows numbers only in the way that a flimflam artists does. It's a talent, but one we should watch out for.

Then my otherwise intelligent friend was marveling at the very evident fact that dual income families are now struggling to maintain the standard of living which used to be common when only the men were working. It feels as though there were some kind of conspiracy to dilute the wages of working people. Some kind of OK women, if you want to work, go for it. We'll adjust. Um, yeah, I thought this much was obvious. These two matters are not disconnected. Hello!

The idiocy of the anti-immigrant comment is that this economy is "designed" such that some percentage of the workforce is out of work. That doesn't mean that there is some designer, any more than do the results of natural evolution, no matter what the crazies say. It just means that there is no set number of jobs, such that kicking someone out of his might free it up for you. The issue is systemic. As with food and water and energy, it's usually not the quantity which causes shortages, it's the distribution. The appearance or especially the fear of shortage allows prices to spike. That serves somebody or some class of people that ain't you or me.

A pretty good clue for what's up with immigration is that when you dig, you are as likely to find that it was the right wing which wanted the cheap immigrant labor as it was the liberals who wanted to afford every soul a human chance. Pitting workers against desperate "illegals" does a pretty good job to push the price for labor down. Ditto women.

But these arguments play because we're angry and we seem to need some target for that anger. Someone who doesn't look too familiar in the mirror.

And so some grand artificial debate gets played out over our heads, without our ever having a chance to find where the game is fixed.

Like the healthcare debates; it helps the criminally kleptocratic insurance industry (executives, owners, not workers) when the left side calls for government to just take it over. That energizes the teapartiers, who - probably sensibly- recoil in horror at the notion of civil-service healthcare. So no one imagines what could be accomplished if we were to have some sensible regulation of insurance as we already know it.

Like what if there were severe penalties for not paying legitimate claims? What if there were a time limit to pay, and what if the price for uninsured were required to be identical to that charged the insurance companies? What if the providers were required to get pre-authorization for payment, the client were completely off that hook, and the subsequent negotiations and arguments were required to take place between and among the experts?  I think that's been tried around the world, and it works pretty well.

What if, furthermore, the patients weren't somehow taught that it is their right to feel entitled for treatment for whatever sort of "off" they feel. What if drugs were not deployed as a cure for the stresses of poverty or of warfare? What if we didn't all crave endless medical testing against terror at various what-ifs as encouraged by advertisements from the drug companies? What if those ads were made illegal again?

Well, apart form the absurdity of attempting to put the genie of information back into its bottle, there is reason to think that all the decisions shouldn't really be in the hands of the doctors. Sometimes they might be motivated to call for more tests than you yourself would if fully informed. They're fighting the insurance companies right now, and have to make up for their losses somehow. The system seems stacked against us even as the sides seem to be warring against each other. Coke and Pepsi. Microsoft and Google. Democrats and Republicans. They need each other. But even more, they need us to think they are opposed and in competition.

Drug companies seem to spend, naturally enough, the most money on issues which might require constant medical intervention. Viagra and Lipitor and things like Prozac are the perfect drugs, compared to useful things like antibiotics which might be used once in a while and that's it. Where overuse creates more problems than the drug can solve, but also where the excuse is somehow "out there" that it's we who use them too much. Forgetting that it might be our feedlot meat production system which creates many of the problems. That with bacteria, it should never be about eradication, but more about a kind of ecological balance among the organisms always present in our bodies and environments. By and large, "we" do what we're told within the limits of our education, intelligence and information. I know I'm not one to second guess my doctor, unless there's a really good reason to do so.

The distortions get created from and by the very same sort of motivated misinformation that the racist fellow used to cover his actual fear of difference. I'm sure he's even convinced himself that all he really wants are jobs for his fellow Americans. Drug companies don't want us to know everything about what they're selling - they speed up the voices magically when forced to fill us in. They refine and expand the unreadable print.

Government doesn't have to be populated by geniuses to provide the same sort of intervention to the public discourse - the balance to the body politic - that antibiotics might provide to the individual human body gone out of whack.

It serves someone's purpose to suppose that the problem is that the regulators now are not so clever as those they regulate. That the germs are smart; the terrorists are smart, that the bombs we need are smart bombs, that each of us only wants to get for ourselves what the least of us, the Bernie Madoffs, want to get for themselves. And morally, he is the least among us. Not a one of us would do what he did against his fellow Americans even if we had the chance.

I for one don't really imagine that the folks who work for the NSA are at the cutting edge of cybercriminal investigation (I have inside information). I doubt the government actually has the most computing power, and if it does, I doubt it's as cleverly deployed as the stuff arrayed in the private economy to measure my desire. I worry that dullards in government service will become overeager in their enforcement, just like the FBI did under J. Edgar, knowing which direction their promotion would come from.

So, too much power is no good answer. But there ought to be a way to release the creative energies of the private marketplace without allowing the predators, always, the upper hand. There ought to be a way to allow the financial markets to do their thing with the efficiency of money flows without always presenting those geniuses with that much temptation to dip into the flow for themselves. You don't have to be a genius yourself, you just have to get the sense that your work is valued, secure, amply rewarded against its difficulty and risks. Something we no longer really provide to our civil servants.

And another thing! Wouldn't you think the capitalist system would prefer a mobile work force? How about a nice regulation limiting the drag on mobility now guaranteed by regionally limited and company-connected health insurance. It's almost as though "they" want you to remain enchained. Or pitted against the great unwashed masses of "illegals." Vagrants. Homeless. Border crossers.

Come on, let's get a clue. This isn't as difficult as we're making it out to be.

Oil Blowout!

This will not come across right. You will think I'm some sort of Pollyanna, and who knows, maybe I am. But I hear of the oil slick down toward New Orleans, and I think something along the lines of OK, cool, Mama is finally getting up to dance. She's reminding us who's in charge here. Of course, that's after I run through my feelings of dread at what it is that we've unleashed. What were Oppenheimer's words? "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."

I have the feeling in the face of this oil blow that I do while sailing and the weather clearly asserts how puny I am. This oil blow terrifies me, even while it thrills me that humans are being shown how small we are. How incapable to contain all contingencies.

I don't really give a whole lot of credibility to the Gaia hypothesis on most levels; that the earth can be considered a unitary living organism. Or in particular, that it/she might be conscious. But then again, the notion of a conscious God is poppycock to me too. Since, for me, what can consciousness mean if not a kind of dialogic awakening, resulting, through language, from multiple minds conspiring. (I won't bore you just now with more Julian Jaynes.)

Sure, I've wondered about a kind of dialog between heaven and earth, but the trouble is that while consciousness is dialogic, language, the substrate for consciousness, requires a lot more than two for the dance to get started. There has to be a whole community.

And if there are other planets alive, well then they are communicating in language which won't be picked up by puny man's technologically based receivers. But surely the Earth is alive It is more than a single organism. It has co-evolved with life, and just as my mind is neither fully responsive nor responsible for everything that befalls it, the Earth reflects us back. It makes no more sense to wonder whether the Earth is dead or alive than it does to wonder whether the me I was a second ago is dead. The earth also, is still becoming, and we shouldn't be so sloppy with our categories.

Which brings me around again to the weather; manifestations of what often gets called fate. The toss of dice beyond anyone's control, except for God's if you want to raise things to that level of abstraction. We can regard this oil blow as a regrettable accident, with no meaning other than what we make of it. But if you follow that chain far enough, there is almost nothing about our existence which can't be traced to accident. At some point its "meaning" comes from outside your puny self.

And so it has suited me to wonder if oil cannot and should not be regarded as a gift from earth to man. Ecologically minded people like me tend to be horrified when we learn  the extent to which our current capitalistic and poisonous diet is actually oil based. From the fertilizer to the pumping of water from the ground, to the plowing and transport and refrigerating and drying, there is as much oil as input to our food chain as there is to our transportation industry. And at least as many outflow points, therefore, for greenhouse gaseous emissions.

We're horrified by the warfare, by the money power, by the straight up raping of the earth accomplished for what There Will be Blood demonstrated so clearly must be a game of greed and self-aggrandizement, inevitably to the point of utter desertification of the earth, the self, the soul. Rosebud.

We're horrified by the poisoning of our bodies by the corn sweeteners, the soybean economy, the concentration of energy production into the hooved animals we consume with such lusty gusto. And most of all we're horrified by the immiseration of so many otherwise intact and self-sufficient cultures and peoples beneath the unleashed Halliburton empires of rapacious global capitalism.

But, you know, just as I was taken aback the other day to hear someone voicing a cogent caution about the impact of all this new (only about 100 years) radioactive energy we swim through: The power grid, the radio, the television, the cellphone, the WiFi, WiMax interconnected super-saturated world of communications and power distribution technology for which, as anyone who's grabbed rabbit ears knows, our bodies make really good antennae: just as I was taken aback by that seeming paranoia, I'm sometimes taken aback by the presumption that we must engineer our way out of the predicament we're in.

My thought was simple; do you really think this occult effect which might be doing something at our cellular level, and who knows, might even be tweaking our propensity for cancer, and might have some subtle effect on our moods; do you really think that impact can hold a candle to the solar power of the actual human communication which rides on all these waves?

Hasn't the impact of that drowned out the other stuff in some kind of inverse of the proverbial drop in the ocean? Hello people, we're globally interconnected now by all this electromagnetic radiation which powers our communications technology.

Or like when people study paranormal interactions between mind and matter, isn't it enough of a miracle that I can apparently will my hand to pick up tools and impact literal mountains of matter, even before I deploy the petroleum-powered engines at my disposal. Have we really become so numb to the miracles right before us?

All of these wonders descend from Earth's gift of oil to man. We have squandered it, surely, and there are some among us who are as bereft of soul as Bernie Madoff. Who would make of it a magnificent tomb. But the majority of us by far do not mean harm by our actions. Harm is caused by their collection and concentration - these petty actions - and by proxy when we allow those who speak for us to aggrandize themselves upon our meager wants.

Anyhow, I'd say Earth has had about enough of our uppity oil-sucking ways. I'd say we put a drill right into her heart and she's bleeding and we'd better start paying attention. But that doesn't mean we have to disavow all that we've done as though it were the result of evil, devil guided mankind.

There is a lot of expanded consciousness riding on the gift of oil. Most of it engendered by the likes of mass mediated communication, leading right up to and including Facebook, which I hate to say, has given me quite a few new and important connections. Ones I wouldn't have had otherwise.

Let's put a diaphragm over top that gusher just as quickly as we can. If oil is still lighter than water, then we should be able to suck the oil out the top. It's a kind of opposite to putting a band-aid on the wound, but the concept's identical.

Then let's let the Earth heal a bit. Let's dial back our proxy aggrandizement, individually and one by one. I know I am not even  remotely interested in some fanciful mansion on a hill. I'd rather live in civilization, and leave the hilltops for picnics. I enjoy walking to the extent that the city affords that luxury. And I do enjoy how much I can get accomplished, even socially, from right inside my home. No time wasted commuting. No life threatening challenges against fate on the highway. And hopefully some smallish fraction of oil use compared to turning the key of my car.

The Trouble with Computers

Against my better judgment, I recently agreed to "help out" at a local non-profit which was having trouble with computers. It was pretty clear that there was some sort of infestation. I explained that I wasn't really looking to do this sort of work anymore, but agreed to help, setting a price that we could both feel good about - something like a quarter of the going rate - about what a gardener might charge.

The recommendations were easy enough, and the emergency patch up was smooth except for that one computer. There's always one, maybe the Executive Director's, maybe the volunteer workstation (in this case), but the general rule is that 90% of the issues/machines/whatever take 10% of the time, and then there is that 10%.  This isn't a precise rule, but you get the idea. It gets called the Pareto Principle generally, and I find that I'm no longer the only person who seems to have heard of this rule.

The temptation is always to just get rid of the 10%, but the way it works is that it's the rule, not the machine, and so you pretty much have no choice about this. There will always be the 10%, just like work will always expand to fill the time available for it. It's why computer techs after the briefest trial by fire become really arbitrary and dictatorial about standards. Without them you spend 90% of your time getting nothing productive done. And when you're "helping out" with an unmanaged network for a not-for-profit, you know that going in, which is why I agreed to such a low rate.

Well, then the Executive Director, without so much as a nevermind, went ahead and ordered a Mac into the mix. Now if I had the dough, I'd definitely have a Mac for home use, but you can see what happens to the whole idea of standards. It just doesn't make sense in a network which needs to be managed.

Which got me thinking about how the trouble with computers is that they are both tools and desirable objects in and of themselves. That is to say that people want these things still, if you can imagine that, pretty much the way they want all libidinously invested objects, which is what capitalism is all about after all. If there weren't any of that sort of desire, we'd all drive Ladas or identical Beetles, and our computers would still be black and white and look like little file cabinets the way my first one did. Way back when the excitement was in the magic that this new tool could do, and not how it looked or felt.

Steve Jobs, of course, understands this about machines. You'd be nuts not to want a Mac more than a PC. It's just cooler, which is pretty much what cool means. Libidinous investment.

And even in the work place, people can't avoid playing with these attractive machines. Hell, a Windows machine is pretty libidinously invested these days too, especially after Windows 7. It's fluid, slick and cool, but still manages to do that within the "confines" of being more straightforward to deploy as a tool. But in an unmanaged state, it really still is an attractive nuisance for workers' free time, or for volunteers to play with, especially before broadband was ubiquitous in the home. This is why techs are so arbitrary and dictatorial about management and locking things down against being toyed with.

This volunteer computer today just plain defeated me. The more infestation I ripped out by the roots, the more that was revealed, lurking, being contained by the thing I'd ripped out. The thing is that many of the bits of what we in the business call "spyware" are themselves pandered as configuration assistants, spyware destroyers, and system tweakers. Everyone with a home computer has a favorite that they swear by. And sometimes the more the merrier.

I pretty much decided that this particular computer had a "root kit" by which is meant something so intertwined, as it were, "beneath" the actual OS that you can't even tell in principle that it's there and the only real remedy is a system rebuild. Which, in the absence of standardized setups and cataloged software licenses and media becomes a necessarily destructive process. You can see why I consider this gig to be against my better judgement.

But here's the thing. I can't go so far as to bemoan the capitalist system and what it does to trick us into relationships with our tools instead of what those tools can do for our actual work. I'm not a big fan of Amish furniture, for instance. I think it's ugly and represents the work of people who are doing it for God, or something extrinsic to the beauty of what they produce.

I think you can convince yourself that it's somehow beautiful, and perhaps sometimes it is, in the manner of naive untutored "vernacular"  art. But frankly, I prefer the self-consciously beautiful stuff, even when it will obviously go out of style shortly. Anyhow, the Amish stuff confuses something about either the tool or the one who's meant to be pleased or both. You use basic tools to create objects which are themselves only meant to be purposeful. Yuch.

But there is no craftsperson on the planet, or artist I imagine, who doesn't form a kind of relationship with his particular tools. Tools are, not incidentally, those things which according to Marx, the capitalist system expropriates from the worker. Not only can't you form a relationship with your tools in the manner of a journeyman craftsperson once you work for the system, you can't select them or care for them, or become attached to them in any way.

I hope you see where I'm going with this.

Hell, maybe someday real soon, when all the work is in "the cloud" it really won't matter what tool you bring to bear on your work. Maybe you'll bring your own, the way I once did when I worked as a bicycle mechanic. The young turks I worked alongside made fun of me because my tools were all Craftsman/Sears which is all I could afford. But I have them still, and they served me well enough.

Anyhow the "knowledge workers" who use computers to get their work done are generally of the managerial class. They directly serve the capitalists, maybe like chambermaids or something. The "administrative assistants" who serve the managers have a much greater tendency to form something approaching an emotional relationship with their machines, calling them things like "'puters" or maybe even naming them. It must be part of what they look forward to each day.

And, of course, at the very top you get to use whatever tool you feel like using and the techs had better make it OK.

I have no real point here, except that it should be obvious to anyone that the PC (here I use the term to encompass Macs, probably smartphones, and certainly the iPad) exists at an interesting intersection in our history of labor. It is, in fact now, the universal tool and as such crosses boundaries between work and play, home and office, right along with its making those boundaries more porous and much less meaningful.

Anyhow, it's why I can't do tech work anymore; at least not on the level of PC support. I could easily enjoy guiding the work of others. I'd be arbitrary and dictatorial and insist that if workers were to use company machines, then they will have little to no choice about their configuration. At the same time, I'd be working to move all the applications into the cloud, for access from strictly sandboxed (insulated from whatever workers do with these things in their play-time) secure and company deployed browsers.

Then the workers could take their own machines home, like a company car say. Or maybe they'd just be responsible to bring their own tools to work. Well, it's a thought.

Meanwhile, I think we should disinvest the objectified female form a bit. Now that should be an interesting project. But seriously, this is where capitalism really does go too far. Because human value should not be determined by relative anything; wealth, beauty, intelligence. These things can be allowed to spread as much as is comfortable, but wouldn't it be cool if we could disentangle actual love from economic relations?? I mean, good luck with that and everything, but stranger things have happened.