Governance

So, I backed into this David v. Goliath story, as I usually do back in, by random reads. There's the Mark Ruffalo connection from the docudrama Dark Waters, which came from a New York Review of Books review of a book I'm now reading called Second Nature, and then a Twitter thread from McKenzie Wark led me back to Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble. 

The protagonist of Dark Waters, Robert Billot, is certainly unlikely. His early history as a lawyer made him seem almost a moral neutral. He wasn't super-charged for success, like many or most of his colleagues at a large Cincinnati law firm, and it wasn't clear that he didn't have the same bland desires to make a good living that we all do. And yet he became obsessed and outraged by what DuPont, by way of 3M, had unleashed on our planet in the form of  "forever chemicals" related to Teflon.

In the end, in a mild sense, he brought the company down. In a very unlikely way, his firm, more of less, stuck by him. There was money on both sides of the environmental law industry. But the tides eventually turned as they realized the scope of what they'd lost from the chemical industry. And still, even in the bumpy denouement, Billot seems the victor. Which means we all won.

Somehow, in all this reading, it becomes clear that there is one kind of decision-making process which can lead to utter disaster, even for the corporate entity which the decision-makers represent. A very different sort of process was demonstrated by Billot in fighting against the first kind. 

Most of us are familiar with the kinds of thinking and meetings which might have gone into DuPont's decision-making. It might be better to call it non-decision-making. In any case, people are tied to a structure - a business - which makes their lives good, and they want to support it. Not just the executives, but the workers and even the victims in the general population want 'the trouble' to go away. Ultimately and inevitably, they want the trouble-maker to go away. Trouble-makers are shunned, when they're outside the pact. Nobody wants to believe that the object of their fervent belief is the actual troublemaker.

Nobody within this structure seeks a moral decision-maker, who might weigh all the nitty gritty of the long view to protect the company from itself. That would be almost a court jester role, if it weren't so serious. Or like the lawyers who follow our troops into battle now. Volkswagen could have used one when they were tipping the scales on emissions readings. Dupont might have been better off if they had realized the scope of what would be revealed, and what the impact would be.

Well they did realize the scope. They just simply did a cost-benefit analysis and realized that the risks were all on the side of admission. That the best form of cover would be to keep on keeping on, and then to claim a kind of sanctioned innocence. In any case, it was easier to add up the dollars, and that all pointed to the clear financial risks of admitting any kind of guilt.

Perhaps there are lots of avenging angels all along the way, and these, even the ones inside us, prevented Billot and his work from being completely stopped. Perhaps it's all happenstance, what some call fate. I'm wanting to use it as some kind of analog for good governance.

I think it's an important subject. In his approach to Terraforming, Benjamin H. Bratton implicitly calls for a very different form of governance that the one which is now allowing some form of rampant capitalism, or call it vectorialism, to keep on keeping on until we're well beyond the cliff of sustainability. 

Our current system of governance clearly renders up a structure more similar to what went on inside DuPont and its company towns, than it does what might be called the autocracy of Billot's almost monomaniacal set of lawsuits.

Except you can't really call him monomaniacal, since he's after what we commonly call the truth, and he's doing it all for the public good. Our legal structures enabled him to do that, even while so much was corrupted and stacked against him. EPA cosy with those they regulate kind of thing. 

Bratton and I agree on the need for better governance. From my read, we agree on most things. Where we differ, I think, is in cosmology, but mostly in how we understand humanity. He doesn't seem to recognize what I consider to be important subtleties, analogs to forever chemicals, in the technological blossoming that he, more or less, champions, or even celebrates.

Just now in these United States we are still witnessing a governance structure - caricatured by Trumpism - which is very much like what happened inside DuPont. There's lots of reality denial and ready acceptance of convenient truths; ways of interpreting facts to downplay not just culpability, but even the facts themselves. We believe what it is convenient to believe. It's convenient not to change. To keep what's working for us in place as it is. 

Every once in a while, I come across really far-out theories about how quantum physics will ultimately reveal those occult structures of our brains which prove that we are connected to the greater cosmos, and that we feel, along with all our brethren among all the species. 

And I think these end up being a kind of humanity worship by way of brain worship. I just simply don't think it's all that complicated, and that these promised complex forever theories are mostly convenient to those who want our current assumptions to stay as they are. The wacky way-out promised theories remain perpetual sideshows. They allow the main show to keep on keeping on.

By extension, by celebrating "intelligent life," Bratton privileges an aspect of humanity at which we are demonstrably not all that great. He favors computational intelligence, as far as I can tell. He sees it in a way which lines up, vaguely, with Haraway's feminism in her celebration of the cyborg. But his is the very opposite of  'staying with the trouble." I want both, I guess.

I've called my own maneuver an analog for what Einstein did, without claiming to be his caliber. I might claim Billot's caliber. Not sure. But Einstein didn't really discover anything new. He reconceptualized what had already been discovered in a way that the pieces fell into place far better than they had been doing. The most celebrated shift was to see lightspeed as a constant along with an equivalency between energy and mass. Everything else followed.

I have been working for my entire adult life to communicate an analogous reconceptualization. I guess that I will ultimately fail. I guess that's because there are too many beliefs stacked against me. I guess it's because I sound like just another crank. 

I don't mystify the human brain, and I don't mystify the cosmos. It strikes me that we already know as much as we need to know in order to change our ways in a manner that would be good for us and good for all of what Haraway calls our kin. And we need our kin.

We have labored under a dangerous illusion that conceptual reality belongs only in the brain. That we carry around pictures of both the world around us, and of the way that it should be. The 'should be' is the realm of "ideas," so-called. We think that only humans have well-developed emotional lives, and that we have the right to commandeer the bodies of our kin to benefit ourselves. 

We no longer think, as Newton apparently did, that other life feels no pain. But we're still pretty sure that they don't suffer the same self-knowledge and foreknowledge that we do, which prevents most of us from taking over anyone else's human bodies for our own personal sake.

No, I'm not heading toward vegetarianism. It's far bigger than that. For me, the pieces have fallen into place once I realized that mind and emotion are both out there as much as is perceptual reality. They don't originate and they don't end with us.

Our subjectivity is no longer either some sort of privileged stance "outside" reality, nor is it any kind of dodge from objective truth. We are no more apart from cosmos than we are very different from our kin. There is no time in the history of the cosmos that conceptual reality wasn't real. And it was real before we thought it up. And it shifted and led to encoded replicators which generated a direction for life that can only be called an emotional direction. It sure wasn't physical.

I mean that emotion provided the direction - an arrow in time, the reverse of entropy - for a conceptual creation which was the replicable replicator. It idealized itself by the proof of so many identical copies. Which is to say by the proof of de-identifying any individual gene.

And so as I conceive the mind, it can and should become our model for governance. Not exactly Gaia, but perhaps moving in that direction. So long as emotions are an add-on to cognition, or even an obstacle, then we can discount them. But once we recognize that emotion is basic to our minds, and that it provides the impulse not just to do the right thing, but to think productive thoughts, then we might not be so ever-ready to cede power to the best cognition. 

Of course, when in our history have we actually done that? Name one President . . . one precedent . . . But I think we do want leadership that we can trust. Maybe Confucius, a purely constructed "man" who provides a kind of retrospective structure for ongoing governance. And it took modern China a while to rehabilitate Confucius. And his was hardly a cognitive structure. The human heart/mind had cosmic function to bring the order of heaven down to earth. To tame the waters, and pacify the beasts. But not to subjugate anybody or anything.

I really do hate to say it, but this may be the positive message to the election of Trump. Rather than to fight it with all the cognitive power at our disposal, we might instead celebrate it in ways to undermine the insane conspiracy theories. Those of us on the "right" side are quite literally denying the most important aspect of reality that our adversaries hold so dear. Trump is a simple measure of how far in the direction of perceptual science we have gone. We are well beyond the cliff, and it's time we rebuilt the ground.

Or in other words, we can't argue people from their conspiracy theories which we consider detached from reality. We can't, that is, until we make an emotional connection. Less yelling and more listening. Everyone, each individual, has a story to tell. We should listen to that with compassion, rather than to assume that all those yelling at us are all one.

Spiritualist Commentary

I once visited Lily Dale, a spiritualist enclave nearby Buffalo, where I now live for the moment (I absolutely adore the English ambiguation machine; do I "live for the moment?" Am I in Buffalo temporarily? Or do I live at Lily Dale?). I had high hopes that something might be triggered there. I was looking for some even slightest sense that there were insights beyond the ones I find through reading and a bit of academic study. I even got myself a "reading."

In the event, it was clearly something to be gotten over with for each of us. The "reader" must have seen that I am opaque and impenetrable. I knew that he wasn't seeing anything. It would be pretty much like some poor doctor trying to diagnose a hypochondriac. Better to go through the motions and get him out of there as quickly as possible.

I was disappointed. Or more likely I mean "I wasn't disappointed." The experience was and remains hardly surprising; pretty much what I'd expected. I'm as proof as they come against spiritualist anything. Like I wear condoms on my gullibility.

Maybe I'd wanted to see if someone would see something in me; something to pull me away from my prideful deficiencies. Or maybe there's just not that much which would surprise me about me; there's not that much that I would be looking for them to tell me, and so it all felt like being a tourist in one's home town. I think I was actually open minded, though. I wasn't looking for negative affirmation.

Around here, in Buffalo where I live again now, temporarily, we often get the chance to take visitors to Niagara Falls, and each time, we also get to see the falls anew. Lately, trying to steer my body in a new direction, I take long walks and see the city in a way which I never could while driving a car. In general, I am the only walker.

Sometimes one is most blinded to the familiar.

I've lately started participating in a local spiritualist writers group, a bunch of people who sense that there are realities which have not been let in to our common discourse; for whom the evidence is too strong that there is more to reality than can be told. But who try to tell it nonetheless.

I have met a Native American medicine man there; I re-met an astrologer I already knew; there are poets, and ordinary folk for whom things have happened which don't fit in to the ordinary narratives of life. Hell, my whole life looks like a bizarre improbability to me, so - apart from the never seeing ghosts part - I should fit right in.

The narratives of these writers would all be extraordinary - hard to believe - except that lots and lots of people follow astrology, even in the highest places. Lots of people believe in and see ghosts. But not everyone wants to tame what they know with words. Almost everyone is secretly skeptical, unless they've seen something themselves. Which I haven't. But I'm not really skeptical, except in ways that I'm perfectly open about. Like, I'm skeptical about the skepticism which powers scientific inquiry, for example.

I never will either see ghosts nor guide my life by the stars, but lots and lots of people will. Still, I am a writer, if I am a writer at all, who writes at that very same edge of sense. Words from others have driven away the mysteries for me. Ghosts have been rationalized to my satisfaction as the reification of what's only "in the mind." But words also take me over the edge, to where only metaphorical is real. Except, well, metaphor is far too limiting a figure.

For me, what's "out there" (fun ambiguating machine again) really is starting to look more and more as though it came from inside my mind. Hard reality is collapsing beneath something else that much more powerful. And reality is pretty darned powerful if you ask me. How strange would it be if the stars did not have any influence on our lives. It only depends how large your frame is allowed to become.

I resist any and all certainties. I therefore risk insanity of the most basic sort, of course. My personal and written narrative often goes off the rails. But, in precisely the manner of this author I recently heard on NPR, the frame within which the various authorities would box me not only doesn't seem to fit, but would seem positively to keep me from myself, as if there could be a me divided from myself by prison bars.

I land in the hospital, but no cause can be found. Or rather, no cause for the cause. (Do accidents always require causes? Or is that just an escape clause the insurance policy writers use) The most important connections in my life are the ones which have been made far beyond my control. Random. Easy to miss.

I'm almost certain the same is true of you, unless you're filthy rich, in which case you're likely to credit your own intelligence and cleverness. It's only human. As if these also weren't matters of good fortune. So, you'll credit yourself with intelligent and clever deployment of your intelligence and cleverness. You see where this is going.

Among the authorities I simply must resist, I would have to include the astrologers, the ones who already know all about ghosts, as well as the usual suspects; the scientists, the doctors, the academics - all the ones who have worked so much harder than I ever will for answers.

These conventional frames are all fully fleshed out now, and so there's nothing left there for me. Which doesn't mean, in any of those and many other cases, that I'm feeling superior to the sense that folks inside them can make. I'm not. There's just no sense there for me. My body's healthy, my mind is strong, the only thing I have to fear is fear, and I'm working on that one too.

* * *

I have a headache today well beyond the power of doctors to diagnose. But it's origin is trivial. Nothing to be alarmed about. I had to get a new "smartphone" because the old one would no longer connect to the Internet. Verizon had sent me five, count 'em, five new ones in fulfillment of the warranty I pay for. I asked them, please, to look a little more deeply into the issue before sending me another one. Each time I set a new one up, costing my precious time and attention, I am a little less confident that my work will last. I told the guy I didn't want to feel like I was driving a Toyota. I think he took my point.
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They obliged me, they brought in their big guns, but in the end offered no other resolution than to send me yet another refurbished identical phone. It seems merest coincidence that the timing of this series of escalating failure rates coincides with the termination of my contract, and the ability, therefore for me to claim a new phone free. Honest - I think it's random. Well, OK, as much as anything is random.

Naturally, I had wanted to hold out until the newer cooler ones come out. The Verizon folks helpfully advised me that there's never a good time to commit with these things. There's always a newer cooler one just around the corner. And it's no real surprise that among the diminishing number of people who ever bought this particular defunct phone in the first place, there should be some kind of crescendo of trouble. Verizon's cost in PR and technical expenditures for a remedy would be impossible to justify.

I caved. They offered me an extra fifty bucks off. (Just now I got a coupon in the mail for a hundred bucks off - I guess the guy was really stretching himself out for me!!) I miss my old phone, though. It was a kludge, a terrible compromise between touch and buttons and Windows' seemingly pathological design-by-massive-terrified-of-the-boss-committee-consensus approach about including the kitchen sink. The very antithesis of the iPhone. But I'd learned to make it work, and especially liked its slide-out keyboard.

Now, I'm sure you're wondering how and why I can afford an Internet-connected smartphone, being out of work, and dissing technology the way I do. Well, I pretend to.

But as you can see, I practically live up here in the ether. It's how I present myself. I have no fixed geographic address, and so I require cellular technology just in order to be findable by friends and family. I swear I don't really want to be reachable at any moment. I extol the virtues of staying put, even of going back to the old ways. But just like Al Gore, I make some kind of exception of myself. I guess.

Well, not just like him. He's rich and growing and I'm poor and shrinking. Divesting myself of fat and other accumulated stuff. But I do find extravagant hope in certain of the new technologies. I watched that Afghani reporter embedded with the Taliban, and like lots of others, I awoke to the evident truth that they could not coordinate their activities, plant their bombs, nor even detonate them were it not for the cellular network. One wonders why "they" don't just turn it off. You know, the other "they."

Clearly, as with credit card companies who would rather we not know precisely how much money they lose to fraud and identity theft, there is far more to lose by shutting down the cellular networks, than there would be for "them" to gain. A few hundred or a few thousand soldiers a year is a perfectly acceptable price. It's commensurate with lots of other costs, like the cost of mayhem on our highways, for instance, or in our hospitals where "preventable" is the single biggest cause of death (OK, I think it's third, but I know it's up there).

The true cost for public admissions about what's really going on would be our lost confidence in the structures which sustain us.

I don't like these Taliban any better than you do. I might like them a lot less, since I also see them as very similar to our own teapartiers. Angry at everything and nothing in particular, so target the biggest thing around. The American government. The US government is acting very big so far.

But I find lots of hope in the terrorist cells' ability to use the technology of wealth to frustrate its power. Poverty stricken people around the globe can now have phones where once the cost to get on the grid was prohibitive for all but the privileged classes.

There is very nearly no limit to what a company as large as Citibank, say, will do to protect your confidence in them. How much of your fees pay for the invisibility of rampant fraud? Do you ever wonder? And still they want to put a tax on top of what they aren't telling you, against your fear, by selling you identity theft insurance. Fear and greed make a charming couple, don't you think?

"Mission Accomplished" was precisely what got done by the shock and awe campaign against Saddam Hussein. We shouldn't have made so much fun of Georgie Porgie in his jump suit. The whole point of our going in there was to cement the fear we all must have of ignorant people willing to fly planes into buildings. No cost is too high to validate the fear in a kind of super high stakes triumphalism. A massive cheer for the winners. It's like a heroin hit to the collective psyche.

There was and remains quite literally no limit to what must be spent to own and to control our enthusiasms. (And you thought the "war on drugs" was about your kids??? Well, in a way, of course, it is. They must be kept in training!) Even though the cost to the lives of "our own" (not "us" but, you know, the ones too poor or ignorant to understand how their enthusiasms are gamed) now far exceeds the harm "they" ever did or could do to us.

Never mind the collateral damage, or the meltdown to our economy, which was the only thing which could, even conceivably, trump the cost of war. The War. The perpetual war of one name or another.

Oh, but what might have could have probably would have - depending on who you listen to - happened had we done nothing? I guess about the same things that happen every day over in Iraq and Afghanistan, or those parts of town where your family would never let you live, but people still live there nonetheless. They do. Are they not afraid? Is terror only reserved for those whose daily life contrasts enough?

I caved against Verizon, and my new phone - which I chose because it had the largest brightest most apparently durable and readable screen, plus the promise of a better way to input text - is an even bigger kludge than the last one. I miss the buttons; no keyboard anymore, it's all swipe and gesture, in the direction of, and with a silent bow toward, Apple.

But Apple, I learn today, is suing Google now for ripping off certain of Apple's patented intellectual property. These people have got to be kidding! They're protecting their right to profit from ideas which quickly become something anybody could do a hundred different ways. Should something like a wheel really be patentable? Is there no commons left??!!!

I have, apparently, purchased the least popular of the smartphones; certainly the least cool. It's running Microsoft's latest Mobile OS, which not a single tech guru praises. And to top it off, the manufacturer, Samsung, has hobbled plenty of the design aspects built-in by Microsoft, all in the direction of a better "consumer experience" I'm sure.

And on top of that Verizon has famously pushed the whole thing way over into the direction of an entertainment device, all for a fee, and all also in the direction of keeping you from putting your own hands on the device's locked away "features."

In the end, I'm happy enough. The browser beats Apple's in most ways. Text can actually be entered more rapidly than by either Apple's or anyone else's methods, or especially by a tiny keyboard with my thumbs. After a headache-inducing learning curve, in the end I think I got what I wanted. I won't be able to type so fast as I'm doing now with keyboard, but that might not be such a bad thing. Hell, I could give a damn for cool, and even hobbled, this beats the alternatives for me. Bizarre how Microsoft now is in the middle, stodgy, between the battling titans of cool.

So, I will deploy my technology precisely as does the Taliban. But I hope I'm a bit more enlightened than they are. I don't feel any anger toward those who screw me in the name of my own good. I'm sure not about to blow up myself or anybody else. I feel no need to be trimmed for Allah. But I do think that there's important work to do.

I sure can see how we have earned the Taliban's anger against us. As certain as I can be of anything, I'm certain that the way to win has nothing to do with guns or money (when the money's not in the form of relief aid). Just as the way to good health has little to do with the powers of medical technology, except when one is truly ill. The technology we need for good health is good information, good sanitation, public safety and housing, and an absence of fear and food insecurity and guilt; as though we cause all of our problems ourselves.

The large corporations now are all doomed to go the way of Toyota. There's not a single one of them which doesn't have the same sort of secret they'll spend any amount to keep from transforming into a generalized loss of faith.

The healthcare industry, collectively, is terrified that we won't be terrified anymore of dying. They act as though they too find the escalating costs out of touch with reality. This is a ploy folks. The more money goes through their hands, the more profit they can make. (Along with my Verizon coupon, I just got another denial of coverage for a blood test. You'd almost think they are trying to alienate me)

And if we stop being terrified, the evident magic will be that, collectively, we'll be that much healthier and better off than we ever could be on their drugs and surgical and genetic interventions when these get deployed as if every deviation from some norm were a cause for emergency response.

There is no massive turning which is necessary. There is no massive evil being perpetrated in our  name. There's just a lot of fear, being rendered up into a fairly insane collective behavior pattern.

* * * 

Last night, because my life is just that bizarre, I had a chance to attend the hockey event of the century. I nearly witnessed the Buffalo Sabres' own top goalie at his homecoming from center stage in the final event of the Winter Olympics. Canada won, but Buffalo would welcome home the next in a long line of superstar just-misses. We let him know how much we love and value him.

In the event, the son of the friend who'd offered me the last minute seat which he'd gotten last minute - absolute primo seats - the son invited a friend and so I got bumped.

Now, I'm sure you understand completely that this was no tragedy for me. I'm not the world's biggest sports fan, although I do seem magically to be in attendance at some great Buffalo sports happenings. Or just miss them. But the consolation prize was pretty good - I got to use their pre-empted tickets to hear Margaret Atwood in person.

Last minute, I couldn't get anyone to accompany me, so I dropped off two free tickets at the box office, which were then snapped up by some grateful students. So, in addition to feeling lucky, I got to feel generous. Which is a better thing to do than to feel pre-empted.

Atwood, poor woman, devoted her "talk" to answering publicly some frequently asked questions that she, as prominent author, often gets. It was pretty transparent to me that she was warning off those questions in the Q&A session which the format of this "distinguished speaker series" has established for itself.

Despite her sharing some intimate history of Buffalo from a Torontonian's point of view, you could sense this bit of tension between her and this crowd. She's most recently written one in a literary barrage of end-of-the world novels.

The crowd wants to know if she's optimistic, what we should do to prevent a catastrophic future. The questions veer just a bit in the direction of questions she's tired of asking. Questions she rolls her eyeballs at. She kept her poise, but the gulf between herself and this audience had grown immense. We felt mildly cheated by her impromptu carelessly prepared and brief remarks. She felt at odds with ill informed and familiar questions.

As a writer, she said, she is and must be an optimist: That she will finish the book, find a publisher, find an audience. As an accomplished author, she has about as much in common with her audience as the health insurance industry does with the ill. Why would she want anything changed? It's working for her. Being darkly pessimistic makes her life perfectly sunny.

I know that sounds like sour grapes, but honestly, it's not. In a way, it was generous of Atwood to give us her time in person. In a way, with the now inevitable mega-sized image of her talking head right over her actual - but too far away to be distinct -  head, it was hard to get the sense of what "being there" really means anymore. A television would be a far more intimate way to hear her speak.

* * *

So anyhow, as you can see I have nothing at all spiritual to offer. Well, except that I have a really hard time finding almost anything at all which is not meaningful. The most random things just fit right in to what I'm thinking about. And I'd say that's just about as powerful as seeing ghosts. Just about as jarring. Not exactly terrifying, unless you lose your mind about it. I wouldn't want to go saying these things out loud, because everyone would just think I'm crazy.

But, in some new-agey spiritualist sense, all that needs to happen to change the world is for lots and lots of people to stop being so afraid. So terrorized. So subject to the narratives pandered by those already rich and famous and powerful. No, no, no, I'm not talking about Margaret Atwood (by strange co-incidence I found out where my long lost copy of The Handmaid's Tale went, but she couldn't use the tickets either). Atwood come to Buffalo, risking her reputation at the same time that our fair city was honoring a hockey player from somewhere else. Oh Canada!

She writes beautiful books full of implied cautionary tales. Stories and poetry which can reveal things about ourselves that we'd never know without the mirror of literature. But she too is asking us to be afraid. I'd say that's at odds with her audience in Buffalo. We have seen the future and it is us. We're only terrorized by what the better off might do. In Buffalo, silly sin-city of Atwood's past, we still sense a chance to turn it around. And if we can turn our city around, anything's possible, right?

Sorry. Way too long. I'm still working on the condensed version. That's a lot harder.

Writing the God Removal Machine

As a reasonably overschooled individual, I know that "Deus ex machina" refers the the machine from which the gods might be introduced to a stage production. Literally, a crane for lowering in the plot fixer, the god, who intervenes to make things right. Figuratively, a clunky plot which just couldn't happen in real life.

As I am instructed repeatedly, faith is found at that intersection between fate - what just happens - and meaningful coincidence. It is a choice, in other words, about how to interpret. And there is meant to be no possibility to influence what has happened, because that would to be tempt fate or cheat God, depending on your choice of words.

Science chases down this nexus, trying to the extent possible to find that final intersection between what can be known (and manipulated) and what is only random. And, by definition, what gets left out as random is meaningless. God's province, if you will, or the Fates'.

Now you know I like to play with metaphors from science. You know I can't write - good writing tells a story, and it has to be a story that's not my own. Good journalism starts with interviews. Good story telling starts with characters. I don't know what the hell I'm doing here, but I'm pretty sure it's not good writing.

But I do have something to say, which can be a plain old burden a lot of the time. And I don't really wish to expose the fact, any more than I have to, that I am just a plain old lousy and flawed human being without a hell of a lot to recommend me in the virtue, talent, and accomplishment departments. But let's not kid ourselves here, I obviously think I'm pretty smart, whatever the hell you might mean by that. (I can't even keep my grammatical "persons" straight! You, me, I, us, we, whatever)

Anyhow, my main big metaphors from science have to do with the fringy stuff. The quantum mechanics and the general theory of relativity, the big bang and the chaos theories, with all of which I have some glancing acquaintance. As much as a journalist might have, say, with those he interviews for a story. Instead of just thinking and writing all by myself about what the Saints' win at the SuperBowl might mean to Buffalonians who were "cheated" out of our win, I could have and probably should have asked a few.

But I was wanting to stuff people's heads, like a bad teacher wants to do. I wanted to fill your head with stuff I've already worked out in mine, across the ages to the extent that I can, by reading. Sometimes even across the cultures.

And you know, in addition to not knowing how to write, I never do bother to do the math. Just like the beginning of A Serious Man - yet another Coen Brothers grim fairy tale so far (it takes almost as much longer than you might be willing to spend for me to watch a movie as it does to read a book) if you don't know the math, you don't know the physics.

But you know, just like the Coen Brothers, I think, or Avatar for that matter, I'd like to turn that problem on its head. If you don't do metaphor, you just can't get physics. Nevermind the math.

I did finally see Precious - I had to wait until I could sit next to someone, since I was a bit timid about seeing it alone, plus I didn't want to have a rewind/reset button at my disposal. The novel it's based on is called "Push" and I'm going to have to say that this term refers to the same thing I've been wanting to do in my writing. It's a kind of abuse of you, for which I'm truly sorry.

Precious is so abused that she can barely make out letters. She's illiterate not just because she's been abused both at home and in school by feedback clearly telling her she's stupid, she's illiterate because the very leastmost modicum of energy required to make sense of any symbol has been, well, pushed right out of her.

And so the turning point in the film, and I'm sorry but I don't really quite care if it's a spoiler, is when the teacher persists, pushes if you will, and Precious realizes she can learn to read. And later, she tells her social worker, "I like you, I really do, but you don't have the strength to handle me." Talk about a Turning Point. You couldn't deal with my life, educated boy.

So, you know, I'm feeling humbled just about all over the place now, but I'm still going to try to tell you something. It's that old E=MC² thing again. Where Mass gets equated to Energy, according to the speed of light. Where the speed of light becomes the Universal Constant, and the Energy and Mass become all shifty depending on point of view.

We're all familiar in real life with how time is the same as distance, or money depending on what interests you most. It takes time to get there from here. It takes money to save time. You can mix and match these around as much as you like, but you can't deny you know what I'm talking about. Machines to collapse these distinctions are the fruits of our sciences, embodied now by engineered technologies and techniques.

Sure, you're going to say it's not all about cars and planes and Information Technologies. What about Biology and genetics? Well, what about them? There's still that matter of getting down inside the machine-like parts to find that originating impulse, or what went wrong, or what could go wrong. As in, it would be aweful to die just before "they" come up with the cure for what ails you. That time and money and distance issue again.,

At the center, where moral choice resides, at the heart of the matter, we just have to leave a question mark or maybe God, depending on your choice of words. But, see, here's the thing, God, the word (thankfully at the beginning of the sentence this time, so I can hedge), is like "green numbers," it has no "content". There's no there there, and so the question might become what harm is caused by putting a word in the place of the question mark. For which the answer is a quick scan of history, or current events for that matter. So, I'll leave that Word (whoops!) alone for a moment longer.

But no-one really thinks science, as a process, is going to reveal that mechanism for choice. Well, except for the Geek Rapture folks, but you know what I think of them, right? (if you do, then tell me, because I can't figure it out) There are lots of proposals, but in the end, everyone's pretty sure it will end up, like in quantum mechanics, at the fringes where mechanism meets probability. Kind of like that Coen brothers movie. Hmmm I wonder how it ends?

So, choice might be right about at that spot where chance meets implication. That faith thing again, except that in this case, you're having a kind of faith in yourself. Your choices, over time, might even define your character. If your life is not some kind of big act, then you might even deserve some honor. That kind of thing.

And if you give God (whoops, sorry, there He is again) all the credit, it's pretty much like cheating, don't you think? Shouldn't you just give Him all the blame too? But I'm OK with that formula I overheard now while waiting to give blood to check my viscosity so I can keep on breathing and stuff; "the way I see it is every time you resist those temptations, you know for steak or wine or ice-cream you shouldn't be eating, you're resisting the devil, you know, and moving more toward God".

I might quibble with the moral content of choice at that level, but I at least get the idea. Faith means choice means a push, of yourself, in a certain direction, and you couldn't always do it yourself without some guidance about the right direction. And lots of times, you really don't understand all the reasons, but you have a sense of which would be the right direction, and if you have character, you take it. That kind of thing.

But distance from moral content gives a kind of deniability of implication. I didn't exactly feel responsible for the condition of Precious up on screen; girls like her I mean. I would never treat my kids the way she was treated. And frankly, the movie was kind to me that way. It wasn't pushing anything down my throat, or into my head, it led me to form my own conclusions, and decide for myself just where my implication is. But it never did let me just turn away. It didn't hide the truth either. I didn't make me turn away the way Tarantino does, for instance. I don't ever want to be that practiced in my reading, er, viewing.

Physical distance, cultural distance, neighborhood distance, school distance, these can all be ways to disimplicate ourselves from moral choices we must and by omission all the time, do make. And who would ever see the need to live outside and be cold all the time to be moral? That's not the point.

The point is that there really is a different non-mathematical equation which must always also be kept in mind. That's the one where disimplication by distance - that point of view thing - squared, if you will, times the gravity of the situation (um, not quite punning, but I'm not sure yet) equals your character. Your moral content. If you will. Your meaning-making energy potential. Your worthiness for love.

And in the case, the Universal constant, which not quite co-incidentally is the same one the Bible uses, is that each human is decreed at the outset to have the identical same character value. (see what I mean about not being able to write?)

The universal constant, in other words is humanity, which doesn't get to be assigned a weight in this equation. It's a constant. That's what constant means, dummie. Sorry, talking to myself again, but I think we all already agree about that, even though we hardly ever act that way. Because, well, it's kind of scary. We don't know how to behave across the boundaries. But we would never want to live in a world where human lives were differentially valued.

Even though, ahem, that's how insurance rates get calculated. Even though that's what grades in school come to mean. Even though that's what gets meant by money. But, to be fair, we are having a really really hard time figuring out how else to do it.

My radical proposal (I'm such a radical! That's my only saving grace in the how strong are you really contest) is so trivial. Just write God out of the equation. It's not that big a deal. Really. It's, well, trivial (I never quite know if I'm punning).

It goes like this. Written words are what connects us, as humans, across time and space and sometimes even cultures. Written words guide us toward good moves, even when we're alone in private. Written words inform that part of us which so often gets mistakenly labelled too, as soul or the ghost in the machine fallacy or the intentional fallacy or the pathetic fallacy, you know, where you project human qualities onto animals and other, um, things .

God, the Word now, is a cop-out. It lets us off the hook. It's too easy anymore, and I'm not saying it always was, I'm just saying now it is. Now, at this point in the history of science, the compilation of too many words for just one, ahem, soul to master, to where the most sensible way to navigate the choices is just by random. It's how I do it. Almost. Sort of.

If we just netFlix up everything so that only the good stuff rises to the top, in just the way that they stock the shelves in stores now such that you never can find the oddball stuff, then we will have lost the ability to read the world at all.

Our economy now is quite literally organized such that each of us, the least of us, is made to feel responsible for what in the end has been a setup by those in power. That's what Marx meant by the internal contradictions of Capitalism. We're at or beyond the endtimes for that kind of logic. And that's because the markets have been so perfected - made so friction-free to crib a few of Bill Gate's words - that the fatal flaw in the logic can no longer be avoided.

If we're all responsible, then no-one's responsible, and at the core of corporations, which are now just massive structures for moral disimplication because everyone needs a paycheck, there's only someone getting paid a whole lot of money to set you up. The good news is that you have to pay an incredible amount for someone to do the devil's act.

But you know, the crane, that god removal machine, is right in our hands, and I'm pretty sure it has something to do with writing, and something to do with our real human hearts (which in Chinese now, remember, is the same word as mind, but sorry, I didn't mean to talk down to you again). Why not use it to remove the devil(s)? We can run our own damn stories without your Logos all over them.

And the word which can't be spoken but is the real word, can have a space to come back in. The everything is nothing paradox of God. Without all the religious stuffing which is just a way for men to keep control. But there I go getting carried away again . . . . (and where does the punctuation belong in my title?)

Audience Rules! Google Out of China

Google did it! Instead of mouthing more mealy rationalizations about engagement, Google pulls back now from the world's biggest market, in protest against the Chinese government's controls against the free flow of information. They had previously drunk the water of compromise, and now they take it back, realizing some basic collision with the company's own core values. If they aren't interested in the free flow of information, who is?

Before we debate that point, I myself now, inspired by Terry Gilliam's latest cinematic romp, must practice sleight of hand. While you are paying attention to the diversion of Google's seeming to do the right thing by you, I am going to conjur my own audience. Shazzam, and you are there.

Evangelicals do this all the time, tapping in to that proto-illness of most peoples' brains where powerful words, authoritatively spoken, excite some sort of belief-system focused on some leader at the pinnacle of some trued structure.

Schizophrenics do this to some clinically mad degree, rehearsing rosary patterns of words as if for dear life; sometimes even unsettling their interlocutors' certainties about what really counts as worthwhile. If they can even get an interlocutor, which is usually pretty unlikely. There is always madness in perfect trust in any human-generated scheme.

These edifices of trust - the churches, the schools, the corporations - are composed of the attention paid by earnest subscribers, in no position themselves, alone, to be certain of anything. Traditionally, the church in robes and gold and ceremony, could legitimize its stand in place of you and me.

Now, at one extreme, we have be-gowned and celebrated universities, whose rationalizations of the world around us must be trued by earnest peers whose own works are "published" and read by others whose readerships are also better than you or me. There is a highly elaborated system for legitimacy, which in these United States keeps our Big U. at the very top on the globe. If we don't blow it, we may yet remain, thereby, economically in power.

At some other extreme are ever-growing institutions legitimated only by the financial contributions of their adherents. To many of us, these evangelical businesslike edifices look for all the world like giant confidence games, supported only by some occult cadence, high production values to the show, and the tired jadedness of common man toward robes and institutional self-promotion.

Which is a really funny observation if you were to think about it.

Google and Microsoft and proto-universities like the Singularity Institute, gain their legitimacy by your purchase of their product, or by your being subject to their advertizing, or by your belief in guru representations beyond the reach of institutions for sanction. Pick your poison, someone's always trying to take advantage of your gullibility.

When you, the public, are asked questions for your answer en masse, the way they so stupidly do in California, the very act of voting makes you complicit in a massive crime against humanity. Complex and difficult matters must be distilled into some truism which will become a proxy litmus test to determine if you prefer the blue or the red pill.

Should education be worth more than incarceration? Should real-estate taxes be capped? Can we trust our elected leaders to represent us? The serpent eats its tale. (at least pikk.com makes good sport of it, rabid fans) We must bind the hand which leads us.

No authority now is trusted; no structure can be made worthy of your belief. I'd like to be willing to die for my country "in an instant" like so many soldiers say that they are, but I really don't know what my country is. I really would like to know, once again, what it is beyond family and personal friends which has earned my full trust and loyalty.

In China, on its citizens' behalf, the government will violate the terms of service of its business partners - which is an extremely civil way to put what they are doing - conducting industrial espionage to expose its own citizens who would like some trued stories about the behavior of that self-same government to be aired in public. Very bad things will happen to these people.

Google's discovery leaves it in a position of no real choice. If it is not to be complicit in what are criminal acts on the face of them.

Other corporations, as I have written extensively elsewhere (don't you just love such vague references?), can lay back behind layers and layers of deniability and keep focus on whatever core business widgets or services they are pandering. We don't always know what might be done in our name, but we do know that we are only interested in bringing profitable wares to market.

But Google's in the business of information; trust in them depends utterly on their commitment to the freedom of information. Otherwise even rubes would understand we're entering the world of Orwell's 1984.

Chinese citizens understand that their fate is collective. Their lives are palpably better on a daily basis, thanks to their single party rule. Strong resolution at their top is never subverted by oversimplified questions asked of under-qualified deciders. While our red and blue resolve themselves into almost perfect opposition, guaranteeing, virtually, that there can be no direction other from the one which will be far too little, far too late. When true leadership is so urgently called for.

And just as we might not want to look too closely at what we are asking our young men and women to do in our name in Afghanistan or Iraq, the Chinese people are often just as adamant about what they don't want to know.

The only fact which really matters is whether the preacher is more interested in gold and glory than in God. Has self perpetuation trumped belief? Do leaders' actions defy their words? Must we hamstring them with direct propositions so that they may do their dirty deeds in trickier ways beneath our notice?

And so, dear audience of non-existent readers, I make this representation to you. There is no thing which I will write which you must take on any kind of faith. I will not make extravagant claims about the future, nor willingly make statements which cannot be substantiated against piles and piles of facts. I will not stray beyond the bounds of reason, nor fall prey to temptations for the rhythms of magical thinking, either as receiver or transmitter. You will know it when I lose my mind.

Most writers, I must imagine, would feel far too naked doing this kind of writing. Well, some have told me so. Where you have no good idea who it is you're writing to. Where you have no particular expertise which makes you the person to go to for good intel about the latest moves of this or that corporation, nor for interpretation of the latest happenings in the world around us. I have no editorial board to assure you that what I write will be this side of outlandish, nor in the vein of what you've paid for.

But, sorry to say, writing alone for just me in private fails to engender my own trust in me. Toward the one side, I might write as do those myriad bloggers now who rehearse for you daily observations about their personal lives, and seem to speak for your heart as well. You comment profusely, yeah yeah yeah, that's what I think too. Or you're a jerk.

Toward the other, there is nothing which I have so fully developed to say that I can work it out book length for your to judge in and by its completion.

I have inklings is all, of certainty, in the end, as it were, and trace the direction toward it here, each day out loud, as if a crazy person writing to myself. But the certainty I seek forms no kind of utterable nor embodiable truth; these are absurdities I just can't believe in.

I have no faith in that sort of perfection in words, nor artificially intelligent robots, nor transhuman decency beyond our belief here and now. I have no faith in even trued words' endurance in any perpetual sense, and the perpetual me falls short within a range I can be comfortable with myself.

That of which I am certain relates to you, dear audience. That there is no such thing as writing which can make sense to a single soul alone. *poof* You're there because you must be. And the power is all yours.

As in these supposedly United States, we must learn to liberate our leaders from the veto power of the least among us, whether small "frontier" states or illegitimate institutions. To do that, we must find a way to trust them. And that in turn must be liberated from the process for producing ad copy on what used to be called Madison Avenue.

This strikes me as almost inconceivably difficult to accomplish. You, dear audience, are so freaking willing to believe the most absurd things, based on some trust in the speaker engendered only on the basis that they make you feel good about yourself. You are falling down on your job. But I have faith in you.

OK, I've got an interview now, for painless suicide in public. Like everyone else, I must eventually agree to work for the Man (Not that one! You know, the one who runs the economy, stupid) or starve. I would represent the government of China, in their cultural outreach to America. Placing Chinese language teachers in our schools. Interpreting Chinese cultural history and values for your edification and enlightenment. Hopefully, leading you to fear and loathe them less, so that we may become partners, China and the U.S., in this better world abuilding.

Is my ambivalence palpable? Is there any way now that I can trust myself? My representations there in private, how will they match this public nakedness before you? Stay tuned! I might just have a legitimate job, or they might just remind me that I have yet to learn to fly a kite. I will do the right thing, of that I'm certain, whatever the hell it is. Or the deciders will do it for me.

Sheesh!

Einstein's Better Half

Not too long ago various idiots savant pondered whether Einstein might have stolen his ideas from his wife. I have proof that he couldn't have. As I tell my friends who haven't seen me for a while; "I've aged well, I have the body of a god (Buddha) in the mind of a lunatic (yours if you believe it)". See, it depends what you mean by better half, and in whose mind ideas might reside.

I was wonderfully gratified today to learn that Bill Clinton secretly cared more for his daughter than for the obligations of world leadership. You can go ahead and contrast that with GWB if you'd like, including the part about sexual transgressions. Some sins are just more serious than others, George, and just because you got in with the wrong crowd doesn't let you off the hook.

So, being a man, of course Einstein forgot to complete his wonderful insight. The part he got for us - the scientific discovery which entailed no moral reasoning on his part since it was and still is just wondrously true for whoever happens to think about it - is the part that made the bomb possible.

The better half - the part which now it might already be too late to reveal, and for that I can only apologize that I'm not a woman - is that he should have and could have noticed that once you've pinned the speed of light, you've also turned accident right on its head.

Things which aren't connected perceptually, which we now understand to involve the exchange of force-defining sub-atomic particles limited in their exchange by the speed of light, are "only" connected conceptually, which means, by definition, in some "mind".

Things with some future connection which can't be established by a chain of causation are - now this is obvious to the point of banality - connectible only by accident. Now I'm making shit up here, but if you really think about it you'll see that it's true - this accident when it's anticipated by some mind can be called an emotional connection, a wanting, a gap to be fulfilled. OK, there's the part you're going to choke on, but think about it now.

You make something happen you want to happen, and you work like hell to avoid the things you're terrified of. I'm not so very sure at all about free will and prestigipredestination, but honestly I could care less. It sure feels as though I'm the decider some of the time.

Now it's easy enough to claim no connection at all when accidents happen, but looking backward, you might simply say that the connection was emotionally prefigured, prior to its perceptual realization. It can be lots of fun to look around at the subconscious, but I'm going way farther than that. I know, I'm messing with sacred words we think we understand here, but give me a little chance . . . I mean that literally, of course! At the extreme, fate and the subconscious are identical, as any good psychotherapist will have to agree.

Emotion is a direction toward, say, something bound by love, and away, perhaps, when that direction is impelled by hatred, and it exists only in the absence of causal proof. Once contact is made, well, then you have causation.

The really cool part is that all reality is always an interplay among and between these aspects, so we needn't bother very much at all with the silly chicken and egg question of which came first, mind or matter. Because it doesn't, well, really matter. Both are fundamental, fundamentalists be damned!

But there is a reductive necessity, in any language which is going to make any sense, for concept, percept, mind and particle, motion and emotion. Otherwise, well, what's a wavicle to consist in, for goodness sake? Paradox (well, yes as a matter of fact, but Žižek can be really tough to read)!? There's no ether, there is simultaneous "action" at a distance when a de-Broglie wave is collapsed by an act of perception, but what's happened, strictly speaking, is conceptual, and is tough to prove by simultaneous measurement (not so tough to prove by other more clever types of measurement).

So the strong anthropic principle, the Goldilocks principle which posits that of course the cosmos beats all the wildest lottery odds to suit us perfectly [because we wouldn't be here if it didn't] can be restated to say that we were wanted. Absolutely nothing else changes. Or everything does. It's only semantics after all.

Now, I've got to go comfort my daughter whose boyfriend is too obtuse to see her charm anymore. Now that their freshman college year has begun, I'm sure he doesn't want to be constrained in what turns his head. If I were a woman, I'd tear him to shreds, but well, I kind of like the guy, so he has no worries from me, and for Pete's sake they're way too young to get serious. Even at my age promises are hard to keep.

All's fair in love and war, but pity the fool who hurts my kids. Now that right there is nuclear power. If only we could harness that stuff, you know, like that toddler energy we all comment about.

Oh, wait, we can!!! We can do the right thing, avoid the haters, steer clear of the magical thinkers, stop thinking in algorithms, religious or scientific, and learn to behave decently, in civilized fashion, with feelings expressed politely. Not a bad idea, if I do say so myself.