Finally, I think I Understand Bratton

I have only random. I try hard not to control what I read, but then I follow threads. I try hard not to look at social media, as if averting my eyes might somehow contribute to the downfall of their corrosive force. But I fail, even while I try to let the random in.

So Bratton tweets. So does my daughter, and she doesn't think she's so great. I should get over myself.

Meanwhile, here is something readable and coherent from Benjamin H. Bratton, which actually betrays a stance. In my attempts to read him, I have slowly developed some confidence that he is compassionate and thoughtful.

Now I know how I think he's mostly wrong (well, I'd have to say "wrong" only in the final or absolute sense, since he's otherwise 99 44/100% right). Via Twitter, he says this bit of writing is from the same time that Bill Gates did this on TED. I don't like websites which don't date their posts. I shouldn't care so much.

My trouble with his position regards the why of human survival. His view is so long - from such an altitude relative to cosmic evolution - that humanity becomes like another bacterial strain. Our strain jumps out from the evolutionary swamp and threatens not just some species or other, but the entire planet.

Implicit seems to be the notion that cognition is what needs rescuing. Agency. He does a glancing credit to Donna Haraway to envision a kind of cyborg future if we hope to survive as a species. An altered, evolved species. It strikes me that Haraway's position was rather more compassionate. Not sure.

My issue is with the supposition that cognition is what humanity is all about. I believe that Bratton falls prey to a pitfall in his very own argumentation here. He's essentially arguing that cognition is why we can and should and must survive, but not because it's at the apex of a long and now discredited chain of being. Rather, his claim is that we should survive simply because we can.

Same thing, no? But the real question is "can we?" Really? So man really does become God, then?

What if humanity is not about cognition? What if humanity is about love? What if our failing is not about not getting the politics right, or the technologies properly aligned, or re-establishing homeostatic balance for our planet by conscious means?

Consciousness is seated in the most primitive structures of the brain. These are the parts whose genetic progenitors go the widest and the deepest. Agency serves consciousness, and not the other way around, and even still our bodies are over 90% not what we consider to be ourselves, when we think in genetic terms. That sort of genetics covers only one aspect of evolution, as Bratton seems clear about.

There is only co-evolution among myriad species.

The wanting to survive which we now feel is the selfish anti-love part that we project into our collective future. In truth, we crave survival as a species for the very same reason that we live life as though it would last forever. We have nothing but what we call our personalities to project, and we mistake the pain of losing those as something somehow worse than the pain of death. Sex, love, rock and roll and personality the way we now live these are very very local and limited. We have mistaken personality for soul, and - as always - we have mistaken God for a cognitive being. A being with a plan.

Talk about anthropocentrism! God in man's image. But it's a funhouse mirror image.

I, too, am 99 44/100% materialist. But I also know that the pure random of evolutionary processes (more broadly understood than just Darwinism or neo-Darwinism or anything else that we think we already know more about than we really do) has not been guided by cognition.

It is consistent with any materialism you may wish that the process of evolution is "guided" by love. You don't need to call it God's love. It's just a proper naming for what's been going on across billions of billions of years to where "years" don't mean a thing.

This evolution is "present" in us. We are not its apex, because we are not its end.

It is perfectly consistent with materialism to reconsider the standard model of physics as a kind of limit to materialism. There are motions in the cosmos which cannot be construed as related to forces. There are no bosons - no messenger particles - to be found, no matter how we stretch our statistical methods for detection based on hyper-complex instrumentation.

These "motions" are actually "e-motions" and the relations are conceptual rather than perceptual. Conceptual relations are always in the perpetual "now," which only means simultaneous across all time and space.

That doesn't mean that mind cannot evolve. But two plus two will always equal four (depending, of course, on some consistent process for designating units).

It is more useful to think of mind as microcosm than as agent. Holograms are more informative here than schematics could be. We persist despite the degradation of the media. Gravitons fade in probability for detection. Zero is never quite zero, is it? Nowhere in the cosmos.

But human mind cannot comprehend the cosmos. That doesn't mean we aren't important.

I'm not about to say or even suggest that agency is not important. We should feel humiliated by what we've done to our planet. We have been humbled. That doesn't mean that we should stop being human. We just have the wrong notion about what it means to be human. Mind includes the emotive center; the heart.

Mind is not only cognition. Emotion is not limited here. It remains doubtful that earth is alone in the cosmos, but we are surely looking for friends in the wrong way. Reading the mind of God has always been a futile exercise.

De-contextualizing on Oscar Sunday

I know Oscar about as well as I know Superbowl. But I was alerted by the popcorn man when, the night before, I watched A Single Man, film version, with some friends at a miraculously preserved massive old cinema here in Buffalo. It's the same theater where my father remembers going for the double feature for ten cents on a Saturday or Sunday matinee.

Those who work at this place are true film lovers, and so the Oscars are significant to them. Enter the ancient doors and there is a genuine old-fashioned ticket booth (you might want to picture something descended from a London phone booth, and only slightly larger - perhaps like those booths from which they sell tickets at carnivals, but more ornate). Inside is a fairly old man - well, older than me - who I believe has been taking tickets for as long as I've been buying them. He smiles and seems genuinely glad to see you, inviting you to go ahead in and look around for your friends if you want. I said, no I'd just go ahead and buy my ticket.

This is one of those times when I might wish I could deploy a movie camera instead of just words. Picture me now before the movie - if each of us can pull it off - driving out of Buffalo to our spiritually grounded exurb to the south, East Aurora. East Aurora is the onetime home of Elbert Hubbard, the Roycrofter, and is and has been a significant one among a local spread of spiritual hubs. Around here the Mormons got their start, as did the patron saints of spiritualism more generally. The Fox sisters (yeah, I never heard of them either) grew up here. This is Iroquois land, long since desecrated by the white man.

I am an interloper also to this spiritualist gathering, organized (well, sprung like an impromptu party, in fact) in honor of a man - a true adept - who would later let our host know that he'd turned back home when he learned that there would be a party in his honor. He is that shy. My own entrance was announced in such a way that I was afraid I might be called on to make some sort of speech: "Chinese scholar, former headmaster, brilliant man" if I'm not mistaken. I didn't even blush, so absurd was it.

This was as nice a party as I've ever attended, populated by the likes of those on the inside of that Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, in case you have that cinematic image ready to hand. I learned about Tarot, astrology, alchemy, qi-gong (with which I am acquainted in rather academic fashion - that far from practice), Native American spirituality, and a whole lot more. I wished I had a chance to learn about dousing, although now that I'm back in the city I don't think I'll need it.

I am very much an outsider to this sort of understanding, and therefore was by far the most ignorant of the bunch. To a person, these people are almost incredibly diligent in their studies. I can't imagine a single one of them fitting any billing as "charlatan" (just in case you're in the market for a reading).

There was one moment when the party was paused by our host, who'd been drinking - to be highly politically incorrect about it - like an Indian (which I could only be jealous about, having recently been ordered away from the sauce), announced that his recently proposed book about Native American spirituality had won a contract. Two, in fact, which must be the dream of any author - to have two houses competing for one's work. Applause and congratulations!

Then he told a funny story about how white people like to act as gatekeepers to the arcana of those whose tribes they bond with. Which must be about as funny from the inside as it is from the outside. I don't think Mason was intending to speak for the tradition. He would write, rather, about the tradition. Which, as a bona fide teacher of and about Chinese, I do actually know can sometimes be accomplished better as a non-native; a member of the target audience with whom the bond is more important at the outset. Sometimes those foreign to English have been its most accomplished stylists.

The pause in the party to make space for that announcement extended to that singular moment when the party is all one. The little clusters of animated conversation had stopped, and the topic turned to Buffalo. As in "what is it about the pall which hangs over our city?" The grey which almost always greets you driving or flying in. The certainty among our citizens that things will always be as they have been and that change is impossible. That we deserve our fate and can only learn to like it (which we typically succeed in doing).

Now here's the part where I would love it if you could be watching on film. Spontaneously around the circle there were offerings of astrological reads of the city ('very Taurian, and therefore stubborn and caught up in itself'), remembrances of some sort of grudge about a running race between the Iroquois and the white man, where the white man cheated. Desecration more generally of this sacred ground.

I felt my mouth opening to offer up my own prognostications of hope.  But of course I realized discretion as the better part of valor. I was out-gunned here in all ways of knowing; the literary, the local and cultural history, the current politics. I'm only recently back in town and so what do I know? Plus, I've never been diligent in anything. I was certainly out-gunned in the occult ways of knowing.

As you know, faithful reader (I guess I'm speaking to myself again now, although even I don't have a good read on what I've written. Maybe especially I), I've had trouble lately with pulmonary embolisms, whose symptoms seem to keep me on my toes by coming back. As I often say, just like "I'm driving a Toyota" now in relation to my own body.

Well, even I know that just as Adam and Eve are a convenient fiction about what must be intertwined in each of us, and just as Jesus was distorted if not destroyed by a patriarchal power-elite which still owns His Church, there is no sense to believing or acting as though your body can be distinguished from your mind. Well, except for this Native American medicine man who recommends treating your body as your pet if you want to get healthy. Which seemed to make a lot of sense to me at the time.

Mostly, though, these folks stay clear of terms like soul and divinity. And for my part, I'm not exactly despairing that the enshrined and fully institutionalized and almost ungodly expensive Western medical establishment has no certain answers for me. After all, that would mean that something about me was definitively broken, even if they were able to offer some sort of fix for it. Some extravagantly expensive fix, just as the rule-out testing has been - extravagantly expensive.

The nice thing about no certain diagnosis is that perhaps there really is something you can and might and even should do about it yourself. I might just follow up on some leads for Shiatsu massage, or qi-gong internal alchemical exercises. Although they have yet to be theoretically validated by Western science, there is a growing body of evidence that these things "work" even in the absence of theory. Even government institutions now sanction their practice.

And for sure, within the theoretical frames as were presented or represented to me that night, my symtoms find a fit and therefore a reason for hope. Neither the diagnosis nor the treatment require much reaching in any of these "alternative" traditions, where in my "native" tradition, they are at an almost complete loss without a slot to put me in.

Which pretty much just begs the question about Buffalo, don't you almost have to say? As in why are these folks sitting around and grousing about what's wrong with Buffalo the same as everyone else does, no matter what their frame of reference. Shouldn't they be doing something about it? Or would Buffalo as a whole need to be willing to sit for its reading???

We do that already in the "what if a whole community were to read the same book" department. Like everything else about this town, we probably have much higher rates of participation than is the norm. But I guess we're hardly all together about what we want. I guess Buffalo would have to change its mind as a whole, and what are the chances for that?

So, I retreated from the party to the more conventional fare of dinner and a movie. I'd missed the dinner part, but the movie is where I started in this post. I did need to stay clear of the attraction of drink at each of the three dinners I avoided that night - so popcorn was my fare. Mmmmmm. Real butter!!

And then there were the inevitable Oscars. I have rabbit ears (no, silly, my TV does), being still not ready to sign any contracts or leases but the ones for mobility. The one channel I can never pull in is the one showing the Oscars. Now I never watch the Oscars, but somehow not being able to made me feel terribly alone. I tried every conceivable antenna position, scanned on-line to confirm that in fact there was no feed, gave up for about the third time, and then finally, as if by some miracle, I hit upon the one magic Kundalini position in which I could sync with the ethereal feed.

Now I was chained to the show. I felt less alone, but so very distant from the accomplishment of this apparent horde of winners. I was glad for their work. Who doesn't love the movies? The humility sounded almost genuine to me, moved just a bit beyond the acting. Mostly, I was bored. I guess that was true of a lot of people.

The stars almost did look and act like normal people though. That has to be some kind of progress, right? Now here's the kicker: (I've been at this now for a length of time unusual for me, who bangs out a thought a day, just about) Yesterday, which is now Monday, I fulfilled my appointment with my Native-to-me Doc. I have a diagnosis! I have a fairly rare mutation among my genes which causes a drastically increased propensity for clotting.

Of course, that hardly "explains" why me, why here, why now; all of which questions have the one important answer that if not me and here and now I would most likely not be alive. Lucky, in other words, that I had family around and was near a hospital. The propensity simply explains the why me part as a chain of unlucky inheritance.

The funny thing is that the mutation, called the "Factor V (Leiden) mutation" descends from that city in Holland from where the Mayflower set sail, where there was a cluster of such clotters. I guess that proves my ancestry, in a way that's hardly comforting. It means more tests now, and a lifelong blood-thinning regimen which, while handling one set of risk factors, hands me another.

So, I guess I won't be letting go of the Western medicine trapeze just yet. They've found me a place and made me an adherent. Not that it might not also be useful to go for the Eastern frame at the same time, which might help to address the why here, why now part of the equation, which in the West is always left to random chance.

It doesn't feel like random chance to me. There have been too many recent changes in my life. I still hold out hope that I can go back to un-medicated and happy without having my life changed by the contaminating knowledge that asteroids may hit, earthquakes may let loose, clots may form, the accelerator may stick, and even the key is no longer a mechanical object. It is a code and impossible to enter while driving.

Many of you may think that we are in the midst of some kind of information explosion. That there is so much *more* we know now than we ever did before. It doesn't take too much thinking to realize the absurdity of that notion. Our brains have not changed one iota since we were formed as a species. To use that hackneyed and tired brain-as-computer metaphor, believing in some kind of explosion of information would be to believe that our brains have been consistently upgraded, according to some kind of biological Moore's law of geometric expansion, which they clearly haven't been.

But no, you will say, the "information," so-called, is what's "out there" all around us, cataloged in libraries and on the internet now, in papers and in teaching traditions, and simply not possible of containment within a single mind. What has changed has been our relationship to the information that's always been there. Our frames have been filled out, almost to the point of being "fleshed." We now know that we can, in principle, guide ourselves to some solid sense of reality, and that we will not be disappointed *except* by random incursions from what must remain, in principle, like a roll of dice, beyond our ability to know, to control, to predict.

A single mind is no more elaborate than it ever was, it is simply better aligned than it could have been with all other non-disformed minds. This is the magic of trans-cultural scientific understanding, grounded in the universal "language" of mathematics. It's what you *must* agree with, unless you're nuts, perverse, true religious or some other patently dysfunctional aberration from survivability.

This then, is that precisely wonderful moment in history, where you can only imagine what God has written for us, for he hasn't said a thing (to paraphrase Oscar Wilde). It must be wonderful, right? Just as quickly as Toyota can transform from being the trusted creator of trusty automobiles into the panderer of more complexity than even they can be on top of (give me back my mechanical linkage, gas pedal to carburetor; key to ignition; brake pedal to pads); so quickly does a person leave his body.

Not some "soul" which is the silliest idea since ideas were thought of (the silliest word since "information"), rather some utter absence of the ability, or the need, to look forward. The plots - largely fictional - that we must hatch for ourselves to bridge each moment to the next must surely end somewhere. After a certain age, you simply are no longer your best and brightest self. There is more looking back than forward, and then it stops. The interval grows infinite, in mirror-image mockery of what Newton's Calculus once resolved.

This fact is hardly cause for terror. There never was a "you" in the first place. We're all gerunds - activities - spanning the intervals between one instance and the next. It is only the forward and the backing; there is no *being*. That would be absurd.

And therefore there is no end to being. There was never any beginning. As it now and ever shall be, Amen.

The hope I hold out, for Buffalo, and for the world, is trivially simple to apprehend. It is that there will be some rather massive conspiracy. Some breathing together of words which simply and perhaps suddenly make sense to all and each of us. This is the catalyzing of the language which is now upon us. Not more information, not more truth exactly, unless by that you mean truing, one against the other. We all suddenly agree on the basics. The frames unite, and we become all one. As it was in the beginning (which never was).

OK, bye bye for now. This is getting a bit overheated. My little brain needs a break before it turns to crystal and shatters into a million shards.

Virtuous Reality

There's been a lot both in and on the news lately, about how virtual reality gets mixed in the mind, in memory, with what's really real. Those guys out in the American desert who fly the drones which cause the collateral damage in Pakistan, say, they get PTSD too. And we were all afraid that they were killing with impunity. I was.

There's also stuff about how brain scans reveal some cognitive response in some patients who had been thought virtually dead. Who had been supposed to be existing in a "persistent vegetative state" PVS gomers I think they must call them. And I can just hear the pro-lifers now spouting all sorts of I told you so-isms, for what is more likely an analog to the harmonic vibrations which can be generated one guitar to another.

Don't you think your interlocutor depends on you to raise the stakes of her being? Did you think that you could be conscious and alive all on your own? Are you that righteous?

The Intentional Fallacy, from back in the day when my teachers were studying literature, is when you suppose that the author, of a book, say, but you could as easily call it a life, has some point to make, some conclusion she's leading you toward, some accomplished state of mind that he would lead you to, also. As if the author weren't there reading along with you, rehearsing words which if they could take you they'd take him also, to that place of something seeming higher than where you'd started.

I've never talked with God, and I'm pretty sure I'd beg for the same good drugs they use over in Iraq to keep our soldiers killing if I ever heard him talking back. That would just flip me right out. Seriously.

God doesn't make nearly so good an interlocutor as you do, and you don't even exist (either?), but you know what I mean. It's just crazy to talk to God and expect an answer. Unless you know where and how to look, of course. But that would be like opening your mind or something, not exactly the strong suit of most religionists.

It's pretty scary to open your mind. Really. I've tried, and failed in every which way direction since Sunday. But I haven't given up yet. Just today, as I was perusing the front page of The Buffalo News on my phone as I am wont to do, there was this young seeming thug (not sure which part the seemingness belongs to) who had bragged about all his crimes up on Facebook. And the cops were crowing about how stupid he was and how easy he made their job. And the commentators were piling on. At least we're smarter and prettier than that guy.

And nobody can see that this guy was just crying out for love? It's scary, really to think that the whole world is not made up of sociopaths, psycho-killers, and that maybe nothing really terrible would happen if we were to leave our doors open, like the used to up in Canada, if you want to believe Michael Moore. I do. This guy didn't want to be so alone.

We can find virtual love on our phones, and virtual friends on Facebook, and can make the claim that shoot-em-ups in virtual reality don't do a bit of damage to our minds. And we can even keep ourselves virtual when in real touch with human beings who we just take advantage of for our pleasures. Ain't nothin' like the real thing, baby. As if the logo-wear could make us authentic?

I think I told you, right, that I went out - yeah it's pathetic, there was me and maybe one other person in the theater - to see Up in the Air the other day? I would have taken you, but I had other things on my mind. Anyhow, there's gorgeous and single (even I can see it) George Clooney whose Dad used to broadcast the news here in Buffalo, non sequitur, but I couldn't resist, playing himself down to the core. And there's this scared and snotty Cornellian (that's Ivy, right?) top of her class chick who's going to save the company all this money by replacing face to faces with telepresence. You know, telepresence, that better than reality you find yourself in on reality TV?

Of course, nobody's allowed to look even nearly as hot as George Clooney (even I can see that), who we envy mainly because he's such a whistle-while-you-work kind of guy even though he has absolutely nothing going on for him in real life. He fires people for a living, and they project all their hatred onto him. And still he goes on whistling, saving up the frequent flyer miles, hating when he has to be home, alone, in his vacant apartment.

I have a cousin who is severely schizophrenic (he won't be reading this, so it's OK) who calls me maybe once a week so we can recite a prayer together. I've got him in my friends and family list so I don't have to think about the minutes to the Verizon evil gods of communication gaming my limits. He was at the ice-breaking moment for drug remedies for schizophrenia, even written up in the New York Times in an article about his Ivy league savior. But I love my cousin, and don't mind saying the prayer with him, even though I've never been able to memorize it. It's nuts, you know one of those ". . . and for the sake of his sorrowful passion" things which can make you numb to any sense at all of what Jesus really might have been.

I have no idea if I do it for him or for me, you know, to assuage my guilt for not being there, presently, in his life. I confess that I have to keep my distance from crazy talkers, because they start to make sense to me, and then I get sucked a little bit into their paranoia, you know, whether it's about the Federal Reserve, the drugs that were administered to keep the secrets about the missing Kennedy or Nixon tapes, the Trade Towers being doped, the don't-walk-on-cracks metronymic mantras which have to be repeated or you'll lose your mind.

My cousin walks all over town - you've probably even seen him in your town - pretty deliberately, eyes ahead, almost no matter the weather. Yesterday I walked all the way downtown msyelf, probably looking like some crazy, all alone through the slush and I didn't even have proper footware. I don't have proper footware. I eschew proper footware. I think Nike's pretty evil.

But you know, it makes me happy, to see things that I never notice driving by; I like to experience the architecture from the ground as a real person might, and to get a sense of neighborhood. Of course, I'm utterly alone in this, which does make me a little strange, and if I were to do it every day, people might start to notice. I had a goal, though. I wanted to score some of that Sumatra they roast right there in the shop downtown. I was too embarrassed to tell them I walked the whole way for my pound of beans. I wasn't sure I'd make it back. But here I am. Fresh coffee is worth the walk. They sure don't have it in Starbucks, where they brag about "only three months". Give me a break!

The really sad part is that as you approach the center of Buffalo, you can't avoid the sense that you are in some ghost town. There are new buildings going up, but not so fast as grand older ones get mothballed. This area can have the highest hotel occupancy rate in the country because of cross-border shopping when the Canadian dollar buys so much more here than there, but even still the central hotels can't stay in business??!! Even while they're building new ones just a couple of streets over? Footsteps echo on the pedestrian mall. Stores are shuttered. It feels sad. It feels exactly like that ghost-town in Nevada somewhere that I found on my motorcycle running out of gas, which made it a pretty stupid diversion from the main road. I spent the night there, alone, not sure if I'd have to walk the long way back out in the morning along the dirt road to literally nowhere. Sorry, I didn't have to tell you about that. It just makes me sound weird.

And yet, if you follow the cars, which it seems don't even know how to stop anymore, which is a funny pun about Toyota I got right off the news, there's plenty of life and commerce all around. Just not at the center. Anymore.

I guess the problem now is that our cars just drive-by-wire, and so there's no real direct connection between your touch and what the car thinks you want it to do. All the other companies are doing emergency pre-emptive software "downloads" now to their drive-by-wire cars, to be sure that they don't get embarrassed the way that Toyota has been. And they talk of the electronic "content" of cars soon approaching something like 40% of what will be their costs. And we don't want to ride trains, where the cars are in physical contact with one another???? Because, what, we're afraid they might go off the rails every once in a while and kill some tiny fraction of what the cars do? Or that the engineer might be sexting?

We seem pretty math challenged in this country. Not understanding that if you multiply points of failure, failure pretty much becomes inevitable, ubiquitous, and certain. You could, instead, multiply the points of success, you know, by hanging back from taking advantage, by not always looking for that hundred dollar bill dropped from God, the way my cousin once found one.

Think of how much they (whoever they is) have to pay people now to sell their soul. I know you think it's just criminal how much more CEOs get paid now than the labor whose productivity has gone right through the roof. I know you think it's criminal how much more those Blackwater thugs get paid than our patriotic soldiers. I know you think its a travesty that some trailer trash might get rich on the Lottery and then just make his life worse because he doesn't know how to handle it. But consider how much value this all places on the soul that you haven't yet sold out yourself. The one in touch and real and undermedicated and not even thinking you ever could hear God's voice, even if you wanted to. I'm using "soul" metaphorically, in case you couldn't tell.

I think it's ours to turn around any which way we want to. The economy has finally caught up with reality. Virtually.

to Dream, perchance . . .

What do you suppose a dream is? Whatever the neurologists will eventually say - about cataloging and housecleaning and random constructs - memory is always a part of it. I'll never be certain that the literary takes on the mind will not prevail, in the end, over the hardware metaphors. Go Freud (misogynist pig)! Go Shakespeare (rehabilitated neologist)! Go Bills (yeah, right)! Go revisionism!

Dreams are hard to remember on waking, sure, but inside of them there is also a continual lag between whatever the problem was that your mind was working out and the working out of it which makes the dreams, when remembered, so surprising for their structure. As if you were some kind of genius beyond your own ability to know. Who makes this shit up when you're asleep? You know you could never do it waking.

The problem is trivialized, I'm saying, if you just suppose that your mind threw up structures based on what has been on it, your mind, and then promptly forgot them so that you could watch the construct of your brain, having suspended judgment for that time. As if you are outside the mind of its creator. Like being able to watch your own movie and be taken in by it even though you're its producer. Looking past the seams which you yourself stitched.

My dream, which I do remember because of unusual full bladder issues, likely related to staying up past my bedtime to watch some football game on TV; my dream was disturbing. I won't bore you with its details, but it did remind me to steel myself against harm to myself that I must bear in preference to harm to my children. That thing which George Orwell in his 1984 supposed can be tortured out of us by finding the one terror we can never, willingly, face. The one we would betray anyone to avoid. It would seem to be a good idea to face them all ahead of time, rather than to be caught in a lie, no? At least face them in your (waking?) dreams.

I must have had manonpause (sorry "andropause" more properly) on my mind, and resurrection, having read of Mel Gibson's rehabilitation all over again for playing roles of a father's rage at his child's injury. Reading of his certainty that the living Christ did resurrect, and him citing counts of eyewitnesses. As if he was there. His movie version doesn't convince me of anything other than of man's inhumanity to man. He seems addicted to violence.

So I was distracted the entire evening; one screen showing the football game - cheering for New Orleans since I don't know football but it seemed like a resurrection of sorts. After Katrina, as if there's such a thing as home team anymore. And one screen showing Extreme Home Makeover Buffalo Edition. Which, even excepting the excuse that I just moved back here, I should really know about. It's right around the corner from me. And just because I don't watch TV . . .

Well, the truth is I'm just plain cynical about such lottery celebrations. Like Slumdog and all the Hollywood movies, they just make you focus on your dreams (sic) and not on reality. As if there will be some sky ranger who drops into your life to take care of all your worries, and send you to Disney Land when he does it.

But there was Buffalo, turning out in volunteer hoards, to help a black community activist who wasn't even born here. Who has an accent still. And the show couldn't contain their project - with so many volunteers - to just that one house, so they spruced up the entire neighborhood.

Sure, I was in transition when all this was happening, and then I was in the hospital, being informed about the West Side by my roommate, one of 13 or 14 Puerto Ricans who grew up in one family there. I learned from his wife how to improve my take on beans and rice. But it's still a blind spot, the West Side on whose border's this side I barely live. It's still like a dream I can't recall. That blind spot I have to remind myself to include in my breath-restoring peregrinations. I generally walk the other way, where all the cool people stroll. Coming in from the suburbs.

Over there beyond Urban Roots. Where they make gardens of the empty lots, and where our white-speaking black mayor invests a lot of hope. I should get over myself already and cheer right along with the crowds.

And yet I hope, instead, to take point for the city as interpreter of China. That place which my daughter calmly points out, to her world which I can glimpse from Facebook, steamrollers Tibet. Bringing civilization to the world, pretty much the way that we have always done under the banner of Christ, or maybe just by Yankee ingenuity. We steamroller anything in the way of what we mean by progress. But we do it by corporate proxy, and with a winning smile.

As an adult and a realist, I understand that if these two great world superpowers posture themselves against one another, each holier than thou, then we're all screwed; and never mind the native riches that are being destroyed along with species on a daily basis, east and west. The Moslem v. Christians sideshow will fall into the backdrop. Foregrounded will be where the real money's at. Oil, after all, is limited. After a while the earth is just skin and bones. We're gearing up for that, right?

Sincerity meets formalism is how I see it. We Americans disingenuous in our insistence that here we enable the freest possible flow of information. Never mind that Verizon can divert that flow for government snooping, on illegal orders, and then get a pass for following them. Never mind that it can prove nearly impossible to get beneath various conspiracy theories to find some actual sincere speech underneath them. Nevermind that you would be a fool to trust even your spouse these days. Especially your spouse.

The Chinese put an especially formal face on things, keeping their own multi-part disputes under wraps until they settle on a public posture. House-imprisoning anyone high up who exposes the inner debates to the outer crowd. Chopping off heads unceremoniously, from those not high enough up to make any difference, but loud enough to be noticed. Harvesting their organs for the public good, or so some conspiracy theories say. Or have they already sunk beneath the noise, and I'm just out of touch?

They eat dogs over there (and the reason we find our dogs so lovable is because we ate all the ugly ones in our past, breeding the kind of irresistible quality which assures their survival as man's best friend). The Chinese were the ones who bred the really exotic ones for our approval.

My niece casually informs me, along with an audience of mostly elderly and extremely well-educated church goers, that in Ghana, where she'd spent two years with the Peace Corps, they don't name their children until a week has passed. In accommodation to the ravages of infant mortality, at least historically.

And my little Peanut was named instantly on violent exit from her wombspace. Two months early, as if there was no chance that the technology avialable wouldn't save her. (It wasn't the technology so much as the doctor's missed diagnosis which shocked the surfactin into informing her lungs while nearly killing her mother).

But we would charge murder against abortionists who understand that a child unloved is a far worse tragedy than one stopped in its gestation. I watched my daughter speaking reasonably up on YouTube about Tibet, as gangs of Chinese intellectuals marched out in protest against this affront to what they knew for certain. Much like fundamentalist capitalists do if I suggest that we don't have real freedom of real information either.

We take an opposite tack with our intellectuals. We suffuse them with left-wing pedagogy, confident that they will always prefer the pretty things after they graduate. Whose is the greater disinformation mill? I truly don't and can't know. I can only know that these two great powers must learn to understand and respect one another, and that only by doing so will the native life of the planet have any chance at all. We won't survive another cold war. The great firewall dividing the Huns from civilization is all made of cultural miscues. And the Huns were really really violent and nasty and brutish.

China sounds dreadful until you consider our prisonhouses full of despair, overrepresented by blacks and others who required drugs more powerful than those on prescription insurance subsidy to feel that their days are worthwhile. Until you consider how we destroy the Lindy Englands of our world, and give the powerful a pass too.

I'm no big fan of the NPR style assumption that if you simply air the left and the right, the balance will be found in the middle. Sometimes there really isn't any truth at all on one side or the other. Sometimes you have to catch Democracy Now! to be reassured the world hasn't all gone crazy (I'm sure Fox TV has a point or two, now and then).

Well, the Saints won in overtime. I liked that. Favre was inspiring too, for taking all those hits just like Mel Gibson would, and even going so far as to congratulate his opposition. And the folks of Buffalo showed the world once again that we will turn your cynicism right into activism, the same way we championed Scotty Norwood for his wide right. Although we're pretty beaten down. We seem to get up again. This City of no Illusions.

And the Chinese have good reason to be nervous about messianic cults resulting from contact with the West. They're pretty sure they don't want another cult of personality. They've suffered a few too many. As with any good marriage, by learning from each other, we can become our better selves. Bring it on.

Impossible Unmagical Thinking - a Rant Against the Supreme Court Decision on "Free Speech"

You won't be able to see it, but Alexander Cockburn, a reasonably prolific left-wing thinker, keeps on warning the folks on the left that global warming might be a diversionary plot, also funded by the carbon extraction industries, to keep our attention away from dealing with the real catastrophe, which continues to be industrial pollution. Cockburn writes for the Nation, where his articles are sequestered away for subscribers only.

That's what the New York Times would now like to do, in the interest of preserving their editorial staff against the economics of the Internet. They'd like to sequester their stuff away from any but paid subscribers. Except, also at the Nation - and I think this one's on their public site - they point out that journalism is doomed even apart from the changed economic realities of the Internet.

These Nation authors disparage the commercial history of journalism, which, if my read is correct, they see largely in terms of a progressive [sic] whittling away at any government subsidies. We once granted those subsidies with a kind of patriotic unanimity, starting way back with Ben Franklin. Well, he made his money from newspapering, and maybe even benefitted personally from the subsidies he patriotically demanded. Isn't it ironic?

That was the spirit with which we practically imposed a free press on defeated Japan and Germany after World War II. Having seen that the absence of a free press contributed to an uninformed public being roused into dangerous action by fascist dictatorships. These authors convincingly argue that direct subsidies to journalistic enterprises are essential to a functioning democracy. They may be right.

Somehow, we have allowed government - any government - to seem synonymous with control over our lives, much in the way that the beloved Dr. Seuss of my childhood presented Mom as the proto-fascist. Government, can't be trusted to hold any interest higher than its own self-preservation; like Mom only caring about keeping the house clean, and never ever participating in the fun. But government could be seen to be looking out for our interests, like Mom keeping us from hurting ourselves by stepping beyond her safety zone.

Let's take a closer look at what's up now:

Attacks on social security do a bait and switch on us Boomers, who are made to think we'll overwhelm the kitty which we funded. Or is it that the reserve fund will need to be refunded from a government treasury impossibly too deep now in debt. In debt to us, the people. It's not that social security will go bankrupt, it's that the government will be too indebted to our retirement fund to be able to pay it back. No wonder people have a hard time with trust.

And Glenn Beck wails about indebtedness in our name, without pausing for a minute to consider the cost of just letting the house of cards fall down. And everybody to his left is certain that he's just as scary as the white supremacists lurking among the teabaggers.

And so the merry-go-round goes, without any hope at all to resolve difficult issues. Without any hope at all to break the stranglehold of officeholders to stay there. Except - perversely enough for those of us rooting for the left side of the aisle - when someone like Ted Kennedy actually dies in office, and then the electorate says hey, finally, we want some change. As if they had been muffled somehow, all those years. Or were they just afraid to cut loose from their extremely well embedded representative in Washington? Afraid to lose their advantage. Whose advantage?

I get spam commentary on this blog now, which I guess is like rising up in the world. Most recently, there was an internal reference to a blog which looks legitimate. There is a picture of an impossibly attractive blond, who you presume must be this fabled "Mom to financial guru" and then there's all sorts of loving commentary, like you see on lots of people's blogs. Fans and well-wishers, but in this case you get the feeling maybe that the whole interaction is concocted. The language just doesn't sound like a native blond. But hey, who knows, maybe they won't steal all your money. You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours, and we can all go viral together.

Sometimes even the really carefully vetted and honest seeming good guys steal all your money. Sometimes they don't even go to jail for it, because they technically haven't broken any laws. They just went out of business, and you took a risk. Will the government go out of business, or will they just bait and switch your attention to something really scary, like Social Security going bankrupt if we don't cut benefits or increase takes, or turn it over to the wall street guys who then could steal all your money without going to jail? (?????)

Who can tell if the teabagger anti-global warming types are right about false fears diverting our attention. But aren't they pandering fear too? Fear of a conspiracy of dunces? Fear of the end of the Republic? But which Republic do they fear will end? If it's the one which is of the people, by the people and for the people, hasn't that ended already? Hasn't it been replaced by Corporatism, whereby if you are big enough you can prevent any and all competition from the smaller entrepeneurs. Isn't that what the supreme court has now enshrined into law?

As David Brooks so aptly points out [I can't find any writing he's done yet on it, but he spoke on NPR and PBS all day yesterday - look it up], these guys aren't going to want to choose parties, politically, since they get their favors from both sides of the aisle. And they sell their wares to everyone; it wouldn't be good business to alienate the liberals, say. But they will lobby for preferences in a way that small business just can't afford, as has been happening with increasing and alarming frequency in Washington.

Our postal rates favor the massive media conglomerates. Airwaves are given away, but only to bidders who are ginormous enough to beat off any and all competition in a public "auction." Media are allowed to create vertical markets, on some kind of fantasy that new technology makes it possible to compete in ways that were never possible in the good old days which required regulation. As if little media outlets on the Internet can really outshine MSNBC or whatever alphabet soup of familiarity you choose.

There is some fiction about viral video catapaulting American Idols from obscurity to fame; and then it turns out to be Lonely Girl, put up by some clever screenwriting team. Makeover teams will not have time to get to your house, though you may dream it.

The Internet now is practically screaming Startup Startup as if the main thing you need to do with your life is have a dream, get some backing from friends and family and then go for broke. As though you might actually drown out the Leviathans of the Internet marketplace. You might as well play the Lottery. Even the cover of my Yale Alumni Magazine now depicts a guy in some basement spending all his waking hours on his Startup dream. You should remember, there still is an old boy network, and this guy has a lot better chance than you do.

I am locked in to Verizon if I want to move around and talk. I am locked in to Bank of America if I want to be able to bank from my phone. I am locked in to the New York Times if I want some reliable sense of what's going on in the world, since no-one else can even afford a newsroom. It's not that I don't trust the little guys, it's just that I'd rather have a good driver with a clean record who's a psychopath driving my kids' bus than the earnest honest guy who just can't drive.

And big corporations really are analogous to psychopaths. So, the Supreme Court now enshrines the right to free speech of those who would yell fire in a crowded theater if they could profit from it. Pretty much like the marketing of HINI flu viruses - er, I mean cures, well, alright vaccines - by the same folks who brought you the "wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Why do we go along with this?

We are about to pass, or more likely not pass, a "healthcare" bill which has been whittled so far away from what can meet anybody's needs as to be unrecognizeable by anyone who identified the trouble in the first place. But by now we're desperate - utterly desperate - to have something done about what is so clearly broken.

The insurance notices come in from my recent hospitalization, and of course everything's denied, since I had the temerity to be hospitalized "out of network". The default is to deny, and then if you don't have at least a college degree, you'll get worn down and assume that you broke some fine print. That it really was your fault all along.

These were not entrepreneurial lobbyists who whittled away the resolve of our representatives who are also, bizarrely, afraid of losing their jobs! Don't you have to die in office before the other party gets your seat? These were big big corporate lobbyists. Conglomerate lobbyists. Syndicate lobbyists. Do you really think they have your interests in mind? Well, I guess you do if you buy the mythology that we have a free market. It's not free if there's only too big to fail and the riff raff.

And we complain about the behaviors of China's government? Come on Hillary, get a clue. Our censorship is far far more effective. We simply overwhelm the voices we don't want you to listen to, and we do it with lots and lots of money. Is this cold war redux all over again now?

Doesn't it make sense, if you're an oil company, say, and you are more aware than the rest of us that you can't keep pumping this stuff out of the earth forever, for you to create some panic about carbon in the air? The price for what's left will and should go sky high. It's what we liberals are clamoring for, as the only solution to save the planet.

We can blame the earthquakes then on global warming too, since who can tell between out-of-control weather and tsunamis started by shifting the balance of the plates by sucking all the oil out of the ground. Do you think liposuction is really the way to lose weight? Aren't there repercussions, and things left out of kilter?

I submit, simply, that we really can't know. There's too much money involved, and too much profit, and even the scientists need their work to be funded from somewhere. But I'm not about to listen to the Jehovah's Witnesses telling me that there is no solution but to believe in some sky God who will make it all alright. They are pandering fear as well.

This sky God has to be brought down to earth. He has to reside in each of our hearts, so that we can act in concert with our fellow humans in ways to defeat the rendered will of people who are only interested in a paycheck. You and I are interested in a paycheck too. But there should be limits to what can be gotten away with in our name. We shouldn't be required to wear the company boxer shorts, or drink their koolaid.

The loss in Massachusetts will do the Democrats good if they will get a clue about what really happened. Global warming will take care of itself if each of us feels a little bit more guilty about the cost of indulging all of our lusts all of the time. Pollution will cease to be a problem as soon as we stop exporting it to countries without the wherewithal to regulate or limit it.

But no good can possibly come from this absurd defeatist and cynical Supreme Court Decision. Unless it provides the necessary goad to turn back the clock on whatever we were thinking when we, progressively over time beginning right around those bloody World Wars, gave "rights" to corporations as if they were people.

Let's do it, people. The only thing we have to lose is our fear. Otherwise we're screwed (he says to monger some fear himself. Hey, I hear there's lots of money it it . . . ).

Did a Time-Traveling Bird Sabotage the Hadron Collider?

Did a Time-Traveling Bird Sabotage the Hadron Collider?

Sorry, but this is just too good to be true. First the New York Times, and now Time Magazine has gotten on the hot bandwagon of speculation about the Hadron Collider being sabotaged from the future. (I'm sure it's the thing most on your mind!)

I don't mean the troubles are too good to be true, since I'm pretty excited to see the thing get fired up. I just mean as grist for my blogging mill, which as you know, faithful reader, is all about making fun of end-time science. Religion too. Actually, I think I make a lot more fun of end-time religion.

I know I'm getting shrill on the topic, but somebody has to get the word out. Hello World, it's time for another paradigm shift. Strap yourselves in, because this one's quite a ride. The Bomb was just a tiny thing in comparison. I mean, this one's da bomb!

Yeah, my daughters always tell me I should never try to use their kind of talk too. It just makes me look stupid.

But there's been a dry spell in theoretical physics for quite a while now. The experimentalists can't seem to think up any new ways to guide the theorizing, which is just getting more and more way out there.

People are now willing to believe almost anything about what will be the next big thing in physics. Multiple universes, time-travel, quantum consciousness, dozens of dimensions. It just gets to the point where you might as well believe in ghosts. Rapture of the Nerds doesn't seem so very different from other kinds of rapture all of the sudden.

But just like love or death, which if you're really lucky hit you out in left field from where you least expect it, the answer is so freaking obvious that it's just about driving me crazy to have somebody, anybody, see it apart from me, myself, and narcissistic I.

No, I mean if I don't get someone else to see it, then I will literally and probably clinically go actually as crazy as I will, by definition, be. You can't be the only guy in any given cosmos. That would be, um, insane? Which is a whole lot worse than being a neckbeard with a pony tail working on artificial intelligence.

So, I'll try a different take. Some of you may understand how the speed of light is one of the fundamental constants of the cosmos. No physical thing can travel faster than the speed of light. Actually, no physical thing can travel at the speed of light and still have any measurable mass. Until it's stopped. Which turns all that lightspeed mass right into energy to be detected, or perceived. Or maybe the other way around, since at lightspeed it's pure energy, and then it gets stopped to mass.

One tiny little consequence of all this is that every single thing in motion is strangely out of sync with every other thing. This problem gets called by the name of the twin paradox among physicists, and it's been brushed aside for as long as there is and will be a distinction between the cool professors who teach to illiterate literary undergrads and the really smart ones who don't want to bother.

Or maybe it's just that the really smart ones don't want to bother worrying about something whose math has been worked out long ago. Except that it hasn't been. Just because the clock on a traveling plane comes back slower doesn't answer anything at all to within my margin or error. Because that clock is not a proper twin to one sitting still in the gravity fields of earth.

The real problem is that anything moving at any speed relative to anything else is, very technically speaking now, in a different cosmos from the thing to which it's compared. Because, you know, if time is slowed for you relative to me and vice versa, we can't be in the same space-time-geographical continuum. It gets disjointed, quantum style.

And as velocity is a function of time, and as you might be boosted to near the speed of light relative to my own near light-speed motion, our combined speeds can't be cumulative because of this fundamental-constant limit of lightspeed. Which means that something's gotta give, and that something is spelled T.I.M.E.

This is the bugaboo which started me wondering now maybe 26 or 27 years ago, and I keep finding more and more elaborate, if not exactly experimental, evidence that it's essentially right. There is no physical way to be in touch with something moving. The dimensions bend in ways to take things out of sync. Time is just another way to keep track of position in the (conceptual) ether, and things get very blurry indeed when you start moving very fast.

Things get blurry in precisely the same way that particles are only probability clouds before the exchange of force carrying perceptual particles. And then these blurry waves get collapsed. But if there were only two particular twins in the entire cosmos, neither one would be in the other's cosmos if they were just passing by. The blur of each to other would be an entire other world altogether.

Which is plenty obvious to physicists too, and so we have these force carrying sub-sub-atomic particles which do the contacting for us. They race back and forth at near the speed of light, which makes them technically massless while in motion, and they seem to define the forces which keep us all together. Those physical attractions which come in four distinct flavors, the most elusive being the gravitational one, which seems to shape the very cosmos, making it very hard to get the metrics on its force carriers.

But the thing we have left to do is to account for mind among all this matter. We are properly wary about letting subjectivity in among the wild successes of objective science. Measuring things, and accounting for them in ways to cancel editorial inputs has given us so much power over our wild surroundings. It's the only way we have to accomplish something approaching agreement among peoples of different languages, religions, geographic locations, not to mention genders and propensity to tell the truth or to lie. To fantasize or be in touch with, um, reality.

The Hadron Supercollider (my own pet name for it) renders up the earnest and truest reckonings among the best and brightest of the experimental physicists about what could be the most productive experiment left to conduct to either seal its fate or destroy the standard model. Not a one of them seems "motivated" to skew the findings leading up to this point. They even seem to have the rapacious politicians at bay this time.

But no-one's really expecting the Collider's findings to help even the slightest bit with disagreements about things political, emotional, evangelical, economical, and so forth. Since these things, almost by very definition, are banished from the realm of proper science. They are in the realm of opinion, editorializing, and such things as how physics projects get funded or not, just for example.

And surely it's obvious that a whole lot of really well-off people would prefer anything over some sort of science which might expose greed as their most basic motive. One man's greed being another person's change-the-world venture capitalist venture, we surely don't want to rock the boat with what makes the world go around.

It really is a testament to the best about us, collectively, that we will render up large budgets for moon shots and Hadron Colliders, trusting those least motivated, the scientists in search of truth, to tell us where the truths will be found that aren't editorially slanted.

But it's not so very good when you measure these efforts up against the things we just won't do for the least among us. And while I hardly think we're paying off the scientists to stay out of the important business of political decision making, sometimes it does begin to look a little bit too convenient to pretend that these omissions of ours are just the costs of being human. These little omissions about spending commensurate amounts on schools as we do on bombs.

I'd be the very first to accept a diversion of funding from bombs to supercolliders or spaceships as a compromise if you don't want to invest in schools, although historically, it's been the funds for bombs which have driven the basic science.

OK, sorry, really, to be this sidetracked into the realm of still more editorializing.

The thing I'm trying to say is simply that it's long since past too late to pretend that we can keep mind out from the object of our scientific studies.

I'm absolutely not talking about brain science, artificial intelligence, neuro-science, or any of those other exciting areas which can and should and must be pursued regardless of what physics might or might not have to say about them, or even what they might have to say about physics.

I'm just saying it's long past the point of obvious that the connections between things out there in the cosmos cannot, at their furthest reaches, be distinguished from conceptual relations, which inhere in mind alone. And mind of any meaningful sort may be an aspirational concept toward which we humans, perhaps, still tend. Science being, for certain, the truest compass to guide our efforts.

That's all I'm saying. I think the quantum consciousness stuff is intresting, but not paradigm shifting for so long as it looks for a mechanism of interaction. I think the physicists who want to say that we can change the cosmos just by thinking about it are a little bit nuts themselves.

The cosmos is indeed a grand conspiracy, and we are not apart from that. We humans actually do "feel" emotional reality, for which we are probably the most sensitive instrument around. No matter what those neckbeard (as if I'm made of teflon here) singularity folks think about robots which will think, it will be a very very long time indeed before we have any sense that they can feel a thing, emotionally.

Because we'd have to, and I mean this literally, care more about them than we do our very own children, and I don't see that happening any time soon.  I mean, unless it already has, which is pretty much how we're acting. If you look at the advertizements I mean, just as a f'rinstance. Or at how we deploy our energies.

Or if you look at the bombs, and the wars and the mega-corporate subsidies.

Oh, it does get tiring providing all these internal and external links to stuff I've worried half to death already. But let's coin another law, which I actually do think and believe and trust has the potential impact of Einstein's E=mc² equation between energy and matter. I know it's pretty darned cheeky of me. Sorry.

It goes like this. No amount of money, no matter how much, can accelerate caring to the point of a simple mother and child connection. You do the math, but I think it's all pretty obvious. At the point where there are enough resources to develop Artificial Intelligence while still exhibiting how little we care for the living creatures among us, then the Artificial Emotions will be the only kind that are left.

And you can have that world, since mine will be already gone. I think that might be a codicil to Rick's law.

So, I understand there's still a mad race on to get the technology right before we melt off the ice caps, put more mercury in our fishes, and kill off all the living species who don't want to live in logoware plastic ticky tacky boxes.

I understand the cynicism about politicians and political or economic systems, and how we still hope that there will be some new discovery just that wonderful that it can actually overcome them all. Something like cold fusion, maybe, or a smart enough grid to make us all conserve energy while wanting to, or cars that run on sunshine.

But if you do the math, it just can't happen. There are too darned many of us, riding on a spaceship whose carrying capacity is fundamentally dependent on a good mix of life forms. No matter what you think of creepy crawly slimy stuff, we actually do need it to live on.

So, another corollary to my law is that clean energy would be the worst possible thing to "discover", unless it really is the energy from the sun. And that gets captured and stored pretty darned well by leaves and other green things, though who could mind a few windmills or solar arrays.

I'll take hot water and light and warmth for my womb with a view. But let's dial it back a notch, folks. It isn't a race for eternity here. It's good living here and now which we might be able to work on if we were to let the editorializing in to science.

Which trivially means, and only at the fringes, that there is no actual distinction between mind and matter. You can't exactly think the future into existence, but nor should you deny what you know in your heart to be trued against it.

Conceptual connections among things, the proper realm of the arts, will never be measurable or mechanically understandable in ways to render our emotional feelings moot. Fine, no-one will disagree with me there. But I go just a tiny step further to say that that these emotional distinctions between what is beautiful and what is schlock are maybe just a little bit more important than whatever the Hadron Collider will find.

And that's because, at the very fringes which it is the experimental physicists' business to explore, there is no detecting the final massless particle which is no particle at all but is instead the conceptual relations among them. Which gets called out only when something is created from nothing, which even physicists don't really expect to be able to do. Except in the tiniest way, and overbalanced by almost as much electricity generation as we provided newly minted dollars to overbalance all that greed. Same law. Same results.

So while they go on trying to detect this so-called Higg's boson, I'll be putting out my usual generous quantities of overheated air. Pointing out that science is already finished if we thought it was going to get us off the hook of being human. That there is no further looking for purely objective reality, and that the really interesting stuff is what's going on inside and among us, the cosmos' most elaborate creatures out of apparent nothingness.

Welcome to Rick's BoZone

Fools Rush in . . . Farewell to Jack Kemp

I want to tackle the big ones. I want to try the truth and beauty equation. Here's the plan: Beauty stimulates copulation, apparently. Copulation, when it's productive and not perverse, apparently has a lot to do with the processes of evolution. Controversially if you ever read Stephen Jay Gould, human intelligence seems like some pinnacle to the same evolutionary processes. So, in at least this minimal sense, intelligence and beauty seem like they might be linked. 

I'm thinking here that faceless animals don't copulate for anything like beauty. And I'm thinking beauty somehow overpowers pheromones and other organizers of ant farms to power aspects of human reproduction. 

And I have to accommodate, somehow, my absolute aversion to the stupid racist notion that beauty and intelligence are coupled. That winners always deserve to win. That's way way way too right wing for me, Jack. Lady Luck almost always deserves almost all the credit. Nor will I fail to notice that women do seem to trade on beauty; that there is some correspondence between social rank and hotness in this endphase capitalist dystopia. Which we will never see as such, because we live within the castle walls. Let them eat cake, indeed.

Sure part of this is that with enough money, almost anyone can be made to appear pretty good. Especially when the styles approach masquerade for daily life. Or when simple health equates to looking good in jeans, and when health is bought for money too. When you add to the dollings up, the bodily buffing up, you really can get something going. Not to mention airbrushings, and taking care about when and how you appear in public. Although it must be a lot of work, for certain. You have to give effort its due.

But let's just say, for starters, that the thing with beauty is that it turns your head. From there, doesn't there have to be something more? Or is it like the linkbacks here in the blogosphere, which I don't really care to get? The beauty gets you more starters. And how come so many really beautiful women are willing to trade on that?  Shouldn't it really just give you the strength not to? The confidence to go for something more than what you can get so easily? Or does risk always go along with nothing left to lose?

I know money is plenty hard to get, but the trouble with getting it by selling your looks or your skills or your talents is that you have to keep working harder and harder and always to deal with your insecurities that maybe he'll go elsewhere for what you once sold him. The Man. Old age should be relaxing. Unless, like me, you've dodged responsibility your whole life. Then you get what you deserve. Which is to work your way in to your dotage, armed only with what you never had, or lost in its true season.

How about this:  Beauty just stimulates the rest of us to copulate more? It's like a leadership role; like President Obama for instance, it sets a direction for our sweaty aspirations. Who would ever want that level of responsibility at this particular moment? But he stands up there, quite apparently keeping his good humor, and it kind of makes you want to work in that direction, doesn't it?  We'll set him straight eventually on the privacy stuff, and on the GNU public license, but in the meantime, what a beautiful mind, and it doesn't hurt a bit that he's quite black. It just makes him that much more believable, since no-one's been grooming blacks for long enough to have him descend from dynastic privilege.

Intelligence begets intelligence for sure, but not in the genetic sense, where everything regresses toward what's mean. It's the sharing which allows great things. Sometimes the showing off. The chasing after what might be better, and wanting to get there first. And at least a kind of working out from the kind of insecurity which provokes girls into flashing their tits as the one thing they know will get the guys attention, and maybe slow them down along the chase. Or cheer them on, stimulating the steroidal jolt. Or so it should. And guys should get over it already. Why not pick someone for better reasons than that everyone else wants her too? Save that for politics and shows. Alpha males must get fatigued from being everybody's target.

I do remain convinced that there is still a direction for evolution, but that it's not the one we're thinking. I'll have to do a lot more study, but I even think that intelligence is something more than something meta- riding like fluff on top of the survival of some fittest. There is this pattern re-cognition in the brain which makes it that much more likely that we can learn to avoid the pitfalls. Then something like invention, where we can take what we discover, and repattern it with tools, into something to give us huge advantage over what teeth nature can provide over eons of trial and mostly error. Tooth and claw into the wilderness, now beaten back by levity and light. Stirred but never shaken.

The gaffe we make right now is to mistake our proudest tools for that mind which made them. We act as if we invent what we discover, and as though our instruments can recognize patterns without us. They can't. They can only sort and filter among larger sets than we can handle all fleshy and alone. 

All machines are nothing more (or less) than elaborated levers to extend our power; our reach; our grasp. Information technology is nothing different, except that by replacing mind with brain in stupid overtheorizing about intelligence as though it were an isolatable thing, we've managed yet again to become hoist by our own petard, childish bootstrap style, into thinking that machines can think. (I swear I remember being read a childish story, about a boy who'd dreamed of flying that way, by lifting himself up by his bootstraps, or maybe I even tried it myself, though I could find no reference anywhere to either)

Mind is interactive, and depends on Proper Names at its centers, to propagate throughout the brainscape. Tools can help. Pen, paper, books and ethereal keys. There is some touching attachment, or should be, to the tools we like to handle. But these are not the same thing as human to human touch. And human touch should not be mediated by machines. Mind, sure. But mind is nothing without heart. And heart depends on more than depictions and other virtual renderings.

There was (at least) one intriguing part to that "What the Bleep" film wherein they demonstrated, sort of, that the eye will literally not see what it has not learned to. Their example was Native Americans not even able to see that Columbus' ships were on their horizon, because they had no category for ships. And perhaps there was also every sort of wild hallucination from which such things as ships might be difficult to distinguish. The shaman had to be consulted, and once authorized, then they could see!

Now, we've tamed the hallucinations, and created instruments to measure every kind of alien intrusion, even beyond the range of our native senses. Which only seems to guarantee that the thing we must remain blind to is ourselves, enslaved to us. We have no authority for that one.

We reward winning always most extravagantly. The beauty queens. Captains of industry. Superstars. Inventors. Discoverers. Monopolists. Gamers of our hearts. Vicariously, it's where we want to be, and really think we should be. We give a nod to Sherpas, provided they climb high enough themselves.

But recently, in our American time, we did learn that it is wrong to use other human beings for our service to the winners.  Humans should not own other human beings, this much we know for certain. But for a good enough price, and if the bargain is straight up, winners might be able to rent their slaves, perhaps at an hourly rate. Perhaps for better and for worse. Beauty betrays the terms. It would be more honest, wouldn't it, if the money were to change hands more boldly and the terms were more straight up? Though none of it, except for the money, seems worth the paper it's written up on.

Still, we dream of machines at our service, which can provide us colder drinks and more pure mixes, and no dirt upon our souls. Except that they foul the earth, finally, with non-digestible transmuted waste which concentrates our most toxic qualities, most toxic of all of which might be our insecure desire just to be served in the first place. As if God were meant for me personally. As if there can be that pinnacle from which all dirt has been banished, but the air remains breathable. As if.

And so, upon this Internet, we are certain we must remain anonymous, cloaked and firewalled away from those who would pry our secrets, or even worse, steal our very identity. I am, at least still for a moment longer wanting to remain anonymous. Wanting to abstract my words so perfectly that they can true all hearts away from cosmic dreams of removal from all dirt and germs that would digest our bodies, sometimes before we're quite ready for that earth to earth return on investment.

But think of this. What if we actually were accountable for all our searches? What if it weren't just Google sneaking into my thoughts and offering up advertisements according to what I've been thinking, and reading and writing and historically searching. What if we called that what it is; an unconscionable invasion of privacy no matter what they promise to do or not to do with my identity. This Googling of my soul, which I shall not abide very much longer. This tapping of my phone lines without my knowing. This unaccountable theft of our commons.

What if I were to true my searchings with other identifiable souls who might also hold me accountable for my misplacings of mouse among rodents; black holes among non-celestial ethers. What if, in other words, humans were to contact other humans who would be held accountable for transgressions? A sort of alternate Internet of love instead of greed and fear and embarrassment. Where DNS sought out, first, actual names of actual people, and less particular and more abstracted, their place of business, and after that, what they like to do with their time.

What if we were to start a movement where instead of being afraid to announce where I live and how to contact me, I were to publish almost everything about myself, and you did too? What if I let almost everyone see into my life if they really cared to, and what if that turned out to be the very best defense against identity theft because no-one could hold your secrets, as they now do, even from you? You would be publicly you and I would be publicly me, and my holdings would be there for anyone and everyone to count and every transaction would leave a bright red trail, so that you could even leave the door unlocked again like they do in Canada where they must still somehow know their neighbors, even still.

What if names were geographically located too, and after that ideologically, for civil civic purposes so that we might debate without hating one another? What if intersections among actual people were tracked, and texts and pictures and things to buy were catalogued where they belong according to the interests of the parties who want them. What if we were to find that some right wing interests actually do cross lines with left wing? In reading his obituary, I find that Jack Kemp doesn't seem such a bad guy, although when I met him in person he had some sort of vocal diarrhea worse than mine and jumped all over the place and never made any full sense. Such a champion of all Richies Rich.

But I can buy the idea that creativity and industry both are released by some rewards for them. I can also buy that some of the best and truest words were never motivated by anything at all, other than some beauty in their utterance. The best of art is never known because its baseline requires getting out from the contest, and in to that kind of beauty which kindles far away and off from any field. Why can these things not both co-exist? There are more kinds of beauty than those which provoke our loins and pocketbooks. There are other ways to arrange our co-existence on this planet than conquest, glory, and abstract removal.

What if we were to find that human metaphoric categories work ever so much more smoothly than machine-made approximations and that nothing we can ever invent will be a match for our own pattern recognition accomplishments. Certainly not for speed, where I can almost always recognize friend at 1000 paces, which helps at least to distinguish from unknown and possible foe.

What if the machine were realigned in service to all mankind and not, Sherpa like, only in service to the winners? And what if we were once again to risk riding in cars with strangers because most of our germs have already travelled the world around and our best defense is a kind of orgy of interinfection to build up our natural defenses against all viral mockings of our designs, since, I'm pretty sure, these interbreedings - tending in the end to brown I'm sure - guarantee more instead of less diversity, as long as diversity is not so much measured by the color of one's skin. 

I am so tired of superstar talents. I am so tired of wanting that kind of supercharged beauty. I am so tired of overelaborated super intelligence which needs to be checked by something more from the manual arts. I am so tired of measures for intelligence, which, like contests for beauty only show up parochial prejudices and miss the breakthrough minds every time. I am so tired of stigmas made against everyone who's not a winner, for whatever it is they're supposed to lack. I'm tired of being a winner without portfolio too, and needing always to reinvent myself. It's all a crass stand in for beauty to transcend our baser cartoon-like common denominators. I'll sing for Leaves of Grass.

Lets have a demasquerade! Let's let each of us be himself, and accept that Mom will always love us, no matter what we do. Sheesh, I make about as much sense as Jack Kemp talking supply side. But not only is beauty in the eye of each beholder, and intelligence for each reader to decide, what we can do to improve upon nature cannot be simply to strip it bare and purify its essentials. There must be more to art that drives us.

Slumdog jilted

Isn't it ironic? I mean after my previous post, and then after spending much of the day working up arguments against the Obama bashers in the family, who just can't quit. I guess Fox TV just can't quit either. Then this perfected film about the standard projected theme.  Hollywood Bollywood (is that how you spell it?) Schmalliwood. Are they all the same? Are we looking in the mirror here toward our own future, where the slums of Mumbai look so terribly much like the dystopic dreams of our environmentalist avant garde. And the poverty there a cruel caricature of the Bush direction for the grand old homeland?

I simply don't understand which film has made it so big in this country. I think I can't actually touch what everyone else is watching. Is this feelgoodism? Are we so jaded with our own love stories? Surely we have hung back from this extreme such that it had to be made in the land of the outsourced call centers? Did we even outsource our earnest dreams because to be quite this parodic is, like picking crops, beneath us? Or is this film the very opposite to Foster Wallace earnesty, and is it meant to be viewed ironically? Perhaps I'm simply the only one to view it?

Is it brilliant or incredibly crass, or like what happened with Love Story way back when, does someone need to be politely excused from Yale before he embarrasses us all? I genuinely don't know how to watch this film. My daughter loved it, and as I shall when my ticker quits, I remained mum, not wanting to upset anyone. Because I'm probably just out of touch. I wasn't around when this particular style calmed down. Imagine waking up to platform shoes without what led up to them. Or is it just now OK, in political incorrect fashion, to condescend. Or do I have that completely backwards?

Needless to say, though there is much power in the projected "reality" depicted, the plot is pure bombast, no? (OK, so I looked the word up.  I mean I wiki'd it, and find that the fabric referred to -fustian - covers - I mean the irony will never end - jeans.  I guess as in blue jeans. So bombast has to cover aspirations to worker casual turned hot advert for enough money for a trainer? This is way way too cool!). So, is it fustian prose I aspire to? Do people write that shit? I mean using 'fustian', say, under control rather than as a reach for prosodic power just beyond control? I'll bet David Foster Wallace could have. Virtuousity in anything is as close to witness of miracle as I ever need to come. 

I aim for clarity, believe it or not. Virtuousity never was my forte. (that's a funny line right there)

So, the formula is simple enough. You have to come by this love thing honestly, and then you have to value it more than the most extreme kind of life affirmation apart from it, and then if you put them together you just simply pop. Or something. The ever after Jesus thing.

So why, in this land of no parody - I'm talking here about the people that are able, and I'm not one of them, to distinguish Saturday Night Live from televangelism in structural form - . . . I think I've already written, ad nauseum, about my great confusion, when coming off one hermetic episode or another in my extreme youth, upon coming across What Was on Television at the time.  I truly mistook the televangelism for parody, and was bizarrely shocked that Saturday Night Live could do that on TV.  We're talking way back around the time of Archie Bunker, though I could be off by a few decades. I have yet to recover.  Rip Van Winkle shocked is what I'm talking about here.

But hasn't this just simply got to be the end of something? Aren't we finished with the projection of life, and isn't it time for the living? 

I, of course, have moved beyond hope for that one true love, and displace all socializing onto this blog, since what once passed for feelings has become so impacted that it would take the proverbial icepick to move my innards (hence these gaseous emissions).

But there's nobody out there.  Not a single soul that I can touch where it counts. And I don't think that I'm receding within. I'm really really trying to find a way to say this thing, though it may already be past time. I'm not looking for friends here. I have plenty, though I mostly hide from them. (I don't want to be a burden?)

So my silly life's plot is at least as outrageous as any other plot acceptable for projection. I'm holding out. I'm looking for true contact. I need a reader. Just one would do. I'm not trying to be coy. 

Officially speaking, I liked Revolutionary Road much better. But they are at the same historic moment, about the same historic thing. This tragicomic finding of the thing itself when you let go of it. This giving up on the prospect ever to be other than in the audience for life. I stagger out after some kind of Michelangelo Antonioni festival, maybe it was called the Little Carnegie at the time, way back in the 70's, before I ever even sat through Pink Flamingos. Divine. Eat shit. I stagger out (those Antonioni movies were really slow moving) and figure it can't go any further than this. I stagger out, and now just like on the boat way back when, except that I'm burning lots more fossil fuel about it, I just can't get warm. The furnace won't keep up with the huge differential, uninsulated, between inside and out.

This vision of Mumbai's slums a vision of humanity's failure. Of humanity as karmic stiving so that maybe someday someone's child will be delivered into Nirvana.  The same story of technological climbing out of the shit which just might find us loving our brothers and sisters. Some day soon, John Boy.

I don't understand why there needs to be so much evangelization of fear. Why we hope that our secret service secretly breaks the law to protect us from unenlightened zealots. Why we have so little faith in the humanity we already know and understand. 

Humanity is the coming together of man with man for something other than terror, right? Humanity is reaching out from the winner's circle. Humanity is so not about winners and losers. And sadly, purity of soul and spirit will not grant eternal life of the sort left behind when we leave the theater. But that's what people think Jesus was talking about. 

Not!

We are furless, and hearth will warm only when cooperatively clothed and sheltered. We are naked, and our teeth (happily, my broken one which cuts my tongue will be crowned Monday, insurance or no!) don't do so well against living flesh. We were apparently made to be human, no? (another one right there - I watched the redneck comedy thing once)

My own little hydroponic heating system, washing my cells in rusted sea water not so different from the sulferous metalic tasting stuff I now can handpump so gridfree from my well, still pumps out heat to my extremities. And my lonely mind does reach out across skinned and skinless boundaries. A little bit educated. (A little bit redundant.) A little bit capable with the indrawn syllables of conspiring humanity. And very much certain that eternal life is that which transcends the innering of thought and feeling made possible only by definition of my personal limits of life span and skin which defines me as only me. Eternal life is just the love which powers this self thing beyond itself. I think there is nothing so trivial.

But the moment is now. Eternally.

Oh dear, this is not profound at all.