Hard Fail; Accident

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COVID-19 Was Started by a Pun!

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

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

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

I digress. 

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

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

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

This has clearly become insupportably dangerous for the planet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Do You Digg Fraudd??

Like all the social networking sites which have eaten up capital to gain an audience, digg.com now turns to the business side of their engaging enterprise. There have been a series of articles leading up to the big question mark launch of advertisements mixed right in with the rest of the votable copy.

The idea is simple enough; let advertisers submit their "stories" for the digg community to poll up or down. The advertisers get a read of the response of this grizzled jaded audience to how they tout their goods. The digg community gets more grist to their voting mill. It's like wine tastings where the purveyors value the outspokenly critical palates the most.

The big question mark was how the community might react. Would they regard this as contamination, and just vote down and bury each and every ad? Or would they reward the corporate sponsor of their playground, and just let themselves go ahead and respond to a few catchy ads.

The early word is that this technique is working like a charm. Digg is lowering the price per click for advertisers whose ads get voted up, and effectively therefore penalizing the ones which get buried.

It feels win-win, since if no one sees it, no one clicks, and so there's no risk to advertisers for costly duds, and users are essentially voting the ads right into their viewscreen. I'm sure digg, like Google, protects its secret sauce as to how the balance works between floating up and in or down and out.

Word is that the revenue is starting to flow.

But what does Digg do when gamers game their system, as gamers always will? Do they discreetly spirit away the votes they count as fraud? What about their own motives, then, to disappear enough counts to increase the costs per click? How would we know the difference? Trust us, digg and Google say, we would never do you wrong.

But this is real money we're talking about now. How will you really ever know what gets promoted to your screen and why? Perhaps you don't really care. Perhaps you're happy to pay attention only to what the corporate sponsors want you to pay attention to. Except that you were drawn to digg in the first place because you thought that maybe the crowd would get to decide what gets raised to prominence, and that it might not be the same as what the Main Stream Media wanted you to know about.

Check out these simple screen shots. They are cookies-cleared sequential takes of tallys up on digg.com. But you don't have to trust the sequence. It's the context which tells the story. Look at the differential among the three stories on the screen and see how it changes, relatively speaking.

 

 

 

So, has digg started paying attention to the business side of digg, or have they changed what voting means?

Transparency anyone? This looks like fraud to me!

No Bikini Atoll

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leaving the relationships, well, radically undetermined.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy St. Patty's Day!

A day or two early, and before the parade, but I did make it out to a nice party last night. Ah Guinness! These are people I only see this once a year, so it makes a nice reality check. I had no chance to tell them all where I was last year and why I didn't make it. But it surely is good to come down to earth and check in with what people more real than me are thinking about these days.

I was truly amazed to hear that houses in the funkier part of Buffalo are being bid up in an economy where real estate value's meltdown is what started this scary tumble. We're all praising God now that we never did take part in that orgy then. Rusted out and the opposite of buff, most all of us.

Folks at the party still talked the same about their kids and projects and excitements with their work. No change as far as I could tell even in this cataclysmic eonomy, among these people that I have known since I was an infant.

Sure, there was one fellow still hanging on at the Ford plant. His tales of HR with boxes, accompanied by security personnel without warning coming at you, and memos from Central Office about "how to deal with difficult social situations (hide under your desk!)" made me think of Nazi death camps. I just can't imagine it has to be this way. So little humanity in the letting go. I guess, as with individuals going off everywhere, there's just too much at risk.

But there might be some waking up - I said might be - to the reality that these really big corporations actually now do stifle innovation more than stimulate it. I'm thinking Microsoft, of course, as an IT guy, but also General Motors, Ford, surely Verizon, Google, and Amazon.com.  I know those last few might surprise you. But these are hidebound massive organizations whose addiction to ever fatter profit, at that scale, just kills us all.

With the car companies, it's easy to see how the logic of short term gain required that they sell more Hummers and light trucks for so long as people craved them, and thus seal their own fate when viewed from the brilliant remove of retrospection. GM killed off it's electric car research, run right near me, where cute little silent cars would stream out at the end of the work day. Even oil companies can't seem to spare any margins for real innovation.

With Microsoft, the editorial Internet is overfull of how many great startups were subsumed into what at best was Microsoft's ecology, but at worst was a giant beast of ownership control and bloat to encourage a bubble of hardware development on the prodding of endless software complexity. Power to the desktop powered most the holder of the patent. As at the beginning with Pennsylvania, it'll take another Franklin to usher in the right rebellion, with publishing still the key.

Now one might expect that this bubble is, like the real estate market, nearly popped. It's easy enough for me to imagine appliances, like Google's Chrome, riding simply on a hypervisor shim. I don't need no stinking OS! And the hardware is just a slight expansion of my smartphone, relegating all the power to data centers "in the cloud". But there's the rub, you'll see!

I suppose that Microsoft can own this back end "cloud", but they seem to be overtaken there by Amazon and Google. Very much like the car companies left with exploding inventories of trucks, Microsoft couldn't help themselves, though their cash position remains infinitely better for now. Still, I'm guessing people are hanging on to their old hardware, in the same way that they are hanging on to their old cars. And clinging to XP for every last ounce that they can get, despite threats to force all Vista and new hardware.

But what then of these cloud companies? Why isn't Google "not evil" and simply just the best? Why shouldn't Verizon reap rewards for its sowing of towers, for so long as I want to talk? What could possibly be wrong with frictionless capitalism on the 'Net?

Folks at the Green (in the other sense) party were  mostly management types, or owners of their own businesses. But many of their parents were union. Almost all were born Catholic, although it was extremely safe there to make fun of nuns and priests.

I do grow tired of complaints as if the unions are even in any slight way to blame for, say, the auto industry's collapse. You get that from the Republican side where there is almost glee for Chapter umteen restructuring, not least to blow away the union contracts and return, say, GM to more supposed efficiency in competition with the Asians. It's that kind of efficiency which is killing off all margins for innovation. Any thought from any worker not in on the take.

I'm pretty sure that the labor component of each new car is nowhere near large enough to define the problem. It's management that's constipated - the union guys will build whatever you tell them to, as efficiently as you like, but you have to be more strategically aligned with what's up in the larger economy.

Like John Stewart who landed so many solid punches, complaining to Jim Cramer about how we were all advised to get into the stock market for the long term, while it now seems that we were only funding the massive orgy of the unregulated short term traders. Their goal might have been to maximize returns for their investors, or did it shift to gaming the system for themselves? In any case, the business of derived derivatives went *pop*, and so much for we trusting schmucks and our planned retirements.

John Stewart's anger was that of his audience too, in this strange inversion where the finance guy, no comic, hams up his show, gonzo style, to keep his audience amused I guess. John Stewart, whose comedy is based on looking staid in the first place (Steven Colbert takes this to its pinnacle accomplishment), and who therefore gets laughs by changing only the shape of his mouth or other simple gestures just slightly out of place for his all knowing and by definition "in on it" audience - John Stewart was the one enraged. He'd become a livid political cartoon, where the best skewering is always accompanied by good laughs.

The inversion was beautiful, as were the landed punches - my own pleasure, as in a boxing arena audience. This sad sack Cramer was simply not going to be allowed into the club of people who actually get the joke, and was forced to remain the fool. With whom no-one could or would identify.

But it wasn't stoning. It wasn't fundamentalist barbaric, at least. It was Madoff going off to jail a little, and being given what every sociopath deserves, finally, to match the absence of any fellow feeling in his soul. Bars and dry stark noisy aloneness. Forever, amen.

So my big celebration, apart from the symbolic space which St. Patrick's day occupies for me (as one bookend, St. Valentine the other, to my youthful de-cocooning), was that my brother in law just had, the day before, been paraded off to prison. His daughter had the clarity of heart to write for the prosecutor a strong narrative of what he'd done to her upon and forever after the occasion of his being ousted from his small fundy pulpit. We all have our excuses.

My sister still must look into his eyes from Lazik magic bionic ones borrowed from God (she really does have such eyes) to see his child-like soul. She stands by him still, but carries on in stoic fashion, to raise his children while Daddy's off in jail. 

There is almost beauty to that, as there is in earnest seeking after remorse from Madoff. How much could he be required to give? And how must those who'd chummed with him, and then given him all their money, now feel about their own true hearts? It's their restraint that's touching.

I will always stive, but hardly ever succeed, to cast no stones. But I am not saddened by some imprisonings. I rejoice in God's grace when it comes, but hope never to make the mistake of seeking soul in emptiness. Finding truth in hollow words.

There is something human in loving your daughter before your Man. And something therefore even above God, who can be left to love those other souls, forsaken, lost and gone to humanity. His Love is something any longer not to strive for in ourselves, because it is that much too far above.

But here, on earth, right now, there is some quickening afoot. Could be in time for Easter? Where consciousness comes alive to its "sixth sense". That knowledge of some continuum as if from light to dark, between romantic manic love at the one extreme and stoic cold clear knowledge at the other that what appears so wrong in public might actually be right. Some inner conviction, of the same stuff as that in-love crap which, thankfully, I'm immune to anymore.

There were things known before written words did crowd them out. Yoruba truths. Local truths. These Chinese mappings of accupuncture points along the body which haven't much changed across the history of man's enlightenment. Some herbal medicines, whose choosing is the result more of seeing - illiterate ways of knowing - than of scientific trial and error.

And now we've reached the very Christian extreme of romantic loving, in whose manic thrall we might do anything (oh, how well I know this truth). Or if you're generation Y and above, you might not even be bothered to fall in love for sex, since those boundaries have lost all meaning.It is a loss. But you still do have the rockstar aspirations as proof of your authentic soul's true meaning. It's the same tale, told with different characters is all. There is not fullness at the top, but that you share it out!

Follow your dream. Lance Armstrong your victory, and beat back the sour grapes suspectors of secret doping. True your Cher voice with bionic tone, and stick it to the unplugged unwashed masses who will love and crave you all the more. Beyonce your face to chocolate perfection. But believe, above all, in yourself. Then Google yourself to death.

Well, that right there is my protest. It's not so shrill, and it sure gets very little attention. I'm Last Year's Man. My complaint with Google and Amazon and Verizon and all of them is that no-one should own the "cloud". No one should own the commons. No one should profit from my words, likely not even me. Though I hardly mind if they profit from building it, this commons on which I depend. And I might try for a living from words yet, some day.

Who Owns You, is the title of a book one of my illustrious former students just triumphantly published. I truly can't wait to read it, but I think I might not even have to (there is a copy with my name on it sitting in his Mom's house, I hope and pray). It's about the patenting of DNA. I do trust it's not on the side of the industrialists of soul. That there is some educated horror expressed (this fellow is, unlike me, extremely well credentialled) that life, too, might become an intellectual production, invented as if by God!

Another fellow at the party last night speculated that the true "class wars" will be between the public sector and the private. He had in mind the assault on private wealth that is one take on Stimulation. But mostly the nasty brutish fact that public employees will own all the pensions at the expense of the rest of us without defined benefits. What an amazing realignment! That taking a job as a civil servant could ever be construed as winning some lottery. That these grey souls who never did dare to dream of rockstar heights should be looked on as the winners! That losers might be winners after all.

Sure, the unions need to change. So do blacks need to stop being all angry. So do screwed people everywhere need to search their hearts for forgiveness.  So could our Constitution stand some rewriting.

But after our Common Wealth is secured. After that.

I swear I will be signing off real soon. I know that I promised I would. But I have only this one brief moment before the Commons gets enclosed for good and evermore, and I become net neutered, because the risk to the true Beast is simply far too great.

Here's a toast to the possibility that I'm dead wrong! Happiest of St. Patrick's Day to you, dear reader, and you!