The Ikea Conundrum - free labor comes with a price tag.

I feel pretty bad about tossing cold water at a friend who was excited to have stocked his new Euro-style apartment (OK, it's not "Euro-style," it's actually in Europe!) with cool Ikea furnishings. But he baited me with his comment that Ikea is all over Europe like Walmart is all over the United States. I couldn't stop myself when he made the case that Ikea was essentially different from Walmart, which we all know, essentially, to be evil.

There has been an accelerating trend among first worlders in the globalizing economy, toward self-service pricing. Hang on a minute, and I'll tell you what I'm talking about.

I know that at this very moment, we're all hoping and praying that all that economic growth will get back on track, so I won't make any claims about how the overinflated bubble couldn't have gotten any bigger no matter how much new hi tech we injected into it. I will limit myself to a very peripheral observation.

Lots of us on both sides of the political aisle have long remarked about how our American economy has been very good at exporting our pollution and low-skill jobs, while importing ever cheaper goods. China has been our most important dance partner in this deadly tango, since they have so many mouths to feed (a Chinese language pun on "population," literally).

Liberal and Conservative differences often seem to come down to whether this is a good or a bad thing, this particular modeling of economic efficiency.

China seems to have driven a pretty successful bargain, now holding so much of our debt, and even being the preferred and maybe only spot for high quality manufacture of so many of our Western inventions. And they're catching up with us in the billionaire-count sweepstakes!

Somewhere in the middle of these extremes sits Europe, poised at the pinnacle of the first world, but somehow avoiding the savage pitfalls America has always been known for. While also avoiding our soaring successes.

Recently, they welcome and provide for third worlders more readily than we do, even though we invented that shtick too. They find ways to care for their sick, and promote healthy public education. They give their workers actual vacation. They don't always let the lowest common denominator rule their day.

I understand they even have rules about suburban sprawl, big box developments, and the fictional retail prices which allow the monopolistic retailers to crowd out the small village green stores in this country. They enforce level playing fields all over the place, and always notice the dangers of corporate gigantism, like that of Microsoft, well before we get a clue.

Lots of liberals here look to the European model as a kind of approach to Utopia, where quality art still has a public space, and literary discourse still has some play in the news.

For a while, during the seeming anomaly of Clintonomics in the midst of our long right wing nightmare, there was lots of excitement about how no labor could ever be cheap enough to outproduce the educated workforce we could create if only we wanted to. That if only we would invest in the bottom 50% of our children - the ones so miserably failed by our public schools - then we would be able to bootstrap our economy back out of the danger zone we thought we then were in.

Now, I love Bill Clinton as much as any other misty eyed liberal who was almost driven to insanity by what followed him. So much so that I've almost entirely given up on any real investments in education as a prime driver of our economy. That notion seems so clouded and distant now, as we face new economic terrors. And anyhow, those dangers - remember way way back when Japan, Inc. was our foe - turned out to be almost entirely swamped underneath our irrational exhuberance. We could almost forget about misery at home, with so much perpetual and perpetuated hope for true universal freedom from want.

Here in New York State our blind but colored governor just announced that he has no choice but to make drastic cuts in education, or face California-style credit-rating bankruptcy in the very near term.

He's at the absolute bottom of his popularity, even repudiated by our color-neutral President, and so finally now has the courage to do the one thing which seems as though it might get the Republicans on board with him. Almost like how President Obama got John Boehner to go along with money for social security stipends to dampen the pain of the first year in memorable history when there was no cost of living increase for our seniors.

I can't disagree with our governor, especially as it really does seem that he has no choice. Make cuts and they will come.

And I am going to make the extremely illiberal claim that investments in education truly are a case of putting the cart before the horse. I don't think that there ever will be a time when everyone has the "smarts" to contribute other than unskilled labor to the economy.

I think unskilled labor still requires a human being to get 'er done, whether at the checkout counter, in the coal mine, or on the assembly line.

OK, maybe not all those places. It is undoubtedly a good thing - a very good thing - when we can have robots take our places in grindingly dull jobs. It is especially good when they can replace us on the front lines in war or to dismantle bombs. Unless you're on the other end of the argument, I guess.

But much of what I've needed to know in my life, I never learned in school. I learned it on the job, or by rubbing shoulders with people who don't think the way I do. Well, OK, that's pretty easy for me, since I think in ways that make ordinary people wince.

But what happens when the dignity of our unskilled workers gets traded away right with their jobs? What happens when you have to write up a resume just to be the one of a million who can get the well-paid factory job? I think that might be a lot like importing hopelessness.

Our dreams of freedom from want have become freedom to want, and then to be able to get some approximation of what it is we really want down the hill at Walmart.

Obama just won the Nobel prize for reinventing our proudest American export: Hope. Now what will we do at home?

I think that whenever any one of us agrees to do it ourselves rather than to hire some local labor, we might actually be contributing to the wrong direction for our economy.

They make it really easy down at Home Depot, that biggest big-box store. They'll show you how to make your house look like all the other ticky-tacky, with standards only an amateur could love.

We've built bicycles for years now on Christmas morning, puzzling through supposedly English translations of directions that must have originally been Chinese. But now the actual design of things - and I have Ikea in mind here - is done with the packaging and shipping and ease of final assembly by the consumer, fully in mind from the outset.

And they've managed to sell it as a kind of style. Almost like blue jeans, where for guys like me it's really really hard to tell the difference between the $20 working model and the $200 designer version.

So my argument is this: When each one of us gloats about our inner laborer by our willingness to do the driving so that our stores don't have to come near to us; When new is always assumed that much better than antique; When we actually find it a challenge to park as near to the big-box entrance as possible; When we get our only real exercise walking those incredibly long aisles to find stuff on those incredibly well capitalized shelves; When we've killed off all the competition except for the Big Box warehouse brand, then we've really killed off any chance for self-expression.

We've become the robots that we thought were supposed to do the dull stuff for us. And we think as alike as the ticky tacky houses we live in. No matter how big they are.

Sometimes we can ask the retiree clerks and they will guide us. I find it amazing that they all actually do smile back, especially the young ones, just entering the perpetual pre-retirement treadmill, with kids at home to feed. Wage slaves up against the wall or over it.

When we accept the goal to find the cheapest price, even when that means that we are the end-of-assembly-line lowest skilled set of hands in the process, wielding the in-box provided hex wrench, and looking proudly over our creation which solves the problem of furnishing our stage-set living space. . .

When we allow our news to be fed to us because we don't even have time along our commute to read a newspaper. I mean even though we'll talk ourselves literally to death or text ourselves into the face of oncoming truck traffic, no-one thinks it would be safe to read the newspaper while driving.

Oh hell, I'll stop. But many of you will have noticed by now that the price of a fast food "meal" (I think that term has been debased to mean face-stuffing appetite suppressant) exceeds the cost of actual food at the local diner.

Many of you will also have noticed that you can often beat WalMart by having the FedEx guys bring the goods right to your door when you buy them at Amazon, right off the Internet.

I was amazed the other day when my shiny new chimney cap was delivered. I gave up on being able to buy the thing locally, and so I found it on the Internet. It was brokered by Amazon from a warehouse web-front-store not so very far from here in Albany, New York. And when the delivery guy came to the door, I wondered aloud to him how they could possibly afford a second trip to a guy like me way out in the middle of nowhere (with five or six Walmarts exactly the same 35 minutes away in any given direction) who's almost never home. And he told me, hell, he makes 80 deliveries a day right here in my neck of these woods. No sweat at all.

So, we're all being turned into drivers, the lowest commodity skill of them all, even though our average speed over the life of our cars is maybe five miles per hour?! And shoppers who stalk the shelves or the search engines for bargains. And assembly line workers at the end of the line.

All because we still control the world's capital, even though we might no longer hold it? Which means that we can afford to do this in our leisure time, and even like it.

But when we absorb the actual laborer to our inside do-it-yourself pride of price-accomplishment inner laborer, haven't we also killed off the neighborhoods which I actually do remember as a kid? Where not all of our friends had the same style parents. And where we played outside without nightmare imaginings about what might happen to us.

Well, when the price of oil makes delivery that much more expensive again - whether self driven delivery or servant-driven; when ships will have to be nuclear to justify outsourcing our manufacture to China and piracy off the coast of Somalia gets that much more deadly; when our own cars are gridlocked down to say 3 miles per hour on average; then we might begin to wake up to the insanity of our present arrangements.

No, I'm not arguing back to the land, back to the misty days of apple pie at grandmas after a long horse and buggy ride. But I might be arguing that we'd solve a lot of our educational challenges just by strolling the sidewalk, rubbing shoulders with less educated neighbors, and sending our kids to school with them.

Come to think of it I actually do strenuously object to the whole idea of education as an economic input. And I don't even have to object to the whole idea of unskilled labor as beneath my dignity. I already resemble that remark! I am the lowskilled laborer beneath my own dignity.

It's kind of like that old chestnut joke about the rich guy who asked the beautiful woman if she'd sleep with him for a million bucks. She thought for a minute and answered, "well, sure, OK?" And then he wondered if she'd do it for, maybe $500 and she got mad and yelled at him "what do you think I am a prostitute!?". And the urbane suave and sophisticated buyer shot back, "sweetheart, we've already established what you are, now we're just negotiating price."

I'm just a laborer. And you can have my services for free!!

The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate

Now this is way too cool! An article right in the New York Times about "otherwise respectable scientists" saying how the Higgs Boson might not want to be discovered. About how that might be why the Large Hadron Collider won't start up, like it's supposed to do this December and like it failed to do last year.

Either the physicists who are up in arms about it have no sense of humor, or no perspective, or both; or these guys actually are on to something. The funniest part was about how the United States version of the Large Hadron Collider, to be even larger, of course, and called the Superconducting Supercollider got scrapped even after billions of dollars had already been spent on it. That's Billions, like Carl Sagan used to be misquoted saying. That would NEVER happen with a highway.

Well, it did in the middle of Ohio as I recall, where I once hazarded upon a lonely interstate bridge in the middle of nowhere while riding my motorcycle. I thought I must have been hallucinating, but the earthy farmer nearby confirmed that this was also a case where the appropriations apparently didn't establish enough momentum for escape velocity. Maybe the guy who got it started was caught sleeping with someone inappropriate? That seems to be the best way to derail stuff these days if you don't like where things are going. Or not going.

Or maybe the farmer was one of those returnees from alien abduction and was telling me elaborate lies to cover up what was really there, camouflaged as a bridge to nowhere. Or maybe I'm an alien abductee. You can't be too careful these days, and you never know who might have stolen your own identity without your being aware of it. Hell, for all I know, I could be an alien thinking I'm me!

They actually did propose a kind of statistical test, these 'otherwise respectable scientists,' modeled almost precisely on what they do over in China when consulting the Yi-Ching, or I Jing or whatever you want to call it. But in this case, there would be no master set of codes to consult. They were just suggesting that the whole enterprise could be scrapped and a lot of trouble saved, just in case some highly improbable test came out on the wrong side of possible.

Well, you have to know how the test would be connectible to the thing being tested. When drawing yarrow stalks for a Book of Changes consultation back over in China or among new agers on this side of the globe, what matters is the state of mind of the person doing the drawing. Or at least I think that must be what matters. What else could it be?

So, I guess the idea is to get the collider itself to generate the random throws. But everybody knows computers can't really do random. They have to reach out into the real uncomputed world to get a seed.

But that's kind of like what the Large Hadron Collider is supposed to be doing in the first place, so I don't see how it could be a very good test.

And anyhow, if you've been reading me right along, which by the way would have to exclude me as reader since I hardly ever remember what I've already written and what is sitting nicely still up in my supposed head and just hasn't found a way yet to make it out.

So this question is up to you and you alone, gentle reader. But if you've been reading me right along, you already know that I've been saying over and over again that the answer is already out there, free for the taking.

Well the answer is already in here, but it's still free for the taking. The graviton, the force carrying particle which would define gravity, sometimes also called the hadron, or the Higgs boson, (I might have my wording off) just isn't there, see. It's supposed to show up only when mass edges toward that asymptotic ending where largish quantities get created or destroyed. That's what the Big Bang means, and I guess that's what must be meant by the end of time off in the other direction too.

In the meanwhile, gravity just sort of is; shaping the cosmos since, even in theory, it's impossible dimensionally to measure anything apart from it. So the Collider is supposed to generate enough energy, which is equivalent to mass remember, to simulate conditions toward the Big Bang boundary. Which is approximately equivalent to, sort of, creating that much mass out of, well that much energy, measured in the trillions of electron volts, which is getting right up there now to how we measure the burn rate of our economic engines.

Now I don't really want to cheat, and talk about the likelihood of the economy holding together long enough to keep paying the physicists and ferreting out the al Qaeda reps who are only working there to see what they can use against us. Not to mention how much longer we can justify using that much energy up to find something a hell of a lot smaller than the head of the head of the head of etc. a pin on which angels might be dancing.

Let's say we have the actual will and expertise to pull it off. Why then do I insist that the hadron won't be found?

Because, as I've said now over and over and over again, the thing which describes the utterly improbable calling into existence of being out of nothingness might as well be called what it actually is. Emotion! There was a wanting, and well, sort of, poof, there you have it.

Yep, that's what I said. These same g-string theorist gurus, who are working out the probabilities of so many things going wrong with the various proposed tests to finalize the standard theory of particle physics are working on a theory to explain the possible mechanisms for impossibly improbable events just like, well, us:

From the New York Times article:

Another of Dr. Nielsen’s projects is an effort to show how the universe as we know it, with all its apparent regularity, could arise from pure randomness, a subject he calls “random dynamics.”

Whatever mechanism they discover to explain this mysterious process, I'd suggest they just label it emotion, just like I have. You wouldn't even have to torture the English language like I do (or like many physicists do), because the word could keep on making sense exactly as it is.

An emotional connection is, after all, a connection only in the mind. It can't be measured except by such external manifestations as secretions, actions, motivations, decisions, rationalizations, delusions, and all the rest which, seemingly, result from it.

By very definition, emotion is improbable in any particular direction. I mean really now, who's going to fall in love with someone sent to them without their sayso, or computer matched. Hmmmm. Moving on then. . .

It took a long long time for something like humanity to evolve, which unlike plenty of beastly species I know, includes the ability for individuals to respond emotionally to things that happen around them. I don't mean like screaming and scurrying for cover. Any old beast does that, and looks like a pretty good imitation of human while doing it.

I mean more like what a dog does when it knows its master.

I'd say this has as much to do with our individually recognizable faces and our grammatical black box ability to use language as it does with our much too vaunted intelligence. Well, sure it has a lot to do with smell, but I have a real problem separating intelligence from emotion in the first place. We'd better table that discussion.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm a pretty smart guy myself, and I'd like to think that gives me some advantages, but it's when people point out my emotional idiocy that I feel really bad about myself. (no, not badly 'teach', I feel myself just finely. I mean I feel bad).

But anyhow, if you think about it, and I know you want to, all the unlikely accidents which have led up to you and me just as we are might as well be called emotional connections across the ages. I mean, consider the alternatives! Would you rather be just a throw of the dice? And even if you are, would you like to be treated that way?

I'm not saying very much changes by this reinterpretation of the obvious. In fact, I'm not saying anything changes at all. Except that we really don't have to waste a lot of time anymore chasing our own tale (I learned on YouTube that penis really means tail from a lady who sells sex in the guise of teaching you something about words. Now if you ask me, that's ridiculous, but who's watching anyhow). We're running the wrong way 'round for chrissakes, and we'll suck ourselves up our own tuba just like the nowhere man did.

Well, maybe it could change things. It wouldn't change a single bit about physical theory except for where it ends up. It wouldn't change a single thing about cosmology, except, sort of, the same problem about where things end up. And it surely wouldn't make it possible to win the lottery. That kind of statistical improbability just makes you stupid for buying tickets. You'd have better odds being struck by lightning, and even better ones if you curse God's name while asking for it.

(I can't actually prove the last one, and I'm not even sure that God can have a Name, but it seems like a good idea to hedge one's bets, if you know what I mean)

If we were simply to call all those unpredictable unmeasurable and even in principle impossible to measure connections emotional connections, we'd save a lot of grief trying to find something else there. Especially when we already know that nothing could be there, since that's what we mean by random meaningless chance in the first place.

Sure, just like those guys wondering if the future is sabotaging us by preventing the Large Hadron Collider from working, you might be able to predict these connections looking backward. But that's Monday quarterbacking, and it's just not fair.

But that's the thing with conceptual relations. They exist only in the mind, in precisely the sense that's meant by that cool new voguish term, qualia. These guys - qualia - can't even in principle be measured or pointed to. They are what you mean by red say when you're talking about communism or Republicanism or the sky at night. You have utterly no way to know that I'm am meaning the same thing when I mean red. Philosophers worry this one to death, although not nearly so much as the physicists worry the collider.

Come to think about it God must be a qualia, which I hope isn't an insult of some sort. I suppose the philosophers have lots of good jokes about that one. God is dead, but so's your brain on crack or something like that. God is all in your head, but then so is your lover. I could go on and on. You never really can know what someone else is thinking.

But one thing is for certain. If there is a principal whereby something can be made out of random nothing, against all known laws of probability, I'd be a lot happier if there was a wanting. OK, so you've noticed my strategic use of the passive. I'm not going to say that someone wanted us, because that would be as stupid as giving a name to the Nameless.

But there are relations among qualia which exist only in the mind. Call 'em conceptual relations and the qualia you might get away with calling concepts. And there are conceptual relations among physical things. Call them projects or ideas or plans whose predictability is purely a function of realism and desire.

I'd be the first to say that the Large Hadron Collider is a do-able project. I hardly think there's a need for it, although there is apparently a pretty big wanting. Go for it guys, but don't tell me I didn't warn you. The thing is not going to tell you what you want or need to know and then you're going to have to come back to the rest of us to get more money, and well, we might have better things to do with it by then. Unless you're going to uncover the hope particle. The change particle. The human decency in the face of sociopathic corporate predations particle.

Oh wait, by George I think I've done it. Feelings. That's all we need. Another cheesy Beatle's song: All we need is love.

Let's hope we do have something better to do with all our money. No, I'm not talking about the Large Hadron Collider. I'd always vote for another experiment in basic science. It's almost always a hell of a lot cheaper than what Glenn Beck gets paid to rant and rave and upset my entire world.

I'm talking about the trillions now that we spend feeding the same furnace which ate up our other trillions. You know, that greed thing. That little lies adding up to one big lie thing. That delusion that you can just keep growing and growing and never pop. That if we all just look after number one, then somehow the invisible hand will make things alright.

But I did give up counting how many particles there might be in the universe at about the same time I realized that someone was pulling my leg about how many angels might fit on the head of a pun. There's always room for one more. Always.

Left Behind - conscientious objection to the workplace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Want Peace? Give a Nuke the Nobel

Want Peace? Give a Nuke the Nobel

Now this is clearly insane, right? First of all, you can't give the Nobel prize to a thing, not to mention to an idea. Just like with patents, you have to give it to a live inventor or an active organization.

You can't patent things themselves anyhow, only their design or manufacturing process. I think the Nobel prizes are meant to be the same kind of stimulus for doing things out of the ordinary. If you give them for someone's working toward something, you're sort of destroying the stimulus factor, right? Well, not with patents, but you know what I mean. It's not like Obama has a patent on making peace.

We want to recognize the pioneers who might have sacrificed so much along their way. The ones we owe so much to. Or wait, isn't that pretty much like closing the barn door after the horse got out? Wasn't the reward in the very discovery, or are we just congratulating ourselves for having noticed these people who actually did change our lives. Still, most of the people striving for the big prize have the grace actually to covet it. What's wrong with our diffident pres?

Well, if you read the article, referenced above at Time Magazine, you'll see they make a good point. Warfare had been industrialized right along with everything else, and upwards of 100 million human souls were being obliterated assembly-line fashion before the bomb. The actual count of the dead betrays a margin of error approaching twenty percent. Nobody really knows.

There wasn't a whole lot of quality control in that industrial process, and not a lot of standardization with the counting methods. So the bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima killed well over an order of magnitude fewer than the margin of error on the more deadly stuff!?

Aweful, but about like what a vaccine does compared to the disease it's meant to curb. And we have so much smarter bombs now, and so much more accurate counts. Unless you're talking about collateral damage, which we really don't and musn't talk about. Ever. It's done in error, and shouldn't count. Please, we're very sorry for your loss, now how much would you like for it?

Smart bombs inoculate against the big bomb, you could almost say. I'm just saying. Or the big bomb keeps the little bombs smart. So smart that they sometimes have people attached right to them, when they're not coming in by remote control right to their GPS perfect bullseye target.

You could award the prize to the Nobel committee itself, since awards to organizations are permitted. That would have a kind of PoMo self-referential flare, not just because it would be the committee awarding the prize to itself, but because it would put a kind of capper on the whole idea of using proceeds from bombings to fund a prize which, indirectly at least, by looking backward, should promote the whole idea of peace and progress on the planet. Or so you'd think. Maybe it's all just guilt money.

I guess there's a taboo on self-congratulation, which our President honored very much in the breach, allowing himself to accept the undeserved award on behalf of the world's aspirations for him. That's OK with me. I'm OK with that. I'm feeling plenty guilty about what I'm not doing to help out our man.

Everybody knows that giving Obama the peace prize was really about giving the people of America the peace prize for initiating a turn away from rapacious empire-building. He's our torch bearer is all, and it didn't hurt that this prize came on the heels of the one he failed to earn campaigning for Olympic torch bearing glory. I think the world is plenty tired of our winning all the contests, and not exercising leadership on the really important issues of the day. Like containing nuclear proliferation, just for a good example.

Everything kind of depends on your frame of reference, doesn't it?

Looking at the bomb all by itself, it's clearly an horrific device. Looking at it in the context of what came before it, it almost looks as though it put a stop to a whole lot of insanity, just by making it that much more insane. By taking things to their logical conclusion. That's something I for one, would like to see a lot more of. Except when it's not even funny.

People who are made ill by vaccines feel pretty angry about it you know, just like people who win the lottery start having magical thoughts about what it means according to what they were thinking or doing, and how it relates to some kind of karmic dessert.

Lots of conspiracy theories get their start by people noticing inconvenient coincidence. As if there were motivation for omission. Motivation for error.

There's an approach to statistics which I've always been intrigued with, and now thanks to a supersecret search engine my friend and I are cooking up, I have been able to find some good intel on the subject. It's called Bayesian statistics, after the really strange fellow who came up with it, the Reverend Thomas Bayes. I'm pretty sure he was a cleric of some sort, like all good scientists used to be, but he was a Nonconformist cleric, so he must have been really really good.

(check out this discussion if you have about an hour to spare, and are bored with reality TV. These two guys are really really smart)



I've always wanted to know if it meant that let's say you were going to flip a hundred coin tosses, and you hit a run of ten straight heads. Dogmatically, the probability of the 11th coin coming up heads is still 50/50, since there aren't any known forces of nature which could have it any other way.

On the other hand, if you were only aware of those 10 heads, without the context of the overall run of flips, you'd be an idiot not to consider the coin rigged somehow, and not a "fair coin." That way, you'd be nuts not to bet on its coming up heads again and again.

But if somehow you had some reason to believe or trust that it was a fair coin - let's say you enlarged your context, and you could say with some certainty, that on average it hit the 50/50 split mark - then you'd be an idiot not to bet against the heads, since the probability of continuing this anomalous run of heads is also about nil.

Normal, classical, non-Bayesian, forward-looking statistics allows that depending on the size of the series, there will inevitably be anomalous runs - clusters of all heads or all tails. It would be really really weird if a coin toss were to come up a perfect series of heads, tails, heads, tails, heads, tails. You'd have to figure some kind of fix was in on that strange coin or in that strange tosser too!

In really large runs, there will be longer anomalous runs. For many purposes, "forward looking" calculation is just fine. And before computers, it was really hard to keep enlarging the scope of contextual measurements to hone in on the accurate state for properly determining probability.

But you get some pretty huge misunderstandings when you suppose, for instance, that an eighty percent accuracy rate on a medical test means that if you test positive you have an eighty percent chance of having the disease.

Lots of fear gets mongered that way. You're much more likely to be one of the much larger number of false positives given that the number in the general population who have the disease is a pretty slight percentage. Bayesian statistics can be pretty critical.

But there is no force of nature which might change the actual odds for each flip, which must still be 50/50, assuming that the coin tossed can be proven "fair".

Which reminds me for all the world of the implication of mind in quantum field theory, Schroedinger's cat, and all the other weirdness of quantum physics. The wave function takes a different form depending on point of view, which is to say whether you're in the box with the cat or out. And if you're in, you'd be rather literally dying just to find out.

Say you see a scantily clad woman walking in a dangerous part of town. Some people would blame that woman for exposing herself to danger. But some criminal on the prowl might just assume that it has to be a vice-squad cop, making this the most protective coloring a woman in the wild could have. Assuming that humans are ever rational actors, as, say, classical economic theory would have it.

Stephen Covey has a whole training protocol partially premised on teaching people how to put aside their preconceptions in order to be open to reality as it really is. Maybe the scantily clad woman is just nuts. Maybe she is a foreigner who doesn't understand the streets of the good ol' USA. Maybe she's lost.

The assumption that it could be her fault if she were to be attacked kind of turns right back on the person with that judgment. Now that person seems a little bit like the theoretical rapist, assuming some kind of power shift toward the person who was just asking for it. Hey, don't blame the rapist [it might have been me???]!

Now a scantily clad woman with a gun is probably the safest creature on the planet. She would seem to be inviting some kind of showdown, don't you think?

And what about the guy who just can't help himself now that he's met his soulmate; whose wife just doesn't understand him anymore? Isn't he committing something a little bit analogous to rape by omission of his poor wife? Or is he just that full of himself that if she doesn't want him then, well, he's a free man. Can we talk?

Here's the place where I'm about to go off the wall. It's what I do, and you should be used to it by now.

Computer searches can only ever consider the structure of the objects your heart desires. They can't know anything at all about the context for the search, which is entirely in the mind of the searcher. They can't know where you're coming from, in common parlance. Most search engines have very little room in them for any give and take. It's just me gaming the machine gaming me gaming what I think everyone else calls something gaming the machine doing some kind of mass polling.

Oh sure, they can become evil, just like Google, and kind of sneakily gather up information about your search habits. Just like all that spyware which we've come to detest. You know, the kind which throws up ads for you to click based on your browsing habits. The payers for the clicks are pretty undiscriminating about where the clicks come from, establishing whole chains of outsourced deniability.

Hmmm, you kind of have to wonder why Google gets a pass, don't you. Well, except that in America if you give something away for free, I guess you can get anybody to believe anything at all.

You've seen those polls which claim that 70% of college boys would rape a girl if they thought they could get away with it. (never can find stuff on the 'net when you really need to check your memory) Same pollsters who say over half of us believe the Bible is literally written. You know, the ones with some kind of helpless vested interest in making sure you're scared all the time.

I might be alarmed except that I'm pretty sure that there's a part of me that would commit rape if I thought I could get away with it. It's a very small and silent part, and it doesn't get let out very often at all, mostly sitting on my left shoulder along with the part of me that grins if, say, the checkout girl forgets to ring up the Frosted Flakes.

Maybe it makes up for all those times they rang up the beer twice. And anyhow, the reason she forgot to ring it up is that the barcode wasn't updated to reflect the discount touted on the shelf, so just imagine all those other people who didn't challenge the mistake and who paid the full price. I'm just saying, I'm a really honest guy, and I wouldn't cheat a flea.

That's the part of me that would, you know, have sex with a woman after seducing her. I mean after all she knew the game, the rules, the code, right? I guess it really does depend on how you ask the question.

If you think you're going to hell depending on how the question gets asked, then you can be sure you're saying that the Bible needs to be taken literally. It would kind of hedge your bets. I mean who would answer "no" to the question "are you saved?" Um, no, well, I'll just go to hell then. It takes a kind of nerve.

So maybe 70% of boys admit that much of the time they feel like they'd do just about anything to get laid. Makes sense to me. My memory stretches almost that far back.

Trust me, Google says, we won't use your information against you. Well, unless you've done something wrong, and we get a bona-fide subpoena. And then we'll fight like hell before giving up the goods. Trust us.

But here's the real deal. Most of my searching really is random, and reveals absolutely nothing about the context for my search. I need to be able to specify both the figure and the ground surrounding what I'm looking for. In order to do that, machine intelligence is almost exactly useless.

I mean unless the thing I'm looking for is that obvious, like, say, a scantily clad woman. Come to think of it, most things I'm looking for get crowded out by scantily clad women just because that's what everyone else seems to be looking for.

What I need is a search engine which blocks all the scantily clad women, so that I can actually have a chance of finding what I want.

Well, OK, scantily clad women have become a kind of taboo, and there are all sorts of ways to block them. They use the same reasoning over in China when they power up their Google filters. Protect the people from themselves. You know, lay in the filters, stop the revolution, give them only what they need to know.

But what I want is to be able to define the context for my search, and not in broad-brush categories. News, Video, Blogs, blech! These don't define contexts. These define media types, or recency, or editorial staffing.

I want something which does a proper Bayesian search, and to do that I need to define my context as well as what I'm looking for. The super secret search engine I used to learn about Bayesian statistical reasoning is what I need. But I'd have to kill you if I let that cat out of the bag.

Still, think about it. Google, just for instance, is really really catty about letting you grok their secret sauce. They know better than you do about what you're looking for, since they can measure other lookers' satisfaction. Maybe they do it by how much money they make on the way other people look???

Their original secret sauce wasn't very secret at all - they used link ranking so that the Internet destinations most linked to by others would be the ones to rise to the top, and not the ones who gamed the system by loading up their webpages with hidden keyterms.

Of course, now the gamers of the system are all finding ways to simulate links to their pages. Or did I mean stimulate? In any case, there is a decided tendancy for the train wreck stuff to make it to the top. Just take a look at CNN's video titles, randomly, and you'll get the idea. It's all stuff you have a hard time not looking at, but it's probably not what you were looking for.

So to help my searching, they have to let me tell them what I'm not looking for. They have to give me some contextual clues about what I am looking for. And they have to let me find my own way in, making my own decisions about what to trust and what to stay away from.

Come to think of it, that right there is probably why all of our newspapers are dying. We used to buy them for the ads as much as for the editorial copy. We had a pretty reliable sense that everything worth knowing about was going to be told about in there somewhere. That all the businesses which wanted my trade would have to show up among the ads.

Sure the newspapers made too much money, but did we have to throw them out of business?

Now all we have is big box stores and some kind of mad race to the bottommost bottom, where if we get charged a few pennies more than the other guy would charge, we're getting fully ripped off.

I just came back from a family funeral, and you know what the buzz was from the rest of the folks I was so happy to be with? They were trading complaints about the service at the hotel that was recommended. They were getting their money back. And this was the cheapest hotel on the big box block!?

I remember running back in to tell a tearful waitress who'd been scolded in a pile-on one time a bunch of us went out to celebrate something at work. The boss had gotten lousy service, and then everyone piled on and pretty soon the waitress was in tears and everyone was getting their money back. Who's really getting screwed here anyhow?

So yeah, give the Peace Prize to the bomb. Or just like Time Magazine making it's person of the year a mirror a couple of years ago, let's all just reward ourselves for electing a color blind symbol, just like the Nobel committee just did, and leave him with the onerous task of getting rid of all the nukes. Getting rid of all the poisonous shouting which is capturing everyone's attention right now.

Then we can complain about him when he fails!

You know, whatever you think about Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck, these assholes are not offering any constructive thoughts about what should be done in some positive direction. They offer heroin hits to your emotions (I never touch the stuff) about the stuff which makes you mad. They give you feel-goodisms about what makes you feel good.

In that they aren't much different from the logo food you eat at the big box restaurants which advertize their food on TV in ways you can almost taste. None of it is good for you, and eating it puts the local joint right out of business, but it's what you want with your self-indulgent hit. Bottom dollar for the biggest bang in appetite satisfaction and in taste bud paradise.

But it's the lowest common denominator, folks. Sure we'd all rather own the cute house in the city, but given limited resources, we'll take the cardboard no-maintenance plastic covered one out in sprawlsville.

Sure, we'd all rather eat at the fancy restaurant, or enjoy actual Mom's actual home cooking, but given the chance that the local joint will feed you something unpalatable and not have the resources to pay up when you sue them, let's do Applebee's. Well, OK, Applebee's isn't doing so well, but one of those other places with lines around the corner, and vibrating flashing buzzers to tell you when your table's ready. (Don't piss off the waitresses though, they aren't making enough to care)

So, I'd say don't stop with giving the Peace Prize to Obama. Give it to the Wall Street financial machine which just got the bulk of the stimulus money. Then give it to the loudmouths who are stimulating all of our shouting anger and frustration over what we've brought on for ourselves by buying the nutty idea that our homes were also our nest eggs.

Pretty soon, it will be way too late to try out the nutty idea that we could destroy the earth with our bombs. We'll have already destroyed it with our vision of the future.

I'm picturing Wile-y Coyote blowing himself with his own TNT here folks. The Roadrunner always gets away. But you're not off the hook, peeps. The Nobel prize was actually for you.

Damned Evolution is Stalled - Rev it Up Mankind!

Through all those years of separation, East and West, humanity never did manage to evolve a new species. We had at least as much separation as those Galapagos Islands where Darwin staked his claim. I'd have to guess evolution just moves too slowly for anxious mankind to wait for. That must be why so many people are eager to start redesigning our naked genes, without waiting for drifting niches or drifting populations and more natural speciation.

Humankind exhibits lots of interesting variations in breed, and in language, and each of these has created virtual walls among us, but nothing even approaching breeding boundaries. Thank beauty I would say, for that continued and productive interest in intermarrying across the walls, since it couldn't be soul-mating, could it?

In China now they're having to face up to racism or lose some face for certain. Children of miscegenation are showing up in the most inconvenient places, and we have to dance delicately when we make them disappear.

Here at home, we're also in some trouble now, having raided the home of someone organizing protests at the G 8-20 summit in Pittsburgh. I suppose since the fellow's an anarchist, there must be some reasonable presumption that he might have been organizing some sort of violent overthrow, but really now, he was doing what we were cheering about when they did it over in Iran.

This guy was guilty of sending tweets about activities, for chrissakes, and crowd and police movements. As I understand it, he was actually arrested for interfering with the ability of the police to make their arrests. He was guilty of scattering crowds then, and not of gathering them in!!??

Now this is pretty interesting stuff, and if I weren't afraid of being arrested myself, I'd tell you that I learned of this by watching Democracy Now. But then I would be guilty of association with Amy Goodman who was herself arrested for attempting to report on the protest gatherings at the Republican National Convention so recently. I could be guilty of associating with known subversives or something, and we'd have to bring in massive counterinsurgency forces to combat me. Even though it wasn't Amy Goodman who told me, since she was at a funeral. A likely story.

So, if I call myself an anarchist, then my twittering warrants a warrant?? What if I call myself a Republican? They have a much longer track record of dirty tricks, and apparently even encourage folks to carry guns to gatherings of those damn liberals: its being perfectly legal, according to the Constitution and its over-interpretation, which right winger strict constructionists aren't supposed to do in the first place, but they take stimulus money to buy their new cars too so you can't count on them for anything.

I suppose folks would be a little more scared if it were blacks carrying those weapons out in public. And maybe Strom Thurmond in the White House. Maybe we'd just round them up prophylactically, like we did those black panthers, or the protesters at the RNC. Just in case they were thinking of raising a ruckus. And maybe they might have incendiary material in their living spaces, you know, like someone's writings about how you have to Steal this Book, and then you could justify arresting them for inciting theft or something.

OK, sure, I get it, if someone uses Twitter in the commission of a crime, then they are also guilty of using some communications device to impede the law. Like when bank robbers use walkie talkies, then they're more guilty than if they just shouted at one another that the cops are coming.

I guess what we're scared about here is that someone might organize a mass bank robbery. You know, like when they get really mad about how the banks are getting so much more money than needy families, and how the banks robbed their money when they foreclosed, and then robbed it again from the tax coffers.

It could happen. Angry citizens planning a heist to get back their share of what was taken from them. Then thwarting the police by sending tweets, deploying crowds, then just walking in like a kind of human wave and walking out with all the money. Weren't there a few really feel-good movies about that sort of thing not too far back. Money falling off the back of a truck, or strewn from helicopters.

Thank goodness angry citizens can't conspire. Only anarchists do that. Angry citizens do act up according to a good juicy conspiracy theory though. The thing is, I really think it was the Bushies who started the conspiracy theories about the Bushies wanting the Trade Center to come down. If you think about it, it gave them a lot of cover. Sort of how Michael Moore looking so unfit can alienate the granola crunchies. They think he's a bit uncouth with his tactics.

I'll bet there'd be a lot of cheering, and not a lot of will to keep that many people in jail. How would they ever handle the PR issues. Well, unless nobody other than Democracy Now were to report the heist.

But that makes me think of something. Why is anyone so anxious about stalling human evolution anyhow, this shortly after we actually did become human enough to slow it down, number one. And Number two, I wonder why no-one has caught what is suddenly so painfully obvious, that we've already conducted a number of experiments in artificial evolution and none of them has worked very well.

I mean, we tried and tried and tried to segregate the sexes, to make them think differently, to force them into differing environments, and they never evolved into different species. I guess that might prove that evolution is just a big fat lie.

But hey, we have a different kind of experiment we can live out now. The crazy nutjob Bible-thumpeting Evangelicals, which compose at least 50 % of the United States population if you believe the reliable polling sources, who are definitely objective and not out to terrorize anyone; they say that mankind didn't even exist until maybe five thousand years ago, or whatever the Bible says.

I know this is true, because people in my own family get really mad when you challenge them about it. Well, by definition, these folks are living in a different world from mine, and that actually does mean that according to the laws of evolution, they might eventually become a different species from mine and we won't be able to interbreed anymore. Hey!

Our environments will have diverged so much that a kind of gattling gun punctuated equilibrium will have occurred, and only what used to be the outliers will actually be able to survive anymore. I think Margaret Atwood wrote a book about that. No, maybe I'm thinking of a Boy and his Dog, the movie.

You could imagine lots of mechanisms to inhibit survival of the less fit. They could claim that God is dead, for instance, getting them shot instantly. Or threaten to abort fetuses. Stuff like that. Oh, I'm just kidding, the shouting classes never go that far.

The really strange part of all this is that I kind of agree that humanity got its start barely five thousand years ago. I actually take Julian Jaynes rather literally. That's my bible (not literally, stupid!), The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. (you'll have to look it up yourself, because I'm tired of linking it, and no-body reads it anyhow) He documents that what we know of as consciousness didn't really exist until some time of critical civilizing mass. And it really wasn't until about the time of Christ, when history started being written down routinely, that mankind stopped hallucinating some kind of God's voice directly into their heads.

Which would mean that everyone was kind of crazy then too, before we got civilized, but at least we were all of the same species. Except their minds hadn't broken down yet. I'm guessing that if you took Walt Disney back to that time, he could interbreed there just fine. In fact, I think that would be scientifically provable, well, except for the sending Disney back in time part, which is just plain stupid to think about. Not as stupid as freezing yourself for eternity, but pretty stupid.

You see, I'm pretty much of the opinion, and I hold to this pretty tightly, that it was the written language which really allowed us to develop into what we now are so very proud of, our humanity. Our unicameral mind. OK, it's bicameral, but with an information superhighway to connect the halves.

And the really interesting thing is that over there in China which is also on the information superhighway, which I know a little bit about since I actually watched them digging the trenches for it, although not that much, but way more than you, likely, if you're reading this in English. I mean if you don't know English really well, you wouldn't have a clue what I'm saying here, so yeah, I'm pretty confident I know more about at least the Chinese language than you do.

And yeah, I'd be pretty afraid of being targeted by some sort of fundamentalist death squad (if only that were a contradiction in terms like it should be) but I have no fear because they apparently can't read. Hey hey, I'm not talking about all fundies, just the ones who might form death squads. I feel pretty safe from that quarter, because they'd have even less of a clue what I'm talking about than those folks who grew up reading only crazy squiggles on the page.

But so, here's how I would make things out. Since it's the writing which defines our consciousness, and since it's really been a scant trio of millennia since we've really gotten any writing down, maybe our next step in human evolution has barely gotten started, and we're just looking in the wrong direction. They say you never know what hit you when you're about to evolve. Well, I say that.

So, it didn't work to segregate the sexes because that just creates a kind of comedy of evolutionary errors making everybody want to kill the homosexuals who aren't even in the game, for chrissakes. And the Internet has almost guaranteed that everyone thinks with one mind, even when they think they're speaking, say, Chinese.

So it isn't the divergent languages which are going to create the breeding barrier. Although some people liken the Eastern tradition to the feminine and the West to the masculine, but it's not like a whole civilization can make brave new babies. That still has to happen one on one. For a while yet, I imagine.

Lots of pseudo-quasi scientistic types, even ones who win Nobel prizes, get captured by the lure of Eugenics. I think they're a little too impressed with themselves, that they want to promote a kind of breeding program for high IQ types. Not realizing that all they'd get is weird looking purebreds, who have all sorts of inbreeding diseases, and could never make it in the wild. Imagine a world of Mensans and I think you might get the picture about how strange that might be. If you don't know any Mensans, because they can be a little secretive or shy about it, imagine a world bred to favor Trekkies, say. You get the idea.

No, what I'm talking about is that we really shouldn't keep working to get along. We really shouldn't try any longer to get the Godists to understand science, and well, we also really shouldn't try to get the believers in the Geek Rapture to believe in God.

Oh, you got me. Damn! You're right. These types don't yell and scream and threaten murder nearly often enough. I mean the Geek Rapture trekkie Mensa types all seem pretty open minded. You meet a lot of them at the Burning Man festival out in Nevada. And a lot of the Godists take to heart their commandments not to kill.

But really now, what if we civilized types - you know who you are - instead of encouraging more openness and light, what if we were to simply encourage the growing schism. You know, let the loonies who believe in the Rapture, the Geek variety or otherwise, let them keep on preparing for it.

Of course it means that they'll keep fouling our nest with their ignorant refuse as livers for eternity. Well, unless they drink like me, in which case they'll have a problem with their livers, which are the body's way of cleaning up the refuse, in this case the refuse of bacteria. They can't do it forever.

I know I know. It would seem that they are taking down the rest of us at the same time as they take down themselves, especially by all this happy talk about how God or Science will rescue us from our bad behavior. It's not the greatest way to evolve.

The more they live for eternity, the more they crap up the world as it is. But those of us who learn to survive drunk on their refuse might be the new humanity. Maybe they're killing themselves off too slowly, but if you eschew reality, unlike us drunks, eventually you're living in castles in the sky and eventually you die. As long as we don't interbreed, and I think we won't, then maybe we won't die with them.

The breeding lines are clarifying after all. I know I'd rather marry down in race (no offense, please, I mean if I recognized a down in race, which I don't) than marry a true believer. Even if she were as compliant as a Cherry 2000, which I understand lots of those true believers are, I really couldn't tolerate the daily cognitive Stepford dissonance. I really don't think I could.

I guess I'm saying I'd rather marry a real dummie than marry someone who believes that humanity was created a scant five thousand years ago. I mean a smart person who believes that. The dummy would have a reasonable excuse, and maybe like James Joyce's wife, would pack my shit away or freeze me when I die.

But you have to get what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a whole new species. A new environment is what creates the evolutionary pressure for that.

I'm guessing you would rather marry a dummie too, if you have actually read this far. So, yeah, lets evolve ourselves right out of this trouble we're in. At some point they'll all drop away in their rapture (we'll know what it really is, Hale-Baba-reebop) and then we'll inherit the earth.

Sure it will be a messy place, but that's what we'll have evolved for. Well have learned to grow Strontium 90 beets, and raise fallout shelter mushrooms, and we'll have done it the old fashioned way, a little bit at a time. We'll be the lucky ones who opted out early from the insanity so much now in fashion. We'll inhabit castles in the glowing muck, but they'll be castles all the same.

My oscillation overthruster is heading into farcical overdrive. I almost believe it would be easier to just evolve our way out of our troubles than to get any of the enraptured people to go along with me toward good living here on earth.

Glorify God - Evolve Beyond Belief! (extinguish godophobia)

Yay! Finally, it's out there, the huckster come-on to end all come-ons, the billboard at the end of the universe, the signpost to eternity, the answer to the question of what's it all about? Life, the Universe, and Everything?

I confess, of course, that this is not original with me. Somewhere on the Internet I found a reference to an actual combative billboard "Glorify Darwin - Evolve Beyond Belief!", but I don't want to be combative. I don't really want to be ironical either. I guess I really do aspire to funny, but there's scant hope of that.

But really now, what is belief? I have plenty of faith that the sun will come up tomorrow (and that if it doesn't there's utterly no point in thinking about it). I have about the same faith that the ground will be there when I place one foot in front of the other.

And I have utterly no interest to know what becomes of "me" after I die. Alright, like Tom and Huck and Joe, I'm curious, but it's not that big a mystery.

That's the part which will stick in some people's craw. But I really don't get why it should. I don't extend beyond my skin, do I? Why should I extend beyond my time span? Why would I want to?

I can't even be defined as me without some shapely boundaries to contain me. They have a recognizable and persistent form, each and every one of them, and like my squiggle on the dotted line when I sign my name, I can see me in an instant, even if others might be fooled.

My motions and emotions also leave distinctive traces, shaped in others' hearts and minds even while not reproducible. Except indirectly through words or movies or others' tellings you might know me. It is the me that's not quite reproducible. I guess they know it when they see it, my friends and family. Most can tell the mockery from the real me, even as I cringe beneath it, finding too much of me sometimes, in what others reflect back.

Sure, I have had plenty of occasion to be unnerved, finding myself where I didn't know I was. Sometimes I even have the pleasant discovery of my very own work, years and years later, still holding up. I can hardly credit it as mine, but then the memories start flooding in. Oh yeah, that was me! I recognize my signature shortcomings, the slip-ups of my chisels, right along with what I did that endures.

I have even more experience with someone mistaking me for someone else that they have known. I guess I have a common enough face, or maybe it's distinct enough that it rings a bell which triggers a memory of someone else distinct? Yeah, that must be it. Surely there's no-one who can be mistaken for moi?

Or what about when some old highschool classmate remembers me and I don't remember him? I get the name first, the face slowly resolving into something vaguely familiar, but still I can't make who he was when I actually knew him come back to mind quite presently. It happens all the time with former students.

I know that I have a weakness in that regard. I find it impossible to remember song lyrics, which is my lame defense against inevitable allegations of being absorbed in myself when I don't remember who you are. Absurdly, I studied classical Chinese poetry in college, a discipline which utterly depends on memorizing a massive literary corpus. Talk about misplacement!

A signal memory in my life was being selected to play Father Time back in kindergarten. I flubbed my lines, and couldn't stop laughing up on stage, holding a staff as I remember, my head covered in a ridiculous white sheet covered in cotton balls that I had made myself.

I have no memory of whether the audience of parents was laughing with me, or if I peed my pants. I do know that no-one ever made the mistake again to put me in any theatrical leads. (Well, except for when I tried to introduce the Chinese acrobats - in Chinese no less! - for a fundraiser to rescue the failing school I then was heading. I'm pretty sure I flubbed that one too).

I'm pretty sure Mom was mortified for me, or was she too laughing uncontrollably? I'll see if she remembers when I see her later tonight. I hate to pin my shyness on her without checking my facts, but let's hope she's quite forgotten.

What you really do remember about someone is what animates those familiar shapes; in particular the face, though one old classmate told me she only recognized me by my walk. I guess otherwise I might have passed unnoticed and unremarked.

I have a moustache and wear glasses, which means that my entire faculty could mock me once, all of them up on stage, putting on five and dime store Groucho Marx noses, and each or was it all sporting maybe one or two of what they thought I might not have seen about myself the way that they did. If it was love or hatred, I had to take it all the same, and will not soon forget it. I am too bashful to claim love, but I will choose it every time. It chains me to my pain, and kept me fighting for that school too, which fight I also flubbed.

Gradually, usually, you remember the person as an identity. In common parlance, you remember their heart; or at least the heart of the thing you remember is whatever it is that does, in fact, remain constant over all the years of our lives. It's not a static quality. It's an animating force. It defines an individual.

Imagine if it didn't! We then would die over and over again in the course of just one "life". I know some tricksters try for that, some sociopathic liars. We hear all the time about people waking up one day to find out who their spouse really was.

I don't mean the sexual infidelities, I mean the really big stuff. We're just fooling ourselves if we don't think the thinker in our pants has a mind of its own. Drawn as it is to beauty it must impale or torture or treat as dirt even while the controlling mind conjurs words like soulmate. And fear defines your makings up too, all liars to yourselves. Especially when you insist that she must like it when you act like a perfect beast. Especially when you think that you must be in control.

But did those people ever really live? I'm not talking about the one who got fooled. I'm talking about the trickster. I've had occasion to wonder if being "born again" can also be a way to hide instead of to own up to who you really are. Disappearing from social commerce to bury your nose in rote-ish words. Escaping to some wilderness. Hiding behind rules of behavior and dress. Formulaic "praise god" greetings.

Why not call that thing which identifies us for our whole life long our heart? I've always liked the fact that in Chinese the metaphor of center - their term for heart - indicates both the literal and figurative center; in English the emotive heart as well as the intellectual mind. They even use a similar term to define their state, although it seems they might have betrayed its character lately. The Central Construct ("Middle Kingdom" so passé).

Here in the West, we still seem pretty caught up with beginnings and endings. With a causal universe - a created universe - and with our own ability to take control, through technology's extension of our grasp, of as much as we possibly can.

Now those Godless Chinese are proving to be even more predatory than we are in their gougings of the Earth. Let's hope they find their Center again, lest their recurrent epochal re-carvings of manly patterns on the face of too-wild earth finally does destroy it. Unless we in the West get to it first. Our race is still for the wilderness, the outer space, the rapture, the end of it all, the perfect perpetual motion machine.

The entire civilization of the globe now is under our American Corporatocratic thumb, as innocently propagated as blue jeans. Let's hope that civilization itself is not destroyed by this mad importation by China, just for example, of something which makes their notion of civilization - the placing of heart in Earth's wildness by bringing the constancy of the heaven's down here to everchanging Earth, which is what the term for "writing", radically, means - let's hope that this fine figure does not get fully displaced by Western machinery for the carving of dragons.

Let's hope we regain our balance first.

In the West we feel still compelled to separate our control center from our responsive emotive center - our mind from our heart - and somehow feel, almost desperately, that when we lose control, we've lost our life. Forgetting that we have almost no control over what others think of us; at least none that technology can help with. Unless you're willing to accept the airbrushed photoshopped object as the person you really do love.

We have lots of control over how we respond to those around us. And a large part of what might get called our character relates intimately to how gracefully we leave off where we don't belong. How we zip our pants. How we enclose our private spaces.

We do end at our skin, yes, and before these last very few centuries of civilized history, our physical control mostly ended at and with our fingers.

Our fingernails such weak tools for gouging, it has been our toolmaking which enabled our peak survival as Earth's temporarily most fit creatures.

Still more recently, we learned to project our hearts out across space and even time, through writing and its related technologies. Through media, more generally. And now our media has become massive in a two-way direction, dear God!

What would have happened in China way back when the written language was always and only a technology for truing hearts toward civilization's center, where a living Imperial Superstar did actually live? Where bureaucrats were trained in poetry, but where the Imperial accountings also worked their way through language. What would mass literacy have done to that Imperial Church? Would it have exposed their deep corruption? Would people have demanded direct relationships to their own truths?

How very nice of Google now, to help China's single party put the governor on this gathering movement, though they say, at least, the fact that something's being blocked is still exposed, if not the thing that's stoppered.

I'm not waiting for the 'Net now dialogic to come awake. But I sure am waiting for the mass-mediated people to do so. And honestly, I don't really know from Left or Right, which side has the best moral compass. I do know who's shouting loudest now. Who lacks all grace. But none who represent us may be the best of us right now. And shouting is sometimes all that's left, when you feel ignored and marginalized.

Now there seem to be some among us, literally enraptured by our technologies, who think that "information technologies" will extend our controlling reach into some kind of infinity. I recently learned that a term had been coined for this: the Geek Rapture. Peels of howling laughter from this quarter (hey, I'm a geek).

Intelligence is as intelligence does, and I don't think it's very smart to separate, even in language, our emotional from our intellectual center. I will never actually care that much for my machines.

When my control ends, I am not dead and gone. I might easily be in love, enraptured by what I find around me, giving myself over to something that rightly is not only more powerful than me, but that I wouldn't want to control even if I could. When my intelligence stops, I might simply be sleeping or drugged or taking a break to let some mediated entertainment in. I might be meditating. I might be listening.

And I also do think that even though I end right at my skin, there is also a me which can be conjured from all the ones who know me and have known me and that sometimes that me is more me than the one I think I know myself. The one I think I inhabit. I mean after all, there are lots and lots of things about myself I just can't stand to look at, think about or emotionally own up to.

My own mom now is at that scary place in her life. She just bought some very expensive lenses to replace the ones she was born with which had become clouded over with cataracts. Thank goodness, as with my home mortgage, the money brokers aren't allowed to discriminate on the basis that I'll be dead before it's paid for.

Well, OK, in the case of my home mortgage, it's just space and land to be bought and sold, and I'm already getting out of that market. I'm too old to keep up with owning a house already (there's a wink in there somewhere).

But I wouldn't have the choice if someone matched the actuarial tables against the paydown mortgage schedule. Hell, if you dig deeply enough, I think you'll find those two concepts even share a set of linguistic or at least mathematical roots.

But I am glad there is no-one telling Mom that she won't live long enough to take full advantage of her new bionic eyes. And I rather hope that when I'm there on my deathbed, as my dear uncle "Bud" was just yesterday, society will be humane enough to give me the choice not to live out my last moments in terror and in pain.

I rather hope that the Godists - the ones who think they have a patent on what God could mean - will have relinquished their stranglehold on what we can say in public and still become a leader. I hope that they will have learned to relinquish their fear, and to find something more like faith than their far too hotly protested "beliefs".

Their faith in God, those Bible thumping evangelicals and Taliban - now there's a fine distinction - seems about as odd as would be my belief if I doubted that the sun would come up tomorrow. I think they have no faith at all. I think they protest way too much. I think they are terrified of what they do not feel, but unlike Mother Theresa, say, don't even continue to act as if they do. I think they are God-o-phobes. There, now I'll lay claim to that term. People who must destroy what they are afraid of in themselves.

I get the power of being "born again," I really do. It's a way to take on a new character, to shed the old that by its being clung to meant clinging to all the mistakes and flaws and fallings short which cannot be rectified except up against something so much more powerful and mysterious and graceful than anything wrought by man.

I get that. I get that truing oneself against words which have rung true across the generations is probably a good idea. I get that there are many many Christians who live their faith, and that young Muslims who strap bombs to their bodies, when they aren't tricked into it, are earnest in their approach to something beyond earthly power.

But the spirit dies even in words. These words, especially when forced into the artificial man-made container of literalness, into which no words - none - can be made to fit, are long dead, and their purveyors are pandering fear now. Love is a far simpler matter than the mystery they would make it.

As if we could interfere with God by taking things into our own hands. As if the Earth would allow it, never mind some reified projection of what man would do if he were perfect. My God is so far beyond man that he doesn't even have a name. Hell, call him Bud.

It is simple care that we must exercise as humans. Not infinite care. Not terrorized capitulation to some human words which inflated hypocrites mesmerized by their own voices scare us into thinking came from God. God doesn't need to speak to me in human language for me to glorify his sacred heart. Hell, I'd say the human language can only get in the way.

I'd say it's long past time to stop the shouting and the pointing fingers, and the sowing seeds of mistrust.

And, for my kicker, I actually do think that love should direct the course of evolution. I actually think it always has. And always will. Any other construing of the far-fetched and nearly infinitely long string of accidents which have become us rings hollow, cold, empty and devoid of meaning.

Hallelujah, for I'm a bum. Today my bank balance passes zero in the wrong direction. Again. But I'll own up to my one and only identity, and challenge every last born-again to come out of their sinning closet too. It is not my "soul" which endures. That is a dusty abstraction, designed to make me wish and long for an eternity which will never come. It is my heart which will never end if only I let if fill now.

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?