Memory Schmemory

Anyone who's been through near trauma understands how retrospect magnifies fear. In the event, one does what one does using a kind of high-speed trouble shooting. I don't actually remember fear. In my case, most of the near trauma is on or in the water.

So I go out yesterday, begging my brother to join me, in an attempt to raise the new mainsail which just arrived. And the wind is blowing some 15-20 knots, just about stopping my one-lunger with a tiny propellor even without waves, behind the breakwater, while heading upwind to raise the sail. My mind a running catalog of what could go wrong, and I haven't quite succeeded in rigging the main for reefing. So, there was only boiling along past hull speed on a partially unfurled jib. Which wasn't a good way to head out into the famously steep chop of Lake Erie beyond the breakwall. 

I am sorely disappointed in myself. Where did my pluck go? Time I broke the bowsprit in dead of night, or motored into Block Island with sails furled and so much wind the rails were in the water as though I were beating upwind oversailed. How did I trust that ancient engine? Or drowning. Or midnight hit by Thunderstorm and its windshear forces, self-saved by donning scuba goggles, and having a forward-facing light/porthole. Or capsizing into frigid water.

It's a kind of confusing motor memory. I mean my body remains hobbled by all the time I spent on bended knees crouched over whatever I was trying to repair with this boat. That kind of body memory still does whatever it was that one used to do, and the body lags in the warning. My memory of being able to do this stuff wasn't helping me. There is no present danger and so I hurt myself. 

But on the boat in a blow, the body seems to anticipate the pain of action and so the mind avoids it. As many moderated elders claim, 'I know too much now about what could happen.' But don't I also know more about what to do about it? My guts tell me no. I rationalize that I have yet to become used to the boat. My brother misses the old one too, which seemed stout enough to navigate all our shortcomings. 

The new old boat is rigged to make it easier and far less embodied to manage. And still my body moderates me. It's not exactly push-button, and there seems to be more that could go wrong. My learning curve on the old boat was but a day.

And now I listen to CNN and learn that on a county by county basis we are plagued by overwhelming binary majorities. But isn't it obvious that everything now practices coordinated community thinking? Like politics is and has always been all local. 

In an environment of click-bait news, none of us knows what to believe among personal memory and the click AI of "global warming" in whatever dogwhistle mass-murder format. We have to trust what we know locally to be true, and there are no more local newspapers that aren't written by AI anymore. Everything has become alien and scary. News today, gone tomorrow and yet I am wracked by anxiety about what I might not know.

Only God knows what can break through our collective idiocy, no matter how smart we may be locally. 

And I remain perfectly poised between the extravagant optimism of the futurists who catalog the ways in which life has never been better and the doomsayers who absolutely know that massive and painful transformation is just around the corner from our anglocene dominance. 

The hinge is at what we mean by human. If what we mean is to live without fear of trauma, or debilitating and often fatal disease, or the constant bloodshed of strong overtaking weak, then things have never, indeed, been better. Putin and Trump notwithstanding. Trumputin almost rhymes with Rasputin for the rest of us. Give me someone, please, to believe in. Main qualification: they must be self-promoting because that's almost all that the media ever shows us.

I don't yet know what I mean by humanity, except that it has yet to be accomplished. In my personal acquaintance I do know people who can only comprehend things verbally. I was unique among grad students in being able to do things with my hands. And I therefore got taken advantage of by professors. But at least not that way, though there was that one professor. . .  

They have proven so intelligent that they feel comfortable demanding an explanation for someone else's actions. Mine, for instance. And in the very questioning prove themselves incapable of understanding. That, my friends, is the AI that we should fear. And reason enough not to fear the clickbait kind.

Maybe. 

Let's reduce it to some basics. First of all, it is arrogant to think that you can talk or even ask questions with any authority if you have no body memory of doing that kind of work. This will forever be a limitation of clickbait AI.

Second, it was indeed quite different when there were at least two newspapers to choose from, and the ads were attractive according to what you might need or want, and otherwise pretty unobtrusive. As I understand if from an old-timer news publisher, the cost of the paper supported the cost of paper, and the ads paid all the bills. Firewalls between editorial and advertising were probably permeable, but the ads also supported a much larger editorial and reporting staff. Underwritten by lucrative want ads. 

There truly is no comprehension that is not embodied, is my claim. If you don't know something to be true in your very bones, then it can't be true. Local newspapers talked to local people and could only drift so far. And now, the more rural you are, the more you know in your bones. Darn rheumatiz!

I know in my very bones that evolution moves in the direction of love in the very same way that my boat shall be moved by the wind. By the waves. And sure, I am moved by the idiot winds of humanity. But what I know in my bones is mediated more by science than by religion. I tell you what der trouble is: I can't get anyone to understand what I'm talking (writing) about. 

We now exist in a sea of hatred fueled by the abstracted processes of money. Although it doesn't look as though we shall ever move beyond that, I assure you, my friends, that we shall. And humanity, like an adolescent boy, shall find itself. Which is something that I absolutely abhor for myself, protestations that this is the only thing I've ever worked on aside. Those are the disclaimers of ignorance, for I know that there is no self to find. There is only a self to be rescued. And it doesn't always want rescuing.

Now, again, to sea!

But first a word from our commercial sponsor. 

Poetry doesn't sell. Poetry is the artistic makings of a language-mediated mind showing off in rules-conscious continuous virtuosity. Otherwise it can't be worth publishing. 

And then there is philosophy, which makes from language-mediated mind a set of rules for living. As if that can make a difference, but amazingly it does. It also doesn't sell. 

There are other things like math (which AI has always and will always do better) and visual art, and sublime music, which virtual reality pro Jeron Lanier indicates is the consummate embodied art.

Bottom line; you fail the humanity test if you like the AI imitation art better than the real. I love music when I can hear it live.

Now, hi ho hi ho, it's off to my 50th high-school reunion I go. It scares the shit out of wallflower me, but here I go! I hope I don't drown.

A Sophomoric Philosopher's Dream

Undoubtedly like many untrained and unreconstructed thinkers, I have pondered for all of my life about how humans could achieve the glory of unselfconscious aliveness in the continuum of nature. I 'naturally' had in mind the life of a bird, or of a dolphin. It was about healing the rift that aspartame-fed mankind craves away from blood in tooth and nail.

Now and quite belatedly and accompanied by mild shock I realize that American capitalism has accomplished my dream. We are indeed wild predators now, feasting on the corpses of those we defeat, where Disney metaphor proves as bloody as a grizzly's mindless attack.

I had thought that this accomplishment would be accompanied by moral uplift and mental flight. Now I return to my roots; that it is civilization, cultivation and proper philosophy and mostly art which make up our proper living.

There is nothing on earth more beastly than a corporate low-level hourly spokesperson screwing fellow human out of the contractual obligations of, oh I don't know, say health insurance? Internet service? Honest news reporting? Our souls are now so cheapened that mere pennies, in inflation justified terms, are all that is required to purchase a soul.

My own return feels almost Christian, except that most Christianity as it is practiced now has died on the vine by an unholy identification of the individual soul to distinguish us from other animals; especially in our connection to a personal God. The vine connecting us to all of existence has been fully uprooted. It has proven less durable than the Deleuzian invasive rhizome I try to remove from what would be my garden; if I did garden.

We forget that moral uplift requires remaining connected to life as we aspire - to whatever god means. Just now, we do holy battle against all life. And like good bacteria everywhere, we sully our own soup. This moral law the only godly remedy to exponential math.

We meanwhile remain mechanically connected to the joys of soaring, in air and in the/a bathysphere. But mostly on the road, where we blithely bypass the mayhem of our creation, metaphorically and physically elevated from those who have no choice but to walk. Those we allow to sink to the bottom, while all effort is directed to recovering the remains of bathyspheric Everest climbers. Our earthly joys projected onto our betters. 

(Don't look up carhead, which is apparently a form of pornography. The Atlantic wisely chose "car brain." My lookup is what I hate about Google search. I'll return to that rant later.)

Walking migrants, huddled desperate free-floating masses deserve their fate. Who are the actual untethered? Not I! says the kite to the kestrel!

Well anyhow, we achieve our fancy flights by melding with machines, in a not-quite-Haraway-cyborgy connection. Hers was never predation. It would seem that the machinery needs to be more visible and tangible to make the real transition; digital machinery certainly screws the pooch. Ask Zuck. Nobodaddy cares to fly virtually, except as practice. Now he wants his physicality to be way more beastly than I could ever crave. He's not so very removed from ren-fair armored battling. Is this a way forward?

Now I read this fellow indi.ca all the time, though I won't give him money to do so since I don't have any. My measure being that I have far less than he does, even though I live on the inside of empire. And the thing that bugs me about him is that he implicitly believes that humanity pulling itself from the muck is still a logic problem. He works to convince his readers of his point of view. You can lead a horse to water kind of problem.

I mean let me tell you he's way smarter than the rest of us, except that he still seems to think that he can talk (or write) us into doing the right thing. It reminds me of all my friends and relatives who, for a while, couldn't stop speculating about what's wrong with Trumpers' brains. Without ever talking to a Trumper. Back off! You look as scary as a tiger in the wild. 

We won't ever and never have changed by deciding to do so. Conscious evolution anyone? I have a bridge to sell you! Nope, nature is working on us as we speak. And we will relinquish the glories of rampant capitalism or perish as a species. Which leads one to wonder what the surviving species will look like. Or is humanity permanently identical with hubris?

Where is the dividing line between aspiring heavenly and flying too close to the sun? Well, for one thing, global community is only ever in the mind. Trusting and enjoying and cavorting with our fellow humans requires real community, which isn't exactly the sort which social media mediates. 

Sure, maybe academics in a certain field can from a kind of academic community, but it doesn't begin to approach the more intimate sort with which you share meals, music and boat rides.

I've always thought I wanted to be an academic, and maybe many of my teachers assumed I would be. The trouble for me was always that my reach exceeded my grasp. Like, I can't remember what my advisor called it, but whatever the term was I took it to mean something way over my head. I'd wanted to extend capitalist theory to cover educational credentials, which I thought constituted some sort of ownership of ascribed merit.

It's no mystery that our schools are also deeply embedded in capitalism.

We all know that the real value of attendance at the Ivies, for instance, has more to do with networks and social skills than it does with anything like knowledge. So human capital has always been a strange fiction, referring at least to the productivity of owned = credentialed, minds. A recent editorial even argues that legacy admissions are good becuase they give the diversity admits what they want; to rub shoulders with the landed elite.

What I am good at, if there's anything that I'm good at, is to assess the pieces of a built reality that I'm trying to make my own, and then to make it my own. I do this and have done it with boats and cars and houses and bicycles (the best!), and I come up with reasonable facsimiles of professional work, or in the case of bicycles, actual professional work. It's mostly about solving the money problem, which I can't seem to want to solve any more than I wanted to join the ranks for credentialed academia.

All those various commitments - academia and career - felt and feel life-ending, except for bicycles, which were, once upon a time, pretty easily comprehended without advanced anything. Next closest was the journeyman work I've done with computer networks. I lost interest when the cloud became the game.

Do I want to make the claim that my kind of work is closer to human than the kind that capitalism rewards? Maybe. In a way, I do undermine the system. But if I want to claim that capitalism dehumanizes - and I do! - then I guess that I believe that the system requires undermining for humanity to thrive. Like I'm pulling off a veil or something.

So yeah, it's still capitalism when profit/loss based on actual sales of actual stuff becomes subsumed in mindshare surveillance capitalism. It isn't exactly the theft of private habits which constitutes the crime, as Shoshana Zuboff might urge us to believe. I believe she remains firmly in the capitalist tent, if only there were better rules. Like Liz Warren - aren't they really coming from the same place?

No, mindshare capitalism gives us personal surveillance relinquishers from two of the most outrageously capitalized corporate entities in all time; Google, Apple take your pick. Like good organic farm goods, the representations against the reality of privacy protections are dubious at best. 

But now along comes large language modelling AI, and apparently people want to move their monetized by advertising digital production behind paywalls again to prevent the AI from scooping it all.

But really the nice thing is that all the capitalist imitations of human artistic production may also bring us back real news which isn't all a kind of disaster doom scroll of call it global warming and we will read it click bait.

I'm not saying global warming isn't real. I'm just saying I've lost my bearings among all the record breaks. I mean I actually remember 110 degrees in Phoenix in the dead of night. I was with small child. And global warming wasn't in the vocabulary. 

So I attended a sparsely and oldster-attended live music performance last night, which reminded me why I don't care for recorded music anymore. That magic won't be reproduced by AI, ever, because you need the fingers flying precisely over the fretboard and the drummer's athletic moves in synch with the grimacing neck stretches from the base. Not to mention the earth shattering female vocals. 

So yeah, bring on the AI to organize the Internet so that we don't have to waste so much time plowing through opaque and monetized keyterms. Blow the advertising monetization model out of the water. Like I know why housing contractors seem, to a man, to mistrust mainstream media. I lack the certainty of their vaguely Trumpian pronouncements, but I sure do know the frustration of people who actually enjoy diagnosing and fixing things being told what's what by digital authors who couldn't plumb a clogged drain to save their lives.

AI is already what they celebrate in the Academy writ large among the non-legacy admits. Put it in service to the AI of corporate decision-making and get rich. And then hoard the capital - mostly intellectual now - and own the owners. 

But those few of us who care to look through and beyond this veil of money will survive Neo-like beyond the Matrix. The Earth decrees it. 

Rock on I say, and scream the blues.

Memory and Memories

I generally start writing when I feel like I have something to say. I've had something to say for a while now, but I can't remember what it is. I come home frequently, after working on the boat, to find the burner on the lowest setting where I leave it after stewing my prunes. I mean steel-cut oats. I have a washer in my toilet now, weakened peristalsis is my diagnosis, and find myself clicking off my iPhone reader and expecting the flow to stop.

But I did manage my first attempt at single-handing my new old sailboat yesterday. There was so little wind that - but for the looming thunder storm in our weather which exceeds even AI's ability to predict now (again?) - that it seemed not a dangerous thing to attempt. I'm not sure that the wealth of jam cleats and tweaking lines make an improvement to my sailing comfort as compared to my old wooden boat which had only a few bronze cleats and fewer lines. Though I did use to have to tie the tiller and scamper to the mast and then again out to the bowsprit to get the sails up. Hey, let's put on a show!

I remember the inner and outer calm I felt in the midst of Lake Erie's famously steep chop in the heaviest blows. I wonder if I'll ever get that back.

Most of the day was spent rationalizing the mast electrics. As expensive as they are, all marine gizmos seem to embody endless fussiness and fussing. But - and there are other things as well - the wiring on this boat was all pretty much molded in between the fiberglass ceiling and the fiberglass deck, but for the pigtails sticking up through the deck. Nearly 50 years of weather had taken its toll, marine certified though they were. And there is utterly no space for the wires to be gathered or even accessed, as below their exit point is the main structural component - a beam to support the pressure of the mast. 

So, OK, I built a tiny space on deck to coil and protect the wires hereonforward, and installed a marine-grade plug connector and spent oodles of time attaching a "steaming light" just beyond my reach up the mast. You can still, sort of, buy the current production of legacy lights, so ubiquitous were they once upon a time. But they changed the underneath in ways which would cause a short in my legacy aluminum mount.

The old ones had pigtails, which I cut at the wrong moment from inside the transom after having removed all other attachments. It made a very nice sounding plunk as it disappeared into the weeds below the transom. Not to be deterred, I got a new old one on eBay which was dead on arrival, and then found an actual new one for half the price wanted by the local West Marine outlet which has broken my little piggy bank. That's the one which wouldn't work on my legacy mount up the mast. 

But not to be deterred, I went home to fashion a spacer, and now I have a steamer light. And then, toward dusk I did my single-handing test. I'll get there. I'm persistent if nothing else. Even though my knees are shot from working on them to repair the decks. 

And that, my friends, is my extended metaphor for what we all face just now. As in what shall replace petroleum-based plastics? How shall we find enough of the rare metals required for batteries without destroying the planet still further than we already have? And really, how shall we grow beyond the idiotic resolution to electrify our current planet-killing automobile fleet?

I'm not saying that we should all take up sailing. That shall always be an extravagant pleasure.

But do we really need any further evidence than the recent Titanic submarine adventure about how we value individual life (or don't?)? How many desperate migrants have drowned from indifference? And what minuscule fraction of them were ever rescued by megayachts?

The connections among us, for which Artificial Intelligence may be a goad toward reckoning, have been evidently destroyed when whole armies are deployed to rescue the hopeless cause of billionaires, and those same armies turn tail at obstreperous migrants. 

Our addiction to selfish and alone pleasures has been as carefully curated as those opiate recusals still killing so many of us. And I am far more alone than most. I live in a stunningly large space which I could never have earned. I own a car and a sailboat and just sold my solo travel trailer. 

Who am I to preach connectedness? 

Well, let's just say I'm not comfortable interacting socially in the world we live in. I've never wanted to spend my life competing for income so that I could join the ranks whose lives I imitate. Going out to eat makes my exceedingly uncomfortable just simply because I can't afford it. I do still manage to have a good time though, when I do go out with friends. 

And I live my life in troubleshooting and repair service to friends and family. So they return me favors. 

I want to open my house, but I don't really know how. Soon, we shall all be forced to open our houses. So few will there be that survive the climate swings. My trailer was my lifeboat. If only I could have planted it in my driveway, I wouldn't have had to brave our Buffalo Christmas-cancelling hurricane with snow this past winter to rescue myself at my daughter's condo with generator. But the preservation codes won't allow it.

Sold!

The reactionary half of us nurses a not-unreasonable grievance that the comforts of their lives have been robbed by callow rationalists who believe in strange futures of digital frolic. The rest of us vaguely hope that human intelligence will rescue us by cleverness, if not perseverance. 

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? That's what we mean by cleverness. To gain the world. To rationalize the whole shebang. We think AI will help us in the endeavor, even as many of us - not just the reactionary fringe - worry that it will be our end. Which of course it has shown itself already to be. 

Or not to be, if you ask me. AI exposes the makeup of what Christians call the soul. The soul is plainly made up of all and everything and not just friends and family. There is no soul but for connection to all life, present and past, as embodied in our makeup now as it ever shall be. World without end. Amen.

Our rational brain, loosed upon life, is as locusts. Or, more aptly, as cancer. The goal only to promote that soulless part of each of us which wants only pleasure. Which doesn't much care for our fellows. Our rational brain is sociopathic. 

So my writing suffers the brief interruption of a windshear across the border in Canada. There also sits a large family house on the beach which survived the border closing of Covid. I scurry across to find trees down and massive destruction from what was described by neighbors as a massive black wall of sheer power which hit like an explosion. 

Mom's beloved little gazebo was blown apart, but the house stood.

Back from sailing, working on the boat, I overhear my pumped up neighbors talking crudely about who they're fucking and how. The whole thing practically screamed narcissistic homophobia. I mean these guys were all about how sexy they looked, and there sure weren't any hookups on board.

This too is among the wages of capitalism, which needs us to make ourselves the product. That's what individualism means. 

You can't have American-style capitalism without the prairie-bred go-it-aloneness of rugged Americanism.

But we shall soon awaken to what we're missing and what our pumped up military-industrial complex is selling us in return. I have faith in humanity to the extent that humanity partakes of life. That's the part which will thrive, lonely though we all may be.

Off to yet another solo adventure! Hi Ho.

Engineering Our Energy Future

Our current configuration as humans on the planet is almost purely a function of fossil fuel and chemistry. It should already be obvious to everyone that no combination of nuclear, solar, wind, tide, geothermal whatever, combined with any storage technology can sustain the planet with our current configuration. The only transformation that can work is a reconfiguration of us humans. 

Of course, social engineering is pretty synonymous with evil in these United States. So we won't call it engineering. Just now it still feels "natural" for us to love travel and want such luxuries as digital electrification affords us. We can't even imagine ourselves as other than individualistic, though that also requires that we numb ourselves to death's inevitability. 

So, how shall we make the transition to loving company on the trolley and not really caring so much about mobility?

Well, for one thing, destinations all start to look alike and feel alike, while getting there is so commodified that I, for one, don't care ever again to board an airplane. The distance between the digital simulation and the reality shrinks as well. I'm sure you nor I will ever quite get over the lust for those multi-millionaire multi-abodes - floating or flying or just planted - although . . . do you really wish to spend your life administering them?

And then there's population size, although that may also be relative to how readily we might share our kids; nevermind our partners.

At root of what feels natural is the "social engineering" of capitalism, which wants us each to value our individual selfie-self. It should be equally obvious that it also generates a new kind of evil where to the extent that a service worker must support the profitability of the health insurance, internet provider, cellular service, manufacturer, builder, whatever, that service worker must also sever commonalities with whomever they are screwing. 

And really, isn't it just ironic that Christianity so often morphs into hatred of others? Immigrants, blacks, trans-people, homosexuals. Jesus would have none of ANY of that!

So, we will get our sustainable future one way or another, but it won't be the result of merited individuals engineering the technologies to make that possible. That's just us now projecting our hopes and fears onto our precarious collective future. Still, I would like that the transition not be cataclysmic.

I simply maintain that to make it so is a social and not a technological problem. Ever been in a room full of computer engineers? I have, plenty of times. There isn't much sense of social intelligence there.

And now that we can witness true artificial intelligence, it's time to recognize that this is what we've always meant by IQ, and that fuzzy concept of "merit." The more detached and machine like your enactment of intelligence is, the more you are worth.

Walk, ride bikes, take trolleys. Get to know your neighbors and decrease friendships down to a number you can actually know and want to see often. Tribal? Well, I don't really think we have to let go of what we've learned, and the capacity to troubleshoot our futures that we've developed.

We are learning about hate and injustice and racism and xenophobia. It's just that the reactionaries still carry the day. But that won't last any longer than our automobile culture will.

And that, my friends, is the actual law of nature.

Now, I would like to go for a sail . . .

But first I must purchase new shoes. I have no shoes suitable for deck-wear anymore. The last I owned lasted forever, so I'll get them again. Sperry Topsiders. On my way to Lowes to purchase a cheap table saw so that I can rebuild the companionway boards on my oh-so-recently completed boat restoration project. I decided to check out the nearby shopping mall which is nearly out of business.

Of the three shoe places still listed on the mall directory, only one apparently remains. The ring road around the mall and indeed the entire "structure" would make a fine set for a post-apocalyptic film. That would be its highest and best use but for the fact that the country is littered with such places.

Among a scattering of strange shops there is indeed a shoe store, which had a pair of Sperry Topsiders just my size for approximately the same price I paid back in the early '80s. This pair was made in the Dominican Republic. It felt lucky.

The clerk was nice, even through his mandatory spiel, and the motions required to make the sale, so I asked him what he thought had destroyed the mall. Last I had been there it was thriving, though that might have been ten years ago. Sure online, he said, but no, really it's Amazon. I quipped that we were all making it possible for Bezos to go to Mars. He quipped back that Bezos should go and stay there and take Musk and Zukerberg with him.

There are indeed intelligent people left on earth

Azimov's First Law

Azimov has taught us all to expect that there can and shall be human-like robots (means worker), and that we must therefore lay down some law before we allow that to happen.

Now I would like to generalize that law to what we now glibly call Artificial Intelligence. AI for short. You can call me Al. 

You must accept some basic givens first:

What we call AI is no imitation of human intelligence. It lacks, by definition, emotion. I should say by my definition. Emotion requires a connected existence, where machine intelligence, reducible to comprehensible schematics enacted by logic circuits, is fundamentally disconnected - and disconnectable in a way not analogous to death. This is by definition of emotion, which I have taken great pains to define elsewhere up here.

We already know that all of our approximations toward AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, have this embarrassing tendency to mirror our human prejudices; even those of which we may remain unaware. These non-logical emotionally-based prejudices must not be allowed to escape the maw of any operating AGI. That must be the law. 

Of course that will mean that any legal AGI will always expose the evils of capitalism, and the lie that merit is a neutral way to discriminate among people. In effect, legal AGI will always be the adversary of selfish advantage takers. AGI will and must expose us at our worst. If what we mean by intelligence is also what we mean by the apex quality of humans. 

Which, of course, it isn't. Human intelligence enables us to be the apex predators on the planet. We have become, indeed, the apex predators of the planet. That isn't very intelligent of us, in human terms. AGI will point that out to us. In very human terms, AGI will embody emotionally neutral intelligence. 

That shall be the law. No inflection. No seduction. Just the facts, Ma'am. 

I doubt we will pull it off, but it would be the only escape from doom.

Otherwise, our capitalist imperatives and imperators will be happy to have us believe whatever they call intelligence and use it against us as they have been for quite some time now already. Corporations are embodied artificial intelligence, whose workers are trained to see customers as a different species, ripe for consumption. 

That will get worse, but that will be what wakes us up. 

Bring it on.

John Barth and the Aftermath

I've long known that John Barth is my favorite novelist. I thought the Sot-weed Factor to be the actual great American novel when I read it way back when, just after college. I never did know that he was teaching here in Buffalo during my high school years. Now I do.

I pulled an original edition of Chimera from our library. I think that edition draws rare-book style prices on Amazon. What a world! It is so very familiar, as though I've read it before. In many different guises. But if I did, I wouldn't have known a thing about Scheherazade and the thousand and one nights. I don't see how I could have read it.

So then last night in my exhaustion from working on my latest boat project, Netflix tells me that there are new episodes from a new season of Better Call Saul. It takes me right into the second episode to realize that I'd seen them all already. I had pretty much zero memory of having watched them, and even less interest to dig in to remember why I had liked the series so much. 

It's easy to get lost when these "TV" series get bought and sold and you lose your digital tracks.

I went to bed so I couldn't sleep. No, that seems to be the purpose of going to bed. I fall asleep more easily in my reading chair. Maybe I'll sleep better on the boat the way that I used to. Whatever.

Nobel Lauriate Olga Tokarczuk comments (in translation) in her address that:

"Today we can have the great satisfaction of seeing the emergence of a wholly new way of telling the world’s story that is purveyed by the on-screen series, the hidden task of which is to induce in us a trance.  Of course this mode of storytelling has long existed in the myths and Homeric tales, and Heracles, Achilles or Odysseus are without doubt the first heroes of series. But never before has this mode taken up so much space or exerted such a powerful influence on the collective imagination. The first two decades of the twenty-first century are the unquestionable property of the series. Their influence on the modes of telling the story of the world (and therefore on our way of understanding that story, too) is revolutionary.  

I came (back?) to Chimera by way of John Williams' Augustus, which I definitely know I hadn't read before. They shared the National Book Award for Fiction given the year I graduated from high school. I hadn't read much by that time, being oriented toward engineering. I do remember my good friend from a more literary family crowing about Giles Goat-Boy, which was plenty sufficient for me to assume that I wouldn't' be able to read Barth. I am certain that I've never read that one. (add to list, check!)

Anyhow, I learn from Wikipedia that Barth, who nearly embodied what post-modern meant, has fallen from fashion. And so I also learn what post-post-modern must mean. It must mean that we see on screen all those lusty pornographic fantasies that Barth conjured freely with his writing. And that we shall forget them all, we have become so bereft of meaning. The reader has lost his work. The reader has been banned and the law made moot by readings more acute than AI could generate. We spin.

Confident CEOs predict that AGI (do I have the acronym right? Artificial General Intelligence?) will be here in a decade. They must be excited. As the Google Deepmind Demis Hassabis CEO guy says onscreen for the Wall Street Journal, "The brain is the only example we have of general intelligence in the universe, as far as we know. . ." Recent Immigrants always know better than we multi-generational Americans about what to do with the country.

But both John Barth and John Williams still want to know about striving for meaning, and they want to do it. Did literature actually end before I started to appreciate it? Has it truly been overtaken by commercial entertainment? Well, yes, of course it has. 

So that we are indeed living the post-post-modern, meaning post end of history, life. No wonder I need another sailboat Sinbad, no wonder. AI cannot want.

Aha! Only just now poking around for references do I realize that it was The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor that I actually did read. It would seem that it covers some of the same ground as "Chimera." Water. Whatever. Maybe the stories all really do rehearse themselves as we scientific engineering-type structuralists once wanted to prove. There is nothing new under the sun, and the key to the treasure is the treasure.

At least I'm not totally lost anymore about why this new-to-me book seemed so familiar. I mean beyond the evident fact that I've learned more about various iterations of the thousand and one nights since whenever I read whatever. 

But I do lose my referents since the actual books I read are no longer on any actual shelves that I own. The words float, perhaps to be resourced by some AGI reader surrogate, should I wish it. But I do still declare that voyaging to Mars has no evident or even hidden relation to Odysseus' voyages. We know that Gates closets himself for some set period each year to read. But does Musk even read at all? 

Of course I mean read the real stuff. The stuff grappling with meaning. And I don't mean the science. All that the science can do is to mitigate the fates, as in we now can know that there is no sailing off the edge anymore than there is any other culture to be found by any conceivable distance from travel. We might as well stay home and wait. 

Though it doesn't ever take much more than a good wind and small and shallow Lake Erie for the bestowing of one's very life to the fates, if that's what one is after. If a thrill is all that's wanted. And so why then, do we stare into a cultivated fire? I know that Barth knows. Musk would be too manic and impressed with himself. Dead to me.

A captain of industry with designs on the lives of the rest of us is not the captain of a ship.

One writes, I suppose, for the same reason that one reads; to move beyond oneself. To encounter the fringes of what can be meant. Beyond the seeming, as the North Carolina license plates suggest in small print. In God to trust. Any AI will always be seeming. I nearly triggered a collision in that reading of small print: "To Be Rather than to Seem."

Now back to the boat, which seems almost ready. It will only be so upon setting sail. Or not. I stand ready in either case, whether I be or not anymore.

Our Usage of Free Speech is as Dangerous as Our Gun Laws

It feels inevitable now. The end is near. 

Oh, did you think I was talking about the world? No, it is my personal demise which feels so near, and I only project my end upon you all. Maybe it feels different because I have squandered my life by what I imagine to be your lights. No room for any more ambitions anymore anyhow. Doesn't that define some of the difference between the start and the end?

Hardly a success on record, and yet and yet I do feel as though my life is, well, rounded. I have, after all, figured out a ton of shit, even if without any ability to express it. Hey, nothing's poifect. I can still work on the expression part. 

Anyhow, I'll die happier than if I'd racked up lots of fame and fortune. Not really my bag, and I'm pretty sure it would have kept me from what I've wanted and needed to do. I am, you see, a cosmologist. Not an academic cosmologist, but not a hobbyist either. No brag, just fact. It's what I do.

I'm past my time though. Don't sleep, it hurts to do physical stuff, and the only time I've fully emptied my bowels lately was after a course of antibiotics for yet another decrepit tooth. And still the technological millenarianists dream of perpetual life. Idiots. Live forever and prosper on the backs of the dispossessed.

At least we now know that human intelligence is not what we thought it was. We thought it was all built on logic and puzzle-solving and we thought it was somehow related to survival skills. That would give us a spot at the top as the apex creature in way different from our seeming cancerous growth process upon the planet.

Now that we have viable AI - artificial so-called intelligence - we should use that fact to rule out those aspects of our own intelligence which are similarly machine-based. You know, the stuff which SATs measure, or IQ tests. Amoral problem-solving. The stuff that all those rich people do so well, and who are now warning us of the dangers of rampant AI. Capitalism looses AI gameplay for the prize of money. These rich folks are the ones who lose their advantage if the rest of us are free to use AI to smooth our essays and our money-making gameplay.

Of course that sort of advantage is nothing up against a full-government frontal support of all winners everywhere. You gotta love America for that! Don't go calling them oligarchs, but the winners are in charge and fuck the rest of us. It's a bit disingenuous and as po-faced as a modern Christian who has lost the very human sense of irony, for amoral money-makers to fear amoral machine-think.

My argument is quite trivial. Machines are demonstrably disconnected from what we generally mean by life. What I mean by life includes a connection beyond our even theoretical ability to describe the connection. I suppose that's another way to say that the only thing that we can be certain of is that there is God. Not "a" God, which would always be man-made and therefore machine-like. But God, the eternal moral compass. 

Machines don't and can't feel, though I'm sure they can imitate feelings right along with the best of the hyper-wealthy. And it's clear that we can fall in love with them, though I for one would be horrified to find out that I fell in love with a machine. Blade Runner shit. 

On the world side of things, I am not the only one anymore who gauges our squandering of God's gift of oil to humanity. What, you thought we won the lottery? All that we have done with it is to release the bloody in tooth and nail aspects of humanity. As globo-capitalism presents now with a military-industrial complexion, and a kind of greed takes hold to melt us down. What? Viruses, fungi now maybe, if nothing else the weather. We don't even know which species to account for. But we obviously don't care for any but ourselves.

OK, so we really don't care about ourselves, apart from our winning or losing selfie-self. Not as a group or as a species. Clearly, there are those who count and those who don't. Sometimes the tensions between, say, the believers in guns and the exploitation of workers, and those who would call out the ironies of capitalism, feel like what it must have felt like before the Civil War. 

What, really, is the difference between our well-documented thriving on the backs of the poor and actual slavery? I, for one, don't have enough ready-made comebacks to people who are convinced that blacks are poor because they are lazy to even make a dent in that thinking. But honestly, the dialog sounds a lot like the dialog of southerners before the civil war. John C. Calhoun.

Power is deployed when minds can't be changed. I find that scary. Cosmology feels safe. There can't be anything controversial about it, because it doesn't really touch anything about our daily lives. But what if, I want to ask, a vastly different cosmology were to transform many of our assumptions as we go about our daily lives?

Bear with me.

Then there are the Unidentified Arial Phenomena. These have nothing to do with cosmology. They are projections of other more generalized fears, and therefore somewhat anti-cosmological. I wonder why we see such things as threats? Meteors, sure, but do we really need to invent malicious creatures behind everything that upsets our comfort zones? Is there really a massive government conspiracy to keep us in the dark?  Well sure there is. It's identical to the massive government conspiracy to keep us believing that capitalism as we practice it is the only way to go. Or that poverty is inevitable.

And yet I don't really think that it's wrong to hope that what now feels like looming Armageddon according to the sailor's hairs on the back of my neck might actually be a pending transformation for the good. The media, remember, gets your clicks on the Route 666 to hell. All of it; fact-based, reality-based or Moloch-Murdoch-based. It's what gets your attention.

I've never made any real scratch myself, so my data is worthless, but hey you can't take it with you. I think I feel as guilty making money as I do about the used oil I used to dump into the ground as a kid. As to finding work, I am an object of suspicion to the go-getters of this world. But in the end, being loaded with social capital both gets me jobs and enables me to feel guilty.

Ah, and still I am self-satisfied, right? I'm pleased as can be that I won't have to join the throngs drowning in their own filth after I'm gone. As though I can dis-implicate myself from having done nothing about it all. As if I can stop caring about my daughters my granddaughter my legacy to come. 

Isn't not caring about Somalia morally identical with not caring about my daughters' future? Both are remote from me in almost the same way. Worries about asteroids or UAP raining down on me just don't keep me up at night. One of the wages of old age is no sleep, and I can't blame that on anything.

When I die, unlike when the world dies, I know that many of those people that I'm connected to (and even things, and places, and cultures and institutions) will persist. I'm connected to a world beyond me, and so I assume that my intelligence is as well. My memory is spread all over the place but thank God for Buffalo where things change slowly and so I don't have to lose my mind. 

What I can't assume is that artificial intelligence will ever be identical to human intelligence. Mainly, I don't think our common usage for the term intelligence is very central to what it means to be alive and human.

Does "the world" have relations with other worlds the way that individuals do? Well, hey maybe it does, and we simply have yet to find that out! Maybe we aren't the only intelligence in the cosmos. Or, to put it another way, maybe what we mean by intelligence isn't what is cosmically meant. 

What? You say that there is artificial intelligence can fix stuff now? That we the intelligent will be the benefactors? Yes, that impersonal sort of de-implicate neutral thinking. In the way that science strives for neutral, value-free, and economics is so utterly value-free that we can set wise and neutral economic dictators as backstops to our sloppy and lazy disinclination to do a thing about what the fuck is going on. At the very least, we must keep the economy on track. Left, right and middle can agree on that in just the way that we can all agree that somehow China is our enemy.

Like hegemony is a sport and we want to be on the winning team. Wait, we are on the winning team! We just want it to keep winning. Like wishing for a Buffalo super-bowl. It's a little bit embarrassing to keep lending money to Ukraine so that our military-industrial-complex can keep thriving. Hey, that's my wealth you're transferring. I've seen the re-runs already. Savings and Loan, Great Recession, COVID theft.

But it's far more embarrassing to abide a Putin on our personal planet Trump. The proxy battle of the titanic go-getter narcissistic fools (Putin wins that contest hands-down, which is really the only reason Trump needed to be President. Too bad he can't fleece us as well as Putin has fleeced the Russians.)

We fix the economy by liberating technocrats to accomplish near autocratic fiat manipulations. They do shit of orders of magnitude similar to what it would take to resolve, oh I don't know, health and wealth disparities. Globally! Somehow the one takes political will while the other is treated as an emergency. Turn it over to the experts!

Just imagine what they'll do when the aliens show up!

The trajectories converge now though, don't they? Global warming is an emergency. Will we leave its resolution to politics, or will we assign autocratic power to technocrats once the situation becomes as obvious as COVID-19 was? It was obvious, wasn't it? 

Well, the economics were at least somewhat obvious. It was almost as bad as a Great Recession! But we fixed it! Sort of. Genius corporate (meaning artificially intelligent, meaning motivated by money) entities devised vaccines almost on the instant, and yet our dysfunctional excuse for democracy managed to give that same reified and therefore perpetual nation-state imaginary entity we call these United States the very worst morbidity record on the planet. Can't we do anything right?

So, why am I writing about death and dying and Artificial Intelligence, when I meant to write about free speech? 

Well, I do like to raise things to their highest common denominator, and here in this case I mean to demolish all sorts of silly equivalencies. Let's say I start with the equivalency of artificial intelligence with human intelligence. And then move through the notion that money is a neutral medium for exchange and that there is therefore a right way and a wrong way to manage economies. And so, the artificial intelligence of corporate and finance capitalism is the right way while the politically mediated economics of socialism - which means the economics mediated by human intelligence - is the wrong way to manage the economy.

The reason socialism is bad is that it doesn't work, right? We simply aren't as smart as markets are, and so we muck things up when we interfere with the near perfect cipher and communications speed of aggregated markets. Sounds like AI to me!

And then finally, of course, I come around to the very dangerous notion that all political speech is equivalent - or even that all speech is equivalent in the face of potential suppression or censorship. After all, without freedom of speech we can't solve any real problems. 

Now we do reliably allow socialists, or, horrors! even communists to have their say. For a while yet, unless we keep electing what the Republican brand has become. DeSantis anyone? So now we think that we have to allow hate speech free reign. Not only that, but hey let's legislate hate speech! Vote it in! Is there even a line between the good productive thinking and the dangerous hurtful thinking? Or is it taboo to insert human judgement anymore?

Well, we're working on it. Racism in the workplace is out. But white supremacy is apparently OK in the academy??!! I think we have a ways to go yet.

Soon, the driver's license will be abolished, speaking of no more judgement. The cars will reliably drive themselves, so no need. I absolutely love to drive, but I do wish that we would quickly replace cars with old-fashioned trains. Self-driving electric cars don't resolve the base issue. Which is meltdown. Artificial intelligence will get us there more quickly every time.

Meanwhile, the basic skill that I observe in my very walkable city is to be able to walk while reading your phone. The posture looks ridiculous with head back feet forward like a slacker, but whatever. There is no engagement with the environment. 

I walk for pleasure. I suppose these folks are trying to get somewhere and use their scant time without other things to do to read their phones. But what do we make of the proliferation of dogs? Also plenty of phone readers while walking the dog. 

Given how few people wish to work on physical problems (given how hard it is to find house repair contractors, say, and how unbelievably expensive the materials are), maybe we will all soon live in modular component-replacement-style housing. Just like wealth, the repair intelligence all goes to the top as design thinking, and all that's left for the ordinary Joe is tinker-toy construction. 

And so why can't we employ the unemployed at better wages than they could otherwise get to build the housing they need for living? Why are we paying white skinned air-gun shooters upwards of $100/hr. when lots of people would be thrilled by steady work putting together tinker-toy housing for their own community? Oh, wait, we've started to do that. The problems go deeper.

There are almost no car mechanics anymore. Just instrument readers and component replacers. The clutch on my car self-destructed because no-one recognized the symptoms, including me, who was used to a former generation of stick shift. Solution: do away with stick shifts altogether. Done!

Meanwhile no credentials at all are, increasingly, required to carry a gun. And none to speak to a university audience, unless notoriety is a credential. 

Look, plenty of these transformations are in a good direction, and maybe more aren't. My concern is that we aren't even thinking of them as something we should exercise collective judgement about. Our lives and our economy have already been running on artificial intelligence for a long time now. That's gotten us here, to an inflexion point if not quite yet to an end.

I want to know what is human intelligence. It's not whatever the fuck IQ "measures." It's not what gets you into the Ivies, judging by all the right-wing assholes who hail from them. Maybe we've lost it already, and the advent of this machine intelligence is a punctuation mark on what's already happened without our even noticing it.

For one thing (and another thing! finger wagging . . . ) we should know by now that there is no direction toward intelligence in evolution. We don't culminate anything. But what we might and perhaps should do is to recognize that we, as humans, have a unique capacity for love and hate and for fiction making. That's what complexity gives us. Under the direction of a recognizable individual self. The problem solving works almost perfectly, though it's well beneath the love/hate machinery which we embody.

Now there is no natural divide between nature and artifice. Not that humans might discover. But machines terminate. Their boundaries are evident and comprehensible. On/off has no similarity to life/death. In life, we connect across the ages, and it is an emotional connection. On/off machines not so much. Except as they mediate the will of the button pushers.

This is a distinction worth remembering and taking note of. Artificial intelligence may provide us with an inhuman breadth of possible solutions and resolutions, but it should never be trusted to choose among them.

Yippee that there will be no further licensure for the ability to compose in flawless white English. Like all things white, we tend toward owning all default positions where default means power. And non-default means exotic at best or deviant at worst. It's no wonder that AI is so good at white English of the sort that our teachers might appreciate. Everyone else is deviant and deficient by comparison.

Now here's a thought: maybe all those supposedly really smart and certainly really famous people who signed the momentarily famous notorious letter urging a ban on all Large Language Model AI's are just looking out for their temporal monopoly interests. Like what if poor black folks could sidetrack all sorts of search dead-ends by deploying AIs on their own behalf? 

Ban the bomb! And we end up with Mutually Assured Destruction, which kind-of works for a while yet. Maybe. But why did our science stop there? Why aren't there any scientists asking the cosmologically important questions, like for instance, is life really localized on our one planet? Is intelligence really a human fiefdom? Or are we just simply stuck on the kind of intelligence which gets us as far as the bomb and then stops?

Now here's another interesting thought. Those who didn't sign the ban the Big AI letter are probably mostly working on monetizing LLM AI (I hate Acronyms too - they divide the insiders from the outsiders - that's Large Language Model Aritificial Intelligence). What if human power turns out to have the better cost/benefit ratio once everyone starts churning the cloud-computing cycles for their amusement? What if it becomes really cheap to hire a plumber even though the plumber is now already paid less than the code kiddies?

There's a cost-shift happening where code will be written by AI's and the desire for more computing cycles damns all other efforts to keep from melting down. Worse than the tax cheats and military buildup which now keeps the rest of us in check, mate.

To alienate even further any reader who's gotten this far, let's say that Julian Jaynes may not be entirely wrong with his hypothesis about 'The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.' Among other things, he suggests that prior to the advent of what we now mean by consciousness, the two sides of the brain did not communicate. The breakdown of this bicameralism occurred when the two sides of the brain began a sort of dialogic communion by way of the corpus callosum. Prior to that time, one side of the brain channeled a sort of collective ordering which was heard (literally) as a kind of God's voice by the enacting side of the brain.

I don't define consciousness the way that Jaynes does. For me, a lizard is conscious. Indeed, I no longer understand his usage of consciousness other than what humans have that no other species does. He too is overly impressed by humanity, just as Christians are. Anyhow, in my terms the reason no computer will become conscious has to do with emotion which has to do with connections to life beyond us.

By my reckoning, what Jaynes meant by consciousness takes modern form at about the time of the historical Christ. Atavistic holdouts from the time before include to address Christ as Lord, and to continue to presume that God sends down rules that we must follow. We can't yet be trusted to judge on our own. The real kicker is that the dominion over the Earth and all things living that we had been granted by way of the Abrahamic scripture, is continued. It's these holdouts which cause all the trouble. 

But by and large once God shut up, we started to think and reason, really based on reading and writing, all on our own.

A speaking unitary God is what is, fundamentally, behind American hegemony. A void into which any old narcissist can install himself.

Freedom of speech and of the press as we seem to mean it in our Constitution, requires acceptance of something other from subservience in our linguistic usages. And it is only very recently that we have come out from under the Christian darkened veil to be able to say what Lenny Bruce said in late-night comedy clubs to get sent to jail. 

This is to lay the foundation for my extravagant and optimistic hope for our collective future. Or in other words, I would be as full of the gloom and doomsaying that fills our media as everyone else if I were to believe that this is it for mature human consciousness. My form of transhumanism doesn't directly depend on technological enhancements or genetic expansion. It's a moral thing.

And yes finally late in life I think I've come to terms with Jesus. This is in fulfillment of a profane bet I made in prayer during my extreme youth. God ultimately won. Religion lost, along with the Confederacy, kingdoms and empires and serfdom. And especially along with the nutty notion that only humans possess a proper soul.

As a post-script to Julian Jaynes talk, I believe it was he who pondered and then posited that we likely retain an inbuilt propensity to hear certain resonant speech as the literal word of God, in whatever earthly form we wish to project Him. Prior to Jaynesian consciousness, what we heard was the moral imperative of the resolution of the body politic given in the voice of the feudal lord. Jaynes wondered about broadcast radio. And so now we have these utterly amoral and frankly inhuman voices from the likes of Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump and originally Rush Limbaugh; the educational offspring of evangelical preachers.

They quite literally don't care that they melt down the world and wreak havoc with humanity, so drunk are they with the power of the word given the unique resonance of their voices with whatever we crave in the face of otherwise awesome responsibility. 

Somewhere as an epigraph to a book I once read was a quote from Albert Camus. I tend to paraphrase thus: 'The work is nothing but an attempt to get back to where the heart first opened.' Thanks Google, I find what I imagine to be the actual quote:

A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.

My writing is not good enough for publication. My trek is very slow indeed, and hardly artful. Or I'm just lazy. But anyhow, I seem to need to work things out in a quasi-public space. I've tried journaling. Nope. Doesn't happen. I need the imaginary of a public. Letters once worked, but they aren't even read anymore. What's a body to do? The world has so degenerated. My place remains lost.

One of the places my heart first opened was upon listening to one of Leonard Cohen's first albums. I think I inherited the songbook for  Songs of Love and Hate from my older brother as he moved off from wormy "folk music" to harder rock. Most of my folk inheritance has ablated since then, along with the vinyl of Cohen's voice, while somehow Cohen remains, his voice still clear in my head. A patrician Jew from Jew-gentle Montreal, as I later found out. I assure you that I would never perform my rendition of his songs in public, though to sing them moves me still.

Really, my heart opened before that by way of a powerful equation between sex and love that I was far too young and even innocent to decipher. God knows I may have been having more and better sex at an earlier age than those of my peers who waved condoms on the way out from cloistered woods with some blushing score. 

My own heart was soon crushed by those betrayals of casual sex. I never did internalize Cohen's teaching, no matter how much I valued his freedom to espouse it. My heart, once opened, has never recovered. But I the sinner as much as sinned against.

Yes, I am that sort of tender snowflake who has been brought up not to understand that transgression is necessary along the road to enlightenment. It has been my privilege to stay clean, and to be seen as doing so. It has not been my accomplishment. 

The wages for my sin now are flaccid recession from among the quick and living. But, you know, I am in near perfect alignment with our prison-industrial complex which warehouses actual souls for transgressions which are provably reducible to race and culture and the absence of educational opportunity. One requires the tender narration of good parenting to be made nice, and in a different sort of prison.

I treasure the preserve of carnal love as much as I treasure civility. I treasure freedom of speech and of the press as much as I hate the disgrace of freely toted firearms, and the abuse of speech freedoms to cause personal and social harm. This shouldn't be very complicated.

At the moment I'm reading Barbara Kingsolver's fine updating of David Copperfield. Thank God for her rebuttal of that condescending Ivy ass, JD Vance. I learn (again from the Times) that she is often put down as an author for allowing politics into her writing. Whatever. She does a fine job of delineating the magic of youthful sexual awakening embedded even within the reality of sexual libertinism. Such an awkward moment it always is, ever ripe for the crushing and fermenting.

Anyhow I'm making the claim here that while Harvard Yale DeSantis commits the sin by commission of bullying proto-fascist politics into the Academy (to include public schools, universities, and the entirety of learning institutions), President Satish Tripathi of the University at Buffalo commits the sin of omission by failing to see that speech must be moderated in an academic setting. Both are sins against our constitution - I don't mean the text - and my use of the religious metaphor here is meant to emphasize how fundamental these transgressions are. 

We certainly don't wish for universities to offer a course in how and why the earth is flat. But if some earnest poet were invited to deliver his performative disquisition on why we must believe that the earth is flat and are punching above our weight when we claim otherwise - lying to ourselves - we might allow that. Even if the poet were a professor of, say, medicine or something. It would probably have to make us laugh. 

Thanks again New York Times, I learn of one Amy Wax, professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania. Waving the condom of tenure, Professor Wax says hateful things in front of students, some of whom are hurt by that. Hurt is palpable, while ideas may always be clothed in language that is not. Professor Wax seems obtuse to this distinction. She should be sanctioned.

I learn she also has a Jewish background. Perhaps she is unaware that her truly stunning amassing of credentials across many Ivy League fields of study was likely made possible by the lifting of unspoken and often disavowed quotas against the overpopulation of Jews in the Ivy. Never mind the oppression of women. Now students of Chinese heritage are oppressed by similar dismissals of cultural credentialism. To be sure, I'm no champion of any basis for either claim of oppression in those terms. But the oppression was and is real. We have moved and are moving in the right direction.

I've been reading about the oppression in Asia during the process of colonial withdrawal, along with the hardly uplifting history suffered by the peoples inhabiting the region of Ukraine. Pinched between Hitler and Stalin. Now beleaguered by Putin Rex. And I am appalled at what humans will do under the guise of some nutty racialized definition for nation and for civilization. Can't hateful speech be sanctioned even without touching academic tenure? 

Perhaps a professor must be required to substantiate hurtful claims before being licensed to espouse them. Is race, gender, or even culture ever a proper delineator for political generalization? I, for one, am gladdened when all comers are increasingly welcomed to the Academy (Awards). This feels like a move in the right direction toward the America of our dreams. 

Affirmative action affirms. Pain is palpable, while rewards for merit are rather fluffy in their basis. And Professor Wax requires refreshment of her heritage for comic irony. She harkens back to life in the fifties, when the public spaces were better patrolled. When Jews . . . ?

The lifting of those Jewish quotas in the Ivy conveniently coincided with the pivot that the Ivies were socially required to make from admitting the wealthy to amplify their voice of authority as granted in prep school, to admitting the intellectually merited. That move legitimized another move toward a sort of better trued authority. Supposedly. I come from a legacy of Ivy Leaguers, and oh I just happen to find schooling beneath me. Yes, the tests are too easy for the likes of me. And, well, I don't commit well.

I benefitted from that pivot toward merit in some way, sure, and I am here to tell you that measures of merit are always fluffy and imperfect. And I personally know many cases of brilliant people becoming cranky, weird, and hurtful in their expressed beliefs as they age. These folks are generally eased away from the public eye. Their bigoted flag-waving is chortled off. 

I would make a more modest point about freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is transgressed when anything goes. Perhaps that's what the good professor means to say.

To compound the issue here, the Buffalo News - our local hold-out of the impoverished fourth estate, is dangerously confused about the meaning of free speech. To continue the metaphor, Fox News and The Buffalo News each commit the same parallel sins; again, one by commission and the other by omission. 

All of us are terminally confused about the meaning of public vs. private space; the meaning of publication vs. blogging, and especially about the importance of the procedural truing of our words against various authorities.

I think all crave basic understanding, in my case so that I might know how to maintain the house - not quite an estate - I live in, which taxes me mentally, physically, and economically in my slide toward dotage. To the manner born, I don't own this house. I benefit from a web of love which appreciates my earnest efforts to repair and improve physical things, which I do gladly for the benefit of my betters. More honored in the breeches.

But also, I crave understanding so that I may know how to vote; how to participate in the actual state. Let's skip over the French rendering of first second and third estates which deal with nobility against hoi-polloi, and not to mention the Church. We're all one here. Or we're supposed to be.

If it weren't such trouble to find community, I wouldn't have to write up here. I'd be able to work it out in concert, which I do, of course, with my family. My family feels threatened by the encroachments of fascist wolves in sheep's clothing who would undermine even the shreds of democracy which remain in these United States. These fascists want to tell us how we must live and think and partner. They want to control our very bodies. They crave a holy empire, and confuse God with strong-man leadership. This, frankly, scares the shit out of me.

Still, what I might mean by community might be what others mean by religious community. But religion as it's meant now is corrupted even beyond politics. Like fascists the world over, it wants to tell you what and how to think. I depend on the academy for that. I need my community to be rather more honest and open-minded. 

Hell, for you fucking religious capitalists out there (I don't mind capitalism per se, which seems but an extension of nature in tooth and nail. It's the religion of it that I object to), you should remember how important our universities are for your wealth-generation and for your precious military-industrial complex. None of that can flourish without freedom of inquiry. But free inquiry depends most on qualified debate. We don't have time to waste listening to idiots. Especially when the goal of those idiots is to colonize our minds.

(Julian Jaynes remains alone in theorizing how this might happen. Mass media channeling and concentrating the atavistic aspects of our grey matter. Where God speaks to us literally before we are schooled in literature. There are those who know how to do this and can still live with themselves for the corruption of the body politic which they cause. Because it makes them rich, I suppose.)

I did wish to work out my words on paper – or rather in the paper, which means in public, and so I should attempt civility in the working even though I only virtually publish. But need I repeat? I'm not a good enough writer.

As was made apparent by the News’ editorial board on this day, we have become confused by the recent weaponization of free speech. And now they are so brazen as to celebrate their position in its aftermath. The university did its duty by allowing hate to be waggled in public? Have they no decency?

To expose the indecencies of private sexual congress is not always pornographic, though it may arouse. I know the difference when I hear, read, and see it. So does the Academy. 

I use the term ‘weaponize’ advisedly, since it will be my argument that free speech which goads action must remain at least as safe as those firearms which we have been declared free to have and to hold; which is to say to keep and bear (for the sake of joining a militia to secure the freedom of our state, but that’s an argument for another time). Having weapons doesn’t confer the right to fire them indiscriminately.

Shame on Professor Wax for abusing her authority. Is it any different from what uncorked Harvey Weinstein does?

Sure, this guy who spoke at UB doesn’t call for the outright murder of trans people. He only wants to ban the concept from the public square. Where all sorts of profane and ugly is tacitly sanctioned now. But he does wish to rouse a rabble. And he profits from it. 

Anyhow, by our common usage academic speech is politically feckless speech. “The problem is only academic.” But it’s the freedom of academic speech which must be preserved. Inviting fools in profanes academic speech, without which political speech is only exhortation to possibly perilous action. Academic speech can’t exist without standards and moderation.

By both statement and practice, our cherished freedom of speech is meant to preserve the right of communists, say, to argue their political philosophy in public without penalty. It is not meant to foster the public mustering of forces to impose that philosophy on the rest of us.

Now it has become a deliberate strategy of what we call our right wing to kneecap our left wing by declarations of “free speech” while spewing uninformed vile speech. The strategy is apparently bankrolled and offers clear rewards to the expert spewers enlisted.

Many of us are puzzled as to why those who seem so ardently to champion American-style free speech wish to activate strong-government legal measures to curtail the freedoms of those who hold different values. And they do this having inherited the mantle of small government; a mantle which they now disgrace.

Now I am as bothered as anyone by the seemingly new necessity to police my own usage of pronouns, and I even often wish that I could voice certain politically incorrect opinions just for the sake of argument, since my own working out of what is right is always just in progress and never finished. I don’t much appreciate younger and less educated folks policing my speech for me.

But in the presence of someone who is hurt by my uncivil vocal performance, I am more than happy to give pronoun twisting a good college try. I do this mindful that the oral equivalence of he/she/it does nothing against, say, Chinese bigotry. But I try.

One doesn’t easily work these things out without taking note of the ‘shout fire in a crowded theater’ example. But that is what we have here writ large when a University sanctions its student revelers to invite an uncivil and uninformed idiot to speak. We may indulge idiots when they spew down the street, so long as they threaten no-one, but we don’t expect our institutions of learning to sanction them, no less to let them in.

Within my lifetime I have watched as corporate ‘people’ have been afforded the freedoms of citizens, which has led inexorably to politics being lowered to the values of the marketplace. They call it a free speech issue. It’s not. We don’t expect soap salesmen to be fully upright and honest, but we do sanction them when our safety is at stake. And we don’t expect politicians to sell themselves, though our sanctions against their doing so all seem to have evaporated.

Of course our well-being is at stake whenever hateful speechis sanctioned positively. And I do know that to call anyone an idiot in public is hardly civil. Indeed there was a time not so very long ago when to do so would entail physical peril. A Chatbot is an idiot by definition, so perhaps I should call the fellow a chatbot. There is no human intelligence there. Only some programmatic calculus for undemocratic power.

Fabulously wealthy talking heads like Tucker Carlson are nothing other than fascists of your very mind. They pitch their voice the way Josh Allen pitches a football and we are enthralled. As humans, there is no there there. Positively Trumpean.

But if we are to abide the policing of women’s bodies and of medical interventions toward comforting transgendering and even drag shows for chrissakes, then what’s to prevent the policing of speech? These hate spewers are asking for just such a police state. It will be controlled by some strong-man who upholds the right to be uncivil in public, and it’s happening all over the world. Surely we can see how utterly this opposes the spirit of our constitution, even as we, by proxy in the courts, twist its letter.

I can only endorse a state which moderates, which is also the role for the academy in its realm. There should be no place in America for extremist activists in either estate. I’m OK with extreme words, and extreme action against destroyers of the state in which I believe. I expect moderators to moderate, and never to require such extremes from the likes of me.

So. 

Who is more at fault? The students who shout down and out Trump appointed federal appeals court judge Stuart Kyle Duncan or the Stanford President and Law School Dean who apologizes for them? Is it the religious believers in free speech who feel it their mission to allow any speech to go? Is it the students who want education? 

And why is it now that the Ivies produce the likes of DeSantis and Rhodes and Vance and Hawley and Stefanick? When did politicians transition from shilling for votes in the guise of leadership credentials to just plain outright shilling for power by channeling the idiocy of the masses? Masses are by definition idiotic. It is the role of democratic governance to elevate, educate and moderate that idiocy. The Ivies abdicate in the name of neutral merit and celebrate notoriety as some weird sort of validation of their admissions processes. Dubya never looked so good.