The Educator's Dilemma

Any reasonable teacher understands that not every student is created equal. As regards the heights of academic accomplishment, some seem destined to fall short right out of the gate. Not to believe that would be as absurd as to suppose that every single human may triumph at the Olympics, given the proper nurture and coaching.

Of course, there may be more truth to that than many sour grapes Olympians might credit. But it's also true that to make each of us Olympians be default, at birth, would be nothing short of cruel. Perhaps as cruel as to force a gifted intellect to suffer the slow and plodding training of those around her, who are perhaps gifted in different ways.

We understand now, as educators, the hidden injuries of race and class. We know that sometimes the brightest students are invisible beneath the cover of different cultural and linguistic norms. We even know that we ourselves can be blinded by those things which we hold most dear; our own personal or cultural canon, for instance, or what we think of as proper behavior in the Academy.

You're probably wanting to jump down my throat now, that the problem is the Academy, which must form its own culture and norms which will be necessarily aligned with those of the ruling class, relative to which everyone else must be remediated.

But short of leaving cultures divided, which no longer seems a practical matter given the seemingly inevitable pressures of globalization, there still must be institutional structure to organize our teaching. Short of willy nilly, each to his or her own, which would leave the ruling class that much more fully in charge and distinct from those on its outside.

It would seem that the supposedly universal languages of math and science are what brings us together, ultimately, under a single roof, as it were, to learn. Leaving the elaborations in the realm of what often get called "the humanities" at the fringes, to be sorted out there and suffered.

And how nice it would and must be for educators to have scientific seeming tools, like diagnostic and IQ tests to cut through the large and petty biases and prejudices of the entrance examiners. To give those students who are different from the ruling class a way in, for the benefit of all.

But these tests then become a proxy for the Olympics of life, where everyone else is somehow less than human; protestations about "all men created equal" very much beside the evident truth that some are worth more than others. Just simply because everyone is supposed to go to approximately the same sort of school.

And this process of schooling gets rationalized, of course and naturally, relative to the organization of the economy. So that it is only economic worth which is being graded, and not some sort of core value as a human being. Automatically devaluing the labor of hands and craft and art, unless those appeal, of course, to the ruling class. The class which, according to our Constitution, we weren't even supposed to have.

Why should I be allowed to work out these sophomoric dilemmas so sophomorically? When there is so much written, so much brilliant angst expended on these very questions, dilemmas, and matters. So much well educated debate. Debate whose entrée would and should and must be denied the likes of myself.

Because even this debate is subject to the norms of discourse, which cannot be divided from the norms of the Academy, defined as broadly or as narrowly as you like.

I do call for more slack and less angst. The problems and their resolution can be found only outside the academy. The dignity assigned or allowed to labor which is not schooled. Dignity allowed even to workers in the government, who need not and in most cases should not or must not be elected, as would be their citizen supervisors.

But even there, the civil service exam does as much to prevent as to enforce a meritocracy. Just as has been the case with diagnostic IQ-style tests in education, we now must have a form of academic postmen, firemen and policmen, again defining "academic" as broadly as you please. All to prevent the petty corruptions and prejudices which we still fear would be rampant without these ideally "objective" differentiators.

None of these devices and techniques need be discarded wholesale. But each of them should and must be regarded askance, for the harm they do as well as for the good. How many, drawing on my recent interactions with the health care establishment; how many can retain some humility relative to the certainties of the frames within which they themselves must operate, given that it is their position relative to those frames which defines them? Against whose standards they struggled to gain, first, foothold, and later position and recognition.

It must be as terrifying at any heights, to fear what one would be in free-fall. Frameless.

And yet letting go of our certainties is precisely what must occur if we are to co-inhabit a world which has suddenly gone all one. We must learn to trust and honor one another across all sorts of divides. Of race and class and culture and language and religion. Divides much more extreme than those which divide the ranks in our Academies.

The reason I hold out extravagant hope is that we have filled in all our boundaries now. There are no more frontiers to cross. Science be damned, there are no more fundamental discoveries to be made. It's all about filling in now, as we realize that we have been turned back at every frontier.

You will not credit this. Or very very few of you will, so certain are you that the procedures, at least, of science are what holds out the most and best promise still. And I am as certain as you are that this remains the case. There are massive improvements still to come in the ways that we can harness energy for good, understand our bodies for better health, and even organize the economy for more human distribution of goods.

But as regards the fundamental sense of who we are in the cosmos, I believe there is no further that we can travel. At that frontier, science holds out nothing more. Or rather, what we already have is far more than enough. We are co-creators, participants now, in the processes of evolution and of sense.

Of course, we always have been. But now, via the cutting edge of physics, we have glimpsed the limits of what, in principle, can be known. There are no further procedures according to which we can discover any more of what is "out there" without implicating our mind in the process. We have choices, the most crucial of which is whether, in fact, we will regard each of us as fully human. And the determination of our choice will not be made by what we say. It will be made by what we do.

And even if you are waiting for some superior "intelligence" (such a telling term) to make some kind of contact, you should know ahead of time that without having come to consciousness yourself, He or She or It will only know you as a worm. You will have become just another life form embedded in the struggle for survival, of no meaning or value as an individual.

Making contact, a project of no interest to me, although it might be to some future generation, simply makes no sense prior to some sense of what it means to be human, "intelligent," and worthy of recognition. I'd say drop "intelligent" from the equation, and we might be on our way. The term human alone is enough. Divide off any single quality of humanity, and you lose it, plain and simple.

Framed!

Back when I was working on my boat a lot, I would sometimes find myself in a mess of more than I could handle. A handy way to picture this situation might be to imagine me with toxic epoxy up to my elbows, a head full of the understanding that I would have to use toxic acetone (nail polish remover) to get it off, and panic about various boat parts in various stages of hardening into the wrong position.

Of course, none of these problems could or would occur had I been less concerned to make permanent repairs or modifications. In the "old days" before the advent of such conveniences as epoxy, it was understood that timbers would rot, that they would need periodic replacement and that the entire labor was an ongoing and therefore never-ending process. Things were even built with an eye toward the possibility to repair them.

We have such enduring and durable methods now, and hardly anyone really bothers with wooden boats. Still, the plastic ones don't, in fact, last forever, and they can be pretty hard to dispose of. And somehow the cost in real dollars to own one keeps shooting up to the point where you almost might as well just build more disposable ones. Except that the cost for a wooden boat goes up even faster.

It is very hard to find peace and calm up against the rush of daily life as we live it.

These days, politically, we seem to be engaged in a new version of trench warfare; that ancient WWI disastrous technique which led to the advent of chemical agents and other monstrous techniques to smoke soldiers out of their trenches.

The longer term solution, on top of fairly lame new laws of warfare, seems to have been bigger and more powerful machines of war, combined with a sort of tactical guerrilla deployment of lightweight units.

In the political arena, we have opposing camps of certainty, which keep looking for ever more powerful tactics or techniques to outsmart foes which are certainly more stupid than your camp. Deserving to die outright. Sometimes the camps even try to sharpen up their arguments, but it seems difficult to downright impossible to entice anyone out of the other team's trenches even to pay attention.

Certainty is certainly not a function of being right. We know, historically, that each time we have thought ourselves certain, that certainty, over time, looks silly. Think about bloodletting, or early treatments for mental illness, or certain medical techniques and chauvenisms. The only embarrassing thing, looking back, is that we were once so certain of something which now looks silly.

Look back on your childhood, for instance. There's nothing that terribly embarrassing about being a child, or being wrong. Just about being certain when it turns out you are in no position to be so.

Certainty is a function of meshing your own position to a larger frame whose stability feels like the very definition of sanity. These frames may be religious, or scientific, and sometimes, especially in the case of science, fairly propositional. You aren't sure what the "right" answer will be, but you're pretty confident of the procedures which will find it.

So, the frame, in the case of science, becomes the Grand Narrative of progress. And still, if you are a medical doctor, called upon to diagnose individuals' dire and distressing complaints, you have to operate within some kind of ad-hoc certainty to be able to function at all. You operate within the frame of what is state of the art today.

And still you might have a hard time listening to those who understand at least the broad outlines of what you're saying, but from the inside, as it were, can't quite go along with the diagnosis. They have contrary evidence, but maybe not the words.

In the case of warfare, nuclear explosive devices have arguably kept conflict down to what classroom teachers like to call a dull roar. World War and the epic-level casualties from the two Great Wars have been kept pretty well in check.

Meanwhile, even though the age of Einstein also marked the age of Thomas Kuhn's skepticism about the certainties of "progress," as well as the overall Post Modern critique of any kind of certainty, we do and must await some sort of new approach to resolving entrenched differences before we can put away the bomb.

Here's a thought:

Yesterday, yet again, I landed in the ER. It felt like the same thing which happened Christmas Eve when I was found to have suffered multiple pulmonary emboli. The diagnosis yesterday was dehydration, likely related to having had a few too many drinks the night before.

The only trouble with that diagnosis for me is that I've had a few too many a few too many times for this brand new set of symptoms to make sense to me. Plus, I'd felt fine in the morning, no headache, no hangover, and had headed out for a walk, in the middle of which I felt the same kind of sudden and total loss of power that I'd felt on Christmas Eve. So, I kept walking, with whatever energy I had left, to the hospital which was no further than to turn around and go back home. Made sense to me.

Lots of tests later, the good news is that there is nothing apparently wrong with me. The clots are known to still be there, and the treatment protocol is ongoing. I guess I'm looking for some trigger this time which made my dehydration do something different than it had ever done before. I'm looking for some connection between this event, the event on Christmas Eve which also came on while walking in the cold, and an earlier event which bizarrely enough felt about the same from the inside, but which was diagnosed to be more of a manic episode with psychotic symptoms.

I know that in the earlier case my mind really did go off the rails. The narrative that I was inhabiting was fully detached from reality. There are reachy links among these events, relating to potassium levels, perhaps, but there have also been very definite and distinct diagnostic protocols which have been able to pin specific issues. And thankfully, some medicines to treat them.

Extraneous to all of these diagnoses is the fact that I have been making an awful lot of changes in pretty short order. I left my job, on the basis - I have to guess - that the cognitive dissonance between what I was doing and both expected of myself and was expected by those who paid me to be doing; and what I felt to be central to my being.

Then I moved premises, sold my house, re-established some important relationships, and established some important new ones. And without really thinking terribly hard about it, I find myself eating the kind of anti-cholesterol healthy diet which I never could get myself to do back when the doctors told me to.  Not to mention distressing events in the Big Picture, like the catastrophic anti-government, anti-regulatory, anti-common sense regime of GWB and his team of hucksters. Global warming, peak oil, teapartyism, Fox TV, and all sorts of things to make a thinking man feel as if the whole world is going off the rails.

So, there have been a lot of changes to my life, and it makes perfect sense to me that there might be a slew of symptoms as I seek, however inchoately, to re-establish some sort of homeostasis.

I by no means wish to be my own doctor, nor to second guess the treatments that I've been receiving, many of which may well have saved my life. I do, rather, wish to second guess the certainties in which these treatments are embedded. Because the one and only thing which ties the different things which have happened together is me. Not me as in the master of psychosomatic symptomatologies, but me as in the guy who has made all the decisions as a result of dissonances which I didn't really do a whole lot to cause.

Sure, I had choices about what job to take, but like all of us, not as many as you might think. I could have deployed strategies to stay where I was, but I saw an opportunity, like a speed skater at the Olympics, and bolted through the gap.  I could have tried more medicines, but, at least inwardly, my difference from the norm was worth taking into account, and none of the diagnoses fit well enough for me to inhabit them fully. Provisionally, for sure, but never quite fully. There has simply been too much changing at the same time, and it hardly surprises me that there might be physical or emotional manifestations.

It always surprises the medical establishment that I'm not on any meds. What's wrong with this picture?

What the doctors can offer me is a much more finely tuned sense than I could ever have of liklihood. They know how to weigh things in some context, where I might be latching onto potassium deficiencies, because among its list of symptoms are all the things which I have experienced. Where an experienced practitioner can put these into some sort of perspective, based on lots of obervations and research.

On my own, at best, I would make a kind of teaparty random mess of my desperate flailing after some explanation. And in the case of health issues, the explanation is precisely what you don't want because that would be a diagnosis, which would mean that there really is something basically wrong with you. So, I'd say ambiguity can be a good thing. Sometimes.

Well, unless a diagnosis is missed and then you end up dying when you needn't have. Which is pretty much why you keep your head down in the trenches too. It's scary to consider what might and can and sometimes likely will go wrong, and if smart people are warning you to look out for what might happen, it's pretty hard not to. Even though, sometimes, the aggregate net effect of looking too hard is pretty hard to distinguish from lots of people getting sick all at the same time, maybe mainly because they've stopped looking after themselves.


Which goes right back to that godawful mess you can get into working on an old fashioned wooden boat in the face of more modern technologies. Sometimes when you add up all the treatment regimens for any one human being, especially after they start interacting and even conflicting with one another, you do end up with a treatment looking a whole lot worse than whatever the disease was that started the whole thing way back in the first place. How many tales have you heard, especially from the elderly, about having to strip away the meds one by one to get back to some baseline from which some sense can start to be made.

The mess is the simple and perfectly predictable result of working within little subsets of certainty without, ever, being able to step back and consider the whole. Imagine if we let the Palin Republicans handle the economy, while the Obama Democrats handled health care. Is there anyone in the world who would consider that a very good idea?? But does anybody consider the compromises we end up with a very good idea? Really?

We will have to find a way to crawl up out of our trenches. We will have to accept that some of us may die of missed diagnoses, reticence, stupidity. It may well be fewer than die now from mistakes in the hospital, which is far more than die from mistakes on the highways.

In my life, retrospectively, there was no need for the big guns deployed against various possibilities which never did materialize. I think I would have died of an appendectomy if there had not been surgeons, but I don't really think that was a terribly complicated surgery. And who knows, I may not have needed to drink so much, which might have been what brought it on, if things hadn't become so crazy in the world by then. If I hadn't been in the middle of not just cognitive dissonance, but crazy amounts of stress trying to keep a school open to which all sorts of lovely people had somehow attached their identities.

The trouble is that you can't really know in advance which are the ones who really do need the intervention of the big guns. Which are the ones who will need the anti-psychotic meds for life. Whose hearts are ticking time bombs. Who is prone to clotting, who will die of cholesteremia. Which cancer must be cut out and how drastically?

But who wants to live life afraid of his own body? On the screen, we all love to watch and cheer and cry about those who live a life as though in contempt of death. These are our heros, athletic, firefighting, fishers in the north seas. And we are afraid, sometimes, even to step outdoors because the neighbors might be toting guns.

The fact of the matter, if you were to do the math, is that the only reason health insurance is affordable to any of us is that most of us don't really care for or need the drastic interventions. God help us if we all become thoroughly modern, and consider it our right to rule out each and every illness which might explain our current symptoms.

There is no wooden boat which lasts forever. There is no body either. It is no longer clear that the way medicine works is in the direction of progress overall. That's not because there aren't wonderful new techniques to help the truly ill. But likely too many folks are dragged into the system hoping for something that just cannot be forthcoming.

We look to the medical system, or at least I do, for simple statements such as "this is what we are willing to do" without the question back "are you willing to pay for it, then?" Instead we get the absurd statement "this is what could be done if you can get someone to pay for it." And no-one is in any position ahead of time to tell you it will be paid for. This creates a state of perpetual panic, pretty much like living on a fault line. Imagine if the police asked you each time they intervened for your safety.

We have displaced our grief in the same way that we have displaced our heros. When it comes home, it is almost always unbearable because we had thought that there could be none so close to home. We had fallen into the lulled sleep of those whose life is too smooth. Until the very earth starts quaking.

Let's dial it back, how about? Stop the advertising which makes us all feel unwell *unless.* Taking trains most of the time will hardly affect our lifestyles. Electric cars for the local trips, rented hopefully, should be sufficient. Walking out of doors makes a huge difference to your healthcare profile. And how about shaking hands across the divides of race and class and education. That would do a lot to calm our fears.

There is so much that is wonderful about life as we have discovered it in these United States. Let's not blow it because a tiny class of hucksters in our midst would have us believe that we must take snake oil to feel whole. I don't think that there's a single person, embedded in whatever trench of certainty, who wants the hucksters to prevail.

And surely no-one believes in a centrally controlled economy anymore. So, what's the fuss? We're only talking about the boundaries. Should healthcare be on the side of police and fire, or the side of coke and pepsi? It's not about goverment making decisions. It's about you and me making decisions, taking responsibility, and calling in the trained experts when that becomes necessary.

Meanwhile, I'm waiting for spring when I can figure out if that old wooden sailboat is still salvageable. For maybe the fifth time in its life. About the same number of times that I've failed to die myself. Let's see, there was the scarlet fever, the drowning, the near-miss on a motorcycle, the appendicitis, the embolism, not to mention the food poisoning, the storm at sea. Oh, I guess it's a lot more times than for the old sailboat. Bottom line, I feel pretty lucky to be alive. Which has not quite but almost nothing to do with elaborate interventions on my behalf.

I sometimes don't think it's my narrative which has gone off the rails. Sometimes I think it's the frame itself which isn't tethered any longer to reality.

Loser!

My sweet daughter used to make an L on her forehead at me a lot. Powerful expressions always originate with the very young, and of course it took me a while to "get" what this expression meant.

It has taken me my entire life until, perhaps, about now to decide that no matter how often I earned the nickname HardLuck, I am precisely not a Loser.

Lately, I whine about what the Health Insurance Industry does to me - they have systematically rejected every single claim, except for the incidentals, for my recent hospitalization. The total bill is enough to wreck me, and having paid my premiums doesn't begin to cover my obligations up against the set of rules they have for me to break unwittingly.

But the good news is that they are showing their hand. Demographically, they should consider me on their side in the Big Fight. They should bend over backwards to convince me that we really do have a fair and honest and worth-preserving system of health care. I'm one of the lucky ones who's recently enough unemployed actually to have health insurance, and still luckier to continue to be able to pay their premiums.

But just like Dick Cheney, they can't help themselves. By their actions they seem to believe somehow that I will be grateful each time they make an exception to their arcane rules that somehow I haven't precisely followed. Most of the time, I'm not the one failing to follow the rules anyhow; it might be the doctor using the "wrong" code, or the hospital passing the deadline for pre-certification, or me getting sick while crossing insurance boundaries. But I'm the one at the end of the line. I'm the one with the fewest resources to fight.

So, the power remains entirely with them to make exceptions, and I should be grateful? Actually, I think I've been granted a glimpse into the hellish orgy which is behind the way profits get made around these parts.

Back in highschool, everyone was shown highway atrocities, enough to make you quite actually sick, for the purpose of discouraging drunk driving. And we continue to be told of what a large percentage of highway accidents are caused by alcohol. For that matter, we continue to be terrorized by stories about drunken airline pilots.

But the message is never conveyed that if you put that many autonomous death machines on high-speed roadways, a certain amount of mayhem is simply inevitable. And it will look just as gruesome.

I prefer to focus on how few fatalities there are, given the nutso system that we have to multiply the consequences of any one of us going off, or making the wrong deer in headlights move, or just being despondent because of some sort of extreme cognitive dissonance.

Leaping ahead here; the terrorists are not the problem. The problem is that we live in a world where we grant the nutjob or the drunk so much power. Every time we think it must have been some Islamic radical, it turns out to have been some neighbor (in the case of Buffalo and Tim McVeigh) or some local nutjob flying his private plane into a building (in the case of Austin) in imitation of the big guys.

And when it really is some Islamic radical, we come up with bizarre conspiracy theories about how it must have been the Big Guy. Which just diverts attention from the fact that the Big Guy was always ready to take full advantage of whatever happened whenever it happened. They tell us all the time that some sort of terrorist incident is inevitable. Is that so that we can prepare for it (how would you prepare???) or so that "they" can?

We are being prepared by a slow but steady erosion of our civil liberties and degrees of freedom, but not the ones that count, like being able to drive cars or fly planes. It's the ones we shrug about which are being whittled away. The ones which, each by themselves, don't mean much, but will add up, down the road, to something which looks very much like Too Big to Change.

Google's gmail wasn't really working very well yesterday. I don't know if this will be documented, or allowed to languish as something that lots of people might have noticed but assumed was something "on my end." We're all vaguely aware of how vulnerable our information systems are. Cybersecurity is generally recognized to be as critical as infrastructure security of any sort. Google gets attacked by overzealous Chinese patriotic students, but that might be a difference without a distinction from being attacked outright by the forces of the Chinese government.

Just as it really doesn't matter who is the pilot of a mobile bomb and what deranged him. The system is simply set such that this stuff has become an inevitability. We like to assign blame, but maybe it's the system that has gone rotten.

Or maybe "the system" is working really really well, but there are some terribly minority winners for whom what they've already won is never enough. Maybe our fear is fully functional for them. If we think the system is busted, wrecked, headed for disaster, then we will remain fully powerless to do anything about it, and the ones who have the power can just keep getting more.

I do think it's about that simple.

The good news is that we will learn to get along because we must. The bad news hardly needs reciting, it's on the news every day, whether it's a Harvard genius toting a gun, or the figment of someone's imagination toting a gun in the UB Library. We're really scared of one another.

But no-one seems to notice how well we do, in fact, get along.

I'm a weirdo on my street, just because, I guess, I'm the only renter. Plus, I'm shy by disposition and don't really know the rules for interaction in the local soap opera. I guess I'm part of it - I wonder what role they have scripted out for me? I could make up some fascinating tales, based on the part that makes it out in public. They'd be at least as believable as the truth, whatever that is. I have no idea what my role is or should be. Honest.

I did not get that job, by the way, where I would be taking on a very public role helping to diffuse the tectonic forces now at the intersection of China and the U.S. This was not a mistake on the part of the search committee, nor does it make me a loser. I was well qualified for the position, and made it to the podium for sure, in a very crowded field. But there was only one position on offer, and I didn't get it.

In a minor sense, I am a known quantity in Buffalo. I am not one of the players. More of a bit part at the fringes who somehow has been in prominent positions at certain moments, but never in a real spotlight. That has been fine for me, but I have also allowed myself to consider myself a loser, even though each time that I have 'failed to succeed' the entire arrangement was a kind of setup. I was a patsy for someone else's failure to set a winnable context.

I guess that makes me some kind of fool, stepping in where more sensible people always have something better to do, or know how to say no. (there's absolutely no way I would have been able to say "no" if I were offered this job. I'm just as scared as you are about being out of work)

Whether heading a school for gifted kids during a stagflationary recession in a shrinking city at a time when "gifted" was a widely derided claim. Whether guiding a high level commission to China without the proper high level alignment back at the home school. Whether struggling to keep up with expectations in a field where those in power all, to a person, announce their utter incompetency (that's what IT work means in case you didn't know what you were doing to those guys who fix your machines).

But it doesn't make me a loser. The losers are the ones who are not allowed to live on my street, and who are therefore concentrated in places I would consider it a risk to my life to live. I wonder how the people who do live there consider it. Isn't it a risk to their lives as well?

Very smart and very well-grounded (sic) people trade advice back and forth, at a very high level - like 30,000 feet in the air high - about what should be done to "rightsize" Buffalo's infrastructure. Which parts should be let go, which bulldozed, which mothballed, since it seems perfectly obvious that there simply isn't enough population of sufficient income to preserve it all.

I don't think I want to live at those 30,000 foot heights. There's no air to breath up there. Well grounded in some esoteric field of experts is not the same as having feet actually on the ground.

I'm guessing that there are lots and lots of people in Sprawlsville who would love to live closer to the action if they weren't so encouraged to fall prey to the notion that everyone in the city is bound and determined get you and yours.

There's a big shopping mall just outside the outer ring of Buffalo called the Galleria. When it was built, it was one of the larger such places in the nation, built to take advantage of the cross-border shopping trends from Canada (depending on the ascendancy of Canadian or American hockey, say).

It's been in the news nationally for not allowing buses from the city to terminate there, leading to the loss of one poor woman's life crossing the quite literally impossible-to-cross highway to get to her low-level job inside the mall.

The first thing you see when you enter the mall are signs announcing that "children" under 18 are not allowed unaccompanied. The assumption is that this too is because of the unruly kids from the city (as if they could get there in the first place).

I happen to know first hand, because I was there, that this rule is because of a very exclusive and expensive private boarding school for dyslexic boys where I used to work. This mall was their Friday night release. During the week, the prescription to empower these boys, who were demonstrably smart (and necessarily rich, which is  neither here nor there) but who had trouble reading; the prescription was to provide order to their lives. And constant phonic drilling.

This was not exactly a military school, but it did set out to internalize order that the students were lacking, in a way often reminiscent of military schools. For the right sort of student, it really really worked. It was liberating.

But if you set these kids loose in the mall on a Friday, with teachers who have been on duty (you had to live on campus to teach there) virtually 24/7, you do have a bit of a problem waiting to happen.

It was these kids who were the reason for the rule at the mall.

As FDR once convinced us, it truly is fear and fear alone which is our adversary.

And if I, a winner in every sense of the game *except* perhaps my own internal impressions, cannot overcome fear, who can?

So, I'll continue to work on it. I'll keep you posted. I still think that the tectonic tensions between China and the US are critically important for us all to worry about, collectively. But of course, they are worries at the level of asteroids possibly coming in from the far reaches of the cosmos if you're on the ground dealing with health and safety emergencies.

The way to bring those issues down to earth, I am fully convinced, is to make it clear on a local level what it might mean to throw out the search for scientific stratosphere-level certainties (religious, technological, blueprinted - it hardly matters, because they're all the very same thing) in favor of a kind of contextualized flowing usage trued against centuries of drilling and practice and recitation. We could use the balance.

The funny thing is that in the so called ghettos, they're already way way ahead of us in the Eastern martial arts training. There may actually be less ground to travel there toward making sense of China, than there ever could be at the University which still only affords a tiny handful of professors and courses.

Well, it's a thought. My strength in my professional life has always and only been my patience. I seem to lend a bit of calm in the face of dire circumstances. It's why I like to sail in the wild weather. It's the kind of fool that I am. It defines my success in the field of IT, overpopulated by over-reacts who love the adrenalin pumping emergencies. I will remain calm, ever looking for ways on the ground to connect with the 30,000 foot perpetual emergency that the smart people in power pay attention to, exhorting us to do the right thing.

Busted!

In the ever interesting scrimmage between Google and China, it seems a compromise is about to be reached. This will be hard for us on this side of the globe to understand, but students in China now are so patriotic that they will do the government's bidding without ever being asked. Actually, even when they are admonished strenuously not to do it, they will read Big Brother's mind.

In this country, the unruly teabaggers are as far from the Academy as they can possibly get. There is almost no intelligence there (I don't mean that there are no intelligent people there, I just mean that as a movement, it is utterly chaotic), just inchoate anger looking for an object. The obvious object is the government itself, which becomes almost spooky similar to what we used to taunt one another about as kids: "You have one finger pointing at me, and three pointing back at you! Neaner neaner neenah!!!"

It's astonishing that they accept Sarah Palin as their spokesmodel. Here is a woman who is as far from understanding real life as the Bushes and the Kennedys were, and yet they hold her up as some kind of one of them. Hers is a different sort of remove from reality, sure, but just because you hunt moose in Alaska doesn't make it real. Just because your husband's a mensch doesn't make him like your husband. They live a fantasy life up there, where the government gives them money.

This woman defines the very term "bitch goddess" and she wouldn't even know what that means. She'd think it was some kind of political incorrectness that she has a right to point her finger at. Well, debating her would be an utter waste of time, so I don't know why I bother. I had something to say about China.

(I always have something to say about China). You'd think, wouldn't you? that after what we call the Tian-an Men massacre in 1989, the students in China would be rather more radicalized toward their government. You'd be wrong. Those punished for that uprising were almost exclusively workers. The students were chastised for allowing their privileged understanding to spill out into the streets. The entire event became what we might call an object lesson. The students followed it very closely.

It is not hard to understand the terms of the bargain the Chinese government has made with its people. Their lives are getting palpably better day by day, and the only thing which can put a brake on that would be chaos; not accidentally the very word which the Chinese use to describe the events on Tian-an Men square that fateful day.

The Academy over here is meant to enlighten. The Academy there is meant to rectify. In both cases, this supposition forms a kind of benign fiction, masking all sorts of petty corruption and deviation. (If you think the Ivy League is all about enlightenment, you should examine the power structure of our nation once in a while)

Rectification means putting words in their proper contexts, mostly. Establishing their meaning - their proper usage - against, in China's case, thousands of years of usage. As you might imagine, this can put the brakes on what we celebrate as "innovation."

Corruption is a deviation, which doesn't change the main stream of improvement. It is the purpose of government, in China, for instance, to keep the rivers flowing in their proper channels, since the weather plays chaotic havoc from time to time, wiping out farms and farmers.

One might suggest that they have gone a bit too far now, damming up the Yangtze and in the process wiping out farms and farmers. Not to mention artifacts and history. But one would never suggest that inside China. That would be to invite chaos.

Decisions, once rendered, must be upheld in a single composed face. Of course we, on our side, also only pay lip service to protests which are now as effectively restrained to within the walls of the Academy as they had been before Vietnam. Only the teabaggers spill out onto the streets.

This is not accidental. Our elite students also accept the bargains offered them. The same riches, beautiful women, access to power, and a chance to enter the government and improve it. This also, is trivial to document. I've seen it from the inside, and it's not always pretty.

So, while I actually don't think that Paul Wellstone was killed by some earnest non-agent of the Bush administration who was reading the mind of Big Brother, I do think that this precise thing explains the cyber-attacks from China. I think Google and China should shake hands and carry on, and that the rest of us should get a clue.

The Chinese government is precisely as responsible as ours is, and precisely as corrupt. I don't say that because of some need for fearful symmetry. It just falls out from the actual balance of power, trade and what these mean for the rest of the world. We have a hard time understanding, much less condoning, China's behavior in Tibet, while the rest of the world has a hard time with us in the Middle East. Or with regard to Israel a lot of the time. Which is also in the Middle East, come to think of it. Duh.

Thinking these things does nothing about making them right or wrong in practice. The problem for Tibet is not its being inside our outside the Chinese sphere of linguistic rectitude, which is arguably as tried and trued as our sphere of scientific enlightenment. The problem is rather, what happens to the stuff that's actually valuable which is a part of their culture and only their culture. The living part and not just the artifacts, which I'm sure the Chinese government will be very careful to preserve.

What happens to all the cultures of the earth now that American English has swapped places with the Queen's own Empire? What happens when we're all just WalMart civ?

I don't think any of us should be pointing fingers, but I do think that we shouldn't exactly trust the Academies to do our dirty work for us either. Clearly, life is not getting palpably better over here day by day. But it surely is for the elites. Why, indeed, would they want anything at all to change??

I think there's room for righteous anger about that. Let the dialogs begin!!

Swindled!

Last night, arguing with a very talented lawyer friend of mine (we like to posture adversarially, although it's not a fair match, since he does this professionally) I heard a sad and funny story.

We were arguing about Tiger Woods and Bill Clinton, and the Starr commission and framing and responsibility. For the sake of argument, let's say I was taking Clinton's side, excoriating (a word lawyers would never use in a courtroom) Starr for dispensing with procedural justice in his rabid pursuit of some truth with a capital T. It seemed to me that Clinton was simply maneuvered into a position where his answer was guaranteed, and that it would necessarily be at odds with the goods being held in reserve against him.

The other side of the argument in this case being that he was *out* maneuvered, and that Clnton was the one with the brains, the staff, the power to avoid precisely this predicament, and in the end he still lied to the American public, in whose service he had pledged to labor.

Clinton lied, perhaps, because it was a small matter. He lied, perhaps, because the consequences of telling the truth would cause greater harm to the public than the harm of keeping it from them. He'd been cornered, and perhaps he'd proved his mettle?

I don't much care about the proper answer. It makes interesting dinner conversation.

So, there was this judge, having an affair with a university professor. One night, they are caught on tape having "not-sex" (if you speak like Clinton) in the parking lot of a restaurant. There was a small accident - a fender bender in the process of backing out - which entailed a quick "no problem, officer" check written on the spot (not to the officer, to the victim, sorry!). There was a tale of drunken weaving on the skyway bridge, and an arrest for DWI.

You pretty much know which side you should be on, until you hear that the judge's wife was having him tailed, and that the DWI was a setup. A tipoff. The pictures were not captured accidentally. Who knows about the bumper bumping?

Apart from your envy that these participants in an illicit affair could keep it that hot after two years, it's not all that easy to tell where the justice is or should be. At least not for me.

The part that's hard to get beyond though, is that you do know that the scorned wife was the reason that the affair stayed hot. She was being used that way. You also know that these players probably knew that about themselves, and wanted to keep things that way for as long as they could. Well, you don't really know, but you can reasonably surmise.

I don't really know the end of the story, although I have to assume that a few lives were wrecked. Once public, these things make a hard time stuffing them back into the can. It's hard not to see the wife both vindicated and justified. But you don't really know the backstory. You don't really know anything about their homelife, what led up to things. Do you need to? So what if she was just a controlling bitch. Isn't that just a cliche to put down those who outmaneuver you?

I spent part of yesterday in the VW shop. My brakes were always on (take that Toyota!), and it was costing me lots of gas mileage. They'd just completed a total redecoration of their shop, which made the entire customer service experience much more lavish than it used to be. I hardly need to tell you that it made me nervous.

Now, I'm pretty loaded down with technology, and I tend to know how to use it. This was the first time that I remember their quote for the part being so far out of line with the "standard" price on the Internet. They'd suggested I should have the brakes replaced at the same time but I held off, on the reasonable argument that I'm still not working. I made some lame jokes about how they'd better not start serving Cappuccino or I'd start thinking I was among the wrong class of customer anymore. They assured me I'd have to bring my own. (the coffee was pretty good, oh, and I just rechecked and it must have been a fluke, like looking up prices on Travelocity before you move to commit. It no longer looks like they overcharged me.)

Of course it did turn out that there was more wear left "than we'd thought". I couldn't tell if that was said sheepishly. It wouldn't have mattered to me. I've driven this car nearly 300,000 miles, and all the service has been done at this shop, and I'm not about to stop loving them just because they made their showroom and customer waiting area look more like that rip-off place which serves Cappuccino, and which I, of course, eschew.

But there's more to the story, of course. Recently, in Toronto, on a Sunday, picking up my girls from the airport, one of my coils went out. (yeah, I thought there was only one too) The car made it home at potentially great expense to the car, and later on I found that the 'net is full of VW haters and flamers who post about this issue, and how VW sux. But when I'd taken my car in for the brake diagnosis, they just replaced all these coils, no charge to me, fixed the rattle with some duct tape arrangement, and told me how I could get reimbursed for the coil I'd bought myself, on the road, on a guess.

The coil I bought was too cheap to bother searching for its receipt (that plus the time to manage the paperwork). And I know the VW shop was eager to do this for me because the newly official recall would mean that they would be paid for charging me nothing. I'm not stupid. But it felt like I was being respected, treated well, favored. Any damage done to the car was by now ancient history. I mean that rather literally.

But now I have no way to tell which was the bigger factor in my lost gas mileage, and where the permanent injury is. An ambiguity I'll just have to live with.  I think the difference from Toyota is that there was never any danger to life and limb here. Just pocketbook risk. But they didn't exactly come clean about it ahead of time, and who knows if maybe the flamers on the 'net had something to do with forcing their hand.

Trust is rough. The temptations are all over the place - I'm sure the VW shop is hurting as much as anyone else for business.

***

Sorry, had to take a break. You know how it is when you stay out late, have a few drinks (I walked home!). You're ravenous the next morning.

I made myself an omelette. It was incredible. I don't know if you'd like it, or if it was just incredible to me. It was a garbage omelette, full of too much unmatched stuff that I had by the dregs. Beans. Chorizo. Olives. Broccoli. Brie. Salza. Little bits of stuff. I have no way to know if I liked it because I'm an easy sell, or because I was happy to find use for those dregs. Oh, I forgot to tell you about the potatoes fried in olive oil.

The one thing I do know for certain is that you would never be able to eat such a thing in any restaurant. That I know for certain. What I don't know is whether that is because there can't possibly be that much love in a plate for hire, or if no self-respecting chef would even think of that combination, or simply because there would be some guarantee of returns to the kitchen. All I know for certain is that you'd never get that in a restaurant.

I also know for certain that I'd never have satisfied my particular craving in a restaurant.

Anyhow, where was I? Oh, OK, sure, you're thinking this is pretty clever, right, trying to make it seem as though these things just happen and I don't orchestrate them, and that they will somehow magically fit right into the story?

I'm not that disingenuous. Please! I make shit up as much as the next guy. I edit. I revise. (the omelette story is true though, and even I know I'll have a hard time selling the notion that I revise. I'm not stupid)

I was going to speak, rather, about how, magically, on the news, as if I were the one to cause it, there are these seemingly coincident happenings. Well, their happening is not coincident, it's plain fact that they coincided. But the randomness of their apparent alignment, that's the seeming part.

First, there's Dick Cheney outing himself as a "big fan of torture." Then there's this guy over in England who pretty much confesses to murder right on TV; how he suffocated his "partner" suffering from terminal AIDS and lots of pain. How he thereby relieved the doctors and his lover all, of what he knew they could never do. And how he was interrogated for 30 hours against the likelihood that he was, in fact, guilty of murder.

Here's the shocker. I want to give them both a pass, both Cheney and the lover. Both of them had the decency to speak their "truths" out loud and in public. Now, you might say that they have little enough to lose. They're old, both of  them, on death's door for various reasons. But there's little enough of that truth telling out there. (there are few enough cars that even get that far!) I'd really like for Cheney to be interrogated, on the power of risking his life, but I'm tipping my hat that he at least says out loud what he's doing in private. When it affects us, I mean. I don't really give a damn what he does in his closet.

How are the rest of us supposed to make good decisions, when everyone's making up stories? How, when everyone's got an angle on everyone else's story?

That's my story, and I'm sticking with it. Really the omelette was incredible. I'm not about to open a restaurant, but still . . . .

Those Who Can't Do

How about these variations: "Those who can't, do." "Those who, can't do." "Those, who can't do . . . " Now let's complete the sentences. "Those who can't, do as they will and consider the rest of us fools for trying." "Those WHO, can't do a thing with their music anymore." "Those, who can't do, should stay over there in the Academy, teaching."

I know it's a silly exercise. Classical Chinese, classically, was never punctuated. They hadn't seen the need for it, plus it made a really good exercise for budding readers. They would follow along with pen while reading, and mark the pauses off to the side. The teacher then could instantly tell which ones knew how to read - which ones were missing essential pieces of context; of background mastery. They could tell which ones were fooled by the subtleties. And the ones who found a new way of reading, which the teacher himself had never noticed, well these ones were taken aside to be browbeaten.

It was an essential part of learning to read. It would be a very very big mistake for a student to be allowed any sense of new with the received classics. You can just imagine the dangers. It would be very much like opening a crack in the cosmic egg. Some light might get in! Or things could fall apart.

Meanwhile, in precisely the same way that childish rhymes rehearse the problems with adulthood, we are fond of reciting the truism that "those who can't do, teach." ("Ashes to ashes, we all fall DOWN" or how about "rockabye baby" or "he bumped his head and he went to bed and he couldn't get up in the morning") For sure, it allows students to get back at their masters. Even, or especially, as the masters themselves take special joy in their students' accomplishment in life after school. Like good parents, they wish only for their children's flight. Or at least marry a doctor, for Chrissakes! You'll never fly, idiot!

Well, not necessarily in China, where your child is still your main insurance policy, which might not be a bad thing for us to emulate, come to think of it. In the Chinese case, the Academy actually was the way in to real-world power. Academic conservatism was extremely functional. And parents figured, hey, if he's gonna fly, he'll do it no matter how strong a cage I build. Chinese parenting has been likened to Jewish parenting by a lot more people than just me. I wonder if Jerry Seinfeld knows about it?

It's pretty much the same way here now, as to ties between the academy and the world beyond. With the big difference being that it doesn't really matter how you score. Here, it's much more important which academy you attended. Our important exams are all entrance exams - entrance to the academy, not entrance to some position beyond the academy. Beyond the academy, it's all just a matter of who you know. Usually, you got to know them inside the academy. Kind of a vicious-circle serpent eating its tail kind of thing, I know.

It is, or at least should be, a commonplace that oppressed people often internalize their oppressors, and become thereby their own jailers. Their own worst enemy. The best evidence for this is how prison trustees are that much crueler toward those under their charge compared to the ones getting paid. This principle has been exploited for eons to great effect.

The question must naturally be begged then, what about the teachers in our academies? These are by and large left-leaning thinkers now, in institutions lavishly funded by the capitalist owner class. Or at least the better the institutions are, the more likely to be so owned and funded. Is the peer review process for tenure simply a handing down of the oppression from the owners of the teachers' minds?

You won't have followed me this far, so I'm going to revert to a bit of shorthand, likely for myself alone. A kind of placeholder to be followed up on later. I actually tried this argument once from the inside of the Academy, and it didn't get me very far there either. In fact, it was the proximate cause of the most recent of my occasions for escape. Oh, I guess I've already reverted to the shorthand, for which I apologize retrospectively, which is what apology should be come to think about it. Sorry!

Some academics are fond of talking about the colonization of their students' minds by various sorts of "grand narratives." They talk about this in language which would not only be utterly uninteresting to those outside the academy walls, but more critically, which would be almost entirely incomprehensible. This "post-modernist" sort of language is utterly impossible to parse. Scientists, of which one famous example would be Edward O. Wilson, the ethnobiologist, try and try sometimes, and can find nothing but circular statements of such occult density that they are certain the scholars themselves have been taken in and made lost by their very own words. Hoist, as it were, by their own petard.

But of course these scientists are denizens of the very same academies, even while being far less likely to lean left. Although still a lot more likely than the population at large. Still, for scientists, the expropriation of their work by the capitalist owner class is pretty much welcome. The feedback loop in that case is fairly direct. You cause our theoretical work to be embodied in the world of better living through chemistry (for instance), continue to fund our research lavishly, and we'll go on being your humble servants, for so long as you let us work on what really turns us on and not just what you think might be useful. Pretty much like artists with a patron.

Be patient and utility will come. It always has. Of course, this implied contract has become strained lately, with universities depending more and more on direct funding from companies expecting tangible and financially rewarding results. There's lots of valid concern now about "motivated" research, as even or maybe especially scientists get in on the take from the great capitalistic economic engine of supposed progress (which ain't looking so great now that the caps are melting, for instance, although the technological fix is surely just around the corner now!!).

Tenure comes to those who pull in grant money. Of course, you have to watch out for the ones with a really tightly wound sense of justice, since they might go on a shooting spree or fly a plane into a building. If the cognitive dissonance becomes too great.

If you're not a scientist, the feedback loop is harder to identify. There are certain routes to political power, to roles inside the government, which, if you're a good player, can be parlayed into power in industry, through that famous revolving door. You might even be able to get away with torture if you rise high enough. And brag about it publicly without worry about the consequences. Which I think is a pretty hopeful sign. Honest! (What, you'd rather have them stay secret about this stuff???!!)

But if you're out of that loop, then you're pretty much relegated to talking about how your own mind has been colonized, even as you browbeat your students into learning how to read and write and talk the way that you do. Jews for Israel and damn the Palestinians who could never know the oppression we have felt. Is it any mistake that so many scholars and writers have been Jewish? Oh, I know, I'm just jealous. Well, sure, and I admit it!

OK, so you don't really browbeat if you're a teacher. It's way more subtle than that. But if you were to be honest, you would have to admit that without that academy you never would have the freedom to indulge this thing which feels like flying. This flight of words which feels very much as though it was approaching some sort of sun, whose existence the words themselves deny. You could do it forever. Admit it. You've never had to work a day in your lives.

That may sound like a taunt or a complaint, but it's not. Honest. I, for one, don't believe that work has to be oppressive to count as work. The forces of the economy would like you to think so for sure, to preserve the economic value of play, for instance, but not me. I know very much what it's like to be penalized for liking work too much. So do those pilots for the regional airlines, who could easily get more for driving a bus.

Still you do have to wonder who owns your mind, according to the little compromises you make each and every day for the sake of peace in the valley. And for most oppressed classes, it's not the things you already know about which are the problems. You can probably identify and make peace with yourself about the paper chase, and the tenure compromises, and the shilling for the admissions or development office.

The things you really have to monitor though, are those things which make you the most exercised, and you don't even know how to identify where the oppression really is. What is it that really bothers you most about your students? What would you really like to slap them down about. That would be the cue to the internal oppression. When the students get uppity, and it really bothers you, and you're wondering if it should.

Sometimes you are just concerned that they are being misled by their own enthusiasm. Usually, you already understand that this particular student, based on a pretty good background check from other assignments, just simply is not equipped for the territory he is heading into, and you want to keep him from embarrassment or worse.

But sometimes they really do find the weak spot in your presentation, and you just want them to shut up. I know a thing or two about how hard it is to stand up in front of a class, exposed, and still to try to resist the temptation to pull rank and bolster the pretense that you really do know exactly what you're talking about. It's a really scary position.

Really, you should just accept the fact that the University owns your mind. That by accepting the credential, you implicitly accepted the need for such a credential to distinguish you from those who don't or won't or can't get it. You recognize that a few of those are just plain too smart to need it or want it or to waste their time getting it, and these become the artists; who produce the actual objects of your teaching. It is and will and should be strange if and why any of them, these objectifiers, become colleagues in the Academy itself, except, perhaps, as "Artists in Residence" who are known to know as little about their own work as it is possible to know. Just in the sense that no-one can really know himself, or why he does or says what he does. That's the magic lacuna in each of us, and it's a good thing as both Anne Tyler and Barbara Kingsolver happened to have figured out, magically, and the very same time. For instance. The University is their Patron then, and as distinguished from you, the Big U. is not their employer.

And that's just the way it is. So get used to it. Unless you want to own your own damned mind, in which case you'd better be pretty proof against crazy. Which if you were you wouldn't require the reassurance of peer review about it in the first place. And just because nobody gets what I'm saying doesn't make me crazy. You know? Right? Hey!!!

Still, I really don't think it's true that 'those who can't do teach.' Teaching is surely doing. You're standing up there in front of a bunch of eager and earnest learners (so long as you don't give them objective measures for feedback, which will only encourage them to game it and become your adversaries) and maintaining this potential fiction that you can lead them someplace valuable, which they could never reach alone. You do it because you love them, more even than you would love to be where they might go yourself. And you take a meta look askance at the work of the real producers in the world beyond the academy. Which, if it had any sense, that world, it would prize this meta-looking in you beyond all reason. It's what a University is for! I have seen the mountain and I can't make it myself, but I can ease your efforts by taking you to my jump off point. What, that's not doing?

Which, speaking of, reason, is how come I have turned almost all of my attacks against the Left. As non-believers in absolute anything, as people who understand that the word truth, while grammatically possible, cannot possibly mean anything at all, except as reification of what originally meant just simply comparison against a standard, in the absence of which, the standard, there is no possible meaning at all, unless you believe that the abstract can be real, and measurable, and something to be trued against. Which just comes right back to that jealous of Jews thing again, now, doesn't it? Because they seem to be able to true things without some actual objectification of that thing against which what they know is being trued. Which was what was so great about that recent Coen brothers movie, A Serious Man, which I'm not, in case you were wondering. I'm not a serious man.

I ramble. And I'm pretty sure I'm right about this stuff, but in the end, those who can't do write, and are almost never actually right, right? I just wish we'd all stop being so shrill and certain about stuff. It doesn't do any good to want people's heads, no matter which side you're on. The problems are all on the fringes, at the extremes, and the solution is about finding some dialog, some truing which can happen among the reasonable people in the middle, not against a standard, but against each other. And it's not that the extremists are wrong. They're just dug in. Trench warfare gets nowhere. Just watch history. Just watch Congress. Well, if you can stand it.

I, for one, just wish that they would let the Olympics play out on their own, competition by competition, and not keep trying to make a story about it, which makes one Olympics look just like any other and not even worth watching. Because I've seen that story and that announcer, and that little heart-wrenching vignette about the struggle to the podium at least a million times. I just want to watch the race!

And what if there are no more mountains left to climb? What if the struggles now are all inside our heads? Would that really be so terrible? Really? We'd have to make the important choices now, instead of kicking them down the road, for instance . . . .

Vote Fraud

I don't know how to pose questions, and I'm in charge of the darned polling company. Did you mean "Boo!" lousy story, or "Boo!" let's turn off the TV, or "Boo!" to turning off the TV. Questions are so much about context. I can never get it right.

I have three "opportunities" out there right now, or maybe four or five depending on how you count them. Maybe the people in charge of the opportunities wouldn't consider me a contender, but how would I know? They aren't talking - pretty much like you ya bastard reader! It's amazing how people and companies and readers and critics will just keep you waiting and waiting, like a frog in a kettle, as if we weren't all desperate for work these days. You might almost say it borders on cruel.

Just for fun, while I'm still in free fall here, which as a line in some movie I recently watched but can't remember which pointed out, free fall is like flying (until you hit). Maybe it was a TV show? I know it's not original with me. Crazy Heart???

Anyhow just for fun - and I'm going on record here that nobody's in danger of a shooting spree from me if you reject me - I'm going to idly suggest the connection among these apparently disconnected applications of myself to someone else's business. Here's the list in no particular order:

• China/US inter-paradigm understanding and cross-cultural brokerage before we end up at odds with each other and take the whole world down with us . . .
• Health Insurance IT development to internalize market externalities to optimise care and cost (externalities include what would be humanly "best" and not just what would cover the most bases - sometimes more "care" isn't better, that sort of thing.)
• non-profit business software development for a sustainable planet (same idea as with healthcare - developing a new economics of humanity)
• love
• startup business to shift the critical distinction for technology from software/hardware to machine/human where it belongs

A couple more are just long shots hardly worth mentioning:

• Winning the lottery (hey, I bought a ticket once)
• Writing for pay (keep your yap shut!)

Some would pay better than others, I'm sure. Some would sustain the soul in ways to make up for shortfalls in pay. Some would sell the soul. Some would defer compensation for some period up to eternity. I'm having a hard time recognizing which is which.

I'll bet you would have a hard time drawing the connections among them. I'll give you a hand.

First of all, in the Chinese tradition, before contamination from us, the West, the technologists, if you will; before that the Chinese literary, linguistic and cultural tradition had no need to noodle the mind/body problem which so obsesses us. There was not a whole lot of obsessing about beginnings and endings, and therefore no concern for ultimate meanings. The word God, for instance just simply never dropped out from or in to the language.

Then there's the utterly ridiculous, obsolete and just silly distinction between hardware and software in the world of technology. It's all circuits in some virtual space. Logic circuits, embodied in hardware or virtually hosted on hardware, it's all on the machine side of a distinction which does count, and which falls out of many languages after a while. That's the human/machine distinction. It falls out of math, that supposed "universal language," in the form of "paradoxes" which only machine-like thinkers could possibly give a damn about.

Some wag on Facebook just now thought I was talking about "love" when I said free fall is like flying (I just meant a job hunt), so that connection doesn't even bear mentioning.

The economics of healthcare are obvious enough for anyone paying even the slightest attention. For instance, who, if told the price ahead of time, would ride an ambulance rather than a taxi if they were going to be asked to foot the bill themselves? Pretty much only the virtually dead already, right? And where do you think all the expenditures go? And do you think any of it could be used to refund the life of the person who likely never made as much in a whole lifetime as will be spent at its end (for the benefit, presumably, of those to be left behind). Q.E.D.

And as to sustainable industry, well that should be a no-brainer too. If you only charge what it costs to extract something, without considering the cost to renew it, you'd pretty much be shooting yourself in the foot unless you were only concerned about a good time right now. In which case, fuck you! Which takes us back to the love connection again.

I suppose that it's OK for two people to be looking for a good time right now from each other, as long as nobody else is involved. Maybe you know how to get to that magic spot of no implication with anyone other than yourself? But then we get back to the soul selling thing again, I mean assuming you have any usage for the term soul, which I, for one, sure don't.

Well, I'm whistling. While I work? Like a bomb in free fall? Because I like the tune? Because I'm in love? All of the above? I always hated multiple choice. So easy to game. (What? You think I earned my way into the Ivy League - fat chance! I was that dog they let in when some Black Hat was proving how easy it is to game the system. But you're too young to remember that one.)

Vote Fraud!!