sagemerlin's Open Salon Blog

The Vagabond in the White House

Wed, 30 May 2012 11:05:20 -0400

So, there he was, just standing there, managing at 71 to look like the same unwashed phenomenon he was at 19, a lifelong vagabond in an antique frock coat and dark glasses, an older, weather-beaten, dried out, dessicated version of himself, looking somewhat confused to be sharing a dais with the President of the Unite States, among Nobel Prize winners, crusading doctors, and a war hero who became a Supreme Court Justice - wondering how in the world he had managed to end up in such a predicament, being extolled as a hero of the Republic for speaking truth to power over a five decade career of ups and downs, on a neverending world tour. And when his turn came, with the tall, angular president of the United States standing behind him to drape the Medal of Freedom around his neck, was it merely an illusion or did the President really break out in a huge smile that seemed to say something like, "Fucking A....I can't believe I'm really doing this."

Unlike the previous recipients, when the young president and the old singer shook hands, the older man gripped the younger man's right shoulder with a gesture that was somewhere between a manly squeeze and a grandfatherly pat....and suddenly it becomes clear: this is one of the very few people in the world who really knows what it's like to be the focus of great attention from moment to moment for years at a time, all because you have a gift with words, and an ability to condense complex thoughts into simple statements.

It was a unique moment and you really got the feeling, watching from a distance, that as much as the younger man was honoring the older man, the older man was conferring some measure of his authenticity upon the younger man.

From this distance, it really looked like the President of the United States was far more awestruck than the aging vagabond was awestruck about being honored by the young president. After all, presidents come and go with the passage of time, but there's only ever been one Bob Dylan, and there will never be another one.

There Is No Law About Language in America

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 11:03:23 -0400

In 2006, Republican Party strategist Kevin Phillips - the architect of Ronald Reagan's Southern Strategy - wrote a book, "American Theocracy," that accurately predicted the deeply damaging impact of the Republican party's obsessions with oil, religion and debt upon the body politic of the nation.

Today, in 2012, virtually all of Phillips' predictions have come to pass....with the predicted consequences.

In effect, Republicanism has become a religion of Americanism, drawing together various Christian denominations into a powerful coalition that has been attempting to install their belief systems as law on the federal, state and local levels. What they are really doing, in effect, is re-writing the Constitution without so much as a by-your-leave - not to mention a Constitutional Convention - by telling us what they think is in the Constitution rather than actually reading what's really in it.

For the past three years, the Republican Party has pursued a brilliant strategy of denying the current president of the United States the ability to govern effectively through filibuster and the erection of false dichotomies which have dominated the public colloquy ever since the current president was elected.

During the Republican Primary season, the Grand Old Party has used a seemingly never-ending series of debates to attack the current president's performance - and each other - in a process that has dominated our collective attention for several months on the theory that the debates enabled them to debate a silent target since the current president has for the most part refused to be drawn into their debates.

It was a brilliant strategy - for the Democratic Party - because the Republican candidates for president have collectively managed to offend every single minority group in the nation, along with one majority group: women in general, virtually guaranteeing a Democratic victory in November.

Rick Santorum has now demonstrated the fatal flaw in Republican theocracy - their tendency to consider opinions facts.

Rick Santorum is of the opinion that there is a constitutional regulation that stipulates that a "state" must have adopted English as it's official language order to be admitted into the Union.

The facts are that both the Constitution and the Laws of the United States are silent on questions of an official language of the United States.

Article 4 Section 3 of The Constitution of the United States stipulates the following rules for the admission of new States to the Union:

"New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new States shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress."

Article 4 Section 3 of the Constitution further stipulates that...

"The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence."

Beyond this, the Constitution itself offers us nothing more about the conditions for admission or the procedures for admission. These are covered in the Law of the United States as compiled in the US Code.

However, the words "English," "Official," or "Language" do not appear anywhere in the Constitution of the United States - but the term "official language" appears twice in the US Code.

One of the references acknowledges that Hawaiians have the right to use their native language in their educational system. The other stipulates that, in cases affecting foreign governments, pleadings and service of summons must be made in the official language of that country.

The term "English" appears 443 times in the US Code. Not one of these entries has anything to do with a condition for statehood.

The "English Speaking" condition for admission to the Union simply does not exist anywhere other than in the minds of the xenophobic elements of the Republican Party, who believe their prejudices carry the force of law.

Since Puerto Rico is at present the only candidate for admission to the Union, comments about an "English Speaking" requirement can only be taken as tacit admission of a terrible prejudice against Spanish-speaking people...but that's par for the course in the party of exclusion.

As things now stand, the Republican frontrunners have so deeply damaged each other in the primary process that - once a nominee has been declared - every single one of that candidate's primary gaffes will come back to haunt the party....and if the nomine should select one of the other frontrunners for his running mate, the effect will be magnified.

Far from the close election the pundits are predicting, whether you like it or not, the current administration has been handed another term on silver platter for one simpe reason:

Not one Republican party member with the stature to be president wanted the job.

No one wants to succeed the current president because this president's policies are working....and the wise Republicans know that the policies they would have to espouse to get the nomination would decimate the nation if put into practice.

Talk about a rock and hard place.

Maybe that strategy wasn't as brilliant as they thought it was, which reminds one of the brilliant strategy that resulted in putting Sarah Palin on John McCain's ticket.

Chaos

Mon, 5 Mar 2012 15:03:15 -0500

If I had bought in before
I would have lost more
I waited for the call to come
That never came at all
The charge laid against us
That we did not manage well
Belies the existential fact
That we do not manage circumstances
Circumstances manage us.

In the chutzpah of our hubris
We think ourselves players on the stage
When we're merely shadows in the audience
Imagining ourselves in the spotlight
From the comfort of the darkness
Committing vain acts and foolish follies
Trying to negotiate with chaos
Some call it luck, some call it destiny
But we don't choose our fates
Fate chooses our destinies
And, in the end, luck decides everything else.

The End of Serendipity: Pointless Progress

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 17:02:53 -0500

This comes under the heading of, "Be Careful What You Wish For....."

On AOL right now, Bernie Meyerson is predicting five major changes that are going to affect the world over the next five years, and he really thinks they are all good things when, of course, they are not.

The first of these predictions is that human beings will begin contributing to the power grid by using our own biochemical energy to run the devices we use in our daily lives, such as cellular telephones.

Okay, maybe Bernie has never seen The Matrix Trilogy, or simply doesn't recognize that becoming a "copper top" isn't among our highest ambitions for ourselves as human beings.

The idea that we can generate energy is nothing new. It was human energy that built the pyramids but that doesn't mean being an energy source is a collective objective of the human race when it seems that we have spent thousands of years getting away from human power as the motivational force behind all useful work.

Bernie also foresees the gradual adoption of biometrical devices to replace passwords.

This would be a boon for millions upon millions of people who are now forced to remember multiple passwords for various website as they are frequently changed by capricious managers who believe they are making their data safer by requiring you to change your passwords every few weeks.

On the other hand, those biometrical devices - which is a highfalutin term for a fingerprint reader - have been around for years, ever since IBM (now Lenovo) introduced them on their Thinkpad line of notebook computers.

No one ever uses them because they are failure prone and sometimes lock users out of their own systems.

And then there are the face recognition systems that rely on the camera built into your notebook computer to determine whether your are you are not....if you are willing to wait while the system decides whether you are, in fact, you.

Bernie Meyerson is IBM's Vice President of Innovation, which raises the question of whether IBM is merely trying to create market hunger for their biometric devices, stealing a page from Apple's highly manipulative marketing play book.

The next item on Bernie's list really should scare the hell out of you, because Bernie thinks we are within five years of a world in which your computer will read your thoughts and implement your wishes....without asking you first.

That's exactly what he said.

We've had fighter planes that respond to their pilot's thoughts for some years now, but no one has ever suggested putting the computer systems in charge of the decision making process in this manner.

Think about it.

Would you really like to own a computer system that was capable of acting up on your impulses.

We think between seven and ten discretely different thoughts each and every second, but we're not aware of most of them because we have already thought them so many times before that they no longer impinge on our consciousness.

My shoes are hurting my toes. How much time do I have left on my parking meter? God, that chick is hot. Did I remember to log off my lead management system before I left work? I need to gas up on the way home. I would really like to fuck that hot chick....

And that's the problem. Our conscious minds are actually cesspools of thwarted impulses and desires that the higher consciousness - what Freud termed the superego - mitigates on a minute to minute basis as it monitors these unconscious thoughts.

Talk about the apotheosis of impulse control, making a computer system the intermediary between you and your subconscious thoughts sounds like a totalitarian wet dream because whatever thoughts your computer can read, other, unfriendly computers can read too, and whatever behaviors our overlords disapprove of could simply be prevented from happening by the appropriate sub-routine.

In other words, kiss privacy good-bye forever if this should come to pass. You could be walking down the street thinking about going shooting the local range, and find yourself tagged as a terrorist on a mission....and that's the best case scenario. IF the system could actually read your intention as being benign, then all pretense of human individuation might itself be at stake.

Number four on Bernie's list is the prediction that within five years, 80% of the planet will be able to access the internet through hand-held devices....and Bernie thinks this is a good thing.

Bandwidth is not unlimited. There are physical limits to what the current infrastructure can carry, and serious questions about whether we have either the motivation or capitalization to build another internet on top of the two that are presently presumed to exist. Adding exponentially to the number of people who already online only increases the culture crushing impact of media overload to another order of magnitude.

The fifth of Bernie's five "innovations" is his assertion that junk mail will simply cease to exist because your devices would have the ability to discriminate between the mail you want and the mail you don't want.

How can a computer make that differentiation if we can't?

Occasionally, junk mail turns out not to be junk mail at all.

Sometimes it's an old lover trying to reconnect with you. Sometimes, it's an unsolicited job offer for a position you really want but didn't know anything about until the email hits your system. Most of the time, junk mail is just plain junk....but even then it performs a function, because junk mail is a window into what the culture as a whole is thinking about at any point in time.

Finally, Bernie asserts that our systems will become so sophisticated that they will be able to go out and find only the information we want to get....and isn't that a terrifying concept?

If Bernie's future should come to pass, we would become our own censors, trapped within the oromboric circularity of a being that feeds upon itself but doesn't know that it's doing so.

Growth comes when we bump into unfamiliar concepts....when our curiosities are triggered by a random thought caused, for example , by a video clip of an IBM vice president extolling the future benefits of technologies now in development that we would otherwise not have heard about until they were already impending facts of life.

Want proof?

How did you come across this article, which almost assuredly would never have found you in the brave new world that Bernie envisions?

You found this article because you were scanning a web site and this topic caught your eye and triggered a response in your consciousness that otherwise might never have happened.

This is called serendipity....and, in Bernie's brave new world, there won't be any room for serendipity, the accidental intersection of random thoughts or actions that create synergistic reactions that create a new reality.

Some people call this the Eureka moment....and, without it, human development may very well come to a dead halt.

The Problem of Information Overload

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 12:02:17 -0500

The problem is information overload.

Divide the ambiant audience by the number of information outlets and you get a co-efficient that indicates the degree of saturation in a media environment.

If you have 100 million twitter users, for example, you divide the 100 million users by 100 million outputs and you get a saturation co-efficient of 100%.

That's the operative definition of fatal information overload.

Yes, fatal. If you take a laboratory rat and you expose it to 24/7 data saturation (bright lights, high decibel sound, food odors, cat smells, etc) the rat simply dies because it can't function in that wash of sensory stimulation. It stops eating. It stops drinking. Then it stops breathing.

What it means in practical terms is that, as you approach a 100% saturation level, you reach a point at which no one hears anyone else.

By analogy, if you have 100 people in a room and you give them each a different page from Shakespeare to read aloud, what you get is total cacophony in which you can only hear the people who are closest to you, but you can't really understand any one person.

This is our present situation. Our civilization is dying from information overload, and we're all contributing to the process.

My solution is to simply shut the fuck up.