“Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.”   – Marshall McLuhan

(From  “Take Today: The Executive as Dropout (1972)”, page 92.)

Executive · head · http · Marshall McLuhan · public incredulity · quote · Red · secrets

The Past:

In the web 1.0 world, we were happy just to be able to surf the web and have access to thousands of new and wonderful services.  However, shortly thereafter, our hard drives became bloated with installed components, some of which were seldom used, slowing our operating systems to a crawl.  Around the same time, surfing the web became a game of ‘memory’ where we had to guess which user names and passwords we had created to get at all these great services.  If we had the misfortune of guessing incorrectly more than 3 times, we often ran into a situation where accounts became locked, requiring emails to virtually nonexistent customer service departments.  In web 1.0 our surfing was limited by our ability to remember passwords and our OS’s ability to support multiple plug ins and installed software components.

Web 2.0 — The Present:

With the advent of Web 2.0 we’re witnessing a new movement, that of the no cost,  no install, and no log in software.  Tired of installing software and creating user accounts, sites have popped up which offer much of the functionality we’re used to with less of the hassle.

Photo Sharing:

Yes Flickr is great.  But what if you want to simply post a fast picture without having to log in and create a sign on?  I just want to quickly share a picture.  I’ve tried these two sites:

Share4Pic -> http://share4pic.com/en/
Image Ox -> http://www.imageox.com/

For example, using Share4Pic to share the image associated with this post:  I need only simply visit the site and perform a quick upload.  After that I’m immediately given a url (link) which I can use in a chat or in an email or what have you.

http://share4pic.com/images/5/8/1/5811518.jpg

Screenshot Sharing

You can adapt this idea to allow for screen shot sharing.  Suppose you are helping someone having some problems using a program.  You’d like to send them a picture of the screen in front of you with some comments.  No problem, just press ALT+PRINT SCREEN.  Now, on Windows, under accessories, open “Paint”.  Using the “Edit” menu click on “Paste” and your screen shot will now appear.  Use the text tool to enter comments as necessary.  Save the file as type “JPG” (jpeg) and save it with a name you’ll remember in a location you’ll remember.  Now, just upload this file to a photo sharing site like share4pic or imageox and send the link to your suffering friend.  He or she will now be able to view your screenshot and benefit from the advice you’ve added.  An example is here:

http://share4pic.com/en/6541394/How_to_share_images/

Screenshot Kwouting (Quoting)

Another great util for sharing screenshots or part of a screen is www.kwout.com .  Have you ever just wanted to show someone where to click or what to look for on a web page?  The best way to do so is to simply show them a picture of what you’re talking about.  They’ve provided a handy widget such that web designers can embed their functionality into their own site.  If you click on this button:

you can ‘kwout’ an excerpt from this blog entry!  As an example from www.simple2chat.com, if I wanted to show someone how to start a new conversation, I could tell them to click on the new conversation button in the tool bar  .  As they say “a picture is worth a thousand words”.  Hopefully this utility will save you several thousand words.  Again, no login, and no install required.  (There is also a handy Firefox plugin which isn’t necessary but is very helpful to have.)

Online Office:

Microsoft Office is great.  It’s been great since 1995 after which I can’t understand the justification for any upgrades.  The problem with Microsoft Office is 1) its cost and 2) it takes up space and resources on your machine.  Web 2.0 has seen the introduction of online office suites.  Three come to mind right of the top of my head:
Think Free: http://member.thinkfree.com/
Zoho: http://www.zoho.com/
Google Docs:  http://docs.google.com

Now, admittedly all these sites require a log in, but they don’t require any installation.  The log in is required to keep track of your documents.  These online suites are, in my opinion, better than Microsoft office as they allow for collaboration across many platforms and sites.  You can build a slide show with your colleagues across the world while working on the final numbers on a spreadsheet type application.

There is another suite here worth mentioning and that’s Open Office.  It doesn’t require a log in, but does require an install.  Just the same, it’s a full featured office suite that is free of charge and is very robust in the features offered.

Music:

The recording industry and the internet community have been playing a game of cat and mouse over the past decade.  There are so many file sharing programs that have been made available and then prosectued that I’ve almost lost track.  To name a few, Kazaa, Bear Share, EMule, Limewire, and all the torrent sites no less.  All are/were great ways to get plenty of mp3’s illegally.  Then came along ITunes and several other pay sites which had a terrific library which you could access by proprietary installed software.

What if you could listen to all the music you wanted without the legal entanglements?  Sounds too good to be true?  Well, not in the world of Web 2.0.  I came across this gem in my internet travels:
http://songza.com/

It’s 100% legal (all artists are payed) and it’s provided to you with no log in and at no cost.  I was amazed with the coverage their library offered.  I tested the depth of coverage with a few rare or rarer favorites of mine from various eras such as:

Saint Saens “Danse Macabre”: http://songza.com/z/gg09tj
T-Bone Walker  “Stormy Monday” : http://songza.com/z/yg36z3
Herbert Gorecki  “Symphony No 3″: http://songza.com/z/af287q
Billie Holiday  ”I Wished On The Moon”: http://songza.com/z/qh8i8y
Pink Floyd “Corporal Clegg”: http://songza.com/z/umf8nj
John Foxx “Underpass”: http://songza.com/z/yo3705
Lenny Kravitz “The Resurrection”: http://songza.com/z/yyv2w6

Music Sharing

If you are an artist yourself and wish to share your music there is a site I recommend which does require a login, but no installation:  www.odeo.com On it, you can create channels of your own works and share them with your friends and colleagues.  Here is a channel created by yours truly:
http://odeo.com/channel/120616/view

Chat:

Internet chat is at once the greatest productivity booster and impedement of the modern era.  I have four different chat clients running on my machine (msn,yahoo,googletalk, and skype).  There are programs such as Trillian which seek to consolidate these services under one umbrella.  First off, it requires an installation and second, I find it doesn’t do a great job at completeness (eg file sharing and video often disabled).

Web 2.0 has a few partial solutions to the chat client overpopulation problem.  The first is www.meebo.com.  This is a site, which like Trillian, puts all your chat accounts under one umbrella.  It has a Firefox plugin which will allow you to use it as though it has been installed on your computer.  It won’t support video or several other advanced features of any given chat program, but at least you don’t need to install anything.

If you’d simply like to have a chat conversation with a few people without having to have them all on the same chat protocol, you can use www.simple2chat.com which is provided by yours truly.  This isn’t intended to be a replacement for chat, but is instead a no login, no install, simple, and fast chat site to allow people to converse or conference quickly and easily.

File Sharing / File BackUp:

With web 2.0, we won’t be installing as much software as we used to.  However, what do we do with all the files we have?  A good example that comes to mind is my mp3 collection.  When I’m at work, how do I have access to my mp3 collection?  I could take a USB memory key, but wouldn’t it be great if there was a web accessible service which could store reams of data?  Well there is.  www.adrive.com offers 50GB (!!) of storage.  You can share the files you’ve stored and upload and download files from any computer with internet access.  You have to provide a login, but that’s no big deal given the advantages.

If you’d like a quick file sharing utility, try www.drop.io .  This utility allows you to share files plus a whole host of other great features.

Summary:

Web 2.0 is a brave new world wide web.  There is no longer the need to install software for hours on end.  Your data, songs, pictures, work documents, and chat clients can now follow you wherever you go.

Websites Mentioned:

Photo Sharing
http://share4pic.com/en/

http://www.imageox.com/

Screenshot Quoting
www.kwout.com
Online Office
http://member.thinkfree.com/
http://www.zoho.com/
http://docs.google.com
Free Downloadable Office Suite
Open Office
Music (Listening)
http://songza.com/
Music (Sharing)
www.odeo.com
Chat – Download – All In One
Trillian
Chat – Online – No Install – All In One
www.meebo.com
Chat Online Instant Chat / Conference – No Install, No Login
www.simple2chat.com
File Sharing
www.adrive.com
www.drop.io

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adrive · artist · blog · cent · chat · conference · designer · drop.io · file sharing · firefox · flickr · Google · google docs · head · http · ILS · imageox · instant chat · Internet · internet chat · itunes · king · kwout.com · location · meebo · microsoft office · MIT · mp3 · Music · music sharing · odeo · online backup · online chat · online office · open office · operating system · overpopulation · photo sharing · RAM · Red · resources · screenshot · screenshot sharing · share4pic · simple2chat · songza · think free · utility · video · web · web 2.0 · widget · world wide web · www.simple2chat.com · zoho · zoho office

For years now, I’ve tried to understand how the Federal Reserve (the Fed) lowers interest rates and how it affects inflation. I mistakenly thought that the Federal Reserve was a wholesaler of money. I thought that it was a Federal institution which under the direction of the government could make money available to banks at a certain lending rate. Thus when the Fed lowered rates to say 3%, the banks could get money at that rate and pass the savings along to their customers by lending money at say 3.5%. I was partially mistaken in my interpretation as to how that affected interest rates. I thought that as a result of people being able to get money at a lower rate, people would spend more, and the more they spent, the more the market could tolerate higher prices for common goods. This is true, but isn’t the full story. So let’s get the full picture.

My first mistake occurred when I assumed the Federal Reserve was a federal institution of any sort. This is not at all true. It is a private bank enacted by an act of congress in 1913 to oversee the US monetary policy. I offer the following interesting nugget of information for those who are interested: It was passed on Dec 23 1913 when most of congress was on vacation, in absence of a proper quorum. If that tidbit piqued your interest, please see this post: http://mwiner.wordpress.com/2008/01/25/terrific-documentary-explaining-the-economy/

So how then does the Fed manage to control interest rates? First off, when you hear of the Fed lowering or raising the interest rate, it isn’t directly lowering or raising the interest rates, it is changing the target interest rate. At a high level, the Fed accomplishes this by controlling the supply of money. Money, just like any other commodity can respond to supply and demand. If there is a lot of money in the economy, interest rates will drop because banks will have an easier time of procuring money to loan. However, having more money in the economy encourages inflation because the value of the currency is lowered by increased supply.

If you want to understand how the Fed manages to expand or contract the supply of money, we need to first understand a few key concepts. The first is partial reserve banking. It was long ago that banks discovered that not every person needed their cash at any given time. It was thus that banks could loan money that technically they didn’t have on reserve. In the US, banks are required to maintain a 10% reserve which means they can loan out 10 times the amount they have on reserve. (This is often referred to as ‘banker’s reach’.)

Next you need to understand what a treasury bill is. A treasury bill is a promise issued to the buyer by the federal government to give you the maturation price of the bill on the maturation date. The bill is always sold at a discount rate, that is a rate, less than the maturation date. For example, a treasury bill may be sold at a discount rate of $950, a maturity rate of $1000 and a maturity date which is a year from now. This means you can buy the bill at $950 and make $50 dollars profit when it matures in a year.

So we now have enough knowledge to work a simple example of how the system works. Suppose that the interest rate is currently 8%. Suppose too that there are 100 people who have $10 each. These 100 people each put $2 in the bank. The bank thus has $200 in reserves and due to partial reserve banking, they can make ten times that amount, some $2,000 in loans. This means they can make a loan of $20 per person.

People typically want to buy things that are 4 times the amount they have on hand. In housing the standard financing model is you must have 1/4 the purchase price in capital. So people with $10 typically want to make a major life purchase which would be $40, but as we see, the bank can easily lend everyone $20, but $40 would be hard to come by at a reasonable interest rate. Thus, people stop purchasing, the economy stalls and the Fed decides to step in.

The Fed does some research and discovers that if the lending rate reduces to 5%, then most people will be able to make the payments and will take out loans and start spending again. So the Fed set the TARGET rate to 5%. To reach this level, the Fed offers to buy a treasury bill the bank has on hand with a maturity value of $500. The bank accepts and now the bank has $700 in reserves. Recall that the bank is allowed to loan out 10 times the amount it has on reserve. So the bank can make $7000 dollars in loans or $70 dollars per person. Since the amount to loan out is plentiful the bank lowers its lending rate to 5% to entice people to take out loans.

It’s important to keep track of the total amount of money in the economy while all this occurs. We started with 100 people having $10 each. Thus there was $1000 in the economy. When the Fed purchased the treasury bill, it printed money to do so. So now there is another $500 dollars in the economy for a total of $1500. You may be scratching your head over the previous sentence, but this is the second part of the misnomer “Federal Reserve”. The Federal reserve is not federal and it doesn’t have any reserves. It prints money to make purchases. I don’t want this post to become a rant against the Fed so I’ll cut it short here and explain the other side of the coin: how the Fed contracts the supply of money.

So now in our moot world, everyone can take out a $30 loan to get the $40 item they’ve been dreaming of. However, one of the principles of a free market is that prices will rise to the maximum that the market will bear. As a result, since most people can afford the $40 item, the market starts charging $42 or $44. Slowly the price creeps up because the value of money has been decreased by an increased supply. In short we are experiencing inflation.

So the Fed sees this situation and decides to curb inflation by raising the target interest rate. By raising the target interest rate, the Fed makes money harder to get, more scarce and thus the market can’t bear higher prices, slowing spending and curbing inflation. To accomplish this, the Fed sells treasury bills. By selling treasury bills, banks that purchase them are forced to spend their reserves to make the purchase, thus pulling cash out of the economy. Recall that banks can loan 10 times the amount they have on reserve. By lowering the amount of cash banks have on reserve, the Fed restricts the bank’s ability to make loans. Since the bank has less money to loan, it must charge more interest to compensate, and the interest rates rise. The key point here is that the difference between the discount rate and the maturity rate must be paid for at some future rate. When the bank comes to collect on this treasury bill, the Fed must pay the bank the promised maturity price. If you have an eye for catching trends then you may have already guessed that the money to pay the difference comes from, yup, you guessed it, printed money.

In conclusion, the Fed controls the supply of money. It accomplishes this by buying and selling treasury bills on the common market. It’s important to remember that when the Fed buys treasury bills it does so with printed money. Also when the Fed issues treasury notes and those notes are redeemed, the difference owed to the purchaser is paid with printed money. This is called a fiat currency, or a currency based on credit — in this case the credit of the United States. It doesn’t take a Harvard ecomonist to realize that every time the Fed runs through one of these cycles of inflation and contraction, that the amount of money in the economy is increased. It is only a question of time before the Fed destroys the currency it relies upon by making it too common. This process is called devaluation. If you want to see devaluation in action, see this graph of the US dollar vs. the Euro over the past 5 years:

http://finance.yahoo.com/currency/convert?from=USD&to=EUR&amt=1&t=5y

AID · ale · bank · banker · banking · Case · cash banks · Congress · Economy · fed · federal government · federal reserve · Federal Reserve System · fiat · fiat currency · finance · free market · Harvard · head · http · inflation · interest rate · king · life · monetary policy · partial reserve banking · private bank · Red · reserve banking · the fed · United States · US Federal Reserve · USD · wholesaler

Ahmadinejad wearing his trademark white jacket and pointing to the Farsi phrase Ma Mitavanim (We Can) on a blackboard.

Canadian Link:  http://watch.thecomedynetwork.ca/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart/full-episodes/#clip185688

US Link: http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=231561&title=reza-aslan

Reza Aslan was interviewed on the Daily Show on June 24, 2009 lauding the response of Barack Obama during the recent and ongoing revolution in Iran.  Aslan notes strong parallels to ‘79 noting that this revolution is likewise a battle for the future of Iran.  Starting at time index 4:48, Aslan applauds Obama’s response:  “Thank you God for President Barack Obama” says Aslan.

“Obama played this perfectly.  During his campaign Iran never left his mouth.  This worked to the disadvantage of Ahmadinejad’s because he couldn’t use his ‘America is going to attack any minute now’ rhetoric.”

Aslan notes that Ahmadinejad’s campaign slogan was “Ma Mitavanim” which is Persian for “Yes we can”.

Responding to opposition calls to make stronger statements or take stronger actions in regards to Iran Aslan warns:

“The US has a long sordid history of meddling in Iranian affairs. … If you want to pu and end to this movement, this revolution tomorrow, let’s listen to Bill Bennett, let’s listen to John McCain.”

Aslan recommends that the US continue its current approach.  “The best thing that we can do is shut up.”  He goes on to say that “Obama has changed the equation in that region.  He is taking the long view on issues, looking ahead 10 years from now.”

Aslan is certain that Iran will emerge a different country from what it is now, but he is concerned as to what form of change will come.  “Iran is on a precipice between North Korea and China; with isolation and militarization on one hand and a preservation of the oligarchies while opening to commerce and contact on the other.”

When asked what US citizens can do to help the revolution, he suggests encouraging and pressuring the EU and UN to act who do have influence in the region.  As for the US, he contends “you have to have a relationship with someone in order to punish them more.  … We have no influence there.  … We can’t punish them any more.  What are we going to do sanction them more?”

—

Reza Aslan’s most recent book is “How to Win a Cosmic War”:
http://www.rezaaslan.com/cosmicwar.html

Ahmadinejad · aig · America · Barack Obama · Bill Bennett · blog · cent · China · Commission of European Communities · equation · European Union · evolution · flu · God · head · html · http · Iran · Iranian Revolution · Islamic Republic of Iran · John McCain · king · MIT · North Korea · obama · President · Reza Aslan · The Daily Show · United Nations · United States · video

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2005/08/21/business/21real.graphic.html

This is a graph of historical housing prices relative to inflation since 1890.  The graph is indexed to inflation so you are seeing the bubble in house prices above and beyond inflation. 

The take home message to this graph is the following.  Take a look at the average home value over the past 100 odd years.  It seems to average somewhere around $112,000.  Now look at the peak which is somewhere around $180,000.  Dividing through we get a ‘bubble-factor’ = 180/112 = 1.6 .  What that means to you is that if you own a house currently valued at $500,000, if the bubble corrects you’ll actually own a $312,500 house (500/1.6 = 312.5).

Will the bubble correct?  Historically bubbles do one of two things:  1) they correct or 2) they flatten and wait for inflation to catch up with them.  What will this bubble do?  I can’t tell you and neither can any of the supposed experts. 

What caused this bubble?  The Federal Reserve lowered interest rates to as low as 1%.  This flooded the market with money which people invested in housing, since the internet bubble had burst. 

Who benefits from this bubble?  This bubble benefits 3 groups of people, bankers, the recently dead, and people with in laws.  Bankers make huge profits on the the inflated mortgages people must now take out to put a roof over their head.  Those who have recently died (since we’re at the peak of the bubble) benefit as their estate sells their property at the inflated price with record profit.  Hopefully they have children to benefit from the heavily taxed inheritance.  Regrettably, if they don’t have children to pass the benefit on to, then it’ll be hard to enjoy their windfall, being dead and all. 

If you’re alive you never benefit from this type of bubble.  People typically want to move up, that is move to a better home.  Thus you have to sell your current home and move to a better home.  Thus, you make a profit on the sale, but take a hit on the inflated purchase.  Basically it’s like borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, and it all ends up even in the wash. 

If you have in laws and can sell at the inflated price and move in with your in laws (avoiding having to buy an inflated property) you may benefit from the bubble by waiting for it to bottom out, if indeed it does.  Living with your in laws may allow you to sell high and buy low, but that assumes the bubble corrects and moreover, living with your parents you may wish you were recently dead.

Who suffers from this bubble?  The most notable group of people to suffer are the first time home buyers.  Entering the market at the peak you’ll be paying 1.6 times what you should hadn’t the bubble occured.  Ultimately all property owners suffer because the bubble leads them to think that they have more money than they actually do.

ale · bank · banker · bubble · cent · fed · federal reserve · Federal Reserve System · head · html · http · inflation · interest rate · Internet · internet bubble · mortgage · real estate · Red · Robert J Shiller · the fed · US Federal Reserve · USD

Walter Kirn on The Colbert Report (Canadian Link): http://watch.thecomedynetwork.ca/the-colbert-report/full-episodes/#clip174780

Walter Kirn on The Colbert Report (USA Link):  http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/228190/may-19-2009/walter-kirn

Review of:
“Lost in the Meritocracy:  The Undereducation of an Overachiever”
By: Walter Kirn (Doubleday)
Reviewed By: Martin C. Winer
June 28, 2009

When I picked up “Lost in the Meritocracy:  The Undereducation of an Overachiever” by Walter Kirn (Doubleday), I expected a semi-dry expose on the problems facing the American Education system with an emphasis on the Ivy League schools.  The only semi-dry thing in the book was the champagne Kirn poured over two fawning exchange students during a graduation night orgy on his way to Princeton.  Told with prose and wit more common to novels, Kirn details his experiences as he rises out of the rural Minnesota winning one of 20 transfer student spots at Ivy League Princeton.

By Kirn’s account it is a wonder that there is any ivy left due to the propensity of the students to smoke any mildly herbaceous looking thing.

“There is no drug scene like an Ivy League drug scene.  Kids can’t just get high; they have to seek epiphanies.  They have to ground their mischief in manifestos.  The most popular one around … held that drugs, … especially plant based psychedelic drugs helped to break down the rigid inner partitions that restricted one’s full humanity.” (p. 124)

Recreational drug use was pervasive at Princeton as were many other illicit activities, with education taking a back seat.  I was so engaged with the stories that I was half way through when I reexamined the title and asked “what is a meritocracy anyways?”

Meritocracy was introduced as a more equitable replacement for aristocracy. Insofar as education, Harvard’s James Conant championed the cause of educational reform towards meritocracy as a realization of Thomas Jefferson’s dream of a “natural aristocracy among men, founded on virtue and talents.” (Jefferson used the term ‘natural aristocracy’ instead of ‘meritocracy’ because it wasn’t coined a term until the 1958 book “Rise of the Meritocracy” by Michael Young.  Incidentally it was intended pejoratively.) As with many high minded theories, the implementation often renders an imperfect reflection of the ideal.

Conant set the controversial School Aptitude Test (SAT) as gatekeeper for the bastions of higher learning guarding all the rewards of power that lay beyond.  When Walter Kirn took the SAT, he discovered he “had a natural talent for multiple-choice tests [which] landed [him] without the vaguest survival instructions [at Princeton]”. (p. 6)  Throughout the course of the book which details his experiences at Princeton Kirn suggests that his education consisted of learning how to succeed in the education system;  this is a far cry from becoming educated.

The distinction is eloquently revealed when Kirn is asked to discuss the ‘critical assumptions’ he’s made in reading the Norton anthologies;  unfortunately, Kirn had done little reading at all:

“With virtually no stored literary material about which to harbor critical assumptions, I relied on my gift for mimicking authority figures and playing back to them their own ideas as though they were conclusions I’d reached myself. I’d honed these skills on the speech team back in high school, and l didn’t regard them as sins against the [Princeton Student] Honor Code. Indeed, they embodied an honor code: my own “Be honored” it stated. “Or be damned.” To me, imitation and education were different words for the same thing, anyway.  What was learning but a form of borrowing? And what was intelligence but borrowing slyly?” (p.119)

Throughout the course of the book Kirn refers to himself as a fraud – sometimes proudly but more often with remorse.  But is Kirn a fraud or instead a sufferer of “Fraud Syndrome”?  Fraud Syndrome (also Impostor Syndrome) is not an official psychiatric diagnosis, but it is a topic well known and documented by psychiatrists and psychologists.  It is an intellectual condition where the intellect feels disconnected from any accomplishments or abilities.  If the intellect were a tree, then the tree would lack any knowledge of its roots and thus mistakenly think that its ability to grow upright was the result of undeserved serendipity.

Kirn’s notion that he somehow managed to beguile and finesse the system into accepting him to its highest ranks is significantly, and ironically, weakened by the quality of the writing he uses in making said point.  What follows is an example of Kirn’s average writing:

“Certain questions which grown-ups deem unanswerable begin as answers which children find unquestionable.  For example: what is Death?  To me at eight years old, death was the signal for a person’s loved ones to cry and look stricken for a while and then begin dividing up his stuff.” (p. 30)

Witty and clever turns of phrases such as these are found on every other page.  While this made for a delightful read, it served to undermine one of his main tenets.  It seems far more likely that Kirn didn’t finesse the system, but that the system managed recognized his talent despite his own inability to do so – marshalling him exactly where he ought to be: in the commensurate Princeton English Program.

If Fraud Syndrome ever does make it one day to be an official diagnosis, then Kirn should appear on the Public Service Announcement poster.  The text is rife with examples of Kirn’s detachment from his talent and feelings of being a fraud:

“My genuine tears [over the news of John Lennon’s death] flowed along with my false tears, as they did the distinction between them blurred.  I wasn’t ashamed of this.  My fraudulence, I was coming to understand, was in a way the truest thing about me.” (p. 77)

“The need to finesse my ignorance through such trickery [(using catchphrases)] — honorable trickery to my mind, but not to other minds, perhaps — left me feeling hollow and vaguely haunted.  Seeking security in numbers, I sought out the company of other frauds.” (p. 121)

“I grew to suspect that certain professors were on to us, and I wondered if they too, were fakes.” (p. 122)

“[My poems] were concerned with grander matters such as the creeping loss of “personhood” in an era of technological change. How I’d hit on this theme I wasn’t sure, but the more time I spent on it the more convinced l grew that I’d borrowed it.” (p.140)

“I confessed that my poems were all a sham and that [my] Bittman [character] was a hybrid version of Eliot’s Prufrock and Berryman’s Henry two famously beleaguered characters from the North anthologies.” (p.144)

“I felt in [my friend’s] company, as in no one else’s, that my bullshitting was a defensible activity, a circular approach to enlightenment.” (p. 168)

One of Kirn’s Princeton encounters offers a possible cause for Fraud Syndrome.  Kirn has a conversation with Julian — undoubtedly Dr. Julian Jaynes best known for his book “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” – in a bar following the production of one of Kirn’s plays.  Julian explained that the human mind was actually two distinct entities, that in ancient times were:

“… virtual strangers to each other.  When a thought arose in one of them, the other one, acting as a receiver, processed the thought as a voice, an actual voice.  …  But who was this being?  …  Man had answered these questions in many ways.  He’d conceived of gods and spirits, angels and demons, trolls and fairies.  Muses.” (pps. 93-94)

When Julian asked Kirn: “did you ever feel, during the composition of your script, that someone else, not you, was in control?” Kirn replied: “Honestly, I feel that way a lot.  Down deep, in a quiet way, I feel it constantly.  And sometimes it shakes me up a little.” (p. 94)  Perhaps this is why Kirn was unable to identify with his obvious talent; it felt external to him.  While Kirn makes this point incidentally in his book, it is nonetheless a very important one.  While Kirn fails to connect with his talent due to this separation of the mind, many more do something far worse:  Many fail to express their talents at all – failing to listen to that other ‘voice’.

While Kirn fails to impress upon me that his placement at Princeton was either coincidental or accidental, he does make some well taken points about the education he received once there.  It seems that when reading in the English program, pretension superseded comprehension.

“We … concluded, before we’d read even a hundredth of it, that Western canon was “illegitimate,” a veiled expression of powerful group interests that it was our duty to subvert.  In our rush to adopt the latest attitudes and please the younger and hipper of our instructors, … we skipped straight from ignorance to revisionism, deconstructing a body of literary knowledge that we’d never constructed in the first place.” (p.121)

“To thinkers of this school, great literature was an incoherent con, and I — a born con man who knew little about great literature had every reason to agree with them. In the land of nonreadability the nonreader was king it seemed.   Long live the king.”  (p.122)

Kirn found that many of the supposed ‘greats’ they were asked to read were completely incomprehensible by students and professors alike:

“Here is a sentence (or what I took to be one because it ended with a period) from the contribution by the Frenchman Jacques Derrida, the volume’s most prestigious name. “He speaks his mother tongue as the language of the other and deprives himself of all reappropriation, all specularization in it.” On the same page I encountered windpipe-blocking “heteronomous’ and “invagination.” When I turned the page I came across – tucked in a footnote –“unreadability.”

That word I understood of course.” (p.120)

For Kirn, university was a process in learning to jockey jargon words and phrases effectively.  Phrases like ‘semiotically unstable’ (referring to T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”) and words such as ‘hermeneutical’, ‘gestural’, ‘recursive’, ‘incommensurable’ were all synonyms for ‘hard’.  Kirn was extremely confused by the works he read but he realized that confusion was not something to be escaped by understanding, but instead something which could be exploited by mirroring it back at its source.

“I was a confused young opportunist trying to turn his confusion to his advantage by sucking up to scholars of confusion.  The literary works they prized — the ones best suited to their project of refining and hallowing confusion — were, quite naturally, knotty and oblique.  The poems of Wallace Stevens, for example.  My classmates and I found them maddeningly elusive, like collections of backward answers to hidden riddles, but luckily we could say “recursive” by then.  We could say “incommensurable”.”  (p.122)

Kirn was adrift in a sea of confusion but it seemed that he was managing to navigate it by drinking the sea water and rolling with the currents.  It wasn’t long before Kirn’s thirst for meaning caught up with him, just as he had become completely intellectually dehydrated, basking in the scorching sun of the top percentile.  Kirn suffered a collapse, unable to continue the charade:

“For a few weeks I was still able to write, but it was a punishing, grind, self-conscious labor. I began most of my sentences with “the.”  Then I went looking for a noun. “The book” was often the result. Next, I seemed to remember, should come a verb. “Is” is a verb. It because my favorite verb. I liked it for its open-endedness — the way it allowed for a wide range of next moves. “The book is always . . .”  “The book is thought to . . .”  “The book is green and . . .” Impermissible. Yes, a book might be a certain color, but starting an essay with the fact wasn’t what college was all about. What was it all about? It was about making statements that weren’t obvious for people who made such statements professionally. “The book is a gestural construct possessed of telos.”

There I could rest.  I’d done it.  An hour’s work.” (p.178)

Eventually Kirn recovered after undertaking a course of self guided education which he found more fulfilling.  He continued his academic career at Oxford as a recipient of the “Keasbey Prize”.  Kirn draws two broader conclusions from his experience.

The first is a ‘roll with the punches and everything will turn out alright’ sort of message.  “… I discovered the truth — if words like “truth” mean anything.  And even if they don’t perhaps.  Pause in your knowing to be known.  Quit pushing — let yourself be pulled.  Stop searching, frantic child, and be found.”  (p. 205)  This advice may bear meaning for someone like Kirn with an innate and wonderful talent.  Its relevance to the rest of us who must work at it is somewhat questionable.

The second conclusion comes out more strongly in the interviews surrounding the book, but it is mentioned briefly.    In an interview (The Colbert Report: May 19, 2009.) Kirn claims that the current meritocracy does not reward depth, but instead rewards the “ability to define ‘incipient’. “Basically people who are very good at cross word puzzles end up running the country.”  “They are able to shine in every cocktail party they attend, but when it comes to running the economy, fighting the war on terror, … not very good.”  Kirn is referring to Donald Rumsfeld and to certain Lehman Brothers board members, who are Princeton Alumni.  Given Kirn’s experiences, it is easy to imagine jargon slinging economists brandishing terms like “Collaterized Debt Obligations” and “Credit Default Swaps” using them as talking points, rather than understanding their deeper implications.  Terms like these undoubtedly are mentioned in numerous A+ Ivy League Economics theses, confounding both the authors and the readers while leading to economic ruin.

This second summation is made in the book when Kirn discusses a run in, after graduating Princeton yet before going to Oxford, with an old friend who was self taught and well read.

“We had a great deal in common, Karl said.

But we didn’t, in fact, or much less than he assumed, and I didn’t know how to tell him this. To begin with, I couldn’t quote the transcendentalists as accurately and effortlessly as he could. I couldn’t quote anyone, reliably. I’d honed other skills: for flattering those in power without appearing to, for rating artistic reputations according to academic fashions, for matching my intonations and vocabulary to the backgrounds of my listeners, for placing certain words in smirking quotation marks and rolling my eyes when someone spoke too earnestly about some “classic” or masterpiece,”       for veering left when the conventional wisdom went right and then doubling back if it looked like it was changing.

Flexibility, irony, self-consciousness, contrarianism. They’d gotten me through Princeton, they hadn’t quite kept me out of Oxford, and these, I was about to tell my friend, were the ways to get ahead now–not by memorizing old Ralph Waldo. I’d found out a lot since I’d aced the SATs, about the system, about myself and about the new class that the system had created, which I was now part of, for better or for worse. The class that runs things.” (p. 210)

AID · aig · ale · America · artist · author · cent · CHIEF · Coming · Deconstruction and Criticism · drugs · economist · Economy · God · Harvard · head · http · ILS · Impostor Syndrome · Ivy League · Jacques Derrida · John Lennon · Julian · Julian Jaynes · Karl · king · lehman brothers · logic · Martin C. Winer · Martin C. Winer June · Minnesota · MIT · OJ · Oxford · Princeton · professor · quote · Ralph Waldo · RAM · Red · Rome · Stephen Colbert · The Colbert Report · video · Wallace Stevens · Walter Kirn · Walter Kirn (Doubleday) · writing

Flounder: Intelligent Design?!

 I was watching this debate on Creationism (Intelligent Design):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40Q8p3GqPqQ

If you want to stump a creationist, it’s easy.  Just ask them to produce a testable hypothesis.  They’ll stamp their feet and wave their hands but they won’t produce nary a one.  While they fume, you might offer some examples of unintelligent designs to drive some final nails into the coffin of what is ultimately a stupid debate.

Here is an interactive which provides evidence for evolution through the imperfections found in nature:

http://www.funtrivia.com/trivia-quiz/SciTech/Evidence-for-Evolution–Unintelligent-Design-209350.html
http://www.funtrivia.com/playquiz/quiz20935017f89d8.html

** If anyone is aware of evolutionary imperfections, please post them in the comments.  If we get enough of them I’ll create a post list.  An example would be the fact that humans can’t make vitamin C but make it 3/4rs of the way along the chemical pathway.

chemical pathway · creationism · evolution · head · html · http · ILS · intelligent design · nature · unintelligent design

Update: There will be a History Channel special on this: “Quest for the Lost Ark” on March 2, 2008 at 8pm.

I was reading a recent article in Time magazine and had to double check that I was reading an article in the “Health & Science” section instead of a book review of the most recent Dan Brown novel. The article can be found here:

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1715337,00.html

Since this generation suffers from a mass case of ADD, let me use bullets to demonstrate how Tudor Parfitt, a professor at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, reveals the Ark to be a multipurpose carry-all for religious relics which doubles conveniently in times of war for a cannon. Yes, you read correctly.

• A Southern African tribe called the Lemba claimed to be a lost tribe of Israel. (They practice circumcision and call meetings using a rams’ horn.) No one believed them until it was discovered that the Lemba priestly cast had the same frequency of a specific marker to the Jewish priestly cast (cohens).
• The Lemba also claim to be custodians of the Ark of the Covenant. Based on the now verified first claim, Parfitt began to investigate this second claim.
• The Lemba call Ark the ngoma lungundu.
  • “The ngoma,according to the Lemba, was near-divine, used to store ritual objects, and borne on poles inserted into rings. It was too holy to touch the ground or to be touched by non-priests, and it emitted a ‘Fire of God’ that killed enemies and, occasionally, Lemba. A Lemba elder told Parfitt, ‘[It] came from the temple in Jerusalem. We carried it down here through Africa.’”
• His search led him to the ancient city of Senna where Parfitt believes the Lemba and their ancestors may have converged where he uncovered several clues as to where the Ark may be today.
• His search ended at the Harare Museum of Human Science in Zimbabwe where he found a drum like object, with remnants of the carrying rings and crossed reeds indicative of biblical origins.
• Neither Parfitt nor the Lemba contend that this object is the original Ark of the Covenant. The object was carbon dated to 1350 ad, which is some time after Moses. However, the Lemba folklore holds that the original ngoma destroyed itself and was rebuilt upon its own ruins by the temple priests.
• Parfitt contends that the Ark was in fact a drum which was a repository of relics and a cannon!

Don’t believe it? It’s hard to believe I admit, however, it is interesting to note that the Ark of the Covenant is brought into many Israelite battles at the head of the attacking force. Now do you put your relics at the head of an attacking force, or do you put your greatest weapon?

Truly the Lord hath delivered into our hands all the land; for even all the inhabitants of the country do faint because of us.” [Josh.2:24]

Still can’t believe it? I admit, I’m having similar trouble. Worshipping a weapon? I keep conjuring up images of “Beneath the Planet of the Apes”:

Africa · ale · ark of the covenant · Arkansas · Beneath the Planet of the Apes · Case · cent · circumcision · Dan Brown · God · Harare Museum of Human Science · head · Health · History Channel · html · http · Israel · Jerusalem · king · lemba · London · lost ark · MIT · ngoma · ngoma lungundu · professor · quote · RAM · Red · School of Oriental and African Studies · senna · Tudor Parfitt · Zimbabwe

Some have accused the Toronto Sun of sensationalism regarding their request of the Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner, Brian Beamish, to release Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) suicide statistics for coverage by the media.  The very accusation of sensationalism reveals a double standard in the way that media outlets deal with issues of mental health.  This past February of 2009 no one accused any media outlet of sensationalism when they carried the story of a TTC fare collector who nabbed a disturbed individual who had pushed several youths on to the tracks. (http://www.cp24.com/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20090216/090216_ttc_collector/20090216/?hub=CP24Home)  There was no fear of copy cat pushing incidents in their coverage nor was their any need to appeal to the Freedom of Information act to secure information.  If you have the misfortune of being pushed on to the tracks, you can at least derive some solace in the fact that your city and your local news outlets will deem the story newsworthy.

If on the other hand you have the misfortune of being thrown on to the tracks by your own hand, rest assured that when you rest in peace, the story will be buried with you.  Officials of all stripes will claim that, for the good of the community, reports of suicides need to be silenced lest you invite copy cat attempts.  The TTC in its press release cites a Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention Media Guide (http://casp-acps.ca/Publications/MEDIA%20GUIDELINES.doc) which suggests that in order to: "discourage imitative or copycat suicides, it is important to avoid or minimize: Reporting specific details of the method".

Beamish, after having reviewed reams of clinical research, concluded that

"The evidence provided … establishes that news coverage which provides details of methods used, uses the word “suicide” in headlines, romanticizes suicide, or provides prominence to a particular death or attempt could reasonably be expected to result in harm. This is in contrast to the simple publication of suicide statistics which do not focus on the details of a particular death." 

(http://www.ipc.on.ca/images/Findings/MO-2466.pdf)

He went on to cite a Center For Disease Control report which found, conversely, that the

"reporting of suicide can have several direct benefits. Specifically, community efforts to address this problem can be strengthened by news coverage that describes the help and support available in a community, explains how to identify persons at high risk for suicide, or presents information about risk factors for suicide."

(http://www.ipc.on.ca/images/Findings/MO-2466.pdf)

-*-*-*-*-

On August 26th, while driving on the DVP, listening to the traffic news, trying to navigate the infernal Toronto traffic, I heard of an attempted suicide off the Millwood Ave overpass.  Later reporting of that same event would only discuss a ‘police investigation’. (http://cp24.com/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20090826/090826_don_mills/20090826/?hub=CP24Home)  When the reporting changed to a ‘police investigation’ I knew that the attempted suicide was successful and that the media had changed its tune for our protection.  However, it didn’t take a PhD in psychology to know that ‘police investigation’ meant suicide so I wondered who the media were protecting?  The vulnerable?  If so, they only succeeded in protecting the most naive of them. 

Still, you won’t hear of any ‘police investigations’ regarding the Bloor St. Viaduct because a suicide barrier was put in place there in 2003.  As the result of some official sounding reports and official sounding thinking, some City Hall bigwigs decided that suicide was a ’spur of the moment’ type of thing and their spurious research suggested that barriers would be an effective countermeasure.  Suicide is in its final moment, perhaps, a rash moment, but that ignores the often months and years of prodrome before a person takes their life. 

In the wake of this recent TTC report, there is again discussion of the erection of barriers.  Barriers take a Not In My Backyard-Bridge approach to suicide; simply shunting the problem elsewhere.  The Toronto Sun has acted courageously in their coverage of this taboo topic.  I hope that other media outlets to follow suit with panel discussions of social measures that can help troubled individuals deal with their issues in a respectful and dignified manner.

Bloor St. viaduct · Brian Beamish · Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention Media Guide · cent · Center For Disease Control · City Hall · collector · head · Health · http · ILS · king · life · media outlet · media outlets · MIT · Ontario · pdf · Privacy Commissioner · quote · Red · Rome · servlet · the Toronto Sun · toronto · Toronto Sun · Toronto Transit Commission

Sisters Chapel - Spelman College

I have finally got my hands on “The Cosby Show — Season III”. I’ve been waiting for ages for the release of season 3 because it has on it one very special episode: “Hillman”. Besides being a generally inspirational episode, it featured on it a choral arrangement of “All Good Things Will be Added Unto You” composed by Shelton Becton, featuring Phylicia Rashad (playing Claire Huxtable-Hanks).

Rashad is an accomplished vocalist and her clarity and precision in the delivery of this gospel masterpiece is unmatched. I recorded and converted it to mp3 but I won’t release it here because it would be in violation of copyright.

The choir featured was a combination of the Spelman and Morehead College Choirs.

If you’d like to get a taste for the arrangement, there is this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3Ot74b1UQc

No offense to these performers who have done a nice job in their own right, just the audio quality isn’t great and Phylicia Rashad is a tough act to follow.

If any choir conductors would like to hear the Rashad version, please contact me and I’ll release it to you for study purposes only. If you’d like to obtain a copy of the score, Shelton Becton can be reached at:

Any and all questions concerning the sheet music composed by Shelton Becton can be directed to e-mail address: raebec@pipeline.com. All inquiries will be responded to at the earliest convenience.

– http://wiki.answers.com/Q/User:Shelton_Becton

Update:

Here is page one of the score!

http://beta.asoundstrategy.com/sitemaster/userUploads/site289/All%20Good%20Things…Solo-Low-Web%20.pdf

Here is how to purchase it!

http://www.sheltonbecton.com/index.cfm?itemCategory=33530&siteid=289&priorId=0&pid=33076

And here is the composer’s website:

http://www.sheltonbecton.com/

For more information on the episode, please see:

http://www.answers.com/topic/the-cosby-show-hillman-tv-episode?cat=entertainment

All Good Things · choir · choral · composer · Cosby · Cosby Show · flickr · gospel · head · http · Morehead · mp3 · Music · pdf · Phylicia Rashad · quote · Red · Shelton Becton · Spelman · web

For my grade 10 science project, my partner and I set out to hook a generator to an electric motor. The idea was that the motor would drive the generator which would drive the motor again in perpetuity. Now we weren’t so naive as to discount the idea of resistance. When you pass current over a wire, a certain amount of that power is lost to resistance (lost as heat). We were proposing using superconductors instead of the wires we used in our mock-up. We also proposed using magnetically suspended bearings and running our set up in a vacuum to eliminate all friction. Even if it was possible to eliminate all friction, there was still another problem for our design.

In grade 10, we had yet to be introduced to the laws of thermodynamics which strictly forbid such arrangements. A physics teacher came over to grade our project and after a quick glance he said: “background emf.” We stood there trying all permutations in our mind of what ‘emf’ could possibly stand for. He asked: “Background EMF? Have you taken grade 11 physics?” We dejectedly shook our heads to indicate that we hadn’t. He continued while leaving our booth “well you need it!”

Having recovered from our tragic defeat, and some 18 years later, I can explain the ‘travesty’ we had committed against physics. Background EMF stands for background Electromotive Force. What this means is that when you use a current (electrical power) to drive an electric motor, the electric motor as a result of its operation generates an opposing current to the one driving it. In a sense it is a sort of electromagnetic resistance. In short, what it says is that the system we built could never work, even if we used super conductors as wires and ran in a frictionless environment.

For the lay reader, a generator and an electric motor are virtually the same device. One generates electricity from motion and the other converts electricity into motion. In fact if you were to take an electric motor and hook up a volt meter to it and spin it, you’d discover that there voltage was generated just as if it were a generator. At the core of either device lies a loop (or loops) of wire and magnets. Recall that I said if you spin an electric motor, you generate a current. Well that’s exactly what background EMF is. As the motor spins, it also generates a current in the opposing direction to the current driving it.

Now along comes Thane Heins.
http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/article/300042
http://www.thestar.com/Article/300041
Through experimentation, he has come up with an arrangement which theoretically feeds background EMF back into the electric motor in a way which ADDS to the current driving the motor. In so doing he’s (theoretically) created a positive feedback loop which causes the motor, not only to maintain speed, but actually to accelerate.

This flies in the face of physics, specifically the laws of thermodynamics which say that you the amount of energy in the universe is constant and in a closed system, you can’t create energy. Heins’ system is what’s called a closed system, that is there is no external input of energy, hence it should not be able to create any more energy than was inputted: ie, the wheel should never gain speed, if anything it should always slow down.

Claims of perpetual motion on the Internet are about as common as claims of a new fad diet which will slim you with no effort. If you catch my drift, such claims are usually discarded as junk science. In this particular case though, it has appeared to have attracted the attention of several physicists, one of whom from MIT, who haven’t admitted that he’s achieved perpetual motion, but also haven’t been able to point out any obvious error in his experimental setup and claim.

Even if this fails to be perpetual motion, perhaps some of the concepts can be adapted to produce newer and more efficient electric motors. At the very least, the exploration of Heins’ design and concepts should help illuminate us all. To see video and for some further reading, please see:

http://www.g9toengineering.com/backemf/demonstration.htm

AID · Case · converts electricity · electricity · Electromotive Force · energy · engineering · Environment · free energy · head · http · ILS · Internet · magnetism · MIT · OJ · perepiteia · perpetual motion · physics teacher · Red · teacher · thane heins · thermodynamics · video

PDF Version: AncientInjustice.pdf

Growing up, my Jewish education consisted of an after school program (‘cheider’ to the Yiddish inclined) while I attended public school by day.  On my walk to Hebrew School I would often try to marry the two bodies of knowledge from the two respective school systems.  A happy romance occurred around 1987 between the religious and secular bodies of knowledge.  As many may recall 1987 was the year of the big crash on the stock market.[1]  Debt and the economy were on the lips of many in those days.

In the secular world there was tremendous talk of personal and national debt, interest rates, unemployment and the like.  All the while, the Torah I was reading in Hebrew school was definitely running on about the sabbatical forgiveness of debt and the precept that “there should be no poor among you”. (Deut 15:1-4)  Now my mental image of the ancient Israelites was that of a pastoral, agrarian people.  With hindsight I can say that this image was only slightly misguided.  Despite the rumored grandeur of the Davidic kingdom, archaeologists hold that their society was more rural than urban.

But this left me with a theological problem:  I saw debt as a product of banks which were on city streets.  I failed to conjure an image of rolling agricultural fields dotted with banks and/or ATMs at the Temple gates. (Parenthetically, it turns out that if the Gospels have any historical veracity, there may have been just such an ancient equivalent of an ATM at the Temple gates.  More to follow shortly.)  Failing to imagine ancient banks, I was puzzled about what the ancient Israelites knew of debt and how then did this prescient warning against the accumulation of debt make it into the Torah?  I questioned my Hebrew school teacher along these lines and I was given the answer that ‘the Torah contained the writ word of God and all His wisdom.  It was written for all times and addressed all the problems that we would encounter until the end of days.’

Platitudes such as this are to young inquisitive men, such as I was, like drinking sea water when thirsty:  quenching only at first and then leaving you more thirsty than ever.  If my teacher’s answer was to hold water (pun intended) then there were conspicuous absences from the ‘writ word of God’.  Where were the foundations for democracy?  Where were the specific prohibitions against slavery (beyond the sabbatical release of Hebrew slaves)?  Where was the discussion about protecting the environment beyond the scant ordinances for burying excrement beyond the outskirts of camp (Deut 23:14)?  From those grandiose absences there were more mundane absences like: Where were the prohibitions against smoking and where were the prohibitions against high cholesterol foods?  My attempts to marry the religious and secular belief systems were thwarted by the absence of these secular guidelines which I had determined to be legitimate and necessary.  After a brief flirtation the attempted marriage failed in divorce with the judgment pronounced by my rationality decreeing that the Torah was not indeed the writ word of God.

Literalists may be tempted by the previous sentence to toss this work out of hand directly into the fire.  Indeed this may provide needed warmth to those suffering the effects of debt.  Just the same, with a bit of patience on both sides of the theist/atheist debate, I believe there is commonality to be found in the good intentions of the Torah.  While we may debate its authorship I will not debate that it was written with the best of intentions.  Further, I hold that it was written to describe an ideal rather than the actual practice of the day.  There is a common modern Israeli expression: “The synagogue I don’t go to is Orthodox.”  Similarly, I believe that the Torah describes an ideal set out for the people to follow which was likely, based on archaeological evidence, considerably different than religion actually practiced by the ancient Israelites.  Specifically, archaeology reveals the rampant practice of polytheism and idolatry up to the Babylonian exile.[2]  Biblical archaeology contends that the Torah was a compendium of tales written by a reformist movement railing against the practices of the day.  Setting aside the issue of biblical authorship, I will continue the discussion in the context of the good intentions of the author presently.

The now dubious authorship of the Torah made my original question even more pronounced.  If the Torah was not written by God, then who wrote it and how were the ancient Israelites aware of debt and its effects?  My research would lead me to the field of biblical archaeology.  I studied the works of William Dever and Israel Finklestein amongst others with the following results.  The ancient Israelites never conquered Canaan as told in the Torah canon.  They were instead Canaanites themselves who survived and replaced a decaying social order with a more egalitarian one.  For those interested in how I arrived at this conclusion there is a wonderful précis of biblical archaeology available on Public Broadcastings’ NOVA series: “The Bible’s Buried Secrets.”[3]  There you’ll find a terrific summary of all the archaeological and scientific findings to date.  I only wish this series had existed at the outset of my research for it would have saved me much trudging through many inaccessibly written academic works on the topic.  Researching biblical archaeology was much like archaeology itself: sifting through piles of academic detritus to yield occasional relics and then putting the pieces together.

So, accepting for the moment that the Israelite race emerged from the nadir of the Canaanite civilization, Zephaniah 1:11 becomes ever more clear:
“The dwellers of Machtesh [, a quarter of Jerusalem,] howl;/ For all the tradesmen [nation of Canaan] have perished, All who weigh silver are wiped out.”
Two things are critical in this passage.  First the time of Zephaniah, well past that of the Canaanite era, and second the reference to the weighing of silver.  Zephaniah was not admonishing the Canaanites but rather the Jewish merchants of Jerusalem who were acting like Canaanites.[4]  As to the reference to the weighing of silver, silver was then as it is now, a monetary metal.  All throughout history, every society has been plagued by the manipulation of their currency leading to their ultimate downfall.  Economists call the process seigniorage gain.

Seigniorage gain is the process by which the minter (usually the government) gains on the difference between the face value of the coin and the actual value of the metal used to make it.  I often think it is the job of economists to construct palatable names for what in the end turns out to be sheer larceny.  Those unfamiliar with the term may be more familiar with the contemporary synonyms such as ‘inflation’.  Whatever you choose to call it, ‘a lemon by any other name would taste as sour’ and inflation, currency manipulation, or seigniorage gain is quintessentially a tax on the middle class leading to widespread debt, poverty and wealth inequality.  It is a fundamental violation of the biblical injunction to have “fair weights and measures” (Deut 25:13-16).

It is my supposition that it was an economic collapse brought about by currency manipulation which spelled the end of the Canaanite civilization.  I will support this supposition by reviewing the log roll of history vis a vis currency manipulation and the subsequent unfolding of the relevant civilization.  Biblical archaeology tells us that the proto-Israelites literally fled for the hills in the face of the collapse of the Canaanites.[5]  There they regrouped and sought to set themselves apart from the evils of their past.  After the dust had settled they returned with a renewed spirit and purpose to set out a more equitable system.  To that end they developed laws against the accumulation of debt and the slavery that results.  Those laws were later canonized in the Pentateuch around the end of the Babylonian exile (4th to 6th centuries BCE).[6]

Some 600 years later we know that these laws were largely being ignored and that corruption again loomed large.  We have the historical testimony of the gospels of Luke and John which recount Jesus’ banishing of the money changers from the temple gates.  Around the time of the year 0 CE Roman currency was the common currency in the holy land.  These coins typically bore the images of pagan gods and were unacceptable for use in temple worship.  At the temple gates, benches of money changers would exchange these coins, at predatory exchange rates, to Levite coins for use in temple services.  These same money changers would charge the Levites unreasonable rates to change these coins back into Roman coins such that the Levite priests could make purchases in the markets.  Jesus found the entire process abominable and forcibly drove them from the temple.[7]  Whether you believe the historical veracity of the gospels is beside the point here.  What is known is that currency manipulation was clearly on the mind of the authors of the gospels and the gospels were known to be written around this time (admittedly within 400 years).  As a pertinent aside, the word ‘Bank’ comes from the Latin for ‘bench’ precisely referring to this historical antecedent.[8]  I believe it is social disarray caused by the financial ruin of Israel which led to its overthrow by the Romans.  There is textual evidence for this in the bible itself:  Jeremiah 7:11 reads “Is this house, whereupon My name is called, become a den of robbers in your eyes?”  Amos 5:7 reads “Ah you who trample the heads of the poor into the dust of the ground, and make the humble walk a twisted course.”

It is an irony of history, if not a recurring leitmotif, that the very same financial snare which destroyed Israel also destroyed its captors.  In Hebrew school we all learned of the famous (infamous) “Judea Capta” coin.[9]  This coin depicts the pride of the Romans in defeating ancient Israel.  It is in the silver or precious metal content of roman coinage with which we can track the decline of the Roman Empire.  The backbone coin of the Roman economy was the Denarius which started out with a silver weight of approximately 4.5 grams.  Have you ever noticed the ridges on the edge of a quarter?  These same ridges were present on the Denarius and there intention is to make any shaving of the coin obvious.  This made it harder for individuals to debase the currency but the government was free to mint coins with less and less silver content.  By the year 274 CE under Aurelian’s reign the coins had almost no silver content at all.[10]  The causes of the fall of Rome are admittedly complex, including the outsourcing of their military defense to barbarian mercenaries.  Just the same, the economic decline of Rome is certainly one of the principle causes and is yet another exemplar of the debasement of currency leading to the debasement of the underlying civilization.

The collapse of the Roman Empire led the world into the dark ages.  The Christian religion took hold championing the cause of the poor all through these long dark ages.  Eventually a fair monetary system was developed called the tally stick system.[11]  Very strict Christian based laws against usury (interest) prevented any monetary abuse.  However, in the 1500’s Henry VIII, obviously unaware of the peril, deregulated the economy and allowed for certain forms of usury.[12]  The economic maelstrom unleashed destroyed the English economy.  In the wake of the upheaval and in the aftermath of the English revolution of 1642, the Bank of London was established.  Oddly enough, the initial shares were bought with no other currency than talley sticks.  The bank of England replaced this monetary system with their own manipulated (or ‘fiat’) currency.  Currency manipulation was now institutionalized in the form of this ‘Central Bank’ put in place to ‘protect and regulate’ the money supply.

Just around this time, gold was being used as a currency.  Carrying ones gold on their person could be cumbersome and moreover, dangerous.  A robbery could erase ones savings.  The goldsmiths of the day agreed to hold gold for consumers at a nominal fee and issued them a certificate which they could then use to redeem their deposits.  These little slips of paper were much easier to work with and in a very short time, the slips of paper would be used in transactions instead of gold.  The goldsmiths made an astute observation.  Not all of their clients came to collect their gold at one instant.  As such they could lend out some of the deposited gold at interest making money on money they did not really have.  While this seems relatively harmless provided customers do not all come for their gold at once, it is in fact at the core of everything wrong in the world today.  The fraud is subtle yet essential to understand.  By using gold that say a farmer had deposited to make loans, you are using the hard labour of the farmer to make money with very little labour.  In a nutshell, this practice siphons up the value of labour and puts it in the hands of the advantaged few who are in a position to leverage it.  This is the practice of fractional reserve banking with is with us to this very day.[13]  When a middle class family takes out a loan to get an SUV, the bank does not lend you their money.  They lend you the savings of an auto worker who drives a compact sedan.  The banker turns interest on money s/he never owned and drives a luxury sports car on the profits.  Such is the food chain of fractional reserve banking.  Bankers love the practice for obvious reasons.  Politicians love it because they can finance their projects without reaching for tax dollars.  Projects can now be financed with thusly conjured money with only a nodding concern for inflation and the ever growing national debt. The average person neither loves it nor hates it because they do not understand it.  Hopefully, that is, until now.

The Bank of England was aware of the practice of the goldsmiths but instead of outlawing it, embraced it.  As such they succeeded in protecting and regulating the money supply insofar as her citizens of wealth were concerned but all to the detriment of the English parliament and the general public.  The bank so bankrupted England that England was forced to place a heavy tax burden on its colonies.  The American colonies revolted to the cry against ‘taxation without representation’ in the war of independence of 1762.  By the end of this revolution, with the effects of the Bank of England in mind the Americans set out to “form a more perfect union”.  Into their new constitution section 10 forbids “…emit[ing] Bills of Credit; mak[ing] any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts…”.[14]  It was pursuant to this section that the United States was on the Gold Standard for most of its existence up until 1933.  The Gold Standard ensured that every bill was backed by gold.  Bills printed prior to 1933 were marked “redeemable in gold”.  After 1933 they were marked as only “legal tender”.  The founding fathers knew of the threat of a manipulated currency but that memory and warning was, as we now see, historically fleeting.

The Americans had the first and second Banks of America which again started to manipulate the currency.  Andrew Jackson famously put a temporary stop to the banking cartels saying: “You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the grace of the Eternal God, will rout you out.”[16]  For a short while he succeeded.  From 1836 to 1913 the United States was free of a central bank and the currency manipulation they bring with them.

During this hiatus in central banking while financial crises persisted, inflation was flat.  That is to say that one dollar was worth one dollar for this interim period.[17]  This allowed for the accumulations of savings which is the true practice of capitalism.  Indeed by the early 1900’s bankers were concerned with the prevalence of self-financing of business development.  So concerned were the bankers that they sought to reassert themselves and in 1913, taking advantage of a recent (some say engineered) financial crisis, the Federal Reserve was born and central banking was reborn in America.[18]  Again too, the promise of the Federal Reserve was to regulate the money supply and again, so it did, to the advantage of the wealthy few.  As it has always been throughout history, currency manipulation manufactures debt and poverty.  Since the inception of the Federal Reserve, the purchasing power of the dollar has decreased by 95%.  Inflation has increased by 1929% (that’s 19 hundred and twenty nine percent!).[19]  The effect of this is that wealth inequality is now staggering.  As of 2001, in the U.S., the top 20% held 84% of all the wealth.[20]  For those who have trouble dealing with math, what this means is that if you are in the class of the remaining 80% (most of us are) then in a more fairly distributed economy – which would necessarily feature a fair currency – you would have approximately 5 times your current assets.

As common as monetary manipulation is throughout history, so too are the attempted fixes when the system gets out of whack.  A fiat currency (recall a ‘fiat’ currency is an ‘on faith’ currency) is a sort of monetary Golem: this time made of minted coins instead of clay.  Generally it functions impeccably as designed, siphoning wealth upwards but occasionally and often dramatically, it causes large financial upset.  When this Golem takes a swat at its banker creators the solution is to placate it with, yes, ever more printed or minted money.  This maneuver results in one of two results: 1) a temporary stabilization of the monster or 2) a hyperinflationary death when the monster collapses under its own weight.  Note that in either outcome, the best that can be accomplished is a temporary shoring up of the system.  Inevitably, the Golem collapses back into the imaginary ore it came from, only after raping the value of the land and passing it into the hands of the elite few.  Revisiting the economic death of Rome, Nero and other Emperors debased the currency via inflation fiddling and minting as it were while Rome burned.

However, one need not look as far afield to find a terrific example of the hyperinflationary death of an empire.  Just recently, the Weimar republic died just such a death.[21]  In the 1920’s Germany forced under the WWI reparations act to make payments to the victor nations.  The victor nations, most notably France and England who were in their own financial distress due to – you may have guessed by now – their own currency manipulation, pressured the Germans to make good on their obligations.  The German coffers were largely empty and as a result they decided to print money to meet their obligations.  The German citizens were wary of the stability of their currency and began to hoard cash fearing a crisis.  Simultaneously the German creditors began to fear default on their loans and closed the taps of credit.  The German economy stalled and went into a brief bout of deflation.  The Germans did what every other economy has tried all throughout history to solve the problem:  they threw more money into the market to try and jumpstart it.  The German citizens feared for their nest eggs which caused them to attempt to convert any cash they had on hand to real assets.  This unleashed a torrent of cash on the market which immediately lead to hyperinflation.[22]  Hyperinflation is runaway inflation fueled by panic and distrust of the underlying currency.  A corollary to the loss of trust in currency is an inevitable loss of trust in the government that promotes it.  It was thus that the Weimar republic fell leaving a political vacuum in its wake which would soon be filled by the Nazis.  Malcolm Muggeridge once wrote that: “It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything.”[23]  History will record that this is equally applicable to the cessation of belief in government.

Historians and economists alike may be quick to point out that there would appear to be a historic precedent for economic spending or stimulus as an escape to recession.  They undoubtedly would point to the Roosevelt era and the “New Deal”.  So hope filled were the citizens of the day that the New Deal was rhapsodized into the Great Depression era musical: ‘Annie’.  Daddy Warbucks swooned “I know the depression is depressing… But we’ll get a new deal for Christmas this year.”[24]  The character Daddy Warbucks was modeled after Paul Warburg.[25]  It was common knowledge at the time that this was so.  Warburg was one of the chief architects of the Federal Reserve which is the United States arm of the Bank of England.  The bitter irony here is that it was the Federal Reserve System which caused and exacerbated the Great Depression.  They were anything but the cure.  The famed economist Milton Friedman spent a lifetime promoting this interpretation of events.  On the occasion of his 90th birthday Ben Bernanke, the current chairman of the Fed said: “I would like to say to Milton… Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.”[26]  While I believe that Roosevelt was well intentioned, he was fatally naïve.  His New Deal served only to confiscate all public monetary gold and transfer yet more power to the Federal Reserve to manipulate currency.  The hidden tragedy of the musical Annie is that while she shares a stage with the theatric Roosevelt and Warbucks (Warburg) singing their accolades as her saviour, she is actually praising the instrument of her orphan plight.  (Annie was orphaned due to the financial insolvency of her parents.)

While unwittingly kissing the hand that starves you may be tragic when it occurs on stage, it is far more tragic when it occurs in the real world.  It is still a mainstream notion that Roosevelt’s New Deal was what rescued the Americans from the Great Depression.[27]  Even though all through history, government salvation through spending has led to financial ruin at every attempt some still espouse the idea that it is possible to spend our way out of the damage wrought by currency manipulation.  Currency manipulation is good for bankers and bankers fund business schools which produce bankers.  It is no wonder then that currency manipulation which goes hand in hand with government spending ‘has’ to be a good thing.  If you want to be at the top of this pyramid scheme you have to support the bricks that build it.  In this light, when the financial meltdown of 2008 hit, how did the pyramid builders propose to deal with the ‘Gre08er Depression’?  You guessed it, with more government spending.

Journalists are already pointing out the similarities in circumstances between Barack Obama and Roosevelt.[28]  I believe the comparisons are justified and that Obama is, like Roosevelt, well intentioned but critically misguided.  Mind you, not only is Obama misguided but most people are ill aware of monetary policy and its implications.  Obama promises trillion dollar deficits running for the next many years.[29]  It is his hope that this massive spending will shock the economy back to life.  The only shock it can reasonably hope to achieve though is shocking the Frankenstein of currency manipulation to life to turn on its creator.  The only reason Roosevelt’s New Deal appeared to work was that by the end of WWII, the US had developed tremendous manufacturing capabilities and the US was a burgeoning economy; the US emerged from the Great Depression despite Roosevelt’s New Deal, not because of it.  The situation in this Gre08er Depression is different.  There is no new manufacturing potential, indeed it is declining.  The US is not a burgeoning nation but is instead a declining one.  Thus the only shock government spending is capable of producing on the US economy is an electrocution.

Growing up I had trouble relating to the ancient Israelites I was reading about.  I could relate only to their enslavement in Egypt which I read as an allegory for my forced attendance at school.  Beyond that, they were a people very far from me both spatially and temporally.  My time was dominated by discussions and anxious anticipation of new technologies and new scientific discoveries.  While I could ‘upconvert’ an ordinance to help a neighbour right a fallen cattle to a more modern equivalent of assisting ones neighbour with a crashed computer in general the setting for torah morality written in terms of cattle, oxen and sheep failed to connect with me.  I was always amazed then as to how these seemingly simple people understood concepts such as debt.  Most debt in modern times comes from securing shelter.  In ancient Israel this could be accomplished by erecting four poles and securing canvas.  So where did these biblical injunctions come from, what wrong were they trying to right?

In trying to answer that question I would have to journey through studies of biblical archaeology and general history.  After so doing, I have found a new connection with the ancient Israelites.  They were trying to solve a very old and fundamental problem:  how to govern a large group of people equitably while preventing corruption.  Currency is one of the fundamental cornerstones of any civilization.  It is fundamental to most of our interactions and if it is corrupt, so too will inevitably be anything built on top of it.  Disappointment then comes in reading the scroll of history with each entry echoing the previous:  “Empire rises with high ideals.  The high ideals erode under complacency.  Corruption then leads to inequality and fiscal malaise.  Empire manipulates the currency to buy time.  Empire runs out of time.”

The tenet of monotheism according to the bible started with Abraham.  What the Torah describes as a moment of epiphany is revealed by biblical archaeologists to in fact be a long arduous process which took several hundreds of years.  Key here is that a stated ideal can become a practiced ideal with exertion of effort over time.  It is thus to the commandment that we “should have no poor among [us]” that we must redirect our time and efforts.  I have recently come to a conclusion that the reformed Canaanite predecessors of the world’s ‘big 3’ monotheistic religions likely came to long ago; poverty is not the result of a lack of wealth but instead a lack of justice.

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[1]   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Monday_(1987)
[2]   William G. Dever: “Did God Have a Wife?”
[3]   http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/bible/program.html
[4]   http://books.google.ca/books?id=sIWn6lYS-MQC&pg=PA171
[5]   Smith, Mark “The Early History of God: Yahweh and Other Deities of Ancient Israel” (pp 6-7)
[6]   McDonald & Sanders, editors of The Canon Debate, 2002, The Notion and Definition of Canon by Eugene Ulrich, pg 4
[7]   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_and_the_money_changers
[8]   http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=bank
[9]   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaea_Capta_coinage
[10]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_Roman_Empire#Michael_Rostovtzeff.2C_Ludwig_von_Mises.2C_and_Bruce_Bartlett [11]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talley_stick
[12]  http://books.google.ca/books?id=pnszAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA8
[13]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking#History
[14]  http://www.usconstitution.net/xconst_A1Sec10.html
[15]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard
[16]  http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quotes_by/andrew+jackson
[17]  http://www.economics-charts.com/cpi/cpi-1800-2005.ht ml
[18]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve
[19]  http://postworthy.com/Worthy/ex/US_Dollar_Purchasing_Power_Decline/205.aspx[20]  http://mwiner.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/wealthdistribution.gif
[21]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1920s_German_inflation
[22] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation
[23]  http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/malcolm_muggeridge.html[24]  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2vGeaqM33g
[25]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Warburg#Legacy
[26]  http://www.federalreserve.gov/BOARDDOCS/SPEECHES/2002/20021108/default.htm[27]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal
[28]  http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,20081124,00.html
[29]  http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2009-01-06-obama-economy_N.htm

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Walter Kirn on The Colbert Report (Canadian Link): http://watch.thecomedynetwork.ca/the-colbert-report/full-episodes/#clip174780

Walter Kirn on The Colbert Report (USA Link):  http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/228190/may-19-2009/walter-kirn

Notes and Excerpts:

“Marine’s [Marine, Minnesota] elementary school was on a hill.  It was the largest man-made structure in town, one of the newest, and by far the ugliest.  Shape: rectangular.  Material: beige brick.  Constructed with tax money, it looked like tax money, a fiscal line item come to joyless life.  Even the playground equipment seemed bureaucratic: a stainless-steel slide and a set of iron monkey bars on which one could picture army recruits glumly sweating their way through basic training.  From the moment I entered the building’s long tiled hallway, its colorless walls inadequately brightened with red-and-yellow construction-paper maple leaves, I wanted out.  But out, I know, meant through. ” p.25

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“Certain questions which grown-ups deem unanswerable begin as answers which children find unquestionable.  For example: what is Death?  To me at eight years old, death was the signal for a person’s loved ones to cry and look stricken for a while and then begin dividing up his stuff.  What is Beauty?  The thing that made me like things when nobody was pushing me to like them. ” p.30

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On losing a debate…
“I’d harmed myself the night before the match by staying up till dawn trying to walk off and bathe away the phosphorescent curlicues of dread lossed in my brain by a drugged cupcake I’d eaten with a teammate in her motel room.  I hadn’t fully recovered when I found myself battling a girl with close-set eyes and the excessively brushed straight hair of a virginal prodigy.  Here was a force I’d never faced before: the supercharged purity of postponed puberty augmented by early viola training.” p.62

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In an early computer class, no one seemed able to use the computer yet it was promised to revolutionize the future:

“That’s when we stopped touching the device and chose to regard it as an icon or a totem.  Our classes turned into speculative chats about the wonders the object might perform if instead of addressing it in COBOL or FORTRAN, we could interact with it in English.  To heighten the atmosphere of possibility, we kept the thing plugged in.  This warmed its obscurely coiled and bundled insides, releasing unappetizing chemical vapors. ” p.66

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Upon watching a younger talented computer whiz work the computer…

“The exhibition unveiled no technical mysteries, but it did help me understand the term “conservative” as I’d once heard it used by a friend’s father while he was watching the TV news.  A conservative was a person who stopped adjusting once adjustment brought him no vital benefits.  The commandment to us from kindergarten on had been to grow, to expand ourselves, to stretch, but there was another option too, I saw.  Once could let others cope with the novelty and concentrate on the familiar.”  p.68

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On a graduation night romp with two exchange students:

Skirts came up, pants slipped off, and legs made V’s that turned into X’s and shifted on complex axes that allowed for wonders of sidelong friction that brought forth fetching squeaks and grunty purrs and primordially bridged all language gaps.  Some new bond was being stirred in that car, some fresh form of international understanding that the Rotary Club, or whichever organizations sponsored the exchange program, might not have planned on but shouldn’t have been displeased by, so intimately did it shrink our globe. p. 73

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Kirn feeling he was a fraud while mourning the passing of John Lennon:

“”All the lonely people,” he began [singing].

The choice was a magical piece of luck for me.  Afterwards, spent, having sung with my whole rib cage and fully emoted on every memorized word, I felt the urge to cry for real — from gratitude.  Thanks to my gloomy second-grade music teacher, I’d managed to respond convincingly, in the company of a well-credentialed witness, to a historic cultural tragedy that would be revisited for decades.  My genuine tears flowed along with my false tears, as they did the distinction between them blurred.  I wasn’t ashamed of this.  My fraudulence, I was coming to understand, was in a way the truest thing about me.  It represented ambition, longing, need.  It sprung from the deepest chambers of my soul.” p.77

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Drug use was rampant, even for the lighting guy during the performance of one of Kirn’s plays:

“The lighting guy, who’d eaten a hash brownie which he’d sworn would wear off before the show, toggled at random between clashing colors, turning the stage into a cruise-ship disco…” p.91

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Discussing a conversation Kirn had about  ‘the divided brain’.  Kirn may be a victim of this divided brain, leading to the impostor syndrome which he suffers from greatly:

“The best conversation of my life ensued — one I could never have had in Minnesota and one that helped me forget my recent troubles by occupying me with cosmic issues of just the sort a place like Princeton should raise but so far hadn’t, at least when I’d been listening.  Julian taught psychology, he said, despite having no diploma in the subject, only a book he’d written as an amateur.  It had ground out of his reading of ancient literature and concerned, he said, “the history of consciousness.”  I asked him to explain but keep it simple.  He told me that he’d try.  The modern human brain, he said, was actually two brains functioning as one brain, but there had been a time, long, long, ago, when man’s double brain had operated differently.  It’s parts, its halves, had been separate then, divided.  In fact, they’d been virtual strangers to each other.  When a thought arose in one of them, the other one, acting as a receiver, processed the thought as a voice, an actual voice.  This voice seemed to come from another being, really.  But who was this being?  Who were these secret speakers?  Man had answered these questions in many ways.  He’d conceived of gods and spirits, angels and demons, trolls and fairies.  Muses.

“Back when, before the Breakdown,” said Julian, “before the gods and voices fell silent, writers truly believed in inspiration.  They experienced inspiration.  It was real to them. Tell me: did you ever feel, during the composition of your script, that someone else, not you, was in control?”

“Honestly?”

“Of course.”

“Honestly, I feel that way a lot.  Down deep, in a quiet way, I feel it constantly.  And sometimes it shakes me up a little.  Should it?”

Julian shook his head, but not as vigorously as I would have liked.

“What was the ‘Breakdown’?” I asked him.  I had to know.  I had to know everything he did, suddenly.  Julian was a genius, I’d decided, even if everything he’d said was crazy.  And it probably was.  Because I understood it.” pps 93-94

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Jaynes

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_Syndrome

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Kirn is brought before the Honor Committee accused of cheating on his Spanish mid-term:

“Guilty or innocent? Yes or no,” Rob said.

I ate a pretzel and let Rob’s anger hang there.  I thought he should have to feel it in the air.  I thought it might force him to face his ugliness.  Then I said, “I heard this from a senior.  In France, there’s a critic, I forget his name, who teaches that antonyms, words that mean the opposite, don’t really mean the opposite at all.  They aren’t the only alternatives, that is.  There are other words between them.  And all around them.”

“Fascinating except this isn’t France.”

“You tell me to choose, but the words I’m meant to choose from — ‘innocent and ‘guilty’ — aren’t my only choices.  I chose another one.  ‘Uncovictable’. p.109

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Kirn discusses the ‘critical assumptions’ he’d made in reading.  Unfortunately, Kirn had done very little reading at all.

“With virtually no stored literary material about which to harbor critical assumptions, I relied on my gift for mimicking authority figures and playing back to them their own ideas as though they were conclusions I’d reached myself. I’d honed these skills on the speech team back in high school, and l didn’t regard them as sins against the Honor Code. Indeed, they embodied an honor code: my own “Be honored” it stated. “Or be damned.” To me, imitation and education were different words for the same thing, anyway.  What was learning but a form of borrowing? And what was intelligence but borrowing slyly?” pg119

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On the unreadability of some of the supposed ‘Greats’:

“This suffocating sensation often came over me ‘whenever I opened Deconstruction and Criticism, a. collection of essays by leading theory people that l spotted everywhere that year and knew to be one of the richest sources around for words that could turn a modest midterm essay into an A-plus tour de force.  Here is a sentence (or what I took to be one because it ended with a period) from the contribution by the Frenchman Jacques Derrida, the volume’s most prestigious name. “He speaks his mother tongue as the language of the other and deprives himself of all reappropriation, all specularization in it.” On the same page I encountered windpipe-blocking ”heteronomous’ and ”invagination.” When I turned the page I came across- tucked in a footnote –”unreadability.”
That word I understood of course.” p.120

See: http://books.google.ca/books?id=igP67FXXQCEC

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction

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Kirn discusses the literary catchphrases for ‘hard’: ‘ semiotically unstable’ (referring to TS Elliot’s The Waste Land), hermeneutical, gestural, recursive, incommensurable. pps 120-122

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Kirn discusses his use of literary catchphrases to mask his ignorance of literature.

“The need to finesse my ignorance through such trickery — honorable trickery to my mind, but not to other minds, perhaps — left me feeling hollow and vaguely haunted.  Seeking security in numbers, I sought out the company of other frauds.  We recognized one another instantly.  … We spoke of “playfullness” and “textuality” and concluded before we’d read even a hundredth of it that Western canon was “illegitimate,” a veiled expression of powerful group interests that it was our duty to subvert.  In our rush to adopt the latest attitudes and please the younger and hipper of our instructors, … we skipped straight from ignorance to revisionism, deconstructing a body of literary knowledge that we’d never constructed in the first place.”  p.121

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Kirn discusses how he used his confusion to his advantage:

“I was a confused young opportunist trying to turn his confusion to his advantage by sucking up to scholars of confusion.  The literary works they prized — the ones best suited to their project of refining and hallowing confusion — were, quite naturally, knotty and oblique.  The poems of Wallace Stevens, for example.  My classmates and I found them maddeningly elusive, like collections of backward answers to hidden riddles, but luckily we could say “recursive” by then.  We could say “incommensurable”.  p.122

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On feeling a fraud for learning to regurgitate professors opinions rather than truly appreciating the classics:

I grew to suspect that certain professors were on to us, and I wondered if they too, were fakes. In classrooms discussions and even when grading essays, they seemed to favor us over the hard workers, whose patient, sedentary study habits, and sense that confusion was something to be avoided rather than celebrated, appeared unsuited to the new attitude of antic post-modernisn – that I had mastered almost without effort.  To thinkers of this school, great literature was an incoherent con, and I — a born con man who knew little about great literature had every reason to agree with them In the land of nonreadability the nonreader was king it seemed.   Long  live the king.  p.122

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On page 122, Kirn holds a play of planters on a stage.  He watches in amazement as the audience waits for something to happen, which never does.  The play is titled: Planters and Waiters.  Double-entendre on “waiters”.

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On drug use at Ivy League schools:

“There is no drug scene like an Ivy League drug scene.  Kids can’t just get high; they have to seek epiphanies.  They have to ground their mischief in manifestos.  The most popular one around the veggie house held that drugs, especially psychedelic drugs — especially plant based psychedelic drugs — helped to break down the rigid inner partitions that restricted one’s full humanity.” p.124

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Kirn expresses a unique view on the relationship between literature and war:

“Literature had torn Tessa and me apart, or prevented us from merging in the first place.  That was its role in the world, I’d started to fear: to conjure up disagreements that didn’t matter and inspire people to act on them as though they mattered more than anything.  Without literature, humans would all be one.  Warfare was simply literature in arms.  The pen was the reason man invented the sword.”  p.145

This may not be as outlandish a suggestion as it may first seem.  If literature is based on pretence instead of substance, as it was in the case of Kirn’s education, then pretence needs to be defended by violence of all forms, military and otherwise.  Further if the great written works upon which the great religions of the world are based turn out to be not the writ word of God, they are then by exclusion, works of literature.  The swords that have been raised in the name of these literary works are well documented.

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More evidence of the theme of detachment.  Kirn seems detached from his inspiration.

“Tessa’s poems focused on harrowing emotions grief, self-loathing, panic while mine were concerned with grander matters Such as the creeping loss of ”personhood” in an era of technological change. How I’d hit on this theme I wasn’t sure, but the more time I spent on it the more convinced l grew that I’d borrowed it.   I invented an alter ego, ”Bittman,” and in my poems I stretched him on the rack of   mechanization and macroeconomics In class, Tessa praised my poems as “Kafkaesque” but I could tell she didn’t like them.” p.140

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More on the impostor/fraud theme:

“Out of shame for this hypothetical failure and hoping to break through to intimacy, I confessed that my poems were all a sham and that Bittman was a hybrid version of Elliot’s Prufrock and Berryman’s Henry, two famously beleaguered characters from the North anthologies.” p.144

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Kirn had ongoing conversations with “V.” – an exchange student who “represented the best of the best of [his] entire country”.

“I felt in his company, as in no one else’s, that my bullshitting was a defensible activity, a circular approach to enlightenment.  And I felt flattered when he listened to me.  Here was a young man who represented the best of the best of an entire country — of an entire people, as I saw it — and I was holding his attention.” p.168

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The pains Kirn went to in order to write collegiate essays after he’d lost his fulfillment in so doing.

“For a few weeks I was still able to write, but it was a punishing, grind, self-conscious labor. l began most of my sentences with ”the.” Then I went looking for a noun. “The book” was often the result. Next, I seemed to remember, should come a verb. “Is” is a verb. It because my favorite verb. I liked it for its open-endedness — the way it allowed for a wide range of next moves. ”The book is always . . .”  “The book is thought to . . .”  “The book is green and . . .” Impermissible. Yes, a book might be a certain color, but starting an essay with the fact wasn’t what college was all about. What was it all about? It was about making statements that weren’t obvious for people who made such statements professionally. “The book is a gestural construct possessed of telos.”

There I could rest.  I’d done it.  An hour’s work.” p.178

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Kirn develops a regime for deprogramming him self from his college ‘undereducation’ and pulling himself out of a resulting depression.

“My alarm clock woke me every morning at five, and for the next three hours I’d lie in bed, with my reference books propped open on my stomach, and repeat aloud, in alphabetical order, every word on every single page, along with its definitions and major synonyms. The ritual was humbling but soothing, and for she first time in my academic career I found myself making measurable strides, however minuscule. “Militate.” “Militia.” “Milk.”  I spent as much energy on the easy words as I did on the hard ones — my way of showing contrition for squandering my high-percentile promise. And in truth, they were all hard words for me by then.” p.183

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Reflections on having been awarded a post at Oxford.

“I’d soon be off to Oxford as a result.  “result” was not exactly the right word, though, because it suggested that logic governs destiny.  But now I knew otherwise.  Imagination does.  And though part of me had always suspected as much and certain teachers had coached me in the notion (“Image that you can be anything you want”), what I hadn’t understood at all was that our imaginations don’t act alone.  One’s own imagination is powerless until it starts dancing with another’s.

Imagine having been imagined.  Imagine.” p.205

Kirn’s summation of the book:

“… I discovered the truth — of words like “truth” mean anything.  Ad even if they don’t perhaps.

Pause in your knowing to be known.  Quit pushing — let yourself be pulled.  Stop searching, frantic child, and be found.

Some call this Grace.

I called it Marguerite.”  (Margerite Keasbey established the Keasbey Prize which Kirn received (enabling him to go on to Oxford)  after being denied a Rhode’s Scholarship). p 205

See: http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2008/02/08/19971/

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Towards the end of the book, it is revealed that Kirn’s Uncle Admiral — a childhood mentor — was Robert W. Knox RADM USC & GS (Ret.).  Here is a brief biography:

http://www.history.noaa.gov/cgsbios/biok4.html

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Kirn’s second, broader conclusion:  Reflecting on a friend Karl who was self-taught and well read and wanted to meet up with after Kirn graduated Princeton.

“We had a great deal in common, Karl said.

But we didn’t, in fact, or much less than he assumed, and I didn’t know how to tell him this. To begin with, I couldn’t quote the transcendentalists as accurately and effortlessly as he could. I couldn’t quote anyone, reliably. I’d honed other skills: for flattering those in power without appearing to, for rating artistic reputations according to academic fashions, for matching my intonations and vocabulary to the backgrounds of my listeners, for placing certain words in smirking quotation marks and rolling my eyes when someone spoke too earnestly about some “classic” or masterpiece,”       for veering left when the conventional wisdom went right and then doubling back if it looked like it was changing.

Flexibility, irony, self-consciousness, contrarianism. They’d gotten me through Princeton, they hadn’t quite kept me out of Oxford, and these, I was about to tell my friend, were the ways to get ahead now–not by memorizing old Ralph Waldo. I’d found out a lot since I’d aced the SATs, about the system, about myself and about the new class that the system had created, which I was now part of, for better or for worse. The class that runs things.” p.210

Admiral · AID · aig · ale · artist · author · Cana dian Link · Case · cent · chat · chemical vapors · CHIEF · COBOL · Coming · critic · Deconstruction and Criticism · drugs · elementary school · energy · evolution · France · gloomy second-grade music teacher · God · Google · head · Honor Committee · html · http · Impostor Syndrome · Ivy League · Jacques Derrida · John Lennon · Julian · Julian Jaynes · Karl · king · life · logic · Minnesota · MIT · Music · oil · OJ · Oxford · pains · playground equipment · Princeton · professor · quote · Ralph Waldo · RAM · random · Red · Religion · Robert W. Knox · Rome · Rotary Club · stainless-steel slide · steel · Stephen Colbert · teacher · The Colbert Report · the TV news · video · Wallace Stevens · Walter Kirn

There has been a spate of activity in the nanotech realm lately. Over the past few months I’ve tracked several new developments. Here they are in no particular order: spine, ram, solar cell, ca

1) Solar Power: The problem with solar technology is the high cost of the solar cells. The current level of technology in solar is in silicon wafer solar cells. They have low relative effeciency and a high relative cost. This makes them unfeasible as a replacement. Many companies, amont them Nanosolar of California, have developed a technology using nanoparticles which can absorb light more efficiently, but more importantly, more economically. Nanosolar is targetting a rate of $1/watt which would make solar power a viable alternative over nuclear or fossil fuels.

More amazing is the fact that the solar films can be mass produced and printed on to any building or surface. More details can be found here: http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10989479
http://www.nanosolar.com/

2) Cancer Treatments:This story warms my heart on so many levels. John Kanzius was himself diagnosed with Leukemia. He underwent several bouts of painful chemotherapy. Not a physician but instead a retired radio and television engineer, he had a brainwave one night while sleeping. He came up with the idea of using radio waves to selectively target cancer cells while leaving the remaining healthy cells unscathed. Chemotherapy is based on the differential survivability of cancerous cells versus healthy cells. That is to say the chemicals used are toxic to both healthy and cancer cells, and the hope is that the cancer cells die out faster than the healthy ones: not a promising prospect.

Kanzius’ idea is remarkably different. He plans to send nanoparticles of gold into the tumor. He plans to use a targeting molecule attached to the gold nanoparticle to saturate the tumor with particles. Then he directs a highly concentrated radio beam towards the tumor. The gold heats up under influence of this beam and essentially the tumor is cooked.

3) RAM-Memory: Hard discs have had a good run. They’ve given us a terabyte of storage at nominal cost and with reasonable access time. The technology of the future however will but much smaller, with no operating parts to wear out. The technology is called ‘Racetrack’ and is being developed in the Almaden Research Center in San Jose California. At the heart of the technology electron spin is used to code information. This information races along a nanowire at blazing speeds with very low power consumption. Future incarnations of this technology promise replace hard discs an allow for near instantaneous start up and uncompromising reliability.

4) Spinal Repair: We all recall fondly the heroic efforts of Christopher Reeve to bring about an awareness of spinal injury and the tragic effects it can have on the sufferers and their families. The problem with spinal injury, indeed most nerve injury, is that the injured site (referred to as a transection) forms a scar at either end of the cut bundle. Nerves do have the ability to regrow however, they lack the ability to bridge this scar. John Kessler, M.D., Davee Professor of Stem Cell Biology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine has come up with a gel of self assembling nanostructures which is injected at the injury site. Once inside, they go to work assembling a scaffolding which allows neural stem cells to bridge the gap. Mice with spinal injuries were injected with the compound and showed significant improvement including the ability to walk again.

almaden research center · california · cancer · cancer treatment · cent · chemicals · Chemotherapy · christopher reeve · economist · flu · gold · head · Health · html · http · ibm · ILS · injury · injury site · Internet · John Kanzius · john kessler · Kanzius Machine · Leukemia · levis · nanoparticles · nanosolar · nanotechnology · nanotubule · nerve injury · Northwestern University · Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine · physician · professor · Professor of Stem Cell Biology · racetrack memory · radio · radio and television engineer · RAM · Red · scar · solar · solar power · solar technology · spinal chord · spinal injuries · spinal injury · stem cell · stem cells · technology electron spin · technology promise · technology using nanoparticles · transection · tumor · USD

The State of The Union – As Seen on TV
Martin C. Winer

But first a word about how this article was written:  This article was the result of a ‘cluster’ or a free-word association.  This is an exercise which is meant to use the ‘right brain’ to spur creativity and generate writing topics.  You can create your own clusters or bubbles here: http://www.bubbl.us/ but it’s best to do them with pen and paper since one tends to self edit when typing.  Each word you see italicized below is from the cluster.  Usually, the idea is to take one theme from the cluster and write about it.  I thought it would be a challenge to include ALL the words and still have the article tell a cohesive story.   Read the article, taking note of the italicized words.  Then see the cluster below.

I have been worried about the state of the world as of late.  Being recently unemployed with no meaningful job on the horizon, I was wondering when I’d be returning to the 9-5 lifestyle.  It’s not that I ravish 9-5, as Dolly Parton’s famous song correctly puts it, 9-5 is all “takin and no giving” but it beats aimlessly strolling on sidewalks waiting for a direction to unfold.  Up until recently I was a member of the over 30 and unmarried class.  Fortune changes quickly and I now find myself suddenly being married with children.  The responsibilities are understandably far different.  Curious as to what direction my life would take over the next months and years, I turned on the familiar glowing oracle fitted in every living room, the television.

While I waited for my big screen TV, a vestige of my former employed self, to come to life, I recalled that a comic had mentioned that Dolly Parton had insured her breasts.  I wondered if the comic was putting us on, as he was apt to do.  Would an insurance company take premiums for such a ridiculous item?  What was the counterparty risk?  Were her breasts in good hands with Allstate (TM)?  The TV came to life with the evening news reporting of another hemorrhage on Wall Street of 213 ethereal points, with AIG requesting more bailout money.  Evidently, indeed, insurance companies would take premiums on just about anything and the only boobs in the interaction were the policy holders who actually thought the policy was worth something.  Bored with the evening news I changed the channel.

Dick Cheney was on “State of the Union” with John King on CNN.  Cheney, a bastion of the old guard was set to be ‘grilled’ by King as to the sins of his administration.  I flipped right past the interview because I knew it could not yield the satisfaction I was seeking.  Waterboarding and assassination squads would be second nature to a man like Cheney who shot his hunting partner in the face.  Waterboarding I imagined was just his technique for cleaning his felled game, human or otherwise.  I wasn’t interested in the past, I was curious to know what my future held.

There was an infomercial on with 90 year old Jack Lalanne sporting his leisure suit and his juicer.  I am a late night TV watcher and infomercials plague the airwaves from dusk ‘til dawn.  Jack Lalanne was born in 1914 and looked to be in better health than myself all thanks to his 1/2 horsepower juicer.  In went an orange, apple, and every other healthy fruit your mother tried to get you to eat as a child.  Out poured a fountain of youth which had purportedly kept Lalanne in such great shape over these many years, yet somehow, it hadn’t managed to save his fashion sense.  The leisure suit was last popular when the juice on everyone’s lips was Juice Newton, “Grease” was the new movie and disco was still in style.  I was intrigued with the notion of extended life and wondered if indeed Lalanne’s juicer could provide it.  Even if it could, what would my life be like, aged 90+ years drinking fruit and vegetables all day?  Would my life be fulfilling?  I changed the channel seeking an answer from the glowing oracle of TV.

The next infomercial was for Extenz tablets; an all natural ‘Male Enhancement’.  Well this held some promise now didn’t it?  At least my latter years could be herbally augmented with extra length and girth.  But just what were these pills I thought to myself?  “An all natural male enhancement?” I wondered to myself.  Didn’t we already have such a thing in Dolly Parton?  What were these herbs and how were they discovered?  Did someone eat a salad with wild herbs one night with shocking results in the bedroom?  How did they then suspect the salad and not anything else?  My mind was awash with questions and I wasn’t much in the thinking mood.  I wanted answers, not questions.  Come on oracle of television, what would my life be like?  The only effort I was willing to exert was in flipping channels.

Yet as I flipped there were a plethora of Viagra and its new copy Cialis ads.  Was the television intimating that my future would need these?  A Viagra ad promised that at age 50 I could trade in my sedan for a Harley Davidson and with one pill have the vigor of a 20 year old.  A Cialis ad promised 36 hour or daily dosing options to make sure I would be able to respond when the mood was right.  If I was as old as Jack Lalanne, would my wife still be ready for me?  I’d be worried about breaking bones at that age.  Another flip would quell that fear.

Once a month Boniva would rebuild my wife’s bones without the need to remember a weekly pill.  There would be no need to take those chalky calcium pills once a day.  Of course memory at that age will be compromised so the once a month dosing is ideal.  Side effects could include liver and kidney disease but at least you would only have to endure them once a month.  God bless Big Pharma.  I could have a once a day boner and my wife could have healthy bones all month.  I was comforted that the future would be bright.  My comfort was not long lasting, at least not as long lasting as 36 hour Cialis promised to be, when it occurred to me that Big Pharma was suffering from a horrible case of misplaced priorities.  With all of their attention focused on bones and boners, they had dropped the two big balls of cancer and heart disease.  I curiously imagined a big Pharma strategizing kick off meeting with people brainstorming on new drug targets and somehow bones and boners getting to the top of the list over cancer and heart disease.  I only hoped that Jack Lalanne’s fountain of youth Juice could get my wife and I past those two roadblocks.

I calmed myself thinking that my 90th year was well off, I being only 35 now.  Big Pharma had time to readjust their priorities.  I continued my flipping to discover yet another Big Pharma commercial for Requip, a medication for Restless Leg Syndrome (RLS).  My legs were perfectly atrophied into their TV watching position.  I didn’t believe that such a condition could occur.  “My doctor said ‘Requip’” said the announcer as a television doctor mouthed “Requip”.  I imagined that the doctor mouthed “bullsh*t” in response to the patients complaint.  [0u92R90U R ‘ jixz-]0039;ffaS980059-09ATRE MT3.  Oops, I’m ever so sorry about that previous mess, you see my arms tend to spontaneously move uncontrollably every so often…  Oh my, could it be I have Restless Arms Syndrome (RAS)?  Well at least I know that Big Pharma is on the case.  Perhaps if I ingest Requip while standing on my head, the medication will settle in the appropriate appendages?  Parenthetically I wonder if all Requip contains is a bottle of gel caps filled with Brandy?  All it seemed Big Pharma could do for me in my latter years was give calm legs and arms and a rock hard erection.  The Viagra commercial warned that any erection lasting over 4 hours constituted a medical risk and thus I knew my fulfillment from Big Pharma would leave me with 20 remaining hours in the day to fill with what?  What would I do?  I looked to the financial stations to see if I had any prospect of finding a job.

CNBC was heralding the success of the latest Apple Computer quarterly results.  The IPhone and the IPod were unrelenting successes.  The host discussed the failing health of Steve Jobs as a concern for the future of the company and since we now know all that Big Pharma is good for, the concern is justified.  I myself am not a gadget freak.  I often mockingly eye people walking down the street sweaty palmed typing at lunatic speeds on their Palm, Blackberry or blueberry or whatever the latest berry is.  I have no need to be so totally connected, but evidently there is a huge market for these devices.  Just the same I was delighted to see the success of Apple whose Macintosh computer was, in my mind, the superior computer in 1985.  Bill Gates was the smarter CEO, not the better innovator.  Steve Jobs didn’t allow clones of Macintosh’s while Gates allowed clones of the PC.  As a result Apple’s market share fell like Newton’s apple under newly discovered gravity.  With all the discussion of executive compensation these days, I think Steve Jobs deserves the lion’s share of the reward when it comes to innovation.  The IPod is simple to use media device which takes advantage of the recent wave of music piracy and MP3’s that puts the tale of the Maersk Alabama to shame.  Now don’t get me wrong, copyright infringement was not created by Jobs, he only capitalized on it.  The IPhone is the next logical extension of a handheld computing device incorporating maps, navigation and a whole host of other useful features we come to expect from Apple.  The Macintosh, the IMac as it’s now called, is gaining market share in leaps and bounds.  I guessed that I had attained some inspiration from the glowing oracle;  perseverance, like that of Steve Jobs in the face of constant opposition and I too could one day go on to innovate a pile of handheld devices – or something like that.  Of course this special was being aired on CNBC the so called financial news network that managed to complete miss any predictions of the financial collapse which had claimed my job.  I wasn’t about to take any advice from them.  No, the Corruption National Broadcasting System as I had renamed them would have to find another mark. I dismissed them with a flip of the channel.

The Cheney Interview was over on CNN and now Anderson Cooper on A.C. 360 was sporting a pie chart showing the distributions of the American reinvestment Plan.  There were huge allotments for infrastructure building projects.  A clip revealed workers building bridges all over the country.  Wasn’t it another Democratic president who wanted to build a bridge to the 21st century?  Now are we building bridges out of Chapter 11?  There was discussion of incentives to homeowners to renovate and rejuvenate their properties.  I thought of stopping in at Home Depot but immediately balked because the 27 minute hand waving discussion with 17 year old ‘Skippy’ who works there never seems to get me the results I want.  For all the talk of hope and economic plans CNN was pushing out, I knew that the recession was receding faster than Dick Cheney’s hairline.

Rembrant - Raising of Lazarus

Then they aired a clip of the master of hope: President Obama.  “America has been great and shall rise to be great again” he prophesized.  I thought this had a familiar tone.  I quickly switched to the Catholic Television Service and the pastor proudly boomed “and the phoenix shall rise out of the ashes just as Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead.”  The pastor went on to solicit donations for a new building project.  This also had familiar overtones and I flipped back quickly to CNN.  “It will take considerable investment from us all but we shall rebuild and come back stronger” proudly acclaimed Obama.  It then occurred to me that Obama was more than just a President, he was our primary minister.  He then intimated at his plan to remove toxic assets from the books of the banks without providing the necessary details I was looking for; undoubtedly he would turn water into wine.  The rhetoric of hope was overflowing my ears and I needed a counter position to ground myself again.  Luckily there was the FOX network who was lambasting Obama as the bane of humanity whose short stint in office had already thrown the economy into apocalypse from which only a miracle could now save us.

Putin and other former Soviet interviewees were quoted as saying that the end of capitalism has finally come.  A commentator remarked: “the American dream of picket fences has been replaced by picket lines” as the video showed protesting auto workers.  Am auto worker protested: “The companies are trying to divide and conquer us, taking advantage of this downturn to cut our benefits and pay.  I say enough taxing the middle class!”  Cheers and hurrahs followed.  My brain was like a pair of Levi’s jeans iconically being pulled by these two polarized stations in opposite directions, at the risk of ripping.  There had to be some truth on the glowing oracle of television.  PBS I thought to myself quickly.  That will save me.

Jim Lehrer

(Ed. Note: Actually it’s IOWA that is ok with Gay Rights, not Oklahoma.  In my cluster, I confused the two, but I went with it because the challenge was to write an article using all the clustered words.  I was only off by a 10 hour drive anyways.    )

Public Broadcasting, publicly funded and publicly ignored in favour of watching MTV to hear if Britney Spears of Lindsay Lohan were wearing underwear today.  Today Jim Lehrer was discussing the state of Gay Rights.  Evidently in Ahnold’s (sic) California the rights of gays have been ‘terminated’.   Ironically, Oklahoma seems “Ok” with gay marriage.  Is that what the song “Oklahoma, OK” is about from the musical Oklahoma?  The world seemed upside down.  Had I inverted myself such that Requip went to my arms and forgot about it?  Oklahoma was a place where I expected politicians to spout the bible about ‘being Fruitful and multiplying’ and how homosexuality was unnatural.  In liberal California, I expect them to say anything goes, from Gay Rights to cloning dolly the sheep.  After all doesn’t Hotel California by the Eagles promise “Plenty of room at the Hotel California / Any time of year, you can find it here”?  I couldn’t make sense of my world.  I was about as comfortable as a man swimming in itchy wool trunks.  I needed to flip the channel quickly.

Kim Kardashian

Chicks Who Love Guns

Up next was a documentary “American Justice” revisiting the O.J. Simpson trial.  It brought back names like Mezza Luna, Nicole Brown, Robert Kardashian, Kim Kardashian… whoops my mind wandered.  Robert Kardashian had helped set a murderer free but brought us Kim Kardashian.  Now they say justice should be blind, but have you seen Kim Kardashian?  He was off the hook in my books but the rest of the characters who let O.J. go were open to attack in my imagination.  I recast the events of that fateful night as a Quentin Tarantino movie.  I’d have my justice, if only in my imagination.  Nicole Brown would now be Jackie Brown.  She would seductively seduce O.J. by dancing for him like Salma Hayek in Tarantino’s “From Dusk ‘Til Dawn”.  She’d then immediately turn into a vampire and eat him alive.  Next, Travolta and Samuel Jackson from Pulp Fiction would show up and after quoting Ezekiel 25:17 would lace into the O.J. lawyers.  Finally the women from “Chicks who love Guns” as seen in Jackie Brown, armed with the AK-47 and they would deal with every “mother [t]ucker” in the jury room.  Returning from my daydream I realized that 10 years had passed and there was no justice to be spoken of.  The only thing I had learned from the episode was that justice is a function of wealth and that O.J. stood for Orenthall James, not Orange Juice.  I’m not admitting I was that stupid however, I’m about to write another article: “If I was that stupid, here’s how I’d admit it.”

I knew how the O.J. saga ended so I flipped again to see what else was on the glowing oracle.  John Sebastian crooned “Welcome Back, to the same old place where you started from…”  It was a rerun of Welcome Back Kotter.  Truly, I was basically back where I had started from, only an hour of flipping elapsed.  I knew nothing more of the future than when I started.  Sure I knew that my bones and boners would be safe, boobs could be insured, and that if I worked very hard, I might find a job.  But I was looking for important answers to important questions like, what would justice be like in the future?  What would the economy be like?  I was sure that Kotter’s Vinni Barbarino wasn’t going to be able to answer my questions.  With that, I turned off the glowing oracle for the night.

‘Apple’ cluster which generated the article.

This is the free word association (or cluster, or bubble) which generated the article.  Again, each italicized above came from the cluster below.

9 to 5 · 9/11 · AID · aig · AK-47 · ale · allstate · America · american justic · Announcer · apple · arnold schwarzenegger · auto workers · bailout · bank · bankruptcy · bible · bill gates · blog · boniva · bubble · california · cancer · capitalism · Case · cent · chapter 11 · chicks who love guns · cialis · cluster · dca · dick cheney · dolly parton · eagles · Economy · Executive · extenze · Ezekiel 25:17 · free word association · gay rights · God · grease · head · Health · heart disease · home depot · homosexuality · hotel california · http · ibm · ILS · insurance · Internet · iphone · ipod · jack lalanne · Jackie Brown · jim lehrer · John Sebastian · John Travolta · juice newton · kim kardashian · king · lawyer · lazarus · levis · life · logic · maersk · maersk alabama · marriage · Martin C. Winer · MIT · mp3 · Music · nature · O. J. Simpson · obama · OJ · oklahoma · palm blackberry · piracy · pirates · President · Pulp Fiction · quentin tarantino · quote · Red · requip · rls · Robert Kardashian · Rome · Salma Hayek · sex · steve jobs · Tarantino · viagra · video · Vinni Barbarino · waterboarding · wealth · Welcome Back Kotter · writing

(Honest Title) Why Men Don’t Like Chick Flicks

(For those politically minded) Why Men Don’t Like Female Centric Films

(For those with a penchant for subtlety) Why Men Don’t like Baby Bird Films A Case Study : ‘Notting Hill’

1) Plot inconsistencies. The plot in all female centric movies seems to center around prolonging a certain romantic uncertainty. This is usually done at the expense of logic. There are two good examples of this in Notting Hill:

i) William (Hugh Grant) goes out in the morning to find a frenzy of Paparazzi outside his door. He knows this will upset his actress girlfriend Anna (Julia Roberts) but only mentions ‘don’t ask’ when she asks him what’s going on outside. He lets her walk outside and be confronted by the same Paparazzi. This, of course, upsets Anna who wrongly accuses him of summoning the Paparazzi and causes a ‘break up’. This, in turn, provides Hugh Grant a grand opportunity to apologize (despite his innocence), setting the female audience swooning and the male audience hurling.

ii) William goes on a movie set where Anna is being filmed where she greets him warmly and intimates that she’d consider getting back together. Unfortunately, she’s just in the middle of a shoot so she walks off to film a scene and William is provided with a headset to hear what is going on unbeknownst to Anna. While casually preparing for the scene, a fellow actor asks Anna: ‘Who was that rather difficult chap (referring to Grant) you were talking to on the way up?’ Anna replies: ‘Oh… no one… no one. Just some… guy from the past. I don’t know what he’s doing here. Bit of an awkward situation.’ Grant reacts negatively and leaves. When Grant asks her later as to why she would say such a thing, she dismisses it as: ‘You expect me to tell the truth about my life to the most indiscreet man in England?’ This is an example of terrible writing where the writers dig themselves out of a whole by floating to the top in syrup. Why didn’t she just answer the fellow actor with ‘He’s a friend’ and leave it at that? Why does Grant have to put up with such behaviour and accept such lame excuses? Of course, in tradition with all Grant films, he accepts the explanation and leads up to:

2) The grand apology. It seems a new trend in the effeminized America to have the leading male prancing around apologizing. In every Grant movie there is a huge apology where he apologizes to some horribly behaved woman to get her love. Watching Grant wince his eyes and beg forgiveness having committed no wrong, aside from his selection in screenplays, is like fingernails on the chalkboard for the male audience. Ross (from Friends) and Grant (in every movie) always apologize for no apparent reason, and in fact, often apologize for not apologizing. Perhaps the only real apology in such films should be an on screen cameo by the screenplay writers apologizing for overly syrupy content. Looking at the movie script: http://www.juliaroberts.de/script2.htm, Men apologize some 23 times compared to 8 times for their female counterparts. The male lead Grant apologizes some 12 times, compared to Julia Roberts apologizing a mere 3 times. Somewhere around the 10th apology, women in the audience are becoming enraptured while their male counterparts are wondering when the next episode in the Star Wars saga will premier so they can watch a movie where men can proudly wield their light sabers and offer no apology in so doing.

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I had heard of the Toronto Opera Repertoire for some time.  I had always wanted to go but I never managed to find the time.  Finally I made it this year to the very last free (pay what you can, donation) concert of the season.

The Repretoire is made up of local talent with many performers having diverse day jobs ranging from physicists to journalists.  I walked into the unassuming theatre with no expectations.  It’s always such a delight when an event with no expectations exceeds even one’s wildest expectations.

All of the talent, conducting and accompaniment was top notch.  The range of music covered and the calibre of the performance was above or beyond most of the paid concerts I’ve attended.  With all due deference to the terrific talent that was there that night, there was one performer who outshone the others by several levels of brightness.

The performance of Hanny Djuwati was a pure joy to listen to.  She announced the name of the piece with such a soft voice I had to lean forward in my chair to make it out.  She had a somewhat heavy Asian accent which made the task even more difficult.   The piece was by Puccini, I never did catch the exact title.  I reclined back in my chair curious to see how this performance would turn out.

The next thing I knew, the room was filled with crisp clear ‘Bel Canto’ singing, all the words clearly audible with an authentic Italian accent.  I’m not often a fan of sopranos in opera as they tend towards being shrill with notes resonating painfully in my sinuses.  Not so with Hanny Djuwati.  The Bel Canto style of singing is a style which emphasizes ‘head voice’ which in turn focuses on clarity without pushing or straining.

After her performance, when I returned to earth, I double checked my surroundings to make sure I wasn’t at the Metropolitan Opera in $500 a seat chairs.  Djuwati certainly belongs there and I was glad to have been given a chance to hear her.

More information on Hanny Djuwati can be found here:

http://www.toronto-opera.com/2009_season/Carmen/djuwati_hanny.html

and the Toronto Opera Repertoire can be found at:

http://www.toronto-opera.com/

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It was my mother who introduced me to the opera “Nelligan” around 1990. We were flipping channels one night when we chanced upon a TFO (the French language public television station in Ontario) airing of the Andre Gagnon – Michel Tremblay operatic rendering of the life of Emile Nelligan. My mother tracked down the CD shortly thereafter.

While the CD contained a full libretto, my rudimentary French (which has since then only marginally improved) couldn’t pull all the meaning out of the text. The opera features an aria which recited Nelligan’s most famous poem: “Le Vaisseau D’or”. I don’t want to violate copyright by posting the mp3, but I’m happy to share it privately with anyone who contacts me directly.

I have finally managed to find a translation. What follows is the original poem and a translation. As for the grander meaning of the poem: Nelligan led a tragic life and this poem is said to be autobiographic in a sense. For more information:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89mile_Nelligan

Le Vaisseau d’Or

C’était un grand Vaisseau taillé dans l’or massif:
Ses mâts touchaient l’azur, sur des mers inconnues;
La Cyprine d’amour, cheveux épars, chairs nues,
S’étalait à sa proue, au soleil excessif.

Mais il vint une nuit frapper le grand écueil
Dans l’Océan trompeur où chantait la Sirène,
Et le naufrage horrible inclina sa carène
Aux profondeurs du Gouffre, immuable cercueil.

Ce fut un Vaisseau d’Or, dont les flancs diaphanes
Révélaient des trésors que les marins profanes,
Dégoût, Haine et Névrose, entre eux ont disputés.

Que reste-t-il de lui dans la tempête brève?
Qu’est devenu mon coeur, navire déserté?
Hélas! Il a sombré dans l’abîme du Rêve!

Translation:

The Golden Ship

There was a fine ship, carved from solid gold
With azure reaching masts, on seas unknown.
Spread-eagled Venus, naked, hair back thrown,
Stood at the prow. The sun blazed uncontrolled.

But on the treacherous ocean in the gloom
She struck the great reef where the Sirens chant.
Appalling shipwreck plunged her keel aslant
To the Gulf’s depths, that unrelenting tomb.

She was a Golden Ship: but there showed through
Translucent sides treasures the blasphemous crew,
Hatred, Disgust and Madness, fought to share.

How much survives after the storm’s brief race?
Where is my heart, that empty ship, oh where?
Alas, in Dream’s abyss sunk without trace.

Selected Titles: Selected Poems of Emile Nelligan; translated by P.F. Widdow, 1960.

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