Friends, I hope you escape this very sudden and very harsh presumably non-avian sore-throat-from-hell Event that attacked me a few days ago & felled me for awhile. I wouldn’t mention it, other people's misery in specific being tedium times ten, except that after a few days of a throat so sore, I was wavering – (I haven’t been to an MD since 1979 except once to get an inch long splinter pulled out from under my thumbnail – yes, you would say anything if they started shoving splinters under your fingernails – an answer I could have let someone else discover) – I thought, maybe, you old fool, this is the dreaded avian flu or who knows. But a friend suggested gargling dissolved Bayer aspirin in water – which I take every day any way. Willowbark is the miracle drug for sure, but chalk this in its column too. As an aspirin junkie for 15 years, only Bayer aspirin has the magic. Sorry, something is missing from the generics in this case. Anyhow, gargle away. I am not cough or other revolting drooling symptoms free, but the scary sore throat is Gone, hallelujah, bro & sis.
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But to the real subject du jour.
Chinese Green & SoKo WiFi Dust the USA
We either pursue the Burning Child shifting of the Military Industrial Complex to the Education Instructional Complex or we end up, baffled, as a backwater in history. We are spending our $820,000 per minute on an absurdly, obscenely obsolete model of dominance. The new dominance is invention for fun and for survival.
Thomas Friedman’s China’s Little Green Book, a Nov 2 NYT column, tells how the Chinese are putting a giga-press on getting green. Not because it’s a nice idea, but so they don’t choke to death on the effluents of modernity.
<?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />South Korea, or SoKo as I ultramodernly call it, has grokked that nationwide ultraband is the kiss the frog & turn it to a prince smartest move. The frog being stuck in the past troglodytism and the prince is the collaborative and colludenative future
And we are stuck with a bellicose Administration all hopped up on the drugs of weapons and war. Everyone else is looking at us with horror tinct with pity or pity tinct with horror. Ye gods, I’m ashamed for our de-evolution, and a different thing, I am skin-crawlingly embarrassed that we are so belligerently and theistically stupid. We actually, tho admittedly barely, elected Al Gore an environmentalist and futurist who grokked green and the noosphere, the internet change from the competitive model to the instant and intimately collaborative, colludenative model. It is catastrophic to America’s hopes for joining – yes joining, what a novel, almost Navaho idea! — the future that we are stuck with an entire administration with at least three fatal flaws.
The whole BushCo mindset is a throwback to anti-ecumenicalism in its many useful varieties. First let’s take a breath, as dear Fitz would say. I am not a communialist at all. I like my little personal space without having to pretend to like people’s company more than I do. I like it sometimes, sometimes I don’t. I like have a lair to retreat to – my garret as it were I suppose. I am not a happy hive person, always rubbing and buzzing like in bars on Friday night. So don’t think I have some sloppy sentimental notion of us all hunkering down in some loving commune. Piffle. However, we could care what happens in the next hovel, I think.
How, for instance, does someone get to take their second dwelling off their taxes before everyone has a first dwelling? And tax payers should subsidize mansions? Really? No one makes their f***ing fortunes in a vacuum. You wouldn’t be so damned rich, FattHoggist, if the janitor weren’t making an impoverished wage. You are not worth 431 times more than your secretary per hour.
So Robber Baron greediness and a complete gelding of the Labor Movement are flaws which pit us in the US against the future.
In the general BushCo backward-looking, I see no one who groks the niftiness of technology. And, be sure, it is its niftiness which is what wins you over. Anyone who does not have access to home broadband is crippled. If that sounds like a blunt statement, it is from experience that I speak it. I had an overlap of dial-up and broadband. The broadband crashed one day (a rarity) and I discovered that the dial-up was all but useless. You cannot go back without feeling like an exile. All people who do not have a decent exclusive personal computer and at least our clunky USA broadband are parapeligic, period.
Going from broadband (as embarrassing as our USA broadband is – more like teaspoon-band compared to SoKo’s gallon-band) back to dial-up is like going from a fine 10-speed bicycle back to a tricycle. Yes, they both have wheels, but they aren’t in fact comparable.
Please don’t be swayed by people who are not happy computer nuts. What do they know? I have the zeal of the converted. In 1988, I was still sure computers would be depersonalizing tools of an inhumane Corporate Structure. Maybe someone meant them to be, but trippingly around the gigantic feet of the dinosaurs, the tricksy lemurs began dancing under the moon after school.
A greatest fear I have is that with the changes happening so rapidly, those kids without computers or broadband, those not rhapsorg, are dusted into a different social species faster than could have happened before in history. The ability to augment your thinking with access to much of the world’s greatest knowledge all-but-instantly makes you different, more concrete, more specific – not disconnected, not more abstract. Now, obviously the same kind of training that a giga-reader of poetry or of the world itself is fortunate enough to get ought be vouchsafed to all these burgeoning brains so that they don’t only get addicted to cotton candy and giddy trivia. But the wonderful possibility of the noosphere is that you can pinball around from profundity to trivia in a trice.
The freedom I feel as a writer now that I can check up on every nuance of what I’m writing about makes me just plain better in a substantial way. The melody is a gift I’ve practiced and earned, but the ability to check that SoKo has ¾ penetration of 4 times to 64 times faster broadband from an 11.05 article is a micro-solidity I can pass along that is both bloody cool and also makes us both smarter.
I use rhapsorg instead of cyborg because the word rhapsody means woven song at root. And this future is orgged or organized more like a woven song than the cybernetic-org – helmsman-org model. There is no helmsman. Yet it is not chaos; there is an anti-entropic tendency to melody; therefore, woven song.
So the kids (or any of us, really) not wired into the symphony are, ipso facto, deprived.
Please don’t waste our time listing all that’s stupid and wrong with the internet. The same things that are stupid and wrong with people’s private minds – just the old mind was less on display to the non-psychic. Us psychics don’t notice so much difference, sooth to say. The vast garbage ground of pretentious nonsense and davidletterman sophomoric proto-humor is now in every Comment column of every blog that the generic imbecile-redneck-dave can find to bray on. However, I have found more thoughtful and resonant moments than ever I might have before. It requires a rhino-hide for a writer and super-quik junk-thought filters – like surfing the tv if you’re the one used to holding the remote – at a glance you see that it’s just britneyesque or whatever ain’t your poison.
So the Chinese are doing giga-green and SoKo is leading the probably unwired way. We have got to instantly get this nation to have universal hotspots – the whole damn nation, like the MoonShot. Why were we woken up by Sputnik and not by SoKo? This is an Emergency & it is not a Test. You should hear that noise of alarm This is an Emergency until you shout at your Representatives urgently and constantly. WiFi this Nation Now.
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collaborate = working together;
colludenate = playing together;
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1 Earth . Caban . Earthquake. Heron . East . tzol 157 11.05.05 sat
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the education-obsessed world begins today with you
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People forget that the moon landing was a huge federal government project. While it ultimately benefitted the private sector in ways no one would have imagined before the space program, it wasn't the private sector that landed a man on the moon.
I'd love to have wireless hot spots in every town in every significant public building.
Dwight Eisenhower pushing the massive interstate highway system was justified on national defense terms tho it actually benefited commerce. The idea was that troops could be shuttled around the US better, were there a need.
The point about universal ultraband and cheap tough cool laptops (wolfbooks I call them 'cause it's cool) is that they'll explode cheap trivial low grade crud, yes, but they'll also explode invention.
It is invention which will preserve America and a decent standard of living — not more destroyers and fighters.
Yes, it will take us time to buy out this idiot war in Iraq and all our obligations to its mutilated and their dependents, but at $820,000 per minute for the Military Budget and $200,000 per minute more for Iraq (It's 'off the books'), we can make the transition to an education-invention economy forthwith if we just change the meme or the controlling idea.
Mr. Lucky, I've read that certain towns, perhaps Philadelphia, are juicing the whole metropolis with broadband. Even the park benches and the buses or wherever you are, I think? Can you imagine what a draw for a city?
Shamanofdroll,
yes, San Francisco is also one of those towns, but it's being fought hard by the existing ISPs who feel that they're losing turf.
Infrastructure is always somewhere between monopoly and free market. One reason the interstate highways in the US took a while was that there weren't incentives for many road builders to do it without a toll, so you got the relatively crooked route of the Lincoln Highway.
ofdroll, cl, — I think there comes a time when we are being so smoked that we have to join nationally to un-wire — like the Tennessee Valley Rural Electrification — We'll be a rural-equivalent by then (3 years??) and need a massive wifi-ification plan to humbly catch up.
This is a race in which one surquickly falls behind because the deprived children who move snail-like through the schools, not as rhapsorgs, but without enhanced-brains will remain exponentially deprived and the schism on the planet between rhapsorg and dolt will be like a ripped piece of cloth. I don't want this. As a futurist, I wistfully predict it.
There is what was a relative backwater city on the northwest coast of Spain called Bilbao. It as a city took a quantum leap and hired Frank Gehry to design this astonishing museum and Calatrava to make an astonishing bridge and from being dullsville and nowhere, they have become a destination and leader on the planet. The bilbao leap.
Why doesn't Oakland leap in and hold hands with SF?
Actually I am glad you reminded me — I'll have to start going to City Council meetings and bringing it up and up and up.