Oh my, by golly, some tidbits to make you jolly.

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Suburbanality; political engineering; </bush>;

If you haven’t found the pogblog Glossary yet, it’s my favorite thing really. If  the Goddess of  Hard Gold smiles bounteously upon me, I will divide my time between Observant Sloth & adding to the pogblog Glossary.

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   To torment a friend, I thored the word ‘suburbanality’ at him, as the master of lightning wielding, dear Thor might have, had anything in his experience prepared him for suburbs or banality. It was part of the patois of devoted mean by which we communicate in our obsidian way. There is the Golden Mean, a pleasing & harmonious proportionality. There is our Obsidian Mean, a pleasing and reckless splash in the sea of ebullient chaos and returning, so far, to the Shores of Reason with barracudas of odd truth.

     Because my putative friend is an original in so many ways, it irks him no end to be lambasted with suburbanality. It would be one thing to be called a hick or a hillbilly or a rube, a kind of reverse pride of which one might preen. But suburbanality? There is no pretzeling which can make that in any iota cool. Just as it tickles him secretly to be called an original, it prickles him to be dubbed suburbanal. Even Achilles had that pesky heel, dear.

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political engineering .. I heard this from either Eugene Jarecki of Why We Fight (which I tenter-hookedly await) or Franklin Chuck Spinney, a Pentagon insider who says we’re spending the ½ trillion Military Budget for – not much. The notion of political engineering in this case is that the fabulously clever manipulation of, say, the B2 bomber. Instead of building & assembling it in one locale which would be efficient, every single state has a piece of building the B2 bomber. Thus when a new generation of the B2 bomber comes before the Congress OR the notion of stopping the program entirely as being obsolete, everyone has a stake in maintaining it. Jobs in the district. Money dispersed.

  The tentacles of the Military Budget Colossus Octopus are so entangled throughout the nation that the Gordian Knot seems simplicity to cleave compared to this Octopoid sucking the lifeblood from our future. To supply gigaTaxCut payola to the gigaRich, medicare, school loans, and food stamps were gutted – yet the gargantuan $820,000 per minute Military Budget is never mentioned, like the Seventh Name of God. The fake Big Boy Republicans bathe in the midal gold which they send in geysers and gushes of ye Olde Faithful — the Military Budget she nevair go dry, swig down the Dom Halliburton champagne, Big Boys, theys macho mucho more where that came from, Ponce de Military Budget, the Perpetual Fountain of Graft.

   Then my dear Democrats are gonadsless – afraid to be seen as soft on Killing & Dismembering & stomachless for Collateral Damage. (That the Republicans are soft on healthcare, soft on education, soft on the environment, soft on the future no one seems to be able to say out loud.)

   “The military industrial Congressional complex is a political economy with a big P and a little E. It's very political in nature. Economic decisions, which should prevail in a normal market system don't prevail in the Pentagon, or in the military industrial complex.

   “So what we have is a system that essentially rewards its senior players. It's a self… what we call it, we call it, we have a term for it, it's a self-licking ice cream cone. We basically take care of ourselves. And that's also why we have this metaphor it's <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Versailles on the Potomac.” Chuck Spinney in interview with Bill Moyers on NOW.  [http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_spinney.html] 

“Have you seen these figures that CEO pay at Lockheed Martin went up from $5.8 million in 2000 to $25.3 million in 2002. I mean, that's five times increase in less than three years. CEO pay went up at General Dynamics from $5.7 million in 2001 to $15.2 million in 2002. It went up at Honeywell from $12.9 million in 2000 to $45 million in 2002. It went up from Northrop Grumman from $7.3 million in 2000 to $9.2 million in 2002.” Bill Moyers, same interview.

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</bush> .. my favorite bumpersticker of late. (Tho I was pretty chuffed by Is it 2008 yet?)

   The Bush thing is an inside joke and it’s probably evil of me to explain the punch line, but this is how it works. In html, the behind the scenes code which allows you to make things <b>bold</b> or <i>italic</i>, for instance, it goes like this: <b> begins the bold. Everything is bold until you put </b> which stops the bold. So </bush> would be stop or end Bush. Droll.

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8 Wind . Ik . Whirlwind . North . tzol 241  01.29.06 sun

ffwofw597§26d2h33m11s33.84g3.25g; 

..

the education-obsessed world begins today with you ..

.. let’s spend the $820,000 per minute Military Budget on education instead

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01.19.06

Dear ZYX ,

   This is a draft about getting laptops to all K-12 Mountain View students to go along with Google's wonderful WiFi. I first sent out  these urgent preliminary considerations on MLK’s birthday because I see WiFi-Laptops as a civil rights issue among other more materialistic urgencies.

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The Mtn. View WiLap Project .. WiFi & Laptops — A National Emergency  

   We will come to see that our greatest national emergency and urgency is getting our nation wi-fied and laptopped. The WiLap Project.

   The WiLap – WiFi & Laptops – Project is the Manhattan Project; the Moon Shot; the Interstate Highway System; and the Tennessee Valley Electrification of our own time.

   Google is <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />wifi-ingMountain View California (pop 70,000) in the Spring of 2006. As water isn’t much use to you without a bucket, I am proposing that we equip each Mountain View student K-12 with a laptop by May 2007. Mountain View would be a model & beta test for working out the bugs in how to WiFi & Laptop our country by May 2011. The heart of Silicon Valley is perfect for this beta test.  

   Our ability to grok or deeply understand this urgent WiFi & Laptops project, to focus on it, and to mobilize our resources upon it will spell a prosperous, vigorous, innovative future for our children, or if we fail the challenge, a diminished, fading role for Americans on the creativity stage of 21^st century history.

   Terrorism is not the key challenge or danger of our time. This is a misunderstanding and distraction from what actually imperils our future. Consider that while we are spending $820,000 per minute on our Military Budget and an additional $200,000 per minute on Iraq, South Korea has 75% broadband penetration (across all social classes) and that their ultra-broadband is 10 times faster than our best. You might imagine us as the last Tyrannosaurus Rex — hugely well-armed, thundering through the jungle — who doesn’t realize that the quiet and quick lemurs win.

    If we re-allocate a portion of this $820,000 per minute/Military Budget plus the $200,000 per minute/Iraq into the WiFi-Laptops Project, we will ultra-charge our American future with all these connected minds. Education will remain centered in physical school buildings for many social reasons, but education will be giga-enhanced by being detached from the brick buildings.

There are 8000 K-12 students in Mountain View. MIT has developed a $100 laptop for distribution abroad to the underprivileged – an utterly excellent idea. However, our own country is backwards and third-world in this giga-Connected regard. We have to swallow our denial, our unconscious habit of pride if not hubris, and get urgent.

Notes & Tidbits:

It is not really possible to ‘share’ a computer any more than it’s possible to share an eyeball or a contact lens. 

Dial-up is hopeless. Dial-up is like before microwave ovens. Or like running a three-legged sack-race. It is terminally frustrating.

WiFi alone is like trying to fly with one wing.

My preliminary thought is to begin with 7^th grade and go down and up the grades as quickly as possible.

It would take about 5 minutes of our Military/Iraq budget to get Mountain View outfitted with K-12 laptops and support systems. Our nation has the resources to make this urgent transition to an innovative future, but we must have the vision.

Some parents will be worried about whether their child will get sucked into some ‘dreadful world of pornography.’ That certainly can be addressed in some V-Chip fashion – probably an inerasable history that a parent can check.

For those not yet lucky enough to have broadband and their very own computer, it’s hard to describe how stunningly enhanced your life & thinking & learning experiences can be. Because a broadband-computer is so intimately tailored to your curiosities, you learn 100 times as fast. Curiosity-fuelled learning is not in fact linear. The astonishing search engines like Google allow you to have immediate access to the best minds on Keats, say, or articles on gamma ray bursts.  

We need to always ask how we can work out any snag in the Mtn. view WiLap Project. I’m not interested in wasting time on all the reasons why we can’t do this project. We must do it, so how?

   I’m grateful that I worked on 3 SF Giants baseball team campaigns. I learned there that you can have common-urgency campaigns in which people set aside their own even rabid politics and religions for a great good.

   Recall that the greatest scientist Newton was also a devoted alchemist and astrologer – all of us need to stay on point and ignore the others’ heresies – which is really just heated dinner conversation.

   Our day job as adults is to urgently facilitate WiLap for our children so they can join the future – otherwise they are flower seeds in parched earth who never get to bloom because we squabble about our old old battles.

  WiLap is the civil rights of our time. Equal access to broadband and a personal computer is like the lunch counter back when. There can be absolutely no discrimination in access to these brain-enhancing tools. It would never occur to you to starve your child. We are starving American children as I write this. Every day we delay puts them farther behind.

Cheers,

pogblog

pogblog@yahoo.com

ps. I need to know from you suggestions of who to begin to talk to about this WiLap Project. Who could love the vision & put up the money? A George Soros-type person. Or several. I’ll ask anyone. Shy I ain’t.

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01.19.06

LH ..

Thanks re forwarding to supt. of schools. The more people who begin to think about this the better. Mountain View could make education history. America better make education history or we will be left in the knowledge-evolution dust. We have to think boldly out of the box. Education needs to declare its urgent national security claims on some significant portion of the $820,000 per minute of the Military Budget (& the additional $200,000 per minute we're pouring into the sands of Iraq).

If we don't do this Education Quantum leap, then the rich get richer. Which is to say that children of parents who can afford laptops get to become knowledge-enhanced (the new cogno-evolution vs bio-evolution), and the poor children get more dependent and dimmed in hope, and the nation gets impoverished materially and innovationally.

It's actually quite 'desperate' in fact, but I'm sticking with 'urgent' for the time being.

Please do let me know if there is someone in the Mtn View education hierarchy who would bleed technology? Or if there is a meeting I can come to and speak for 5 minutes?

I plan to talk to AR, principal of the private VVV, soon. They have laptops for each 6th, 7th, & 8th grade desk.

Cheers,

pogblog

pogblog@yahoo.com