Ollie Oxen free

Intro

                      The question as to who reads this blog (and why) seems particularly relevant to the present issue.

                   First, as always, the joke, which is  our running gag about being the most important website on the planet. It amused me early on because not only does everybody feel thier effort is primary but more importantly because it addresses a core issue on the net, which is the data flood.

To navigate the sites you have portals like Google and to navigate personalities you have Facebook certainly neither of which is unique, but both gain from the perception, at least, of being most efficient.

                                 This leads us to another joke. Question:"What is the purpose of life?" Answer:"The creation of ever more efficient and beautiful machines." Har har There there, don't scratch your head and pretend you don't understand. The stock market measures things the way I have described and not according to some vague measures sure as self actualization. Old yuppies will remember the saying that the person who dies with the most toys “wins.”

In politics the logic is brutal. We insist on being parsimonious with the lives of human beings – our moral sense insists on it – yet who do we provide for? Robots?

                         In any case these essays have a self limiting function built in, which is in part intentional, although it makes it easier for me. Well over 99% of the public doesn't understand them. Most people have not matriculated at several secondary schools and even more to the point most people do not have the opportunity to spend a lifetime doing what they are interested in.

                       But this is not to say there are no models for what I have attempted. I met Ester Dyson, in the mid 90's. after she had spent several years in the funky Russia of the day and she was starting up what could be called a zine called Version 1.0. She's certainly no dummy but I felt she was a little naive as far as her optimistic projections as to what all this data collection would lead to.

To some extent she was prescient in suggesting the tagging of interstitial s, eg google's adding selective adverts to Gmail, but in other cases she seemed oblivious to the power that was going to be given to the corporations. Since then I think she's probably pulled back a little. The credit crunch of 08 displayed the notion that just because you can sell something doesn't make it worthwhile.

In any event Ester was selling V 1.0, which was four or six pages, without adverts for several hundred dollars an issue. Most people think that's expensive but at some levels of expertise it's a drop in the bucket, especially if you are making multi million dollar decisions.

                         Another model which I was introduced to early on when I was writing for the Justice department, right out of school. These are the Presidential Info sheets. Again they are rarely more then a page or two and have to encapsulate the context and options available. (Note: I am not saying I wrote any of these papers, meant for the President’s desk, only that I had access to a very selective few. The President at the time was Reagan who was noted for political orientation, but at the information level, at least, this ideological “spin” was kept to a minimum.)

                       And finally , as those who have invested substantially in the stock market know, most "tip sheets"(that's the vulgar name) are no more then a few pages long and even that is mostly filler. This is by no means to denigrate the value of information, but real information is damned near impossible to find and what is more is the specificity of information.

There is a series of tests I introduce in casual conversation to determine the character of the people I am working with. Most of the time they aren't needed. One can wing it and simply sit back and listen to what the person is saying, really saying, and go with your gut.

But one of these tests is when I ask the person if they feel that ability is specific as to one field or if someone who excels in one field would excel in others. If they say the latter then there is a good possibility that they have not really been tested in the crucible of imposed failure. Experience teaches us that we are lucky enough to know the necessary thing well - because that's where the competition lies.

                             And so, I have left these essays in the darkest corner I can find. The mafia kingpin says "lawyers I can buy" and likewise I have not sought to diversify. I began as, if anything, too diverse and it is only now that the real fruits of concentrated study are being seen. We don't advertise - We do virtually none of the things guaranteed to make one a successful blog - such as offering how to fix it advice. Or putting in key words to fool the robots or posting in high traffic sites and including the url.

In fact the mind is paradoxical. Marketing books will tell that in many circumstances the correct price is higher rather then lower. And if you listen to say, Old Time Radio, at times there is strong attraction to the adverts. We all claim to hate advertising but I suggest one not jump to conclusions before the facts are in.

                       In some regards I have sort of a Teutonic attitude towards this project. I realize that it has a limited audience and to this end I have to leave it for you to find me. If you did then congratulate yourself. If you found me and feel I have sparked some ideas in your mind - I regard my efforts as worthwhile.

   the main section

 

                  We were surreptitiously pushing the latest single. It was late in the Carter administration. The song was was called “Big Silence” and it was a homage of sorts to Laurie Anderson’s “Big Science”. We were still teenagers and originality was not our strong suit. (Come to think of it it never even became our strong suit.)

I can still remember the chorus after all these years.,

“Neutron bomb, Neutron bomb

There is no big noise with a neutron bomb

But there’s a big silence, big silence”

Lyric poetry this was not.

              There’s a theory that the reason why Marijuana is taking so long to legalize when for instance almost anyone can buy a multiple round assault gun, is the pot has comparatively little in the way of negative side effects.

Since everything pleasurable is sinful and there fore must be punished this is against the way of the vengeful God. Alcohol gives you hangovers. Narcotics get you addicted - so they are okay, decent things.

The beautiful thing about the Neutron bomb, and chemical weapons is they kill people and leave the more valuable things, like property, alone. There isn’t much talk about the Neutron Bomb nowadays. I wonder where it went?

Kollywood, bless their mercenary little souls, has not forgot. Abiut ten years ago there was a spat of TV programs all based on the premise that humanity had be forced to the pre-technological era. Very amusing.

                        One “cousin” of the neutron bomb is the Electromagnetic Pulse weapon, or EMP, both these weapons have disadvantages however. One is they don’t kill people, and that is one of the goals of warfare. The other is the destruction of the administrative infrastructure which then has to be repaired.

Then again creative thinkers can see this as an advantage as in the case where the only communications devices are in your hands and all you have to do is pry them from the dead hands of the people you have killed.

It raises a question we have not dealt for over two thousand years. If you read the Bible you realize that there was a like of smiting and smoting and basically it was take no prisoners except for slaves and if you were say a Viking you only took slaves when you were in a good mood.

                         It has to do, basically with what the Brits, in their warm hearted way, call “good value.” Joan Baez, an opponent of the VietNam war pointed out that she could not actually see the day when the Viet Cong would march down Main Street USA and take over the drug store, which was one of the arguments of the pro war crowd.

It points out that a constantly changing aspect of war is civilian participation. The American Civil war was so “Civilized” that the ladies of nearby towns would pack a lunch, dress in their best gowns and stand on nearby hills to observe the progress of battles. In warfare, such as the Napoleonic conflicts war was a matter of set armies having set battles at set places, usually places out of the way - because it was understood that the winner would want to own the property they fought for. My own forebearers, from Alsace-Lorraine had the experience of seeing themselves change from French to German to French to German and so on, as the land changed hands constantly. (Meanwhile the actual inhabitants kept on growing wine and making pastries.)

When in 1941 an increasing frustrated Josef Goebells, propaganda minister of the third reich, declared “This is it! Enough is enough! From now on it’s total war.” He was referring to a specific concept, one that he hadn’t really paid attention previously anyway. It was the idea that henceforth civilians would be considered legitimate targets.

                           In reality this was already in place, because the Luftwaffe had been bombing civilians since 1938. What is more such bombing was primarily a terror tactic since it tended to have little impact on a nations ability to wage war - and indeed the case is made that it was counterproductive in stiffening the enemies resistance.

                            Suffice to say the invention of the nuclear bomb changed everything. Now it was the soldiers, in bunkers who’d survive and the civilians who would die, indiscriminately.

As stated. Compared to a nuke, chemical weapons are discrete - the only kill the living.

Now comes the nasty part.

                       Joyce described the history of history as Circus Vicus, which was a reference to a fifteenth century Italian historian, Giambattista Vico  who believed in a cyclical model of human history. The opposite is called teleological and it says that humanity is moving straight towards some end or another, for our purposes that can be either good or bad.

I find it often wise to remind myself that progress is a funny critter. Specifically slavery appears then goes away then comes back and never seems to go away totally. Likewise monarchy seems a function of environment.

Some early wars, when life was scarce, consided of one or two champions fighting to the death - simply because they could not afford to lose more men. Then in tribal conflicts over limited terrain the extermination of entire tribes comes to be.

We are currently in a period of sufficient, if not over population. The elites in universities with one or two children are not overly sympathetic to the groundling with his dozen infants. If then we were to suppose a pendulum between the value of human life and that of property one could suggest that property is increasingly at a premium - and this may well also be impacted by global warming’s effects.

The is the context by which the post colonial era can be understood. The Axis nations, and before that Imperial Germany were essentially seeking to gain the sort of colonial empire that had seemingly so enriched Great Britain. To end the constant wars for control of the third world Roosevelt agreed to help Britain if Britain would agree to relinquish her colonies after the war. This is what happened.

                        Still the same forces that brought us slavery and the Imperial empire were still in place and they rapidly began the formation of the post colonial world - one where the natural resources and labor of the third world would continue to serve capitol but the responsibility for the maintenance of the resident populations, health, housing and education, would be given to the local states.

                   Some of the new nations, Jamaica for instance, used their independence to attempt a total break with the world economic order and the results were not good.

                          I’ll admit there are times I get discouraged in these writings - no one seems to get it, nor if they were to take the time and effort to understand does it seem they would value it. But I like to think that this understanding, hopefully unfettered by the constraints of ordinary society, may be of use to someone, somewhere, some lucky person or persons.

             In retrospect it’s possible to suggest that the reason I am not selling books at twenty dollars a pop to up and coming world shapers and movers and shakers is most of the futurist books claim they can make you rich and/or happy with the wondrous events “just around the corner”.

It could be suggested I have a scientific orientation, which demands that any hypothesis be proven in as many situations as the scientist can imagine.

But a better model might be that of medicine. One of my early career goals, shot down by circumstance, was to be a psychoanalyst and in any case medicine is about two things - finding out what’s wrong and fixing it. There is a school of psychology that in effect studies what is right but most people consult physicians only in distress.

                                  To say this yet another way, I have and will continue to, sought to identify the possible problems we may face in the future - if not to eliminate them then perhaps to mitigate them. I wish I could give you some magic elixir, or cure, but among other things that’s only possible in the face of actual circumstances.

When you come right down to it there’s not much I can do and again I resort to the psychoanalytic model where the therapeutic process focuses more on avoiding current and future f*ckups then in somehow relieving the wounds of the past. As they say, “It is not much but it will suffice - it has to.”

 Outro

                Outro  

                 For the record and those interested these articles are usually written in three or four sessions - more then that and they tend to be all over the place. Twain, famously said that had more to say he'd have written a shorter letter, and in my case the more factual the source material, usually the briefer I can be.

                         And often I write the bulk of the essay initially and then return to add another 20 % or so, usually in an effort to tie it into the readers frame of reference, which I understand may not be as academic as mine.

                             And Hemingway reminds us that one can only produce a certain amount before needing time to "Let the well refill".The great social novelist Honore Balzac could write at twelve hour stretches for days and weeks - but that, after all was fiction

An nineteenth century English poet, who's name escapes me,said when he wrote his poems they were between God and him and then after a few days God only knows what they meant.

I find that the great benefit of obscurity is that one is not shaped to fit the mold of prevailing wisdom. (As an aside, in my other life, as a musician, this is a real problem in that the central controllers in the big cities have ruined many a talented band and artist.)

                                     Finally then in commenting on the essay you, hopefully, have just read I'll say this. One is that increasingly I seem to be leaving the realm of current business trends and venturing back into anthropology. My apologies :-)

                       Actually this is not as great a digression as it may appear at first. In the fifties there was great concern in the US about the "Hidden Persuaders" - advertisers who could control our minds and pocket books, later on many conspiracy theorists came to the fore and today we are concerned with the degree to which organizations know and thereby control, our personal decisions.

                       Francis Fukuyama, Ray Kurzweil and others all have different ideas as to what the near future will bring. What they agree on is that science and technology will continue to advance. I separate the concepts of science and technology and us the idea of Teknos as initially defined by Lewis Mumford, although I am not primarily concerned, as he was, with the design of humane living habitates.

The concept of Teknos we are here addressing is the broader concept of "the maker." I wish to avoid theological issues but immediately one can see that the maker's subject, increadingly is the remaker, of mankind. That role hitherto has been left to God, as the uncreated creator, and left to sort itself out, an option we are increasingly unable to afford ourselves of.

Jacques Ellul, a French law professor of the mid 20th century, was able to see how technological process invariably tended towards totalitatianism, a situation he experienced first hand as an occupant of Nazi occupied France.

To free ourselves of debilitating limitations we must be prepared to answer all questions as to how we would like to live our lives. I refer you to the question of "What is life for?" Do we serve machines, or the other way around? It is not settled nor will ever be.

                    Even logic has problems with this. Is it valid to detroy one section of a population in order to advance another?

                     Information theory, like music, is an old science. However primitive it still functioned as the glue of society. Today I would lie to leave you with two suggestions, or thought experiments.

One is that there is nearly always an element of sacrifice. The Greeks would send 20 of their best men and maidens to be the food of the Minotaur. However we view it, via individual or collective the notion of pure logic, Kantian interpretation aside, seems to demand sacrifice.

Secondly, When we speak of slavery, human sacrifice, or any of the past human behaviors we now find abhorrant it is important to realize that such behavior in its day was the norm. We still regularly kill convicted murderers in the US and there's little opposition to it, even as we know that a certain percentage of those put to death are innocent.

                       Furthermore when we start to deal with these practices, which have become the norm they d not come into being overnight. unlike science, which can proceed in leaps and bounds, or evolution, society, left to it's own pace proceed in gradual steps.

First something is a possibility, a risk that is either taken or not, then if successful, it becomes the custom of the land, and only then, finally it becomes codified into words as law.

                   And I will leave you with the suggestion that we judge others not only by what they do, but by what they not do as well. 

        One last  though relating to something I touched upon in the body of the previous essay. It has to do with paradox of mind. What we might call the superficial paradox is  actually the dialectical flip flop. One thing turns into  it's opposite.  Actually the original thing is still there, but what with most things in the universe occurring in waves the original concept or definition goes into abeyance.

     Real paradox, as in Zeno's paradoxs is much weirder and  in fact cannot actually be described - er, hence the paradox.  It is a state of things were two contradictory existences seem to occupy the same reality at the same time. 

         The fact is the mathematical axioms of Euclid  cannot explain these paradox's and yet they are the basis of all math.  Actually, like Godel's theorem it's beyond  my skills, but it seems to explain things.

     What I'm about to say is much simpler. As time goes by the conservative movement it tending towards it's more extreme dogmatic, and ideologically driven forms.  The young turks of the Republican party for instance admire the libertarian motives of An Rynd.   I'm not sanguine about this or willing to declare it trivial because my experience in politics suggests that for every outward conservative there's several more in the background egging them on.

         As I mentioned in relation to the stock market however the result of total freedom from laws is not absolute power, but our old friend chaos.  You can to an extent, "ride the tiger", as was done by people in the late nineteen twenties. In fact one of the specific blind spots in American history is the question as to what extent the great depression  was predictable and why wasn't it?