It seems a federal trial is beginning for a local man accused of shining a small, hand-held spotlight at a helicopter flying low over his house. Apparently the flashlight blinded Homeland Security Agent Dave Simeur, causing him severe pain, and almost made him crash. He also claims the homeowner, Wayne Groen, continued to chase him with the flashlight.

Being a man who spends most nights awake and outside under the stars, I know nighttime helicopters. Even here, far away from international borders, few nights go by without darkened, low-flying helicopters hovering by. I don’t know why. And I don’t even know who to ask. Do I contact the mayor’s office and ask, “what are all these helicopters flying about at night, and who’s flying them, and what gives them the right?”

I thought the airborne ruckuses might be primetime-worthy fugitive chases at first, except that their appearances are almost never accompanied by police cars or sirens. Often, they trace back and forth across a few miles, never going out of hearing range. Sometimes, they are moving very slowly, at a very low altitude, which does indeed rattle everything in the house. In the middle of the night. Which, if I were asleep, would infuriate me.

That’s what happened to Wayne one night while he and his wife were fast asleep. A loud roar, a shaking house, and objects rattling off the shelves. It wasn’t the first time. He ran outside, he claims, to see what the hell it was, and to warn it off the top of their house. It really does make an impressive rattling…

You know he was mad. Furious probably. Of course he was. And it’s perfectly natural. Those assholes don’t care one bit what they keep doing to people down below in their houses, you would think. And they don’t. Not really. Not enough. And so he shined the light: I see you, you son of a bitch! Look at me down here! Pay attention to what the hell you’re doing!

And then Dave the Airborne Agent thinks, how dare that stupid fucker shine a light up on a Homeland Security helicopter! We’ll teach that arrogant SOB a lesson in respect and get him behind bars! Let’s see, I’m blinded, and almost crashed – yeah – putting government agents in danger – yeah – and the neighborhood too maybe. It’s too bad we can’t just take him out, though.

Or was it really, as Dave’s testimony suggests; oh god! My eyes! It hurts! We’re gonna crash in this Blackhawk helicopter that fights in war zones, from a flashlight! Holy moley my friend co-pilot, are you okay?

You know what, asshole helicopter pilots, agents, officers, or whatever you are, who fly low down around people’s homes all dark and secret-like at night… watch out! Wayne’s certainly not the only one you’re pissing off. If thoughts were crimes, the fantasies I’ve had about downing a few of you… and I’m about as far being a violent person as you can get.

And if a flashlight can so easily take you and your $14 million warplane out, just wait until you go up against my slingshot!

Do you think I’m being uncaring, insensitive or disrespectful about agents and police and pilots who are just doing their job when shaking houses apart in the middle of the night? No, the “just doing my job” excuse was long ago used up. For everyone. In everything. It’s your responsibility if you get slapped upside the head eventually, when you’re continually harassing and terrorizing people – for whatever reason.

We know that distributing work out in a decentralized manner, amongst many things, is a good idea. The Internet was born from this thinking, by design — highly tolerant of any small or even large segments failing. The military knows that relying on central control makes you both vulnerable and dependent. So the Internet requires no central authority to operate in any fundamental sense. If a failure occurs, it routes around that failure. This is the aspect, ironically created through military funding, that now physically embodies democracy – disparate entities functioning together loosely as a greater whole, both individually free and collectively resilient.

It was not always so. Just a couple decades ago, Apple created the famous commercial where the beautiful and free “new order” smashed the tyranny of Big Brother and his centrally-kowtowed minions.  IBM mainframes, the huge repositories of centrally controlled information, were the mainstay of corporate and government life. When they failed, everything stopped. Your only choice was to call IBM, whose agents arrived en masse, unsettlingly dressed all alike in creepy dark suits to set things right; so business carries on. As long as you purchased the right plan…

When Apple came along with computers for humans, or “end users” in corporate IBM-speak, IBM realized their business model must change. They already had branched into “distributed computing” by installing smaller mainframes at customer’s satellite companies that fed into larger, central mainframes. Now it was just a matter of embracing these “personal” computers as well. Although centralized power resisted distributing processing to end users, mostly by the technorati themselves, and doomsaying abounded, the newly freed employees could finally have their way with their own information, and productivity soared. People could get what they needed, when they needed it, change it into any form they could imagine, and were no longer wholly dependent upon centralized resources and control.

Yet strangely, a trend seems to be moving us back toward the centralized control of information processing, glitteringly re-branded as some amorphous “cloud”. The reality is, this cloud is really just a collection of CPU’s and storage devices, very much the same as any latter-day mainframe. In essence, the big Old Iron has returned, and we’re eagerly handing our data processing capabilities right over to it. And it’s not even our mainframe any more. It’s someone else’s. Some might say it’s not a mainframe, but a cluster. A collection of CPU’s and memory that had access to large and fast data storage and retrieval. Those people need to take another look at what latter-day mainframes are.

Even if we do get past the cloud of marketing and look at using another company’s data processing services, certain realities remain: maintaining 100% uptime is only a holy grail. Despite all the effort and cleverness a systems engineer will devote to maintaining uptime, the fact is, we are returning to a single point of failure every time we put something on the cloud, unless we are using the cloud as merely a supplementary or backup mechanism, or have those mechanisms ourselves as backup. And there is little, if any, transparency. Even several days after a major failure of the largest cloud, no detailed information has been provided about what actually went wrong, nor what is being done to mitigate such an incident in the future. Even IBM in the days of the old iron would provide immediate and ongoing detailed status reports. But “the cloud”… who knows? Right?

One last thing to consider other than central points of failure, and their accompanying points of performance limitations and benefits, is that using another company’s mainframes creates a single point of access for increased government access and control. When everything is on the cloud, the government needs only to deal with one company – one ring to rule them all, so to speak. During the infamous illegal government wiretapping case that broke during the Bush era, the government compelled AT&T to allow access to our communications by forcibly bringing all data into one hub in San Francisco, so they could snoop. Using the centralized old iron model makes this government behavior simple, whereas the distributed model once again points us toward democratization.

As the dust settles from this failure, the spin, which will be dutifully echoed by all the tech heads currently ensorcelled with the “cloud computing” moniker, will be that there is nothing wrong with cloud computing. In fact, it is user error – the customers who were too cheap to purchase a second or third redundant site at another data center (or region) deserved what they got. And strangely, they won’t even notice this implies multiple “clouds”, nor will it raise any questions as to how this cloud differs, in essence, from any well-managed colo rental space.

If anything comes of this, perhaps people might start saying the plural clouds instead of the singular, amorphous cloud. I doubt it. It’s one of those sensationally brilliant marketing accidents that is perpetually reinforced by throngs of parrots. What we must learn is to start asking the question once again: who are we renting our servers from, and who are we giving our, and our customer’s data to? And why?

Perhaps cloud fans would find Eucalyptus interesting.

PS. You are the sun.

This article was published in The Sunbreak and was quoted in The New York Times.

It’s always a dangerous thing when you have not only all the answers, but also all the guns.

It’s also dangerous when you discover you’re not actually fighting for freedom, liberty and democracy – unless freedom, liberty and democracy are equivalent to money, that is. And there are, actually, reasonable arguments that support the notion of money as a tangible quantity that represents freedom, liberty and democracy.

But money is not for everyone, equally. Was some notion of equality intended to exist within these notions of freedom, liberty an democracy? Perhaps different “types” of equality, based upon… merit? What we consider realistic is wholly dependent upon the predominant agreements between us all – or by who controls the water, food supplies, housing – or who directs the big guns.

Yesterday, the last US citizen left alive, who served in the first World War, died of old age at 110. Frank Buckles saw the birth of America’s fledgling war industries. Indeed, those industries allowed us to eventually successfully complete the second World War as well.

The Supreme Allied Commander of World War II was Dwight Eisenhower, who eventually became President. He was intimately familiar with the industrial businessmen and their growing coziness with politicians and military leaders. He also knew very well that when you combine money and profit-making with the instruments of killing, a recipe for disaster is close at hand.

And this is exactly what we are left with: baked from that European oven is our “military/industrial complex”, as he coined the phrase. The Supreme Allied Commander of the free Western World’s military arsenals, and our President, warned us with the utmost gravity against the military and industry’s growing influence. And even today we are left with war, in the name of profit.

So it is not surprising the industrial machines react so menacingly against “whistle blowers” or any others who bring to light any truth behind their publicly-oriented propaganda. Nor is it surprising that the majority of military leaders go into high-paid positions after their retirement from military service, into the same companies they previously channeled billions of our taxpayer dollars. And it is not surprising that we must continuously demonstrate a need for the most outrageously enormous military, no matter how that need is demonstrated.

But it may be surprising that the Department of Defense is perfectly comfortable defying Presidential orders – in this case, orders to revise their classification system – a system that classifies far more than it should, and that often does not release historical documents when it is required to by law. Let me be clear (that latest in fashion propaganda emphasis): right now the heads of the Department of Defense are defying orders – Executive order #13526 to be exact.

As Steven Aftergood notes, “The promulgation of implementing regulations for [President Obama's] E.O. 13526… is not an optional activity,” said William J. Bosanko, director of the Information Security Oversight Office, which oversees the classification system.

The industrial war machine is a perpetual and enormous drain upon our country’s wealth. We can’t even discuss taking some of that money and giving it to people who might need help with winter heating, let alone an operation or medicine to save their lives. We are the richest country on the planet, yet we cannot afford schools. All this, and our military can defy Presidential orders, and work its propaganda on Congressional lawmakers? Cheney’s Halliburton can take billions servicing the war machine, then move the company to the United Arab Emirates to avoid US law and taxes?

Propaganda is a powerful tool. Beliefs we hold dear that can be manipulated to serve an end is a weakness to which even the most headstrong among us are susceptible. The War Machine mentality is like a drug addiction – it kills while making the dealers and players rich. Right now, it is withering us, even spiritually.

And the alternative? Life! Or as a first step, perhaps, just not-death. For anyone. Or maybe, if you must, err on the side of not killing this time. Have a sit-down. Think it through. Imagine what else we might accomplish, with such a committed focus of money and attention. I imagine such a thing would cause the history books to tremble, just a bit.

20 years of killings. They probably go to Planned Parenthood for abortions, too. Or did, before they got killed.

We need to get back to our values. Like cutting education. Like removing everything that could help someone who needs it. By helping those people who don’t need it.

Trickling down, like a little bit of blood in the dog-eat-dog world of pure money competition. Or like saliva from a killer that you leave untested for a decade more, who clears out the undesirable.

Inspired by the Seattle Times article on Ridgway’s 49th victim confession.

Interestingly, the Sandy Bridge chipset on board have Digital Rights Management (DRM) hard-wired into the Intel chips. The chips are designed to allow movie studios and television providers to command your computer not to record video.

Of course, Intel claims they have not built DRM into the chipsets, but that their chipset “gives PCs the level of trust that the studio needs to make their content available.”

Personally, I don’t like the idea of my computer’s capabilities being controlled by outside companies or entities.

The Free Software Foundation considers DRM technology to be inherently defective by design, and there is a long, ongoing campaign against DRM with some very good information available at http://www.defectivebydesign.org.

Here is a little letter I wrote the president of Intel, Mr. Paul Otellini:

In question is a person’s ability to achieve “higher order thinking”; a state where you can listen to political, cultural or religious “spin” and easily recognize it as such: an insulting manipulation of people.

Perhaps political, social and religious “spin” isn’t insulting, though. After all, if it works on people, then those people aren’t able to fully recognize it and deal with it – and that means you couldn’t possibly be insulting them. You are just simply manipulating them.

And manipulation is fine, right? As long as you play within the “rules of the game” which are the purview of lawyers and police (and pastors and priests).

Unless, of course, you possess “higher order thinking”, which may lead you to consider people and their situations in the terms of a philosophy of ethics rather than simple mechanics (and who can move the biggest gears).

And if you do possess this “higher order thinking” then you do perceive political, cultural and religious “spin” not only as insulting to people, but also as an act of evil which relies upon ignorance and deception to promote an agenda.

Unfortunately (and sometimes fortunately) people who lack “higher order thinking” often distrust those people who do possess “higher order thinking”. As everyone knows, whenever you say something that is not commonly held true, or commonly believed, or commonly known, you are talking crazy talk. And sometimes no matter how much evidence you can bring to the contrary, you remain talking crazy talk to most ears.

And since people with “higher order thinking” usually restrain themselves from participating in the unethical and “evil” acts of political, social or religious “spin”, the only real chance they have of helping people awaken and resist for themselves the never-ending onslaught of manipulations laid upon them is to help them achieve “higher order thinking” for themselves.

But you can’t give someone something they don’t want, unless you force it upon them (almost always an act of evil). Even if you manage to open someone’s eyes to something they did not want to see, they will usually find a way to rationalize it back into a comfort zone that they can safely, subsequently, ignore.

The only way to help is through education where people’s minds can take on their own fires of discovery and questioning that fuel them for a lifetime – and benefit us all through a process of open sharing and collaboration.

Money interests continue trying to convert academic institutions into mere vocational factories that produce graduates with skills complementary only to their money-making desires. Any “higher order thinking” is fine, as long as that higher order thinking is constrained within the boundaries of the money-making interests.

In other words, the trend noticed within this Seattle Times article is not surprising.

So until we collectively rediscover the real and profound value of education and academics, here are some easy pill-popping tidbits:

• Secrecy is not security, nor is it a path to security. Secrecy is secrecy.
• Weapons do not make people more secure. Mutual understanding and respect does.
• Understanding and respect do not come from force. Dominance and submission does.
• Money and economics are not impartial agents of social evolution and advancement.
• Money does not care about nations, borders or people. Money cares about money.
• How anyone appears publicly is rarely anything like their true nature.
• “Supporting your troops” does not require that you also endorse Empire.
• Empire exploits troops, supporting them only enough to maintain effectiveness.
• Empire does not like questions. Empire likes narrow, focused subjects that perpetuate Empire.

Still, I cannot understand how our leaders are so eager to give away our tax dollars to a perpetual war machine, and to corporate criminals who were likely very well aware of their nefarious actions upon our economy even as they committed them. Poorer people are having their property taken away by the very banks who caused the economic crisis, while those same banks continue getting more money and benefits from taxpayers. And yet so many of our leaders continue to claim we do not have enough money to care for our own people who cannot afford medical care. The insurance companies might lose profits. And if they do, our leaders fear that campaign contributions from the lucrative health insurance lobbies might take a significant hit. Right now corporate health concerns have six hired lobbyists for each and every member of congress and are spending well over a million dollars per day trying to control any health care reform that might happen.

Over the last few days I have had the fortune of reconnecting with an old friend who happened to spend years serving in our country’s military, including the Gulf War. The effects upon him from his service are apparent, physically, emotionally and mentally. Thankfully, he was both smart enough and humble enough to recognize that he needed help dealing with his situation, and has got some. But tragically, all at his own expense.

You see, our defense and intelligence agencies, despite their monstrous budgets, won’t pay for any of his medical treatment, neither physical nor psychological. And since we provide no health care for our own citizens, he has paid for his own recovery as best he can out of his own pocket. This has not been easy since some of the physical ailments suffered afterward left him hospitalized multiple times, and once with brain surgery for an infection that was somehow related to his lungs. He suffers from several chronic symptoms and has lost an inordinate amount of body mass. To top it all off, he also developed diabetes, requiring regular insulin injections, even though his family members have no history of diabetes. Interestingly, the Department of Defense and the Veterans Administration only recently acknowledged that the onset of diabetes was directly correlated to Vietnam Veteran’s exposure to chemicals, after more than 30 years of keeping people hoping for some type of financial assistance. Many of the symptoms exhibited by Gulf War veterans can be explained by similar autoimmune problems resulting from chemical exposure, including heavy pesticide use, forced inoculations for anthrax with vaccines unapproved by the FDA, experimental pills for biological weapons effect mitigation, and even such things as 300 tons of depleted uranium being dispersed in the skies. Yet these veterans are forced to claw their way through a dizzying maze of paperwork and departments to even prove they were deployed soldiers, let alone made ill during their service, in order to have any hope of medical assistance, and even then their efforts are often thwarted by one bureaucratic dead end after another. And it certainly doesn’t help matters when the DoD loses all records related to inoculations, both for the soldiers and for any scientists who may wish to study the causes of Gulf War Syndrome. No causes have yet been determined, yet the suffering of these soldiers is very real.

It angers me that we are a country who can treat its own people so callously, sending them off to war to risk their lives under the guise of an honorable patriotism that cares for its people, and then shrinks from its own responsibility to those people after they are spent. It angers me that we cannot even care for our own people’s basic medical needs. Because if we did care, at least these veterans would not need to try begging money to find treatment from the hands of those who sent them to die in the name of honor. Honor that is apparently nothing more than marketing tactics to the armed forces. It is clear: any claim to honor rests solely within the soldier alone. To our armed forces agencies, any notion of honor is meaningless. As meaningless as honor is to a medical insurance company, or any person who would deny anyone, soldier or not, the care of a physician in their illness or suffering.

I started writing this piece as a cost comparison to help us realizes the priorities our leaders have when allocating our public money. Their words are duplicitous, and any claims toward acting in our best interest are outrageous. Yes, that is a gross generalization. However, the voices of the very few leaders who genuinely do place our best interests first are drown out or marginalized into ineffectual whispers by the large money interests.

This friend I mentioned has, though he will not admit it, become demoralized trying for so many years to get the help he deserves, in futility, even as he continues to suffer with his afflictions. I am going to do all that I can to help him. Right now, he is grateful to me, but also laughing at me, saying he approached it with similar zeal until the bureaucratic behemoth finally beat him down. I expect all of you to help. Public money is our money, not just big company’s money. And we need to be there, for each other.

And for you conservatives who feel you know what honor is, look at yourselves. You cannot say it is honorable and necessary sending someone to die, yet dishonorable or unnecessary to help save someone’s life. To believe that is the mindset of a sociopath.

I don’t even mind if their fetish is a notion of power instead. Sure, you go have a great time making the laws we must live by, or enforcing them, as long as you must live by them too, and they conform both in letter and spirit to the boundaries we have agreed.

I’m curious how the new Michael Moore movie will portray Capitalism. Will he demonize it, or will he educate us? With Capitalism, like all academic constructs, the reality is, they are meant to be examined and studied — learned from — and only rarely taken as absolutes. They are meant to serve and better us, as humanity, not we them.

Right now a great deal of confusion is being generated through the people and mechanisms of this self-important abstract system, called Capitalism, that we have adopted. So much confusion is generated that we are even turning on ourselves. In essence, it is a holy war we wage, caught up in our own creation, adopted within our cultural myths and beliefs. And on all sides, real human lives are sacrificed in growing numbers upon the alters of progress. But what progress, really?

Is our measure of progress and success an accumulation of numbers, like the bizarre old woman whose attic gets filled to overflowing by her obsessive accumulation of trinkets? Or is true progress and success measured differently, more acutely, as the astonishing and previously impossible undertakings we have shouldered for one another in the interest of progressing our species onward to a better life for us all?

In a very real sense, Capitalism is a primitive structure, rooted in our most primal, and even barbaric instincts: conflict, gaining advantage, greed and strict boundaries. I can imagine no quality of Capitalism that cannot be reduced to at least one of those four. It is a reflection of our current world. It is a reflection of our beliefs, a reflection of work, and a reflection of nations. For most of us, it is a reflection of ourselves, even more so than a religion will shape even the most devout among us.

So what about the big bad word used by politicians and money interests to throw the brakes on any policy, law or even idea that tries to give, even the smallest amount of our public money back to the people who need it most, the ultra poor and even the mostly poor now, middle class? That’s right, I’m talking about the “S” word; Socialism, which, through a long history of propaganda, conjures images of evil Communists, secret police with interrogation cells, constant phone taps on citizens, disappearances, torture, and the invasion of foreign countries around the world to promote their oppressive way of life. Oh, wait. Hmm. Is that us?

Of course, there will be some among us who will claim, through hopelessly wrong reasoning, that it is the few wisps of socialist thinking recently entering into our political dialogue, that is to blame for our descent into that same state we claimed was so evil – evil, that is, when it wasn’t us. But that state is us, committing wanton acts of evil, and we are not a Communist state, nor even by a long stretch, a Socialist state. States become evil when they try, at any cost, to maintain themselves, unchanged.

I am not advocating Socialism, nor any other political or economic abstraction. However, I am advocating a thorough exploration of modern ideas, as well as old ones. It is unlikely that any one system will be good. We know that reality rarely conforms to ideals. Socialism is flawed because it requires that we can genuinely trust one another to adhere to the best principles for us all, through rational means. But unfortunately, we still have far too many liars. We still have far too many people who want things for themselves alone, despite the existence of other people. As long as this is true, more modern and humane systems like Socialism will be in danger of exploitation. We must learn to be honest, and care for each other, and not just in our own self-interest. But that does not mean we should avoid taking steps in new directions. In fact, we should. How better to learn, than to explore, with both our minds and hearts set to the task?

Pure Capitalism does not fulfill our social needs.It is wholly inadequate, and its shortcomings even go a long way to fostering ill for us, socially. Good does not arise, on its own, from greed. Capitalism is not wholly evil, either. But it impact upon our social structures must be tempered by something more humane than mathematics. It must be tempered by our desire to help one another, which all of us, when we are interviewed individually, possess a strong predisposition to do. We want to help others. And there is nothing wrong with that. And there is nothing wrong with making certain that those among us, who have benefited so greatly from us, also, to some degree, return benefit to us. There is nothing wrong with saying that ethics are every bit as important as profit. Doing so is a large step up in our social evolution and is one we are beginning to understand, and believe, despite the monumental efforts of purely capital interests.

Capitalism is not freedom. Nor is Socialism freedom. In the US, our notions of freedom arise from our founding documents, from which all subsequent law must, in theory, conform. Capitalism and Socialism are abstract ideals that we can look to and study, adopting those qualities we feel are right, for a given circumstance. I have heard it said by both liberals and conservatives, that the economic bailout of Wall Street was an act of socialism for the rich. That is not Socialism. Socialism would have that money go to all of us, not the banks, to pay off the mortgages. It was, instead, an act of Capitalism, and a telling example of how Capitalism can actually undermine a democracy – just as the trends in health care reform are also currently headed: a boon for capital interests, at our expense, with possibly something beneficial for us, coming down the road.

You know, I have given up being surprised by how many things lead me back to the general exploration of our universe, beyond all these ridiculous machinations. Those of you who follow NASA are familiar with the Augustine Report, commissioned to study NASA and its programs, then report back to the government. The preliminary report suggests that NASA needs more funding. And the GAO finds that NASA has not done enough to “develop all the elements of a sound business case” for its current human space flight plans.

If we used the money we have spent on the wars, and money we spend on the military in just one year, we would fully fund NASA, and more, for over 100 years, which is twice the agency’s current age. What “sound business case” is there for these wars, let alone humanitarian justification? The justification is oil, and its impending scarcity, and subsequent rise in value, which is also at odds with alternative energy development. Capital interests should not trump humanity’s interests. The question should not be how much money can we make, but rather, how much better can we make ourselves, through our understanding of each other and the universe we inhabit?

Imagine what we might come to understand and accomplish if just some tiny fraction of money were diverted from our military industry, or we decided to transform our military industry into scientific research? If we could just change from thinking in terms of offensive capabilities, to defensive, the savings would be enormous. The resources we could devote to energy, science and exploration could begin a new renaissance in our human endeavor.

I was listening to an astronaut speak a few days ago about his first sight of the Earth during a space walk. He’s a big, goofy Italian from New York, with all the trimmings. He said, it’s one thing when you look at the Earth through the window of a spacecraft, but it’s another thing altogether when you see the Earth clearly, right before your face. This big lug said, he looked at the Earth and words can’t even describe how beautiful it is. He looked away from it and thought to himself, God didn’t mean for anyone to ever see this. Then he looked again. And he thought, this is what Heaven must look like, watery-eyed, and worried that the moisture would do bad things in his suit, and that he would be given hell by his fellow astronauts now for telling this story. And then he thought no, this is not what Heaven must look like, this is what Heaven is.

It’s time we pull our heads out of money, power and war. It’s time we pull our heads out of never-ending ideological struggles that do not elevate us. It is time we devote ourself wholly to our own betterment as a species, not just to our own betterment. It is time we evolve. It is time we remember how, to show the way, by our example.

Each morning we pass through a transition, ancient as our species, when our mind, and our body, leaves its sleep, coalescing into wakefulness. This is, nearly always, the most radical occurrence of our day, yet we pay it no heed. For eight hours we live a life of pure imagination. For eight hours our body relaxes its form, completely. For eight hours we lay, trusting and vulnerable to all things. And then we wake, where the imagined life is closed.

Academics will tell you, the three greatest minds shaping the modern canon are Darwin, Freud and Marx. Darwin gives us our position in the world and defines for us many of our struggles within it, as a natural evolution. Freud creates a vocabulary for our mind, so that it might make sense, of itself, and other minds. And Marx lays bare our participation within the societies we inhabit.

If we are alive, then our lives are always in transition. Darwin’s ideas have, mostly, settled into our collective psyche; even into those people who rail against “Darwinism”. That apple has been eaten, and we create what gardens we can. Freud, also, is absorbed into our lives, if only “subconsciously”. Despite our ego. And Marx lit the fire that fuels our ongoing struggle for social justice and equality, against a tyranny of the few.

We see religions evolving, fighting to survive truths. We begin allowing ourselves to believe that caring for our sick and injured is more important than monetary profit, and that an injured Earth must also have care. We become aware that an incessant struggle to obtain money only creates more wealth for those who already have it, and the disparity becomes apparent. We wage a war of uncertainty, discontent, and a promise of hope within ourselves. We begin learning the lessons we already knew, were true. We begin to inhabit that disassociation, to resolve it. We evolve.

Through the scary things, and the confusing things. Through what we care about, and what we hate. Through our obsessions and our distractions, and our enjoyment. We evolve through our shame and guilt. Our obligations to each other. Our attention and expression. Hard and soft. And that which does not evolve, dies many slow deaths, one after the other. While here, it is our nature to become. Some would say, to be. We are, each of us, in this together.

The other day, I was listening to Grace Lee Boggs, a 92 year old woman who devoted her life to improving everyone’s life. She was nearly ecstatic about the urban community gardens she helped create in a decaying Detroit so many years ago; a movement that spread to other cities. Not for herself, but for the gardens; growing fresh food within communities on land reclaimed from the fall of misguided edifice. It was people, neighbors, shaping their own destiny independently. It was people, looking to each other, instead of waiting for direction from on-high. These gardens represented the cornerstone of what we are becoming. Excruciatingly slowly.

The world is rising, outside our borders. It has smacked us hard, saying, that is enough. We, beyond your borders, are not you. And the West, staring aloof, even amongst themselves, ratchets up its machinery. The grim countenance of bankers staring down upon these unruly children, who must be taught.

And the other day I watched Africans dancing, and singing in that rhythm which grips inside the gut, lifting up through the heart and skull, then bursts into a primal happiness. Children climbed the stage to dance, and fat women in wildly colored clothing, young and old, joined in the spell. This outpouring dwarfed the reach of our machines. But before this, I heard a story, of the mother, carrying her baby across a land, for so long, so tired. The vulture arriving through the air with its great wings, offering to lift her child home so she might rest, then join them at home. The vulture, who fulfilled his promise by returning her child with his heart pulled from his chest, consumed, and his eyes plucked out, explained himself: stupid woman, you deserve your grief, for trusting a stranger with your child.

Even our own stories, within our borders, tell of the bearers of the rings of Power, wielding them in the name of good. The great lady, who, when freely offered the One Ring that rules and binds them all, admits her desire to take it, using it only for good. But in her wisdom and restraint, she refuses. I pass the test, she says. I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.

To be alive is to live transition. I heard President Obama’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly. It was a beautifully-shaped formula, pompous and condescending to the nations of the world, yet laced with some truly good things. He spoke as if the United States was always the peaceful negotiator in a world whose nations held intractable positions. And now we, the United States, will bring the world together in the name of good.

The few of the Security Council, donning their rings of power, to bend the world toward good. But no good can come from them, nor any nation’s leaders. Good will only arise from those crazy children who walked onto the stage, simply to dance, and the large women who joined them, flowing across the field of view in bright, colorful boubous, simply for the joy of life’s rhythm.

Such a power in their dance, of raw life. Of a good, that is more than Good. This cannot be injected into people’s arms from points on-high. Good rises from the earth to gather in the chest, traveling out, only through our eyes. To each other. The world knows where we must go. We are in transition, in the garden. And our opportunity for good is to diminish, into each other’s midst.

Anyone who has traveled and had the courage to step out of their protective cultural bubble is forever transformed in inexplicable ways. It is the difference between a traveler and a tourist. A tourist merely looks, from an abstract distance, at the animals in the zoo, while keeping themselves safely separated behind the glass walls that define them. On the other hand, the traveler jumps right in. The traveler may not be fearless, but no one can say that the traveler is not courageous. It is not easy, letting many of our internal definitions slip away. But it is the only way to truly understand other people, as any modern anthropologist will tell you. And in return, it really is the only way we can better understand ourselves.

It is said that through formal education people are also transformed. This is true, to varying degrees. Mathematics and the various sciences, through their rigidly narrow focus, provide some hint of transformation. But they are better equipped to provide logical obsessions to the reasoning area of the mind. And these obsessions can easily distract us from our own humanity, and the humanity of others. But there also exists within academia the study of Humanities. Nearly all science and business students groan at the prospect of having to take even a few Humanities courses as general university requirements. Because, if it were not for those educational requirements, they would rather not learn any more about humanity. After all, they are human, yes? What else is there to know? Just a bunch of crazy gobbly-gook?

What does it say about us, when we are unwilling to explore the incredible diversity inherent in humanity? In a culture where we are increasingly encouraged to find our small niche, or our well-defined cubicle, what place is there for humanity? Everything becomes oriented and limited to our function, rather than our experience of what it is, to be alive. In fact, if we happen to have flashes of self-insight, or question the function we have adopted and defined for ourself, many people are left in a near state of anxiety or panic. The study of Humanities does not exclude function. It embraces function. But Humanities takes it even further. Humanities embraces everything we can possibly conceive or experience, whether it appears reasonable or not. Humanities says, we’re all just human, and we’re all fundamentally different, and we’re all so very similar. Humanities says, sunshine, don’t worry (or do) — it’s okay. Let’s just look at this. Maybe we’ll learn something. And be better off for it.

It should be no surprise that as students increasingly devote their lives to business, humanities dwindle. Business and money are what draws people’s attention, while their their own nature as a human, and their fellow human beings, are less a concern. Of course you can rationalize that students enter into studying disciplines mostly devoid of humanity, with only the best intentions toward some indefinable humanity, and the positive role they might play, in the long run. Just remember that education is, indeed, transformational. Even business education.

Last month Chris Hedges wrote an excellent article called Higher Education Gone Wrong: Universities Are Turning into Corporate Drone Factories. Don’t let the somewhat cynical title put you off. It is worth a read. He is completely correct. I’ll take his piece a little further:

Academia is, indeed, still teaching critical thinking. However, critical thinking is no longer as much about truth as it is about “winning”. Even in the sciences, where truth remains mostly necessary, the motivation is more about the ego of the individual “winning” that truth, than it is about truth in and of itself. Students, and by degrees our society, are loosing the ability to think critically except within the terms that can somehow benefit themselves in some self-interested way.

This also is not very surprising, considering the enormous increase in corporate sponsorship of university schools and research. Public funding of universities and research comes with few strings attached, and as such, truth can be the primary concern. However, public funding of education has been drastically reduced, and in these economic conditions where even states are desperate for money, universities and education will only increasingly rely on private parties for their funding.

As I mentioned a few months ago in another piece related to education, there is a very small, yet interesting, trend happening in the humanities. Even as the number of people who devote themselves to the humanities declines, the number of people devoting themselves to philosophical inquiry is slowly, yet steadily increasing, though nothing as fast as business. Nevertheless, this is a hopeful sign. It means that more people are questioning the very foundations of their lives and their culture. It also means that more people are interested in what truly is right and wrong, independent of what any arbitrary religion or culture might espouse.

In philosophy, the study of what is right and wrong is called “ethics”. It is also no surprise that most students view philosophy students as freaks who are best at chasing their own tails. There is some truth in that preconception. But leaving it at that is a grave mistake. The study of philosophy is no simple task. It is as much about disciplining the mind with the clarity of reason than it is about any historical study of human thought. It is about applying reason to all things, not just the measurable. And to those people unaccustomed to reason truly being applied to their lives, the philosopher might come off looking like a lunatic, or an ass. But trust me, and you will have to, if you have not immersed yourself within philosophical inquiry — the clarity of reason applied to us, in all our many facets, causes most people to run away screaming in fear. Philosophy is the the root and foundation of all science. It is the root and foundation of our ability to understand ourselves and our world, even beyond the merely empirical. And when you apply this rigorous discipline to notions of right and wrong, through the study of ethics, even religion is left far behind in the dust and our lives, through our decisions, and the subsequent manifestation of a greater culture and society, are revealed in vividly naked splendor, both in its magnificence and its hideousness.

It is no wonder that corporate and money interests, and in turn, most students, de-emphasize the importance of philosophical inquiry. It is dismissed as impractical, at least when they are feeling nice. And it is dismissed as subversive, when they are feeling threatened.

Philosophical inquiry is the process of bringing truth, which is often obscured or hidden, out into the light of day. But truth threatens many people. One of the most effective ways of achieving any selfish end is through hiding truth. And in a culture which idolizes the self and the self’s greatness above all else, much truth must be hidden. Then, when lies are revealed or deceptions are unmasked, the perpetrator usually will not confront the truth or even admit any wrongdoing. They just simply, and predictably, attempt to obscure and hide the truth further, a little like a bug trying to hide in plain sight by hoping the colors of its shell blends well enough with the background noise. And, if cornered, the bug attacks.

So, you might ask, why have we given all this money to the people who have just taken all our jobs and money and homes? And who, exactly, are these people? And why does our government have to funnel money through AIG before it reaches the banks, rather than giving the money directly to the banks? And why are these banks, who are receiving our money, not lending the money back to us, but are instead, buying up smaller banks? And why is Obama disregarding the law by not taking these banks from their owners and restructuring them? And why is our Treasury Secretary Geithner saying that banks will need several trillion dollars more before the “toxic” mortgage problem is fixed, when we could just as easily pay off the bad mortgages so that people can remain in a home, and hence eliminate the toxic items?

Selling homes that have been repossessed is a booming business right now, if you have the money to buy them. Banks are selling people’s houses left and right, and the bottom feeder realtors are in a frenzy. Just recently I was asked to do a programming job for a small realty company that sought a better way to make repossessed homes more easily searchable, while at the same time, making people think that those repossessed homes were available only through that realty company. Thankfully the computer store owner who brought me the job, lied about the terms the contract while trying to lock me into other terms, and I could gracefully back out. But I was going to do the work for these carrion eaters, because the owner of the computer store was giving me a gift, and I liked him. And as such, I could rationalize helping these bottom feeders. But my rationalizations were weak, and I knew it. Yet I was going to do it anyway. It is a strange thing being happy that someone you like has lied to you.

Just as I was willing to do, too much evil is assisted and committed by people who rationalize that they are “just doing their job”, or who say “it’s just business”. Neither one of those statements satisfies even the most basic ethical criteria. Such sayings really mean, I know what I am doing is wrong, but I am going to do it anyway, only with a candy coating. Mathematics doesn’t cover this. Business school doesn’t cover this, except as to further business. The humanities do. And philosophy, in particular, covers it completely. That entire enterprise, from the bottom feeders and those who assist them, up to the original instigators, is a giant wad of ethical evil, where a great number of people continue to suffer while a very few people reap the benefits from this suffering, and all the while, the carrion eaters circle to grab what pieces of flesh they can, falling from the carnage. I was so happy when Zane told me he purposefully stayed away from repossessed properties when he bought his house, so many months ago. When I asked him, I expected him to answer that he did buy a repo. He didn’t. Cheers for Zane!

The same weak rationalizations are also used by people to invade other countries. Here, the carrion feeders are the military service industry and the reconstruction industry, both of which, involve Cheney in a prominent position — just like Geithner held a prominent financial position in the banking industry, as did his predecessor, Paulson. We see this, and we are aware of this. Yet somehow, we lack any outrage. We expect that our government will give our money to the bankers. We carrier to noise ratioexpect that our government will claim that we have no money left to help normal people. The essence here is, there is a massive shift of wealth heading up, yet again, to even a smaller few people, and our government is doing all that it can to make certain those few people remain in tact, even though, economically, there is no reason to do so, and every reason to destroy this “too big to fail” mentality.

If we can employ critical thinking, we can see our situation more clearly. Unfortunately, critical thinking is no longer considered useful, or even desirable by many, including universities. For the most part, universities teach facts and methodologies oriented toward specific purposes that align with business. Even in science. Without an ability to critically think and form questions, people are vulnerable to spin and hyperbole. And that is precisely all we get from what few corporate news sources that are left to us. Journalism is dead in the corporate media. What remains is merely propaganda, in the service of the very people who continue to take all they can, in whatever way they can, without a concern for ethics, and often without even a concern for law. And after propaganda comes sensationalism. This is our current American society, even with the harbinger of change in place.

Without an ability to critically reason, our population is left with two choices. Believe what is said through the media outlets, or simply ignore any larger concerns. The majority seems to ignore larger concerns. But either way, those who lack the ability to critically reason will focus almost exclusively upon immediate tasks which are in their own self-interest. From the perspective of the “power elite”, who possess a sea of people lacking the capacity to critically think, and who are well-trained in narrow skills, this is a harvest boon. They can easily hide from anyone those things they do not wish known, while offering up rationales and distractions to keep their machinations hidden. As was mentioned in the previous business ethics pieces, this behavior is similarly and readily adopted by even small business owners. Our culture is no longer an ethical one. It is all about who can get what for themselves. In other words, we have a hard time blaming the bad guys, because more than likely we’re bad ourselves.

But change is here now, right? We should not be looking at what was done in the past, but should instead stay positive and look toward the future. These are even Obama’s words. They are also the words of any business person, or person in power, who wishes to get away with something, and carry on business as usual. Unfailingly. It is a simple, yet effective, semantic trick. After all, who doesn’t want to be positive? Only assholes and crazy people, of course. Well, there you have it. Don’t look. Just keep going. Don’t rock the boat, and don’t be an ass.

As we lose more and more of the incalculable benefits of the Humanities, we find ourselves growing into an increasingly mechanistic lifestyle. This is also excellent news for the corporate state, for we are a vast army of well-trained cogs, gearing up for the battlefield of the newest millennium: the global economy. The war is between the US, Southeast Asia and soon the European Union. We are becoming a world of multiple poles. The Middle East is a strategic resource. Wars of one type or another are always necessary to keep power in place. Of course, we must keep the military/industrial complex happy as well, so really, killing wars will not entirely end.

It is also no surprise that with the blurring between government and business, private military armies are on the rise. Even in the Obama administration. Corporate armies have no allegiance to countries. They have an allegiance to money. And they have the added benefit that they are not bound by a country’s military laws or treaties, which also means that private armies can be deployed on US soil.

It is perfectly clear to even the non-critical observer that our government no longer functions in the interests of its citizenry. Obama has made no real change. He has strengthened our occupation of Afghanistan, he is taking military action within the boarders of Pakistan, he completely supports the suspension of habeus corpus for anyone he deems a terrorists or “enemy combatant”, he continues the Bush Administration’s declaration of a national emergency which grants his office sweeping powers and clouds of secrecy (with Congress’ blessings), he refuses to investigate or prosecute our country’s torturers, nor will he investigate or prosecute the CIA people who illegally destroyed the torture videos in their possession, and he is doing absolutely nothing to prosecute, investigate, or even bring to light any of the wrongdoings committed by the previous administration.  He has, however, invited a boatload of celebrity performers to the White House, including a special performance by Stevie Wonder, who was the reason, he says, that he and his wife were married.

Meanwhile, because some cultures on the planet are not quite as brain and heart-dead as our own, rioting is on the rise. The few media outlets who cover this, label it “class wars”. But the class wars were already fought. The poor and middle-class lost. Now, with their bottomless hunger still unsatisfied, the dominant players in world finance continue to squeeze for more, as people from all classes, except the very few at the top, become even poorer. This is why you see such large police forces in every city, wearing riot gear, and an increase in training academies for them, and consistent technical advances in non-lethal weaponry for crowd control, and body protection for these forces. It is well known that rioting will continue to increase. It is planned for.

But only as a last resort. Until people start rioting, we can expect things like the re-branding of issues that make us furious. After all, for people who don’t think critically, a re-branding will just slide right in unnoticed into happy land. For example, the private military contractor Blackwater has changed their name to Xe. Obama has renamed the war on terror to “overseas contingency operations”. He’s also changed the economic crisis into the bank stabilization plan, while making toxic assets into “legacy” assets — in word, at least, a thing of the past. Let’s just keep positive and look to the future, instead of the past. Never mind who’s getting the money for those “legacy” assets, or why those assets even exist. Never mind that the banks get payments for those mortgages from we people, and they get the properties from us when we can’t pay, and they get the money from selling those properties again with even more mortgages, and they get the bailout money from us, because they over-valued all those houses and assets to begin with, and are now insolvent as a result. Oh, and never mind that the Obama administration is breaking the law by not forcibly restructuring these banks. And yes, those banks are using the money to buy up all the smaller banks that might one day compete with them, and who would benefit from their demise. Change we can believe in. Riots in London at the G20 economic conference. 30,000 protesters in Europe near the German-French border at the recent NATO meeting, with three burning buildings left behind and almost 400 people jailed. Nearly all of Greece in turmoil, near the breaking point. And don’t forget the pirates! Mmm. Pirates.

But is re-branding bad? Looking at re-branding from an ethical standpoint requires that we look at more that just the act of re-branding, which is ethically neutral. We must ask, why is he re-branding? If it is an attempt to clarify issues, then it is ethically good. If it is an attempt to obfuscate issues, then it is ethically bad. If it is an attempt to disassociate himself from the previous administration’s policies, while still adhering to their core, that is simply a re-wrapping; an obfuscation, and that is bad. From an ethical perspective, this re-branding is a very bad thing, indeed.

All this amounts to one inevitable conclusion. Humanity is not as important as business. Is it surprising that students enroll far more in business than in the humanities?

Within the US right now, 1 out of 10 people are on food stamps. They need help from the government just to eat. More than double this number of people have no health insurance. This means that if you get sick, and could be treated, you will be left instead to die because you cannot pay (unless the illness is immediately life threatening). Even if you have money to pay a health insurance premium, but have even some small condition, it is very likely you will not be able to find a policy, unless you are working for a corporation that has an arrangement with a health care provider where they are required to accept you. And right now, we are also approaching 1 out of 10 people being unemployed. However, this is a little deceptive. The figure relies upon people who have been actively seeking employment. The real figure is between 30-40%. Yes, the math in these figures do not really make all that much sense. It’s best that way.

Perhaps our evolution into a corporate government is inevitable. After all, we provide details on all our friends and acquaintances on Facebook, and we even sign over the rights to everything we write, post or send through Facebook, to Facebook. Our personal statistics are analyzed, stored and marketed. We entrust all our personal and business email, and all our curiosities to Google, who similarly analyzes, stores and markets our identity. We allow our government to listen to all our telephone and email communications. And I assure you this is no joke, we even carry around our own government listening “bugs” with us at all times — our cell phone, which the government can turn on to listen at any time, as well as track our whereabouts. The FBI, even under FOIA will provide no details.

Technological developments such as cloud computing further centralize our information and dependence upon singular, larger corporations. Small agricultural farms are practically non-existent, while large, corporate farms grow our crops and livestock with close contractual ties to chemical and genetic companies like Monsanto who also control nearly all seeds. Public utilities such as power and water are being sold to private investment companies. So are our roads.

Many years ago, perhaps more than ten now, Battelle Memorial Institute did their best to convince me to join their ranks as an employee, rather than as contractor. I loved working with Battelle. Their slogan was, “Science in the service of humanity”, and for all that I saw, they meant it. For years they attempted to shed the label of being a “think tank”. They are a non-profit organization that offered a sort of refuge to some of the greatest minds in science, to come together, in a multi-disciplinary setting. However, they also we responsible for running a handful of our national laboratories, and relied heavily upon government funding. As such, before they would hire me, they wanted to sample my urine.

I had no real reason to keep my urine to myself, other than an ethical one. Should a company be able to sample our body’s makeup, or our genetic information, before hiring us? The question is not an easy one to answer. I leaned toward “no”. They ought not to be able to require me to pee for them. But I decided to leave it somewhat up to them. I told the director who wanted to hire me, and the director and staff of human resources that I would give them my pee, but only if they agreed to come out in the courtyard to watch me pee for them. If they could bring themselves to actually face what they were asking another to do, and the humiliation, then I would consider their job offer worthy enough to compromise myself. Needless to say, they would not agree, and I even received a couple unofficial apologies for the requirement. It is certain my life would be very different now, had I compromised my ethics at the time. I do not know how different it would be.

Ethics guides my life, in most respects. It is why I will not help some companies, or people, and it is why I will help others. It is why I try to be honest, even when honesty is not the easiest course. Adhering to ethics sometimes makes me seem like an ass. And sometimes it makes me seem like someone who just can’t leave well enough alone. And sometimes I fail. Other times, I manage to set an example. Almost always, I seem the lunatic.

Most people never bother to ask the foundational questions that arise from what they are confronted with. They simply do what will be best for them at the moment, in those given circumstances. Scientists like to believe they can think critically, but usually their perspective and the scope of their vision is severely curtailed by the edicts of natural law, which are wholly inadequate to critically engage the human and cultural condition. This is why I am encouraged by the slight rise in students pursuing the philosophical disciplines. These students will learn to think. They will learn to see. They will learn how and why and where they should question, and that is everywhere. And most of all, they will learn that few things are just givens, and rarely are things as they appear on the surface.

Ah, the games we play. The beliefs from which we cannot see beyond. And the mazes that contain us. Our hearts, that seek, feel and experience. This is the purview of the Humanities. This is what we must not forget. Because in the end, we always come back to it, if only in our quietest of times, when we are alone. But how much more majestic when we are together? How different would it be, exploring our humanity together, rather than just seeing who can manage to get what from whom? Humanity. Or who can get what from whom?

At the end of the day, our education is unavoidable, one way or another.