The Sacred: Vasuveda, Who Dwells & Shines, Said "Everything Comes Back"

You can change the fate of humanity with a laptop, but some things you never want to change. I strive to save the best of what we were. Most of all, I want to save people's voices, and if you ever hear the not yet perfect results of synthetic speech processing, odds are I was involved in their creation.

The picture above is beautiful. I want to be there, too. Hindu devotees from Bihar state performed rituals this Monday in Allahabad, India, the annual month-long Hindu religious festival of Magh-Mela. It was such a festival that Hesse's character Siddhartha attended and decided to give up his luxurious life as a prince, to go after something far greater. People still bathe at Sangam, at the plexus where the Ganges, Yamuna and Saraswati meet, to wash away their sins. If we could only but likewise wash ours down the River.

My wife puts her mouth against our two month old son's belly, blows to make the sound of a whoopee cushion, and he laughs with the purest joy. I remember that feeling, I don't want it to ever leave the earth, or that is to say, erased without trace, without beholder. I remember that we can hold pieces of ochre in one hand, buildings in the other, that I will do anything to halt a long decline of everything I've ever loved into the ground, and I remember the end of that book, Siddhartha:

It was the self, the purpose and essence of which I sought to learn. It was the self, I wanted to free myself from, which I sought to overcome. But I was not able to overcome it, could only deceive it, could only flee from it, only hide from it. Truly, no thing in this world has kept my thoughts thus busy, as this my very own self, this mystery of me being alive, of me being one and being separated and isolated from all others, of me being Siddhartha. And there is no thing in this world I know less about than about me, about Siddhartha.

Very Strange Thought Of Day

People with Alzheimer's are going to use Twitter.

The World's Best Distraction(s)

I'm thinking about featuring more distractions here for a few reasons--because I'm fully aware my heat-seeking missives about why we should all start learning Eastern languages and naming our kids Murgesh, Hu Wei, or Abdullah can be a mite troubling (or as Phil once commented, "Jesus, why the [expletive deleted] did I read this before going to bed??," possibly the highest compliment any post of mine has ever received), because the internet ate my attention-look a dog blog!-attention span, and because the internet is also like a Memory Cloud where we can all wallow in luxury and steal cool time-destroying tools from everywhere and use them as a new shiny-object-oriented form of communication--and Squirmelicious was a timely enabler. He must be a tech minion like myself, one whose path to enlightened nirvana was hastened along by an iPhone. And now, amongst other neat things in its 3G version, you can hold your iPhone like a 6-iron and play the Back 9 on a virtual, dirt-cheap Pebble Beach:

Things are rough out there, with stock markets crashing, banks imploding, and politicians arguing about lipsticks and pigs and 60’s radicals. It’s time for a break. And what better distraction is there than the awesome iPhone?

The iPhone 3G, the most recent iteration of the revolutionary device, has seen its previously closed system opened to 3rd party developers. The change enabled users to download apps from Apple’s app store and load them onto the phone. Where the original iPhone offered only a handful of applications– Google Maps, You Tube, a weather forecaster, and one or two other programs– the app choices on the 3G are in the thousands.

A perusal of the App store will display both several categories of programs and multiple takes on the same program. For example, there are at least twelve different programs to track your golf score, six programs that access the social network site Digg!, seven incarnations of Sudoku, twenty-two personal information managers, and the list goes on.

With memory precious and many of the programs costing between $.99 and $10.00, how is one to know which programs to choose? Squirmelicious has solved this problem for you by choosing the 12 best Applications for the iPhone.

There are a lot of great ones, but here are the 12 best in no particular order:

1. Facebook - Addiction to the world’s most popular social network is widespread and adding this wonderful client to your iPhone will only exacerbate the problem, but how else are you going to announce to the world that you are waiting at a red light?


2. AIM - You can finally chat on your iPhone with this client that offers all the same chat capabilities as Apple’s ichat.


3. Pandora – This phenomenal program will literally change the way you listen to music. Pandora, along with Last/FM allow you to create your own custom radio stations as well as access the stations created by those in your network. You might want to grab this one fast as it’s not clear how much longer they will be around.


4. Yelp – I use this one constantly. Yelp offers user submitted reviews of restaurants, bars, and retail outlets and by utilizing the iphones built in GPS system, the reviews are for places right where you are at the moment.


5. Flipbook – this polished program lets you create frame-by-frame animations. Pointless, but oh so fun.


6. Labyrinth – using the devices accelerometer, this game allows you to roll balls through a maze avoiding holes and other obstacles by tilting your phone in various directions.


7. Net News Wire – This rss reader uses your news gator account. Simple and effective.


8. Missile Command – My favorite game from junior high school now on the iPhone.


9. Traffic - Real time traffic reports utilizing the iPhone’s built in GPS chip.


10. My Delicious – Access your delicious bookmarks right from your iPhone.


11. AirMe – Share Geo-Tagged photos with many different photo sites from flickr to picassa.


12. Remote – Control iTunes from your iPhone.

Large Hadron Collider Rap

If you read the headline, "Scientists Seek to Re-Enact Big Bang," you can be forgiven for automatically forming a few crystals of concern and asking, "Now what hells are you damned fools going to unleash?"

While smashing nuclei together at the speed of light (probably) won't create a black hole strong enough to suck Lake Geneva into some nth-dimension, an ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) success in creating dark matter and quark-gluon soups will open a new age of high-energy science.

First, beady-eyed scientists will claim they can weaponize the reaction and make the atomic bomb look like a holiday kiddie-sparkler, which is why the US paid half a billion bucks to CERN for observer rights. On the bright side of the dark side, even more scientists will try to figure out how to use it to make clean energy, which is why the CERN consortium spent $4 billion on building the world's most advanced superconductive 17-mile long underground particle accelerator. It's located in an area famous for making the world's most precise watches.

A 23-year old intern from Michigan State, Kate McAlpine, wrote and produced a rap video while working on ALICE. It's delightful, instructive, and possibly the best argument ever for getting Midwestern white girls into rap.

Freedom From Memory & How Google Makes Us Stupid

"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

I can feel it, too.

I’m haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

(I've been thinking the same as more and more of my interactions are conducted with multi-tasking pancake people. The above is excerpted from a recommended article by Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic. Read the rest.)

Barack Obama's Broken Promise, Its Connection To Gay Crack-Smoking Sex, & Power To The People

The Obama campaign has gone back on its pledge to take public funding; John McCain is miffed as a mo-fo, and sharply rebuked the Illinois Senator:

"This election is about a lot of things. It's also about trust. It's about keeping your word."

Hahaa-ha-ha! I laugh like a drain! (John. Please. Stop it with writing one-liners for the Daily Show--they pay comedians to come up with this stuff at Writer's Guild rates. You're ruining livelihoods, man, taking food out of kiddie-mouths.) Umm, like we couldn't see this one coming? I tell you, after living through 30+ compressed years of fetishistic fascist fart-blasters running loose over the land, it's hard not to engage in what the namby-pamby crowd would call Schadenfreude, or joy in the pain of others. So like a good liberal, I will high-mindedly and nobly suppress evil laughs and any cackling, derisive voices threatening to part the bonds of the Good Graces. Like this one: "How ya like getting fisted, Walnuts? Take it from a Democrat, mwa-hahaha!" Uncharitable graffiti, no one knows where it came from: "Eat shit and die on your vomit, fellating corp-whore!" Or yet again: "How's it feel getting your ass whooped by a muslim-named liberal negro, McBeeyotch??"

Bear with me. I promise to get to the gay sex and coke, very soon, probably in a couple of paragraphs. I realize, almost no one actually gives a shit about campaign finance, and reading about it is like studying tetanus inoculations. It's boring, and it aches. Sure, Obama's Web 3.0, small-donor approach is a seismic tectonic event, kinda like declaring independence from King George, but it's dull-ass booooring. (Now, in my mono-maniacal voice: "You'll see. Oh, you'll all see!") In large part it's boring because both campaign finance law and practice are purposefully obscure, exist in a legal zone run on Heisenberg's Cat principles, and were written by a collaboration of John McCain's staff and his lobbyists. How does someone like me read them? By neglecting family, so you don't have to. The basics are these:

1) if you're an individual you can't give much money or buy John McCain a Patek Phillipe watch like you used to, but it's ok to lend him the indefinite use of your Ferrari, yacht, or children. You, qua you, can only give $2,300.

2) Whereas if you're a corporation, you are as Nike, an immortal being living apart from and above the rules. Simply make massive contributions to blind trust funds in off-shore tax havens in politicians' names, or set up Political Action Committees with impressive titles like Citizens Against Animal Orgies and Obscenity (CAA-OO). Then buy TV and radio air time to scare people into fetal positions.

3) If you're running for President, you can eschew direct contributions from citizens and corporations in return for a lump sum of $85 million dollars, a Door Number Three solution if there ever was one. Not bad, really, except that's only about enough for a campaign's worth of ads in the infomercial time slots and a couple of bus rides.

Political infomercials. Ha! "If you vote in the next five minutes, we will reduce your yearly income tax by $49.95 AND include not just one, but TWO repaired potholes!!" Hell, I don't even know why Haz-Mac wheezed like a militantly hypocritical old grumpy-gus; given the huge loophole in category 2 above, there's still plenty of time and corporations eligible to fund Republican Political Action Committees. There is a huge, voluptuous reservoir of anger to tap into, and they can run ads like this one:

"Hello, my name is Larry Sinclair. Barack Obama is my former lover. We mainly conducted our affair in limousines, and we usually smoked crack cocaine together before performing oral sex. On each other, numerous times. Barack now gets off presenting his white-washed version of 'Family Values' to our unsuspecting country, but in 1999, he got off with me!"

Lest you think I'm joking (which ok, I kind of am) this isn't very far-fetched. Rather, it's fetched, it's completely and wholly fetched. Larry Sinclair of Duluth, Minnesota is a concerned citizen and gay man who has been making these exact claims, as he did this Wednesday for two and a half hours on a national stage. No, really: he paid the National Press Club $3,000 to have a conference in the "Holeman Room" and a couple dozen political-beat reporters attended. I'm not suggesting a Republican conspiracy propped this perv up for later consumption in front of supermarket check-out stands, no. The country's Polar Moment of Screwed-Up Inertia is still operating at "Feral Pit Bull Humps Poodles in Westminster Dog Show" levels. Clearly, things like this can just happen on their own, and I'm barking down a different tree.

Sinclair previously posted a YouTube video which consisted of him in front of a little camera giving his Obama gay crack schtick, a capella. And then he started a blog. The vid got almost a million hits on YouTube alone, and the comments sections on any one of his blog posts might get filled with over 1,000 responses. This is blog Street Cred. (Geez. Maybe I should finally come out about my McCain affair, when he fondled me one torrid night in Tempe, Arizona.) Next, Sinclair showed up outside the DNC committee meeting on May 31st to ostensibly show support for Hillary Clinton and got some press coverage.

At this, Obama-supporting bloggers began to take more serious umbrage and scrutiny. The uber-lib Firedoglake took up a petition to bar him from holding a conference, which no one at the National Press Club dignified with a response because Firedoglake sent no cash, no wads of cash, merely generating 11,500 utterly useless signatures. However, other bloggers played investigative reporter/news outlet, and this is where it starts to get good. Whitehouse.com offered Sinclair $100,000 if he could pass a polygraph test, one which he took and failed. Others did some digging on Sinclair's past and present, finding that he has done hard time for fraud and felony forgery, has a whole shopping list of charges over 27 years of various twisted stuff, and has outstanding warrants in at least two states, Colorado and Delaware.

A couple who blog from Paris (bastards!), the Mitch and Nan Show, had been focusing on Sinclair for awhile. They even maintained a direct blog-blog correspondence, or more like what we used to call a flame-war, with Sinclair, who began threatening to hunt Mitch down and kill him every other paragraph or so. Anyhow, one of the M&N Show's readers lives in DC and tipped them off to how to get the cops to show up at the National Press Club. Using Sinclair's own blog posts about his conference Wednesday, they were able to prove his whereabouts and provide his photo to a police unit responsible for picking up fugitives. Sinclair was arrested right after his appearance, new navy-blue suit and all, hand-cuffed and carted off on a previous charge in Delaware. Having skipped bail before, his request for it was denied.

Both the campaign finance and Larry Sinclair stories are really about how the internet as we know is redistributing power as applied to political involvement in the Kentucky rifle sense of the word, and to digital journalism in the original "journal" sense of the word. It's happening right in front of our noses, so you'd think it would be obvious. It isn't. Since I've already harped enough on our shortcomings and evolutionary gaps as primates elsewhere, I won't make ontogeny recapitulate phylogeny all over again. Simply put, never having been faced with any comparable cheapness and speed of information transmission before, it's understandable we're largely missing the implications of what's going on. It's too fast. Coherent emails are really too much to expect out of humans. When McCain challenged Obama to ten "You Be Lincoln, I'll Be Douglas" (ahem) town-hall debates, someone from the McCain campaign actually flew to Chicago, took a taxi to HQ Obama, and handed over a piece of paper with suggested locations to a campaign staffer. The paper was handed over like it was an invitation to a duel, circa 200 years ago. The staffer took it, unfolded it, sighed, and said: "You know, you could've just emailed this."

McCain is pissed because Obama has tapped into sustenance he can't get at: the taproot of something akin to a participatory democracy. Traditional, credentialed "what happened?" news reporters are pissed (or would be if they had more clue about what it means for their collective future) because they showed up at a wanted felon's press conference and patiently asked him serious questions regarding an alleged affair with Obama, not realizing he was also a former mental patient. That's forgiveable, but he had a kilt-wearing lawyer in tow, a lawyer who before the conference began explained why he had to wear a kilt--in order to accommodate his exceptionally large genitalia in comfort. (Happened.) I mean, hello: McCain can't get enough ordinary people to give him money. Two dozen D.C. political presstitutes couldn't find their inner Lois Lanes long enough to figure out they were being had by a dual-diagnoisis ex-con. The system, is it much broken yet?

For campaign finance, people who have no business whatsoever making donations to politicians, as in populist pipsqueaks like me, we're fighting with huge corporations over whose asses politicians have to kiss more. In the process, even if we lose, we are redefining how laws will be written, like perhaps not by the business interests they're supposed to apply to. For what we call The Press, people who can't live without spell-check and ran away screaming from English classes are putting regular beat-downs on publicly traded reporting. Bloggers handed in their homework for free and put a criminal in jail, plucking him out from under The Press's elevated nose. Is there any telling where this might go? =)

Time Warner Rushes To Deliver Web TV To Newly Discovered Tribe

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Time Warner Cable Inc (TWC.N) plans to offer subscribers an easier way to bring Internet video to their television screens as part of an overall home networking system, Chief Executive Glenn Britt said on Friday.

"Right now it's pretty hard to get Internet stuff on your TV," Britt said at the Sanford C. Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference in New York. "Within a relatively short time it's going to be very easy to get Internet TV on your big screen TV," he said, estimating it would take between one to two years to popularize such technology.

"To prove just how easy it will be for the average consumer, we have targeted the best demographic in the world, a purely indigenous tribal group on the Brazil-Peru border. The tribe has had no previous contact with the outside world, does not have a name or a known language, and as you saw on PowerPoint slide 19, they were trying to shoot down our plane with spears and arrows. We have teams on the ground bringing in two 48-inch flat screens, satellite uplinks, and the required generators. We're scheduled to go live in 8 days."

Britt gave few specific details about how the service would work or when it would become available in the US, focusing on the design benefits of bringing YouTube to peoples untouched by television, internet, or any known communication methods. "Tivo and Apple TV were for the classic tech-savvy early adopters, and the uptake in those segments is already falling off; whereas in cable, we have traditionally dominated in much broader market segments, the ones only capable of switching channels. An undiscovered, completely illiterate tribe is the perfect focus group for us...when they can use it, we'll know it's ready for North America."

Shares in Time Warner Cable, which recently announced plans to separate fully from Time Warner Inc (TWX.N) by the end of the year, rose 2 percent to $30.57.

(Note: portions of the above were taken from business news about Time Warner.)

Kanzius RF Nano-Particle Cancer Treatment

Being bombarded with microwaves isn't all bad, may even be a life-saver. After my last post, I went looking for a good old-fashioned 'technology will save us all' story and hit the jackpot. From Wired magazine:

A promising new cancer treatment that may one day replace radiation and chemotherapy is edging closer to human trials. Kanzius RF therapy attaches microscopic nanoparticles to cancer cells and then "cooks" tumors inside the body with harmless radio waves. Based on technology developed by Pennsylvania inventor John Kanzius, a retired radio and TV engineer, the treatment has proven 100 percent effective at killing cancer cells while leaving neighboring healthy cells unharmed. It is currently being tested at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

“I don’t want to give people false hope,” said Dr. Steve Curley, the professor leading the tests, “but this has the potential to treat a wide variety of cancers.” Modern cancer treatments like radiation and chemotherapy have proven remarkably effective at treating many cancers, especially in combination, but are plagued with toxic side effects. These treatments kill healthy cells as well as cancerous ones.

Gold nanoparticles are used to coat the target cells and radio waves bounce around inside. Each cell becomes a receiver for a high-energy RF field, with resulting hyperthermia excited in the bad cells. Makes sense.

John Kanzius is a retired radio engineer with a tech degree who underwent chemotherapy for Non-Hodgkins Lymphona in 2003-2004. At that time, he saw children with terminal cancers and resolved to help. By 2005, he had built a contraption in his home, collaborating with Richard Smalley, the Nobel-winning nanotechnology pioneer of 'buckyball' fame; by 2006, he had convinced the University of Pittsburgh Medical center to perform trials on laboratory rabbits. As of November 1st, 2007, the cure rate for the rabbits was 100%. Sadly, Smalley, who had fought a long battle with cancer, died in Houston at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in late 2005.

Read more here...

Lifting The Veil With "Charming Burka"

A Berlin-based artist, Markus Kison, has developed functional fashion for the modern muslim woman who wants the best of both worlds--outward tradition, inner high tech. The woman in blue above is beaming her photo to a young man's cell phone:

Nearby mobile phones that also use Bluetooth will light up with any small file a woman chooses to broadcast as her identity -- a photo, a cartoon, a text file or even a sound clip.

This is one product that should make it to market, since it debuted at the MIT Fashion Show.

New Hampshire Recount

Dennis Kucinich is paying for a democratic primary vote hand-recount in New Hampshire, scheduled to start Wednesday, January 16th. The optical scan counts were performed by Diebold, and a comparison of the scanned Clinton/Obama votes vs. their hand-counted votes is rather remarkable:

Head to head comparison - corrected numbers
Clinton: statewide optical scan tally
95,843 52.73%

Obama: statewide optical scan tally
85,910 47.27%

Clinton: statewide hand-count tally
16,767 46.75%

Obama: hand count
19,097 53.25%

1/5 - 1/7 Real Clear Politics seven poll average (head-to-head pairing)
Clinton 43.9%
Obama 56.1%

The closeness of the match of the two candidates hand-count with the Real Clear Politics seven-poll average (1/5 - 1/7/08) - compared with the divergence of the optical scan tally - remains under investigation.

(via The River Blog, originally posted at News From Undergound, data from Election Defense Alliance.)

The Beginning Of The World As We Know It (Part One)

Having gotten all the nice spiritual Rumi-stuff out of my system in the previous post, on to practical things; to the world's problems, and their solving. My ersatz leaders keep telling me how anything wrong is all my fault, so I thought, why not? Let's have a go and make it good. Our problems are only as big as the wind and the waves, as the sun and the rain.

At first, my working title was 'Why Democrats Are A Bunch Of Drooling Catamites.' You see, my case of Two-Party Immune Deficiency Syndrome (TPIDS) is late-stage, and the Democrats surely play their part as Complicit Mommy Government to perfection, as a companion and helpmeet to our Abusive Daddy Government. Whom it's our enviable task to either kill, beat sense into, or run away from. So, yes, let's start off with the Party of the Damned, or what I choose to call "the Dims." I changed the title above to something more active, with an eye to an ongoing series; by way of power law and microcosm, Dims are great projectors for our Big Problems. As the old military recruiting jingle goes, "what a great play-ace, it's a great waay...to start!"

Isabelita, the thoughtful cookie at Learning to Sequence, noted in the comments section of Shorter Clinton, Shorter Obama that Hillary:

'seems like a "kinder gentler" form of the GOP, and Obama seems insubstantial. There's not a single Democratic candidate I'd vote for; wonder if we can outsource the leadership of this country to, oh, say, New Zealand?'

Iz sums up my sentiments well. If Hillary gets elected, we will be renting and watching "Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS" as en-masse comfort food. Paradoxically, though, the inmates of Casa Lord have given money to Obama and were invited to lunch with his wife. We have an Obama sign hanging in our window. Yet, something inside me still wants to crisply slap each side of the guy's face with a pair of wet leather gloves and bellow like George S. Patton, "Be a man, fer chrissakes!! There are brave candidates out there fighting and dying, and you're hiding in the make-up room like a coward!" Sigh.

But what else is left? I've considered supporting Dennis Kucinich, and even Ron Paul, because at least they take an unequivocal stand against The War. The obvious political lesson they, or any well-choreographed goose-steppers provide, is this: Take a stand, you existentially challenged boobs, take a stand! (Note: See goose-steppers.) So at least Kucinich and Paul "get" the basic prerequisite. Fortunately or not, however, neither can get "elected."

It all starts with The War. In the beginning was The War. The War is run by the War Machine, which now makes up most of the country's remaining manufacturing base...you know, just like it did for The Soviet Freaking Union back in 1984. That being the case, if the Democrats truly didn't want us to invade/occupy/eternally exploit Iraq, would we still be there, or ever have gone? Would Cheney still be President? Would Hillary Clinton have been the one who first used the phrase after 9/11, "You're either with us or against us? (Yep, she was first, and beat Dumya to it.)

The truth is, the Dims support The War Machine, and that's why they support The War. They're bending over, busy slurping at the Money River, looking up to carp threats occasionally and then backing down to slurp again at the life blood of this nation, this precious gift of governmental innovation, as it runs in rivulets and rills down into the scuppers of FACISM. The same ugly thing this country pulled out all the stops to defeat 60-odd years ago, bombing every major city full of evil German and Japanese people to smithereens, not to mention the Italians and French who got in the way. People keep wondering and marveling how craven, how caved-in and sold-out Congress can be, but it's really simple. It's as simple as buying and selling hogs. Fascists love hogs. [Sotto voce: And fascism's better, because run! Cower! Twitter like fluffy yellow chicks, and be afraid! (Looking left and right for spies.) The only alternative is so-cial-ism. Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!]

To paraphrase the idiot son of an asshole, "Being an Empire is hard work." Yes...yes, Fearless Leader, you masturbatory imbecile, it is hard work. So here it is, the answer, the solution to our problems: smarter work. The only way to save what's left of imperial standing melting away like run-off from a denuded hill, and our domestic freedoms at the same time, two-birds-one-stone style, is to wise up. And make a big, hard, brave yet obvious choice. A choice which is ultimately necessary anyway. Amongst smaller hard choices, the Democrats have to not only renounce The War, they must renounce The War Machine. Nothing much other than a tack into the wind, merely risking political and physical assassination domestically and a heapin' helpin' of Humble Pie internationally. So how, other than fitting our alleged representatives with electro-shock collars and pumping them full of 100 mikes of LSD, do we work them up to the gargantuan tasks common to vertebrates?

Somehow I can't picture my Senators (Patty Murray, Maria Cantwell) driving that bus in Selma. Actually, I'm picturing it right now as they're dragged off the bus by police and savagely beaten with batons. Ha-ha! To be realistic, look, we're dealing with a government that told us with a straight frigging face to go out and buy duct tape in case of a nerve gas attack, and that kerosene can melt steel. (Mental Note: I suppose duct tape could be used as a way to cover your mouth and nostrils so as to induce a less painful death. Kerosene and jet fuel don't melt steel, not in my back yard.) A direct frontal assault on The War Machine won't work. It would simply send Terminators after us like Skynet and shoot us with plasmatic death-rays.

But what we can do is start small. An insurgency they don't see coming, an infiltration, a Rat Attack. It's already got plenty of foot soldiers, even investors. We can do things that my darling Senators, the Bobbsey Twins, will enthusiastically support. They just won't know the full implications, and when they finally glom, it'll be ok by them. Because they care about money. Every Constitution, every Estate, is based on money, on a currency. A currency is a metaphorical basis for storing power and wealth. We need to switch the fundamental basis of our power and wealth. The US has switched its currency basis at least four times in its history, and it will do so again.

Power and wealth. And beer! Mmmm. The focus of our big ol' technologized Teddy Bear, our throwing-candy-to-the-children-while-it-kills-them War Machine, is oil. Our currency isn't The Dollar. Our currency is oil. This is a VERY BIG problem. First, its worldwide production has begun to go into decline--9.5 million Saudi barrels a day wen down to 8.5 over the past year, but they "could pump more if we wanted to!," sure, and Iran, well, they're desperate for nuclear power because the mullahs know how wildly overstated their reserves are, and the rate at which their wells are declining--plus, we're losing control of the damned stuff anyway. That's why we're building military bases on top of wherever we can find new, relatively helpless sources of it. Even if that quixotic effort starts getting a lot cheaper or miraculously succeeds, well...we're still, for all practical purposes...Going To Run Out of Oil.

We need to switch our currency. This implies a future Manhattan Project, a huge national investment and roll of the dice, on sustainable energy. And that will, at some point, happen. But the Rat Attack doesn't have to wait for a Manhattan Project. It can germinate and advance incremental change. Its weapons are not just wind farms and solar panels, not bipolar Priuses and biodiesel Passats, but all manner of gardening, all sorts of ruminants (including ponies), tree-planting, urban bee-keeping, de-centralized heating, and simply giving a damn. Raising chickens on your patio, damn the Bird Flu, full speed ahead. This is how the Amish and most of the world survive on two bucks a day. We should probably do A-OK on forty thou per capita. And if a schlumpf like me can do organic gardening,anyone can.

This might be a good place to note that Exxon's corporate profits were bigger than the Gross Domestic Product of all but about a dozen countries last year. Exxon and other distended, artificial, inhuman structures like it are The Enemy. These are the enemies who are stealing your money. By the way, they also want to kill you, slowly, so they can wring every last bit of useful output and consumption out of your body. They've calculated the calories, and want to turn the world into one big "Arbeit Macht Frei" concentration camp, their kapos as commandants, and they're succeeding. Every drop of oil you don't use and every ray of sunshine you do sends these monstrous mutants, and many of their large shareholders, into fits of depression and murderous rage. Because they know, deep down in their black insatiable selves, that no one owns the wind, the sun, or the rain. Although they've hired lobbyists to address that disadvantage.

We need to start an anti-oil insurgency, and it's going to be surprisingly easy. I belly laugh at the prospect because, you see, we're not going to have much choice. Soon enough, driving 40 miles to save five bucks on t-shirts made by slave labor fed by slop troughs in some distant Work Zone is going to look exactly like what it is: stupid. We're going to live in a world where you can walk, float, or teleport to bars and stores. I'm not speaking from high moral terrain here. It's simply going to be cheaper than going through violent machinations and invasions to coax flammable goo from under far-off ground.

iPhone, Therefore iAm

One sunny day last week was iPhone day. Because of my profession (speech technology) and the nefarious activities of a particular client involved in podcasting, having an iPhone is a necessity. Or, at least that's what my partner and I told ourselves after a few bouts of rationalization, guilt, and cover-up: then it went like this: "Debate has now concluded, and the floor is closed. We're getting them. Gentlemen, start your engines!" Of course, Lord Wife already knew of the decision well in advance.

Oh, yeah? Well I know things well in advance, too. For example, I know the battery to this fragile sucker is going to die, at best, 21 days after the one-year warranty lapses. That's only if someone doesn't steal it first, and if my son (Lord Running Boy) doesn't drop it into a sink full of water while playing on the sly with a camera so intuitive and slick, any toddler can use it to take great pictures. There's a good chance it could drop out of my pocket and shatter like a crystal chandelier on the floor of Whole Foods, or supernatural forces could get involved, like the time I saw our iPod fade and disappear into thin air, snatched by envious poltergeists who reached forth to envelop it in the sheltering bosom of their realm. (The echoes of distant laughter could be heard, along with a cry which sounded a lot like "Toonage!") Yes, a lot of things could befall this media equivalent of a sleek P-51 Mustang. It can do anything a flat-screen TV can do--but it can do it over Berlin. And I know that battery is screwed either WAY!

I also know that there's a YouTube button right on the screen. And Google Maps with directions and satellite imagery. Instant-on streaming video which works surprisingly well on the 200kbps EDGE network, delightfully well on Wi-Fi. Consider this single point of data for a moment: a whopping total of 17% of cell phone owners capable of playing YouTube have used them to do so. By comparison, here's the just-compiled research on the iPhone:

Despite owning their new iPhones for a short period of time, 63% of iPhone owners have already used the widescreen-enabled device to watch video.
Half of iPhone owners (51%) have watched a YouTube video on their phone.
46% have watched a music video.
34% have watched the news.
32% have watched a movie trailer.

The graph above the post's title shows the number of news stories filed per day about this media device. Grown to over 20,000 per day, still going strong. Twice the number of stories yesterday as the day of the launch. What for? What's the rumpus? Because it's as good as they say, that's what for. It's so elegant it makes me want to download a free copy of Plato's 'Republic' from iTunes (yep, it's in there) and listen to it as an audiobook. There's been so much thought put into the interface functions that, unlike the Palm Treo sitting on my desk as a paperweight (make me an offer), it makes getting my emails and voice-mails a pleasure. It may even cure my non-violent but total resistance to text messaging.

A product development friend at T-Mobile says they've taken the little pony apart, sliced it, diced it, looked at it from every angle...and determined it's not a threat. To wit: 1) Communications functions aren't good; 2) Virtual keyboard a serious drawback to high wpm and interface integrity; 3) Worst of all, no one likes getting fingerprints on their screens. Summary: Not a serious communications device.

Guess what, muchachos? Denial! You're in dee. Nye. Ull. YouTube is the future of communication. I can go to Amazon, rent 'North By Northwest,' download it to my desktop, sync my phone, then watch it wide-screen. The screen resolution is so high and sharp I'll actually enjoy the movie. As for the virtual keyboard, it isn't any worse than the slippery, convex-shaped keys on the pad of my former (buh-bye!) Treo. For the first time in my life I have set wallpaper on my cell--it's the painting 'Sunday in The Park.' I just switched to that in 10 seconds from the peacock feather I tried out for the sheer hell of it. My ring tone is from a WWII-era Ma Bell. And smudges on the screen? Ha! I keep the touch-screen clean because it's beautiful. I just keep it that way. I've waxed it. All this, and I haven't even cracked the instruction manual yet. But then, there's this Teleport button on it that I haven't tried...

Just kidding about the Teleport. Apple says it plans to sell 10 million of these communications revolution devices during the first year. They're wrong. They're going to sell 20 million. More. It's not a niche phone. It's The Web 2.0 phone the world has been waiting for, and Apple has done a quadruple-lux and nailed the landing, first-try. This device will achieve a Halo Effect and vastly accelerate the pace of innovation and proliferation in mobile entertainment and services. By September, you're going to see octogenarian retirees cheerfully wearing these things on lanyards around their necks. Capice? It's that good. And just see what happens Google introduces Voice Search.

Update: my esteemed partner just called me to rave about the earbuds. Say you're listening to Sinatra and a call comes in. The song automatically lowers volume so you hear the phone ring. You answer the phone, the song mutes, and the bud system switches on the microphone. You talk, and you hear your phone conversation in stereo. You end the call, and the song comes back on. You reach down to the volume control, and turn it up. Steve Jobs was in Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Belgium, and just today in London signing distribution deals. This phone cost me $652 dollars. If I drop it the wrong way, there's no service plan, and no insurance. I would have to buy another. And I don't much care. Do I hear 30 million? And here's one final thought:

Google Directions: New York To London

If you go to Google Maps and get directions from 'New York' to 'London' you get a simple 64-step plan to make it there. First they have you drive Northeast to Quincy, Connecticut and tell you take a right off of the Long Wharf at Step 23, rather than directing you to jump into the East River from any number of available docks, roadways, and bridges in one of New York's boroughs. Smart. This way, they shaved a week or two of total time off the trip by heading overland and getting further up the coast.

But here's where it gets weird. After you jump into the ocean at Quincy and swim across the Atlantic at Step 24: "Swim across Atlantic Ocean, 3,482 mi.," they want you to crawl ashore at Pont Vauban in France and go through Le Havre over towards Dieppe. This does not make sense to me; rather than make landfall in France and go through all the rigamorole of getting over to the ferry to cross the English Channel from Boulogne, it would seem far more efficient to swim directly to England's traditional port of embarkation, Plymouth.

Someone should bring this navigation error up with the Google people, as it could save on some travel inconvenience.

(h/t to Pat Lang at Sic Semper Tyrannis for surfacing this.)