Moderate THIS, Karen De Coster: Busy-bodies and Busy Bodies

THESE ARE NOT LAZY, HELPLESS FAT PEOPLE:








One of my favorite lines in literature was from To Kill A Mockingbird, in which Harper Lee describes Mr. Ewell, the man who lived at the junkyard, who in the story, unjustly accuses a black man of raping his daughter (which line I approximate here): “The only thing which allows Mr. Ewell to hold his head high is that if you scrub his skin really hard, deep down underneath all that dirt, that skin is white.” I grew up understanding that if the ONLY thing you can feel proud of is that your skin is white (and, by extension, if you feel proud of that fact at all), then you don’t have anything to be proud of. The color of ones skin is a given fact, not a personal achievement.

Nowadays, I apply that same principle to people who vilify fat people. Fat people are the only people in our society left whom haters still feel they can publicly hate with impunity. These same haters probably typically still also hate various other races, religions, or cultures, but, being conformists and therefore cowards, they are too afraid to be public about it. But about the obese, they just won’t shut up, but instead, expect praise and amens for the vocalizations of their prejudice.

With obesity, they can have a field day, because their deep-down sense of inferiority requires that they accept and further the myth that fat people are fat because they are lazy gluttons (which the hater feels that he or she, at least, is not), and therefore are actually deserving of such vilification; their condition is something that they brought upon themselves.

But, just like we all know that homophobes are closet homosexuals (sexually secure men and women aren’t the least bit concerned about what other adults consent to do in bed, they’re too busy enjoying their OWN relationships and are glad that others can have them, too, regardless of whatever it is that floats their boat; true love is a force that multiplies, doesn’t divide), so too, those who so vocally hate and fear the obese are harboring some intractable sense of resonance with the condition. In other words, deep down inside, what you really fear is what you fear you really are.

Now, I don’t mean that those who want to ostracize, outlaw, tax, punish, hide, exclude, ban, imprison, or exterminate the obese (or simply get off on writing negative articles about them) fear that they, themselves, are “really” fat (although in some way they may be way too obsessed over their own appearance and secretly fear that some “but the Emperor is wearing no clothes”-saying kind of a person will spill the beans on them by pointing out how really very ugly they are). Usually, they have no specific relationship to fat at all, but are, instead, those who can and do eat anything imaginable without the slightest fear that they will gain an ounce. They are people who have no weight problem, but somehow imagine that this is because they have worked at it and have therefore achieved this condition (whereas everybody else is some kind of out of control glutton), yet in actuality it is no more praiseworthy than the color of their skin.

What it is that they really fear, is the concept that some shameful, hidden desire or hunger within themselves is one that will someday rise, grow and out-picture itself on their body for all the world to see. What they fear is that some evil vice, thought, or obsession will become public knowledge, and in their mind, the only reason this hasn’t come out yet is that they have held onto it with a vice-grip of self-control. They fear that if they would ever let go for a second, they would then send out into the world an unstoppable torrent of vileness, much in the same way that they view adipose tissue overwhelming the carrying capacity of the human body. This is, perhaps, akin to the grieving male who is terrified of crying, because if he ever dared to let go and express or release his grief, his tears would be enough to drown the world. The female version of that is a fear to give in to anger; for to do so might be the explosive release of a whole pandora’s box of destructive ills onto the world. To people like this, the obese are an abomination, because in their mythological view, they are examples of people who have let go, and in the lives of the obese haters, such letting go would mean the annihilation of their illusory lives. So, to them, the obese somehow MUST BE STOPPED.

But this is not what obesity in the real world (the world beyond the fantasies of the lean) is about at all. Obesity is but one of countless examples of a single affect caused by a myriad of reasons, many of which are still unknown. To blame all obesity on a single combination of two causes, eating too much and exercising too little, is not only incorrect and unobservant, it is actually insanely wrong, and every overweight person KNOWS this, whereas it seems that NO non-overweight person imagines anything else. And how unseemly of a situation is this: countless non-overweight people who know NOTHING about this condition, arrogantly lording it over and advising overweight people with principles that the overweight people absolutely know are false (or at least misleading, or only a tiny part of the story). Why should people open their mouths at all on a subject they know nothing about, or when whatever it is that they know is wrong? This would be like me lecturing physics to Richard Feynman, arguing philosophy with Lao Tsu, or telling Michael Jordon how to play basketball.

Well, what else could be the causes of or contributing factors to obesity? Unhealthy food, toxic food, food laden with chemicals the body has no idea how to process (substances that didn’t exist millions of years ago), emotional stresses bathing the cells with cortisol or other hormones causing imbalances that cascade into various maladies such as insensitivities or burn-out of insulin, leptin, adrenaline, or other hormones that now no longer can carry regulatory messages that the body can act upon, reproductive cycles that stimulate the storage of fat, bad or diminished sleeping habits that confuse the natural processes of the body, feelings of insecurity or lack of safety (actual or imagined) for which the body knows only one solution that was appropriate in ancient times, to put on pounds for warmth or cushioning or greater size, or for protection; eating too few calories (dieting) that leads to a signal of famine and therefore a food storage response, too much exercise that is over-stressful to the body and therefore worsens the internal chemical imbalances, false dietary information promulgated by the government or food corporations, or by people who have always been lean and therefore know nothing whatsoever about the process of weight loss, unproven genetically modified foods, anti-biotic, growth-hormoned, estrogenated feed lot protein sources, rancid oils, mercury in fish, vitamin shortages, damaged immune responses, damaged liver, gall bladder, badly functioning intestines, toxins in the colon, pharmaceutical side effects effecting massive weight gain…is this enough to give you the idea? And combine these causes with all the mis- and dis-information on how to lose the excess weight once it is gained. I have at this point seen every single kind of food blamed for the problem in some diet plan or another, going beyond the usual culprits of sugar, white flour, and certain fats, to even include ordinarily-considered benign or essential substances such as certain vegetables, fruits, and even water (yes, I even found a diet plan that was against drinking water). And for all I know, there may actually be some truth to these various complaints. So what is an overweight person to do? It’s probably easier for them just to give up trying to fix this condition and try to live with their body condition, particularly considering the fact that the impulse to eat is fundamental (you could almost just as easily make yourself breathe less), especially when a person is starving, and if an overweight person is unwittingly consuming non-nutritious food (or food substances that the body doesn’t need at that particular time), then no matter how much they eat, they are still starving and therefore the impulse to eat cannot be stopped.

I have become disturbed by seeing this ignorant viciousness toward the suffering obese happening more and more now that people are being emboldened by the possibilities of socialized medicine. Now no longer is it “they might make me sick if I see them on the beach” (this is a subset of the very weak characteristic of “Oh, I am so offended”), or “they’re going to be sitting next to me on the airplane”; now it’s “they’re going to unfairly raise our social costs of medicine”, or maybe even (from the greens who crave population diminishment, which can only be described as a yearning for genocide) “they’re going to eat up all the food in an economy of shortages…and I’m going to need that food to power my car!”

Well, to be disgusted by the sight of fat people on the beach, one may as well claim revulsion at babies born with cleft palates, or to be repulsed by paraplegia, or horrified by acne. Life, unfortunately, is loaded with misfortune and bodies are scathed. What, it’s all a matter of aesthetics then? You find fat bodies “distasteful”? Sorry, but few Americans can justifiably lay claim to that; we’re not Parisians, after all, or even Masai warriors, for that matter.

You fear an unpleasant seat neighbor on an airplane? That could be somebody undeodorized, or a boor who won’t stop talking, or a couple of unruly, undisciplined kids, or scores of other circumstances. Life, venturing outside your own living room, is filled with any kind of unpleasantness. If you’re that worried about who’s going to be sitting next to you on a plane, maybe you ought to fly first class…or secure a private compartment on Amtrak. Sure, YOU have to pay more, but YOU are the one with the problem with life not being nice enough for you.

Regarding the cost of medical care, maybe you ought to not lend your support to socialized medicine; there are far more reasons to not want that than the presence of fat people in society. Maybe you are also suggesting the elimination of a much worse drain on medicine, the elderly? Which would include YOU when you get older, of course.

While all this has been around for quite some time, it now seems to be amped up more than ever, with very shrill people screaming very loudly and very frequently. Suddenly, other people’s obesity is being considered a national problem (instead of an individual problem, which is what it is). All this came to a head for me where I finally had to write about it, because there is a blogger that I used to enjoy and admire, Karen De Coster, who writes for various libertarian causes. I liked her, because she seemed to understand economics and the principles of personal freedom. For quite some time, it was refreshing to hear her sensible and personally empowering point of view; I would have said that Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson (what we think we know of them, anyway), to name only two out of many, would have loved her and welcomed her voice in our present times when so many people have given up self-control in favor of the nanny state. I thought we needed writers like Karen De Coster to counteract the soporifics emanating from mainstream globalist media.

But to be successful and genuine in this arena is to walk a razor’s edge, and bloggers have to be careful, because they offer much greater opportunity for dissection than do columnists writing by the column inch, or broadcasters speaking in sound bites. Sooner or later, the more a blogger writes, the more his or her warts will come clear to the public eye, and this is all the more obvious in the case of those bloggers who attempt to put forth the illusion that they are perfect, all-knowing beings pontificating for the benefit of an imperfect, ignorant public, which is Karen De Coster to a “T”. As a blogger, I’m safe from that, myself, because I have always been up front about my confusions, questions, and attempts at moving forward from my place of error and brokenness. If my thoughts seem strange (or just plain “wrong”) to people, as they almost always do, it is because the ordinarily accepted realities (group-think illusions) do not need to be spread by me—I am speaking from an entirely different, alien, and possibly brand-new (or seldom spoken) position, but one which I think takes us closer to the truth. (And when my direction ends up being wrong, I am quite clear about being willing to alter my view and my direction.)

Libertarians have successfully been branded selfish and uncompassionate by liberals, as also have conservatives and Republicans (President Bush thought that he could stand out and garner liberal votes by claiming to be a “compassionate conservative,” thereby underscoring that conservatives were normally NOT compassionate). This is because the libertarian end of the spectrum supports the inalienable right of private property and absolute personal freedom of behavior up to the threshold that nothing is done that steals from or interferes with or hurts the rights of others. A tax that raises money for a welfare program, for example, is for government power to steal private property from one group of people for the benefit of another group of people. Libertarians view this as wrong, but liberals ask, “What, you don’t want to help your fellow citizen? Are you not your brother’s keeper?” Libertarians are not against helping their fellow citizens when they are the ones voluntarily deciding to do it; it’s the being forced to by another group that is the problem. But for liberals, “helping their fellow man” is an easy sell, especially to those who will be the recipients of this aid (under the determination and control of the liberal elites). This is the “progressive” way, which has been accepted by the majority voter as the “caring” and “evolved” way to run a society, despite the fact that it is ultimately destructive both to the producers from whom all this largess is taken, and to the recipients (some would say “parasites”) who, while gaining some level of subsistence, nevertheless lose their initiative and self-reliance, often for generations.

Unfortunately, the blogger Karen De Coster has demonstrated that she actually IS as uncompassionate as any liberal would accuse her of being, and in actuality she doesn’t agree with libertarian principles at all. In fact, in typical LIBERAL fashion, she only wants freedom for herself and for others who completely agree with her, but she would deny that freedom to others whom she thinks are somehow distasteful, but who may be anything but, and she would deny that freedom to those who support those others whose freedom she denies. (This is pointed out by the fact that she moderates the comments that are left on her site, and I know from personal experience that she will delete comments that conflict with her position. I consider that cowardly, especially for one who thinks she is such a "female stud", and for one who espouses freedom, hypocritical. How can you say you espouse freedom when you manipulate a one-sided discussion, and particularly when the point of view you eliminate is the one that actually presents the truth? This indicates that you have an agenda and therefore your blog does nothing but add to the disinformation stream, which makes it not worth reading...not worth it for me, anyway.)

She recently wrote a negative blog decrying fat people riding motorized wheelchair scooters at Walmart. To hear her description of it, Walmart is inundated by hordes of fat people traveling the aisles, people “too lazy to walk” and utterly without shame. This is something that for some reason bothers her very much…I guess because she sees it as yet another sign of our society’s diminishment into a state of chosen helplessness in which these “lazy obese” will require, demand, and expect help from others, which presumably includes Karen De Coster’s personal treasury.

But there is much amiss here in this complaint.

First of all, just because an obese person CAN walk does not mean that they are lazy when they do not. Our whole society is one that, when offered the opportunity to do so, will most often choose a machine to assist us with our labor. After all, we generally drive our cars to the store, park as close as we can, and go up and down stairs via escalator or elevator. We will also use a washing machine for our clothes instead of taking them down to a river so that we can beat them on a rock. If we are to write a letter, we more often than not will chose to do that writing on a computer rather than getting out clay tablets for cuneiform. If we mow a lawn, we will use a power mower instead of a scythe, and if we clean a carpet, we will use a vacuum cleaner instead of ripping the carpet up and hanging it outside so that we can beat it with a carpet beater. If we are cold, we will adjust the thermostat on our forced-air heater instead of going outside with an ax to chop down a tree, and a maul to split the wood so that it will fit into our wood-burning stove.

Is this laziness, or is this convenience and time-saving? Presumably, in Karen De Coster’s world view, if it is an obese person doing these things, such as riding a scooter around Walmart, then it is laziness, for she believes that they “should” do much more walking because she feels that it is proper for them to exercise in order to lose weight, a goal that she demands.

Ms. De Coster attempts to sweeten her argument by stating that her amputee brother who really NEEDS a scooter often can’t get one, because all the lazy obese have commandeered them, instead. Well, who’s not being self-reliant, here? Presumably her amputee brother needs a scooter ALL the time (his amputations do not come and go), so why doesn’t he have one of his own for use everywhere he goes, but is, instead, relying on Walmart to provide him one? How does he get through other stores, or is Walmart the only place he shops?

Think for a minute, if you will, of a Walmart shopper who is a hundred pounds overweight. No, let’s make it ninety pounds overweight…ninety pounds is the weight of a bag of cement. Okay, now you, the healthy, in-control, beautiful and perfect skinny person, are going to go shopping at Walmart. But what you must do the whole time you are over there is carry around with you a bag of cement. You like exercise right? Well, let this be your exercise. This is a bag of cement that you NEVER can put down, by the way, so you have been carrying it for months and months and months before you even started this particular Walmart shopping excursion. This bag of cement, you will sleep with, you will make love with, you will sit with when you watch TV, you will carry it with you into the shower, and you will have it with you at all times while you are at work (do you have a job that requires you to be on your feet?). Hum, are you getting just a little bit tired? Don’t you just want to put that burden DOWN? Well too bad, bucko, you’re just TOO LAZY, then. Don’t even THINK of lightening your load for even a moment by riding that scooter, you may frighten the easily offended Karen De Costers of the world and what you need is to exercise to lose weight! (But I wonder, why hasn’t that exercise lost the weight by now? An exercise that you are doing ALL the time, and yet not one pound comes off? Is there something wrong with the formula?)

I have a friend, who happens to be a phenomenally talented writer—published in real books and journals, not on-line blogs (need I say that she puts De Coster’s journalist hacking to shame?), who, when I met her, was in the process of getting her PhD at U.C. Berkeley. Is getting a PhD at Berkeley something for the lazy? Well, she got her PhD, but the most difficult thing for her was walking across that huge campus every day. Why? Well, she was overweight, overweight enough for someone like Karen De Coster to sneer at her as she passed. Overweight enough for her to have several broken bones inside both feet, bones that her podiatrist told her would never heal so long as she continued to put a load on them. The agonizingly painful broken bones in her feet would never heal unless she dropped out of school and stopped walking to class for several months. But the idea of that was impossible, because my friend was not only committed to her PhD program, which she hoped when it was completed would lead her out of the financial trap she was in, but she also was raising three children by herself after she and her children escaped from her violent and physically abusive husband. So she just lived with the painful broken feet and walked across campus, eventually earning her PhD and getting a job as a professor at another college where she was then able to work on getting her feet healed. If U.C. Berkeley happened to have a fleet of scooters for students to use for getting around campus, I can assure you she would have used them, and with great gratitude in her heart for the university’s compassion.

One might ask how this person happened to “allow herself to let herself go so much that she ended up obese and with broken feet”. Well, the lack of money was the largest factor (if we fail to take into account the stresses suffered by a battered wife trying to save the life of herself and her three children). Cheap food is incredibly fattening food. Is it smart to eat that way when you are poor, or trying to save money, or living on student loans? Well, obesity is an insidious condition, it creeps upon one slowly, whereas poverty is large and glaring and immediate and obvious. So what do you think a person in that situation will most likely do? (And notice that most people this obese are poor; does this show that they are lazy and therefore their laziness makes them BOTH poor AND obese, or is it just that their poverty leads to less healthy food choices?)

I have another friend, a hugely successful sales rep whose territory covers Washington State and British Columbia. This friend is always earning “most sales” or “most new customers” or “increased sales goals most often met” awards at her company. She makes quite a lot of money and I would venture to say that this person is not lazy, either. Yes, she is overweight. Why? Because she eats out in restaurants a lot…almost every meal, actually. You tend to do that when you are on the road all the time. Do you think that when she is selling her wares at some island off the coast of British Columbia, that when it is lunch time, she will drive back home to her apartment in Seattle and fix herself a healthy lunch? No, she will go out to eat, then continue to meet with her various customers, then go out for dinner, then check into a motel for the night. There’s a lot of walking involved in this job, too, from some hard-to-find parking space on a city street to a small store several blocks away (or up a steep hill), or to several stores inside of a huge shopping mall. I wonder why all this walking didn’t help her to lose weight? Instead, it led to her needing to have her knees replaced due to wear and tear on her joints. Do you also understand that each time she had a knee replaced (these operations are done separately, one knee at a time), this meant that she had to STOP working for several months and this then meant that her income STOPPED, too? So it took her quite a while to finally go ahead and schedule these surgeries, which in quite a practical way meant that she was in danger of losing her job, or her well-won territory. Meanwhile, until she could complete both surgeries, she continued to walk and travel and sell with agonizing knee pain…yet if Karen De Coster or one of her non-feeling compatriots happened to see my friend obtaining a moments’ relief by riding a scooter, they would frown and look down on her and shake their heads in dismay at the gall of one so able demonstrating such laziness…for something that really was none of their damned business. Just be thankful YOU don’t need, or want, to ride an a scooter.

I could go on and on and on with these stories, which could be repeated countless times in a universe of other examples, but the principle should be clear without further examples, anyway. Unless you have walked a mile in an obese body, then you ought to shut the hell up. You don’t KNOW the daily misery of being in an obese body, and I’m not going to describe it to you. Maybe if you sit and think about it for a while, you’ll begin to figure out a part of it, but even then, you wouldn’t be able to imagine the whole of it if you had never actually experienced it.

You may THINK you know the business of a fat person, what they did wrong to get that way and what they should do right to get out of it, but if you do think that, then you are an idiot. Only a liberal, nanny-state-loving Nazi thinks they know how another person should live. A person who believes in freedom doesn’t sneer at those who are exercising that right (which in the case of the obese, is only exercising the right to exist and get around the best way they can during this present time; and then, maybe when the right combination of events and circumstances occur, they will choose to commit to a program of their own choosing and an effort that suits them that will succeed in getting their excess weight off; or maybe not). And while you may view their condition as unhealthy and life-threatening (the obese understand this far better than you do) and you therefore wish to justify your suggested controls on their lives as being for their own good (such AS, for example in other arenas, MANDATORY health insurance or retirement fund savings), you must understand how society could likewise turn against you and apply some “for your own good” controls for some other “unhealthy” habits, conditions, and activities that involve you.

In Ms. De Coster’s case, among her various interests, she is into machine guns and riding Harleys. I think that’s her perfect right and I would work to see to it that she is allowed to pursue these, and other, activities unmolested. But don’t you think that to some nosy busy-bodies, this might look like an accident waiting to happen? To people like those, machine guns and Harleys would be Ms. De Coster’s “obesity”.

Missing Michael Jackson

I work quite near where Michael Jackson's parents live and have driven past their house countless times over the years without actually knowing which house it was. But today a friend of mine at work showed me her iPhone photos of the crowd around that house, so I decided to drive by it on the way home from work to see what was going on. Actually, it wasn't possible to drive down the block the Jackson house is on, as the police have it barricaded. But you can park elsewhere and walk down there if you want, so that's what I did.

One whole side of the street (the side opposite the Jackson house) has news media satellite trucks from end of the long block to the other. I'd never seen anything like that before; there must have been maybe thirty trucks lined up, maybe more. The trucks, with their satellite upload dishes on the ready, all aimed skyward, were pretty cool to see, but it actually seemed like a pretty slow news day. It made me wonder just how much "hurry up and then sit and wait" is involved in the average news person's day.

There was a pretty big crowd of people out in front of the Jackson house. The gate to the parking area was open, but people respectfully stayed outside in front (but there were a few police in the area keeping things orderly). I felt like the people were expecting somebody to arrive at or leave from the house, but instead, things seemed quite quiet. I wondered what it must be like to have a constant presence of people like that, but of course, the Jacksons are quite used to it. When my mother died, and then when my father died, I wanted absolute privacy for our family to grieve, but the Jackson family surely knew that these people waiting around outside their house were fans who loved Michael, which maybe helps some.

There was an immense amount of flowers, stuffed animals (including a gigantic stuffed cartoon gorilla), balloons, banners, posters, notes, and pictures all along the wall in front of the property. The basic themes of the notes were, "Gone too soon," "You're at peace, now, sweet one," "You meant so much to me," and "Thank you for the wonderful music, which we will treasure forever." It reminded me of pictures I saw of what people had left for Princess Di after her tragic death. I had been disappointed at the news media for failing to mention all the charitable works that Michael had done, but the signs and the notes out in front of the Jackson house did not repeat that same failure--his fans remembered, for sure. There were reasons beyond Michael's music that his fans loved him so; part of that was how much he gave to others, and another part of that was how much pain he had been in, himself. People could relate to that.

My friend who had shown me the iPhone pictures said she wondered if Michael would have been as creative as he was if it hadn't been for the pain, and I thought of others who had begun as child stars, such as Judy Garland (found dead on her toilet at the age of 47 with an overdose of quinolbarbitone). If they had had happy childhoods, they maybe never would have had the deeply affecting careers they had, so that which benefits so many others perhaps costs too much for those who give us what they do.

I thought about how lonely Michael had been, upon his own admission. It was terribly sad to think that with all his popularity all around the world, that it seemed that he did not have one real friend who truly cared about HIM (instead of what they could get out of him). A friend who might have warned him to stop having children sleeping over at his house because of the accusations it opened Michael up to, or to cool it on all the damaging plastic surgery, or to not let concert promoters sign him up for a 50-city tour when he was tired and frail. But then again, maybe he did have people trying to help him and he didn't listen, I don't know. Or, again, he just wouldn't have been "Michael Jackson" without all these things.

It's funny, Michael Jackson was always one of my favorites, and I was one who always felt that he was innocent of any crimes, but I didn't confuse him with a person that I have a personal relationship with. And yet now with him suddenly gone, I feel the same kind of guilt and regret that one can feel when friends and loved ones die--"I never told them I loved them enough...I didn't visit them enough or write to them enough or call them enough...", whatever the regret it is. For example, I never went to any of his concerts (surely he must have had them in the United States, but I wasn't really on that wavelength). I guess what the feeling boils down to is, "I always took them for granted," and in Michael's case, I always took him for granted, too. I guess he was always going to be there, pumping the music out.

It seems that no matter what we do, that lesson keeps on coming, and coming from unexpected places. I guess what it really boils down to is that we take LIFE for granted. And, like so many things that happen that result in a loss, Michael Jackson's death is one more thing reminded us of how precious life really is, and how much we need to be thankful for it every single second.

So Much Misbehaving

Is it Los Angeles, or the times we are now living in? It is hard for me to judge, since I have been here so much longer than most other places I have lived, but it seems that Los Angeles contains some of the rudest people in the world. But maybe it is the times we are living in, instead, because now seems to be a time where what is presented to people as examples of success are liars and criminals (that’s government), or rabidly aggressive, selfish, pushy people (that’s celebrities on television). It’s kind of like people are made to think that the model of a life successfully lived is the reality game show, Survivor, where there is only one winner for the million dollars, and the way to win is not to be the strongest, most resourceful, and most competent in the face of challenges, but the one who is most able to fool and then shaft everybody else.

This kind of thing is neither inspiring nor entertaining to me, and so I don’t watch it on television and I don’t participate in it in life.

But I sure do see it all over the place, mostly in little ways that shock me even more than all the gross sociopathy that surrounds us. Of course the forest is rotten, but it is truly disturbing is that the tree roots are, too.

One example I experience all the time is how people merge onto the north heading side of the 405 freeway from the Skirball Center exit. This would be my way of going home if I take the freeway, which I rarely do, because I do not have the constitution to deal with the behavior at that entrance. For some reason, this long entrance consists of two lanes of traffic, but merges into one lane about two car lengths from the highway. It is the left lane that is the main lane, and the right lane that is supposed to merge into the left. One can clearly see this from the design of the roadway, but one problem with this is that the roadway designers must have presumed that conscientious and forward-thinking drivers would look ahead and see that the better and correct lane to be in is the left lane. So, of course, I get into the left lane as soon as I can, which usually means at the very top of the road when I make a right turn into it.

However, what that does is leave a relatively empty right lane, a perfect and unavoidable opportunity for the stupidly short-sighted and the aggressively selfish. All they see is that if they go into the right lane, they will move past (ahead of) seven or ten cars waiting patiently in the correct left lane. And then what those in the right lane face is the bottleneck at the end where they are two car lengths from the freeway, yet are next to a solid wall of cars in the left lane, all of whom had gotten there before those in the right lane did. So the effect is that those in the right lane want to butt into line ahead of the wall of cars in the left lane, yet they have no right to do so, and how many in the left lane, do you think, are willing to let them in?

Okay, so maybe a driver from time to time will be genuinely “stuck” there in the right lane because they weren’t paying attention and will look pleadingly at the drivers in the left lane for a space to get in. That’s when I will give up the battle and let them in…but that then seems to invite the rest of the whole row of cars in the right lane to then aggressively push into the space that I have allowed for the one nice, pleading driver. But more often, however, the tack of those in the right lane is to just play a game of chicken with those in the left lane and push their way in any way they can, devil may dare. I have been in several of those contests, myself, in which what I am thinking is, “If you really want to buy me a new car, then keep on going because I am in the right of way and I am not letting you push your way in no matter what you do.” I have seen cars continue on anyway by driving up onto the hill of dirt on the right shoulder and then drive on down the freeway that way until they can manage to force their way into a lane later. These are the same drivers, I am sure, who will perform any dangerous stunt on the road just to get one car length ahead of you, and one car length ahead of you is where they will stay for the next hour, because their actions had secured no significant advantage at all…but they will constantly be on the lookout for the next such useless opportunity. Honestly, who wants to live that way? What kind of person spends every waking moment looking for the tiniest advantage of getting one car-length ahead? Is the proper focus for one’s journey through life to be that tight and small, looking just one inch ahead of their nose?

The truth is that more and more people are acting like they are the ONLY people in the whole world.

For example, a couple of days ago, I was at a bookstore looking for a magazine. I wasn’t looking for any specific magazine, was just aimlessly scanning what they had, hoping for something that might interest me. I guess at the back of my mind was maybe a travel magazine featuring some place I might want to go.

As I did this, I came upon a section where a little girl was sitting on the bottom shelf of the magazine rack, on a cushion of magazines, and surrounded by piles of discarded illustrated children’s books. Hey, one doesn’t sit on, in, and among the merchandise, and there were plenty of couches and chairs in that area. And if that wasn’t bad enough, her father was busy looking for books he hoped might interest her, taking them off the shelves and bringing them over to her where she was ensconced on the magazine rack, pleadingly giving them to her and then watching as she rejected them, discarding them one by one in a mess on the floor, and then he went back to the shelves for more. (What a mess they were making for the bookstore staff who was going to have clean up all that after these people left, empty-handed, of course. The girl was going to end up with ice cream, instead.)

Fortunately…but I don’t know if the good fortune was for me or for the girl and her father…she was sitting on, in, and among a section of magazines that didn’t interest me—magazines for video gamers. But if, instead, she were in the travel section and thus was blocking my view of about seven different potential magazines, there would have been a confrontation. In my mind, the confrontation might have gone along the lines of me speaking to the little girl, “Get the fuck off the magazines so that other people can look at them, you hideous freak,” which would, of course, have created quite a stir. I would have hoped to have scarred the girl for life, maybe impressed upon her indelibly the level of comportment required in a bookstore, and if I had succeeded in scaring her out of bookstores entirely, so much the better, for honestly, if you can’t behave, then I don’t want you anywhere around me, and from the looks of this, this girl had absolutely no hope in life of ever growing up into anything better than a despicable bitch.

I took one look at her father, a blond-haired guy in his 30s wearing a beige baseball cap (makes me want to vomit), and pegged him as a certain brand of “Los Angelino hope to make it big as a producer in the film industry” whom I despise. When he isn’t messing up bookstores with his sickening princess of a little girl, he’s busy attempting to pass people on the road in his Porsche—he’s got a “pitch session with the studio” that he’s late for and everybody else better get out of his way. I could see his whole story—divorced, his wife got custody, so he only has alternate weekends to “impress” his daughter and his method is to cater to her every whim and thus ruin her for life. If she’s pretty, some other poor schmo will marry her for sex, get so he can’t stand her, divorce her, lose custody of the child and so the whole thing goes generation after generation.

I’ll just skip by people talking out in pubic on cell phones. I hope they actually are getting brain damage as the alternative health practitioners continue to warn…in fact, I’m sure it’s already happened. I realize that I am now a generation or two behind, but I just cannot fathom the need to be connected to somebody by phone every waking minute, walking down the street, shopping in a store, waiting in a doctor’s office. And I sure don’t want to listen to them in a restaurant making business deals or arranging their child’s bar mitvah. Do your work in the office or have your conversation at home. Leave the rest of us at peace. Egos are shallow enough as it is, do you really have to pretend to be the big cheese or social butterfly to a public of absolute strangers, who hate the sound of you and would love to mutilate your face with a fistful of forks if they could? And this happens EVERYWHERE, ALL the time.

Then, yesterday, it was around 11:00 at night and I was hungry, so decided to walk over to the convenience store at the gas station a few buildings over. I hoped it was open; the previous owner would lock it up after 10 PM and you had to shout your request through a little hole and exchange money for snack food through a sliding drawer. But hooray, this new owner is more welcoming and even the front door was wide open; there was busy traffic of people getting gas (it was Friday night) and the store had quite a few customers.

I went in, picked out some things I wanted to buy and then got in line. Finally it was the turn of the guy directly in front of me, who held up a plastic bottle of Naked juice and said he wanted a refund. The clerk, who is some kind of Asian/Mexican mix, looked at him blankly. I know and like this clerk, have been buying from him for years, and know that he often lapses into a pretend “I don’t know the language that well” when problems arise. The guy continued, “I bought this here a few minutes ago and now I want to return it, I want my money back.” The clerk continued to stare at him in disbelief and finally said, “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

The guy continued, “How could you not know what I am talking about? Don’t you remember me, I was here fifteen minutes ago, I bought this juice and some other items, but now I don’t want the juice, so I am here to return it.”

The clerk said, “I don’t remember you.”

The guy could not believe this, and continued to berate the poor guy, acting upon the assumption that he was in the right and all he needed to do was spark the clerk’s memory over the transaction and then he would be able to return this bottle of juice. But I could see that he was getting nowhere, and why should he? (Just keep the damn juice; if you don’t want it now, save it and drink it some other time.) For one thing, it looked to me more like he had just then taken the juice out of the refrigerator and gotten in line, but even if what he was saying were true, one could not expect the clerk to remember him among a constant stream of junk-food buyers, and who thinks that these snack items are returnable, anyway? The clerk asked him for a receipt, which the guy didn’t have. So then the clerk told him to come back tomorrow morning (when, I guess, the owner would be there), but that was unacceptable to the asshole, who wanted his money NOW.

It was clear to me that the guy was going to get nowhere, and nowhere was where he should have gotten. I wondered whether I should step in and come to the aid of the clerk, but I also wondered if this were a prelude to a gun being drawn and thus didn’t want to escalate the negative energy with my contribution. Instead the guy had an idea, he would go back outside and get the other stuff he bought to “prove” to the clerk that he had bought the juice in that same transaction and thus could get his refund. His leaving then brought me up to the cash register.

I said to the clerk, shaking my head, “I’m amazed at some of the stuff you have to contend with.” Then I suggested, “Simply tell him that the juice is non-refundable, that it violates a health code, that you have no idea what he had done with it after he took it out of the store, that you can’t sell it again.” All these would be logical explanations in my mind, but the clerk was more set on the bullheaded approach, and all power to him. The guy came back in as I was leaving and I hoped that next time I came back to this store late at night, we wouldn’t be back to the locked door and speaking through a hole in the glass. And if so, I knew whom exactly (what type of customer) to blame for that.

If I had my way, I’d send every one of these people back to kindergarten for a year. They failed to learn even the most fundamental rules of how to live in a decent society. Or else I’d like for there to be a special kind of “fatal swine flu epidemic”…one where whom the virus infects are those who act like swine. Unfortunately, life doesn’t operate that way, and the ones who have to suffer are the innocent and the polite, while the guilty and the rude continue on their merry way.

P.S. Here's a great article about the exact section of freeway where I have to drive home every day when I take the freeway.

Summer Lover

It must be the testosterone therapy. Why else would I be so especially excited about the onset of summer? I mean, not that I’ve never loved summer or anything, but this year, I am really feeling it and the feeling is good. I’m even loving being in LA, and that’s funny, because only a few days ago I checked out a calculator on the website that showed me how much I could increase my disposable income by moving somewhere else. I calculated it for every city on an American coast, for which I included Great Lakes cities as coastal, too. It works really well for moving away from Los Angeles, one of the highest cost-of-living cities in the country. About the only coastal cities I would lose money moving to were Santa Barbara (the worst), Honolulu, New York, and San Francisco. Even moving to other California cities would put disposable income in my pocket, even cities in Orange County, or cities like Santa Cruz.

Interestingly, based on these calculations, the best cities to move to are in Texas, and second best would be Connecticut. Well, Texas really was no surprise, and any one of Texas’s coastal cities would put an extra $20,000 to $30,000 in my pocket annually, presuming I could find a job similar to the one I have now. Sure the salaries would be less, but the cost of living is SO much less that the net effect is a hefty gain. And Texas is a state I would consider. My experiences there have always yielded very friendly people and a pride of place that I consider admirable. And I am one who likes hot humid environments and the Gulf of Mexico. Hurricanes, though, I could do without, but other than the west coast, you can’t find coastal cities without hurricanes whose weather isn’t freezing cold in the winter.

Moving to cities along the Long Island Sound in Connecticut would put about $15,000 to $25,000 extra in my pocket. I never would have thought of that with Connecticut, but the deal there is that salaries tend to be high (they’re in the vicinity of New York), whereas cost of living is lower than Los Angeles. I just wouldn’t like Connecticut winters, though.

A state loaded with coastal cities that I would consider, Florida, ended up being less impressive when it came to increasing disposable income…the figures there were around $10,000 to $15,000. Not bad, really, it’s just that the Texas figures were so much better.

Yet even with this, this onset of summer is making me love LA. Summer this time didn’t suddenly blast itself onto us, but has slowly crept in almost like an eastern season change, yet the season is definitely Californian. In California, as the sun goes down, a cool, sometimes chilly breeze comes in to fill the gap, which is why even in summer restaurants with outdoor patios have overhead heaters. This is something I am sure people from eastern climates find hard to understand, for in the east, when the day is hot, so, too, is the evening. Now, there is hardly anyone I know who likes a hot summer evening better than me; sitting on a porch with, say, a Southern Comfort in the hand, rocking back and forth as the lightening bugs flicker and the tree frogs shriek. If the thunder cracks and a rainstorm suddenly pours, well, so much the better, I’ve got a cover over my head.

In California, the version is a cool but sweetly refreshing chill that washes over the salt-sprayed and sunburnt skin. I can almost feel the sand between my toes and smell the bonfire that we have started on the beach. Watching a sunset as the sun makes a golden pathway across the water before it finally sets into the ocean, especially as you are entwined in the arms of a loved one, the two of you cozily wrapped up in a set of beach towels or a blanket, what could be more beautiful than that? If you’re watching this sunset from a private, hidden cove, you’ve probably got a jug of cheap wine chilling in the ice cold Pacific, held in place by a line tied through the glass handle ring. It doesn’t have to be a fancy California wine in order to enjoy this beautiful setting, and the beautiful setting enhances anything you are drinking.

Yes, it must be the testosterone, the only medical therapy I can ever remember that clearly brought on instant positive results. I haven’t felt this good inside my body since I was college age, something I never thought I would ever feel again. I had to ask my doctor if what I was feeling was genuine, or was I just somehow fooling myself, and he confirmed it as a reality, saying that he hears this from his patients all the time (he himself, a Malibu surfer when he isn’t practicing medicine, is too young to need testosterone therapy). And this, unlike injected pharmaceutical testosterone, is a therapy that is pretty safe—bioidentical hormones that are custom compounded individually for the patient and rubbed on as a cream.

From the look of me, I’m just about the last person that should be feeling sexual, yet this feeling seems to be translating to others from me; maybe the true secret of attractiveness is simply feeling good yourself. And that, I do. Even if my only possible lover is the city, and its delicious seasonal change brushing across my body, a body held and carried back and forth by a fervent, frothy ocean, the joy within me seems to say that that is more than enough.

Money Danger Opportunity

Now here is something that I was fortunate enough to come across that is not exactly what you might think--when you see the word "conspiracy", don't get immediately turned-off by thinking that is something like "the 9/11 conspiracy" or "the New World Order conspiracy"...not exactly, anyway. Here is the link, but read my explanation:

The Eight New Rules of Money

I'm sure some of you have heard of the Rich Dad, Poor Dad books by Robert Kiyosaki, and you might have even read a few. I've read three of them and liked them all very much. Here, for free, is his newest one that it is being posted on the Internet, chapter by chapter as they get written, because the author believes that the normal publication time (about two years to hard copies being available in bookstores) would be just too long; in the light of the kind of history that is being made right now today, it would be too late for this information to help anybody.

Robert Kiyosaki's most important point is that people are not educated about money. The schools don't do it, and he feels that there is definitely a reason for that: the schools were made by rich industrialists to train WORKERS, not rich people. Another man I admire greatly, John Taylor Gatto, has been saying this for years, which is why the schools are so awful (they are factories designed to keep the people DOWN).

Kiyosaki's real dad (the "Poor Dad" in his books) was practically a socialist (in this new book, Kiyosaki actually calls him a socialist, although I doubt if his father "knew" that he was that directly). (Please forgive me if I have gotten some of these details wrong...it's been a while since I have read these books. The gist of what I am saying is correct, even if some facts may be wrong.) He worked for the government (I think as a teacher?) and depended upon the government mediocre salary and government security in order to survive. While he was a nice and smart man who taught Robert a lot of important stuff, he was NOT someone who understood how a person could become a huge success in life. Robert's "Poor Dad's" idea was to be a drone--secure, and it is hoped, safe, but nevertheless a drone. (But such safety is a delusion as many people have now discovered.)

However, in contrast to the "Poor Dad" philosophy, Robert had a friend whose father was very rich. This friend's dad had (if I remember correctly) a large string of stores and maybe also commercial real estate. (By the way, let me interject here that Robert had been saying for years that people had to watch out when they considered their house to be an "asset" instead of a "liability". Again, this has proven to be nearly prophetic.) Robert's friend's dad had a enterpriser's or entrepreneur's concept of how to live, and he impressed Robert very much. Robert started out as a kid working in one of the man's stores and learning everything he could from him. He "adopted" him as his "Rich Dad," and the one who really taught him what he needed to know about money.

The lessons in Kiyosaki's books are immediately obvious, and yet they make you think, "Why didn't I ever understand that before?" That's because NOBODY ever taught us any of that before, and, in fact, there is a definite ENERGY in the country to KEEP us from learning it. Kiyosaki wanted to change that, because he believed that an educated and fully productive society benefits ALL of us (even the super-rich, who don't seem to get that...although I will add here my own contention, and that is that most of the super-rich of the "Rockefeller" type don't have the slightest idea how to go out and make money; they've inherited all their millions or billions and are ignorant of the real process, which makes them very afraid of those who DO understand it. Unfortunately, these people nevertheless do have a LOT of power.)

I was inspired enough by Kiyosaki's books to put together my own "money course" for after school at the school where I work, using Kiyosaki's two different "Cashflow" games as a method of instruction (one game for little kids and the other game for older kids). Unfortunately, the kids really weren't interested (maybe I wasn't a very good teacher?); they'd rather just play. While I did have several very smart and interested students, the majority of them were disruptive and undisciplinable kids that made it impossible to function, so after two exhausting trimesters, I stopped offering the course. One lesson that I learned from that experience is that most of the wisdom offered is really only for a very few students, anyway, which is why "forced schooling for the masses" is such a failure. In the early days of our republic, students only took courses in and learned material that they were interested in and really wanted to learn; for the rest of their time, they were making a living, such as helping on the family farm or in someones enterprise, in whatever capacity they could (of course nowadays, our child labor laws would prevent the latter).

Despite my having read three of Kiyosaki's other books, I had no idea that he had the particular background in thought that he talks about in this new book...that is to say that he is philosophically one of "what I am", or maybe I ought to say that I am "one of him". He was greatly influenced by a book of Buckminster Fuller's; he seems to share the same understanding of education as John Taylor Gatto; he says that the only honest politician running for president and the one who had correctly warned us YEARS ago about what was going to happen was Ron Paul, the one I supported (with donations and my vote in the primary). So I'm feeing a real kinship with Kiyasaki that I didn't know was there.

And I think he is entirely worth listening to. So far, of course, I have read only the first and currently available chapters of this book, but several times I found myself having an "Ah-ha" experience about things I THOUGHT I understood but didn't really. He explains things so simply and logically, that even if at times he maybe seems to be talking down, that is exactly the level I need to be talked at (wow, badly written sentence, but I think you know what I mean). Simple is fine with me if it gets me to understand!

You, too, can read this book as it comes out, if you want to. There is a certain level of "signing up," although I THINK that just setting up a user name and password is sufficient. However, I went all the way with a complete registration (name, address, etc.), because I knew that along the way, I was going to want to participate in the forum's discussions, which is another aspect of this. If doing that worries you, I think you don't really have to...but check it out and see. As for me, I thought it was worth it.

Okay, in many ways I am easily impressed (but I appreciate that about myself, because it shows a level of humility). For example, a few days ago I had an appointment with a new doctor in Malibu, and afterwards, I decided to treat myself by coming back home via the Pacific Coast Highway. Of course, I am eternally envious and amazed at those people who have houses RIGHT ON THE SAND along that route, something that seems IMPOSSIBLE to me. I decided to have lunch at Duke's, a restaurant on the coast that I had long wanted to try out, but so far never had. I got there just as they opened for lunch (11:30). It was a beautiful Southern California day, the kind of thing that people pay so much money to be here and enjoy, but which I don't enjoy as much as I should because I resent not owning a house (but yes, circumstances ARE changing). I sat outside at their "Barefoot Bar" and had a delicious macadamia-encrusted Oho (or is it Ono?) fish from Hawaii with saffron rice and salad, and with a coconut-milk and pineapple juice rum drink, all of which my personable waitress referred to as "The Consummate Duke's Experience" (which I also understood meant that I was a perfect patsy for the "Consummate Duke's Marketing", but so what, I DID enjoy it...in fact, it was ALL perfect).

I sat there right up against the plexiglass partition directly on the lava boulders upon which the waves were crashing and surveyed the scene that curved out before me. Just beyond the flat, empty portion of beach began again a string of houses directly on the beach with their decks jutting out over the water and their intimate stairways down to the very sand, ah, how wonderful, and then across the highway and high up on the hills above, even way up on the mountain tops, were other multi-million dollar houses. I marveled at the people who had successfully done such a thing, placed a house right on the beach or else infinitely high on a mountain I didn't even know you could reach by car. I was reminded of my idea about "how late" it was now to do this in L.A., and how marvelous it might have been to have come here in the 40s or 50s when things were only just beginning, and yet I also chastised myself for fear and inaction; I thought about the many notices I continually see on Internet sites such as "The Sovereign Society" or magazines that I receive such as "International Living" where they discuss waterfront property for sale in Brazil or Panama or Uruguay, or islands off the coast of Asia, or in developing former Communist regions of Eastern Europe along the Mediterranean (Dubrovnik, etc.) for prices like $30,000, and I think "Well, aren't these like 'LA in the 40s or 50s?"; in other words, I understood how easy it was for me to succumb to "fear and inaction" in the face of genuine opportunities elsewhere. Something I really need to fix about myself (and I think more understanding of money and how it works will help with that).

But then Robert Kiyosaki did a video on his site that was taken in his backyard in Hawaii, and he made no bones about the fact that it was ON WAIKIKI BEACH and I knew that those waves crashing up against the border of his property and that sand had to be among the most expensive oceanfront land on the face of the EARTH, and Robert Kiyosaki is a self-made man, having started out working in a store and whose real father had a government job. Robert Kiyosaki is not a Bill Gates, for example, who managed to ride the crest of one of the world's major economic and technological developments, a "once in an eon" opportunity that Gates happened to be at the forefront of. Kiyosaki achieved his achievements in a way that virtually anybody could also do if they knew how, and had the foresight, courage, and energy to do so. This is not to denigrate Kiyosaki's achievements at all, because primarily what he did was fill an essential need that had long needed to be filled and he was the one who did it...but my point is that such opportunities are infinite and do not require any special place and time.

And even when times seem dark and getting darker, we must not make the mistake of riding the waves of those times down into a treacherous whirling sinkhole of personal resignation and destruction, but should, instead, see that the opportunities to fill hungry needs are even more numerous than in the good times. So when the things are the darkest, so do rays of light shine the brightest.

So, if Robert Kiyosaki's newest, and perhaps deepest "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" book seems to interest you, please sign on and let's see how far it will take us. No more worrying about surviving, but putting our attention onto thriving. That's the "opportunity" half of the "danger/opportunity" ying and yang of the word "crisis".

Two Things About The Devil

Since Obama (I've decided to go along with a practice I've heard others suggest, to NOT call him "President" and frankly, it's an image that doesn't compute in my mind anyway) never ever impressed me for even one second, while all around me people were tearfully prostrating themselves before his image as "the new coming", I can't really say that he ever struck me as the least bit "beautiful". But as so MANY people seem so fully drawn in by the "good-looking, well-spoken black man" (a concept that ought to insult every other black man and maybe they're soon enough starting to figure that out), whereas I, in contrast, see him as having proven himself to be the worst president in U.S. history before he even took his oath of office just by virtue of the cabinet he assembled (I mean REALLY, making a MONSANTO man the Secretary of Agriculture, suggesting a tax evader as Secretary of the Treasury? Why didn't he assign a wolf as Secretary of the Henhouse?), I began to muse over that concept of "he looks so good, so he's got to be wonderful".

As I thought, somewhere in the back of my head, I could hear my wise and thoughtful father warning us when we were children, "Don't make the mistake of thinking that the Devil would be scary and ugly. Something scary and ugly you would obviously reject. The Devil is the master of LIES and part of that is that he could assume any pleasing shape he would think would be a temptation to you. The truth is, the Devil would beautiful beyond belief. After all, he was before the fall the highest angel in Heaven, and second in command to God. As his name of Lucifer suggests, the light-filled sight of him would make you fall down on your knees. Also, the Devil does not consider himself to be an enemy to God (that would be impossible, anyway). The Devil is an enemy to JESUS, the Son, whom Satan thought had usurped HIS position in Heaven and whose very existence diminished the purity of the One God. The Devil did not want to be second fiddle to Jesus, so he rebelled. Watch out for those temptations...they will not be obviously repulsive."

As a child I used to try to imagine what a beautiful Devil would look like and wondered how I could possibly be saved from him due to that pleasing appearance. I gather from Christian theology that you basically are helpless against the Devil, that you need Jesus's help to feel the contrast between the two and to pull away.

But I think what people in our present-day society have pulled away from is that kind of understanding, which they would think of as only being rabidly "Christian" (and therefore "backward') anyway. But I don't think you have to be a Christian in order to understand that concept and I am sure other religions have concepts similar to that, if dressed in the stories of a different mythology with different animating characters illustrating the basic concepts. That which is "evil" or which can really hurt you may not be so obvious, but instead would be so very pleasing, and that is what makes it all so very tough.

But gee we are so all appearance-oriented, now. It seems that our society really doesn't care about genuine substance at all; the only thing that matters is how things look, and are they fashionable and cool, and anything else is thrown by the wayside. And the way it seems to be in this society, now, the Devil could even appear hideous and frightening, and THAT would tempt some people. A truly beautiful appearance might not even work any more; that would be considered too "prissy and good".

Now I am not saying that Obama is the Devil. After all, I started this piece by saying that he never for a second tempted ME. But for sure he does tempt so very many others and it is those others who need to be warned. Because it is so clear to me that the substance of the man is harmful, yet there are so very many, too many, who wouldn't even begin to consider that, let alone clearly see it. And that is because, to them, he "looks and sounds good" (but LISTEN to what he is saying!). But looking good when one is not exists in which realm, now?

The second thing about the Devil that I was recently reminded of was that "you have to invite the Devil in." Now, that is amazing when you think about it; that this ultimate power of evil is nevertheless helplessly blocked from forcing his way into you. Is that really true, and if so, how can that be? I can only think that that comes from the idea that the Devil is not against God, the Father, he is only against Jesus, the Son. The poet John Milton, in his amazing and powerful work, Paradise Lost, went so far as to say that the main suffering of Satan from the fall is that he is no longer able to look upon God's face. God still holds the upper hand, here, and if people were given the power from God to have freedom of CHOICE, then even the Devil does not have enough power to violate that. So YOU can keep the Devil out, just as Jesus did during his three temptations (and, as Buddha did, during HIS three).

Back to Obama...times are tough and are likely to get much, much tougher and I think the time will be ripe for MUCH confusion and suffering and this offers a great opportunity for evil to expand across the land (the road to serfdom, economic collapse, homelessness, starvation, civil unrest, martial law, race war, nuclear war, totalitarianism...). For sure many will succumb to evil, will join it and carry it; many already have. But for those who would like to avoid that, it might help to remember these two things, which you can take as actualities, or you can take as symbols and metaphors:

1. The Devil would be amazingly beautiful and appealing (and therefore hugely tempting), but

2. You have to invite the Devil in; otherwise, he is powerless against you.

For those who don't like that kind of thing, sorry to get all "Christian" on you, but hard times require something strong, and I don't know anything stronger than God (or however you conceive that force). Now might be a good time to reconnect.

Living It

(KayPro II Portable Computer from the 80s)


Something that bugs me, that I am hearing much too often, is how “Generation Y” (just now coming en masse into the workplace) knows so much more about computers than “we” do (“we” apparently referring to anyone over, say, 40), usually parroted by somebody who actually doesn’t know all that much about computers. I even heard a lecturer at a workshop in a room filled with several hundred successful business managers say, “They even know more than every one of you in this room combined.” Wow, what a big slap in the face, and shocking in its actual inaccuracy.

These aren’t Generation Y people saying this, though (of course, they may be thinking it), but fading out Baby Boomers, or people advising fading out Baby Boomers (either hoping to facilitate that fading out, or else attempting to help them forestall it). Usually they back up that contention by saying that there wasn’t ever a moment in the lives of Generation Y when there weren’t computers around; “They grew up with them”, and also (which I think is so funny) the fact that Generation Y text messages so much. “E-mails are passé,” said our school’s board chair, who, himself, probably just recently got into e-mailing, so must watch his kids with jaw-dropping amazement as they dance across their Blackberries with their thumbs.

Well, sure…I think there must be a point in everyone’s life in a rapidly technological-developing world where individuals choose to stop and get off. There actually are several of my close friends who drew the line at getting a personal computer at all. As far as they were concerned, they could balance their checkbooks on the back of the bank statement, and they could sort their recipes in card files—checkbook balancing and recipe organizing were usually the arguments for getting a home computer back in the 80s when that technology exploded out onto the scene. Oh, that and games, which I know for a couple of decades was the main reason families bought computers for the home.

My father was one, who, although he did buy a computer and actually used it to COMPUTE things (very complicated polynomial equations and the like to solve load bearing problems or predict rocket trajectories or determine the solar power requirements of satellites), refused to ever go on-line, having somewhat of an irrational fear of the Internet, like it was a pipeline into a potentially indiscriminate demonic realm. Instead, he retained his trust in books and libraries (and well, I would never contemplate buying a Kindle). While he was hugely technological himself, he was almost “Amish” when it came to the Internet. (My mother, on the other hand, LOVED it.)

One friend of mine lost his career due to the advancement of computers into the workplace; he never could even learn how to master a mouse, unable to still his tendency to pick it up in the air and click it at the monitor as if it were a television remote control. Another friend, a sales representative, was forced to receive instructions from her vendors and her sales organization via e-mail and finally allowed into the house something I have never seen, “an e-mail server”, which is, apparently, a device for sending and receiving e-mail ONLY, and I have been instructed to NEVER e-mail her, its use is ONLY for business purposes, an instruction I’ve been able to follow due to the fact that she has refused to give me her e-mail address.

I, myself, drew the line at the above-mentioned text messaging. Just as I am still aghast at how many Generation Yers I see out in the world who are always, constantly, and forevermore talking on a cell phone wherever they are and whatever they are doing, I, generationally or personally, do NOT have the psychological need to be “connected” every single second of my day. An extrovert like me, who can make strangers on an elevator laugh with a sly comment or two, seems like a true introvert when compared to those constant cell phone users whom I feel are downright co-dependent. And ramp that one up a notch by the need to remain symbiotic via text messaging in class or during business meetings. Unbelievable. I do not view “want 2 c u after work” as a sign of superiority that should make me quake and worry about my future employability.

But maybe that’s because I know computers. While members of Generation Y were born and there were computers there, I evolved up with them. When I was born, computers were there, too, but they were immense room-filling machines that you communicated with via punch cards. I learned Fortran when I was in college at Berkeley and our programs to do things such as make the computer play tic-tac-toe or chess filled up several two-foot-long boxes of punch cards. You didn’t simply click on icons or select functions from a menu, you organized explicit instructions line by line and tested relentlessly to untangle the various endless loops you had inattentively programmed in. Data was transferred to reel-to-reel tapes and it was a great joy for me to go into a computer room and watch those reels with their long slack loops of tape click progressively forward, or suddenly fast forward or rewind (it was to prevent the tapes from snapping apart during these sudden fast forwards or rewinds that the tapes were mounted with these long slack loops)…but then later disc packs were invented (looking like stacks of brown 33 1/3 rpm records) and data was now accessible without the need to fast forward or rewind through reels of tape. [For those who want to get some sense of the enjoyment of this, I highly recommend renting the 1967 movie, “Billion Dollar Brain” (the “billion dollar brain” is a computer) starring Michael Caine and Karl Malden, and watching the title sequence with theme music by Richard Rodney Bennett. It’s a great movie, anyway, but I particularly love it for that title sequence alone—it shows what a computer was like for me when I was 19 years old.]

Later I worked as an analyst for a market research company in Los Angeles that had a unique real-time audience-reaction computer system used for testing movies, television pilots, commercials, and other things, developed and invented by an engineer who was one of the founding officers of the company. Audiences would watch a television pilot, for example, and turn dials that indicated their emotions throughout the program—turn up if they liked or were engaged by what was going on, turn down if they didn’t. (Most recently I saw that technology in use with audiences by CBS during the president debates. I was pleased to see that still in use, and personally related to it as I had known the man who had invented it and I had earned my living for a time by analyzing data that it produced.)

There was also music testing for record industry R&D, but instead of using the conscious dial method of input, members of the audience were hooked up to galvanic skin monitors and their unconscious reactions were recorded that way. The computer could receive and compute the data by any parameters the analysts wanted, characterizing individuals in the audience by gender, age, education, income, various tastes and purchasing habits, and so on.

A guy who was my roommate at the time worked as an assistant for that engineer who developed those systems and that engineer was also the “technological genius” working as a consultant for the fledgling Apple computer company, and others like it, so my roommate would bring home exciting tales of these small, DESKTOP computers that were being developed right in front of his eyes, and mine, too, as he often got permission to bring a prototype Apple or a Commodore, or some other mini computer, home for us to play with. The engineer wanted to see what we would do with them. I programmed the Commodore to write Dada poetry. [Interestingly, the dada artist Man Ray had lived in that very apartment, so maybe I was feeling some of his influence!] Remember, this was before most people even knew there was such an idea as personal computers, whereas my roommate and I were writing programs on personal computer prototypes sitting on my dining room table.

The famous Hollywood writer’s strike around 1978, 1979, occurred then (since, then, last year or so, we’ve had another one) and that stopped all scripts and other written production, so we all were laid off from that research company. Needing to find some other employment, I had been hearing about the new concept of word processing, and I jumped into that with both feet. I was hired by the Los Angeles (entertainment industry) branch of the sixth largest law firm in the United States as a word processor, in those days a relatively high-paying field, because it was so new and specialized. Again, this wasn’t clicking on an icon or selecting functions from a menu…we didn’t even have CRT monitors, then. You’d learn word processing star codes (these varied depending upon which company’s system you were using, but a typical example might be “*LM” and a number to set the left margin on a document, “*RM” and another number to set the right margin) which you would enter into the computer via an inputting keyboard that was like a typewriter in that it also typed out on long attached sheets of paper everything you had entered in. The typewriter was also an output device that printed out selected samples of the document you were preparing, and then, once your document was finished, completed copies for circulation, editing, and possible revision.

Many years after that, I was hired by the surgical department of the Stanford University Medical Center to be their resident “computer genius” (as some of the staff called me). Desktop computers were now entering the market and the business manager bought several of them for his administrative offices, but nobody knew yet what to do with them. He had the dream of having all the administrative functions programmed and he hired me to figure out what we could do with those computers and to use them to bring into fruition his ideas. I really cut my teeth on those PCs back then and I made them do things that IBM hadn’t even imagined they could do. The software for those computers were still tabulas rasa, blank canvases available for the individual imagination to put into use. By then we had CRT monitors (black and white, of course) and used floppy discs instead of solid disc packs; these floppy disks were about the size of 45 rpm records and you needed to load into your computer at least two of them, one for the software and the other for the data.

One of my favorite accomplishments during that era was creating and executing the idea of what I called “The Automatic Audiology Examination Report Generator.” The ENT (ear, nose, and throat) department was having trouble getting all their hearing exam reports prepared; they were overflowing with completed tests and were getting further behind in getting the reports typed up (word processed). I realized that most of what they reported was standard, with some individual variations, so I created a system in which all the clerk had to do was enter X’s on a database grid that corresponded to whatever standardized tests had been taken and the test results, and then enter in where appropriate specific data that was unique to that individual (such as name, address, unusual test results, and certain “ad hoc” comments), then merge that individual database with a shell document that automatically printed out the complete verbiage of the audiology report: “Now presents Susan Smith complaining of chronic tintinitus of the left ear; examination reveals a profound hearing loss in the 8,000 to 9,000 frequency range…” etc. Instead of fifteen or twenty minutes per report, the clerk could do each one in about three to five minutes; she put the X’s in the particular places and the COMPUTER wrote the report. It was a hit.

Again, just recently, all the companies across the U.S. that have 403(b) retirement funds [that’s the non-profit version of a 401(k)] were being made by the IRS to have new plan documents prepared that reflect the various changes in the law that had been made recently. It’s a huge extra load of work for human resource and business managers everywhere; fortunately in our case, TIAA-CREF, our retirement fund, would have plan documents made for us if we presented to them all the features of our particular plan. This was done via a series of questionnaires that reported all the features, essentially check boxes and filled-in blanks, and then a report-preparing company would turn that information into the verbiage of a written plan. Once I saw the completed process, I realized that this was EXACTLY the same concept as my “Automatic Audiology Examination Report Generator”. The company was able to prepare plan documents in virtually no time at all, because the system of box checks and numbers or words filling in blanks led to the automatic selection of appropriate sentences or paragraphs, equivalent to the system I created for Stanford’s ENT department.

Again, not only something that I witnessed, but something that I actually developed myself (whether others unknown to me also developed something similar, or not, I do not know, but with Stanford University being the nucleus of Silicon Valley, I’m just sayin’…) is still being productively used today.

Despite there being stability, there is also change, and so my boss and benefactor, the business manager, got a higher job at a different university, in Florida, and took with him his administrative vision, which his replacement at Stanford did not share, or even understand. At his new job, he was high up enough that he answered only to the Board, and he invited me to go with him to Florida to run that university’s entire IT department. Damn…one of those cross-roads in life in which I probably took the WRONG turn. I turned this opportunity down, thinking that IT management was not really the career I wanted for myself. How different my life would be now, though….

Instead, I had a business idea of my own I wanted to run, so I left Stanford and attempted self-employment. I needed a computer, but PCs, even the most rudimentary ones, were way too expensive for me at the time, so I rented one, a Kaypro. Does anybody remember those? The Kaypro was “portable”; it was a metal box, like a small suitcase, with a handle on the top lid for carrying around. You snapped the lid off and inside it was the keyboard; the rest of the box was the computer itself, with slots for the required two floppy discs and a CRT monitor about five inches in diagonal. Even though it looked like somebody’s Heathkit oscilloscope, I loved the thing.

I actually did have a few customers for my business and I believe I created some marvelous things for them. But the money coming in was far too little and too slow. What all happened then is not relative to this particular tale, but basically the business did not work out; whether the idea was good or not, I can’t quite say, but the timing was definitely wrong. I saw no solution other than to go back to work for somebody else.

I ended up working for Seagate Technology, maker of hard drives. My job was mostly word processing, using the exact same type of computers I had used at Stanford, but in a more mundane, less creative way (using the word processing function, but not the database and programming functions). One interesting part of the job, however, was talking to the company’s engineers from India and translating their verbal instructions for assembly and testing of hard drives into understandable English for the factory. So, for all practical purposes, I was now “writing hard drive assembly instructions”. When I next actually bought (instead of rented) my own computer, I made sure that it had the latest technology, a hard drive by Seagate.

In 1986, I finally bought my first home computer. I was going through some old files yesterday and came across the sales contract for it, which was a Hewlett-Packard Vectra PC, with an IBM COLOR monitor (latest technology) and a Canon LASER printer (brand new printing technology). That whole system cost me in the neighborhood of $10,000. Why, just to have a second font on the Canon laser printer cost me $250 for an additional font cartridge.

Not many today would pay $10,000 for home a computer system, yet this was in 1986, when $10,000 had the present-day buying-power of a little under $20,000. So, by today’s standards, I was willing to pay $20,000 for a home computer? Yeah, maybe not very many people of my generation did that; that having a PC at home was not as usual or expected as I might have thought.

By now the floppy discs were half the diameter of the ones I had used at Stanford, and, as everyone knows, they evolved into the smaller plastic-cased ones, used on the Dell computer I got after the HP was obsolete, which now have all but disappeared, themselves. (That Dell also had a CD-ROM, and a CD burner, two new technologies at the time.)

But with that HP in 1986, I was also on-line with a dial-up modem. This wasn’t the “Wild World Web”, I don’t think that term was in use at the time. It was CompuServ and now I was shopping on line, buying airline tickets on line, and conversing with people on bulletin boards. E-mail, as such, wasn’t quite so common, since so few of the people I knew even had computers. But otherwise, I was conversing all over the world with those who DID have computers and were likewise on CompuServ.

Naturally, I continued to evolve from there until today I have an Apple laptop and a gorgeous biggest-screen-possible aluminum iMac desktop, and an HP color all-in-one printer/copier/scanner/fax, all DSL networked wirelessly. I can take my lapdown down to the pool and do work and go on-line, or, of course, go on-line anywhere in the world where there is free wireless Internet connection. No, I do not have an iPhone with dozens of apps, although my T-Mobile cell phone does have a (cumbersome) Internet connection of sorts that I use mostly to check out movie times when I am out and about. So far, I still draw the line at text messaging, as a technology I don’t want or need.

When I first started working where I work now, Y2K was the big feared danger (and I had to be on a committee that had a plan regarding what we were going to do about it). I’m not going to say that it WASN’T a danger, although all the computer-controlled systems did not shut down and our society did not collapse on midnight of January 1, 2000. What I will say was that any danger there was, was fixed by…whom? By people who KNEW all the old computer systems, the Fortran and the COBOL and so on, all the old programming languages that I and fellow students in college in the late 60s were learning, that’s what’s UNDERNEATH all the beautiful, convenient, accessible user interface that everybody enjoys these days. What if those people weren’t around to go back into the Gordian Knot of those complicated systems to uncover and reprogram all the dating code?

The point is that while we see rapid change happening on the outside of technology, and the ever-expansion of its amazing use, deep down inside are the footprints, the vision, the blood sweat and tears, the wisdom, and the heart and soul, of OLD GUYS (men and women). “Old guys” who were there and contributed to it, or just old guys who just “were there” and understand it.

Sure, some high school kid can (and does) “text message”, just as he will utilize whatever comes next, and whatever comes next after that, and then whatever comes next after that. And my little 11-year-old nephew never seems to be without his laptop.

But don’t, I repeat don’t, ever say that the new user “knows more” than the previous generation or two just because they “have” the technology and they frequently use it in its latest form…in fact, can’t imagine being without it. Those previous generations are the developers and observers and the users from way way back who are INSIDE the very technology that the latest users are enjoying. Let’s remember that, and have some respect.

Even Newton in his science was not willing to accept a singular glory, despite all his genius, saying, as he did, that he knew he was what he was due to his standing on some very broad shoulders. We should all be at least as humble as Newton was.