Tuesday, April 25, 2006

The Candid Camera World

Smile. You're on Candid Camera.

The CNN news anchor said this morning, "The average Londoner is photographed 300 times per day." The world is a stage, at least in London.

These photographs and video feeds come from cameras on posts, light poles, traffic signals, and automobiles. Some cameras are hidden, some are blatantly public.

See for yourself what Times Square looks like, right at this moment.

Recognize anyone?

The web page linked to in the paragraph above, in addition to showing an ongoing real-time view of people in Times Square, New York, has a map showing the locations of about 8 other Times Square webcams through which you can view that world. As a person walks down the street, you can almost stalk them as they move from one webcam to the next. You can be Big Brother.

The tapestry of the views all these cameras collect is usually stored on tape. Although every frame of this video has a known time and location, one cannot access a tape quite like a hard drive. It needs to be mounted and run forward to allow review of what was seen at some particular instant. It is not so easy to follow a person on tape as it is using the real-time web cameras.

More than that, these tapes are not uniformly accessible. The video can come from many sources, many of them commercial, and from many different types of cameras. You can not follow the movement of a person from camera to camera as easily on these tapes as you can in real-time on the webcams. Tracing a person's movements is not yet a piece of cake.

For the growing number of cities that have free city-wide wifi, standalone webcams on light poles and traffic signals will want to appear. Will their signal be available to the public? Will you be able to check for traffic before you leave for work? Will your mom watch over you as you drive along and call you at work about running that red light? Will the police be waiting when you arrive at work?

Will only the police be watchers, or can everyone watch?

Tomorrow's webcam databases will store their video data on direct access storage devices, just like today's home movie producers and reproducers who store their video on their home computer's hard drive. Accessing these databases will be a piece of cake. Any nemesis with access will be able to chart your every move, both yesterday and today.

Know that you are being watched. Any move you make may be before a camera. What to do, what to do? What to say to all the future viewers who may be watching this moment?

Smile?

Fake them out? Put on a good show? Smile and remember that even God is watching? Model the behaviours you hope the watchers will choose for themselves?

You can only be yourself. Seen in all your glory. Paranoia is inefficient. Wave to the crowd, Your Highness.

You can only be yourself. But now you may have to someday justify and defend what you have been. So you must own your government. Because it owns you.

Whether earth is a jail or a garden is up to the prisoners.

Sunday, April 23, 2006

One Nation Among Many

One nation among many.

At the end of the Clinton presidency, America was poised to become the leader of the world. As the one remaining superpower, it could have dominated all further development. Now it has thrust its sword into the sand and the sand has turned to rock, and America has been drained until it is just one nation among many.

Other nations conspire together to seize control. Every nation's agenda is expressed through a web of alliances and coalitions.

The boundary is not what it used to be back when we ruled the world. When we now indulge in brazen bullying, it invites other nations to strangle us. We notch up the rhetoric and they notch up the price of oil.

An endless war against the world is not an option any more.

If we get really bad, the boundaries on our power will collapse to our borders, and we will have to solve our problems internally, as smaller countries do.

Evil is self-limiting.

It is a sad commentary on the state of the current leadership that so many actions are taken or even suggested with no regard to their possible consequences. This is the clinical definition of madness.

Will the Pope let us keep Aviano if we nuke Iran? Will Ireland let us continue to land our military flights? The lifelines to our troops could be cut. They may need to come home anyway, to guard our open borders against the Silkworm shoulder-fired missle importers, the build-a-dirty-bomb clubs, and the anthrax maniacs.

An inability to listen to the views of others ensures failure.

Once again, the power of democracy at work.

Monday, April 17, 2006

The Other America

Forty percent of the voting public in America thinks that the Biblical explanation of how the universe was born should replace the scientific. Not be taught in parallel - replace it.

Meanwhile, they drive cars that run on petroleum created millions of years before the tiny 6000-year span captured by the bible, petroleum discovered using sciences which discarded Adam and Eve as they learned about Tyrannosaurus Rex. They let themselves be healed by brain surgeons whose knowledge of living processes descended from the theory of the shared evolution of life's many forms,yet they pull their children from schools that teach it.

Curiously, almost the same percent has undying support for a fading president.

Who are these people?

In Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon, all the children are above average. If a child is not above average in brains, there are always social skills, height or girth.

As far as intelligence goes, the sad truth that too many Junior High graduates forget is that only half of us are above average. The rest of us are below. Intelligence follows a bell curve. A person with an IQ of 100 is precisely average.

When asked, most people in the lower half will confess that they have above average intelligence. They really believe this. How can they be so deluded? First, they can identify many individuals who are dumber than themselves. Secondly, they cannot identify many who are smarter. This is not intentional. They just have no way of knowing.

Geniuses may walk among us, unnoticed.

The information age treasures intelligence and rewards its owners with free training and wonderful salaries. It connects intelligent people to each other in ways that are not much used by the bottom 40 percent. It presents them with larger information flows, provides databases, organizes histories.

The information age also presents the bottom 40 percent with a more graspable life. Parents who got D's and F's in school and learned early that they would be life's failures, useful only for propelling the curve that makes everybody else look good, now can see their children presented with a ladder of learning that they can climb at their own pace, with the reward of personal accomplishment at each step.

The keyboard teaches the alphabet. The word processor teaches spelling and composition. Messaging teaches social skills. Blogging teaches the art of the soapbox.

Each of these is a part of literacy, each gives a better grasp on life.

The brainy people often forget about the bottom 40 percent, although at election time they rediscover them.

When you're in the bottom 40 percent, life can be manageable if you keep it simple. It can get adventurous if you try to have too much fun. So you want a community of people with whom you can be a good person. You walk the line.

Want to meet some 40 percenters? Go to church. Stay for the fellowship hour after the service. Greet each person as a child of God. They will be happy to tell you about themselves and their beliefs.

Some churches take the bible to be the literal word of God. The book itself is holy. Every last word in it is true, in every translation and edition. The literalists tend to favor the King James edition - the one that sounds like Shakespeare. For them, truth was once and forever revealed, and is immutable. In coming close to it, one comes close to God. All that is needed is acceptance of Jesus' power in your life for your life to change. In these churches a visitor will meet the core of the true believers.

Other churches are less tied to the literal cross. They may believe that God reveals new truth to us daily, every hour, every minute, every second. The model for these churches is that our understanding is always evolving. For many in these churches, the bible is seen as a source of teachings that can change a person, a guide to the process of becoming holy and closer to God, a poetic guide to the history of man's evolving relationship with his maker. They are Christian, but not literalist.

Literalists thrive on faith.

Believe something long enough - make yourself believe it - and it will become true for you. Your husband loves you, even though he beats you. Your children are in Jesus' hands because you pray for them every morning, and they're sure not in your hands, at least not the older ones. If the disability check got a little more generous, we'd have Rush Limbaugh to thank for that. Believe that people can be good, and they will. Have faith in their salvation, and they will have faith in yours.

Faith beats logic for a literalist. Truthiness meets the test.

Literalists thrive on the power of trust.

Trust that the president will take good care of the nation. Trust in the candidate who looks the most like Johnny Carson. When you vote, vote for the president if you can. After all, he is our leader, and we need to show our support. He may not know everything, but he will surround himself with competent people. We hope and trust.

"Being loyal to your school is just like being loyal to your girl" goes an old song, possibly by the BeeGees. Being loyal to your country is just like being loyal to your mom and dad.

Of course there are also those in the bottom 40 who don't go to church. It's hard to find them at a fellowship hour, except perhaps at a club or a bar. They are another country, too.

People who are mentally in the bottom 40 percent also tend to be in the bottom 40 percent financially. This means fewer can afford cable. Fewer have computers. Fewer can type. Fewer can navigate the web.

For people in the bottom 40 percent, truth does not need to be a product of logic. You don't have to deduce the truth. Truth is what you believe. You may believe something to be a truth because someone shouted it at you long and loud, or made you shout it. It can be like the barking of a dog. He who barks the loudest is the truthiest. You believe something because you trust the source.

You may believe a truth because you need to believe in something so you can know you exist.

Truth is spoke in simple words. The truest sentences are the shortest. Long words and long sentences are hard to understand and are probably intended to fool a person.

How can the bright, young residents of blogland, the world's newest ivory tower, connect with the yearning masses aching to breathe free?

Ask a biblical literalist who parented the brides for Adam and Eve's sons and the question may confuse him, but it will not put his mind in gear. Suppose, instead, that in exploring understandings, you ask, "What is the evidence?" and "How do you know that this is true?" Given the carrot of your attention, a simple mind can learn to reward its listener by constructing supportable, reality-based understandings.

We are all simpler than we think.

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Model For An Endgame

Ever drop a nickel down one of those hyperbolic coin funnels and watch it roll around and around, its circle getting smaller and smaller until it finally spins madly at the center, loses traction against the sides, and falls down the hole?

The end of a presidential second term couldn't get any simpler than that.

The coin funnel is a good model for a lot of kinds of endings, including death itself. As a chess game near its end gets down to fewer and fewer pieces, the players make long sequences of short moves trying to position themselves for the checkmate, or to avoid it. I've read that the Romanovs, Russia's ruling family, slowly spent all their money after the revolution, trying to recover their lost wealth. Unable to rule, the only motion they could make was to sue, which they did until their money ran out.

A curiously similar model for the beginning of a game is the cornucopia, the Horn of Plenty. From a tip as small as a mustard seed, all creation flows. Fruits and vegetables and many mustard seeds.

Cornucopias and coin funnels are happening all around us, every day. Somewhere between the cornucopia and the coin funnel is the world of what survives from day to day. If we can avoid getting caught in a coin funnel or smothered by a cornucopia, then in this world, day by day, can we do good, in this world can we help freedom be discovered.

Sunday, April 09, 2006

All The People Unforgotten

An age has come where information about an object is more important than the object it describes.

If you know your great-great-grandparents' names, you can go to www.familysearch.org and find them on the 1880 census. Another website, Ancestry.com, has indexed many other censuses, although they are free to view only at the library. Your ancestry is at your fingertips.

You can see your home from the air on half a dozen sites. Type an address into Google and click "Local" and a mix of roadmaps and aerial photos can lead you to your roof.

On another site, www.zillow.com, you can see what your home is worth, how many rooms it has, and when you last replaced the furnace.

Three different sites advertise on Google that they can provide a list of the calls made on your cellphone to anyone who wants it.

Add to this the phone surveys, spyware, keystroke collection programs, phishmail, and rootkits that penetrate our daily lives and one longs for boundaries on the world's info-lust. But this is only what's happening today.

What does tomorrow have in store? One up-and-coming technology is DNA-based genealogy. By sampling your DNA and comparing markers with lines of descent, companies can confirm your ancestry. For those who do not know their parents, this is a wonderful step forward. For those of us who know too much about our parents, it's a step toward the time when each person's whole genetic map will be databased and that record will govern their life.

The information pool is very hungry. Our own hungers drive it.

Being able to see online the exact digitized image of a census page recorded on the dusty steps of a poor country farmhouse in 1860, to see this longhand scrawl on my screen, enabled me to correct a misspelling and to connect a missing link to a chain of ancestors that went back for ten generations.

The reward of discovering that my ancestors lived near the state line and misspelled their names suggests that more was afoot than the census reveals. Someday soon I shall drive to that county and ferret out their secrets. Whatever is of record. Who knows what it may be.

Who should know what?

Should our descendents know just how much of their inheritance got spent on bodily fungicides? That data is in the system. It only needs to be indexed to be searchable. I'm sure they'll be charmed when they discover it, just as I was charmed to find the suspicious humanity of my own ancestors.

What should the government know? Should it listen to what we are trying to tell it?

Or should it harvest the traces we leave, come to its own conclusions about our need for fungicide, and perhaps decide for itself that our athlete's foot infection is a social danger requiring special quarantine?

Do we get to decide what it should know? Can we decide what it should do with what it knows? Can we get a handle on it?

Only through our elected representatives, only by our continued attention to their probable malfeasance.

The data presently in the hands of government yearns to be free. Data warehousing connects disparate records into a single row. A process called data mining joins the dry spray fungicide users with the wet spray ones and joins that list to the heavy bleach consumers over 50. Suddenly the group of those who fail to clean between their toes is known. Your name is on a list. It gets shared between departments.

Commercial database vendors would love to add those lists to their pool. When free samples of foot fungicide begin to arrive in the morning mail, you will know your data has been compromised. When your congressman votes strangely, you will know the same for him.

Democracy demands that the people continually take control of their government, again and again. Just as the government is doing its best to learn about its client base (or victim base, depending on your viewpoint), so, apparently, are information age citizens doing their best to learn about the intricate and often hidden inner workings of government. Identifying an incompetent bureaucrat or a failed policy is a game everyone can play. It can only make government more responsive and the world more democratic.

At the same time, your private soul can never be known. We carry the burden of a world that thinks it knows us, but in spirit we are free and unknowable.

Say hello to the unknowable in the next person you meet. It may respond.

Saturday, April 08, 2006

A Return To Stillness

Walk slowly someday.

You will notice that the more slowly you walk, the more you see. And the less you are seen. Others fail to notice you.

As my mother aged, she drove more and more slowly through the hills near her home. When she reached 15 miles per hour and realized that the view out the side windows was more interesting than the road ahead, she stopped driving.

The more slowly you move, the more you see of where you are. Go fishing and the world makes more sense. You can see totalities.

The faster your motion, the more you focus on the road ahead, as that is where you will be by the time you can react. If you are running in panic, less and less do you know where you are.

Time then to sit still and know what am.

Thursday, April 06, 2006

Democracy Seeks Truth

Do politicians ever tell the truth?

Most words have many meanings, especially in the larger dictionaries. Between two people who know each other well, words can gain special meanings. The words before and after a word can change its meaning. Combined in a sentence, words can mean so many different things that the sentence becomes impossible to understand. You can't be sure what you heard.

Most people make the best sense they can of what they hear. If they're unsure, they determine what's most likely and decide that that is in fact what they heard. This personal act of closure is what enabled many people to believe that Saddam was in cahoots with Al Queda. Because they decided for themselves what they had heard, they owned their conclusion, had an investment in it, and defended it against all comers. Truth was known. Implication, repeated many times, became truth.

Because people do this, politicians speak in streams of code words and catch-phrases. They know how we know what's true. They know about our buttons and how to push them.

Politicians are always hoping to speak your language. Before a group of Christians, they are full of "Hallelujahs". Among veterans the code words include "Honor" and "Strength". The word "Justice" appears when they speak to the dispossessed.

It is in their best interests to tell people what they want to hear and to promise more than they can deliver. They can always play catch-up later. They get hired for their promise, not their past. We are very forgiving.

You cannot depend on a politician to tell you about his lies. He may not tell the truth.

You can depend on his opponent. An opponent may be no lover of truth, but if he can find a lie to which he doesn't also subscribe, he will expose it. It will be to his advantage.

But first the politician must be given a chance to prove the truth of his lies. Who knows, we might be wrong. Not until a project seriously fails can we know that it was based on falsehood and illusion.

Without opposition there cannot be a search for truth. Without time there cannot be proof of falsehood.

Opposition, over time, delivers truth.

The ongoing search for an agreed-upon truth is much more visible in Congress than in our elections. In Congress, almost everything proposed is opposed. Battles of words and wits shape the laws that bind us. Laws are heated in the forge of passion, hammered and shaped on the anvil of the real, then nailed like horseshoes to the hoofs of the Executive Branch, where they can help it meet the ground. The Executive promptly throws them off.

An Executive Branch leadership must be receptive to the will of the people as expressed through Congress. It must actively engage the targets of the laws Congress creates. Failing either of these it cannot hope to maintain its survival for long.

The truth will out.

Monday, April 03, 2006

The Endgamers Versus The Openers

As he watches his father's thousand points of light turn into the glint off a thousand pitchforks, President Bush must be aware that his administration is increasingly trapped in an endgame.

In chess the endgame is played with fewer and fewer pieces. The moves are more desperate, the logic is simpler and less avoidable.

Unless things change, in about 6 months the number of soldiers lost in action in Iraq will be greater than the number of people killed on 9/11. The number of people Bush sent to their death in his silly sidetrip will exceed the number lost to terrorists.

Saddam's trial threatens to outlive the American presence in Iraq. If we leave before he is convicted, he could be rescued by his old comrades in crime. We could be back where we started. So we need to have a presence in Iraq until Saddam's trial is completed.

Meanwhile, federal prosecutors are seeking the death of failed terrorist Moussaoui on the grounds that his lies led to the death of thousands. Setting a new precedent, they are, which may find use in future cases.

Discovered in the act of peering into everyone's private communications, the President excused himself by explaining that the endless war against terrorism empowers him to do as he wishes. His excuses dig an even deeper hole. Mismanagement is declared intentional.

Rather than cut him down, the Democrats have elected to let him swing in the wind, a poster boy for bad politics incompetently defending his failed adventures. There is little he can do.

While the conservatives are trapped in an end game, the progressive forces are playing the beginning of a chess game - the opening. At every move, they put a new piece in action. Capture the center. Catch the opponent off guard. Get a piece ahead. Put him on the run.

Every departure from truth is eviscerated and its entrails explored. Every shading invites close inspection. Every move attracts more headlights.

It may be that conservatives, the defenders of what has been, will always be trapped in an end game. Progressives may similarly be trapped in a perpetual opening game.

Our two-party system at work.

Sunday, April 02, 2006

The Most Revolutionary Act Of All

It's easy, it's simple, and anyone can do it.

Ask somebody "What do you think?" today. Then wait three seconds.

This tells them that somebody values their opinion. It tells them that their opinions matter and that so do they. It gives them permission to spout, permission to exist. It gives them human attention, a precious commodity. They will seek it forever.

It also sets up a model for their own behavior. They learn that they can get attention by giving attention. Ask them their thoughts often enough and sooner or later they will begin asking others the same question.

Remember to wait for an answer.