Reading out the Window

Not a typo. To be sure, my first act on rising is looking out the window. But then the world I want to see is really merely Weather. I already know my drive, backyard, pear tree, and the rest—or the trusty Honda and the houses across the way.

So Window here means World generically, and early on I’m reading it because the world window is made of paper: Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Detroit News (all depending on the day). A screen would be another kind of Window, but I wake first and the TV makes a noise that might wake Brigitte. That would be. Sad. So paper it must be at first, and for me by preference. I get more from paper and with fewer distractions.

Given the built-in bias in every form of medium, Windows is the real word here. Reading out the Windows, plural. WSJ? Stocks. NYT? All the news that’s fit to print. Well, not quite. The Detroit News? Sports. It takes some effort to figure out what sport deserves half the front page—unless you recognize the code words, e.g. Simpson blankets Bohannan. Is blankets a name, noun, or verb?

My own reading is very selective these days, and the time spent on the W (be that Window, Windows, Weather, or World) less and less. That’s because as you retire (in every sense of that word), you notice that you no longer recognize the names, be that Simpson, GreenSky, Nvidia, or MoneyGram. Much effort must be expended even recognizing what, say, Nvidia does. And when you do, you’re  no longer interested.

I note here that W is not quite the last letter of the alphabet, but close. Thus the World is not quite all there is to read about. There remains something that transcends the W. XYZ. So after reading out the Windows for a brief spell, I fold the papers for Recycling and turn to XYZ. In practice that means tidying up or, on a day like today, dressing warmly to shovel some snow. Doing that I see a big green truck pulling up. The letters GFL are on its side. Even our trash hauler is going in for abbreviations! But what does that mean? Remove the goggles; peer more closely. Ah. Green for Life. But all out there is white and blowing…

Attention Deficit Denial (ADD II)

The New York Times ran a story this morning headlined (in the Times Digest) Secretary of State Leads from Shadows. The essence the article tells that Rex Tillerson has avoided media exposure since becoming Secretary of State. “In the light” means being on TV; “in the shadows” spells obscurity and hence, in the eyes of media, a lack of importance.

Years ago, already, it had occurred to me that celebrity is a curse—indeed a burden. And Tillerson, who will turn 65 on March 23, has spent his life in the shadows. He graduated from college in 1975. That same year he joined Exxon as an engineer, and stayed with that employer until his swearing in as Secretary of State in 2017. If experience forms our habits, it must be difficult to become a creature of the limelight overnight. So Tillerson must be comfortable in being invisible—whereas a political animal, like Donald Trump, must wake every morning wondering what he can do to be the center of the news today—rather than what he must do.

Attention is addictive. Once addicted to attention, it must be painful just to be oneself. No crowds of journalists, no flashing lights, no shouted questions. No cameras when one walks to one’s own plane. No need to point a finger at a person (invisible to the camera). What pain to be just human.

But Fame has its benefits. I remember once reading an historian who said that any person, no matter how obscure, observed in public to hold conversation with Louis XIV, was sure to become rich very soon. For me that told the whole story of celebrity. One can work out how that happens—how contact with power can render one powerful. The mystery (and emptiness) of such derived power also struck me at the time, and I made the resolve to avoid Louis XIV if he ever comes into my view. As for Tillerson, it will be interesting to see if he is still in the shadows when his time has come to fade away...

Evolution in Media and Beyond

Brigitte found a fascinating article yesterday centered on the U.S. Ramstein Air Base in Germany—a place where she once worked before she and I ever met. The context today was Ramstein’s role in making drone warfare possible; the article is titled “Game of Drones” and appeared on April 17 in The Intercept (link).

The background on the publisher for starters. The Intercept is the first publication of a corporate entity called First Look Media. That corporation dates to October 2013—hence we might call it young. It was founded by Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire founder of e-Bay. He is just 47 himself and hence, in a context like this one, also quite young. He built the company around three editors famed for groundbreaking and generally liberal orientations: Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Jeremy Scahill.

Omidyar’s entry into the media by founding his own company is less visible than Jeff Bezos’ (Amazon) purchase of the Washington Post or Chris Hughes’ (co-founder of Face Book) majority investment in The New Republic. No doubt, now the pattern has been set, yet other Big Names in the e-World will also enter the media. The evolution here, in a way, follows the source of New Money; to get into the media has long been the crowning act of reaching that stage in success where becoming a Lord of Mass Communications is the last peak left to climb.

The story of Ramstein today, by contrast, illustrates societal/technological evolution on a grand scale: How to annihilate distance (and therefore time) by permitting drones to destroy targets from terminals at Creech Air Force Base in Clark County, NV using drones flying over Arabia, let us call it. The intermediate point of focus is Ramstein’s satellite relay station, itself served by a Galaxy-26 satellite that oversees most of the eastern hemisphere of the globe. The satellite serving as Ramstein’s eye-in-the-sky was first moved from a location above the U.S. to the one it now occupies in 2009.

Evolution keeps working in its mysterious ways. And just to imagine the money and effort to move a satellite halfway across the world boggles the mind—and never mind the vast labors and expenditures necessary to implement a military system the public is only vaguely aware of. Brigitte sighs, remembering her humble labors at Ramstein which, even in her days, was a center of the Cold War. How it has evolved….and how rapidly.

Back in 1948, when the occupying French forces began to build the first airbase at Ramstein, the town had a population of around eight thousand—and the place to see was the Catholic St. Nicholas Church, the tallest structure anywhere. Back then the feast of Corpus Christi was celebrated with a procession—and is still celebrated today. 

The evolution, therefore, is just 67 years old—even as the old still hangs in there. How long will all this last? I found the image of Ramstein’s St. Nikolaus church on a Wikipedia page showing another hundred or more airplanes taking off, landing, or making patterns in the sky. Progress is still going on and up, higher and higher. Someday, of course, this curve will peak and start going down again. I won’t be here then, but it will happen.

Easter Morning

An odd dream of black Mormon women controlling the Postal Service from the Moon wakes me this morning. The New York Times is, of course, “itself” and embodies the same incoherencies as my dream.

This madness will retreat, of course, as I anchor myself in concentration. Neither dream associations nor the news deliver the longed for Divine Order. But Divine Order is at work. My surroundings are still. Faint sunlight. The call of a mourning dove. Ignoring Netanyahu, the trees and bushes bud. The noise of a crumbling civilization does not signal anything high no matter the vast technologies and moneys that bring me news of them.

Settle out. Calm. That steady hiss in my ears means silence. No wind. The temperature is over 40. Deep breath. A kind of sleepiness steals over me, but B will wake now any minute and her cup is ready to take up filled with water boiled in our hi-tech Sunbeam device calculated to perform in 1 minute and 28 seconds. Breathe again…. The ragged clouds of madness have, indeed, already blown away. The animal has quieted; it sensed a superior and reassuring presence.

The resurrection of the Lord today: a potent, hopeful symbol even if we see no hint of it anywhere in a paper that today reports on a search for Jesus’ bones.

Where the Plastic Money Went

Our Bank, PNC, provides an annual summation of charges made to our principal credit card. We only use one. We charge most everything to it that we buy outside—never mind small and very incidental purchases like the occasional ice cream in summer and the like.

Here is where at least some of our money, the plastic kind, went this year:

Category	%
Media	27.3
Groceries	25.1
Merch./Retail	20.4
Moving Expense	15.5
Insurance	4.3
Restaurants	3.7
Gas	3.0
Health	0.7

Total expenditures include two other major categories. One of these are direct payments by our bank to designated accounts:

·         Utilities

·         Extra health and pharmaceutical insurance.

The other is checks that we write. We write fewer and fewer, but some of these are often significant in size:

·         Charities

·         Repairs

·         Special jobs like lawn repair, guttering, etc.

The percentage breakdown is for on-going expenses. We note with some raised eyebrows that we pay more for media—including telephone, newspapers, magazines, cable television, Netflix, and Internet—than we pay for food! Always suspected something like that.

A note or two. A special expense in 2014 was the actual physical move we made in July. With that absent, the Media percentile would be higher. Health is low—but only because we don’t use a credit card to pay for it--and Medicare does most of it. Gas is low as well, but that’s because we buy most of our gas at Costco, and Costco expenditures are listed under groceries.

Yes. Those media. This posting today inspired by news to the effect that a portion of Arizona lost all Internet service because somebody found and severed a major carrier line buried deep in mountainous territory. All sorts of devices went down, not least ATM machines where we draw out cash when we need it.

The Public Square

One of the curious consequences of modern technology is that it causes distortions to Time and to Space as these are ordinarily experienced. What they are is a philosophy, natural and other, keeps examining. I emphasize modern technology because its uses demand very dense and ample forms of energy; the availability of such energy really dates to the mid-nineteenth century.

When we speak of the “public square” these days, we no long literally mean a place. Long ago and far away, however, when the Greek agora and the Roman forum were such centrally located and large open spaces, space in the ordinary sense was very important for any kind of meaningful public assembly. The spatial aspect of public communication had not yet been (call it) virtualized. That virtualization began with the rise of the newspaper, was intensified by radio, and became exhaustive with the dawn of television. Since then—if we must absolutely find a space for this public square—we find a part of it in every living room; it is the part were communications are directed at the public. The response to these communications has been institutionalized as polling; it is from polling that we get public opinion—rather than from the shouting, yelling, or clapping in an actual, physical forum. The geographical reach of the old agora was also limited maximally to a 100-mile circle. Our media are influential everywhere.

The time dimension in ancient times was limited to the speed of travel by horse or by ship. Events in China taking place back then on a given day could not—could never—reach people in Italy on the same day. Today we’ve annihilated Time as well or, to be more precise, the speed at which electronics waves travel is the new limit.

So where do we fit the Internet? Is it yet another extension of the media? Does it enlarge that public square? In an ambiguous way— perhaps. It enlarges the public square for those who are willing to use it for that purpose—but it is generally much slower than media-capped-by-TV. The Internet is also only potentially public. My favorite analogy is that posting something on the web is analogous to typing out a sheet and pinning it to the back of one’s garage. If the garage backs onto an ally, some potential readers might see it…. In fact it isn’t quite as bad as that because the Internet has multiple searchable indexes, the big one being Google. But the Internet, like all modern technology, annihilates space and time to the extent now possible. It is the Great Library. You can find virtually any kind of take on reality there, from the absurd on to the exalted. But it does not oblige you to go to any building anchored in space. Consulted with mobile devices, it is everywhere. And its speed is very fast. Ah, the 1950s. All those trips to the library—and up and down all those stairs there….

For Christie’s Sake!!

It strikes me as quite implausible to imagine that people delayed an hour or more because a bridge is closed would reason as follows:  “This must be my Mayor’s fault, a Democrat, who failed to endorse my Governor, a Republican. And this is what he gets. Therefore I will not ever vote for my Mayor again.” If traffic delays produced such thought, we would have recall elections all over the country every month, and nothing would get done. Come to think of it, nothing is betting done anyway.

Here is a popular Governor. His chances to run for president are now totally ruined? I’m made to think so by a press possessing the brain-size of sharks. (We learned yesterday that sharks have quite minute brains.) In 2016, yet. When I let my mind roam over attractive candidates for president, Christie does come to mind, along with Jerry Brown of California—and former Mayor Michael Bloomberg. With a Democratic Congress behind her, Hillary Clinton, seems to me, would also make a formidable president, but that proviso makes such an outcome unlikely. Furthermore, while certainly a wild man, but in an attractive way, Christie might just be taken at his word. He did not cause that traffic jam.

Shaking my head, moving my hands wildly. The New York Times again tells me that our Visa Card is unresponsive. We may be denied such news in the future unless we act with alacrity. Might be a good idea to let the paper lapse…

Other News on ZNN

For the first time in a while, all three papers that reach us here—Detroit News, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal—all featured the same story prominently on the front page: The City of Detroit has filed for bankruptcy. The Detroit News, of course, is only delivered thrice weekly (Thursday, Friday, and Sunday—the days that advertisers still insist upon), thus it illustrates one of the changes that’s taking place gradually in the media: the slow fade of the local daily.

Another change, of more recent date, is CNN’s renaming itself ZNN with the onset and still virtually continuous coverage of the Zimmerman trial—yes, even after the case has been decided. Well, the renaming isn’t official yet, but in this household we’re ahead of the curve. That trial’s coverage is also the early introduction of might be called the News Serial, thus wall-to-wall introduction of coverage of some event certain to be extremely popular with the public. The Z-phenom is not the first. Some earlier trials were run this year with tornados.

ZNN still covers “Other News,” much in the same way that the PBS’s Newshour does. We tune in to that program daily too, but only to hear the Other News, usually delivered by Hari Sreenivasan. That’s real news—but it only takes about five to seven minutes of the entire hour (all right, 45 minutes) of that show. So also with ZNN. But it is taking such a long time of watching the trial, the tornado, the tsunami, or the hurricane before a little Other News shows up that one is tempted to zero in on Google’s newspage to get any kind of news at all, and that’s becoming problematic too.  

To be a well-informed citizen? It’s growing more arduous. Even Google is caving. The three leading stories on Google News this morning? One: A Massachusetts cop released snapshots of one Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Dzhokhar who? Oh! Yes. I do. I do have the vaguest. That was the Boston Marathon News Serial of which Dzhokhar was a leading character. Two: Why was Zimmerman (yes, the Z-phenom) tried by only six jurors—the cosmic question that’s been plaguing me all night. Three: Why, it’s Mr. Snowden, still holed up somewhere in Moscow’s airport. Now as for Other News, keep hitting PageDown in arduous labor to keep informed.

The Good Robot

The good robot will have three functionalities. One is a sensory system that conveys what is happening outside it fully and accurately. The second is a logical structure within able to “understand” outer events correctly. The third is a motor system, moved by the logical structure, which will enable it to act correctly, thus avoiding “dangers” and realizing “values.”

Are we good robots? It seems that we are. Our sensory systems bring us the outside world without distortion, more or less “straight.” To be sure, we have some problems at dawn or dusk or in the night—and fire hydrants may look like dogs if, say, some discarded cardboard box is leaning up against it. We are fast. And because we are, it is very difficult to draw sharp lines between our perceptions and our reactions. But at least at the level of ordinary experience what comes in is neutral. What we perceive may be interpreted as threatening or attractive, but those qualities arise from within. They follow the perception at a tiny lag in time. In turn our actions or inactions to this stimulus are sequentially last.

Imagine next what would happen if the input were distorted. This can happen if the sensory apparatus is defective or comes to be modified by drugs. Suppose that our senses were managed by another person—and that that person had something to gain or lose by how we interpreted the incoming signal. The reason why our inputs are always just “the facts, Mam, nothing but the facts” is because we are—a good robot. The design is optimal. It mutes the same old and draws attention, always, to change, the unusual—the moving, the too hot, too cold, too sharp, too dim, too bright. Otherwise it is neutral.

Now our modern Media are our only organ for sensing the Great Collective. Alas, they’re managed by other people. And these people have incentives to distort the signal in ways that will benefit them. Minimally they have to earn income to support the services they provide, and they are in competition—whereas, in us, different senses, like touch, sight, smell, hearing, taste are flawlessly organized so that only the intensity of a sensation will cause us to prefer one over another sense. “What is that evil smell. Where does it come from?!” And we’re on our feet—even if we’re watching a very tense mystery.

To be a great collective robot’s sensory system, the Media must deliver news, if nothing else, as objectively as possible. But that’s only possible if there is a unity of vision out there too. Reforming the Media, so that they deliver only the facts, Mam, without slant, clever choice, and interpretation appears, ultimately, an impossibility. We’re individuals, not cells in a Great Collective. Therefore, in the case of watching or reading the Media, what comes in is a distortion—and yet another functionality must be cultivated before we can permit ourselves to react. We must develop and apply a truth filter. No robot has that, alas, be it good or bad. But we do.

Remembering Pre-Media

What was it like before the media arose? To get a feel for that I just think back to the times when I was too young to read the printed version effectively. The time when I could came when I was already an adult, had left home, had joined the Army, felt myself out “in the world,” and bought myself a subscription to Time magazine.

Before that time the world seemed oddly greater—because the part I knew about was relatively small. It reached me through living people: parents, nursemaids, teachers, other children. Yes, radio was already present then. It had an odd, a funny sound. Adults sometimes gathered around it and listened to that sound with anxious faces. It was war time. Martial music would come in the wake of such troubling news.

Before papers, before radio? Outdoor markets and civic squares substituted for the media. People had to go outside and meet with others—or someone came by, hurriedly passed “it” on, and then one had to rush out to the square to see, to hear. As for what might be going down in far away Tibet—and whether or not some army was invading it—that sort of thing was way beyond perception.

I learned of Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassination from a young nurse in a hospital waiting room. I was the only person there, half nodding off as I waited for Brigitte who was giving birth. The nurse was shaking my shoulder. I opened my eyes. Hers were right in front of mine. “They shot him,” she said in agitation. “They shot him.” And she was gone. I had to discover what she meant on my own. That was a tiny return to the pre-media days. But, of course, she’d heard it on the radio—and rushed out to take the news to whomever she could reach.

Even since my childhood, which already had that squeaky radio and those slow periodic papers actually worth reading—papers that printed special editions when something really big was happening—the world has been completely transformed. Distance has invaded our Now. Our bodies, optimized to deal with rather small environments—while our spirits can range to infinity—are now subjected to stimuli from all across the globe, in images, sounds, and in written form. We react to all of the alarms as if they were here, on top of us—but they are far away. They cloud our mood, they distract, they shanghai our reflexes and emotions. The media bring news of explosions and of mayhem—but do not match these with still landscapes that, in Tibet as indeed everywhere, are also part of the environment. Monstrous distortions. I applaud those who are beginning to filter out all the news unfit to know because we cannot do the least bit of a thing about them.

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The image is an Amplion AR 19 Dragon Radio Horn Speaker shown here.

The Stealth Phenomenon

The stealth technology—its most “visible” form is military hardware—is also known as LO technology; LO stands for “low observable.” But observable by what? Well, radar and other mechanical sensors such as those that pick up differences in sound or thermal effects. The modern form of stealth technology was undoubtedly born right alongside the invention of radar (RAdio Detection And Ranging)—but the art was present long before that time as camouflage—blending into the terrain and thus remaining invisible: animals and plants practiced it long before humanity learned to hide itself in war—or peace.

For my purposes today, however, military stealth technology merely serves as an illustration. Why is it that we see virtually no Good News in the media—aside from a few “heart-warming” features served up sparsely in Sunday papers or, with slightly patronizing smiles, by the TV media? The reason I’d propose today is that significant ranges of social reality prefer to operate behind a kind of stealth technology for practical reasons as well as on principle. To remain invisible to the media, an institution must pass three tests: it must behave correctly at all times, it should produce genuine value for the public, and it must avoid drawing attention to itself. The naturally accruing attention from its constituency will be enough to help it operate effectively. The same goes for individuals.

One of the very first German sayings I learned as a boy, after World War II had carried us to Germany, was “Selbstlob stinkt”: “Self praise stinks.” Children would yell that when someone was trying to make himself/herself too big. That sort of thing, coming from your peers, had an educational effect. Attention was a by-product, and nothing more than that, of action—doing things right, not doing things to gain visibility.

All this came to mind recently when news came that Dell Computer was going private—and whenever that subject arises, the privately-held company—I always remember Cargill, Inc., the largest of these. Its headquarters were (still are) in suburban Minneapolis, where we once lived. I got to know Cargill rather well and hence developed an admiration for the privately-held company—in an age when “coming of age,” for a corporation, means “going public.”

The publicly held corporation, what with the commercial culture that has developed around it, is something of a corruption. The trading of its stock becomes the focus of attention—and works backwards to skew all decision making. It leads to all kinds of evils, like acquisitions and divestitures, short-term planning, mass lay-offs that cause the stock to jump, and the absurd notion that the corporation exists only to make stockholders rich rather than fulfilling missions stated at the time of its incorporation. Such entities avidly desire visibility—and also suffer from it. Selling stock to the public is an easy way to get large capital infusions—but I wonder if the benefit actually covers the eventual functional losses the public suffers from the process. If it’s easy—it is suspect.

Good institutions do not attract media attention. The good is taken for granted—the disturbing produces headlines, draws attention, and therefore sells ads. The glow of Good is local. I suspect that the Good or at least the Neutral is overwhelmingly more common than the sleazy—but the lenses of the world bring nothing but news of corruption, decay, and of collapse. What percentage of the total is it? We can only guess.

Press Freedom and Self-control

Are the communications media the sensory organs of the collective? Functionally yes. If the press is the ears and eyes of society—and the press simply reports what it “senses”—a free press is clearly valuable and legitimate. To illustrate, let me view this at the personal level. What I see out there is initially simply—what I see. The images are neutral. The valuation of what I see comes at a slight delay; it is another function. When the press undertakes not only to report but also to value the news, to interpret it, to give it emphasis in various ways, why then it morphs into something else. At present here, where press-freedom is guaranteed, the media have become functionally like a collective consciousness. Continuous coverage of disasters or mass killings literally saturates the public awareness with news packaged to excess: excess horror, excess sentimentality, excess outrage, on and on.

Let’s assume it’s so: the media are the collective consciousness. But then in turn the press should exercise a corresponding self-control. If self-control isn’t exercised, the freedom granted to the press becomes problematical. It begins to constellate other situations—like needlessly yelling fire in a crowded theater. The operant assumption is that the public has self-control. Therefore the press is free to profit from the exploitation of anything that happens.

But the operant assumption is false. When it comes to electronic media, especially television, the public is conditioned by it. TV watching is almost impossible to avoid. News channels have evolved into quasi-entertainment channels. Therefore lack of self-control by the rulers of the press has translated ever more into lack of self-control by the public. Curiously all of us—not least those who commit mass murders—live more in our minds than in our bodies. Hence our coverage of mass killings may well serve as inspiration for yet other marginal people to enjoy a moment of glorious fame.

The Chinese understand the relationships I’ve sketched out here. Their own imposition of self-control on the media is certainly excessive. Our version is the polar opposite. The right way is somewhere in between. A story yesterday reported on the Chinese censoring a paper because it editorialized in favor of a more constitutional government in China. Amusing. Here the Constitution protect press freedom. And things have slid too far down the slope. Therefore it has become virtually impossible for the Federal Communications Commission to clean up our media or impose some semblance of discipline on them. We all own the spectrum. We license some to use it. Most abuse that freedom. And to undo that, we would have to change our Constitution. Good luck with that. But if my last post on enantiodromia is correct, in the future it will happen here. And in China the press will be freed. And therefore I feel for future generations in China while also being more confident about the future of our own.

Stormy Weather

It’s just an anecdotal thing—in contrast to a vast, exhaustive survey—but as I scan expressions of public critique of everything (excepting only certain sacred subjects) I am always reminded of reading the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a respected German daily back in the 1960s.  Just for the record, the FAZ has also changed; I’m not hoisting up some icon. But my memories are of lengthy analytical articles looking at current events and developments, written with huge care and empty of the emotions, clever flourishes, and ink-on-paper eruptions of outrage that now are pretty much routine.

Got to thinking, looked up the word “jeremiad,” reviewed the career-path of Savanarola (1452-1498), noted with pleasure that he burned objects like mirrors, cosmetics, playing cards, and fine dresses in what came to be known as bonfires of vanity, on which fascinating subject Tom Wolfe (he who also wrote The Right Stuff) fashioned a novel in 1987. Just in time, one might say, honoring the Japanese.

Got to wondering if this whole nexus of public speech ever resulted in appropriate reform? My guess is that it never did—or does. By the time the hell-fire preachers arise, secular or religious, the game is always over. The preaching is a symptom of its times. The preachers, to be sure, always find huge audiences. They’re entertaining. The times, at such times, have the character of vast storms. Huge masses of people are swayed this way, that way. All coherence disappears as baby carriages get magically embedded in the trunks of mighty trees. And above it all is a demonic howl—and that howl is then the public speech.

What helps small minorities of people then—and it is only small minorities that remain unaffected—is the still, small voice of reason, but it must also be publicly audible. It helps remind the members of the minority that they are not entirely alone. The proof that only minute groups retain some sanity is brought by the tiny circulation of a handful of periodicals one opens with pleasure when they arrive and, taking a glad breath, sits down to share with someone near.

On the Menu

Doomed	Urges	Irks
Hits	Killings	Undercut
Slams	Tripped	Penalty
Claw Back	Cast Doubt	Squeeze
Pockets of Strength	War	Freezes Out
Plays Up	Cookie Crumbles	Nears Exit
Investigates	Mayhem	Tear Down
Get ‘Haircuts’	Ban	Arms for Battle
Pushed	Tax Cliff	Tune Out
Relieves	Tie Hands	Bulks Up to Fight
Calls Back	Go After	Extreme Regret

Herewith words and phrases surgically removed, chopped, cut, or squeezed out of today’s headlines in the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ, here, of course, is just a random sample and not in any way different from the media taken as a whole. The writing in the Journal is good. Most stories tell you the essence in a lead sentence. Admirable. The picture of the world that emerges is that of giant monsters with pea-sized brains doing battles to the death in a world that is nothing but conflict. That’s Progress. The Journal also captured my two reactions: Tune Out and Extreme Regret.

Quadragesimo Anno - Fast!

Someone has conducted a poll trying to discover what characteristics convince viewers that a pundit or other public figure is credible. The elevating result? Those who speak fastest are viewed as really knowing their stuff. We got to analyzing this momentous discovery. For starters, there are two ways of imbibing television fare. One is by listening to the content of the message, thus its intelligible meaning. The other is to scan the image for its emotional message. And in the second case, the energized fast-speaker will, of course, look more authentic and certain, never mind what he or she is actually saying.

We went on from there. Used to be, we said. Used to be that with much thought and labor the Pope would prepare a letter to the people, an encyclical, written in Latin, translated into many languages, and passed out. First bishops would read and study it, then priests in even greater numbers, finally some summaries would be presented at Sunday sermons to countless congregations. To pick an example, how about the 1931 Quadragesimo Anno, a letter to the public on “the reconstruction of the public order.”

We got to imagining how vastly improved our lives would be if Pope Pius XI would have memorized what he had written and then, having been trained in passionate fast-speaking, would have speed-orated, dare we say rapped, the whole thing to masses assembled to hear the message in St. Peter’s Square. Ah, the opportunities missed for failing to embrace the latest innovation back in the long ago.

April Fool's News

We’re in the process of deciding what paper to read in the morning. The local papers are no longer dailies; they still appear every day but daily delivery only takes place a few days a week; these days are selected to coincide with shopping days in the run up to which advertisers need assurance. The two papers (Detroit News and Free Press) merge, as it were, into a single Sunday edition. My scans (using HP) and their collage (using Picasa), shown here, tells you what met my eyes today, April Fool’s Day. (My mention of two brands above will surely be followed by checks in the mail...?)

We are so used to this sort of thing now, it’s difficult even to remember the sober black-and-white papers of the 1950s, when we arrived, with at best one photograph, sometimes not. The paper we read then was the Kansas City Star. This Sunday issue actually has an internal section intended for the grownups titled News+Views; but the front page is meant to appeal to an imaginary subhuman mass out there I’d call the Yahoos, but I doubt that many now associate that word with Gulliver’s travels any more.

The plan is to abandon this paper and also the daily New York Times; that paper is at least trending in this direction more and more. We think we’ll settle for the Sunday New York Times and, the rest of the week, for the Wall Street Journal. In that process we shall save ourselves a lot of money—necessary because we need it to fill the doughnut hole our Congress has graciously provided to decorate our pharmaceuticals coverage.

Ludi Famis

We are lucky to have discovered and then developed, in sequence, electric power, cameras, film, television, computers, and finally digital recording of sounds and images. For this reason our circus games are altogether virtual. We are enabled to let our decaying imagination soar, if that’s the word, and produce exciting spectacles in which hundreds, thousands virtually die in various horrible ways—but no one actually does, not in the circus, anyway; the arrow thumps into the bared chest with a sound you wouldn’t actually hear; the shaft trembles nicely from the force that supposedly sent it to kill; blood spatters effectively in all directions—but it’s all pure illusion. Death, of course, may still cause the young to succumb to mishaps, like taking a bath, because “a history of drug abuse” lurks in the immediate past. But such deaths also enable us to have soulful retrospectives into the life of the celebrity. Unlike the backward Romans, who had to use real people to enact their combats in the ludi circenses, not least actually dying, our enactors are capable of flying and of physical achievements impossible in what was once admired as “real life”—meaning violence, vulgarity, drunkenness, bar fights, and broken noses.

Déjà Vu

CNN presented a show yesterday titled GPS Road Map for Saving Health Care. The GPS there stands for “Global Public Square.” It was a well-done comparison of heath care programs around the globe, including the United Kingdom, Taiwan, and Switzerland. But I kept having a powerful sense of déjà vu—if not the genuine kind. I really remembered seeing something quite like this. As one segment ended I went to tell Brigitte what the next country on the list would be. Sure enough. I had been right. And after the show ended I said to her: “I’ve seen something very much like this, very much. The same absolute content, same sequence—even some of the people interviewed are the same.”

It turns out I was right; I did the digging this morning. Back on April 15, 2008 PBS’ Frontline presented a program called Sick Around the World. That program had segments on health care as delivered in the United States, UK, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, and Switzerland.  President Obama signed our health care bill on March 23, 2010, thus two years later. CNN’s program, presented by Fareed Zakaria, was quite excellent, Zakaria’s summation correct and eloquent. Such shows, however, have zero influence on actual political behavior. The reason for that is another interesting subject.

The Spread of Fuzz

Fuzzy logic had its beginnings circa 1965, the invention of Lotfi A. Zadeh. I remember it well because a most memorable colleague of mine, Howard Gadberry at Midwest Research Institute, introduced it to me. Howard, who was my elder by two decades or more, and very impressive, yet had a child’s delight in the new. He used to appear in the door of my office, stare at me at length, and when he had my attention begin: “What do you know about sharpness?” Then—after the second or third such event I knew what was coming next—I knew that I would now hear things about “sharpness” I couldn’t have predicted in a hundred years. So here was Howard: “Ever hear about fuzzy logic?”

In a nutshell fuzzy logic is based on probabilities, so in contrast to standard logic which produces True or False—and nothing else—fuzzy logic gives you Maybe and can also quantify it. That’s another way saying that this Whatever is neither this nor that. Everything blends.

Monique is leading a project at present which gives her team, and I’m a member, an opportunity to look at U.S. economic sectors once more in revealing detail. And in conversation after conversation, the same theme keeps emerging: the spread of the fuzz. Trying its absolute damndest to keep the more and more rapidly morphing institutions coherent, at least for statistical reporting purposes, the Bureau of the Census still valiantly clings to concepts like Retail, Wholesale, Manufacturing, and Services, but in a kind of slow-motion shapeshift, our institutions will not, repeat not, hold their forms.

Now statistics, of course, are the tool by means of which we resolve the images of collective reality. Numbers are the photons that bring the information. If outer physical reality were behaving as the economy does, we would have begun to panic quite a while ago. That dog is morphing into something else. But what is it. No sooner do we say “fire hydrant” than it has shifted shape again and now looks—believe it or not—like a running bush.

It’s everywhere. The phenomenon of fuzzing is most easily noted by seeing journalism morphing into entertainment-propaganda-advertisements-for-myself-gossip-as-an-industry. But lordy, lord. When you see wholesale melting into communications, and manufacturing exploding into a hive of bees, why then you wonder. But we are trying our best to help Monique put the pieces together again. After all, when the subject is pharmaceuticals, people do tend to think, reading our compilations, that we are talking about drugs, not some new forms of semi-monopolistic distribution.

Quick Update of McLuhan

The tedium is the message.