It's Not Just the Full Moon Any More

L.S. came up with this title as we were yukking it up about our "adventures" teaching in the public schools, so I thought I'd steal it since she, like everyone else on the planet, does not read my blog.

What the title refers to is this:

Just as ZOMBIES are the psychic manifestation or personalization of our fear that starving hordes in hand-me-down clothes are coming to devour us,

so the various contemporary story lines about werewolves, feral children and people being "bitten" by something and infected by some rabies-like RAGE virus and going mad ("28 Days Later," "28 Weeks Later," "I Am Legend," "30 Days of Night," etc.) intensely resemble - at least to L.S. and me and probably a lot of other "educators" - the kids we confront on a daily basis at all levels of the U.S. educational penitentiary.

Like those bitten and infected unfortunates, there are just so many kids out there who seem to be on some perpetual mindless treadmill of disruption, defiance, destruction and chaos. They are violently allergic to peace, quiet, order, learning, reason ... they break it up the second any of these blessed states takes hold in the classroom. One pities the poor tormented little creatures.

Cloudy with a chance of bubbles

What is "the cloud"? It sounds too good to be true: a Happy Place where data are stored without ever perishing or degrading or running out of space.

But what have we been told about things that sound too good to be true? Oh yeah, they turn into bubbles, and bubbles burst, and burst bubbles create chaos and pain and poverty.

Looking for a precise definition of cloud computing, a definition that would avoid the telltale ecstatic dreaminess of proto-bubblistic thought, I found this (see link at http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/so-what-is-the-cloud-exactly-experts-want-to-know/13662 ).

Seven experts were asked to define the cloud, and their answers were, and I quote:

1. A way of delivering value and monetization efficiency.

2. The notion of data and applications and hardware sources being accessed remotely.

3. 20 years ago your typical knowledge worker got 80 percent of the info needed to do their job from inside the company. Today, it’s completely flipped. Cloud computing is the technical response to this reality.

4. Providing value with computational devices.

5. I agree with Larry Ellison, I think cloud computing is a lot of hype.

6. Cloud computing is getting all the advantages of computing [without one]. ... Cloud computing is all about making it easier for people who create applications to provide them without the headaches of hardware.

7. Cloud is the worst buzzword I’ve ever heard. Vapor, something you can’t touch. I think it’s a lot of hype, but then again, here I am offering that service.

8. Extracting applications from hardware and networks.

9. Almost inevitable – self-serving technology on demand.

10. The solution to what you have in your basement.

11. As more and more people need it, it makes sense to provide it as a utility.

12. Virtualization is the promise to compute, but it is not actually computing.

13. To some degree, we’re talking about capacity … at some point, hardware becomes obsolete.


The moderator of this forum makes it confusingly clear from the outset that "although cloud computing is hard to define, it’s the reality of how it affects us on a daily basis — rather than its definition — that is important." Maybe that's why he didn't extract a coherent definition from any of these guys. Just dramatically invoking "reality" trumps concrete use of language in this universe.

One of the participants later adds, helpfully if a bit alarmingly:

We’re not so concerned with the hype or what you call it – for us, what it amounts to is real. The best example for us are the cybercriminals – they’re the ones who are the most effective users of the cloud today, with botnets and tens of thousands of zombie computers. That kind of power. That’s what we’re dealing with.

Another participant demands, "What are we putting in place to make sure we have a stable system? There’s only so much electricity, silicon, storage. It’s systemic in our society, but not everyone understands." Is cloud computing supposed to be that "stable system"?

So ... the cloud is everywhere because it can be nowhere, and nowhere because it can be everywhere. It is computing without a computer. It is a "promise" to compute, not computation itself, as our money is now a "promise" to pay, not payment itself. The cloud is information from "outside." Right now it is the playground of cybercriminals (but that will change?). It provides stability without utilizing "electricity, silicon [or] storage." It is even more "virtual" than computing, which I'd thought was virtuality itself. It is the magical solution to the physical limits of power generation, bandwidth, processors and silicon chips.

Despite their lack of physical existence, "there will be private clouds," assures one expert. Down-to-earth computers already lack any privacy whatever; supposedly firewalls made of cloud will prove more unbreachable than those of mere circuitry?

No matter how "remote" the location, the cloud must still exist somewhere. Mustn't it? Unless it's a mathematical point, which has no mass, or an electron, which has no fixed location. All of earth's knowledge contained in a massless point, a placeless particle, virtual virtuality ... Businesses as well as individuals might well feel insecure about relinquishing their data to be "stored" and accessed from such a no-man's land.

The cloud is external and universal. It is the concept that all data will be "outsourced" to some vague mega-processor in the sky (cloud cuckoo-land, I believe the British call it). The Information of all the world will be up for app. But the cloud is, first and foremost, a business opportunity. The next big thing! We know the warning signs by now: the glazed dazed look, the beatific smile, the catch in the throat when speaking of the Beloved, the absolute certainty, the blissful imperviousness to logic, the beautiful belief that this time, this time, there WILL be something for nothing ...

Sharon Who?

I'd heard of the famous Port Huron Statement made by Students for a Democratic Society, but not, until very recently, of the Sharon Statement made by its antagonist, Young Americans for Freedom.

Sharon Tate? Sharon Stone? No, the Sharon Statement was a political position paper arrived at by a small group of YAF members who met for a couple of days at the Buckley family home in Sharon, Connecticut. Written up by M. Stanton Evans, the statement was issued on September 11, 1960.

The Port Huron Statement, named for the town in Michigan and written largely by Tom Hayden, appeared about two years later, in mid-June 1962. It was the product of months of rancorous wrangling within SDS -- although nowhere near at the level such infighting rose to toward that organization's disintegration a mere seven years later.

Clearly the New Left was aware of "Sharon" at the time and were determined to counter it. Not that the mainstream media was giving YAF the time of day. As a high school student I was actually able to read the Port Huron Statement, but heard very little about YAF.

The two statements make an interesting and still useful contrast. For one thing, Hayden rattled on 12 times as long as Evans. But compare for yourselves:

http://www2.fiu.edu/~yaf/sharon.html

http://www.h-net.org/~hst306/documents/huron.html

Paradoxes of the Marxian Belief System

There are several. Here are four; please feel free to add more.


1. "The People must rule" - and because we know what the People want better than they know themselves (i.e., because they're stupid), we are justified in taking power in Their name and governing against Them whenever necessary.

2. "The People are innately good" - and this is why the People must be tricked and coerced and forced into Doing the Right Thing and never allowed to have Their own selfish petty-bourgeois way.

3. "We love the People" - as an abstraction, that is, not as individuals; in fact socialists are notorious for their antisocial, unmannerly, boorish behavior toward flesh-and-blood human beings.

4. "The capitalist system is inherently doomed to collapse" - but because it never quite seems to do so fast or furiously enough, we need to help it along with Cloward and Piven strategies, designed to overwhelm and crash the system with impossible demands.

The Parasite

I came upon a book called The Parasite (1982) by Michel Serres, a French philosopher. He examines parasitism of all kinds, from natural to existential, using language, fables and everthing else he can think of. One chapter in particular reminded me of the famous "healthcare debate":

Serres recounts the fable of the man who picks up an apparently freezing snake and takes it home to warm it by his own hearth. The snake wakes up, is startled and angered, and bites the man. Serres continues:

"The serpent was not a lessee; he was not looking for a haven; he was answered without having called. He was given an uncalled-for opinion. Someone made himself the serpent's benefactor, savior, and father. You are sleeping quite peacefully, and when you wake you find yourself in debt. You live with no other need, and suddenly someone claims to have saved your country, protected your class, your interests, your family, and your table. And you have to pay him for that, vote for him, and other such grimaces. ... Who has to pay? The litigation is serious. Who is the host and who is the guest? Where is the gift and where is the debt? Who is hospitable, who is hostile? ...

"Who among you allows himself to be displaced, carried from his home territory, permits himself to be the passive object of another's whim? ... Who would thank, moreover, the one who decides for you? That would be the same as giving recognition to professional politicians. To those who see and consider others as if they were rocks, cold stones. To those who force others to be only objects, which then can be carried. To those who are astonished when the passive object suddenly wakes up and lashes out in anger. The one who did not lash out against his benefactors, saviors, and fathers would be forgetting all his duties, as would he who did not pass from cold passivity to the heat of battle. Ready to die."

2012

It's only 3 years and one month away. As Neil Cavuto pointed out on his show the other day, one of the lures of the 2012 scenario is that it functions as a massive reset button - we've got more than a few "fine messes" on our hands, and wouldn't it be handy to be able to dump them over the side and watch them vanish forever into a huge fiery gape in the earth ...

Spoilsports keep repeating that the Mayan calendar does not end in 2012, but merely begins a new cycle. Ah, but the advent of a new cycle may well be an occasion for turbulence, dislocation, realignment - "the end, when God untunes the sky" - if only temporarily.

Belief that the world we know it is about to end, or has to end because it is unsustainable, is at a very high point. There is a longing, not yet overwhelming but tangible and growing, for radical simplicity and renewal. And if we have to look at images of California sliding into the Pacific in overbuilt chunks to stir up our juices, so be it, I guess.

The film itself manages to turn people from just about every continent into stock figures: the earth mother, the waffling pol, the clandestine-murderous pol, the selfless scientist, the blonde bimbo with toy dog, the obnoxious overweight rich kid, the absentee father, and so on. Millions of tiny computerized human figures die terrible deaths by fire, earthquake, volcano and tsunami as our heroes escape by airplane. Then their sneaky breach of one of the "arks" intended to save the elite of the earth and man's cultural treasures nearly gets everyone aboard killed. Then the selfless scientist risks all the arks by suddenly deciding to let in the thousand or so folks about to be abandoned at the ark site. Everyone feels better about himself (forget the other billions) and of course the rescue succeeds without a second to spare and miraculously there are no ill effects from having taken on extra hundreds of people.

The director reportedly just laughed when asked if he were going to include scenes of Muslim holy sites undergoing destruction; he commented, "My co-writer Harald [Kloser] said, 'I'm not writing this to get a fatwa on my head.' We have Jesus falling apart in all kinds of forms. The Vatican falls on people's heads, and we can do that because we're a free, Western society, but if there would be, like, Mecca destroyed, there would be an outrage. And so you don't do it." Yes, the film shows the Pope, all the cardinals, the Sistine Chapel, St. Peter's basilica and the whole square full of praying believers being crushed and buried in mid-prayer. One thing you can say about modern Christians, they sure can take a joke.

I have a strong weakness for end-of-the-world scenarios, but usually prefer those with more realistic and achievable odds for survival. Of all the world's-end narratives I've heard, the "planetary alignment/solar flare/neutrinos mutating into microwaves/core boils/crust destabilizes" one is by far the least likely. I have to agree with Robin Cook that, barring a sizable asteroid that just blunders in out of nowhere, our most likely big die-off will come of a mutated influenza virus combining the high transmissibility of one strain with the high lethality of another.

There really are a lot of dooms to choose from, though. So many ends, so little time.

Distracted from distraction by distraction

Eliot accused us of this back in the 1920s or 30s. How he'd writhe now! I haven't blogged in ages since "joining" Facebook and trying in vain to keep up ... Twitter is not in my future (but that's also what I said about blogging and Facebook, and earlier about CDs, email, DVDs, etc.). Love that too-true t-shirt that remarks "More people have read this t-shirt than read your blog" ... Am mainly writing (writhing?) this to get the previous stale title off the blog, where it greets me each time I log onto the internet. Visiting myself, automatically. Because I care.