Is this the Next Generation of Mobile Computing?

This is an amazing vision of the future. It will make owning the iPhone seem quaint.

No Need to Violate the First Amendment When You Have Industrial Policy

Just a bit more on the Charles Krauthammer piece mentioned in my previous post. Mr. Krauthammer makes a couple of points. One is about Madisonian norms.

But even more importantly, and what makes his piece so trenchant, is that he is exposing a subtle way to suppress and control the media without explicitly violating the Constitution. It's called industrial policy.

Threaten a network and you are also sending signals to other who might get in the way of a political agenda.

To potential advertisers: we control a lot of money, contracts and life support in bad times. Don't advertise on networks where we find stories unfavorable to our political agenda.

To media rivals: don't follow the disfavored media outlet or we'll do the same to you that we're doing to them.

This is the change we've been waiting for? Co-opting the NEA, ACORN and other government-funded groups for political propaganda purposes? And cutting the financial legs out of the free press if it interferes with our "revolution?"

How very Hugo Chavez-like of Mr. Obama.

On Obama Thuggishness toward Dissenters

Charles Krauthammer is one of Washington's most intelligent and respected opinion journalists. He makes an important point in this piece. President Obama and his thuggish administration, in trying to delegitimize political dissenters (Fox News, Chamber of Commerce, Insurance Companies, etc.) and in fact intimidate them into silence by threats, is ignoring the Madisonian traditions of our country.

You know, the traditions that say we must respectfully tolerate dissent.

The traditions that differentiate us from countries such as Russia, Iran and Venezuela, whom Mr. Obama has such cordial relations with, but who all intimidate, prosecute and even murder dissenters as enemies of the state, Allah, or the revolution.

Mr. Obama is showing himself to not only fail at all of his promised open-minded and open-dooredness. He is showing himself to be diametrically opposed to it.

Can a person with such a vaunted opinion of himself and his mandate to "fundamentally reform America" be trusted to respect dissent, or even the Constitution itself should his project be threatened by political failure?

When he attempts to exclude Fox News from a press event, as took place this week, how long before, Hugo Chavez-like, he finds some reason to shut down Fox News entirely?

Is this intolerant behavior the "change we've been waiting for?"

Waxing Poetic about Logic. Really.

Last night I gave a lecture to my three Dowling College students (yes, three), about the importance of logic and critical thinking.

I am perhaps the only person I know who can get excited about this subject.

Perhaps I can capture some of that magic here.

Logic was one of those remarkable gifts given us by Aristotle, the great observer of nature, who found and captured patterns in everything, from the heavens, to state constitutions, to thought itself.

In stepping back, even from thinking itself, to observe its patterns, we are able to control thinking, and expand its power. (We also discover deep mysteries in it, and paradoxes. More on that below.)

If we observe the syllogism: "All mebops are ziggly. Zanthor is a mebop. Therefore, Zanthor is ziggly" we understand the power of logic. No, seriously.

Why? Because we recognize that logic illuminates aspects of thought that move beyond questions of truth.

First, this nonsense example shows that thought has a flow. From premises to conclusions. We feel impelled to draw a certain kind of conclusion, even in this example about something we have no experience of, because of that flow. From here Aristotle would catalog way in which thought flows properly and improperly. ("Validity")

Secondly, that flow is supported by our ability to say "if this were true." An awareness of this aspect of thinking is important because it is the basis of hypothetical or imaginative thinking. Once we recognize the flow of thought, and its roots in saying "if this were true" of the premises, we become self-consciously aware of our ability to turn on and off the truth of statements or claims about reality.

Combine that with the idea of the flow of thought, and we become aware of what might follow when we combine new thoughts or truths together. That ability to see the implications is powerful.

(I often use the example of Steve Jobs, whose own logical skills allowed him to consider what it would mean for the world if it were true that there were personal computers. Even as many others, such as the bankers who rejected him, could not consider the possibility, stuck as they were in the logic that supported only the current uses of the mainframe.)

Michael Gelb's books on genius, such as "How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci" and "Discover Your Genius," opened my eyes to thinking of logic this way, as he argues that genius is not mere intuition, but a powerful combination of intuitive, imaginative thinking with deep analytical skills, uniting both sides of the brain. Geniuses had to be conscious of the assumptions of their current pursuits, so as to transcend them.

Hearkening back to the dialectic of his teacher, Plato, Aristotle's description of thought as moving from premises and conclusions also makes us aware of the need to examine the truth of our premises; themselves the conclusions of some rudimentary previous "arguments" in our minds. Hence, for example, how did we come to believe that "all mebops are ziggly"?

We begin to recognize that all thought is built on previous thought. Even as we also see that those previous thoughts disappear into the mysterious depths of our memory and our senses. Only a small portion of our thought "flow" or process is available to us at the conscious level. A riddle.

One can see here the groundwork for everything from Augustine's awe-inducing reflections "On Memory" in the Confessions, to Descartes' consideration of the Evil Genius, to Freud's theories of the Unconscious.

From these kinds of mysteries, people might be inclined to conclude that thought disintegrates into impenetrable irrationality. However, despite that mysterious disappearance of prior thought into the depths of the senses and unconscious, I still believe Aristotle's gift of logic remains inherently progressive.

Only by recognizing one's premises and those of others can one move toward any kind of consensus at all. (Or any act of forward-thinking genius, as I noted above.)

We continue even today to strive via the dialectic in psychology, art, and other disciplines to draw our experiences from the depths, into conscious awareness.

We learn to examine prior premises, even our own, for the larger purpose of understanding, expression, and yes, even reaching agreement.

How about Re-Engineering our Distrusted Media?

So CNN reports alleged racist "quotes" Rush Limbaugh made without fact-checking them. But it does fact check a parody done by Saturday Night Live about President Obama. Public trust of the media is at all time lows, because of bias and shoddy reporting like this.

Meanwhile, my and many other local newspapers are dying for lack of readership.

How would an engineer solve this problem? Or an entrepreneur? I asked myself these questions this morning as I looked over the tabloid rack at the local supermarket.

How about if the media began doing what engineers and entrepreneurs do all the time? As I am trying to do with my own small business ventures on the model of The E-Myth Revisited, by Michael Gerber.

That is, put processes in place to standardize where there is variation, and remove "bias" surprises, so that the media consumer knows more of what to expect.

How?

These days, a self-policing "ombudsmen" reporting on the media outlet itself is about as far as many media outlets go. And that weekly or monthly cleanup comes usually too late for our rapid fire news cycle. And, quite frankly, such people and stories are boring.

How about making the processes by which stories are written more transparent to the consumer? How about posting them in a wiki, for ongoing modification, and maybe even public comment, or task-taking when the story goes awry. And linking to them in each and every story written for additional comment?

For example, a captured process might say, if a story is about X controversy (abortion, taxes, government spending), then the following must be included.

You get the idea. The first tries and "captures" of these processes in a media team wiki, for example, will be halting and have mistakes. But think about what it would mean if CNN, or Fox News or MSNBC created processes that the public could compare the stories against, for quality and consistency!

If we allow "advocacy journalism" on television or in print, another process could describe how it should be clearly delineated to the consumer at the beginning.

I think that would improve the quality of journalism, restore public confidence, and also sharpen the discussion in areas where "opinion" is tolerable.

Given the lousy shape of the media, I'm surprised it has not been done already.

Commentary on a Recent Viral Video Defense of Religion

Some of my Facebook friends are passing around the video below. It's an interesting defense of religious belief, going viral on the Internet. It's good to see that not only the atheists like social media.



The argument made by the young Albert Einstein in this video is one taken directly, although in less scientific form, from St. Augustine, its original author.

Simply put, evil is not "real" but rather the absence or "privation" of goodness.

Augustine made this argument against the Manicheans, who held that evil was an equal and opposing force to good. If so, Augustine reasoned, then man has no free will, being caught up simply in the war of two opposites. A convenient deterministic theory for escaping responsibility.

An elaboration of this argument is made in a modern context by author Jean Bethke Elshtain in a talk given at GooglePlex, entitled, "Harry Potter, St. Augustine and the Confrontation with Evil." In it, she elaborates on the idea of evil as a parasitic form of non-being, using the examples of the Nazis and Voldermort from Harry Potter." It's a very interesting talk, parts of which I show my philosophy students every year.




Interestingly in the first video, however, the young Einstein makes a "reductionist" argument against his instructor. He cites darkness as the absence of light, not a reality itself at the subatomic level. The same for cold, which is the absence of heat, which is subatomic activity.

However, if one were to rely on the subatomic level, what would we say about love? Is it a reality at that level, or something else?

There are risks to denying realities that man experiences at his own level. That is why Einstein's instructor is onto something, and why the argument for atheism persists. Because just like our experience of love, we experience cold, or darkness, or myriad other evils at our own, not the subatomic level.

I recently had a conversation with a friend about this very same point. And about my concerns with the limits of Augustine's argument.

I sometimes think Augustine's argument is stretched too far from its original purposes.

If one proposes that evil is a lack or privation, then it is merely a zero or non-being. There is nothing to see in it, only to ponder the mystery, as Ms. Elshtain does, of its parasitical nature.

But what if one looks at the myriad manifestations of evil in the world? The privations of so many goods, that yield so many different and disturbing forms of evil, at our human level, not the metaphysical or the subatomic.

This is the gist of the black comic points made in first video in the comic series "Mr. Deity," which I truly enjoy, even as it disturbs me greatly. The episode is entitled "Mr. Deity and the Evil."



God is questioned as to why he wants SO MANY evils. Now, one could argue that God simply wanted to create so many goods. And each good must, by God's own plan face its own potentially horrifying privation. Granted, privation is the absence of good. I've got that.

But at another level, you must consider the black comic point above. What the heck is the plan for history when there is so much evil that seems to be driving it? Just think of the Nazis, for example. Or child abuse. Or cancer. History is moved greatly by the reality of evil. Privation is everywhere. Pervasive.

Collectively, we are resilient in the face of it no doubt. But I do not believe, as I noted in a previous post, that one can dismiss an individual's being scandalized by the experience of it, as Michael Novak has done at times, as a "morose" concern with it.

I have no answer to the comic point raised above. Except to recall the point made by Aquinas in the Summa Theologica, which scandalized me in graduate school. (II-II, Q. 19, Article 11. "Whether Fear Remains in Heaven.")

Aquinas argued that even in a state of beatitude in Heaven, man would still feel fear of God. This entire passage is contained in a section on "The Gift of Fear" contained in a larger treatise on "Hope." (I think this section bears re-reading on my part, for sure.)

I don't think Aquinas would be willing to call God "dark." But when one considers the prominent role of evil and suffering in the world, and even the scandalous and almost fetishistic obsession among Christians with evil and suffering, one can't help but feel disturbed. By them, and by God's apparent "plan" for "sacred history," so-called.

Is it in any way inefficient? If so, what does that say about the nature of God?

It certainly disturbs atheists, especially when they read the gleeful way in which Christians were willing to see them in a state of eternal damnation for their annoying lack of faith. Today, we have far more empathy and understanding of our fellow man, and should reject co-dependency with them, for their and our own sake. And recognize that their concerns are our own.

A Weekend with a Theme

I entered this past weekend with one thought. "This is the anniversary of my mother's death." I don't know what I expected of this anniversary. There is nothing about a 22nd anniversary that should mark it as special.

What's more, as I have noted in other places in this blog, I believe I have long since outgrown the religious habit of seeking signs; a habit that bound me closely to my mother in my youth. So, why would I expect this kind of anniversary to yield any thoughts of significance?

During my mother's illness, I sought signs more than ever, and thought I found them. I saw them everywhere. My mother would be OK. I only felt betrayed when they did not bear out.

In the years that have followed, my advanced education and teaching of critical thinking has taught me too much about confirmation biases and other quirks of the mind to allow myself to get so carried way again. Better to wander with no "signs" at all, I have thought, and see what happens. Reality has other ways to hit you in the head.

But perhaps this weekend, I still wanted something. Perhaps I am still a child who wants something from his mother. Perhaps also, the lingering effects of baptism are not so easily washed away. And the foolishness of religious sign-seeking is permanently embedded in me.

As I awoke this morning, one thought occurred to me. Whatever I thought I sought from this anniversary, I may have received. More on that after this necessary explanation.

My mother died 22 years ago from a brain tumor. Her death was traumatic to our family. She was the center of it. A source of strength. In the days that followed my father did not do very well, and things looked very shaky for all of us. Somehow, though, we managed to survive.

Her death also seriously shook my religious faith for the first time. In way that never recovered, thanks also to reinforcement from the events of 9/11 and a few years of natural disasters that followed, and other, deeper personal crises.

All of which revolved around hopes and dreams being snuffed out. My mother had just turned 48 when she died. The last of her children would soon go to school. And my mother would be free, finally, to pursue dreams she had put on hold for many years.

Her potential would go unfulfilled.

When I saw the infamous photo of the man falling to his death on 9/11, upside down, I meditated on what his hopes for the future were that morning, before he found himself in that nightmare. The same could be said for the water-swept dead bodies in the photos of "The Tsunami" and Hurricane Katrina.

I have always been an actualization person. I want very much to grow. I value the desire to grow in others highly. It inspires me and attracts me.

I have suffered as an idealist in Fortune 1000 to Fortune 100 corporations for 7 years now. I have learned many things about growth there, and grown enormously during that time. But I found those places did not really create the cultures they preached about. And it frustrated me terribly.

I despise statism for many reasons, but perhaps most importantly, because it shackles the natural growth potential of human beings.

I have come to learn over the course of my life that personal growth is highly important to me. And I continue to think about how it is frustrated quite often in life. And I wonder how a God can make that part of his plan, for his inherently forward-looking creatures.

***

I find myself in perhaps the toughest situation of my professional career. Out of work for now seven months, I have struggled like never before to understand my marketability, and myself. I have made unprecedented, expensive investments of time and energy in myself and my own career. And I am, for whatever reason, struggling to show for it.

Not in personal growth. I have learned a great deal about myself. I have valuable clarity about a number of important issues.

But in more tangible ways, things are very tough now. I won't be able to get by much longer at all. Things could become very bad, as winter approaches. And that will affect the "growth" of possibilities for the four shining stars of my life, my beloved children. Thoughts of their suffering, and restricted possibilities in life have haunted me in recent weeks.

***

My weekend began on Friday night with an unexpected phone call from my sister Susan. She had a baby just a few weeks ago. We don't often talk on the phone. Now would seem to be even less opportune for her. And yet, she just wanted to say hello, and to offer encouragement, and financial help if necessary. I was deeply touched by her call. It carried me for hours and hours after with a bit of hope.

On Saturday, I had many plans to continue my networking, my job search, and the daunting plans to build my own business. But I felt exhausted. The thought of continuing with all this effort for yet another, fruitless day, where there was only I and no RO on the I was not appealing.

My two sons roped me into the "Rocky Marathon." I would watch one with them perhaps. I didn't think they would watch the first Rocky movie for long. Too much Paulie and Adrian and not enough slugging in the ring. But, to my great surprise, they did watch. Along with Rocky II, III and even part of IV. With me right along with them. My plans would go to hell for Saturday, and I felt better. I also appreciated Sylvester Stallone's screenwriting like I had not before. Recognizing adult themes of suffering, and hope, and redemption like I had not as a kid, when I saw these movies for the first time.

Sunday morning, I returned from church, which I left earlier than ever in my life, to find the boys ponying up their own money to watch "Rocky Balboa" on demand. OK, another Rocky movie. I'll bite again. And more admiration for Stallone, especially when he, playing a "has been" in the movie, lectures his son about the importance of getting up again after being knocked down.

Sunday afternoon we took the kids to Sunken Meadow State Park, where the kids just swam. I took their pictures along the rocky beach, confident that some day we would all look back on those photos fondly. And I forgot nearly all of my worries.

And then, Sunday evening, when everyone was asleep, I read a small pamphlet from the Five O'clock Club, which talked about the daunting challenges of the new economy, as well as the great rewards that would follow if workers would only take charge of their own careers. New growth, new flexibility and constant change in response. But all built around a vision that comes from deep inside, which, when acted upon, can be deeply satisfying.

And then, oddly, a chance encounter with Joel Osteen on my television. A man who combines religious preaching with a gospel of self-help and success. I respect his conviction, but I don't accept uncritically his assertions. To me, they often lack evidence.

By strange coincidence however, this night, I found him repeating the same theme I heard from Rocky Balboa earlier in the day. When life knocks you down, he said with his trademark squint and a smile, you have to keep getting up. He cited his friend stricken three times with cancer, and other anecdotes. What can you say to that? It's not an argument. To me it simply seemed self-evident. What else can you do, unless you want to lay down and die?

In the silence of Sunday evening, I found myself wondering why some people choose to look at the good anecdote, the hopeful one, and not the bad one, as I often do. Why is our world half beautiful and half horrible? Which makes you more of a fool? Despair? Or hope?

As I awoke this morning, I realized that my entire weekend, which went nothing as planned, was filled with themes of hope. From start to finish.

An anniversary gift from my mother? Perhaps.

Confirmation bias? Perhaps.