The invisible hand is caught in a reacharound.

Lets see what that invisible hand is up to today | hell's handmaiden: "The story, the day the music died, is a sad tale of corporate shenanagins and consumer pain. Read the article and ask yourself, “Where exactly is that invisible hand in all of this?”

The answer I’d like to propose is that it doesn’t exist. It isn’t there, not in the way that most of your hard right free market proponents need it to be. Ponder. I’m going to leave it at that for now, though if you wondering why I claim to not bash Smith but only the right wing twits who never read him: Smith “made it clear in his writings that quite considerable structure was required in society before the invisible hand mechanism could work efficiently.” The twits tend to forget that ‘considerable social structure’ part and head straight for ‘get the government the hell out of everything’ thus creating what I like to think of as a government so minimal that it stops working."

As I've dryly noted here and there, now and again, I'm a great believer in the free market. And some day I'd like to try it for myself to see how it works.

In fact, Smith was pretty firm on that, that considerable "market intervention" was required to keep the market from being "cornered." Proponents of "lazez-fair" regulation see no problem with that - or apparently milk and gas hitting the four dollar mark.

There can be no individual liberty if we are reduced to slavery in effect by economic means. And that has always been the preferred option - serfs are ever so much easier to maintain than slaves. Worse yet, one has legal obligations toward slaves.

So, as a libertarian, I'm pro choice (as the gag goes, on everything), pro fair trade, pro social justice, pro infrastructure, pro just-big-enough-government and pro REAL , fair and free markets.

The closest thing that we have ever had is the Web, by the by, and you can tell that the Faux Libertarians are doing their damnedest to turn it all into AOHell.

Isn't it odd that in order to be that sort of Libertarian, you have to both deny your own individuality while also denying the possibility that individual definitions of value and reward might apply?

At this point you may wonder why I don't just call myself a Liberal and be done with it. Re-read the above paragraph and substitute the word "liberal."

Having the wrong thing done unto me for the wrong reasons under the delusion that it's possible to meaningfully calculate "the greatest good of the greatest number" in most areas of social policy leads inevitably to the struggle over the right to choose what "blessings" we will receive.

Oddly, it seems that the same people who decry regulation - are all too willing to advise "prudent" intervention when Liberals are in power.

Meditating on "Postie" ethics.

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There is another side to the Google Spanking story. I stumbled across the exact sort of blogger that I'd consider to be a problem, and his response to being considered the problem.

From the small biz blog.

It's true. I guess my blog just isn't good enough for them.

WordPress told me to get out of Dodge; that they didn't want my scummy blog soiling their servers.

According to them, a blog that promotes online businesses, products and information is against their terms of service, labeling all blogs of this sort "Get Rich Quick" blogs. Exactly how is WordPress doing business? Online, isn't it? Pot, kettle, black.

Take your biz and shove it, WordPress!

Anyone else had any bad experiences to report with WordPress?

Regards,

Tony

My first thought was, "what part of terms and services did you not understand?" I've looked into Wordpress. It's a teense fascist in some ways. Blogger is a lot looser in letting you do your thing. What you want to do should dictate the services you use, especially if you aren't paying for the services. The idea is to perform a service of value in order to get paid, not to get paid for creating nothing of value using stolen bandwidth. (This is why Blogger gets the top bar on my site. Bind not the mouth of the kine that treadeth the grain.)

I use Blogger because I like the interface and because I write controversial things from time to time - and have suffered DNS and hack jobs as a result. I'm not an IT guy, and Google has some of the smartest people in the world making and interface that allows even an idiot to create a professional-looking blog.

And clearly they do. See above. WordPress - and this is just an impression, folks - seems to think of it's users as an unfortunate necessity, and certainly a resource that needs weeding. Well, I can understand both viewpoints.

And frankly, were it my servers, I would have done the same. The "small business blog" above is not just spam. It is "make money fast spam." Spam spam spam spam spam spam spam spam... and it is embarrassing to me that they are a "featured blog" on Pay Per Post today. That is a problem. If they are featured, people think I'm doing what they do. Worse yet, potential advertisers will look at the featured site - and run like hell!

You see, I approach a paid post as being content, first and foremost. I'm attaching my name to it, after all, and my credibility is simply not for sale. At least, not that cheaply.

But I do have to consider the fact that in choosing to take paid posts, people will assume that I do it in the same way and for the same reasons. Worse yet, I have a feeling that this "postie" gets the juicy offers while I'm down in the five to ten dollar range, after the massive Google Spank.

Well, if this is a typical example of a "Good Postie" - spank us again. But I think a more targeted approach would be a good idea.

This "small business blog" is simply a scam to get paid posts into engines, essentially getting free advertising. And it is blatantly using a free blog service (once wordpress, now Blogger) to do that. It's theft of services, plain and simple - even more so with Blogger, since that's a Google service, and Google owns Adwords and, of course, Google.

Me, I strive to produce content that's worth indexing. Most businesses suck at bragging about themselves - hell, sometimes it's hard to discern what it is they do. They often overlook the better aspects of their products and services, as well as entire demographics that might like what they have to offer. Well, that's the sort of post I do, if I take the post at all.

Just do a site search for "payperpost" and you can review what I've done for yourself.

But there is one thing I refuse to do, and that is pretend that I'm passing on the good word from the goodness of my heart. My readers deserve that very important piece of information, and I'm not going to lie either by commission or omission.

So, even though often advertisers say "No in-post disclosure" - meaning no obvious indication that it is a paid post, I often cheerfully ignore it - although, to be frank, I'm far more likely to just snort and pass on by. You want me to write a positive article on your business, a hundred words, and give no indication that this turd landed in my feed for a princely five bucks? No. I also want something worth writing about, and your offer tells me that you GOT nothin'.

Look, you clearly get what you pay for. And clearly, a slot on sites like "the small business blog" is going to generate what those of us who learned some of the webmaster trade in the Adult industry refer to as "crap traffic."

"Crap traffic" is traffic that may be overwhelming, but has a conversion rate of under half a percent. Or in other words, all they want is something for nothing. And this traffic is helpfully generated by a class of entrepreneurs (to be kind) that also want something for nothing. Free traffic, or money from you in return for a lot of nothing worth having. Some of those entrepreneurs do sites like this, others deluge your inbox with offers to "optimize your site."

Caveat Emptor always applies. And this applies to advertisers, to bloggers, and of course to readers. "What's in it for you, that I believe this?"

A lot of the time, I click through on an offer only to find some useless eye-bleeding monstrosity that sells overpriced crap to stupid people. I don't take those opportunities, because I absolutely do not want my site linked to that site. I don't use "nofollow" on these posts, because if I'm willing to write about it, I DO wish to be associated with it in the Google Index.

For myself, I hope that you think well enough of me that you would not assume I'd waste your time and mine for trivial sums. What's in it for me is a great post on a topic I probably would not have come across any other way. In other words, it's just like Alternet or Media Matters in a very real sense, but with a kicker: You think well enough of yourself or your product to pay me an honorarium for the time it takes to do the background and the post.

That's an important thing to know. And I think it's important for my readers to know as well - especially when you leave what is said up to me. I'm perfectly willing to take your money and tell you that you have a bad site or a crappy idea. That sort of feedback may be less welcome, but it's cheap at the price. And I STILL get a good post that attracts traffic organically.

But I may be in a distinct minority. That saddens me. I confess I'm not a very social being, so checking out "the community" didn't much interest or appeal to me. If I had, I may well have thought twice before joining - but it is an idea of such potential value to me and potentially of general value to the web - that I think I would have ultimately come down on the side of doing it right. The web really cannot exist without a commercial aspect to it, but in order for that to be properly realized, we have to figure out ways of doing it that are not simply newspaper ads that blink.

In fact - and I learned this creating ads for a local newspaper with knife and wax, while mildly high from the developer solution from the optical typesetter - that the best ads were informative ones. Those were the ones that became regular accounts. Those ads were content that readers who were familiar with a business would actually want.

IZEA has taken a good deal of crap for the fallout and disappointment, some of it quite justified, but I think some of it was simply the fact that they overlooked the necessity to have a much stronger imposed code of ethics. For instance - the two or three post a day limit means little if you have seven blogs, all of them mostly spam.

And I think in part that is due to the fact that in order to make more than beer money, with blogs of average rank, you have to really grind them out, do the minimum, crank out a minimal interstitial about your cat and then grind out another, Rinse, repeat.

Now, I personally want to be able to make money blogging. I want it to be what I do for my career. But I don't intend to change what I talk about or the way I talk - because that is essential to my ambitions and the thing that makes a post from me distinct in it's own right.

Advertisers need to be both willing and able to reward those of us who go the extra mile, and to consider us as individuals with individual perspectives. Further, I think a greater recognition for the value of a post over time is required.

I mean, I don't know if some bloggers go back and strip out paid posts. I don't, but I could see some advantages to it, I suppose, in terms of maintaining page rank. And it's not exactly dishonest...

But then, there's that ethics thing, again. I give full measure, pressed down and running over as a policy. As a result, my PPP posts are approved automatically, and payouts are quick. Once I got into a groove, I haven't had a single post rejected. And in some ways I'm a little miffed, because some of the posts I have written for money get higher traffic than my own, "far more important" content.

But, however they get here, they are here, and I get a chance at putting one of my little ethics bugs in their brains.

I can't do that if I cheat to do it. I do not want someone clicking on a google entry from my blog and going "Oh, crap. Scammed again." And I think that is ultimately the attitude that will separate the wheat from the chaff. And I think that IZEA's "SocialSpark" network will be the forum in which the means to do that will be sorted out.

And no, this was not a paid post. If you like it, buy a t-shirt or something. :P

An Ethical Business Model

The good folks at lifelock would like me to remind you about them. I've blogged enthusiastically about their credit monitoring and identity-theft protection before and I'd be happy to do it again - but that's what hyperlinks are for.

I get a lot of traffic looking for that post. And yet identity theft has not stopped, because frankly lots of us find the whole thing too baffling and confusing to deal with.

For the seventh year in a row, identity theft tops the Federal Trade Commission's complaint list, accounting for 36 percent of the 674,354 complaints received between January 1 and December 31, 2006.*

Now, you might think that having a credit card with what seems like a similar service is the same thing, but it's not. It's generally not as comprehensive as Lifelock's - and it's not really a service to you - it's their routine fraud prevention presented as a service. (Ever had to call your card number to confirm that you really did want to buy a left-handed garden rake for Uncle Joey?)

Lifelock has no transactional interest in your doings, other than being paid a flat fee for keeping an eye on things. Their website is a model of openness, and frankly, I think it should be a research assignment in all business and marketing classes. Very little hype, no weasel words, and all limitations in the same type size as the promise. It's a model of an ethical contract.

And THAT is the point to this post. I don't need to tell you to trust them. Everything you need to know is on their site - including the rarely mentioned but vital bit of information - to what extent they can be trusted.

That extent is one million dollars.

Google Spanked Non-Erotically.

Way back in the days of yore, I had a Google page-rank of five, based on posts, links and traffic that I'd damn well earned. Then I tried to monetize that traffic using PayPerPost.

Now, I'd tried using Google AdWords, but after a few tries and a few unexplained account cancellations that seemed to revolve around newsworthy nippleage and/or the odd f-bomb I drop to gain attention, I decided that Google AdWords were incompatible with the blog you see here. You see, I don't write in order to optimize for money and traffic. I write what I write, based on my sources. And PayPerPost is one of my better sources for ideas.

I've found that generally if people are willing to pay you to blog about something - and willing to accept an honest response (the little +/- icon) - then generally if my site qualifies given the keywords I've set up, it might just be the idea I don't have for the day.

That's why my PPP assignments tend to be sporadic. It's this blogger's way of dealing with writer's block.

Well, I was one of many people who's blogs were "spanked" by Google with a drastic, arbitrary and of course economically devastating drop in page-rank, for the sin, apparently of taking money to write particular posts. You know, as opposed for taking a salary or a sponsorship to write entire blogs.

Somehow, apparently, that's more ethical? Or perhaps it's due to the fact that such blogs tend to be entirely acceptable to Google Adwords, since they are already hewing to some form of company line or theme that makes it easy for them to assign keywords. Well, whatever - but while my content may not be all that predictable, it did earn that PR5 honestly.

And of course, Google Pagerank has been a critical number when seeking out sponsorships and putting a value on your display advertising space.

Well, Izea.com has struck back with Izea Page Rank. Here's mine.




The idea, of course, is to compete with Google and Alexa, neither of which are seemingly all that friendly to the individual, entrepreneurial blogger.

It doesn't particularly bother me about Alexa not being all that great for me. It has always favored really high-traffic sites. Google, though, is supposed to go by the ethos of "first, do no evil."

Now having said that, I have not said anything before this because it was absolutely clear why some action of this sort was probably required. Google's search engine was getting cluttered by crappy pages from crappy blogs that exist only to exploit engine traffic.

Of course, the same could be said of AdWords blogs. And it should be. You see, there's little point in buying AdWords if it's going to give you crap traffic. Well, it's hard to know what criteria went into the "spanking," other than the obvious - those of us who were spanked know that we aren't considered suitable for Google.

But just as obviously, there were definitely "civilian casualties," people who take occasional posts, for whatever reason.

And personally, I think that a well-written, contextually appropriate paid post of mine stacks up against an unpaid piece of crap by someone wanting to churn out keyword-filled entries for their AdWords blog.

Yes, Google, Yes; I KNOW there has to be a way to filter out the Make Money Fast people. I also know that it's likely to be imperfect. I'm even willing to take something of a personal hit in order to improve search results. I use the damn things too. But in point of fact, people use Google to find stuff to buy all the freaking time - and posts like mine really do add value to that end of the business.

You, Google, need to get on board, and take a look at the ethical and practical rethinking that Izea is doing over at SocialSpark. The idea kicks ass. Maybe you should, I dunno, share data or something?

Today's Posts are brought to you by...

The point I want to make.

You see, I haven't made any money for a while, and I need to, because I desperately need two video cards. Or, more accurately, that was my motivation for clicking on Pay Per Post. You may have noticed - or not - that I haven't done a paid post for some time.

Well, as I said, today I needed the money, and so I clicked onto PPP. And, not only did I find two opportunities, I found the idea I needed for today. It's an idea that's been perculating in the back of my mind, it's all about new media and new economy vs. old media and old economy and it turns out that these two paid opps precisely illustate exactly what I want to say.

And this turns out to underline an idea that I've had in the back of my mind since my days in the newspaper biz; the idea that the most powerful ads were ones that underlined the article(s) on the same page, and vice versa, that an article acually gained some degree of importance by making advertisers compete to be on the same page - whether or not that correlation was real or completely accidental. This was back in the day of knife and wax, and I still think of advertising as my first calling.

You see, I spent most of my time as a newspaperperson designing, writing and physically placing ads. Before that, I designed and placed ads in all sorts of niche media for Judges Guild, an RPG company that specialized in D12 game systems and had a small ad budget that needed to be targeted wisely.

Like most very small companies, Judges Guild lived and died on advertising coupled by word of mouth and had very, very little discretionary income to use for that advertising. Every single penny was begrudged, as it came out of the owner's food budget.

Literally.

Now, I want you to take a glance at all the ads on this site for a moment. Scroll up, scroll down, the article will still be here when you get back. All the graphical and all the text adds are placed here by someone who is taking a few pennies from their food budget in hopes it will make you click on something.

Consider the reality and implications of that. Consider the fact that in many, many cases, these people are taking the entrepreneurial course because it allows them to be creative; or even more viscerally; because it allows them to feed their family about as well as welfare would, but with some dignity and hope attached.

This is also something of an epiphiany for me, and more importantly, it's going to be an important day in terms of illustrating the new reality of web-based media and advertising. You see, it used to be commonly understood that advertising drove media. But in the new media, adverising is "cost plus" - that is to say that advertising is something that the media owner can choose and place, and their success at that relates entirely as to it's relevance.

And second, direct media buys - such as google ad-words, blogpspot, and my own choice, Project Wonderful - are completely depeneant upon the tracking of my niche.

Furthermore, - and here's a beutiful and wonderful thing about the web - I can actually sell advertising "futures." I mean, in a sense. Today's posts, for instance. As a demonstration and experiment, based on my faith in the importance of this serious articles, will carry with them a unique "Project Wonderful" button bar, targeted at SEO optimizers, newsletter engine producers and all others who specialize in marketing the stuff that creative people make.

Ultimately - speaking from practice, direct creative experience and from direct observation of the market, creative people really suck at marketing their own work. And yes, I include myself in that category. Marketing is an entirely separate skillset, so radically different that I would have to say that no creative person should even consider going without at least an informal reality check from a marketer, and vice versa. People who are just getting into flexing their marketing muscles search desperately for things worth selligng - and it's my observation that they tend to run through several painfully instructive relationships before they find the thing, the people or the ideas that mesh with their personal particular talents.

This of course implies that it would make a great deal of sense for an internet marketing agency to scoop up people who are driven to the trade, who want to market, and who need to be put together with a deserving client, so they don't have to do their time in the ghettos of MLM or affiliate marketing.

My illustration of what that would look like is in my next post, and just to underline that, I will be paid for it.

Ethics are universal and ethical transactions always pay off better and over a longer term than unethical transactions. But it's not always easy to find a ethos that expresses one's ethic in a time of extraordinarily rapid change. I've decided to return to the vary basis of life to continue my exploration of that principle; survival, happiness and long-term prosperity are all direct evidence of learning to do the right thing.

Love what you do. Do that. Hire people who love what they do to make you money.

Update: I'm not actually getting paid for this post unless the good people at Pepperjam send me a tip. Apparently I forgot to click the "reserve this post" button. Well, I can hope for tips. Meanwhile, this post says exactly what I had in mind, so I'm stickin' to it.

I was unable to clip the vid at Pepperjam, so I really want to twist your arm to do that. Hint to folks at PepperJam. Never preclude the possibility of viral publicity. This vid should be as accessible as anything on Google or YouTube.

clipped from www.pepperjam.com Unlike most agencies that offer expertise limited to one vertical, Pepperjam offers extensive professional consultation and management services across multiple areas of search-engine marketing (Pay-Per-Click / SEO), affiliate marketing, and online media planning and management.

We have all seen the offenses committed by people who don't believe they need marketing expertise; an offense often committed by a person who would not be fool enough to think that a receptionist existed just to answer the phones. Your marketing strategy, techniques and chosen markets tell people what sort of person you are. From that first introduction, they will or will not consider doing business with you. EVER!

I often shop at a store that sells overstock and the inventory of businesses that, alas, are no longer, and I often see blatant examples of this sort of thing. For instance - tuna in a can, crackers, a knife and a napkin - nice little instant lunch, right?

And so they said - with graphics and packaging that strongly suggested a personal hygene product. Any decent marketing consultant could have saved this product to successfully compete with Star-Kist along with asking the obvious question - who are you to try and compete with Star-Kist with the exact same product?

But this product didn't get that far - at least, not within my demographic. I probably would have noticed.

The fact is that, for all the books and advice written about marketing, it is an intuitive art; one that takes a certain sort of mind to begin with, and then a great deal of time and education making expensive mistakes on other people's dime. The more volatile the market is, the more this is true, except for the exceptions.

Do you know what the exceptions are? I can give you examples of exceptions - like Coke, like Tootsie Roll, like Gold Bond Powder.

Coke, of course, is the poster child for not screwing with an established brand identity, with it's "New Coke," although I happen to think that Pepsi Clear was a runner-up in the "dumb marketing ideas." I call it a near runner up because that's the sort of product that might actually have paid off - with a little better marketing. Clear Pepsi is weird, and it doesn't taste any different than Pepsi. Clear Pepsi with Rum is a clear Cuba Libre - which could have taken the umbrella bars by storm.

New Coke? Well, a good friend of mine, a professional dominatrix and former prostitute had a pithy phrase for this exact thing, which is worthy of it's own acronym.

DFWTM. "Don't [Screw] With The Money."

She was speaking of moving in with a base player, developing a coke habit, or risking your capital. It's funny how people on the edge of being poor have values that are starkly similar to those of very rich people. Neither believe in screwing with their capital assets. In her case, the "assets" were literally the left cheek and the right. She took the ideal extremely personally.

Which is exactly what Coke did, in trying to replace it's formula with "New Coke."

Now, if you are a marketer, these are probably pretty lame, prosaic or even inaccurate examples. You see, I'm a really good example of the sort of person who absolutely SHOULD hire a marketer. I know just enough to be dangerous.

In fact, it's probably true that if I did not love what I actually do more, I could learn to be really good at marketing. It's SO tempting to think that means "I could become good enough to do this myself."

But the fact is, really successful people and really successful companies have gotten that way not because they are "adequte," but because they focus on exellence in their core area of expertiese, and then seek out, track down and if needful, tranqillize and kidnap the flavor of obsessive geek that they need.

See video: Is it not true that the CEO of Pepperjam is the sine qua non of the well-fed, smugly successful geek? Well, that's precisely the sort of marketing geek you want. If he's as geeky as I suspect, he WILL annoy the crap out of you, but if he's as smart as I suspect, he will hire people to interface for him. People, whom I suspect, who understand that having blonde streaks and a smile adds 10% to their bottom line.

That is the sort of expertise you want on your side.

You may have noticed that I have said very little about Pepperjam, the company. Well, that's because I don't have to. At most, I would have needed 100 words plus a link to their video - and that would have been more than they had asked ME for.

But then, I don't take paid posts unless they can become one of MY posts.

The next post in this series will be a general unpaid post about the economics, ethics and reasons for monetizing a website in the first place, based on my experience in print and online journalism.

In order to make all these posts appear in the proper, top-down order, I'm backdating all the posts I make today, so that they appear below the first, explanatory post. I mention this because I do not ordinarly do this, but for today, I'm going to consider today's posting to be a whole which will be linked and promoted as such. In other words, if you are reading as I'm writing, the next post will be below THIS post.

My hidden agenda is to make you think I have a hidden agenda.

When Life Gives You Lemons Bumper Sticker

Goddess knows it must seem like I'm wildly concerned with selling you stuff lately. Well, I kinda wish the explanation was the obvious - but obviously, if I were that good at selling shit people didn't really need to buy I would have no time to blog at all.

The point is far closer to this: that in order to do what I should to - blog - I have to pretend to myself that the whole point to it is to sell you crap you don't actually need, while at the same time, making crap that on some level is crap that you actually do need to see, and internalize as a message, whether or not you literally buy it, and indeed, whether or not it's even salable crap.

At this particular point in time, I'm actually drunk enough to say that out loud. I'm not going to actually hit post until I'm sober enough to ensure that veritas is enhanced by vino, but I'm honest enough to know that brutal self-honesty requires a little support from time to time.

That probably sounds like whining - but it's so very not. And therein lies the point.

I am first and foremost a visual thinker. On my best days, I am able to translate my visualizations into words fairly seamlessly. But some days, I need to indulge the thought that there is a "Hidden Agenda," and thereby explain why it is you should relate to the message and/or concept I've squeezed onto a product. In reality, the only thing I've ever needed to hide about my agenda is how badly I suck at hiding it.. :P

Drunk, sober or stoned; I'm afraid with me that what you see is what you get. It takes a great deal of ethanol to overcome my training to dissemble, to imply there is something unspecified and attractive hiding in the depths, to cater to your inexplicable neurotypical belief that every human motive is really cloaked in the the semblance of moral rectitude.

No, with me, the real deception has always been this - the learned practice of implying that there is a hidden, deeper motive to what it is that I do. In particular, I've learned that it's far more acceptable to have an apparently poorly concealed motive to make a relatively honest buck at your expense than to admit the fact that money itself is a damn poor motivator for me.

Understanding as I do that for most people, money IS important, and that it translates well to applause, I can start to ask for value for value fpr that which I do that I consider valuable.

But I will tell you something right now that I suspect strongly applies to all artistic personalities (or there would be no market for agents) - the idea of an artistic work of mine being inherently valuable is not just alien, it's frightening.

You see, like most children, I desperately wanted to do the things my parents did. And my father was an Irish traveling salesmen. No, wait, it gets better - he was a disabled, NORTHERN Irish traveling, RACIST salesman.

How did he get disabled? The official stories vary, from jumping off a load of plywood and landing the wrong way to far too many years driving a jeep too fast over dirt roads.

Me, I think he said the wrong thing to the wrong people thinking that he was safe saying it because of a similarity of skin color, or a common interest in other bigotries - and got the crap beat out of him. Goddess knows there were ten thousand times the thought occurred to me and in point of fact, I never actually met anyone who met him twice that looked forward to the third time.

Well, you might imagine how well emulating my father worked out for me. To give me credit, I never even tried to emulate his social skills. But, to underline my lack of clue - it never once occurred to me that social skills were what it took to sell things to people who could do without those things. Looking back my father was a salesman in the way I'm a writer and an artist, an intuitive genius.

...yeah, I know how that sounds. Bear with me for a moment, it's not the brag it you might think it is. And my point is that he could not "pass on his trade" any more than than I could.

In my experience, "genius" always involves a trade-off. Some brains, some people, some minds are just more specialized than others, and when they are digging into their best thing, they are of course seen as brilliant. Even if they can't manage basic hygiene, or figure out how to match their socks.

People, like my father and like myself, need to realize that they need other people who are neither blessed nor afflicted with that spark of genius - because whether it is a blessing or an affliction really is not largely up to us.

You see, I'm not neurotypical. Neither was my father. I'm a multiple personality and an autistic or if you prefer, an artist - and my father was, depending on what terms you prefer, a sociopath or a salesman.

People like me and my father are far more dependent than we would like to pretend on the quality and the advice of our enablers.

You know how I know that?

Let me introduce you to my mother.

And at this point, let me tell you something. I do "honor my mother and father." Like most folks do, they did the best they could with the tools at hand, according to the customs and assumptions of the day. Unfortunately for them, neither of them was the sort of person for which the customs and assumptions of the day would lead to good results for me. Both would have been better off as unmarried, child-free "free thinkers."

Neither of them could or would make that leap. And it does neither of them any honor at all to pretend they were any good at trying to be what they were not, or pretend that they should have tried in the first place, even though that trial resulted in Yours Truly.

I'd like to take credit for the moral fortitude of my own choices - but I'm afraid that like most folks and certainly my parents, the majority of my moral fortitude is revisionist hindsight; one part rebellion, two parts incapacity, three parts ex post facto rationalization of things that worked out well despite best parental advice.

You see, my mother was a photographer and an adventurer who's courage failed. I grew up being bored and unintentionally inspired by the photos she took while being a courageous free spirit in post-war Japan. But, she was female, and she thought that mattered more than her talents or muse.

But perhaps even more importantly was the fact that she was NOT a teacher. She was an adventurer, a free spirit, a "not teacher" born into a family of really amazingly good intuitive teachers. Alas, that is also a calling that far too many think of as a profession or a trade. In a sense, it's true. Many people can overcome a lack of native ability by training, in the same way that one may not be born to be a seal, but can learn to swim.

My mother was capable of teaching in exactly the same way that a cat is capable of swimming.

But ultimately, her family thought that becoming a teacher was a safer and more rational choice than exploring that which she actually was. I am, in large part, the product of her regrets, and that is which I honor. Had she followed her muse and her real nature, I doubt very much that I would have been born at all. She certainly would not have married my father. In all honesty, I suspect that her sexuality was as lesbian as it gets. Apparently even lesbians marry their daddies if they are forced to pick a man, just as men tend to marry their mommies, if the same applies.

You see, her father was a traveling salesman, who, having realized his mistake, rarely came home. What a rude shock it must have been, then, for my father to spend most of his marriage with her living on bile and disability. (Note illustration.)

You see, each of us are the sum of every bit of luck and every choice of every ancestor we have, unto the seventh generation. It is amazing to me how many people read the Bible religiously - as did my mother - and the more religiously they take it, the more wildly they miss the point.

In point of fact and experience, the Christian Bible, and in exactly the same way, the sacred texts of all other religious traditions, are the distilled common sense of those who learned the hard way, and you, as the reader, have to understand that in order to profit from it. For not only does it matter that these people "know better" than you do, it also matters WHY.

And for that matter, unless you have been in the anaougous shoes of the people who write scripture, it's not that easy to intuitively discern that "why" part.

Let me give you an example; "Saul of Taris." As much as we know about Saul, or as he was later known, Paul, most of what we should understand remains unspoken, in large part because Paul himself took it for granted.

Saul, you see, was a jew. But he was also a Roman Citizen and a tax collector. There are very few tax collectors who make even the slightest ripple in history, much less create large bodies of art, scripture or literature. In all probability, Saul of Tarsus was a tax collector even as was his father before him. The problem was, Saul was not born to be a tax collector; he had either a lack of the proper inclinations and skills, too much empathy, or somehow his sexuality (which many presume to be gay, though I'm only willing to go as far as "not ordinarily heterosexual") collided in some hideous and personally unresolvable way with his sense of self.

Been there, done that, MADE the T-Shirt!

Paul one of the most hideous and best recorded nervous breakdowns in all of history. Fortunately for him. Unfortunately for us, he spent the rest of his life trying to explain and or blame that breakdown as being the fault and/or responsibility of other people.

If prophets were perfect people, they'd never be foolish enough to be in that position in the first place.

The thing to learn from Paul is NOT what he thinks you should do - but rather to learn the things you should avoid in order to not suffer as Paul did. Paul himself did not understand that, even giving an extraordinarily sharp mind, so we may all forgive ourselves for being a little unclear on that point ourselves. Aside from that, as my entire life history attests, knowing what does NOT work is not a great deal of help in knowing what will work.

Save, of course, at times like this.

There are cusps and moments in history where everything is going to change and no common-sense assumption based on history or tradition (absent a full understanding of the reasons for making that rule of thumb in the first place ) will work. While human nature will guide the outcome in all cases, we as human beings seem to have little ability to understand our own nature or the governing needs and drives of others; most especially in the cases where the underlying, unstated and unconscious natures of other persons differ from our own.

Right now in these times, as Alvin Toffler's worst nightmares come true in our laps, wallets and personal lives, knowing what used to work is a somewhat useless thing. The only reliable guide is the ability to usefully extrapolate from a negative result, because the only thing that can be predicted as the rate of change goes vertical is that whatever works right now will probably not work tomorrow, with an increasingly short window of opportunity for any workable solution.

By preference and inclination, I'm a Conservative - but in practice and of necessity I've had to apply my conservatism to ideas and approaches that seem wildly radical to any person not so blessed as I with such a mixture of functional distinction and practical wisdom.

I don't think of myself as being therefore wiser than the average bear, nor do I "look down upon" most folks. But I am increasingly thinking of myself as a niche commodity with increasing application.

And thank you, my dear readers, for your support. :P

"We Were Hosed"

Yellow Elephant, where were you? - Civilian Version

The cynical depths to which this postmodern presidency has descended has long ceased to shock or surprise me, but the extent to which pure propaganda has been it's first, second and third string option, and how well that has worked should probably trouble us a lot more than it does in our current depths of accommodation to the increasing awfulness of our current circumstances.

As it becomes clearer and clearer that every effort was indeed to reduce us - the American people - to a panicked dependency upon the good faith of our leaders, we are starting to realize that not only has our trust been abused, but the very institutions and mechanisms that ensure trust and our collective security have been deliberately subverted and those who dedicated their lives and honor to those institutions have themselves been duped and betrayed.

The shocking part of this story is not so much the manipulation of the media by the Pentagon, but the despicable and duplicitous use of it's own to manufacture trust out of the fabric of their own credibility and conviction. They spoke - in the main, I hope - sincerely enough. Retired military members remain in touch, but of course are not current and they can be reliably expected to assume conditions and assumptions about standard doctrines and procedure that clearly turned out to be incorrect.

The use of partisan hot-buttons and the peddling of panic over threats that are, objectively speaking, routinely and quietly managed by other nations without subverting their own internal stability tends to lead one to the more or less reluctant conclusion that the currently shrill and divisive partisan climate is exactly what our would-be lords and masters desire.

George Bush was quite correct when he stood on that aircraft carrier and stated "Mission Accomplished."

The misson was not Iraq, saddam, or "tur'ism."

The mission was to scare the smart out of the American people, and we have been stuck on stupid for some time now. In order to succeed in that effort they have managed to scare, stupify, co-opt or otherwise utilize a lot of people who - had they been a little more cynical, a little less trusting of Authority they had been trained to believe actually is acting in the interest of and within the boundaries of The Constitution - would have been less willing to collaborate.

But, then, they were trained to expect that trust in order to do a job that requires such a level of trust.

If a military man is given what is termed "Actionable Intelligence," they may or may not take it with a grain of salt, but they would never assume that the intelligence itself was selected, slanted, doctored or even completely fabricated.

Beginning with the buildup to the Iraq War, the Bush administration created this "media Trojan horse" to counter any and all criticism. At times, they manipulated the networks' own military experts, spoon-feeding them talking points on everything from Iraq to Rumsfeld's handling of the war to Guantanamo. Here's a quote from the Times:

"Again and again, records show, the administration has enlisted analysts as a rapid reaction force to rebut what it viewed as critical news coverage, some of it by the networks’ own Pentagon correspondents. For example, when news articles revealed that troops in Iraq were dying because of inadequate body armor, a senior Pentagon official wrote to his colleagues: 'I think our analysts — properly armed — can push back in that arena.'"

Because of course it's not the body armor that matters - it's the PERCEPTION of body armor that's critical to administration planning.

As the video reveals, at least one former "military expert" is using blunt words indeed to describe the depth of betrayal that he feels.

Nor is he alone among current and former military personnel who are increasingly upset at the squandering of morale, military fitness and equipment for no obvious strategic or tactical gain.

It only really makes sense if the objective of "the mission" is to subvert the military itself and either turn it into the direct arm of an oppressive state, or render it unfit to oppose the emergent "private" military organizations. Groups such as Blackwater, with their ties both to powerful corporate energy interests and via those ties, the Bush Clan, have gained greatly in both funds and operational experience at taxpayer expense, without even having to pay lip-service to concepts such as "duty, honor or country," much less Geneva conventions, international law or that "Scrap of Paper," the Constitution.

I doubt that there has been any great outbreak of flaming liberalism within the military, so whatever the "official response is," one seriously doubts that military criticism of the emergent results of the "Project For a New American Century" is due to any wide indulgence in socialist thought, marijuana or even "squeamish" Liberal concern for the consequences of war upon the unfortunate. The military - and most properly so - is concerned with the integrity and survival of the Military itself, and struggling to come to terms with a situation in which the entire doctrine of civilian control of military force is - or should be - questioned.

That is to say, what is the proper response when the civilian leadership is clearly unfit, clearly corrupt, clearly incompetent or worse yet, hostile, and increasingly in direct command of alternate force options who are loyal to none but their paymasters? These are circumstances that try men's souls; that make them question the very foundations of their duty and their loyalties. If the military cannot trust the current leadership, to whom may it turn? This becomes even more complex when one realizes that the loyalties of ranking military leaders themselves may be open to substantial question under the circumstances.

Had I wished to create the circumstances, military, social and economic wherein I could declare a civil war and prosecute it against the elements of the Citizenry I considered "disloyal," "surplus" or "unreliable" - well, I'd have acted fairly much exactly as the Bush Administration has done. It generally takes the commitment of about 30 percent of a population to succeed in such an aim, given the current advantages the Bushistas have, and they may, I repeat, may, have achieved that state of affairs by polarizing the politics of the nation around the war and a number of other issues, to a state wherein the irrational hatreds of the fringes are no longer confined to the fringes.

If I'd wanted to commit an act of aggression in order to secure a reliable energy supply and control the crossroads of the middle east - I do believe that would have been possible, if prosecuted both ruthlessly and with the best military and civilian intelligence available, in both senses of the word. It would have been wrong, and it would have been the exact wrong the Left assumes that the Bushes intended - but I do not believe the failure is entirely due to mis-management. Rather, the placement of the mismanagers was as precise and deliberate as the seeding of landmines, or the spraying of chemical agents to degrade the effectiveness of "the enemy."

I do believe that if I'd wanted Bin Ladin hanging from a gibbet at Ground Zero as the proper result of a fair and public trial, I could have achieved that with the available might of the United States coupled with the enthusiastic co-operation of the world.

But despite the expenditure of irreplaceable faith, credit, blood, innocence, lives and the economic security of nearly every citizen of these united states, no such result is evident. This leads to the conclusion that such a result is a matter of policy - or at least, that it would be wise to operate under that assumption that Bin Ladin is either directly or effectively on the same side as Bush.

"Three times is enemy action."

If that is true, what does three to the power of three suggest to you? I don't doubt that the sheer number of deceptions, lies and subversions would be far from that particular mark.

They have met the enemy, and it is us. Your politics are irrelevant. Left, right or middle of the road, when was the last time anything happened that even resembled a result you could reasonably expect based on your understanding of the issues as they were represented to you?

The disconnection between words and deeds is stark and quite obviously independent of the stated politics and agendas of the majority of persons in Washington.

It may well be that your vote will be made irrelevant. It may well be that the existence of the United States as a Constitutional Republic as we have known it is in question. Strike that. It most certainly is in question - the only question is whether that question will be resolved by a peaceful and legitimate political process.

The other question, of course, is where you stand, where your real interests lie; Bush, or your family, friends and neighbors.

It all boils down to ethics, and each of us choosing to act from our most basic understanding of justice, duty, honor and, yes, righteousness.

Love it or Leave it Camo Tee

Nobody's Life, Liberty or Property...

"...Is safe while congress is in session."

Forwarded to me with the request that I pass it on. Which I surely will do.

http://blog.absolutearts.com/

From: illustratorspartnership@cnymail.com
Subject: "Promoting" Orphan Works
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2008 18:28:51 -0400

FROM THE ILLUSTRATORS' PARTNERSHIP

Yesterday ( Thurs. Mar. 13, 08) the House subcommittee on Intellectual
Property held their first hearing on new Orphan Works legislation.
Note the title:

"Hearing on Promoting the Use of Orphan Works: Balancing the Interests
of Copyright Owners and Users"

http://judiciary.house.gov/oversight.aspx?ID=427
Balance, however doesn't seem to be part of the Orphan Works
juggernaut. Indeed, after this hearing, we can no longer assume that
the U.S. Copyright Office is an advocate for the protection of
creators' rights. As they wrote on page 14 of their original Orphan
Works Report:

"If our recommendation resolves users' concerns in a satisfactory way,
it will likely be a comprehensive solution to the orphan works
situation." (our emphasis)

But how can any copyright law be "comprehensive" if it makes millions
of copyrights, no matter how valuable, available to users, no matter
how worthy, under a system that would introduce permanent uncertainty
into the business lives of creators?

Private Sector Registries

Since the last bill died in committee in 2006, the advocates of this
legislation have promoted the creation of private commercial
registries. On January 29, 2007, a lead attorney for the Copyright
Office warned us that under their plan any work not registered with a
private sector registry would be a potential orphan from the moment it
was created.

This means you would not only have to register your published work,
but also:

— Every sketch or note on every page of every sketchbook;
— Every sketch you send to every client;
— Every photograph you take anywhere, anytime, including family
photos, home videos, etc.;
— Every letter, email, etc., professional, personal or private.

This Would End Passive Copyright Protection: Under existing law the
total creative output of any "creator" receives passive copyright
protection from the moment you create it. This covers everything from
the published work of professional artists to the unpublished diaries,
letters and family photos of the average citizen.

But under the Orphan Works proposal, none of this material would be
covered unless the creator took active steps to register and maintain
coverage with a commercial registry. Failure to do so would "signal"
to infringers that you have no interest in protecting the work.

The Registration Paradox: By conceding that their proposals would make
potential orphans of any unregistered works, the Copyright Office
proposals would lead to a registration paradox: In order to "protect"
work from exposure to infringement, creators would have to expose it
on a publicly searchable registry. This would:

— Expose creative work to plagiarists and derivative abusers;
— Expose trade secrets and unused sketches to competitors;
— Expose unpublished and private correspondence to the public on the
Orwellian premise that you must expose it to "protect" it.

Yet registries will not be able to monitor infringements nor enforce
copyright compliance. Even after you've shelled out "protection money"
to a commercial registry to register hundreds of thousands of works,
you still won't be protected. A registry would do nothing more than
give you a piece of paper. You would still have to monitor
infringements - which can occur anytime anywhere in the world; then
embark on an uncertain quest to find the infringer, file a case in
Federal court, then prove that the infringer has removed your name or
other identifying information from your work. Meanwhile all the
infringer will have to do is say there was no such information on the
work when he found it and assert an orphan works defense. This will be
the end result of trying to "resolve the users' concerns" at the
expense of time-tested copyright law.

Coerced registration violates the spirit and letter of international
copyright law and copyright-related treaties. And because this bill
would effectively eliminate the passive copyright protection afforded
personal correspondence, family photos, etc. it would tear one more
slender thread of privacy protection from the fabric of fundamental
rights we currently take for granted.

We urge Congress to carefully reconsider the unintended consequences
of this radical copyright proposal.

— Brad Holland and Cynthia Turner, for the Board of the Illustrators'
Partnership

Please post or forward this email in its entirety to any interested party
For additional information about Orphan Works developments, go to the
IPA Orphan Works Resource Page for Artists
www.illustratorspartnership.org/01_topics/article.php?searchterm=00185

I suggest that you contact your representatives immediately with your concerns about this matter. This is the worst sort of "privatization," where a real and useful service is replaced by a money-making scheme that will do less, cost far more, and bury every individual and small business that has any intellectual property under a snowstorm of probably quite useless paperwork, while giving all the "passive compliance" advantages to potential data thieves.

Under this law, Pepsi could replicate Coke and every single frame from every single film will have to be individually protected - for a fee.

Frankly, I think the very idea is obviously corrupt. Certainly it is practically impossible for individual creators or small businesses to adequately protect their works - since there's no possible way for them to afford to prosecute offenders. Recovery, you see, is capped.

The obvious remedy would be for the US entertainment industry to relocate north or south of the border, where the Berne Copyright Convention would still apply, and US commercial and constitutional law would require it's enforcement. Same for small creators, who could incorporate in Canada, Mexico, or anywhere else with an online application form.

And of course, at that point, well, actual relocation seems probable - given the very portability of the digital arts themselves and the communications capability of the web. For myself, I could live and work anywhere with a high-speed internet connection, and I'm starting to become rather indifferent to patriotic appeals, considering the rising cost of patriotism these days.

I would find it much easier to be patriotic about a homeland in which my home and livelihood were actually secured by my taxes, rather than made available to the highest bidder by people my tax dollars pay for.

I like Forbes - but why do they like me?

I am unembarrassed about monetizing my site. I'm not the sort of person that thinks that good hard work should go unrewarded in order for it to be seen to be good. The thing about advertising of this sort is that it doesn't pay off at all if you don't have something worth reading. Well, that's the theory anyhow.

Nonetheless, I'm writing this to confess that I'm as surprised as you probably are. I signed up on a lark, thinking it was about as likely as being accepted by Pajamas Media.

In this article I aim to speculate about the reasons. I assume that Forbes pays a lot of mind to alternate voices and employs people at least as smart as I am. While it's editorial bias is toward a conservative sort of complacency, I don't think they are entirely capable of blinding themselves to the obvious - that a major shift in the entire economic structure and indeed, the very basis of wealth is inevitable, probably sooner than any of us will be entirely comfortable with.

Forbes is definitely on my list of reliable sources; on the rare occasions that I want a solid, conservative business viewpoint. However, as an ethics blogger, they are primarily useful to me as an example of the power of positively not thinking about ethics.

It's kind of amusing, to see how very correct Jesus was about the rich man, the camel and the eye of the needle. I'm in no position to criticize, by the way, my life has included some embarrassingly pointed lessons regarding the peril of thinking within the box you think you have earned the right to think within.

Perhaps that's why my blog passed the vetting process. Advertising is a form of validation, especially as it's directly linked to the Forbes.com name. I can't imagine how else it could have, I rarely write about Business and Finance directly, unless it's something of a Jerimiad. But the more I write about ethics, the more I realize how very profitable - and I mean that quite literally - it is to practice ethics religiously. Ethics, really, is no more and no less than the art of making correct decisions.

Indeed, as I look back, I can think of several times that if I had been more skilled in explaining what I knew to be true - well, my boss would have been a very wealthy man, and I would have been quite comfortably supported by a tidy nest-egg and a paid-off earth ship.

You see, - and sometimes it seems silly and futile to insist on this point - I am a fiscal conservative. I'm also something of a social conservative, though I have little or nothing in common with Social Conservatives who wish to engineer society to make there socio-religious preferences compulsory. What my conservatism amounts to is a reflexive dislike of sudden, unpredictable change, to the extent that I've spent a great deal of my life learning how to anticipate it so that I could be conveniently elsewhere.

Mostly, though, I'm a Libertarian in all senses; I believe that ultimately government should serve individuals, not groups, not corporations, not pressure groups and certainly, especially, primarily - not it's own agendas.

All individuals. Even the filthy rich. Even the desperately poor. Even the hapless and apparently useless. Because, well, we are all networked, all of us are five degrees from everyone else - and with the relationship between persons being that close, it really is damned unwise to pretend you can isolate yourself from the consequences of heedless, inconsiderate action.

Worse yet - the consequences of unethical decision making tend to be diffuse and unpredictable in time and space. It's far, far more difficult to protect your interests from the blow-back of an unethical decision than to do the right thing in the first place.

Furthermore, though the blow-back is unpredictable in time, the general "progress curve," the rate of social and technological change we currently experience, tends to make all consequences more dire. The up-side is that ethical decision making will tend to reap far greater rewards far sooner than conventional wisdom would suggest. Still, it's an obvious idea, one that our nation was actually based on, the idea that the fundamental unit of society was the individual.

I'm a Constitutional conservative. Not in the Alito sense, but in the sense of someone who has a decent, if casual background in the writings of the founders and their intents - which was primarily the intent for the Government to secure the rights and liberties of individuals, in the belief that, aside from being intuitively right, ethical and morally proper, it was also the simplest way to ensure a minimax outcome - the most possible approaches to social, cultural and structural issues at the minimum global cost.

My view of the last thirty years - which has been a view from the bottom tier of the pyramid, or close to it most of that time - has been that the presumptions of the Regan Revolution have proved to be deeply and irredeemably flawed. For, if you strip away the rhetoric, it amounted to this, "Look good, smell good, talk a good line and put your conscience in your pocket." And we have allowed a government to grow up with those very same values - the idea that "money has no smell" and that the worth of a constituent is measured in their ability to generate campaign funds. Furthermore, we have abandoned ourselves to the tender mercies of centralized planners and social experimenters who are neither persons of good will or even of satisfactory qualification - were there any satisfactory qualification for such a thing.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, none of that is true. In Middle America, ethics still work and honor and one's good name matter - because if nothing else, if you cannot be trusted, there's someone else who can be. And if you are truly criminal - well, even if the law might shield you, it may come down to an axe-handle to the kneecap.

I mention that since an appeal to conscience is, obviously going to be met with a well-practiced defense. So let us consider instead the steel fist in the velvet glove, the probable alternative when justice is apparently evaded. That fist is called "consequence." This nation is set up for a perfect storm of consequence, so long as those who have the ability to use capital leverage to make some important changes fail to do so.

Now, here's where I part company from the average Liberal. I don't have anything against rich people. Making money is a damn useful skill. Even knowing how to use money effectively is a damn useful skill. The military refers to it as "logistics." I just object to it being seen as the only thing that matters - and I try to remember that when I think of my own pretty nifty skill-set.

Alas, that skill-set doesn't include the financial arts, and I'd love to have someone to take care of that for me. But frankly, it would be a complete waste of my time to try and play on that pitch. I'd be roadkill, and it wouldn't be any fun.

And damn, if it's worth doing, it ought to be fun.

But past a certain point, it becomes more than a bit silly, if not outright dangerous, if you are willing to set aside all principles, all common-sense rules, and every other consideration to pile up wealth for ... well, for what?

I still don't understand where the satisfaction is in creating messes like Enron or Tycho. We can shrug our shoulders, and say, well, obviously, they were sociopaths. Alas, this is very true. It was true, it was obviously true, and yet somehow, nobody did or said anything much, until the utterly predictable occurred.

Here's where I think the current wealth culture has missed the boat entirely. It's as if the idea of profit has been entirely divorced from the greater realm of society and the people that make it up. Far from being accusatory on that point, I'm apprehensive. For frankly, even the legitimate "winners" in this game are isolating themselves to the point of utter irrelevance to the vast majority of people in this nation, while setting themselves up as perfect marks for those who can and do exploit the gullible.

Let me underline that with an except from Forbes.

Top Suburbs To Live Well
Matt Woolsey, 03.26.08, 12:01 AM ET

By This Author Matt Woolsey What The New Lending Limits Mean For You In Depth: Best Places To Buy Foreclosed Homes More Headlines RSS News Feed

Piedmont, Calif., atop the Oakland Hills, boasts good schools, plenty of parks, and safe streets where the local kids gather and most of the police's attention goes to errant skateboarders.

---

I wonder if that's how ghettos were marketed back in Europe, to wealthy Jews who very much preferred to not be reminded that there were indeed surrounded by poor and hungry Gentiles that their religion - as it existed at the time - said they need not concern themselves with. Not, of course, that being concerned would have helped all that much - but that's not the point to this comparison.

Mostly, the lesson here is the temptation being presented you, the opportunity to freely associate with "like minded people" and thereby voluntarily consign yourselves to irrelevance and of course, a willful abandonment of any rational sense of self-preservation. Instead, you prefer to trust the noble and self-effacing good will of your shepherds. You have unwittingly become captive resource, one that's permitted to live in relative splendor so long as it doesn't interfere with the people who matter, those who see themselves as born deserving of the right to control everything they can. That control depends on you not noticing critical flaws in their policy and being persuaded that those flaws are the fault of those who bear the cost of those flawed policy. As long as you subscribe to such willful isolation, you will be permitted to believe that you do actually matter. Just so long as you don't.

You will be tolerated - just as I am - to the extent that you provide cover to those who do, a "peasantry to swim within." For myself, I'm permitted to exist to prove that it's still possible to criticize the powers that be and live. But of course, that doesn't make the criticism any less germaine. For myself, I'm willing to trade on the complacency of those who think venality, corruption and greed will triumph over good, honest dealings.

Your willingness to "get with the program" is enforced by the cultural perception that the rest of the country is plagued by crime and infested with evil criminals - the sort who wear sweat clothes and flash gang signs. Oh, and Islamist radicals.

Willy Sutton was once asked, "why do you rob banks?" "Because that's where the money is." he replied. Well, you are where the money is. But please note, it's not the Willy Suttons herding you into complacent little ghettos which emphasize the appearance of safety. Someone is aiming to make a pile off of you - and they fondly expect you to thank you for it.

How do I know that? The thing I do well is to put together seemingly unrelated things and see how they fit in a larger pattern. Sometimes it's almost obvious - as in the example above.

The cognitive dissonance of juxtaposing that article with links to the best places to buy foreclosed homes was left there because I never pass up a free clue-by-four. And because Willy Sutton and later free-lance communists were able to remain free and inconvenience the wealthy banks for years due to the fact that the poor had no particular reason to protect the banks - or the wealthy who's wealth depended on them.

Now, I have not the predictive facility to say for sure if we are headed for another Great Depression, but I'll give better than even odds that we are in for a Staggering Dislocation, and the last place I'd want to be is in a poorly-secured complacent ghetto where the appearance of law and order is valued over actual law. That makes you enemies you don't even KNOW about - like the New Orleans residents turned back into the floodwaters at gunpoint by sherriffs who knew that white trash and nigras had no place in their town.

In that whole event and that one example of starkly immoral actions by government, we should all wonder in who's interest it is for our government to be making policies that have the direct and predictable effect of shattering a once cohesive and reliable social matrix - the very thing that most folks who hark back to the values of the 40's and 50's are indeed thinking about.

If you were allowed to belong to the dominant culture at all - wealth and privileged mattered a great deal less than they do now, or perhaps more importantly, skill, ability and proven merit were valued more, and it was understood that when separated, neither mattered all that much, really.

Our nation invested in improving it's most valuable form of capital - it's citizenry, and that paid off staggeringly well. Mind-bogglingly, unbelievably, stunningly well.

But now it's devil take the hindmost, because nobody seems to want "their taxes" to go to the "undeserving," where "undeserving" is "not me, not mine, and not immediately." That is the sort of mean-spiritedness that makes a culture fly apart at the seams, into vicious fragments of violently competitive demographics. I don't choose to live in Somalia for a reason.

So, now that I've troubled your mind - I sincerely hope - what do I suggest? What courses of action show promise?

Well, first of all, I have a very practical suggestion. Take yourself and your kids on a cruise to someplace like Africa - or South-Central LA. Take some time, make some friends, make some connections, and figure out a way to invest money to do some good. Hell, as you need to train your kids to administer capital wisely and well, this is a perfect way to do it. In a place like Bangladesh , India, south America or any randomly chosen Indian reservation, there are people with amazing skills and no money to spread the word. A budget of five-hundred or a thousand dollars for your kids to invest will pay off in many delightfully unexpected ways.

So go shopping, and invest some money in bringing your scores to market. You do have excellent taste, right? An eye for value? The sense of who is a worker and who's a poseur?

You see, nobody has the right to ask you to change who and what you are, or the things that matter to you. Nobody has the right to compel you, via taxation or pressure beyond your own, unavoidable fair share of the load in keeping this great economic engine turning over for the good of us all. It's in your very immediate interest to make this society work - and to ease the path towards welcoming a future of global, free and fair trade between individuals. The alternate is a pile of worthless paper and a very uncertain future.

What I'm asking you to realize about yourself is that your wealth brings a skill-set that is far more important than you might realize. Just get out of your comfort zone, abandon both complacency and enui and find out where you are needed. Because, well, you are. Desperately. And there is no feeling like it.

Right now, there are incredible opportunities in green and appropriate technology, approaches that are often being developed in the third world, for lack of access to the expensive, energy-intensive solutions we are so fond of. What is needed is a transfer of expertise and skills. For instance, bio-digester technology is cheap in the third world because labor is cheap, and all these things are built by hand. There's no way we could afford a bio-digester built that way to deal with our organic waste disposal issues - but a little appropriate gee-whizmatroncs would change that. We are talking technology that with the right investments could be realized in five to ten years as practical answers to issues of climate change, the intersection of national security and energy resources and the sort of peace that a full stomach and a well-engaged mind brings people.

And there is going to be an absolute HEAP of money - great, steaming, obscenely deep piles of it - in providing clean water and energy to urban areas at affordable prices. Los Angeles and Las Vegas rise to the top of my mind, but really, every Southwestern state has this issue. Every single current approach is some variety of megaproject - and they won't work.

What is needed is not just an elegant solution, but entire portfolios of elegant solutions. Elegant solutions tend to be green by definition because green approaches waste as little as possible. When you think of it, waste heat, wasted water, wasted organics - all of this might as well be money flushed down the toilet.

Quite literally.

I'm old enough to remember the howls of outrage in my resource-based home-town when teepee burners were banned, as being both serious pollution sources and a not-insignificant fire risk to the resource base itself. Then someone got a brilliant idea, and the press-to fire log was born, as was pressboard. Suddenly, chips and sawdust were too valuable to waste, and the entire engineered wood industry was born. That happened pretty darned suddenly, too.

Well, that's the situation here and now. And I'm pretty much convinced that at this point corporate America is too invested in doing things the way they have always been done to change - at least, of their own internal will.

Corporations are ponderous things, and this is the sort of challenge that needs as many possible approaches as can be imagined, because, well, there is not going to be one universal ideal solution, no market that can be structured or dominated.

The web - and global demands in terms of dignity, human rights and a widespread resentment of damn incompetent exploitation have come together to present individuals worldwide to pretty much work around authoritarian constraints. Increasingly, the "legality" of the imposition of constraints on the free action of citizens is becoming moot, as government - domestically and more generally - has lost a great deal of respect for it's ability to do it's supposed job while becoming far to intent on interfering with our personal lives at the expense of doing anything very useful.

The same is true of multinational corporations - to the extent that the distinction serves to make any difference.

Yet this apparently desperate situation - and it is quite desperate - is fraught with opportunity. Perhaps even more appealing is the realization that those who are on the front lines of hewing out a new way of coping with the demands of a rapidly emerging global culture are those who will be able to shape it's nature.

The demand for food, housing, stable social networks, well-regulated and reliable market transactions, transport, distribution, energy and communications are growing exponentially - and with no end in sight. Get your money working on something that doesn't involve the technology, mindsets and economic philosophies of the 19th and 20th centuries.

You may be tempted to hear this as "learning to make do with less." Actually, what I'm saying is quite different. Every great leap forward in our history has been about learning to do better with less - less effort, less risk, less waste, fewer man-hours and a broad and general increase in both personal liberty and general living standards.

I do not aspire to a return to feudal culture and subsistence agriculture - as some silly-fringe Libertarians do. Nope, I aspire to the far more likely and easily realized, which is a future where we need far less energy to do what we want, and have far more options as to what that could conceivably be.

I aspire to a future where nobody needs to go hungry or feel useless - and the more options there are, the more likely that will be. I see a future in which the capability to be violent is seen as the insurance of peace - not a means to it, and certainly not a major economic sector. Rather, I foresee a return to the philosophy of the citizen-soldier, and a general commitment to policies that do not require us citizens to suck in our ponderous guts and go out and do or die. Our mercenaries and proxy armies have brought us little net profit as a nation and a culture, if any, compared to the cost. It's time we stopped pretending that acting unethically towards others is in any way defensible - even in the boardroom.