Pontificate
Pronunciation: pän-'ti-f&-"kAt
Function: intransitive verb
Inflected Form(s): -cat·ed; -cat·ing
Etymology: Medieval Latin pontificatus, past participle of pontificare, from Latin pontific-, pontifex
1 a : to officiate as a pontiff b : to celebrate pontifical mass
2 : to speak or express opinions in a pompous or dogmatic way
- pon·tif·i·ca·tion /(")pän-"ti-f&-'kA-sh&n/ noun
- pon·tif·i·ca·tor /-"kA-t&r/ noun
The following video deals with mature subject matter and is intended for adult audiences. Viewer discretion is advised.
http://toronto.cbc.ca/clips/Toronto/wmv/strike-031706.wmv
For Your Eyes Only:
CBC News
The Satellite - MSA Newspaper
Monday, March 20, 2006
Friday, March 03, 2006
My Inner Hero
My Inner Hero - Warrior!
I'm courageous, straightforward, and charismatic. I'm a born leader, but I'm also not afraid to face danger on my own. Nothing stands between me and victory... nothing that lives to tell the tale, anyway. If you need someone to charge into battle for you, call on me.
How about you? Click here to find your own inner hero.
I'm courageous, straightforward, and charismatic. I'm a born leader, but I'm also not afraid to face danger on my own. Nothing stands between me and victory... nothing that lives to tell the tale, anyway. If you need someone to charge into battle for you, call on me.
How about you? Click here to find your own inner hero.
Saturday, February 18, 2006
Walmart - East India Company; Part Deux
North American Governments and Modern Corporations — each in its own way encourages amnesia. The facts of history are dangerous things. They call to mind ways of thinking, ways of living, that are inimical to the modern American way of life.
Corporations have emerged as the dominant governance institutions on the planet. The largest among them reach into virtually every country in the world and exceed most governments in size and power. Corporations are characters in the larger stories of industrialization and capitalism.
Then:
Everyone knows the Civil War was fought the twin issues of slavery and states' rights, but how many Americans know the Revolutionary War was fought to stop corporations? The revolt over the Tea Tax was not a revolt over the fact that the tax had been raised, but rather, over the fact that it had been lowered.
The new, lower tea tax allowed a multi-national corporation, the East India Company, to flood the American market with cheap tea, thereby driving small mom-and-pop tea shops into bankruptcy. In that respect, the Boston Tea Party was akin to an attack on the local cornerstore, the Founding Fathers were dedicated in part to destroying the ability of corporations to operate on American soil.
Now:
There is genuine apprehension that small shopkeepers and intermediaries would be adversely affected by the arrival of the global retailer in India. In the United States, many mom-and-pop corner stores have shut down and others struggle to survive where Wal-Marts open.
Small entrepreneurs and the burgeoning middle class are the backbone of the Indian economy; and it will be a sad day for the Baniyahs of Bombay when they get savaged by Wal-Mart's organizational innovations, advanced inventory system; its bulk purchases of goods, price discounts; and a ferocious anti-labor policy.
John Menzer, the president and CEO of Wal-Mart's international operations said, "India represents a $250 billion retail market, growing 7.2 percent a year, but modern retailing is just starting to emerge." India is not only "a huge organic growth market for Wal-Mart," he said, but also a fast growing outsourcing market, with an expected $1.5 billion of merchandise export to Wal-Mart stores this year.
For those you who dont like reading too much and have better things in life to do just so you know, "Wal-Mart is thinking of operating slave-labor camps in India. They plan to do this through their suppliers and, increasingly, in walmart's own name." "Manmohan Singh and Chidamabaram have jumping up and down silly, giggling like teenage school girls ever since they heard Menzer say the F-word.[FDI-Foreign Direct Inverstment-Of course!]"
Domestic:
Wal-Mart has 2000 stores worldwide; and sells almost every thing at low prices, giving low and middle-class people access to goods which would have been otherwise beyond their monthly budgets. The retailer is able to do so by buying massive quantities from inshore and offshore sources and hiring people, mostly women, at blood and sweat wages.
The seamy side of the retail giant, include its denial of health coverage to employees, unequal wages for women and the elderly, ethnic and gender discrimination and many other not-so-legal practices. Wal-Mart rezones cities, determines the real minimum wage, channels capital throughout the world -- and conducts a kind of international diplomacy with a score of nations.
International:
Walmart's business practices may have greater impact upon the world than Al Qaeda, tsunami and earthquakes if we choose to pay attention. As the retail giant scrounges and sponges the third world for cheap goods, in the process it also creates employment for hundreds of thousands of people in developing countries. In the United States it keeps overheads low by hiring mostly female workers.
Implications:
The Wal-Mart department store chain, which employs 1.3 million people at 4,700 stores worldwide, and in 2002 became the largest corporation in the world, is levelling economies of the U.S., industrial nations, and the Third World.
Wal-Mart is a driving force behind the decadent Imperial Roman model of the United States. Unable any longer to reproduce its own population's existence through its own physical economy, the United States has, for the past two decades, used an over-valued dollar to suck in physical goods from around the globe for its survival. Wal-Mart is both the public face and working sinews of that policy. It brings in cheap pants from Bangladesh, cheap shirts from China, cheap food from Mexico, etc. Workers who produce these things are paid next to nothing. Wal-Mart Is Not a Business, It's an Economic Disease.Wal-Mart is destroying communities; it represents an institutionalization of the values which stink."
Not since the days of the British East India Company as the cornerstone of the British imperial system, has one single corporate entity been responsible for so much misery. At the core of its policy, Wal-Mart demands of its suppliers that they sell goods to Wal-Mart at such a low price, that they can only do so by outsourcing their work to low-wage factories overseas. This causes the exodus of millions of production jobs from the United States and the setting up of slave-labor concentration camps around the globe. Wal-Mart's policy includes crushing living standards in America, forbidding its workers from unionizing, bringing in workers illegally from abroad, and bankrupting tens of thousands of stores and outlets on Main Street, ripping apart communities and their tax bases.
Wal-Mart uses its power to ferociously attack and decimate labor power, and it is the leading force in the mass exodus of North American manufacturing capacity and jobs. The company is militantly anti-union. Reportedly it has instructed its managers never to hire workers who once belonged to a union.
Alarms Bells in My head going off:
It's not the prowess of Walmart that worries me more than the deviance that will be employed to get the niche in the market. As of now, Indian consumers are happy with the convenience of the kirana shop but they were content with watching Ramayana & Mahabharata on the big sister channel too [DD] too. Its when Macaulay's children make food and grocery buying an ambience-driven exercise that I would be concerned.
Conclusion:
The traditional model of American capitalism from the mid-20th century was that American corporations were respected because they were globally efficient, but they also paid their workers a good wage so that workers could become consumers and part of the middle class of American society. I think we've lost that model today, because globalization has pushed Wal-Mart and companies like them towards global efficiency, where consumer prices are the only things that matter.
Corporations have emerged as the dominant governance institutions on the planet. The largest among them reach into virtually every country in the world and exceed most governments in size and power. Corporations are characters in the larger stories of industrialization and capitalism.
Then:
Everyone knows the Civil War was fought the twin issues of slavery and states' rights, but how many Americans know the Revolutionary War was fought to stop corporations? The revolt over the Tea Tax was not a revolt over the fact that the tax had been raised, but rather, over the fact that it had been lowered.
The new, lower tea tax allowed a multi-national corporation, the East India Company, to flood the American market with cheap tea, thereby driving small mom-and-pop tea shops into bankruptcy. In that respect, the Boston Tea Party was akin to an attack on the local cornerstore, the Founding Fathers were dedicated in part to destroying the ability of corporations to operate on American soil.
Now:
There is genuine apprehension that small shopkeepers and intermediaries would be adversely affected by the arrival of the global retailer in India. In the United States, many mom-and-pop corner stores have shut down and others struggle to survive where Wal-Marts open.
Small entrepreneurs and the burgeoning middle class are the backbone of the Indian economy; and it will be a sad day for the Baniyahs of Bombay when they get savaged by Wal-Mart's organizational innovations, advanced inventory system; its bulk purchases of goods, price discounts; and a ferocious anti-labor policy.
John Menzer, the president and CEO of Wal-Mart's international operations said, "India represents a $250 billion retail market, growing 7.2 percent a year, but modern retailing is just starting to emerge." India is not only "a huge organic growth market for Wal-Mart," he said, but also a fast growing outsourcing market, with an expected $1.5 billion of merchandise export to Wal-Mart stores this year.
For those you who dont like reading too much and have better things in life to do just so you know, "Wal-Mart is thinking of operating slave-labor camps in India. They plan to do this through their suppliers and, increasingly, in walmart's own name." "Manmohan Singh and Chidamabaram have jumping up and down silly, giggling like teenage school girls ever since they heard Menzer say the F-word.[FDI-Foreign Direct Inverstment-Of course!]"
Domestic:
Wal-Mart has 2000 stores worldwide; and sells almost every thing at low prices, giving low and middle-class people access to goods which would have been otherwise beyond their monthly budgets. The retailer is able to do so by buying massive quantities from inshore and offshore sources and hiring people, mostly women, at blood and sweat wages.
The seamy side of the retail giant, include its denial of health coverage to employees, unequal wages for women and the elderly, ethnic and gender discrimination and many other not-so-legal practices. Wal-Mart rezones cities, determines the real minimum wage, channels capital throughout the world -- and conducts a kind of international diplomacy with a score of nations.
International:
Walmart's business practices may have greater impact upon the world than Al Qaeda, tsunami and earthquakes if we choose to pay attention. As the retail giant scrounges and sponges the third world for cheap goods, in the process it also creates employment for hundreds of thousands of people in developing countries. In the United States it keeps overheads low by hiring mostly female workers.
Implications:
The Wal-Mart department store chain, which employs 1.3 million people at 4,700 stores worldwide, and in 2002 became the largest corporation in the world, is levelling economies of the U.S., industrial nations, and the Third World.
Wal-Mart is a driving force behind the decadent Imperial Roman model of the United States. Unable any longer to reproduce its own population's existence through its own physical economy, the United States has, for the past two decades, used an over-valued dollar to suck in physical goods from around the globe for its survival. Wal-Mart is both the public face and working sinews of that policy. It brings in cheap pants from Bangladesh, cheap shirts from China, cheap food from Mexico, etc. Workers who produce these things are paid next to nothing. Wal-Mart Is Not a Business, It's an Economic Disease.Wal-Mart is destroying communities; it represents an institutionalization of the values which stink."
Not since the days of the British East India Company as the cornerstone of the British imperial system, has one single corporate entity been responsible for so much misery. At the core of its policy, Wal-Mart demands of its suppliers that they sell goods to Wal-Mart at such a low price, that they can only do so by outsourcing their work to low-wage factories overseas. This causes the exodus of millions of production jobs from the United States and the setting up of slave-labor concentration camps around the globe. Wal-Mart's policy includes crushing living standards in America, forbidding its workers from unionizing, bringing in workers illegally from abroad, and bankrupting tens of thousands of stores and outlets on Main Street, ripping apart communities and their tax bases.
Wal-Mart uses its power to ferociously attack and decimate labor power, and it is the leading force in the mass exodus of North American manufacturing capacity and jobs. The company is militantly anti-union. Reportedly it has instructed its managers never to hire workers who once belonged to a union.
Alarms Bells in My head going off:
It's not the prowess of Walmart that worries me more than the deviance that will be employed to get the niche in the market. As of now, Indian consumers are happy with the convenience of the kirana shop but they were content with watching Ramayana & Mahabharata on the big sister channel too [DD] too. Its when Macaulay's children make food and grocery buying an ambience-driven exercise that I would be concerned.
Conclusion:
The traditional model of American capitalism from the mid-20th century was that American corporations were respected because they were globally efficient, but they also paid their workers a good wage so that workers could become consumers and part of the middle class of American society. I think we've lost that model today, because globalization has pushed Wal-Mart and companies like them towards global efficiency, where consumer prices are the only things that matter.
Thursday, February 02, 2006
Confessions of an Academic Hit-man
Education, like other social services such as health, is far from being a simple ‘product’. The forces of supply and demand can’t be the only factor taken into account, because education is a right recognized in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
But the education market is no longer simply a matter of choice and competition between educational institutions. The education market is a diffuse, expanding, and sophisticated system of goods, services, experiences and routes – publicly and privately provided.
The rendering of educational processes into a form which is more readily privatized – into a contractible form, into a form for cost and profit calculation, into a version of education which can be reduced to a commercial exchange based on output indicators, which can be monitored.
Within institutions – colleges, schools, universities – the means/end logic, education for economic competitiveness, can transform what were once the social process of teaching, learning and research into a set of standardized and measurable products.
As part of seeking after new ‘markets’ and the re-orientation to the customer, new forms of ‘delivery’ and consumption of higher education are being created which can result in learning becoming increasingly fragmented. Colleges have been turned into value/commodity producing enterprises. They become institutionally rearranged on a model of capitalist accumulation.
College students are rendered as active consumers but passive learners, a development that further reinforces the idea that a diploma is a commodity that (hopefully) can be exchanged for a job rather than as a liberal education that prepares students for life.
The economy of student worth - seeking success in the performative culture – is very much a product. If only there was some way of curbing the derogation of ethics, brought about by privatization and the ‘disciplines’ of the market. In the business of survival in the marketplace, the niceties of care and equal value become easily dispensable. The social relations between providers and ‘clients’ and among the providers themselves are changed significantly. This is a process of 'ethical-retooling’.
The currency of judgment in education provides an infrastructure of comparisons which value practitioners and institutions solely in terms of their productivity, their performances! Productive individuals are the central economic resource in the reformed, entrepreneurial public sector. The performances of individual subjects or organizations serve as displays of 'quality', or 'moments' of promotion or inspection.
Metrics are constructed which are used to make different sorts of activities commensurable. The use of metrics, targets, linked to incentives and sanctions, and the constant collection and publication of performance data, embeds instrumentality into everything that is done. What they stand for, or represent the worth, quality or value of an individual or organization within a field of judgment.
In the process, what we do is emptied of all substantive content. Increasingly, we choose and judge our actions in terms of affectivity and appearance. Beliefs and values are no longer important - it is output that counts. We have come to value others solely for their performance, their contribution to the performance of the group or the organization, rather than their intrinsic worth as persons.
The commoditization of academic labour has shifted the carriers of culturally valued knowledge bearers into a struggle for authenticity. Authenticity and performance are as easily replaced by compliance and silence. Academic entrepreneurs are determined to improve academic productivity creating a bureaucracy of academic auditors. The pervasive presence of business ethos in the education industry is a sign of the changing balance of power between the state and the market.
The specificities of human interactions involved in teaching and learning are being erased. The practice of teaching is being re-made and reduced to externally generated rule-following and target achievement.
The prerequisite of the commerce of education, is that Knowledge is no longer legitimated through ‘argument and reasoning', rather, through the pragmatics of ‘optimization’ – the creation of profit rather than ideals.
So, what makes up today’s college student? Today's college student is defined by shallowness, flexibility, transparency and represented within performances. Their ‘professionalism’ is in turn their willingness and ability to adapt to the necessities and vicissitudes of policy.
But the education market is no longer simply a matter of choice and competition between educational institutions. The education market is a diffuse, expanding, and sophisticated system of goods, services, experiences and routes – publicly and privately provided.
The rendering of educational processes into a form which is more readily privatized – into a contractible form, into a form for cost and profit calculation, into a version of education which can be reduced to a commercial exchange based on output indicators, which can be monitored.
Within institutions – colleges, schools, universities – the means/end logic, education for economic competitiveness, can transform what were once the social process of teaching, learning and research into a set of standardized and measurable products.
As part of seeking after new ‘markets’ and the re-orientation to the customer, new forms of ‘delivery’ and consumption of higher education are being created which can result in learning becoming increasingly fragmented. Colleges have been turned into value/commodity producing enterprises. They become institutionally rearranged on a model of capitalist accumulation.
College students are rendered as active consumers but passive learners, a development that further reinforces the idea that a diploma is a commodity that (hopefully) can be exchanged for a job rather than as a liberal education that prepares students for life.
The economy of student worth - seeking success in the performative culture – is very much a product. If only there was some way of curbing the derogation of ethics, brought about by privatization and the ‘disciplines’ of the market. In the business of survival in the marketplace, the niceties of care and equal value become easily dispensable. The social relations between providers and ‘clients’ and among the providers themselves are changed significantly. This is a process of 'ethical-retooling’.
The currency of judgment in education provides an infrastructure of comparisons which value practitioners and institutions solely in terms of their productivity, their performances! Productive individuals are the central economic resource in the reformed, entrepreneurial public sector. The performances of individual subjects or organizations serve as displays of 'quality', or 'moments' of promotion or inspection.
Metrics are constructed which are used to make different sorts of activities commensurable. The use of metrics, targets, linked to incentives and sanctions, and the constant collection and publication of performance data, embeds instrumentality into everything that is done. What they stand for, or represent the worth, quality or value of an individual or organization within a field of judgment.
In the process, what we do is emptied of all substantive content. Increasingly, we choose and judge our actions in terms of affectivity and appearance. Beliefs and values are no longer important - it is output that counts. We have come to value others solely for their performance, their contribution to the performance of the group or the organization, rather than their intrinsic worth as persons.
The commoditization of academic labour has shifted the carriers of culturally valued knowledge bearers into a struggle for authenticity. Authenticity and performance are as easily replaced by compliance and silence. Academic entrepreneurs are determined to improve academic productivity creating a bureaucracy of academic auditors. The pervasive presence of business ethos in the education industry is a sign of the changing balance of power between the state and the market.
The specificities of human interactions involved in teaching and learning are being erased. The practice of teaching is being re-made and reduced to externally generated rule-following and target achievement.
The prerequisite of the commerce of education, is that Knowledge is no longer legitimated through ‘argument and reasoning', rather, through the pragmatics of ‘optimization’ – the creation of profit rather than ideals.
So, what makes up today’s college student? Today's college student is defined by shallowness, flexibility, transparency and represented within performances. Their ‘professionalism’ is in turn their willingness and ability to adapt to the necessities and vicissitudes of policy.
Sunday, January 15, 2006
The Deviant's Advocate
Deviance is the source of all innovation. It can be a force for good or for evil. It's the reservoir of new ideas, products, personalities and markets. All innovation and progress -- commercial, biological, social, scientific, artistic, and personal -- is a direct result of deviance. Deviance is an innovation virus, one that infects the status quo, changing traditional thinking at a primal level.
Today's criminal-justice system and social register are at loggerheads. There was a time when pimps were invective oppressors of women: including physical and sexual abuse, economic oppression and abandonment. And gangsters whose deep and pervasive corruptive influences extend beyond drug trafficking, extortion, and the more traditional forms of vice. Today, "gangsta-ism" is a prerequisite to having a Top 40 hit on the Billboard since "Rhyme Pays".
Deviance drives today's social and commercial agenda. Things that we found repulsive only yesterday we embrace today. Deviance migrates from the Fringe to Social Convention, rapidly creating markets and permanently changing the rules of the social and commercial game. The pace of change has picked up to the point where the functional distance between the Fringe and Social Convention has disappeared.
Yesterday's pariah is tomorrow's market darling, and what was once socially unacceptable is suddenly hot commodity. The rate of deviant change is so intense and so relentless that we are beginning to witness multiple deviances. The game's rules keep change before we get a chance to jot them down.
Deviance is really one of us taking one step away from the middle of the road. In individuals, ideas, products or institutions it is expressed as it chugs along a fixed and predictable path.
Fringe (where it first appears in the mind of a true deviant): you'll find yourself moving from the comfort of the accepted into the fast-paced world of the trendsetter.
Edge (where it picks up a small following): you'll land in the rarified realm of the ultra cool avant-garde.
Realm of the Cool (where it begins to develop a broader following among trendsetters): you are in the seductive yet frightening world of the cultist and the fanatic.
Next Big Thing (where the formerly unthinkable becomes almost de rigueur): you'll crash head-on into the heart of social darkness: the world of naked, pure, unabashed, and largely frightening deviance.
As the deviant enter the "Realm of the Cool", it acquires a growing audience because the idea is starting to win more media coverage. What was once preposterous is now taunting and teasing the sensibility of society. Cool Hunters and culture vultures nurture this market. As the deviant achieves audience size and market scale in the Realm of the Cool, it's ready to move on to the Next Big Thing.
At that point, the original deviant is little more than a distant reference point, and has now become sanitized, commercialized, and packaged. Conventional society may flirt with the deviant when it's in the Realm of the Cool. But when the deviant hits the Next Big Thing, those in the mainstream become genuinely engaged with it.
Athletes, actors, and musicians used body ink as a way of telling the world that they were big enough and powerful enough to reject social taboos. Tattoos shifted from being badges of guilty pleasure to being visible status symbols proudly worn. Today, tattoos are an essential part of the formal uniform of any self-respecting, pampered, suburban youth intent on demonstrating his/her individualism. These days, every male athlete/rock star worthy of the name carries a storyboard of ink on their body.
The pattern is universal for all to see. In film, food, or fashion; In magazines, music, or medicine; or In wellness, fitness, or any other form of being hip. Deviance tells the story of every mass market ever created. What starts out as weird and dangerous mutates until it becomes a saleable commodity for corporate America.
Deviance ought to be a big business, if it weren't for one thing: cultural problems. Culture poses major opposing problems for deviants: Popular American culture is full of new opportunities and it loves the deviant. American corporate culture serves as an organizational anti-virus, protecting business-as-usual businesses from new opportunities. Corporate culture hates the deviant; it works to eliminate deviant employees and discourage deviant ideas. Corporate culture punishes deviant behavior and attitudes. Thanks to all this hate, most large corporate lose the opportunity to discover the future and get there first.
Companies are stuck in a deeply disturbing rut that they are unable to work out: All innovation springs from deviance. Innovation is good. But deviance always ends up being bad. As a consequence, established businesses tend to feel caught between their addictive thirst for breakthrough offerings and their fear and hatred of anyone who refuses to parrot the party line.
But it doesn't have to be that way. The history of innovation proves it; corporate leaders need to accept it: The advantage always falls to the deviant, because nature and commerce hates the status quo.
Deviants don't, won't, or can't play by the rules. Their mission to propagate deviance. They are the greatest hope that moribund corporations have for renewing their vision, energy, innovation, and future. The challenge to business is simple: Think deviant!
Today's criminal-justice system and social register are at loggerheads. There was a time when pimps were invective oppressors of women: including physical and sexual abuse, economic oppression and abandonment. And gangsters whose deep and pervasive corruptive influences extend beyond drug trafficking, extortion, and the more traditional forms of vice. Today, "gangsta-ism" is a prerequisite to having a Top 40 hit on the Billboard since "Rhyme Pays".
Deviance drives today's social and commercial agenda. Things that we found repulsive only yesterday we embrace today. Deviance migrates from the Fringe to Social Convention, rapidly creating markets and permanently changing the rules of the social and commercial game. The pace of change has picked up to the point where the functional distance between the Fringe and Social Convention has disappeared.
Yesterday's pariah is tomorrow's market darling, and what was once socially unacceptable is suddenly hot commodity. The rate of deviant change is so intense and so relentless that we are beginning to witness multiple deviances. The game's rules keep change before we get a chance to jot them down.
Deviance is really one of us taking one step away from the middle of the road. In individuals, ideas, products or institutions it is expressed as it chugs along a fixed and predictable path.
Fringe (where it first appears in the mind of a true deviant): you'll find yourself moving from the comfort of the accepted into the fast-paced world of the trendsetter.
Edge (where it picks up a small following): you'll land in the rarified realm of the ultra cool avant-garde.
Realm of the Cool (where it begins to develop a broader following among trendsetters): you are in the seductive yet frightening world of the cultist and the fanatic.
Next Big Thing (where the formerly unthinkable becomes almost de rigueur): you'll crash head-on into the heart of social darkness: the world of naked, pure, unabashed, and largely frightening deviance.
As the deviant enter the "Realm of the Cool", it acquires a growing audience because the idea is starting to win more media coverage. What was once preposterous is now taunting and teasing the sensibility of society. Cool Hunters and culture vultures nurture this market. As the deviant achieves audience size and market scale in the Realm of the Cool, it's ready to move on to the Next Big Thing.
At that point, the original deviant is little more than a distant reference point, and has now become sanitized, commercialized, and packaged. Conventional society may flirt with the deviant when it's in the Realm of the Cool. But when the deviant hits the Next Big Thing, those in the mainstream become genuinely engaged with it.
Athletes, actors, and musicians used body ink as a way of telling the world that they were big enough and powerful enough to reject social taboos. Tattoos shifted from being badges of guilty pleasure to being visible status symbols proudly worn. Today, tattoos are an essential part of the formal uniform of any self-respecting, pampered, suburban youth intent on demonstrating his/her individualism. These days, every male athlete/rock star worthy of the name carries a storyboard of ink on their body.
The pattern is universal for all to see. In film, food, or fashion; In magazines, music, or medicine; or In wellness, fitness, or any other form of being hip. Deviance tells the story of every mass market ever created. What starts out as weird and dangerous mutates until it becomes a saleable commodity for corporate America.
Deviance ought to be a big business, if it weren't for one thing: cultural problems. Culture poses major opposing problems for deviants: Popular American culture is full of new opportunities and it loves the deviant. American corporate culture serves as an organizational anti-virus, protecting business-as-usual businesses from new opportunities. Corporate culture hates the deviant; it works to eliminate deviant employees and discourage deviant ideas. Corporate culture punishes deviant behavior and attitudes. Thanks to all this hate, most large corporate lose the opportunity to discover the future and get there first.
Companies are stuck in a deeply disturbing rut that they are unable to work out: All innovation springs from deviance. Innovation is good. But deviance always ends up being bad. As a consequence, established businesses tend to feel caught between their addictive thirst for breakthrough offerings and their fear and hatred of anyone who refuses to parrot the party line.
But it doesn't have to be that way. The history of innovation proves it; corporate leaders need to accept it: The advantage always falls to the deviant, because nature and commerce hates the status quo.
Deviants don't, won't, or can't play by the rules. Their mission to propagate deviance. They are the greatest hope that moribund corporations have for renewing their vision, energy, innovation, and future. The challenge to business is simple: Think deviant!
Saturday, December 31, 2005
Dr. Bourgeoislove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bonne année
Life in North American society embodies a basic contradiction between capitalism - the luminous bourgeois ideals of peace, freedom, opportunity, love, and community and the harsh, brutal realities of the irrational economic system which encourages these ideals and feeds off their unobtainability. The whole function of trade and commerce is to exacerbate this disjunction.
Business destroys the coveted bourgeois values and the familial structures set up to secure and nurture those values. Social mobility, success, depends on brutality; this is the primary law of capitalism. Capitalist competition severely limits the ability of most people to become very close to any other people.
Religion is an important prop of bourgeois ideology, the Church represents a community of sorts. And in it's inability to comfort anyone the church shows its impotence. It is one more bourgeois ideal that does not work.
Family ties, social mobility, quest for security, companionship, and even religious values all relate and correspond to real universal human needs for community, love, respect, support, appreciation.
Social institutions which function in four levels of familial affiliations — the nuclear family, the extended family, the ethnic community, and the Church — upon which the we rely to provide and protect these values, wither before the irrational, destructive forces of capitalism, the main goal of which is profit, not the meeting of human needs.
Each institution strives unsuccessfully to create an ideal community. In all cases, the needs of business destroy whatever communal aspects these associations might provide. In fact, it is the very effort to conserve and support these families that becomes corrupted by business and destroys them.
Capitalism, at its best, must destroy human life and associations to exist. Thus, the more vigorously bourgeois society strives to achieve the ideals it has set for itself, the more destructive and corrupt it becomes.
Economic dependence is a debilitating experience for anyone in this society.
Afterthought: May the new year bring light to more people. From their own personal darkness, may each one be emancipated by his/her own free will.
Business destroys the coveted bourgeois values and the familial structures set up to secure and nurture those values. Social mobility, success, depends on brutality; this is the primary law of capitalism. Capitalist competition severely limits the ability of most people to become very close to any other people.
Religion is an important prop of bourgeois ideology, the Church represents a community of sorts. And in it's inability to comfort anyone the church shows its impotence. It is one more bourgeois ideal that does not work.
Family ties, social mobility, quest for security, companionship, and even religious values all relate and correspond to real universal human needs for community, love, respect, support, appreciation.
Social institutions which function in four levels of familial affiliations — the nuclear family, the extended family, the ethnic community, and the Church — upon which the we rely to provide and protect these values, wither before the irrational, destructive forces of capitalism, the main goal of which is profit, not the meeting of human needs.
Each institution strives unsuccessfully to create an ideal community. In all cases, the needs of business destroy whatever communal aspects these associations might provide. In fact, it is the very effort to conserve and support these families that becomes corrupted by business and destroys them.
Capitalism, at its best, must destroy human life and associations to exist. Thus, the more vigorously bourgeois society strives to achieve the ideals it has set for itself, the more destructive and corrupt it becomes.
Economic dependence is a debilitating experience for anyone in this society.
Afterthought: May the new year bring light to more people. From their own personal darkness, may each one be emancipated by his/her own free will.
Saturday, December 24, 2005
The Capitalist Who Stole Christmas
Hope you have a "Merry You-Know-What" and enjoy your "Christmas vacation"; oops I mean winter closure.
In a desperate cry to escape the tortures inflicted upon me this side of the wall of separation between church and state. I cry for help. This is not a rant about the gumming up of civilized discourse in a phlegm of hateful resentment of everything secular.
Christmas today is an exuberant display of human ingenuity, capitalist productivity, and the enjoyment of life. I'd actually prefer if people saw what it was they were celebrating and called it just that. In this case why bother with the terminology call it what it is - 'Winter Shopping Festival.'
It is not just on religious issues that the media and the intelligentsia seem determined to suppress, it's an ongoing symptom that plagues the entire passive aggressive global society. In the international jungle, made more dangerous by terrorist networks that circle the globe, anything that it is not defended is in jeopardy.
And if we let liberal ideals govern the nature of holidays, we'll learn that the best customs of Christmas, from carols to trees to spectacular decorations, have their root in pagan ideas and practices. These customs were greatly amplified by American culture, as the product of reason, science, business, worldliness, and egoism, i.e., the pursuit of happiness.
Undermining a sense of the worthiness of a society undermines that allegiance -- and, without allegiance, there is no defense. No society can survive in the long run without the allegiance of its people.
Christmas shopping is like pornography -- nobody wants to admit they've seen it, yet everybody seems to know what it looks like.
The majority of the population take part in the tradition of commercialized, secular Christmas. Why? Because it's fun, especially for the kids in the family. What kid doesn’t like candy canes, snowman cookies, Santa Claus, parties and toys?
It’s almost impossible to be a kid in North America or Western Europe and not get enraptured by the “magic” of the Christmas season. We all know that the stores we got our loved ones gifts from and the reatil sales associates who served us were referring to the commercialized, secular Christmas—the one that fattens their profits while raising credit card debt.
Essentially, Christmas has been captured by capitalism. The Grinch hasn’t stolen Christmas. Capitalism has.
Christmas is gradually being secularized into a season of general merrymaking and loads of money making. It is in transition from religious “holy day” to secular holiday.
The retail industry's main goal is for you to buy something. They will jump on any excuse you might have, to not only excite you to shop, but woo you into their establishments.
Capitalism doesn’t care. The market doesn’t care. All that matters is how to make the best profit possible from selling products to the public.
One reason you might shop is to buy a present for someone. In the very late fall, a majority of the population is not only buying one present for someone, but many presents for many people, to the delight of the retail stores (and hopefully the delight of the recipients).
Life requires reason, selfishness, capitalism; that is what Christmas should celebrate -- and really, underneath all the pretense, that is what it does celebrate. It is time to take the Christ out of Christmas, and turn the holiday into a guiltlessly egoistic, pro-reason, this-worldly, commercial celebration.
And -- before it becomes taboo -- a Happy New Year. Oh wait! It's the beginning of a new tax year, and the next five or six months will be spent working for the government.
In a desperate cry to escape the tortures inflicted upon me this side of the wall of separation between church and state. I cry for help. This is not a rant about the gumming up of civilized discourse in a phlegm of hateful resentment of everything secular.
Christmas today is an exuberant display of human ingenuity, capitalist productivity, and the enjoyment of life. I'd actually prefer if people saw what it was they were celebrating and called it just that. In this case why bother with the terminology call it what it is - 'Winter Shopping Festival.'
It is not just on religious issues that the media and the intelligentsia seem determined to suppress, it's an ongoing symptom that plagues the entire passive aggressive global society. In the international jungle, made more dangerous by terrorist networks that circle the globe, anything that it is not defended is in jeopardy.
And if we let liberal ideals govern the nature of holidays, we'll learn that the best customs of Christmas, from carols to trees to spectacular decorations, have their root in pagan ideas and practices. These customs were greatly amplified by American culture, as the product of reason, science, business, worldliness, and egoism, i.e., the pursuit of happiness.
Undermining a sense of the worthiness of a society undermines that allegiance -- and, without allegiance, there is no defense. No society can survive in the long run without the allegiance of its people.
Christmas shopping is like pornography -- nobody wants to admit they've seen it, yet everybody seems to know what it looks like.
The majority of the population take part in the tradition of commercialized, secular Christmas. Why? Because it's fun, especially for the kids in the family. What kid doesn’t like candy canes, snowman cookies, Santa Claus, parties and toys?
It’s almost impossible to be a kid in North America or Western Europe and not get enraptured by the “magic” of the Christmas season. We all know that the stores we got our loved ones gifts from and the reatil sales associates who served us were referring to the commercialized, secular Christmas—the one that fattens their profits while raising credit card debt.
Essentially, Christmas has been captured by capitalism. The Grinch hasn’t stolen Christmas. Capitalism has.
Christmas is gradually being secularized into a season of general merrymaking and loads of money making. It is in transition from religious “holy day” to secular holiday.
The retail industry's main goal is for you to buy something. They will jump on any excuse you might have, to not only excite you to shop, but woo you into their establishments.
Capitalism doesn’t care. The market doesn’t care. All that matters is how to make the best profit possible from selling products to the public.
One reason you might shop is to buy a present for someone. In the very late fall, a majority of the population is not only buying one present for someone, but many presents for many people, to the delight of the retail stores (and hopefully the delight of the recipients).
Life requires reason, selfishness, capitalism; that is what Christmas should celebrate -- and really, underneath all the pretense, that is what it does celebrate. It is time to take the Christ out of Christmas, and turn the holiday into a guiltlessly egoistic, pro-reason, this-worldly, commercial celebration.
And -- before it becomes taboo -- a Happy New Year. Oh wait! It's the beginning of a new tax year, and the next five or six months will be spent working for the government.
Monday, December 19, 2005
Are you a Macaulayalee?
Thomas Babington Macaulay's speech of Feb 2,1835, to the British Parliament speaks volumes of where we as a nation stood. Then his Minute on Indian Education, delivered in 1835 again spoke volumes of us and what was expected of us, "...a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect..."
Suggested Reading:
http://www.hindu.org/publications/fgautier/selfdenial.html
http://www.geocities.com/ifihhome/articles/sk001.html
Suggested Reading:
http://www.hindu.org/publications/fgautier/selfdenial.html
http://www.geocities.com/ifihhome/articles/sk001.html
Thursday, December 08, 2005
The Second Slice of the Chinese Melon
About 200 years ago, Napoleon Bonaparte returned from China and said, "That is a sleeping dragon. Let him sleep! If he wakes, he will shake the world."
Well, China is wide awake today, economically and strategically. The fastest growing region on the global landscape with an economy that came out unscathed out of the East-Asian Currency Crisis and the SARS epidemic just to bolster its place as the 6th largest GDP in the world. As of 2003, China was the world’s second largest economy—only surpassed by the U.S.—and had the highest growth rate of any major country. And not to mention an open arm welcome into the WTO General Council with a makeover from the World's Factory as the World's Market.
What baffles North American Economists the most is the Chinese economic engagement came with a learning curve so steep its continuing development poses a threat to them? China challenging North America's strong holds of industry & manufacturing comes with a lot of political ‘shock’ and wee bit of economic ‘awe’.
China’s economy opening up to the outside world worries those who fear that country’s huge pool of low-cost labor will drain jobs from the North American shores, and less expensive goods will spark trade problems. China’s untapped market present huge opportunities for North American businesses that would surely outweigh any loss of jobs, but the sort of jobs that had left to China a long time ago were the low-wage, low-skill jobs. Will the day when higher-wage, high-skill jobs are outsourced to China mark the epic struggle pitting the American eagle and the Chinese dragon?
There is a distinction to be made between deepening economic ties, fostering multinational trade and global manipulation by companies for their own vested interests. Outsourcing might be distressing to the system prevailing, unwilling to accept the pace of change. But unlike ever before, North America's impotency to produce timely innovative cutting-edge technologies, ideas and industries is hurting its image.
The real question is how many consumers of the 'Welfare Capitalist Economy' actually see the effects of 'Neo-Imperialist Globalization'.
The achievements on the economic plane of life in North America outstrip progress on the political plane to such an extent that economics and politics have lost their synchronicity. The flattening of the global economic playing field, in cohesion with a bastardized global political plane leaves a fertile ground for the gutters of the world to pool together.
Capitalist ruling classes in North America, have an attitude toward government economic policy that needs to be checked. This should ensure the operations of the Chinese marketers do not impede our ability to create jobs in North America and protect the working people of North America from the tremulous changes of supply and demand.
It should come as no surprise that China, of all the bureaucratized and degenerating workers states, has been able to make the greatest progress toward capitalist restoration. The strategic vision of the Chinese bureaucracy to align themselves with the neo-capitalist entrepreneurs of the globe are responsible in their getting rich and morphing into capitalists while the great majority in China, are suffering a decline in their living standards.
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has embarked on a pragmatic and outward-looking program of economic development that focuses primarily on exports, foreign investment, technology and closer ties with the West.
The Chinese leadership clearly realizes that domestic development and sound trade expansion rely on stable international economic conditions. China is rapidly becoming the world's biggest "low-cost" manufacturer, flooding the global marketplace with relatively cheap electronics and appliances.
The domestic market in China is rapidly developing, showing every indication of becoming, within as little as another generation, at least as important as the United States as a mass market for global suppliers of everything from computers, cell phones, and other electronic goods to automobiles, refrigerators and other consumer durables. China is already at least as important as the United States in terms of incremental growth in imports.
The Made-In-China world we live exists mainly thanks to the manufacturing plants on the mainland, that take advantage of low wages and high productivity (very high rates of exploitation) and a substantial percentage of China's exports are the fruits of foreign firm production in China (rather than indigenous Chinese firms).
China-"the world's sweatshop" has long been lusted after by multinationals eager to gain customers in the world's most populous domestic economy and to exploit China's natural resources and relatively low cost (and abundant) workforce.
In a world where China's emergence as a major base for foreign firms to assemble manufactured goods;
• Where its influence over the free flow of capital, goods and executive talent across the globe is rocking the delicate balance between economic and military carrot and sticks.
• Where ever-closer political ties have blurred the lines between friend and foe.
• Where North American corporations are willing to sacrifice manufacturing jobs, technology and military security in pursuit of quick profits.
• Where multinational affiliates, these outposts of American capitalism are used by the Chinese to manufacture products exported back to the US thereby creating a trade imbalance.
One begins to wonder the role of China in the North American economy is it one of a ‘strategic competitor’ or is it one of a ‘strategic partner’. Bureaucrats and capitalists on both sides of the mutually incompatible social systems are counter posed to the working class of the world. Be it the world's capitalist countries or the degenerating workers states they outsource to.
East Asian efforts to penetrate the North American industry, to gather innovative technology and sensitive business information, have made headlines in the past. Today the world is changing before our very eyes. Some old rivalries are fading while others are coming to the forefront. Today's friend may become tomorrow enemy and visa versa. This is especially true in the rapidly changing world of shifting political alliances and changing boundaries for economic competition.
Neither China nor North America will ever be a paradise for workers. But workers, like institutional investors, must have the confidence in financial institutions, stock markets and government regulators for an economy to grow.
China is an economy undergoing rapid transformation. Its rapid growth has brought great opportunities and challenges—both for China and for the rest of the world. Some producers see Chinese competition as a threat. They worry about losing market share, about the impact on their markets from highly competitive Chinese exports. That's as familiar a refrain as it is an understandable one.
But China's growth has brought immense new opportunities for exporters—of primary commodities, of manufacturing inputs and of finished goods. China is contributing to the growth of world trade, not displacing it from elsewhere.
And competition from Chinese exports has benefited consumers across the world as well. Let us not forget that competition is one of the great benefits that freer trade brings, even when it forces some painful restructuring for those firms unused to it.
But China, too, is undergoing major and sometimes painful restructuring. It is a large and populous country. It has a cumbersome and inefficient bureaucracy, especially at the local level and in state-owned enterprises. Many of its citizens still live in abject poverty, and the gap between rich and poor has widened. It faces enormous demographic challenges as its population ages rapidly over the next few decades. Its banking system is saddled with bad debts that will, ultimately, have to be written off.
Chinese policymakers are seeking to maintain economic growth at levels that can have an impact on poverty while avoiding inflationary pressures that would ultimately hamper growth. And they are often relying on policy instruments that are at best unreliable in what is increasingly functioning like a market economy.
The challenges for China are not new, of course. The transition we are witnessing today started more than two decades ago. Adjustment is a relatively slow process even in small simple economies—and China is neither small nor simple.
What has changed is the extent to which all our economic fortunes are now linked with those of China. Its sheer size and its dynamism make it increasingly important for global economic growth. With Japan's economy largely stagnant for much of the 1990s, China played a crucial part in sustaining and helping to fuel Asian economic growth. With European growth still lackluster, the opportunities offered by Chinese growth are increasingly important for North America. It is in all our interests that the Chinese economic miracle is sustained.
Well, China is wide awake today, economically and strategically. The fastest growing region on the global landscape with an economy that came out unscathed out of the East-Asian Currency Crisis and the SARS epidemic just to bolster its place as the 6th largest GDP in the world. As of 2003, China was the world’s second largest economy—only surpassed by the U.S.—and had the highest growth rate of any major country. And not to mention an open arm welcome into the WTO General Council with a makeover from the World's Factory as the World's Market.
What baffles North American Economists the most is the Chinese economic engagement came with a learning curve so steep its continuing development poses a threat to them? China challenging North America's strong holds of industry & manufacturing comes with a lot of political ‘shock’ and wee bit of economic ‘awe’.
China’s economy opening up to the outside world worries those who fear that country’s huge pool of low-cost labor will drain jobs from the North American shores, and less expensive goods will spark trade problems. China’s untapped market present huge opportunities for North American businesses that would surely outweigh any loss of jobs, but the sort of jobs that had left to China a long time ago were the low-wage, low-skill jobs. Will the day when higher-wage, high-skill jobs are outsourced to China mark the epic struggle pitting the American eagle and the Chinese dragon?
There is a distinction to be made between deepening economic ties, fostering multinational trade and global manipulation by companies for their own vested interests. Outsourcing might be distressing to the system prevailing, unwilling to accept the pace of change. But unlike ever before, North America's impotency to produce timely innovative cutting-edge technologies, ideas and industries is hurting its image.
The real question is how many consumers of the 'Welfare Capitalist Economy' actually see the effects of 'Neo-Imperialist Globalization'.
The achievements on the economic plane of life in North America outstrip progress on the political plane to such an extent that economics and politics have lost their synchronicity. The flattening of the global economic playing field, in cohesion with a bastardized global political plane leaves a fertile ground for the gutters of the world to pool together.
Capitalist ruling classes in North America, have an attitude toward government economic policy that needs to be checked. This should ensure the operations of the Chinese marketers do not impede our ability to create jobs in North America and protect the working people of North America from the tremulous changes of supply and demand.
It should come as no surprise that China, of all the bureaucratized and degenerating workers states, has been able to make the greatest progress toward capitalist restoration. The strategic vision of the Chinese bureaucracy to align themselves with the neo-capitalist entrepreneurs of the globe are responsible in their getting rich and morphing into capitalists while the great majority in China, are suffering a decline in their living standards.
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has embarked on a pragmatic and outward-looking program of economic development that focuses primarily on exports, foreign investment, technology and closer ties with the West.
The Chinese leadership clearly realizes that domestic development and sound trade expansion rely on stable international economic conditions. China is rapidly becoming the world's biggest "low-cost" manufacturer, flooding the global marketplace with relatively cheap electronics and appliances.
The domestic market in China is rapidly developing, showing every indication of becoming, within as little as another generation, at least as important as the United States as a mass market for global suppliers of everything from computers, cell phones, and other electronic goods to automobiles, refrigerators and other consumer durables. China is already at least as important as the United States in terms of incremental growth in imports.
The Made-In-China world we live exists mainly thanks to the manufacturing plants on the mainland, that take advantage of low wages and high productivity (very high rates of exploitation) and a substantial percentage of China's exports are the fruits of foreign firm production in China (rather than indigenous Chinese firms).
China-"the world's sweatshop" has long been lusted after by multinationals eager to gain customers in the world's most populous domestic economy and to exploit China's natural resources and relatively low cost (and abundant) workforce.
In a world where China's emergence as a major base for foreign firms to assemble manufactured goods;
• Where its influence over the free flow of capital, goods and executive talent across the globe is rocking the delicate balance between economic and military carrot and sticks.
• Where ever-closer political ties have blurred the lines between friend and foe.
• Where North American corporations are willing to sacrifice manufacturing jobs, technology and military security in pursuit of quick profits.
• Where multinational affiliates, these outposts of American capitalism are used by the Chinese to manufacture products exported back to the US thereby creating a trade imbalance.
One begins to wonder the role of China in the North American economy is it one of a ‘strategic competitor’ or is it one of a ‘strategic partner’. Bureaucrats and capitalists on both sides of the mutually incompatible social systems are counter posed to the working class of the world. Be it the world's capitalist countries or the degenerating workers states they outsource to.
East Asian efforts to penetrate the North American industry, to gather innovative technology and sensitive business information, have made headlines in the past. Today the world is changing before our very eyes. Some old rivalries are fading while others are coming to the forefront. Today's friend may become tomorrow enemy and visa versa. This is especially true in the rapidly changing world of shifting political alliances and changing boundaries for economic competition.
Neither China nor North America will ever be a paradise for workers. But workers, like institutional investors, must have the confidence in financial institutions, stock markets and government regulators for an economy to grow.
China is an economy undergoing rapid transformation. Its rapid growth has brought great opportunities and challenges—both for China and for the rest of the world. Some producers see Chinese competition as a threat. They worry about losing market share, about the impact on their markets from highly competitive Chinese exports. That's as familiar a refrain as it is an understandable one.
But China's growth has brought immense new opportunities for exporters—of primary commodities, of manufacturing inputs and of finished goods. China is contributing to the growth of world trade, not displacing it from elsewhere.
And competition from Chinese exports has benefited consumers across the world as well. Let us not forget that competition is one of the great benefits that freer trade brings, even when it forces some painful restructuring for those firms unused to it.
But China, too, is undergoing major and sometimes painful restructuring. It is a large and populous country. It has a cumbersome and inefficient bureaucracy, especially at the local level and in state-owned enterprises. Many of its citizens still live in abject poverty, and the gap between rich and poor has widened. It faces enormous demographic challenges as its population ages rapidly over the next few decades. Its banking system is saddled with bad debts that will, ultimately, have to be written off.
Chinese policymakers are seeking to maintain economic growth at levels that can have an impact on poverty while avoiding inflationary pressures that would ultimately hamper growth. And they are often relying on policy instruments that are at best unreliable in what is increasingly functioning like a market economy.
The challenges for China are not new, of course. The transition we are witnessing today started more than two decades ago. Adjustment is a relatively slow process even in small simple economies—and China is neither small nor simple.
What has changed is the extent to which all our economic fortunes are now linked with those of China. Its sheer size and its dynamism make it increasingly important for global economic growth. With Japan's economy largely stagnant for much of the 1990s, China played a crucial part in sustaining and helping to fuel Asian economic growth. With European growth still lackluster, the opportunities offered by Chinese growth are increasingly important for North America. It is in all our interests that the Chinese economic miracle is sustained.
Sunday, December 04, 2005
Outsourcing
Outsourcing: a.k.a. Industrial prostitution - To whore out work to less fortunate, less informed, more vulnerable workers who will do the labor because they need the work, the money and the security of having a job.
If that's not what outsourcing is what is?
Outsourcing: Manufacturers cutting corners by exploiting workers on some other corner of the globe today for their own personal profits, reducing productions costs.
I thought that was what Imperialist conquests were all about. I thought those days were over. I thought the world was a better place today in comparison to the world described in my dilapidated old history books. I guess I was wrong to come oot of those classrooms feeling it was a better place we lived in today.
Its just too many people dont care to see through it all. Its just too many people intend to live the American pipe dream; to make it being in the capitalist heart land of the world but more often get hit by the realities of the Welfare capitalist economy that they live in. Factory workers are great ... they hardly ever save any money they blow it all away... in booze, food, mortgage. the service industry workers are even better they talk the talk ... but can hardly get anywhere close to walking the walk.
And with all those war monging inbred plaid clad bible thumping red necks, taking advantage of every immigrant that sets foot on the land, with all those political hang ups, socio-economic hiccups. What's it going to take to tear down these walls of mistrust... These walls of hatred .. these walls of racial prejudices, of religious hegimony, of social inequalities...
maybe a whole lotta love...
If that's not what outsourcing is what is?
Outsourcing: Manufacturers cutting corners by exploiting workers on some other corner of the globe today for their own personal profits, reducing productions costs.
I thought that was what Imperialist conquests were all about. I thought those days were over. I thought the world was a better place today in comparison to the world described in my dilapidated old history books. I guess I was wrong to come oot of those classrooms feeling it was a better place we lived in today.
Its just too many people dont care to see through it all. Its just too many people intend to live the American pipe dream; to make it being in the capitalist heart land of the world but more often get hit by the realities of the Welfare capitalist economy that they live in. Factory workers are great ... they hardly ever save any money they blow it all away... in booze, food, mortgage. the service industry workers are even better they talk the talk ... but can hardly get anywhere close to walking the walk.
And with all those war monging inbred plaid clad bible thumping red necks, taking advantage of every immigrant that sets foot on the land, with all those political hang ups, socio-economic hiccups. What's it going to take to tear down these walls of mistrust... These walls of hatred .. these walls of racial prejudices, of religious hegimony, of social inequalities...
maybe a whole lotta love...
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
Why do Engineering Students Whine So Much ?
If there is a singular commonality in every technology course taught through out the Engineering College system it's this un-deviated classroom style from the following pattern:
1) Greet class.
2) Ask if there were any questions about the previous day's problem set.
3) If so, work out the problem in question on the chalkboard, without further explanation.
4) Repeat step 3) as needed.
5) Announce the pages in the textbook from which the next problem set would be derived.
6) Perform a sample problem from the new problem set.
7) Ask if anyone has any questions.
8) Give the problem set assignment.
9) Dismiss the class.
Going through the above described scenario for the past couple of semesters I have begun to feel like I am on a Star Trek episode. "Captain, I think I understand… these creatures communicate through multivariable calculus problems!"
Through the course of all the harried teaching I saw and experienced that took place there would be the rare occasion where actually the occasional concept would be explained. But for most of the time it's a Whine and Cheese affair. These complaints that I speak of, well are they really serious or are they more of a routine need to vent, that's for you to decide...
"If you get a 60% below on ANY quiz," You would get the "YOU ARE NOT STUDYING HARD ENOUGH." remarks. I have wondered what would happen if you got a 30% on a quiz. Were you branded forever? Expelled? Excommunicated?
The social-life-killing workload is the stuff geeky nerd humor among the 3rd year technology students is comprised of. Often heard slogans include, “Sleep is for the weak!" & "Your underwear has two sides."
First-Year students rarely pose questions that challenge teachers enough. They bail out before they get a chance to learn to think. I don’t blame them; instructors need to re-evaluate how they are teaching students because the stress is showing in students today. Somebody's got to have a look at their blended families, their IM hot wired SNAFU life styles. Students today are consumers and technology education must change to meet that reality.
Health Sciences & Business have changed the way they work with students, using problem based approaches, putting students into small groups where they have to decide what they need to know and how they should solve a problem. That’s the way technology works in the real world, but the college system has been slow to embrace these strategies probably because they require a lot of skill on the part of faculty.
Compose in your mind a montage of quizzes covered in red ink, classes wasted in the stupor of incomprehension, and frowning instructors muttering strange spells in their eerie scientific jargon. And as time passes there grows a void between you and the instructor that seems increasingly unbridgeable as the days go by.
The Technology streams regularly get good students and if they are not successful, it can’t be entirely their fault. It might just be that faculty have to move out of “we’ve covered it; it’s done” operating model to a “knowing how it is that students actually learn their technology courses approach.” I guess it’s time for the college to tell faculty members that they need training in speech.
I honestly believe there are a finite number of smart people who enroll into Mohawk College's Technology Programs who chose this as a viable career option. But if we are to live up to the provincial need for technically qualified people of a certain stature it's high time we find a way to retain students smart enough to do the math and motivated enough to at least take a bite at the technology apple, but who are turned off by the overwhelming coursework, low grades, and abysmal teaching.
Find a way to teach engineering technology to verbally oriented students who can't learn math by sense of smell. Demand from (and give to) students an actual mastery of the material, rather than relying on bogus on-the-curve pseudo-grades that hinge upon the amount of credit a fatigued instructor wants to dole out. Use textbooks that are more than just glorified problem set manuals. Give grades that will make engineering technology graduates get to be competitive in a grade-inflated environment.
None of these things will happen, of course. Our professors are perfectly happy weeding out undesirables with absurd boot-camp courses that conceal the inability of said professors to communicate with words. Fewer students will pursue engineering technology majors, and Canada will grow ever more reliant upon foreign brainpower to design our scientific and manufacturing endeavors.
1) Greet class.
2) Ask if there were any questions about the previous day's problem set.
3) If so, work out the problem in question on the chalkboard, without further explanation.
4) Repeat step 3) as needed.
5) Announce the pages in the textbook from which the next problem set would be derived.
6) Perform a sample problem from the new problem set.
7) Ask if anyone has any questions.
8) Give the problem set assignment.
9) Dismiss the class.
Going through the above described scenario for the past couple of semesters I have begun to feel like I am on a Star Trek episode. "Captain, I think I understand… these creatures communicate through multivariable calculus problems!"
Through the course of all the harried teaching I saw and experienced that took place there would be the rare occasion where actually the occasional concept would be explained. But for most of the time it's a Whine and Cheese affair. These complaints that I speak of, well are they really serious or are they more of a routine need to vent, that's for you to decide...
"If you get a 60% below on ANY quiz," You would get the "YOU ARE NOT STUDYING HARD ENOUGH." remarks. I have wondered what would happen if you got a 30% on a quiz. Were you branded forever? Expelled? Excommunicated?
The social-life-killing workload is the stuff geeky nerd humor among the 3rd year technology students is comprised of. Often heard slogans include, “Sleep is for the weak!" & "Your underwear has two sides."
First-Year students rarely pose questions that challenge teachers enough. They bail out before they get a chance to learn to think. I don’t blame them; instructors need to re-evaluate how they are teaching students because the stress is showing in students today. Somebody's got to have a look at their blended families, their IM hot wired SNAFU life styles. Students today are consumers and technology education must change to meet that reality.
Health Sciences & Business have changed the way they work with students, using problem based approaches, putting students into small groups where they have to decide what they need to know and how they should solve a problem. That’s the way technology works in the real world, but the college system has been slow to embrace these strategies probably because they require a lot of skill on the part of faculty.
Compose in your mind a montage of quizzes covered in red ink, classes wasted in the stupor of incomprehension, and frowning instructors muttering strange spells in their eerie scientific jargon. And as time passes there grows a void between you and the instructor that seems increasingly unbridgeable as the days go by.
The Technology streams regularly get good students and if they are not successful, it can’t be entirely their fault. It might just be that faculty have to move out of “we’ve covered it; it’s done” operating model to a “knowing how it is that students actually learn their technology courses approach.” I guess it’s time for the college to tell faculty members that they need training in speech.
I honestly believe there are a finite number of smart people who enroll into Mohawk College's Technology Programs who chose this as a viable career option. But if we are to live up to the provincial need for technically qualified people of a certain stature it's high time we find a way to retain students smart enough to do the math and motivated enough to at least take a bite at the technology apple, but who are turned off by the overwhelming coursework, low grades, and abysmal teaching.
Find a way to teach engineering technology to verbally oriented students who can't learn math by sense of smell. Demand from (and give to) students an actual mastery of the material, rather than relying on bogus on-the-curve pseudo-grades that hinge upon the amount of credit a fatigued instructor wants to dole out. Use textbooks that are more than just glorified problem set manuals. Give grades that will make engineering technology graduates get to be competitive in a grade-inflated environment.
None of these things will happen, of course. Our professors are perfectly happy weeding out undesirables with absurd boot-camp courses that conceal the inability of said professors to communicate with words. Fewer students will pursue engineering technology majors, and Canada will grow ever more reliant upon foreign brainpower to design our scientific and manufacturing endeavors.
Friday, October 28, 2005
The Revenge of the von Trapp Family
When I think about revenge, I think about The Sound of Music. After everything the Nazis put that plucky von Trapp family through, they all end up on the top of that mountain, singing, with Julie Andrews spinning around them like a deranged wind-up toy. They seem utterly at peace. What a perfect final image, as they climb up from the valley of their former lives, perching for a moment on the high border between the past and future before they descend into their new home.
WARNING: I haven't actually seen The Sound of Music in years, and I hardly paid attention to it anyway because I thought it was a girls' movie and I was mad because we had to watch it instead of the show about hyenas.
But think about how bitter the von Trapps must have felt about leaving their home behind, in the hands of the Nazis, even if it was to go to a new, safer place. Their relief at being liberated from their oppressors probably kept them from thinking too much about revenge for at least a few months. Eventually, their human desire for Justice must have reared its head. Captain von Trapp would heave the ax fiercely into the firewood and asked himself how anyone could get away with all that Evil, and why God was showing no sign striking back and reasserting the superior power of Good.
Sure, the Nuremberg trials provided the von Trapps and the rest of us w ith the sense that there was at least a measure of Justice in the world. But as they grew numb and familiar to their new homes, the von Trapps lay in their beds and considered that the overwhelming majority of shitty human behavior goes completely unpunished. Everybody noticed that Julie Andrews didn't lead the family in musical rounds the way she used to. Her and the Captain began to feel secretly, shamefully repulsed by each other, and tried frantically to hide their flagging desires. And that little kid stopped doing that really cute thing he kept doing in the movie. That thing about milking cows or buffing his lederhosen or something.
The valley where they now lived, that had seemed so fresh and alive with promise when they saw it from the mountaintop, was growing cramped, as if squeezing and contracting to expel them. Or possibly, their need for revenge was growing so large that nothing could contain it. That girl who was in love with the Nazi boy began a series of sexual relationships with obnoxious, grabby boys who could never help her reconstruct her shattered belief in the existence of love. When at last she befriended a young man who treated her with respect, Julie Andrews finally broke her heart by seducing him on the family's clavichord. Discovering Julie Andrews helping the gawky, virginal boy to undo her underthings, the Captain flew into a rage and fetched the ax. Everyone in the von Trapp's adopted town was treated to the shameful sight of the tearful and naked young man, running from the enraged Captain, with his still-erect penis bobbing frantically before him.
Another member of the traumatized von Trapp clan took out his pent-up anger by laying out poison for small farm animals. The Captain caught him hiding in the bushes beside a neighbor's field, watching the baby goats go wobbly-legged and collapse into tiny heaving mounds moments after eating the snacks he had left for them. The Captain beat him soundly, venting his helpless fury at the dawning realization that his family was disintegrating around him and he could do nothing to save them. He had led them here to safety, and yet they were each somehow still trapped in the merciless grip of a brutal regime.
WARNING: In the interests of avoiding legal action, this would be an appropriate time to point out that as plausible as this scenario may sound, I made it up.
Every day, millions of men, women, and children beg their gods for Justice, for some small redress of their grievances, and get the cold shoulder in return. To them, the line between Justice and revenge becomes as insignificant as the lines on a sidewalk. When you were a kid, you taunted yourself with the idea that stepping on that line would break your mother's back. You still half-believed in the cosmic consequences of even the most insignificant act. Now that you're older and acquainted with injustice, you walk unafraid over the lines and toward wherever you're headed.
WARNING: I haven't actually seen The Sound of Music in years, and I hardly paid attention to it anyway because I thought it was a girls' movie and I was mad because we had to watch it instead of the show about hyenas.
But think about how bitter the von Trapps must have felt about leaving their home behind, in the hands of the Nazis, even if it was to go to a new, safer place. Their relief at being liberated from their oppressors probably kept them from thinking too much about revenge for at least a few months. Eventually, their human desire for Justice must have reared its head. Captain von Trapp would heave the ax fiercely into the firewood and asked himself how anyone could get away with all that Evil, and why God was showing no sign striking back and reasserting the superior power of Good.
Sure, the Nuremberg trials provided the von Trapps and the rest of us w ith the sense that there was at least a measure of Justice in the world. But as they grew numb and familiar to their new homes, the von Trapps lay in their beds and considered that the overwhelming majority of shitty human behavior goes completely unpunished. Everybody noticed that Julie Andrews didn't lead the family in musical rounds the way she used to. Her and the Captain began to feel secretly, shamefully repulsed by each other, and tried frantically to hide their flagging desires. And that little kid stopped doing that really cute thing he kept doing in the movie. That thing about milking cows or buffing his lederhosen or something.
The valley where they now lived, that had seemed so fresh and alive with promise when they saw it from the mountaintop, was growing cramped, as if squeezing and contracting to expel them. Or possibly, their need for revenge was growing so large that nothing could contain it. That girl who was in love with the Nazi boy began a series of sexual relationships with obnoxious, grabby boys who could never help her reconstruct her shattered belief in the existence of love. When at last she befriended a young man who treated her with respect, Julie Andrews finally broke her heart by seducing him on the family's clavichord. Discovering Julie Andrews helping the gawky, virginal boy to undo her underthings, the Captain flew into a rage and fetched the ax. Everyone in the von Trapp's adopted town was treated to the shameful sight of the tearful and naked young man, running from the enraged Captain, with his still-erect penis bobbing frantically before him.
Another member of the traumatized von Trapp clan took out his pent-up anger by laying out poison for small farm animals. The Captain caught him hiding in the bushes beside a neighbor's field, watching the baby goats go wobbly-legged and collapse into tiny heaving mounds moments after eating the snacks he had left for them. The Captain beat him soundly, venting his helpless fury at the dawning realization that his family was disintegrating around him and he could do nothing to save them. He had led them here to safety, and yet they were each somehow still trapped in the merciless grip of a brutal regime.
WARNING: In the interests of avoiding legal action, this would be an appropriate time to point out that as plausible as this scenario may sound, I made it up.
Every day, millions of men, women, and children beg their gods for Justice, for some small redress of their grievances, and get the cold shoulder in return. To them, the line between Justice and revenge becomes as insignificant as the lines on a sidewalk. When you were a kid, you taunted yourself with the idea that stepping on that line would break your mother's back. You still half-believed in the cosmic consequences of even the most insignificant act. Now that you're older and acquainted with injustice, you walk unafraid over the lines and toward wherever you're headed.
Friday, October 21, 2005
Fear & Loathing in Professional College
What is the freshman experience? If we follow that question seriously it will lead us past the zone of academic bullshit, where dedicated teachers pass their knowledge on to a new generation, and into the nitty-gritty of human needs and hang-ups.
First, let's see what's happening now. Let's look at the role students play in what we like to call education. College is where we let the dying society inject its venom into us. They exploit and enslave students, they petrify society and they make democracy unlikely. And it's not what we are taught that does the harm but instead how we are taught.
College freshmen are pushed around, their will is stolen, they are turned into timid square apathetic slaves --authority addicts. A student is expected to know his place. The faculty tells us what courses to take, what to read, what to write, and frequently, where to set the margins on his word processed document. They tell us what's true and what isn't. Some teachers insist that they encourage dissent but they're almost always just teasing and every student knows it.
In fact, for the freshman student, it doesn't make that much difference which program you're in. The real lesson is the method. The medium in college truly is the message. And the medium is, above all, coercive. You're forced to attend. The subjects are required. You have to do homework. You must observe college rules. And throughout, you're bullied into docility and submissiveness. They may pad the handcuffs--but the handcuffs stay on.
It's how you're taught that does the harm. You may only study geometry for a semester-- or Calculus for two years. But doing what you're told, whether or not it makes sense, is a lesson you get every blessed school day for twelve years or more. You know how malleable we humans are. And you know what good learners we are--how little time it takes us to learn to drive a car or a plane or to play passable guitar. So imagine what the effect must be upon our apt and impressionable minds of a twelve-year course in servility.
Twelve years pitted against your classmates in a daily Roman circus. The game is Doing What You're Told. The winners get gold stars, affection & envy. They get A's, honours, awards and college scholarships. The losers get humiliation and degradation. The fear of losing the game is a great fear: it's the fear of swats, of the principal's office, and above all the fear of failing. What if you fail and have to watch your friends move past you to glory? And, of course, the worst could happen: you could be expelled. Not very many kids get swats or fail or are expelled. But it doesn't take many for the message to be heard. These few heavy losers are like severed heads displayed at the city gates to keep the populace in line.
The unwritten law of the land when it comes to instructors is: Tell the man what he wants to hear or he'll fail your ass out of the course! When a teacher says "jump", students jump. Even more discouraging than this master-slave approach to education is the fact that the students take it. They haven't gone through twelve years of schooling for no reason. They've learned one thing and perhaps only one thing during those twelve years. They've forgotten their algebra. They've grown to fear and resent literature. They write like they've been lobotomized. But, Wow, can they follow orders!
Students don't ask that the orders they are given make sense. They've given up expecting things to make sense long before they leave elementary school. Things are true because the teacher says they're true. Your english teacher tells you a noun is a person, place or thing. So let it be. The important thing is to please her. Back in kindergarten, you found out teachers only love children who’d stand in nice straight lines. And that's where it's been at ever since.
What could possibly explain what we see in a freshman class? Is it a slave mentality? We are obliging on the surface but hostile and resistant underneath. Students vary in their awareness of what's going on. Some recognize their own put-on for what it is worth and even let their rebellion break through to the surface now and then. Others -- including most of the "good students" -- have been more deeply brainwashed. They swallow the crap with greedy mouths. They honest-to-God believe in grades, in busy work, in General Education requirements.
College entrance requirements tend to screen out the rebels. Not entirely, of course. Some students are expert con artists who know perfectly well what's happening. They want the diploma and spend their years in the penitentiary alternately laughing and cursing as they play the game. If their egos are strong enough, they cheat a lot. And, of course, even when they are angry down deep somewhere, it comes out in passive rather than active aggression. Frequent spells of laziness makes them misread simple questions. They spend their night mechanically outlining and highlighting chapters while meticulously failing to comprehend a single word of what's in front of them.
My question here would be; Why does the medium of education affect the freshmen so deeply while its purported content--the subject matter--so often slips their minds? I believe this is partly because the content varies from year to year while the form remains more or less the same. But also, the form--a structure of rules, punishments, rewards--affects us directly in a real way, while the subject matter may have no such immediate grasp on our lives. After all, don't we tend to learn best what matters most? Under a coercive system it isn't really the subject that matters. What matters is pleasing the authorities. These two are far from being one in the same.
Finally, there's the darkest reason of all for the master-slave approach to education. For one thing, damn little education takes place in colleges. How could it? You can't educate slaves, you can only train them. Or, to use an even uglier and more timely word, you can only program them.
Students don't get emancipated when they graduate. As a matter of fact, we don't let them graduate until they've demonstrated their willingness -- over 16 years -- to remain slaves. And for important jobs, like teaching, we make them go through more years just to make sure.
Educational oppression is trickier to fight than any other form of oppression. If you're a terrorist, they can't exile you. They either have to intimidate you or kill you. But in high school or college they can just bounce you out of the fold. And they do. Rebel students and renegade faculty members get smothered or shot down with devastating accuracy. Others get tired of fighting and voluntarily leave the system.
Students have immense unused power. They could, theoretically, insist on participating in their own education. They could make academic freedom bilateral. They could teach their teachers to thrive on love and admiration, rather than fear and respect, and to lay down their weapons. Students could discover community. And they could learn to dance by dancing on the scantron cards. They could raze one set of walls and let life come blowing into the classroom. They could raze another set of walls and let education flow out and flood the streets. They could turn the classroom into where it's at -- a field of action. And believe it or not, they could study eagerly and learn prodigiously for the best of all possible reasons -- their own reasons.
They could, Theoretically. They have the power. If history has taught us one thing, for students, as for any oppressed group of people, the hardest battle isn't with the enemy, It's with what enemy has done to your mind
First, let's see what's happening now. Let's look at the role students play in what we like to call education. College is where we let the dying society inject its venom into us. They exploit and enslave students, they petrify society and they make democracy unlikely. And it's not what we are taught that does the harm but instead how we are taught.
College freshmen are pushed around, their will is stolen, they are turned into timid square apathetic slaves --authority addicts. A student is expected to know his place. The faculty tells us what courses to take, what to read, what to write, and frequently, where to set the margins on his word processed document. They tell us what's true and what isn't. Some teachers insist that they encourage dissent but they're almost always just teasing and every student knows it.
In fact, for the freshman student, it doesn't make that much difference which program you're in. The real lesson is the method. The medium in college truly is the message. And the medium is, above all, coercive. You're forced to attend. The subjects are required. You have to do homework. You must observe college rules. And throughout, you're bullied into docility and submissiveness. They may pad the handcuffs--but the handcuffs stay on.
It's how you're taught that does the harm. You may only study geometry for a semester-- or Calculus for two years. But doing what you're told, whether or not it makes sense, is a lesson you get every blessed school day for twelve years or more. You know how malleable we humans are. And you know what good learners we are--how little time it takes us to learn to drive a car or a plane or to play passable guitar. So imagine what the effect must be upon our apt and impressionable minds of a twelve-year course in servility.
Twelve years pitted against your classmates in a daily Roman circus. The game is Doing What You're Told. The winners get gold stars, affection & envy. They get A's, honours, awards and college scholarships. The losers get humiliation and degradation. The fear of losing the game is a great fear: it's the fear of swats, of the principal's office, and above all the fear of failing. What if you fail and have to watch your friends move past you to glory? And, of course, the worst could happen: you could be expelled. Not very many kids get swats or fail or are expelled. But it doesn't take many for the message to be heard. These few heavy losers are like severed heads displayed at the city gates to keep the populace in line.
The unwritten law of the land when it comes to instructors is: Tell the man what he wants to hear or he'll fail your ass out of the course! When a teacher says "jump", students jump. Even more discouraging than this master-slave approach to education is the fact that the students take it. They haven't gone through twelve years of schooling for no reason. They've learned one thing and perhaps only one thing during those twelve years. They've forgotten their algebra. They've grown to fear and resent literature. They write like they've been lobotomized. But, Wow, can they follow orders!
Students don't ask that the orders they are given make sense. They've given up expecting things to make sense long before they leave elementary school. Things are true because the teacher says they're true. Your english teacher tells you a noun is a person, place or thing. So let it be. The important thing is to please her. Back in kindergarten, you found out teachers only love children who’d stand in nice straight lines. And that's where it's been at ever since.
What could possibly explain what we see in a freshman class? Is it a slave mentality? We are obliging on the surface but hostile and resistant underneath. Students vary in their awareness of what's going on. Some recognize their own put-on for what it is worth and even let their rebellion break through to the surface now and then. Others -- including most of the "good students" -- have been more deeply brainwashed. They swallow the crap with greedy mouths. They honest-to-God believe in grades, in busy work, in General Education requirements.
College entrance requirements tend to screen out the rebels. Not entirely, of course. Some students are expert con artists who know perfectly well what's happening. They want the diploma and spend their years in the penitentiary alternately laughing and cursing as they play the game. If their egos are strong enough, they cheat a lot. And, of course, even when they are angry down deep somewhere, it comes out in passive rather than active aggression. Frequent spells of laziness makes them misread simple questions. They spend their night mechanically outlining and highlighting chapters while meticulously failing to comprehend a single word of what's in front of them.
My question here would be; Why does the medium of education affect the freshmen so deeply while its purported content--the subject matter--so often slips their minds? I believe this is partly because the content varies from year to year while the form remains more or less the same. But also, the form--a structure of rules, punishments, rewards--affects us directly in a real way, while the subject matter may have no such immediate grasp on our lives. After all, don't we tend to learn best what matters most? Under a coercive system it isn't really the subject that matters. What matters is pleasing the authorities. These two are far from being one in the same.
Finally, there's the darkest reason of all for the master-slave approach to education. For one thing, damn little education takes place in colleges. How could it? You can't educate slaves, you can only train them. Or, to use an even uglier and more timely word, you can only program them.
Students don't get emancipated when they graduate. As a matter of fact, we don't let them graduate until they've demonstrated their willingness -- over 16 years -- to remain slaves. And for important jobs, like teaching, we make them go through more years just to make sure.
Educational oppression is trickier to fight than any other form of oppression. If you're a terrorist, they can't exile you. They either have to intimidate you or kill you. But in high school or college they can just bounce you out of the fold. And they do. Rebel students and renegade faculty members get smothered or shot down with devastating accuracy. Others get tired of fighting and voluntarily leave the system.
Students have immense unused power. They could, theoretically, insist on participating in their own education. They could make academic freedom bilateral. They could teach their teachers to thrive on love and admiration, rather than fear and respect, and to lay down their weapons. Students could discover community. And they could learn to dance by dancing on the scantron cards. They could raze one set of walls and let life come blowing into the classroom. They could raze another set of walls and let education flow out and flood the streets. They could turn the classroom into where it's at -- a field of action. And believe it or not, they could study eagerly and learn prodigiously for the best of all possible reasons -- their own reasons.
They could, Theoretically. They have the power. If history has taught us one thing, for students, as for any oppressed group of people, the hardest battle isn't with the enemy, It's with what enemy has done to your mind
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
Schrodinger's Solipsistic Student
Concerts tend to bring out the best in musical performers. For some reason uncomprehendible to the most of us, there is sense of connection that you can feel at a really charged up concert. We barely get a glimpse of it and never truely last in that euphoric moment forever.
In a classroom, we're neither looking for a concert like experience, nor are we want a Seinfeld-esque personality.
When I walk into that class room, what I'm secretly hoping for is somebody who can engages the intellect of the class, making them feel good they're alive. Yet there have been several an occasion, you are made to feel like yet another formless boring data dump by someone who not only hasn’t figured out how to connect with the class, he hasn’t even realized he needs to.
Students have accepted the fact of the matter that most of their teachers simply launch into their own work as if
• they have read and thoroughly assimilated all previous work in the field;
• they can absorb, in real time, all of the material about to be verbally inflicted on them; and
• they can accurately extract all the important conclusions from this spiel with little or no help from the teacher.
It takes quite a bit of effort to stay awake at the best of times to figure out the context, if not surmise that deep down within somewhere hidden away is a logical flow of ideas.
The greatest trick Microsoft ever pulled was convincing the world that PowerPoint was not Evil. "Bullet Oriented" visual aids establish a military relationship between the student and the instructor. Powerpoint has this way of efficiently bulldozing subtlety replacing it with ambiguous phrases and lowering the student's IQ by 20 points.
Very soon one finds the presentation has taken on a rather gonzo element. Moderately promising data morphs itself into chartjunk poking it's finger into the eye of thought.
Well how did these visual aids that were supposed to get the main points across maintaining a logical flow of ideas come to the point of driving students up the wall. Powerpoint allows speakers to pretend that they are giving a real talk, and audiences to pretend that they are really listening.
When the time comes to open your text books to page N, and it's kind of like story time but when the contents of the book are read aloud to the entire class, and you get this eerie feeling you know less about the subject that when he started reading trust me it's bad.
This is when it comes to mind, hey if JFK had powerpoint would he have been a better speaker. Would "I have a dream" sounded any better if we saw it with some animation....
Is it too much to walk into a lecture hall and find someone who's
• Kind without being a pushover
• Knowledgeable without being condescending
• Clearly expressive without being boring
In a classroom, we're neither looking for a concert like experience, nor are we want a Seinfeld-esque personality.
When I walk into that class room, what I'm secretly hoping for is somebody who can engages the intellect of the class, making them feel good they're alive. Yet there have been several an occasion, you are made to feel like yet another formless boring data dump by someone who not only hasn’t figured out how to connect with the class, he hasn’t even realized he needs to.
Students have accepted the fact of the matter that most of their teachers simply launch into their own work as if
• they have read and thoroughly assimilated all previous work in the field;
• they can absorb, in real time, all of the material about to be verbally inflicted on them; and
• they can accurately extract all the important conclusions from this spiel with little or no help from the teacher.
It takes quite a bit of effort to stay awake at the best of times to figure out the context, if not surmise that deep down within somewhere hidden away is a logical flow of ideas.
The greatest trick Microsoft ever pulled was convincing the world that PowerPoint was not Evil. "Bullet Oriented" visual aids establish a military relationship between the student and the instructor. Powerpoint has this way of efficiently bulldozing subtlety replacing it with ambiguous phrases and lowering the student's IQ by 20 points.
Very soon one finds the presentation has taken on a rather gonzo element. Moderately promising data morphs itself into chartjunk poking it's finger into the eye of thought.
Well how did these visual aids that were supposed to get the main points across maintaining a logical flow of ideas come to the point of driving students up the wall. Powerpoint allows speakers to pretend that they are giving a real talk, and audiences to pretend that they are really listening.
When the time comes to open your text books to page N, and it's kind of like story time but when the contents of the book are read aloud to the entire class, and you get this eerie feeling you know less about the subject that when he started reading trust me it's bad.
This is when it comes to mind, hey if JFK had powerpoint would he have been a better speaker. Would "I have a dream" sounded any better if we saw it with some animation....
Is it too much to walk into a lecture hall and find someone who's
• Kind without being a pushover
• Knowledgeable without being condescending
• Clearly expressive without being boring
Thursday, September 15, 2005
Freaky-No-Mix: A Rogue Explores The Hidden Side of Almost Something
The following document is thanks to Freakonomics... If there's one thing I detest it's having to create the same kinda stuff over and over again.. I can relate to God .. i mean he did the original patented creation himself and left man with the pleasurable unoriginal procreation mass manufacturing part..
Well back to my original idea of righting the write stuff.. [sic] well this book got me thinking .. it rekindled my thought process and shed new light on already existing preconcieved notions about life in general... it was actually the very first time i read a piece of non-fiction and said to myself ... this guy better come out with his sequel pretty quick...
as for the piece of literature i intend to write... compared to the original book this is going to be a joke of an effort .. but hey it's just me flexing my grey cells ...
ahem.. ahem... testing grey matter ...well let's wind the clocks back to the year 1991... the year the narishimha rao congress I regime came ot power in india... manmohan singh opened the floodgates to international inverstors and the trade markets openned up... we in india saw a huge influx of trade and commerce... the harshad mehta stock market incident ... the Rajan Pillai East-West Airlines scandal; i mean the lil factoids you can gather from the era are gigantormous...But let's just stray away from all that and have a look at something totally irrelevent ...
The year is 1995 and both Aishwarya Rai and Sushmitha Sen won the respective beauty contests that they participated in ... .My pondering in this case is ...what did these women have that their predecessors didnt have.. was it that in the couple of years [91-95] they were able to acquire int'l beauty consultants and we adopted a new strategy in training these girls .... or were their vested interest in choosing these women to be winners in the contest...
Let's speak in numbers ... a country of nearly a billion people ... half of them, are women let's say... and half of em are in the 18-35 age bracket... and half of em are urbanites ... and half of em are in the economic bracket to take full advantage of this economic boom that we have spoken of...
In this case study, when there is a new born market of customers and in india's case such a large majority of people with purchasing power .. in the cummulative numbers have made up for what japan and the US do in pure GDP.. so we have this market place with people ready to buy and markets openning up every day.. so what do the marketters need to do mass promote their goods ...and what better way than to do so other than with the media ..
back to the beauty market ... 1995 ... india has posted it's flag in the international beauty market ... guys are oggling ... girls are getting self concsious ... u have awakenned a slumberring marketting .. and guess what those baby boomers did for us .. they left us with a massive number of urbanite hip youngsters who are soaking up this phenomenon right before your eyes...
within the next 5 years we will have seen lara dutta, priyanka chopra and a lot more of those chicks walking down those ramps and and fluttering feathers as they walk by....
"Femina Miss India" has a category for Miss Perfect Left Butt Cheek and Miss Most Moist G spot...
the market has soaked up this phenomenon and if there's one thing that Newton got right when that freaking apple smashed his skull in was "momentum" ... and with the beauty product growing every minute ... somebody did something right...
well.. the chain of thought has been broken thanks to a lunch break never the less that isnt a problem with our predicament ... well we have figured out that there were ulterior motives behind all those beauty queens being pumped out of india.. i mean think about it ... up until the 90s the world didnt give two shits about the kind of beaty that Indian women had.. and now all of a sudden...OHHH... AHH... they are exotic beauties .. my ass... the capitalist the wolrd over just saw
they could naw their way into ur pockets ...
now let's stray away from that chain of thought and look at the socio-political aspect of it .. let's just say that these girls of the 90s were concieved in the 70s... so that makes the parents those bell bottom flower power folks who were smoking pot and listening to some really cool music .... so what abt those ppl... did they send these girls to the right school ... give em some kinda sensibility that wasnt around earlier... did they take them to the right movies... the right fairs... the right family events ...
Let's have a look at their biology ... were they the product of the green revolutions bio-engineered milk and wheat..or were they picky eaters as kids ... did they opt out of certain kinds of foods .. what kind of foods didd they totally avoid.. what was their exercise routine like as kids ... were they bullied by the boys in school .. or were they used to being oggled at all thru school...
Now how about have a look at really miscellanous aspects: Were they the first borns, where they born in the same kinda of astrological/astronomical star alignments ... did they have pets ? Did they mastrubate regularly? how about sexual escapades... were the involved in lesbian trysts ???
Enough said, There's a lot more I'd like to look into... Cricket Players, the Hawala Scam, The amount of Gulfees, The Mallu brain drain phenomenon...
Well back to my original idea of righting the write stuff.. [sic] well this book got me thinking .. it rekindled my thought process and shed new light on already existing preconcieved notions about life in general... it was actually the very first time i read a piece of non-fiction and said to myself ... this guy better come out with his sequel pretty quick...
as for the piece of literature i intend to write... compared to the original book this is going to be a joke of an effort .. but hey it's just me flexing my grey cells ...
ahem.. ahem... testing grey matter ...well let's wind the clocks back to the year 1991... the year the narishimha rao congress I regime came ot power in india... manmohan singh opened the floodgates to international inverstors and the trade markets openned up... we in india saw a huge influx of trade and commerce... the harshad mehta stock market incident ... the Rajan Pillai East-West Airlines scandal; i mean the lil factoids you can gather from the era are gigantormous...But let's just stray away from all that and have a look at something totally irrelevent ...
The year is 1995 and both Aishwarya Rai and Sushmitha Sen won the respective beauty contests that they participated in ... .My pondering in this case is ...what did these women have that their predecessors didnt have.. was it that in the couple of years [91-95] they were able to acquire int'l beauty consultants and we adopted a new strategy in training these girls .... or were their vested interest in choosing these women to be winners in the contest...
Let's speak in numbers ... a country of nearly a billion people ... half of them, are women let's say... and half of em are in the 18-35 age bracket... and half of em are urbanites ... and half of em are in the economic bracket to take full advantage of this economic boom that we have spoken of...
In this case study, when there is a new born market of customers and in india's case such a large majority of people with purchasing power .. in the cummulative numbers have made up for what japan and the US do in pure GDP.. so we have this market place with people ready to buy and markets openning up every day.. so what do the marketters need to do mass promote their goods ...and what better way than to do so other than with the media ..
back to the beauty market ... 1995 ... india has posted it's flag in the international beauty market ... guys are oggling ... girls are getting self concsious ... u have awakenned a slumberring marketting .. and guess what those baby boomers did for us .. they left us with a massive number of urbanite hip youngsters who are soaking up this phenomenon right before your eyes...
within the next 5 years we will have seen lara dutta, priyanka chopra and a lot more of those chicks walking down those ramps and and fluttering feathers as they walk by....
"Femina Miss India" has a category for Miss Perfect Left Butt Cheek and Miss Most Moist G spot...
the market has soaked up this phenomenon and if there's one thing that Newton got right when that freaking apple smashed his skull in was "momentum" ... and with the beauty product growing every minute ... somebody did something right...
well.. the chain of thought has been broken thanks to a lunch break never the less that isnt a problem with our predicament ... well we have figured out that there were ulterior motives behind all those beauty queens being pumped out of india.. i mean think about it ... up until the 90s the world didnt give two shits about the kind of beaty that Indian women had.. and now all of a sudden...OHHH... AHH... they are exotic beauties .. my ass... the capitalist the wolrd over just saw
they could naw their way into ur pockets ...
now let's stray away from that chain of thought and look at the socio-political aspect of it .. let's just say that these girls of the 90s were concieved in the 70s... so that makes the parents those bell bottom flower power folks who were smoking pot and listening to some really cool music .... so what abt those ppl... did they send these girls to the right school ... give em some kinda sensibility that wasnt around earlier... did they take them to the right movies... the right fairs... the right family events ...
Let's have a look at their biology ... were they the product of the green revolutions bio-engineered milk and wheat..or were they picky eaters as kids ... did they opt out of certain kinds of foods .. what kind of foods didd they totally avoid.. what was their exercise routine like as kids ... were they bullied by the boys in school .. or were they used to being oggled at all thru school...
Now how about have a look at really miscellanous aspects: Were they the first borns, where they born in the same kinda of astrological/astronomical star alignments ... did they have pets ? Did they mastrubate regularly? how about sexual escapades... were the involved in lesbian trysts ???
Enough said, There's a lot more I'd like to look into... Cricket Players, the Hawala Scam, The amount of Gulfees, The Mallu brain drain phenomenon...
Monday, September 05, 2005
Partir, c'est mourir un peu
The first time I tried writing a love letter for myself [I'd mastered the art, and authored several a letter for a fair price in alcoholic beverages by the time...]; it never got sent to the girl... Instead I modified it and included parts of it in a Kalari article [Kairali's in-house mag]...
" I do not know for what deed of mine in my last life I have been rewarded with so many laurels, of which having the good fortune to be acquainted with you becomes the icing on the cake. At times I feel that you are not just human but rather an angel sent from above, perhaps an incarnation of some divine godly form, let's put it as the God of small things, blessed with these gifts which you bestow upon me as I arrive.
The small things that you do that makes me happy in not just small measures but very large heaps. The little parties you throw, the little songs you sing, the little dances you perform, the little advices you give, the little games we play, the little chats we have. The little things that make this life a little, no, a lot worth living.
If I compare each person I have met in this miniscule lifetime of mine to a star, I would call you a shooting star. Few and far between do you come by to emblazon me with your celestial presence. You were not there when just a few stars inhabited my skies, and will not be there when my skies are to be peopled by so many. But when you are around, you just light up my sky, you make all the stars just stop and look on at you.
When I'm with you I feel I'm dancing with the angels in the sky, I see snowfall in the summertime, feel the healing powers of the one above, see the world from the highest mountain, taste love from the purest fountain. With you I saw the sun make love to the sea. You lift me up when I'm feeling low, I see my tears disappear, and I feel my pain pass away. You do the things I've never done; I've sailed in a perfect dream but still haven't seen anything that amazes me quite like you do. "
Today after all these years I'm still being asked to write ... I couldn't help but look back ...
" I do not know for what deed of mine in my last life I have been rewarded with so many laurels, of which having the good fortune to be acquainted with you becomes the icing on the cake. At times I feel that you are not just human but rather an angel sent from above, perhaps an incarnation of some divine godly form, let's put it as the God of small things, blessed with these gifts which you bestow upon me as I arrive.
The small things that you do that makes me happy in not just small measures but very large heaps. The little parties you throw, the little songs you sing, the little dances you perform, the little advices you give, the little games we play, the little chats we have. The little things that make this life a little, no, a lot worth living.
If I compare each person I have met in this miniscule lifetime of mine to a star, I would call you a shooting star. Few and far between do you come by to emblazon me with your celestial presence. You were not there when just a few stars inhabited my skies, and will not be there when my skies are to be peopled by so many. But when you are around, you just light up my sky, you make all the stars just stop and look on at you.
When I'm with you I feel I'm dancing with the angels in the sky, I see snowfall in the summertime, feel the healing powers of the one above, see the world from the highest mountain, taste love from the purest fountain. With you I saw the sun make love to the sea. You lift me up when I'm feeling low, I see my tears disappear, and I feel my pain pass away. You do the things I've never done; I've sailed in a perfect dream but still haven't seen anything that amazes me quite like you do. "
Today after all these years I'm still being asked to write ... I couldn't help but look back ...
Friday, August 26, 2005
Les Indespensables De Arun Jacob
I have come to accept the true penetration of confusion, Confusion that dwells within.. Confusion that finds place within the deepest darkest corners of the human psyche.. One that resides amoung th e loftiest of you and me...
Confusion, the horror of this pain it brings, a pains that stings... a stinging we dwell on ... we accept because a narcisstic streak within us calls for this paiin to keep on inflicting it self upon us... the claves knaw into us sucking the life force of our very existance away from us... but there isnt a fear in our minds which ios a vacous entity now for fear and confusion have taken hostage of what used to be afeasible thinking faculty now home to this weird sensation that we have come to hate but havent had the courage to uproot from within...
So who feeds this demon that grows and gathers allies and gets stronger with each passing day ... the priests within have lost their pwoers to conduct the required ceremonies of exorcism which might have been the last hope of rekindling the past .. but we have come to terms that the past will never be back ..and this wild being that has taken control of the realms of the mind, we have to accomodate this being..for it holds divine powers .. the likes of which we have never seen before.. an entity that gains strength in a given instant... a whiff of the slightest fragrance, a bright color ..a melodious tune...this enemy is turning out way too strong for mere mortals to combat...rather it would be better to ally ourselves with this embodiment of all things undescribable
where is this fear coming from ... is it a generalized fear of all things alien and new ... am i afraid of this new entity that i havent been able to figure out yet... is it my ego that cant handle the fact that this might be it's waterloo... this might be an enemy i cant subdue ... who am i dealing with... and why is it that as much i want kill this nemesis .. i'dn't mind dying in his arms ...
how much pain and suffering must one amass, be inflicted upon before one finds the courage to stand up before this fiend or is he/she a friend..
Why do you do this to me 'Love'?
Confusion, the horror of this pain it brings, a pains that stings... a stinging we dwell on ... we accept because a narcisstic streak within us calls for this paiin to keep on inflicting it self upon us... the claves knaw into us sucking the life force of our very existance away from us... but there isnt a fear in our minds which ios a vacous entity now for fear and confusion have taken hostage of what used to be afeasible thinking faculty now home to this weird sensation that we have come to hate but havent had the courage to uproot from within...
So who feeds this demon that grows and gathers allies and gets stronger with each passing day ... the priests within have lost their pwoers to conduct the required ceremonies of exorcism which might have been the last hope of rekindling the past .. but we have come to terms that the past will never be back ..and this wild being that has taken control of the realms of the mind, we have to accomodate this being..for it holds divine powers .. the likes of which we have never seen before.. an entity that gains strength in a given instant... a whiff of the slightest fragrance, a bright color ..a melodious tune...this enemy is turning out way too strong for mere mortals to combat...rather it would be better to ally ourselves with this embodiment of all things undescribable
where is this fear coming from ... is it a generalized fear of all things alien and new ... am i afraid of this new entity that i havent been able to figure out yet... is it my ego that cant handle the fact that this might be it's waterloo... this might be an enemy i cant subdue ... who am i dealing with... and why is it that as much i want kill this nemesis .. i'dn't mind dying in his arms ...
how much pain and suffering must one amass, be inflicted upon before one finds the courage to stand up before this fiend or is he/she a friend..
Why do you do this to me 'Love'?
Thursday, August 25, 2005
KUNDI-MAN [PBUH; place bum upon him]
I take great pride in posting this piece here... My hearty congrats to the author for the first episode of the Kundiman Project :"Kundiman Begins"...This happens in a galaxy far far away...and has been happening for way to long ..
KUNDIMAN’S LIFESTORY
BAD BUT GOOD DAY
One day there was a boy named Jamie. He loved cycling. He used to go to school on his cycle everyday. One day he saw the three meanest bully’s of the school. Andy, Axel & Joe. They saw him & came towards him. He wanted to escape but he couldn’t go away because he was already late for school and there was no place to hide. By This time they had already reached him. “Watcha doing wimp” asked Ax. He didn’t answer. He tried to ignore them & started walking when Andy blocked him. “Wait there Jam I have a little present for you on Christmas”. Jamie replied “I know that your gift will be stupid you jerk”. Andy got angry. “I know how to take care of this problem”. He pushed Jamie right into puddle of mud & they went away laughing. Ax said “Take this as your X’mas gift wimp”. He was covered with mud. He was so angry. How could he go to school like this? He thought. He ran fast & reached the school gate. He went right in & reached his class right on time. He got into his class without looking at anyone. His teacher Mrs.Pimpleweed saw him & asked him “Where were you Jamie?” He replied “I got bullied on the way” She thought for a while. Then she said “That’s not my problem, it is your responsibility to look after yourself.” “That’s detention for you.” Some children started giggling. It was not his fault he got bullied he thought. After a horrible day of school he had to go to detention & the worst part was he had to stay at school with the teacher watching his every move. He never knew how detention was as it was his first time and he really did hate cuz Andy, Axel & Joe were there too. He tried to think of an excuse to get out of there. The only thing he could think of was the toilet. He asked her “Madam, may I go to the toilet” asking it in a very kind manner to make sure she would fall for the trick. “Well…………ok.” in a rather annoying way. “But I’m warning you if you don’t come back in 10 minutes you will get detention for the rest of the week.” Detention for the rest of the week! That would be the worst thing that could happen. He came out of the room quite disappointed. His plan had worked at the same time failed. Anyway now that there was no use trying to escape detention he thought there was no use but to go to the toilet cuz he felt like going to the toilet now. He liked almost all the superheroes and sat shiting on “thee seat” and thinking how life would be if he was a superhero. He was so much into it that he forgot the time fly by. He quickly got up (after cleaning his butt) and went to wash his hands. Just when he was going to leave he remembered to flush (which usually happens to me) and then something very strange happened right out the “thee seat”.
KUNDIMAN’S LIFESTORY
BAD BUT GOOD DAY
One day there was a boy named Jamie. He loved cycling. He used to go to school on his cycle everyday. One day he saw the three meanest bully’s of the school. Andy, Axel & Joe. They saw him & came towards him. He wanted to escape but he couldn’t go away because he was already late for school and there was no place to hide. By This time they had already reached him. “Watcha doing wimp” asked Ax. He didn’t answer. He tried to ignore them & started walking when Andy blocked him. “Wait there Jam I have a little present for you on Christmas”. Jamie replied “I know that your gift will be stupid you jerk”. Andy got angry. “I know how to take care of this problem”. He pushed Jamie right into puddle of mud & they went away laughing. Ax said “Take this as your X’mas gift wimp”. He was covered with mud. He was so angry. How could he go to school like this? He thought. He ran fast & reached the school gate. He went right in & reached his class right on time. He got into his class without looking at anyone. His teacher Mrs.Pimpleweed saw him & asked him “Where were you Jamie?” He replied “I got bullied on the way” She thought for a while. Then she said “That’s not my problem, it is your responsibility to look after yourself.” “That’s detention for you.” Some children started giggling. It was not his fault he got bullied he thought. After a horrible day of school he had to go to detention & the worst part was he had to stay at school with the teacher watching his every move. He never knew how detention was as it was his first time and he really did hate cuz Andy, Axel & Joe were there too. He tried to think of an excuse to get out of there. The only thing he could think of was the toilet. He asked her “Madam, may I go to the toilet” asking it in a very kind manner to make sure she would fall for the trick. “Well…………ok.” in a rather annoying way. “But I’m warning you if you don’t come back in 10 minutes you will get detention for the rest of the week.” Detention for the rest of the week! That would be the worst thing that could happen. He came out of the room quite disappointed. His plan had worked at the same time failed. Anyway now that there was no use trying to escape detention he thought there was no use but to go to the toilet cuz he felt like going to the toilet now. He liked almost all the superheroes and sat shiting on “thee seat” and thinking how life would be if he was a superhero. He was so much into it that he forgot the time fly by. He quickly got up (after cleaning his butt) and went to wash his hands. Just when he was going to leave he remembered to flush (which usually happens to me) and then something very strange happened right out the “thee seat”.
Friday, August 19, 2005
I'm the Demon Seed, Satisfaction Guaranteed
The kinda ecstatcy one kinda develops is pretty enormous ..when it's a personal victory... of the sorts i might try to explain .. but i'd rather not ... coz it's the best possible i can rollick in laughter... the pure pleasure of the sinister minds...i get it now..have u ever noticed there are some conversations u wanna go over... coz they are like chess games... u wanna study the moves.. coz that's how they were executed....
The sheer brilliance of certains acts are best left unadmired by the general and admired by the creator and an elite few... coz vanity is the underlying theme behind it ... I can relate to Dr. Frankenstein... I can relate to Dr.Jekyl ... the virtuosity of this creation of yours isnt for the world to find flaw in ...rather for u to cherish vanquish and encapsulate into a moment ... that can be replayed ...where u can bask in the glory of...
What am I talking abt ? does it matter.... well i guess it does.. the premise is non-possessive intimacy... and how a certain somebody was trying to comprehend it..well... finding something out that you already knew ... is kinda like finding something else right... that too..
I had set out to say way too many things ... but i'm yet to find the perfect platform to latch onto ... falling flat and doing something without conviction isnt what i'm up for tonight... this will have to do..
I Love You...[couldn't come up with a better closing line...]
The sheer brilliance of certains acts are best left unadmired by the general and admired by the creator and an elite few... coz vanity is the underlying theme behind it ... I can relate to Dr. Frankenstein... I can relate to Dr.Jekyl ... the virtuosity of this creation of yours isnt for the world to find flaw in ...rather for u to cherish vanquish and encapsulate into a moment ... that can be replayed ...where u can bask in the glory of...
What am I talking abt ? does it matter.... well i guess it does.. the premise is non-possessive intimacy... and how a certain somebody was trying to comprehend it..well... finding something out that you already knew ... is kinda like finding something else right... that too..
I had set out to say way too many things ... but i'm yet to find the perfect platform to latch onto ... falling flat and doing something without conviction isnt what i'm up for tonight... this will have to do..
I Love You...[couldn't come up with a better closing line...]
Thursday, August 11, 2005
Nagumomo
Why have I engaged in a sabbatical... Well the answer would be rather plain and simple... There's this polish proverb I heard recently that makes absolute sense... "You know what they say about families; they look best in portraits" Truly I say onto you ... there are times I question myself ...is it rage sympathy or a bit of both that runs through me ... How irrational people tend to be can sometimes be bewildering... i almost endangered the delicate balance of coexistance on this planet ..while trying to divulge in the inner depths of rationality... a man on a mission is a rather dangerous proposition ... and ppl try to feel your integrity to succumb to their fancies... well emotional battering is another forte one has to flex your muscles in ...this incoherent piece of literature is a creation or loads of confusion empathy pity anger and rage.... if only i could channel it somewhere else and get something out of it .... as for now folks .... bah... who and what am i trying to console..... well... gimme a lil more while ...i'll sort this out ....
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