Tangent-

TANGENT-

I hope your work has not taken it's toll on your youth.

ANOTHER TANGENT-

I had a very awkward conversation with a young Hispanic Psychology student at Berkeley recently.

She said that she is obsessed over whether or not her children will be "revolutionaries". She said that she wants them to be revolutionaries but she also wants them to be free to have their own way of life.

This seemed immediately very uninspiring to me. Firstly if someone tries to make their kid into something the kid usually tries very hard to be anything but. Secondly I have no idea what she means by have their own way of life. Ways of life are always patchwork quilts made of political, religious, and business affiliations.

After some chatting I told her that my mother was Austrian and Mexican and she was taken aback.

I asked her what she wanted to do with her career and she said she wanted to do whatever is best for the Mexican American community. We basically got into this discussion of "grassroots" versus "ivory tower" means of social change. I made it clear that as a Berkeley graduate she may be one of the few educated Mexicans in future history, and that she may be one of the only people to reach a Judicial seat, principal at a non-profit or PHD on a specialized topic. On the other hand she might work to change over 25,000 Mexican lives over the course of the same 30 year career. I tried to explain how state legislators late in their careers often make it down in to the local level later in life and tend to dominate the city level.

She was kind of hurt by my comments and responded that immigration rights is all about enforcement not so much law. I said yeah I get it and enforcement is about public opinion so you better maximize your influence on public opinion by any means you got.

Then she went on about selling out to markets and advertising. I responded that markets are not about money. Markets are about emotion and that she is asking for people to have compassion. People respond to things emotionally within just the first few seconds. Neurophysiology teaches us that the Amygdala makes an assessment of whether or not something seen in the eyes is good or bad before the person is even conscious of what it is that they are seeing.

I says:

"I said hi to all of your friends and you are the only one who smiled and spoke with me. At that moment you were not thinking about the color blue and the number three."

She said "why is it that I was smiling."

"I don't know and it does not matter. We could do a study, or deduce the root cause. It still would not matter. We would not have any of that if it were not for the initial positive response. We would not even be talking right now."

She basically walked away.

At this moment I destroyed her pride and happily so.

Pride is contradictory to progress. It closes communication to put static ideas into precedence over dynamic living things.

She had some story in mind about who she is and who her friends are and who I am and she could not for a moment think that she just had some kind of base response to a living situation.

We could now get into a discussion of what it means to be categorically Mexican or categorically "for social change" or we could just be categorically "human".

yet another tangent--

British Petroleum just brought all of the six supermajor oil companies under one leadership group.

The media is centrally controlled due to FCC laws put in place by Colin Powell's son.

Obama supports continued big military budgets. Over 30% of the Army budget is going to Dick Cheney's companies. Over 50% of the Airforce Budget is going to private contractors.

There are only six major commodities distributors.

The markets are controlled through the extension of credit not the fluctuation of interest rates.

In sum you could put less than ten men in a room who control Food, Money, Energy, Military and the flow of information.

And yet they tell us there is no such things as an international sovereignty.

Early Life

My earliest memory is the experience of death. I played at the edge of the pool for hours on end when I was three. With my right arm and right leg submerged I would imitate the motion of a swimmer but I could'nt swim. This subdued dance I so enjoyed while teeter on my chest and belly which gently rubbed against the warm clean concrete of the edge was an item of worry for my parents and grand parents. Because they knew I couldlnt swim I was effectively forcing them to watch over me intently. Grandpa Michael Caro was watching me through the kitchen window. They asked him if he could I was alright and he said that I was alright. There is an ethic best summarized by the phrase what does not kill me makes me stronger that is strong in my family. The cool unheated pool water engulfed my body as I slipped. I was face down in the pool. My visual field was filled with the rippling lights refracted through the layers of concentric circles which defined the surface of the water which played as a projection over a handful of leaves some floating dust and the smooth surface of the bottom of the pool. That changed. The projections seemed to increase in intensity until it seemed that I was sealed in a container filled with blinding suffocating impenetrable light. Like a black hole in reverse. I could no longer enjoy the sensation of the water flowing between the fine hairs on my skin not because I was dry but because I was floating face down and had drowned. I will never forget how cold my body became as the water in my longs was contiguous with that of the pool. My body heat transfered freely into the pool both from the surface of my skin and the inside of my lungs. As the story goes no one knows how long I was floating but my grand mother was the first to notice my motionless corpse floating in the backyard pool. She dove in and made some attempts at mouth to mouth for children. Fifteen minutes later the ambulance arrived and pronounced Theodore Vincent the Fifth dead on arrival. My mother prayed to god in curses and screams which interrupted the condolences of the paramedics who attempted to fill out the forms which record my death. Several minutes later I began to breath. My first breath seemed to me to be something very funny. Although I was too weak to laugh I was laughing inside at the sight of my mother's terror. I can only imagine that I was intoxicated by brain damage. The medics said that I would suffer permanent brain damage. They said that my parents shouldn't expect me to read or write because I may never learn to speak again.

They were right, for a while.

Although I was a strange infant who never learned to crawl. I reverted to my infancy. I would knuckle walk taking "steps" by repositioning my seat and letting my legs flop to whatever direction, for the year following my death. Eventually I learned to walk for the second time. My second first step was not an event to celebrate. I was almost four at the time. I spoke in a sequence of incoherent babbles often attaching the relevant noun at the end of a sentence. It may have been the fact that my grandparents spoke five languages in the home. The spoke German Hebrew Spanish Italian and English and those languages were heard in equal parts in conversations between Eva and Mike Caro. I did'nt learn to speak until I was almost five. I was put into ESL courses based on my difficulties with English. They asked me to write things in my native language and of course I did. I wrote things in Hebrew. My grandmother taught me to write in Hebrew thinking that I already knew how to write in English. For a year and a half I was in ESL and ESL mixed classes. My mother realized that my ESL teacher spoke horrible English when they had a parent teacher meeting with to discuss my learning disabilities. The only benefit I gleaned from this year in ESL would be the friendship of my table mate Natto. Natto is one of my best friends to this day.

I was placed in a normal English speaking class and left my first and second generation Mexican friends for a class of asian white and black kids. In this new and much more like television environment I thrived. I scored highly on most standardized tests typically in the top two percentile for the state of California through elementary school. I was a pain in the ass to my teachers whom I made fun of at every opportunity. The mood of the classroom was at the whim of my wit. I would complain to my mother that I had no friends. Often I cried to her while she drove me to school and when we arrived at the classroom door the children would say my name and cheer. Then she would say don't you see you have lots of friends. Although I was always well known for public displays my lunchtime friends were self proclaimed nerds and outcasts. One year I came back from Isreal with a broken leg. I wore a cast for almost an entire year. My friend Daniel the son of one of the worlds premiere baroque violinists was the only kid who would play with me. We built sand castles in the sand and spoke about taking algebra and advanced math.

I was Theodore Vincent the Fifth but they called me Clinton. Daniel calls me Clint to this day. My father who I never knew referred to me by the name of his favorite musical artists George Clinton. I always wondered why he didn't call me George. In the summer I would be back in Israel every summer until sixth grade.

Pimpin' Longstockings

What is a movement but the dollars behind it.

This "Web 2.0 SF Beta Start-Up Rebirth" movement is raising troops. I have had an opportunity to speak to a few of these young GED educated soldiers of fortune and I must admit I am confused by many of their suppositions.

They assume that the growth rate during the first week of a web product can be linearly mapped on to future earnings for years.

They assume that the reason why there hasn't been a multi-million dollar social networking product is that there hasn't been a sufficiently clever design.

They assume that automation is the cause and effect of profit.

The growth rate during the first week reflects the existing demand for that web service, not the continued growth in that demand.

The reason that there has not been a sufficiently clever design is that clever designs are tools to representation people not representations of people who are useful tools.

Automation is inexpensive. Automation is a way to research a method, provide repetitive content, or deliver information to large numbers of people with less effort. The quality of the research, content or information delivery will be entirely determined by the human being behind the automaton. The quality of the research, content, and delivery will determine the rate of return for that product.

We have discussed demand, design , and quality of service, all of which can only be deductively understood in terms of the demand for, designs of and quality of the human being who provides the service.

Why then are we discussing software products when we should be discussing (sound generators) D.J.'s, (sight generators) designers, and (people generators) promoters.

Or if you have all of the above perhaps you need someone with a sharp wit. Perhaps someone like Larry M. Speakes.