Upon Returning from the Funeral of a Friend who Died Far Too Young

If there is a meaningful take-away from a funeral, it is to count your days. I have always taken this to mean that each day is precious, that we only have a finite number of them, and we don't know when the last one shall be upon us. So counting your days means to make sure each one counts, that each one is meaningful, that one doesn't sweat the small stuff, or live life backwards full of regret. One can only will forward, so will forward and live for today and tomorrow. Jim was a historian who was trained to look back, but he lived his life forward, even when he knew that he had precious few days remaining. The only difference between him and the rest of us is that he knew in a very concrete way that his days were numbered. For most of us most of the time that is a merely abstract truth of no practical relevance -- kind of like knowing the speed of light. See a friend cut down in his prime and at least for a few hours one might feel the finitude of life in a very real way, and one might try, at least for a few hours, to give life its due, life which, in a sense, is even more precious and finite than clean air and water. Show at least as much concern for the precious and perishable commodity that is one's own life and one will not waste time on matters of insignificance. But of course this is very hard to do consistently or even for a day. It is in the nature of things that we live as though we have all the time in the world. But of course we do not. So live and love forward for the sake of the good and important things you can do today, tonight, tomorrow. Whatever that means for you, take the time that remains seriously. Take it, use it wisely, do not squander it. For someday, and sooner than you think, someone will be delivering your eulogy -- or mine!

The Higgs Boson & the Breaking of the Cosmic Vessels according to the Kabbalah

Shevirat haKelim? (The Breaking of the Vessels) While the theory which makes the new discovery of the Higgs Boson important is utterly beyond me, it is striking that it apparently explains the emergence of matter and ultimately of life itself as owing to the shattering of the perfect symmetry of the early universe, a shattering produced by the Higgs Boson. See this story in today's NYT: CERN Physicists May Have Discovered Higgs Boson Particle http://shar.es/sLIGP

Facebook and the Enclosure of the Digital Commons

So Facebook has been valued at $104 billion dollars. Do you, my Facebook friends, feel richer? Do you understand that all the value of this company comes from your interactions with one another, from your posts, from your friendships, from your sharing of the most intimate details of your lives with each other, and (of course) with Facebook, at the same time? All of this detail adds up to data to be data-mined, to be parsed and parceled, to be sold to advertisers so that they can serve as the pander between your pocketbook and their profit. If you ask me, it is a latter day enclosure of the commons. One might think, since all the value of this company comes from you, my Facebook friends, that Zuckerberg, might want to share the wealth of this IPO with you unsung creators of the value which he has aggregated, analyzed and marketed. I keep waiting for the invitation to become part of the Facebook Co-op but it has been slow to arrive. I am sure it is just a matter of time. After all, he surely knows he could not have done this without me, without us. Moreover, and finally, it is not like he sold us a car or beer or even a search engine. What he did figure out was how to get enough of us to drop by, stick around and hang out with each other (mind you, not to hang out with Facebook, but to hang out with each other!) while he and his team monitored everything we said or did on the site, so that he could sell this data to his advertisers, who endeavor in turn to sell us the very thing which the analysis of our online behavior suggests should fulfill our heart's desire.

A few questions to close: first, what are your thoughts on this day of days? And, more particularly, do you think it is a good thing that an unregulated private company controls the social space where 900 million people -- and perhaps several billion yet to come -- spend so much of their online lives? Is this really the best way to realize the Internet's social and communicative potential? What say you?

Michael Gottsegen has shared: Apple’s Tax Strategy Aims at Low-Tax States and Nations

But it's legal... Outsourcing of jobs: there's an app for that. Offshoring of profits: there's an app for that too. Exploiting foreign workers: there's an app for that. Underpaying their taxes: there's an app for that. Screw you! Apple: contending for the moniker of "evil empire" & laughing at the rest of us -- all the way to their British Virgin Islands subsidiary! Apple’s Tax Strategy Aims at Low-Tax States and Nations
	Apple’s Tax Strategy Aims at Low-Tax States and Nations Source: nytimes.com Apple serves as a window on how technology giants have taken advantage of tax codes written for an industrial age and ill-suited to today’s digital economy.

Michael Gottsegen sent this using ShareThis.

Is Popular Sovereignty up to the Challenge of Today's Problems?

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  A friend asks: In particular, is today's national democracy - which functions in an intense and commercially media-driven environment, against a background of an insufficiently curious and perhaps poorly educated electorate - a suitable system to solving complex, interdependent, long-term global challenges?

  
  

  
  

  I answer: Good question! What did someone once say about democracy as the worst political system -- except for all the others! I do think that the complexity of the challenges we face -- economic, ecological, social -- is such that it exceeds the capacity of the popular sovereign to determine. And yet, I would still argue that the diner, not the cook, let alone the owner of the restaurant, is the best judge of the soup. To me this means that the populace needs to be politically engaged and politically attuned enough to assent or dissent to what the political class proper and the technocratic elites propose. Thus in Greece, for example, I don't think that the idea of a popular referendum on the austerity package was ill-conceived. To say that the bankers and technocrats or the suits in Brussels should decide these things and that the people cannot be trusted to make such decisions is to treat the democratic electorate like children, and is an utterly oligarchic and arrogant attitude. Are the people up to the task? I think that they are up to the task of collectively deliberating on what broad lines of policy should be pursued. However, I think that the widespread apathy owes to the fact that the "alternatives" which have been set before the people do not speak in a meaningful or credible way to popular needs and discontent. I think that the elites who control the agenda offer up a very narrow set of options which serve in one way or another to preserve the status quo which benefits the elites. In the face of this control of the agenda by the elites, the importance of the Occupy and Indignados movements is that they challenge the elite's right to set the agenda, and they agitate to place other items and other more transformative possibilities on the agenda. This is crucial, I think, that political ideas emerge from below, that the technocrats in turn figure out how to give these ideas workable substance, and that the masses in turn be allowed to decide upon which soup to eat. What is entirely dysfunctional is a system where the top 1% sets the agenda, frames the alternatives and uses its control over the large media to ensure that the entire debate is restricted to this narrow menu of possibilities, a debate that is depicted as a boxing match in which the people are spectators placing bets on the outcome rather than contestants in a contest about that upon which their very lives and the lives of their children depend. OWS and the Indignados movements are challenging the right of the economic elite to set the agenda and define the choices because in the current neo-liberal era all of the choices offered by the elites as "responsible" serve to entrench elite control while further immiserating the middle and working classes. And I wholeheartedly support this challenge -- in the interests of genuine democracy, fundamental fairness and ecological sanity.