Supreme Reflections

     These days when one hears "supreme" leader one tends to think of Iran and its non-voter appointed head, although after Trump voiced that he wouldn't mind being the Pope, he might be entertaining that title for his own remaining months or years, both in office and on Earth.  Here's a portion of that term as defined in Wikipedia: ...the supreme leader delineates the general policies...supervising the legislature, the Judiciary, and the executive branches.  The current lifetime officeholder...has issued decrees and made the final decisions on the economy, the environment, foreign policy, education, national planning, and other aspects of governance...also makes the final decisions on the amount of transparency in elections, and has dismissed and reinstated presidential  cabinet appointees.  But the devil is in the details since that copyrighted term is used strictly by the Islamic Republic (gasp...could it be TACO time already?).

     But in this case, the "supremes" have nothing to do with such aged leaders, or institutions such as the courts, but rather relate to a singing group from back in the day, one headed by a young Diana Ross.  And when one NY Times editor wrote that she was having a birthday, and was now looking back on her life, that carefree, taunting and now almost haunting song came roaring back into my brain stereo: Reflections of the way life used to be.  Here's part of what that NY Times editor wrote: The approach of my birthday always leaves me a little blue; the occasion is a sour cherry on top of my usual two scoops of critical scrutiny and second-guessing about my life.  This year is no different.  But I find myself leaning more toward introspection than self-loathing.  I can’t account for how I’ve used the past 30-odd years, to say nothing of the previous 12 months, but I’d like to better understand how exactly I got to where I am...(I can practically feel the snap of the rubber gloves on my hands.)  And I like to think they chime with the indelible literary project the Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux set out to accomplish: “I shall carry out an ethnological study of myself.”  Just as with the song, such words would have normally sailed by me without any fuss except that my birthday had also now passed.  

    So speaking of songs, how was this one, a song I've heard dozens or hundreds of times, but suddenly heard these particular words anew: If you're walking 'round thinking that the world owes you something 'cause you're here.  You goin' out the world backwards like you did when you first come here, yeah.  Yeah, indeed.  Was this the universe talkin', as in telling me to listen up!  Or was it because I was now a year older than last, and my "new" age was causing me to actually listen for a change?  And then a few things happened to add to the pile (one being that I didn't seem to enjoy that I was feeling pinned down at the bottom of that pile).  

     The Interviews: one piece came from an interview with former Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, this when Blinken was concluding his time in office under Biden. Said Blinken: I thought at a young age that maybe I wanted to try music as a career, and then I realized I was missing one thing: talent.  I'm not sure I want to inflict any more music on the world.  I actually hope --talk about what comes next-- to get to attend a few concerts.  That'd be great.  But then came the interview with Meredith Whittaker, now the president of the Signal Foundation.  Here's part of what she said in the WIRED interview: There’s an inflection point in 2012 that I’m sure you’re familiar with: There’s this paper that got published, called the AlexNet Algorithm, that basically brought a bunch of ingredients together and ignited the current AI moment after a long winter.  What it showed is that with massive amounts of data and powerful computational chips, you could make old algorithmic techniques—techniques that dated from the 1980s—do new and impressive things.  I am hypersensitive to data.  I’ve been in the measurement wars.  So I’m like, “Wait, what is machine learning?  Oh, so you’re taking trashy data that you claim represents human sentiments—or things that are much more difficult to measure accurately than the low-level network performance data that I was very familiar with—and you’re putting that into some statistical model, and then you’re calling that intelligence?”  I was like, “Wait, no, you can’t do that.”  So that animated a lot of my concerns around AI.  And of course throughout this time I’m learning more and more about what the business model actually is...I’m like, “Oh, this is not innovation. This is capital.”...What was new to ignite this AI boom right then?  It was the presence of massive amounts of data—training data and input data—and powerful computational chips, the more of them strung together, the better.  Now, what are those?  Those are exactly the affordances that have accrued to the early platform companies that have built out their social media networks, built out their data centers.  With artificial intelligence, we’re basically relaundering a lot of this shit through broken models that are giving Google more and more authority to claim intelligence when what they’re actually doing is issuing derivatives of the shitty data they have.  And what was AI used for?  Why were they into it?  Because it’s really good at tuning ad algorithms, at targeting ads.  It’s not an accident that the three authors of this AlexNet paper were immediately hired by Google...The short answer here is that AI is a product of the mass surveillance business model in its current form.  It is not a separate technological phenomenon.  

     The Articles: So I do try to keep up in a layman's way with such things, given that I am not versed in coding or anything even close.  I've heard the old terms --C++, Fortran, Python, Java, etc.-- but Whittaker's interview was light years ahead.  With Blinken I was ready to settle in, and with Whittaker I was feeling left on the side of a desert road.  And then I read this on software and coding and how even today's software engineers had better start learning the new Go language (which is already 16 years old), except that upon further reading, even Go may become passé, or at least humans coding it may become passé.  From The NY Times: Want malware to steal someone’s data?  A chatbot can write the code...Last week, Google announced that one of its bots had found a flaw in code used by billions of computers that cybercriminals wanted to exploit — likely the first time A.I. has managed such a feat...Cybercrime is expected to cost the world more than $23 trillion per year by 2027, according to data from the F.B.I. and the International Monetary Fund.  That’s more than the annual economic output of China...The newest cybercriminals are robots.  They write with flawless grammar and code like veteran programmers.  They solve problems in seconds that have vexed people for years...Algorithms have been around for decades, but humans still manually check compliance, search for vulnerabilities and patch code.  Now, cyber firms are automating all of it.  That’s what Google said its bot had done.  Others are on the way.  Microsoft said that its Security Copilot bot made engineers 30 percent faster, and considerably more accurate...

     The Books: Okay forget coding or AI or software.  Too late for me to understand that, much less try to catch up.  So imagine my surprised to see a copy of What Color Is Your Parachute...for College.  The original book from the 1970s was a classic for us wandering boomer students.  Where were you going?  What did you want to do?  How would you change the world, or yourself?  It was a book like Passages, giving you a preview into how to look forward and perhaps give you a chance to prepare for the journey.  This newer version asked: You're young and likely still figuring out what is most meaningful to you.  Then it reverted to questions asked in the original version: When you have finished your life here on Earth, do you want there to be better stewardship of what we possess --as individuals, as a community, as a nation-- in the world, because you were here... do you want there to be more morality, more justice, more righteousness, more honesty in the world, because you were here...do you want there to be more lightening of people's loads, more giving them perspective, more helping them to forget their cares for a spell; do you want there to be more laughter in the world, and joy, because you were here... do you want there to be more wholeness, fitness, or health in the world; more healing of the body's wounds, more feeding of the hungry, and clothing of the poor, because you were here... do you want there to be better protection of this fragile planet, more exploration of the world or the universe --exploration, not exploitation-- more dealing with its problems and its energy, because you were here.  It added for each of those questions, and more: If this is your main purpose in life, then write one paragraph about it.  At this point you should have a pretty good idea of your key interests and values.  At least for now.  Remember, you are always learning and developing new interests and uncovering your values.  So consider this a start.  But somehow what hit me more than those words was the first book by Jesuit priest Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart.  At the time it was written, Los Angeles had over 1100 gangs, but Father Boyle founded Homeboys Industries, a gang rehabilitation program that has expanded in its 30 years to countries around the world: Australia, Scotland, South Africa, Norway, Sweden, and much of central and south America.  In one part of the book, a petite young beauty (his words, since this was a dance function where members could dress up and escape life on the streets for at least a few hours) told Father Boyle as she walked in, "G...promise me you'll bury me in this same dress."  As he wrote, he couldn't really picture an old woman being laid to rest in that short red miniskirt; but this 16-year old was never picturing herself growing old, but rather seeing herself being buried in a year or two.  The power he expressed, of compassion and of not judging, was transformative, not only for the gang members but for readers and listeners as well.

     The Music: So on this birthday of mine, we ventured on a hike (more on that later), came back sore, and sat outside with a drink or two and settled into our Spotify routine, each of us choosing a song then passing it off to the next person (works great at small gatherings).  My wife enjoys newer music far more than I do and so has quite a number of playlists with artists such as Garbage and the disbanded Civil Wars, as well as Luke Sital Singh and Michael Kiwanuka.  Me?  My music is more memories and clips which I hear now and then from movies or series.  But it got me thinking (as the phone for using Spotify got passed back and forth) how music had changed in my life.  In my parent's days, the background band was just that, in the background.  Singers were just singers...no instruments, no duets (Sinatra, Darin, Como, and such); then solo singers walked out with a guitar or a piano (Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, and more); then harmony groups (the Temps, Beach Boys, CSN, and such), then bands with many members both singing and playing, which is about where we are today.  But (and not counting one-name bands such as Elton John, Stevie Ray Vaughn, and others) what causes a band to suddenly shift back and feature a "front" man or woman, I wondered; was it their mastery of an instrument, or was it more of just being a performer, one such as Michael Hutchence or Freddie Mercury (keep in mind my age, here).  What brought the fans in?  The show or the music?  Or both?  And how was it that a guitar could seem to make the blues sing so much more than a piano, no matter the artistry of the player (Gary Moore vs. Diana Krall).  But that was now the scotch talking, taking away the tiredness of my legs from the hike.

     The Hike: Ah yes, the hike, our first of the season.  Now keep in mind that we used to hike weekly, even when we worked.  Trails were relatively empty then, a mid-week hike often finding us bumping into fewer than half a dozen people.  But we got busy, we got lazy, we got complacent, even as we walked the dog and cleaned the house and kept up with the exercising.  But here it was late-July and the summer was whizzing by, and we had yet to get out for a hike (it had been quite hot here, we rationalized).  Indeed as writer Margaret Renki asked: How had I allowed myself to become so busy?  How long had it been since I'd spent a day in the sun, eating sandwiches from a cooler and watching water ripple across the surface of a lake?  Why do I so often behave as though there will be unlimited days to sit quietly with my own beloved listening to birdsong and wind in the pines?  But now, mid-week and mid-morning, the upper parking lot was full, the cars backed up 20 deep, our plans forced to shift to a different trail, a different start.  But as fate would have it, the alpine flowers on the alternative trail were at their peak, something we would have missed on our planned hike higher up.  We encountered many people of all ages, many being moms carrying babies on the front or nestled on their backs.  Many of the people walking were elderly, some foreign, some quite fit, but each was out to just admire what nature had done with such little water, and done just a short distance away "up there."  So many were out introducing their children to this natural beauty.  

     So apologies if this did indeed seem as if I was reflecting.  Indeed I was looking back in the sense of people and animals who were no longer with me, but I was here now with my wife, and seeing so many younger people getting out and crowding the trails, absorbing the wonders of nature right in their backyard; those things alone made me quite happy to just be in the moment.  It was how my wife and I had started when we were younger, a trail or two, then a few travels down rivers or canyons, then more and more trips as we could afford, juggling work schedules and finding pet sitters.  And that was the real reflection, one now staring back at me.  “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones," wrote biologist Richard Dawkins in his book Unweaving the Rainbow:. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.  The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia.  Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton.  We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people.  In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.  We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”

     The American Climate Corps was underway, getting 6 young people applying for every open position, all in an effort to mirror the Civilian Conservation Corps of the Depression years, one which put 3 million young men to work building trails and planting 2 billion trees in our parks and across the country.  Trump killed the ACC on his first day in office, wrote the LA Times.   Normally this would have added to my pile of depressing news.  But here I was witnessing the opposite, the young were the hope, and they were out here.  And while I was saddened that the Heritage Foundation had taken 10 years to groom their spokesman in Trump and thus begin implementing their plan for our government, that also now put them 10 years behind the curve; and as the Meredith Whittaker interview showed me, there is much more happening at a speed we boomers and near boomers can no longer comprehend.  And that bodes well for our future.  I am certain something is happening, stirring the undercurrents of people now confirming that something isn't right here in the world.  Take Lindsay Gill who was featured in Woman's Day: Lindsay Gill, a mom of three in the Washington, DC, area, knew the challenges of motherhood—sleepless nights, mounting costs, and the feeling of constantly falling short.  She also knew that for some women, especially those who were struggling to make ends meet, the pressure could be crushing.  So she started collecting diapers and wipes—whatever baby items she could—to give to moms in her community who were quietly struggling.  Word spread, donations poured in, and The Napkin Network was born.  In under five years, the group has collected thousands of essential baby items and distributed them through partnerships with schools, underfunded nonprofits, and grassroots outreach. The idea is simple: Meet moms where they are, offer what they need, and never make them ashamed for asking.  For Lindsay, this isn't a charity -- it's solidarity.  It's moms helping moms.  It's saying, we see you; we've got you.  Her dream is to take The Napkin Network nationwide so no mom will ever have to choose between paying the rent and buying diapers,  One person,  One priest,  One hiker...

     The Egg: So my annual rotation around the sun had begun another journey for me, meaning another birthday had passed.  And after all that I had read, and listened to, and walked, and witnessed, I could only feel grateful.  Not only to still be here but to have been born at all.  I was still able to go for a hike, unlike the 12-year old pepito of Father Boyle who was caught in a gang's crossfire and killed.  And I wasn't one of the many children now starving to death in Gaza, despite some 6000 trucks full of aid waiting, but being denied entry, reported the BBC.  Somehow I was born and still here, all while realizing that so many others were still waiting to be born (the surrogate mom "industry" is now estimated to become a $129 billion money-maker by 2032, wrote WIRED; earlier in the year, Bloomberg had reported on the questionable practice of finding surrogate mothers, often from poorer countries).  Maybe understanding much of what was happening in today's world was now beyond me, but I was renewed by being out in nature, and seeing so many people, so many young people.  And then my wife pulled out an egg the next morning, a batch from our farmers co-op carton of eggs, available at our regular chain grocery store.  And there it was, all in one, the history of nature, the rings of planets and petroglyphs, the shape of hope, all in a small container that we have yet to understand how to make.  Nature too, had hope.  And it also lay with its young...