Hurley Burly.

If you have any sense of history at all, any sense that giant institutions have always tried to impose their world-view on the population they seek to control and, therefore, profit from, you should be very sensitive to the current dogma being propagated by nearly every giant company and thousands more smaller companies who are those giant company's willing executioners.

AI is almighty, god-like and great. Any mistake is your fault and acceptable. And any deviation from today's current technology orthodoxy subjects the deviator to excommunication modern-style. 

This morning, I came across an ad from Oracle--a malign company if ever there was one. By the way, like the drug dealer/child-killer driving a giant SUV and flaunting his wealth and power, Oracle of late is doing the same. Consider this.

This sort of growth doesn't happen to a half-a-trillion dollar company if some sort of manipulation and prestidigitation isn't happening. Something is going on that is about as kosher as a church basement potluck dinner in Pork Belly, Iowa.

Growth this precipitous is simply not tenable. It's the human contact equivalent of Elizabeth Hurley deciding I am Mr. Wonderful. If that somehow happens, something is amiss. 

Back to the 19-page ad I saw for Oracle this morning. Here are just some of the dogma masquerading as truth statements I pulled from their downloadable brochure.

What I find striking in all this is how Oracle's claims are so distant from any reality I've ever encountered. Much like church dogma in the age of Galileo or RFK-anti-science dogma coming from much of amerika today. Much like the arrogant dogma of statements like these from WPP, my ex-employer.

HINT: When your market cap has dropped from $32B to $6B in ten years, and you've shed 70% of your employees, calling yourself a creative transformation company ain't cool. It's like a rapidly metastasizing cancer hiring a PR-firm and calling itself a "rapid cell-growth organism."

As it pertains to Oracle and their long ad, I found this footnote. All of the data in their slides above comes with this as their source.

2019! 

Really, they're citing "scientific" data from a study that's almost seven years old? That's a bit like taking a photograph of an acorn and calling it a future 300-foot-tall giant sequoia. 

The best thing that came from being born during the era of LBJ and Richard Nixon, of Vietnam and Watergate, of long-hair and middle-fingering norms is that we learned to question. Everything.

Something is rotten in the world when trillions are spent telling you how great AI is and you've yet to see any evidence of it other than you can make a video of your dog talking from a still photograph. 

Despite trying to force it down my throat, I'm not sure AI is winning anymore hearts and minds in the workplace than amerika did in Vietnam fifty years ago. Compliance is not acceptance.

Something stinks here.

In a time of universal dogma, questioning is a revolutionary act.

A Knockout.

One late afternoon late in the summer way back in 1975 when I toiled under the unforgiving sun as I manned third base for the Saraperos de Saltillo in the Mexican Baseball League, I was getting dressed in my warm-ups. Hector walked over to the worn wooden bench underneath the dripping pipe above my cubby. I was lacing up my black leather Riddell spikes which I had brought in my duffle all the way from New York.

"Jorge," Hector said, "Buentello is feeling sick. He said he is dizzy."

"He's not always dizzy?"

"You have a point. But tonight, he is more dizzy than usual and cannot catch."

Gonzalo Bustamante had just joined the team from the Yaquis of Ciudad Obregón, a lesser team in the Mexican Pacific league. Hector had shifted me to right field and put the newcomer at third. After eight games, Bustamante was batting an even .400 and had already amassed seven RBIs. 

"I would like you behind the plate tonight."

"What about Gordo," I asked. Gordo Batista was our backup backstop and our full-time bus driver.

"As a catcher," Hector said, "Gordo is a good bus driver. I will put either Andrade or Cervantes or Ibarra in for you. Whoever hits the ball best when we are warming up. And you will be behind the plate. Yturbe is pitching. He is steady."

"As a catcher," I answered, "I am a good third baseman."

"It is only for this one night, until Buentello recovers his balance."

Hector left my side and brought me a spare set of teal-highlighted catcher's gear. 

"Tonight you will wear the tools of ignorance."

"I didn't know it showed," I said, adjusting the straps to my left shinguard.

As much as I hated catching, I hated it less than playing in the outfield, where Hector had stuck me since Bustamante joined the squad. I hated being away from the center of the game, far away from the action. At least catching had me in the center of things where my mind had less of a propensity to wander. 

Right field was a notoriously lonely outpost, the Alcatraz of the baseball field. Xavi Liberto played there at the start of the season until his batting average fell below his weight. One night to pass the time he hid a small parakeet he had captured in his glove so he had someone to talk with. When a line drive was sent his way, without thinking he grabbed the ball and in the process crushed to death the small yellow bird he had hidden.

As most games did that long summer so long ago, this one faded into the ones before and the ones to come. Though Yturbe was strong that night and we were up by two going into the ninth, he faltered just when we thought we were home free. 

With two down, the Olmecs put two men on and their next batter hit a long one to right that took a hop over Ibarra's head. Two runs were in when Adame, in short right, relayed Ibarra's throw to me, unfortunately about two or four feet too high.

I leaped to catch it, and that's the last I remember until I woke up in the red leather  front seat of a white Cadillac convertible that belonged to Don Jorge Torres Casso, the owner of the Saraperos. The Olmec's runner had crashed into me, safe. And I went flying to the wooden backstop breaking through two of the old, dry planks, and was knocked out for a good fifteen minutes.

We had no ambulance at El Estadio de Francesco I. Madura, so the boys dragged me to Casso's car and Casso drove me to the hospital in his car, cursing me for my dusty uniform against his clean leather seats. Dr. Jesus Verdusco, our backup shortstop, who was a third-year medical student in the off-season at   Tecnológico de Monterrey, held my hand from his place in the seat behind me.

Casso, driving blindly, cursed the 15 minutes to the hospital. "My seats," he said. "You ass and your dirt on my seats. Why did they not put down a towel on the upholstery?"

He cursed me and so reminded me that the world had kept on spinning though the spinning of my head made it seem like it had stopped while I was blacked out.

After that night, I never again caught, not even batting practice.

Like I said, as a catcher, I was a good third-baseman.

Not Well-Bread.

There's a famous writer in the Yiddish canon (the canon without ammunition) called I.L. Peretz. He was born in 1852 and died in 1915, living in what today is Poland and what was then known as the Pale of Settlement. Basically crappy land where the Czar decided to throw all the Jews so they were a) out of the way and b) close enough to be taxed and inducted into the army and c) handy when a pogrom would cool the tempers of the non-Jewish peasantry.

Though in the parlance of the anti-Semitic Stalinist regime, Jews were "rootless cosmopolitans," and in the language of the Christian right Jews are either "not real Americans," "loyal to Israel not the US," or the demons who are "economy-and-media-controlling spawn of the devil," Jews have done well in the world of literature.

I talked to my (gentile) friend Stacy about a book I was writing once. Stacy rose high high high in the publishing world but had aged out at about 55. I told her about my book and she said, "it's probably publishable. Jews read."

Charles Murray--the disgraced sociologist--wrote a piece in "Commentary Magazine" back in 2007 called "Jewish Genius." Once the European social revolutions of the mid-nineteenth century had finally granted Jews full citizenry rights and admission to universities and elite professions, something profound happened in Europe.

Murray writes, "Disproportionate Jewish accomplishment in the arts and sciences continues to this day. My inventories end with 1950, but many other measures are available, of which the best known is the Nobel Prize. 

"In the first half of the 20th century, despite pervasive and continuing social discrimination against Jews throughout the Western world, despite the retraction of legal rights, and despite the Holocaust, Jews won 14 percent of Nobel Prizes in literature, chemistry, physics, and medicine/physiology. In the second half of the 20th century, when Nobel Prizes began to be awarded to people from all over the world, that figure rose to 29 percent. So far, in the 21st century, it has been 32 percent. Jews constitute about two-tenths of one percent of the world’s population. You do the math."

Perhaps it is for the reasons Murray cites above that Jews are no longer considered, at least in advertising, to be diverse. For convenience's sake, we are lumped together with white people. However, the real world knows what five-and-dime demographers and agency DEI people don't know.

As Bret Stephen's pointed out in last week's "New York Times," "For 2020, the F.B.I. reports that Jews, who constitute about 2.4 percent of the total adult population in the United States, were on the receiving end of 54.9 percent of all religiously motivated hate crimes."

It's with all this context that I want to talk about a story by I.L. Peretz called "Bontshe Schweig," or "Bontshe the Silent." You can get a pdf of the story here. It will take you about six minutes to read it, depending on how often you interrupt your reading by checking your social accounts.

In any event, "Bontshe," was a story I first read in college when I was still in my teens. I read it again 40 years later, just when I was turning 60.

To my eyes what makes the story great is that reading it as a young person and then as an old person, if you're anything like me, you'll find two different meanings in the ambiguous ending--I found Bontshe pathetic, weak and despicable in his meekness when I was young. Today, I understand.

The crux of the story is this.

Bontshe has the most miserable of all lives. He's never had anything go his way, never had a stroke of luck. Never felt loved or respected or heard or not hungry. Despite all that, Bontshe never complains. 

The angels see this and when Bontshe dies they whisk him up to heaven and herald him as a great man. But as are the rules of heaven--they put Bontshe on trial. When he is deemed the most-righteous of humans, they grant him anything he wants. Any luxury, any comfort, any laughter. Anything.

Bontshe, simply, asks for a warm roll with sweet butter melted on it.

That's it.

Today, as an old man, I understand Bontshe.

The riches of the world, the fast cars and slow women, the big apartments, the five-star resorts, the fancy restaurants, expensive clothing and vintage wines don't mean anything to me. 

As the world seems to be falling apart, as a new wave of hatred and violence seems to be tsunaming over our planet, as catastrophic Anthropocene environmental change has arrived, all I want is a bit of peace every day.

Maybe some quiet. Maybe some sunshine. Maybe some dark coffee. And a nice piece of toasted raisin bread with cinnamon with just a dab of salt butter, the salt and the sweet of the raisins making me smile. Oh, and just a scintilla of quietude, kindness and love thy neighbor.

To be clear, I don't know what this post is about except maybe feeling aggrieved. And scared. Yes, scared.

Last week with the horrors of Ye and the 405 and asses like Kyrie Irving taking up every bit of the news, not one agency DEI person said anything that I could hear.

Like most silence, it was deafening.