MY WRITING STYLE

by Michael S. Hart


If you have read a lot of what I have written, you probably already
know half of what I am about to tell you here.

I write as I think and talk, in broad strokes, with no doubts as to
where I am coming from or going to, though I will be the first from
any source to point out that sometimes I interested in some details
more than others, and thus may give detailed examples here, where I
don't give any there.  This may later be counterbalanced by my fair
play instinct, and you might see a paragraph in such a style as was
obviously written at a different time and place. . .I often get the
kind of feedback that comes from arguing both sides of an issue.

The reason for this is that I think in terms of very big pictures--
pictures that cross the boundaries of social and economic classes--
pictures that cross the boundaries between the arts and science and
pictures that cross the boundaries of hundreds of countries, over a
period of thousands of years, and include the fates of billions and
billions of people.

I am trying to change the world, and I make no attempt to hide that
I am trying to change the world, though I must admit that every day
it seems as if I am forced to learn more and more how very much the
people of the world, at least those who have voices in such things,
resist the simple effort I am making to provide books to the masses
of the entire planet without regard to all those boundaries.

You see, most of the voices you hear are the voices of those who in
one manner or another won under the current set of rules, and thus,
in an effort to perpetuate their winnings, want to keep those rules
in place, or even rewrite them even more to their advantage.  Given
a quick look at certain measures to preserve the wealth of the rich
in America by eliminating the estate tax, I am sure you understand, 

or will understand, as soon as you take a look.

However, once in very, very long time, an invention comes along and
upsets the previously established old boye networke, giving a truly
unprecedented chance to the masses that used to be reserved for the
very wealthy and powerful.

The obvious choice for this is The Gutenberg Press as Gutenberg was
the obvious choice for "Man Of The Millennium". . .as the person to
whom we owe the most for our current level of civilization.

Before Johannes Gutenberg the average person owned 0 books.

Before Project Gutenberg the average person owned 0 libraries.

Before Johannes Gutenberg the price of the average book
was equal to the price of the average family farm.

Before Project Gutenberg the price of the average library
was equal to the price of the average family farm.

Before Johannes Gutenberg the literacy rate was maybe 1 percent.

Before Project Gutenberg the literacy rate was maybe 10 percent.

[See my articles about the US Adult Literacy Rate measurements.]

But literacy is only the tip of the iceberg, and the titanic ships
of state have no way of steering there behemoth gigatonnage around
any changes as great as those of The Gutenberg Press.

It has now been ~35 years since I first placed "The US Declaration
of Independence" online as the first step in building an eLibrary,
and while even the largest nations and corporations and colleges a
world has to offer have voiced lip service to such eLibraries, the
sad truth is that there priorities are still the same, to preserve
the status quo, and NOT to bring library after library into homes,
other than into the homes of those who can afford them.

The broad stroked sketch of this is that if even a small college--
much less a small city, state or nation--had invested even 1% of a
tiny budget in such an eLibrary over the same number of years, the
truth is that no one would ever have heard of Project Gutenberg.

The truth is that none of the power players WANT a world in which,
for whatever reasons they may give, there are entire libraries for
the masses to OWN in their own homes.

We've had "personal computers" since the 1970's.

Why not "personal libraries" since the 1980's???

You probably don't know that there WERE some attempts at libraries
of an electronic nature that supposedly started in the 1980'd, but
these were kept away from even the general public of the Internet,
still a rather elite bunch back in the 1980's.  Today these claim,
for better, or for worse, to be the oldest and largest eLibraries,
and I respond simply by asking how many people have downloaded how
many books from these eLibraries, and in what periods.

Heaven only knows how few people I have ever met who have books of
these eLibraries, even today, that they downloaded directly.

If you have visited many of these eLibraries, you know that it was
not the most friendly atmosphere, not the kind of place where your
desire for books was met with "take all you want" and "give to the
family and friends," but instead with a rather stiff presentation,
and with open faced statements that you were not intended to read,
or copy, or whatever, the books from these eLibraries.

This is just the opposite of Project Gutenberg, where the original
collection is downloaded en masse every single day and night by an
assortment of worldwide readers.  The donated collections have the
various different rules of their donated eLibraries, which we were
only too glad to honor, as long as we could give them away to all.

Without undue effort, a person can download an entire library from
Project Gutenberg, while sleeping overnight or during the weekend.

It is my hope that soon it will be possible to download the dozens 
of libraries that could be filled in this manner, all with perhaps
just one click for the entire library.


/OK, enough about Project Gutenberg.


However, please recall that I said literacy was just the iceberg's
tip as we got started on this topic.

The truth is that The Gutenberg Press was not just the father of a
new age of literacy, but also the father of The Scientific Age and
of The Industrial Revolution.

The Gutenberg Press provided the first widespread diaspora of what
was"  known in the world of science, and it was also that very 

first
example of what was to become known as:

"Mass Production"

Before The Gutenberg Press, there was no mass production concept!

Before The Gutenberg Press, there was no utilitarian metallurgy!

Before The Gutenberg Press, there were no interchangeable parts!

Before The Gutenberg Press, there was no middle class literacy!

Before The Gutenberg Press, there was no mass education system!

Just try having an Industrial Revolution without them!!!



Today we are going through the same changes.

And the "globalization" of everything is upsetting those who quite
literally used to have everything to themselves, just as it did in
the days of The Gutenberg Press.

There are those who strongly resent that the masses can now have a
whole library of free books, not just in physical fortresses quite
well supervised and protected by the system.

There are those who strongly resent that any one of these "masses"
who reads enough could gain a college level education without them
having to pass through the "cookie cutter" educational system that
used to ensure that most graduates thought as they were told to.

Let's not forget those "masses" and Bibles that were translated or
printed by Martin Luther and the like.

Before that The Church had a monopoly on all religious information
and on the rites and rituals and their interpretations which were,
to say the least, somewhat "situational ethics."

You can be sure that modern universities and colleges will feel in
similar ways about those who educate themselves. . .and the "self-
made person will take yet another beating at the system's hands.

Yet not all modern universities act and feel this way!!!

MIT, The Massachussets Institute of Technology, provides all of an
entire university's available online course material to the public
at large, so anyone in the world who wants can immerse themselves,
as fully as they like, in any and all of MIT's reading material at
absolutely no cost.

In addition MIT is funding various "FABrication LABoratories" from
Africa to Scandinavia where local residents are encouraged to make
anything they can think of. . .in Africa it's parts for an age old
washing machine that the manufacturer hasn't supported for decades
and in Scandinavia it may be parts for a new-fangled bicycle.

MIT is also responsible for starting the "$100 Laptop Project" for
including the "Have Nots" in the virtual world.  I, myself support
the $100 Laptop Project by encouraging Project Gutenberg to give a
base library of eBooks to the recipients of the $100 Laptops.

The major problem is that most of the "Haves" strongly resent this
kind of opportunity for the "Have Nots" to become "Haves."


Home schooling

However, sometimes the disapproval of the "Haves" backfires on the
very people who started various movements, such as Home Schooling,
which was created to allow for extreme fundamentalist religions to
teach things in school that were outlawed by "Separation of Church
and State."  Those who deny there is no such separation should see
their money-changers to find out why they do not pay taxes.  It is
fair enough from my point of view to end these separations as long
as all back taxes are paid in full as if they had always been due,
and I am even willing to forego penalties, and just have them paid
up the same way a normal person or company would, but no penalties
unless they create new reasons for such.

The roots of "Home Schooling" date back to the end of segregation,
when various kinds of white supremacists, not the kind that get in
all the media, just the normal everyday kind, decided to school an
entire generation outside the now "integrated" school systems, but
this idea also appealed to those on the other side of the aisle to
school their children in thinking just the opposite way.

In a certain way "integration" caused a new kind of "segregation,"
first defined by "white flight" to create suburbs in which kind of
a "socio-economic" segregation took place, and again, these people
were able to keep their children in separate classrooms of unequal
funding, since schools have traditionally been property taxes, and
these people all had property well above the average.

For them it was a win-win scenario, moving away from all problems,
still living within the appearance of a very high propriety, still
being able to create their own brand of segregation.

But once this reached the level of the lower class fundamentalists
who could not afford such an existential move to suburbia, schools
of private or suburban levels being unaffordable to them, then the
idea of "Home Schooling" took root, and programs to support school
activities in the home, without the need to send your children for
any kind of contact with the masses.

After all, wasn't that the general premise of the whole thing, the
ideal being to keep you and yours away from them and theirs.

They say "you can't legislate morality" and this is perhaps one of
the best examples, along with "prohibition" and "abstinence."

However, as I mentioned above, those who planned to beat their own 
system of laws found that this backfired, and the other half, such
as it was, also could put their children into home schooling, thus
avoiding the trash-pits that were left behind when "white flight,"
and other upper class alternatives were used to outflank the legal
requirements of school integration.

I won't even go into the whole school "bussing" issue here, but it
might well be worth your attention to see just how far people were
willing to go to avoid either segregation or integration.

The basic idea was that since various towns had been formed with a
specific plan to create a new all white upper class school system,
that the way to defeat this plan was simply to have all students a
certain area had sent to school on school busses, or at least half
of them, and thus mix the school populations across the boundaries
of suburban town lines and school districts.

It was a VERY interesting ride.

Thus the liberals founded their own home schooling system, and the
conservatives may have appeared foiled, but the truth is that this
society became ever more fragmented, which in their eyes gave them
an even more powerful base of operations as per that old maxim:

"Divide and Conquer"

That reminds me of an interesting quote in the news this week:

"We have united our enemies, and divided our friends."

Said of various US policies in action around the world.

I would be remiss here if I didn't even mention the one exception,
the one that sponsored my own public school education, and which I
thank daily for providing me with the best public education in the
United States:

The US response to Sputnik.

The search for "The Best And Brightest" for "The Space Race" had a
profound effect on my education, as the very first day of school a
year later found The Best And Brightest of the U. of Illinois sent
out to recruit The Best And Brightest from my grade school, and it
was a combination of a lucky opportunity and the refusal to be out
of such a program than led me to take every single "advanced class
opportunity" that was available all the way from grade school to a
high school diploma, and then to surf that wave of opportunity for
a second time in college.  I don't think I would have graduated if
not for such programs, school would just have been too boring.

You can read much more about this in my article on my education.


You learn to think in broad strokes with this kind of education in
place of the "learn by rote memorization" education that suffices,
or does it, when there is no such emergency.

They SAY we have an emergency now, but it is not an emergency in a
sense that brings an emergency response, only emergency powers, as
was predicted by George Orwell in "1984."

THEY say that "1984" never happened. . .but it did, on schedule as
President Ronald Reagan created "The Homeless," spent trillions on
unneeded military boondoggles to his war profiteer friends, and in
the school system started to attack the "School Lunch Programs" by
announcing that "Ketchup Is A Vegetable," thus depriving millions,
and millions, and millions of school children of one more aspect a
"Universal Education" program was designed to provide.

Most of those who run this country literally have no idea just how
much that one meal meant to millions of people, and the effects of
removing one vegetable from that plate.

When you consider all the courses removed from our school systems,
whether they might be courses of food or of instruction, you might
be able to realize just how intentional the fall of US schools has
been since the first laws were passed to racially integrate.

Many would compare this, as a nation, to:

"Cutting one's nose off to spite one's face."


These people, who regale everyone, both locally and globally, with
statements to the effect that the US is the best and brightest and
most powerful nation in the world, economically and militarily, do
not really have any idea what they are talking about simply due to
the fact that our media are unwilling to tell them that the US has
not been in the Top 5, Top 10, Top 15, etc., in schools for years,
that the adult literacy rate in the US is such that about one half
of the adult US population could be expected to read and follow an
ordinary note of written instructions to get to a McDonald's for a
purchase of lunch for an office staff.

Whether it is "1984" or "Brave New World," the illusion persists a
lot longer. . .that we are the best, brightest, and greatest.


Copyright

I also speak in broad strokes when I talk about copyright, while a
snowjob of details of dozens of US Copyright Acts would snow us.

There are only a half dozen copyright acts in all history that our
current situation requires us to understand, the others failed, or
were just "stopgap measures" to preserve the status quo until some
struggle among "The Power Elite" was resolved enough to decide the
exact way the public would be deprived of "the public domain."

Some would have you believe that copyright laws were invented by a
hundred different countries, but the truth is that they were works
of a single company who wanted to stifle The Gutenberg Press, that
company was originally called "The Stationers Guild," and later on
"The Stationers Company."

They had a virtual monopoly on the world of publishing for all the
time of recorded history, and pretty much were those who wrote it,
though perhaps not the real authors. . .though you might be just a
bit surprised at how much difference being the final writer of the
history of the world can be used to change things.

That monopoly was thoroughly destroyed by The Gutenberg Press from
the middle of the 1400's onward.

More books were published between 1450 and 1500 than in previously
recorded history, and the numbers kept doubling and redoubling.

Only the most powerful could afford even a single book before this
new technology upset the applecart of the world.

Afterwards books were the province of everyone.

Entire religions of millions lost tightly held control of texts on
which they were founded.

Entire generations learned to read, while not one of the ancestors
had even considered it.

This was too much for The Stationers, and they proposed laws after
laws after laws for 250 years of this nonsense of public literacy,
and finally, in 1710, got one approved that stuck. . .several when
approved had simply been ignored, both by the officials who should
have enforced them and the people who should have obeyed them.

Thus, on a cold day in history, the number of "books in print" for
The United Kingdom fell from 6,000 to 600, the stroke of a pen was
quite literally the stroke of doom to The Gutenberg Press, and The
Stationers now conrtolled all publishing in the UK and all offices
were located in London.  You know what this means if you have read
any of Jane Austen's accounts of what it was like to go to London.

The trouble is that then other countries were pressured into doing
the same thing if they wanted good trade relations with the UK and
we should note here that the UK was then, "The Empire on Which the
Sun Never Sets," truly the first worldwide superpower.

You should also be aware that economic warfare has always been the
preferable method of war, and obviously still is today.

The whole Middle-East thing, from Lawrence of Arabia to today, has
been about oil, no matter how much the perpetrators say there is a
"no blood for oil" policy.

The whole immigration thing is to keep people who want to work for
a living from doing so, so people who don't really want to work in
that sense can keep getting paid for doing nothing. . .at least in
a significant portion of their pay period.

We SAY we believe in everyone having a fair chance, and then we do
all we can to prohibit them from entering "a level playing field."

I can't say enough here about Thomas L. Friedman's book:


"The Earth Is Flat."


The trouble is that "The Earth Is Flat" really only applies to the
people who can read well in the languages of the countries willing
to hire them, and I should add that only about 50% of Americans as
per National Assessments of Adult Literacy (NAAL) of 1992 and 2003
were able to read at such levels.

This, in spite of the fact that 85% of them graduate high school.

This means that about 1/3 of all Americans graduate high school in
such a manner that they still don't have the reading abilities for
absorbing the materials in the dozen or so books required of them,
each and every year.

However, there are other people who want to compete for the jobs.



Immigration

Immigration is now a buzzword, simply because The United States is
now so economically weak that it wants to protect its workers from
competition from other workers willing to do the same jobs, longer
hours, less pay, less benefits, etc., etc., etc.

"Protectionism" is being used to keep United States workers from a
horde of other workers who would do more for less.

Yet United States workers are being paid so little that where your
minimum wage worker could afford a one room apartment; there isn't
one single county left in the United States where this is possible
as the last one was reported to have vanished several years back.

There are those at the top levels of government who now tell us it
was never the intention of either The Minimum Wage Act or a Social
Security system to provide the actual cost of living.

Tell that to the millions and millions of people who did live, and
well enough, on the minimum wage and on Social Security until what
we came to call "Voodoo Economics" or "Reaganomics" in which those
at the top of the economic pyramids vote themselves advantages for
tax breaks that cut their taxes by 2/3 or more, while shifting the
burden to those with less.

"Tax the Poor to Feed the Rich."

If you look at the heyday of United States Growth, you'll find 93%
income tax levels on the richest of the rich, now you can't find a
tax level, even before deductions, of more than thirty-odd percent
as a result.

The rich always complained that the poor would, if allowed to vote
in the general elections, would vote themselves a free lunch.

Now it appears that this is ok, as long as it is for the rich.

The Neo-Conservatives have changed the rules to enhance themselves
and their collective enterprises and families to the point where a
tax on even the richest estates is being targeted in semantic wars
that call them "Death Taxes."

Here we are in a country that was founded on anti-aristocracy, and
we are now creating our own version of "The Landed Gentry."


The Landed Gentry

This is one of those things you should look up yourself, to find a
number of sources that will give you an idea of what happened from
the results of aristocracy that resulted in the fierce revolutions
of America and France in the late 1700's, after so money money was
flowing from the bottom to the top for so many years.

You might even want to research places in which it was illegal for
anyone but the nobility to even HAVE money, at least certain kinds
of money, much less to own land, buildings, animals, etc.

In addition, you might find that there were certain societies when
it was illegal for anyone but the nobility to even wear clothes of
a certain style. . . .

Didn't you ever wonder why Italian shoes are so pointy???


The Haves and The Have Nots

These laws were created simply to preserve the space between those
we call the "Haves" from those we call the "Have Nots."

It wasn't enough to rig the game so it was nearly impossible to do
anything but live the life you were born to, but it was legally in
written laws that you couldn't even own the money, land, clothing,
or other accoutrements of the wealthy.

In The United States something else happened, they created a place
where people were "socially mobile". . .at least for a time, and a
new place always had more "social mobility" than the olde places.

I can remember spending one Friday night with the richest kid from
my school and that Saturday night with the poorest. . .not likely,
at least today, but this was 50 years ago in a place about as far,
far away from Washington, DC, as you can get without crossing some
salt water to get there, and still be in The United States.

However, as The United States "matured," it became more and more a
country like every other country, with more and more divisions for
socio-economic stratification, the "nouveau riche" being kept out,
by "The New York 400," the Philadelphia "Main Line," etc., etc.

Of course you are aware that it was illegal to even teach certain,
and this still resonates in our schools today, people to read.

Imagine in "The Land of Opportunity" making it illegal to read!!!

Of course, it was illegal to own property, own companies, or most
anything else, too, if you weren't "free, white and 21" and male.

This isn't all as far in the past as you might like to think, and
it rears its ugly head when certain people are pressure not to do
their voting in certain places, and UN observers are not welcome,
even here in The United States.


In Conclusion

So now you hopfully know a little about my writing style, with an
assortment of example that I hope will keep growing here in these
little blog articles that may or may not become my epitaph.

I have to write them here, as few will publish them anywhere else
that people can read them, and at last here you know you got them
in the original form, not misquoted, quoted out of context, or in
other instances quoted out of date.

It's not that I don't make mistakes, Heaven Forbid!, I make great
big mistakes that you could fly a 747 through.

But I learn, I improve, and if I live long enough, perhaps I will
be able to perfect these little articles enough that those who in
my eyes try to distort them, will largely be unable to do so.

Usually I am happy if my first attempt gets me anywhere near 90%,
in relation to what I am trying to accomplish.  Sometimes I admit
that I have to be happy with 50%, when I bite off so much more at
one time than I can chew.

However, even if I start at 50%, and then go half way to my goal,
then half way again, etc., it goes something like this:

50%   1st Try
75%   2nd Try
88%   3rd Try
93%   4th Try
97%   5th Try
98%   6th Try
99%   7th Try


I am not ashamed of this kind of growth rate level though we are
supposed to pretend to the world that we did it very close to an
exactly perfect performance the first time.

This kind of hypocrisy I don't want or need.

For those who do need it, I suggest you learn to judge a book on
some other merits than it's cover. . .no one write perfectly, so
you have to get used to the fact that you need your judgement to
separate the wheat from the chaff.

Ay, there's another rub.

One of the great weapons of those who try to cloud the issues is
simply to add so much more chaff to the conversation, drowning a
reader in detail, that the reader is simply forced to shut off a
whole range of input, including the parts the chaff purveyor may
be afraid for you to know.

Watch out when someone who has been silent for a long time comes
out with too much to digest all at once!

Not only does this tend to reduce the reading public, but it may
also cause the "moderator" of the conversation to call a halt to
what might otherwise have been very enlightening.

"Tis better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness"

But beware of the person who lights a whole forest of candles.

Anyone who doe not clearly state the purpose of their writing or
speaking at the beginning or the end should be suspect, and true
words must be spoken in between to support those clear points.

I cover lots of ground in what I write but each element supports
the general structure of the point I am trying to make.

The point here is to tell you about my writing style, which I am
hopeful I have done, even though I may have made you work in the
process of understanding.