SplendorQuest.com

The Asia Times:

America outspends China on defense by a margin of more than six to one, the Pentagon estimates. In another strategic dimension, though, China already holds a six-to-one advantage over the United States. Thirty-six million Chinese children study piano today, compared to only 6 million in the United States. The numbers understate the difference, for musical study in China is more demanding.

It must be a conspiracy. Chinese parents are selling plasma-screen TVs to America, and saving their wages to buy their kids pianos – making American kids stupider and Chinese kids smarter. Watch out, Americans – a generation from now, your kid is going to fetch coffee for a Chinese boss. That is a bit of an exaggeration, of course – some of the bosses will be Indian. Americans really, really don’t have a clue what is coming down the pike. The present shift in intellectual capital in favor of the East has no precedent in world history.

“Chinese parents urge their children to excel at instrumental music with the same ferocity that American parents [urge] theirs to perform well in soccer or Little League,” wrote Jennifer Lin in the Philadelphia Inquirer June 8 in an article entitled China’s ‘piano fever’.

The (more…)

I say that just about every time I speak in public, and people always ask me to repeat it, and they inscribe it carefully into their notes.

It’s a simple enough idea: What you’ve thought of all your life as privacy has simply been a function of inefficient data processing tools. The more efficacious the means of acquiring and storing data become, the less privacy — unintentional ignorance by others of observable facts — you will have.

If you find this idea repellent — dang…

It is what it is, and it’s absurd to rebel against it. We are real, physical entities. Our purposive actions sometimes have secondary physical consequences that are potentially observable to other people — and to data acquisition devices. Your best hope of achieving privacy, going forward, is to expire. Short of that, you might try to exist in some sort of extra-physical way. And short of that, you might try doing everything you do where no one — and nothing — else can observe you. And short of all that, swallow hard and prepare to have every fact of your life known, at least potentially, by anyone or everyone else.

This does not bother me at all. I deliberately lead (more…)

This is the official launch of SplendorQuest.com, the official first post. I’m cross-posting it at BloodhoundBlog, as well.

Fair warning: This post is comprised of an extract from my novel, The Unfallen. After the “more” tag, you will be exposed to romantic fiction involving sexually playful adults engaged in actual life-like grown-up encounters. If you’re not comfortable with that kind of thing, skip ahead now. The nets are awash in content, after all, and almost none of it is about grown-ups. This post is nothing but a tiny glob of glowing phosphor on the vast oceans of information. Feel free to swim away with my blessings.

But: If you do want to catch a glimpse of actual grown-ups in action, I might have what you need. The splendor that is the grail of SplendorQuest.com is a state of mind, a state of being, a mental fugue state where being and awareness of being and worship of and delight in being all become the same thing. The fiction I write — or the best of the fiction I write — is about people who live — and who know enough to love — that splendor. The extract shown below is a snapshot of those (more…)