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Friday, August 10, 2018

The Internet Backbone

  
Left: Harvard University, Right: M.I.T.  Both within walking distance of each other.

It was the spring of 1994, and I was a freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  For the millions of people out there who have no idea what the hell M.I.T. even is - one might allege that it were the technical sister school of Harvard University.  Harvard, was a school my dad had attended in the 1960's.  He was a graduate of the Business School at Harvard - class of '62.  Growing in North Dallas, he had often suggested I attend Harvard University to make sure I would be among the "in crowd" in then-crumbling United States of America.

The first time I had ever heard of Massachusetts - and been capable of remembering it much - was probably in 1984 or 1985.  I remember driving around with my dad that year - since I was born in 1975 (June) - in 1985 I would have been 9 or 10 years old, and finishing the fourth grade, or starting the fifth grade.  A visitor to our school, Mohawk Elementary in Richardson TX, had dropped by to tell all the kids about Ivy League Schools and going to college, and I was asked to tell them where my dad had gone - and I said "Harvard."

Today, I couldn't possibly explain much about these memories, since I am a victim of the regime's electronic-psychiatric purging - brainwashing - to be specific.  They keep copies of the journals and stories that both I, and even my parents had written when we were all younger.  The government has scans and PDF's of stuff about my family stretching back to stories about Torello from the 19th century.

In any case, I remember distinctly driving up Coit Road here in Richardson (North Dallas Suburb) on my way to get new glasses that day in 1985 - and telling my dad that I wanted to go to M.I.T. when I grew up - because I would be able to program Apple Computers using BASIC - or maybe an ATARI computers - like we had all been doing in elementary school.  My dad knew M.I.T. was next to Harvard since he had been in real-estate development since graduating from there.  We must have discussed something, but unfortunately the journal pages that My Master possess don't say much about what we discussed on that day in 1985 - or he (My Master) won't ever tell me.

Before the micro-television that today I now have surgically implanted behind my eyes (small video boards) and the tiny audio speaker system that I have attached to my hears - I used to have lots of happy memories about my life.  I don't get to remember a lot, nor I get to think about much of anything.  I know where I grew up, what I studied, what I learned, and who my friends used to be.  I can rattle off today the complete list of houses where I lived and address at which I've worked (or tried to).  I know the names of all the people I have met in my life, and who photos are stored on the Internet Backbone.

I know that when I graduated High School, I was one of the smartest kids around the North Texas area.  I only graduated "at the 11th place" of my High School's GPA rating system - but I had a lot of clout in my High School and had sort of pushed some of my classmates to occupy "the top 10" places instead of me.  I not only didn't worry so much about "ratings" - back then I could tell that a lot of what was left of the "crumbling America" had just morphed into "people contests" where identifying who was number one was the only thing really important.  Many times (but not always) any actual accomplishment or result was being mercilessly destroyed or subverted.  Letting a few of my "scholastic cohorts" rank #1, #2 etc at our school's G.P.A. (Grade Point Average) list seemed like the trifling of sacrifice on my part.  On graduation day - I wasn't event in the "Top 10 List" of GPA for students who walked at graduation.  I didn't care, I had been admitted to Harvard, Yale, M.I.T., Stanford and others.  I spent a lot of time on college applications.

My freshman year was going to be tough, and I really knew it.  On arrival at M.I.T., and I had a back-up plan of fleeing the U.S.A. down pat.  I used to tell my classmates when they got really "enthusiastic" about being cool - that 10 out of 15 of my High School teachers had already been murdered before I even started my freshman year - and could you please try to keep what is even happening in "this place" (meaning America") in perspective.  Drug dealers, U.S. Soldiers, Marines (USMC) and Police didn't particularly care who they shot or who died.  The difference between a U.S. Army soldier (USMC), a drug dealer, a first-world high school physics teacher - and a complete murderer - was almost always "how much cocaine he/she had recently used."

It was the spring of 1994, and already I had witness the Boston Police open fire on my fraternity house, and I had decided I needed to leave the United States.  I was only 19 years old, but I had been frantically studying Mandarin Chinese with my "Chinese Friends" and my tapes, etc., driving around Dallas - and was really prepared to leave an never come back.  People today mostly stare at my blankly when I say things like this - but they just don't know the horror of what it was like to see so many friends (my white friends) - literally children - killed in drug-fueled violence like for me.

Most of the people I that I ever wanted to tell about my "leaving U.S.A." for good were already dead, and I was only a freshman in college.  The genocide of the Reagan and Bush I Administrations had been raging loudly since 1983/1984.  My parents had an entire 3-ring binder of photos and stories of deranged soldiers doing things like laying land-mines on the kids soccer field.  I had written a lot, and wanted to get involved - but knew that the only true evil act I could actually commit would be to give up on education, studying and learning to become a "law officer" or "police."  I had my calling, and was ready to learn everything I could, and had done so so successfully, that no college rejected me.  I had watched local police departments walk into school and literally execute a student "for fighting."  The Police were not the answer, although they would be "very safe" and "very secure" (for themselves, not their victims).



M.I.T. and Harvard University


Boston, Massachusetts

So there I was sitting in my frat-house (Delta Kappa Epsilon - a fraternity to which George Bush and George Bush Jr. had both belonged) starting at bullet holes put their by the Boston Police Department.  A convoy filled with at least 7 machine gun laden police standing there and shooting - and me going out front to argue and yell at them - at some amount of risk to my own person.  People in the 1980's could be reasonable, as long as you could should that you "knew stuff."  Knowing stuff meant you had a good ability to communicate, but back then - in stark contrast to today - the best way to maintain your communication skills was to constantly read, learn & study.  Knowing enough about physics to place out of M.I.T.'s phyiscs requirements, and enough about chemistry & calculus to do the same usually meant there were no "adults" or "grumpy old men" who were going to call me stupid.  Keeping with all of the standard requirements made by a High School Curriculum - something not everybody who was at M.I.T. would have claimed to do - meant I could walk up to a militarized attack convey filled with soldiers wearing Boston Police attack gear.  That had been firing on us again for whatever reason, and the "Dirty War" was raging fully.

In June of 1994 I had decided there was just no way I was going to change things in the U.S. with any kind of leverage about "I was smart from M.I.T."  The Police State was waxing so tremendously - that literally firing a bazooka round to my High School Chemistry teacher's face here in Richardson Texas probably earned them a major award.  Sure, joining a police department would have kept both me and my family safe - but at the complete expense of the countless people I would eventually shoot, imprison or even murder.

Don't get me wrong, I was not a hero, a vigilante, or a soldier.  I had stacks of circuit boards at my parent's house in Texas.  I had written a version of "Windows Media Player" that could play digitally recorded music through the computer speaker before Microsoft Windows even had a media player.  I had all of the classic rock CD's from the 1960's - and was "burning MP3's" before the MP3 had even been invented.  A simple analog to digital converter chip wired to the RS232 port on the back of my 486 Intel Computer would read the digitized bytes from my CD player and save them on a hard drive.  I could play Kurt Kobain's "hit" (Teen Spirit) that was blasting on the radio 24x7x365 on my home computer before computers even played music.

Down-sampling (saving fewer snippets of the music) meant it only took 3 Mega-Bytes to store the song on my computer.  I only had 80 Mega-Bytes on my Intel 486 computer.  It took me a week to wire an Analog to Digital Converter Chip to an RS-232 port on an Intel 486 - and write the Turbo Pascal Software to save those signals/samples onto the Hard Drive.  It took another week at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to play the samples using a GUI-Window Interface using my computer speakers because I had to write the Window GUI for playing the MP3 in the first place (before MP3's existed).  Classes had been cancelled, and nobody was attending school much anyways.  I did this in my dorm room on my own, not as an assignment from any Professor there because there were no Professor's doing any teaching.  It was 1994, and there were still bodies of dead students laying around M.I.T. campus due to the war.

In June, a week before my birthday, I got an airplane to Taiwan, The Republic of China, and left.  I gave up my dreams of being a "technical guy" or an "educational leader" in USA.  I left and started studying Mandarin Chinese.  I stayed in Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C. at the family of a friend of mine from High School.  I stayed there for as long as I could.  I began teaching English Classes during the day and studying Mandarin Chinese at night.  I got to meet normal people.  I was able to attend schools where murder was no longer an issue, not even a worry!  I was never happier.


I remember all this.  I remember it well - it is one of the audio/video clips that "My Programmer" or "My Master" loves to play in my eye-balls and my ear-drums when I sleep at night.  I live with a TV in my brain - and it isn't always fun.  It is torture.  It is a human rights abuse.  It is an atrocity of human rights.  It continues in this city today (Dallas, TX) mostly because of the cowardice of "if I have a slave and I am someone's master - I can never become a slave myself."  Another part is of course how financially lucrative it all is.  The remnants of the United States Government have seized control of almost every expensive home, business and apartment complex in U.S.A. (former USA) and literally have credit/debit cards (Visa/Mastercard) cards that just say "approved" when they buy things.  The corruption is so astronomical - that the actual amount of money stolen by my master doesn't even matter!



The Republic of China on Taiwan (R.O.C.)  This was where I fled.  This was once referred to as "The American China"  because the U.S. had backed Chiang Kai-Shek during the Chinese civil war in the 1940's.  During the Korean War in the 1950's - somewhat of a misnomer - hundreds of thousands of Chinese Soldiers spilled across the 38th parallel to fight and kill and bring the U.S. Army to a standstill.  Chiang Kai Shek (also known as "CKS") was defeated by mainland China under Mao Tse Tung.  Today there is a heavy "One China Policy" as most oriental people on the other side of the Pacific see Beijing as the clear winner in any U.S. - China standoff.


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