I was born in the early evening of Easter Sunday, 1940, an auspicious day. I was one of the few who managed to get born at that time, as people stopped having children during the Great Depression. My demographic cohort, those born from 1936-1940, is the smallest of all living American cohorts, amounting to around 9% of the United States' population.

By chance, my housemate in the sophomore year of college was born the same day, but several hours earlier. I think I have only met one other person born that day. There are just not that many of us.

While, for a short time, our small numbers gave my cohort an advantage when coming of age, the Baby Boomer crowd soon pushed us aside. I had a conversation with a Boomer ca. 1976 who made it clear he would do anything to get ahead. He was ruthless. He was solely interested in his welfare, not mine or anyone else's. That attitude brought into being the resurrection of political Conservatism in the 1980s and thereafter. For most of that Boomer generation, "Greed is Good," but for me and many of my age that is an appalling anti-social abomination. Conservatives took advantage of that groundswell of unrestrained ambition to elect Ronald Reagan in 1980 and destroy the common welfare ever since.

Obviously, I am not a Conservative, nor have I ever considered being one. I was active off and on in liberal, now "progressive," politics since the 1960s. But, at heart, I have always been a Socialist. I now classify myself as an Utopian, as it seems social democracy has receded to a distant heaven,  like the glaciers in this era of global climate change. Conservatives and greed may have irreversibly wrecked the planet, not just human societies. I hope not, but it does seem so. What is happening is utterly contrary to what I desired since I was a teenager.

I had the good fortune to receive an excellent education, partly on account of some inspiring teachers, and just as much on account of my burning interest and extensive reading. I wanted to be a professor, probably in Philosophy. I would still be thrilled if one of the local bastions of academia offered some sort of appointment. But, it will never happen, and, anyway, I am no longer physically fit, although I feel reasonably well qualified to teach undergraduate courses in ethics, history and philosophy of science, philosophy of history, elementary logic and the like. I am particularly fascinated with historical matters, as I believe they offer some clues to the future.  Despite that addiction, I also firmly believe in a chaotic theory of history: we came from nothing, travel a random course and end in nothing. It's T. S. Elliott's "not with a bang, but a whisper."

Before going much further, I suppose I should say something of my biological functions. A long time ago, I became entangled in a disastrous marriage, from which issued a son and his son. I wasn't prepared for the marriage that was, which eventually destroyed my finances, as well as any desire to be connected with families. I eventually met the women with whom I now live, in an arrangement of adults minus children and all the complications that go with that. I consider my emotional situation quite comfortable, although I suspect most people would find it rather strange. Of course, I supported women's lib early on, so I haven't had a problem with each person doing one's own thing. When I see other people struggling with jealousy and desire and all the other traumas, I am glad I got over that early in life. I do learn from my mistakes.

I say no more about my "personal" life - that's what other people call it - because, actually, nearly all my relatives prefer not to be mentioned or seen with me in public. Some of them just don't like me. Some of them really hate my political and social views; not surprisingly, they are Conservatives. Others just think I'm creepy or possibly dangerous. For the record, since a near relative got Alzheimer's, none of them ever calls me to say 'hello,' although I have sometimes inquired about their status.  Of course, I inquire less and less, because what they do is really none of my business. So much for the personal life.

I am always reminded of the scene in Dr. Zhivago in which the good doctor is confronted by the Red leader, Strelnikov, in a rail car while he is on the way to Siberia. Of course, Strelnikov is Lara's husband, once the offended boy who attempted to kill his bourgeois rival. He is dedicated to The Revolution which eventually swallows him whole. But, in his railroad car, he tells Zhivago the personal life is dead; there is nothing but the Revolution. Zhivago says all he wants to do is live. To live, to be free! Therein is an opposition and a struggle I have always felt.

MY attraction to Utopian thoughts began when I was 16, when I read Sir Thomas More's Utopia. That book started a train of events leading straight to my present writing. While I thought the arrangements of Utopia strange, I was provoked to feel that something was wrong with our arrangements, so read other works of social analysis and criticism. It became clear to me that American capitalism and society were fundamentally flawed. So, in the 1950s, I became a reformer. But, I was very shy and intimidated by presenting myself in public. I didn't have the strength to assert my point of view. This contradiction between feeling that something was wrong, that something had to be done about it, and an inability to do anything persisted until the Free Speech Movement exploded around me in Berkeley, Calif.  My personal liberation  began by volunteering to gather information for the ACLU after the historic FSM Sproul Hall sit-in. The courage of others finally inspired me to get out there and do something. I have been "out there" ever since. I hope I have inspired others to do likewise.

Let there be no doubt. To this day, I am utterly convinced something is radically wrong with American Capitalism and society. The Bandit, George W. Bush, is not an accident, but the logical result of American culture; i.e., what Americans believe and habitually do. For that reason, during the last decade or so I came to realize, rather too late to do much about it, that I am not an American. I am a United States citizen by birth, but not an American. Like others of my persuasion, my only refuge is to be a citizen of the world.

Like everyone else, I have had to support myself. I was not gifted by my parental family, so I have had to earn just about everything I ever had. I started by buying my bicycle in order to continue working an arduous paper route when I was about 11. I have worked ever since. I sold newspapers, managed a grocery section, worked on a production line and in a warehouse, and clerked at an insurance company. I was fired from my clerkship shortly after the Kennedy assassination. Several months later, my then-wife pregnant, I managed to enter the lowest rung of the white collar classes as a social worker, a lowly paid field usually assigned to women. I can thank Lyndon Baines Johnson's Great Society for my elevation. During the following 8 years, I entered and left graduate school, got divorced, and started my many years of night school studies. I hoped to earn an advanced degree, but never got there. I was, however, able to learn enough biochemistry to change careers to laboratory technician which, if one is lucky, is where failed PhD aspirants end up. I spent another 7 years of my life reading and studying and doing science in two medical research labs.

I would have stayed in the labs, except that family and politics once again intervened in my life. My son lived with me during most of his teenage years, but later preferred to return to his mother's home since his friends lived near there. I was unable to form any stable love relationships or a happy home as long as I lived in the San Francisco Bay area. Then, Proposition  13 came along, just after I belatedly (compared to others) bought my first house in the ghetto. Prop 13 ruined my economic life, as my University wages were frozen while the rampant inflation of the late 1970s increased my costs dramatically. I could not afford to be a lowly medical research technician. My next door neighbors were the local robbers, so I was robbed, along with everyone else in my neighborhood. Altogether, when I was 39, my life was not a success, so I packed it in.

I traveled to different West Coast cities - Seattle, Reno, Los Angeles - for a year. I didn't belong  anywhere. I moved to the Sierra foothills east of Sacramento, but was clearly not at home there. While in the process of moving, I was attacked in my motel room in the middle of the night. I fled the motel, and stopped at the first place that looked safe, which turned out to be Davis, Calif. I had considered, looked at, and rejected Davis a year prior, when leaving Berkeley, so it was a strange turn of fate to end up here. I was too shell-shocked from my recent experiences to move for several months, and then the need to make money surfaced. I wasn't in a position to move, because I did not know where to go and I was running out of money. After much begging, I managed to get a temporary position as a programmer at the University of California, Davis. I was clearly not my employer's first choice, but only a default in case all else failed. Too bad, I was hired and I have lived in Davis ever since.

My employer assigned me to an unpleasant task, that seemed simple to him, but turned out to have ramifications. I was asked to implement what turned out to be a major system for one of the most politically important departments on campus. My boss had sold a computer system to that department because he loved selling things and was trying to save his own skin. He intimated it would solve their office problems, but neglected to tell them about the small matter of software. Computers, of course, don't work without software. When hired, they thought would finish the project in a few months and be gone. The department had really wanted an IBM machine, but the salesman-boss made them a lowball offer they could not refuse for a DEC computer. The department had prepared a specification for their software, a book the size of the San Francisco yellow pages. I was presented the book, which my superiors had sneeringly not looked at, and then had a meeting with an important department official who made it very clear that the department expected the contents to be fulfilled.

I worked far more than 60 hours weekly for a year, wrote 150 programs, and eventually substantially fulfilled the department's requirements. In order to do so, I had to invent a crude database management system (DBMS). There were no such things commercially available at that time. People used COBOL and RPG to do it. My DBMS was based on COBOL. I didn't realize what I had invented until a few years later, when PCs and DBASE arrived in the market. That was another of the many opportunities I missed in my life, but also illustrates that there are, in depth, local reasons for the convergence of technological developments.  My bosses, of course, were displeased with my work, and the subscribing department tried to have me fired several times. None of them were ever aware of the immensity of what they had asked. After 19 months of that hell, I quit. I started my own business and have been self-employed ever since. Of course, that was another financial mistake, because those who stayed on did very well. The department used my software for 9 years, after which they got the coveted IBM machine.

The one good thing that happened at that time is my meeting my significant other. She was assigned by the department as my minder during the software project. Yes, there are "minders" in America, just as there are in China and Iran, people whose job it is to make sure permit holders only do what is permitted. Ted Koppel recently did a piece on Iran in which his minder was very helpful, eventually exposing the fact that the local boss in Southern Iran is a leader of the regional Hezbollah. In my case, I ended up living with my minder. As is true of all minders, she truly dislikes all of the rules she imagines I break. But, she has no idea of how the rules are supposed to be implemented, which is the problem of all minders. That is why autocracy always fails. It is also why I managed to finish that project. As Clint's Dirty Harry said, "Go ahead, Make My Day!"

I spent a few years programming with the University, and that was it for me. I just couldn't stand working there, where everyone disliked me, yet tolerated me because I could do what they could not. So I upped and quit. I started the business which evolved into California Expert Software the next day. This business has never been a money-maker. I worked an average of more than 60 hrs/week for 20 years and made very little. Except that my minder continued working for the University, I'd be homeless. So, I owe her everything. Those few who were willing to pay for my services got by far the better of the deal. I think they know that, but that is the sort of thing one never admits because of the guilt involved in  using someone badly.

In the course of my so-called business, I installed computer systems and networks for small laboratories and businesses. I designed and wrote a lot of the software they used. After Windows95™ was introduced, user friendly software for almost everything was cheap and available. That pretty much killed the small-scale software development  industry, including me. Microsoft went after its competitors - Netscape being a prime example - and killed them. That was not unintentional; that was Bill Gates' interpretation of how capitalism was supposed to work. I tried several strategies to avoid getting the ax, but nothing worked. Toward the end, I made more money by just being a computer maintenance technician than by having any greater aspirations. In the school of hard knocks, I learned I was part of Malthus' surplus population. I learned that most people had little use for the things I could do.

Ironically, I also found out that what I know how to do is prized by the bomb makers. I almost took a job at the local H-bomb factory, because I was told my work would be on the "civilian side." But, the deceit was revealed just before I signed on the dotted line, so I refused the offer. I took that incident as an insult American culture felt it owed me. All I had to do to earn a very good living, and be esteemed by my fellow countrymen, was sell my soul. I am sorry, you heard this plot before?

I was much relieved to lay down the baton when I moved to the Oregon Coast in 2000. Unfortunately, the stock market crash of 2000-2001 took away most of my savings for retirement. Ironically, I had reconfigured my portfolio in September, 2000, based on "best available" Wall Street advice. I did not invest in Internet Bubble stocks, but I did invest in supposedly safe growth stocks, like Intel. I believed the Wall Street gurus who said the crash was just a short term correction. It didn't matter. I lost about 85% of everything, partly because I tried to defend my positions by trading in options. I still trade stocks, as this is one of the few ways left to me by which I might make money. But, I resent the time and effort I spend on it, so each year I trade less and less. I think the realistic outlook is that the sheep get sheared, and I was a sheep. Very few human sheep every grow back their wool coats, as, in America, denuded sheep are sent to the meat factory for rendering. This is the sort of society we live in.

I've always enjoined film versions of Dickens A Christmas Carol, because it accurately depicts America as Scrooge before his conversion, and at least holds out hope that, someday, Scrooge will repent.

It's all as well that I lost my coastal home, because my health declined after moving back to the California (trans. "hot oven"). It's still declining, leaving me largely confined to the ground floor of this condo. I can still climb up the stairs to the bedroom at night, but that is an effort. So are a lot of other things. I try to do everything I can for myself. I am fortunate that my significant other provides a home for me. There are doctor's offices not too far from here. I can still drive, but I have to be very careful.

My handwriting ability is gone, and my typing is poor. I make a lot of typing mistakes that slows the writing. I am fortunate in not being as bad off as Steven Hawking. But, like him, I struggle on with my intellectual problems.

In 2006, I published a book about political philosophy, The Graduate Student's Question. This year (2007) I finished Ethics as Social Conscience, now available at online bookstores. In the process of thinking through the many and various philosophical issues those books pose, I found myself less and less concerned about having an overall, consistent philosophy. I became more and more impressed by how things change, so that the order and explanation of things varies from time to time. This is just to say that final answers, if any, are very difficult to discern in Nature and our experience. So, I am now more concerned about giving a reasonably correct account or, more minimally, direction of delimited problems. This has been a very difficult lesson to accept, as, by inclination, I am a "system builder." Should I continue writing, I want to comment on aspects of my work which will make it "hang together" better, or, at least, will identify how and why I arrived where I did. I don't think I am the world's greatest philosopher, nor do I believe I have the solutions to the outstanding problems, but I believe I am focusing on the crucial problems of my time, the 20th and 21st centuries. I hope my examination of those problems will contribute to humanly favorable solutions.

I consider my most valuable contribution to society has been my thoughts and writings.