  Optimally doped ceramic superconductors (cuprates, pnictides, ...) exhibit
transition temperatures Tc much larger than strongly coupled metallic
superconductors like Pb (Tc= 7.2K, Eg/kTc = 4.5), and exhibit many universal
features that appear to contradict the BCS theory of superconductivity based on
attractive electron-phonon pairing interactions. Here I argue that this
paradoxical simplicity is plausibly resolved within the framework of the
Pauling-Phillips self-organized, hard-wired dopant network model of ceramic
superconductors, which has previously explained many features of the
normal-state transport properties of these materials and successfully predicted
strict lowest upper bounds for Tc in the cuprate and pnictide families.
