Dream Ticket

Dust to Dust

A couple of weeks ago I, whose organizational chops are not equal to setting up a two-car motorcade, contrived to organize and get through my father's funeral at the San Francisco Presidio National Cemetery. I am astonished that I did not fuck up.

The kindness and efficiency of the VA and cemetery officials who were involved in the affair cannot be overstated: the entire family, and I in particular, will be forever grateful for their efforts.

Der Alte's remains were in a container the size of a shoebox, but surprisingly heavy as I lowered them into the hole. The presence of my siblings, of most of my nieces and nephews, and of a few of the following generation, made the ceremony a little easier. My thanks to all.

Life in These United States

This:

When I was growing up my parents were loyal subscribers to the “Reader’s Digest,” which I regret to report informed my own foreign policy views until about 1966, when it occurred to me that I was just four years from conscription age, and that a lot of late teens were returning from Southeast Asia in body bags. Anyway, the little magazine used to include a regular feature “Life in These United States,” with charming humorous anecdotes about our lives in the most prosperous and virtuous country ever.

That was a long time ago.

A few days back, Coast Guard veteran Walter Scott was shot to death—in the back, from twenty feet away—by a sociopathic police officer on the payroll of the North Charleston SC police force. The official account of the episode was that the victim attempted to grab the cop’s taser, and that the policeman shot in self-defense. A bystander’s video gives the lie to this account.

No video? The official story would never have been questioned. Officer Slager would have quite literally got away with murder. He may yet.

This is not—is not—an isolated incident. Summary executions and fabricated evidence are SOP at need at every level of law enforcement.

This will not change in the lifetimes of anyone who reads this. What needs to change is the common delusion that we live in a society that does not countenance this conduct.

This is how we live today.
This is how we live today.
This is how we live today.

The Tempest, 2015

I will not apologize to William Shakespeare since he is, like, long dead:

Full fathom five thy country lies,
Of its wealth are weapons made;
Google’s servers are its eyes,
All thy former rights will fade.
Paid for by the Kochs’ spare change:
Plutocrats both rich and strange.
CPAC cheers this fresh new hell:
Ka-ching!
Same way past republics fell. Ka-ching!

We are so fucked...

Further to Tech

After considerable pressure from friends, family, employer, I have at last embraced the Dark Side, and in consequence the number of people in North America who do not own mobile phones has fallen from 250 to 249. I presently look at the device with a certain sour suspicion, but I imagine that a few months from now the Kool-Aid blood levels will have risen to life-threatening numbers. I still don't feel good about this.

The graphic has been lifted, with unauthorized gratitude, from vfxjake.com.

Remembering 2001

No, not that one. The one from 1968.

In the book HAL's Legacy, contributor Donald Norman points out a number of particulars in which the filmmakers were mistaken as to the direction that computer interfaces were to take. What's sad, though, is that, HAL conspicuously excepted (and we now have automated subroutines that can mimic very sophisticated elements of human cognition without, as yet, a trace of actual self-awareness*), a rationally-ordered global civilization could have accomplished much of the spread into space envisaged by 2001: the orbiting wheel, the moon bases, even a manned mission to the outer planets would all have been plausibly within the reach of a planetary society less determined to squander its treasure and energies on plunder and war. Kubrick's vision is a reproach to our failure, and also a transcendent cultural artifact of the last century, fit to stand comparison with Genesis or the Iliad as expressions in mythic terms of their respective civilizations.

*This will, I predict, come about in my lifetime, should I have the misfortune to reach my father’s present age (he’s closing on 93 in another fortnight; I’m 62), and when software sentience is at last detected I suspect it will be some years after the fact.

Happy fucking birthday, George W. Bush

I repost this from a predecessor blog because it’s a particularly fraught anniversary, and because I still think that something like a malign configuration of the stars hovered over that morning, then so hopeful (reposting follows):

On this date many years ago, a Saturday, it was, I flickered into consciousness from sleep as—ah, Nabokov described it in a similar context in Ada—“the tiger of happiness fairly leaped into being.” I woke up, entwined and ungarbed, with a young woman whom I’d been stalking (as she would likely put it today) for over a quarter of my young life. I don’t think that the morning assembly of reality has ever rocketed up such a vertical gradient of joy, and I’m astonished looking back that my nose didn’t bleed. It all ended badly about a dozen years later, and while I don’t hold any truck with astrology (we Leos aren’t that credulous), I have to scratch my head at the thought that this radiant morning was also G.W. Bush’s twenty-eighth birthday. Clearly doom and grief were in the air, all unnoticed then...