Another Book to Read

Phillip Hoare's book, The Whale, sounds absolutely fascinating...

Hoare muses on "Moby-Dick's" abject failure to stir the collective imagination during Melville's lifetime and the classic status it has since achieved. "Each time I read it, it is as if I am reading it for the first time ...; Every day I am reminded that it is part of our collective imagination; from newspaper leaders that evoke Ahab in the pursuit of the war on terror, to the ubiquitous chain of coffee shops named after the Pequod's first mate, Starbuck ...;"

and...

"The Whale" does not disappoint. First, there are the simple, shocking facts about whales. A fin whale off the coast of Nantucket can be heard by its counterpart off the coast of England, more than 6,000 miles away. Inuit harpoons dating back 235 years have been found in the belly of hunted bowhead whales — one of the world's longest-living mammals. The right whale is the owner of the largest testes in the animal kingdom (around 1,100 pounds each), and, after foreplay sessions involving sensuous flipper stroking, the female may let more than one partner enter her at the same time.

and last but not least...

"At the end of the book, you finally jump into the water with a giant sperm whale. What was that like?

Normally you see the whale from the surface of the ocean, or dead, or mediated. So going into the world of the whale was a complete mindfuck. I felt slightly insane, partly because of its sonar echo-locating my skeleton. It’s a powerful electrical charge going through your body; you feel this 3-D image of yourself being relayed back to the whale, much as you might see your reflection in the mirror. And yet it’s entirely silent.

This female whale eyeballed me and then jack-knifed through the blue into the black. It was just so improbable. It’s like a CGI re-creation of a whale. It’s almost laughable. For three days afterward I’d close my eyes and this whale would swim through my head. At that range, you can just tell they’re sentient, intelligent animals. I felt like I ought to apologize to it for the weight I’d brought with me into the water.

This kind of writing reminds me of Arthur C Clarke's 1957 prescient novel, The Deep Range, a book describing how man mines the sea, including whales, with increasingly dire results.

"But as soon as such killing is no longer essential, it should cease. We believe that this point has now arrived s far as many of the higher animals are concerned. The production of all types of synthetic protein from purely vegetable sources is now and economic possibility-or it will be if the effort is made to achieve it. "

Unfortunately, we're not there yet.

It's About Time

Smoke the Bigots Out of the Closet, the truly excellent piece written by Frank Rich, is spot on. It's about time gays and lesbians can serve our country without shame or deception.

A funny thing happened after Adm. Mike Mullen called for gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the military: A curious silence befell much of the right. If this were a Sherlock Holmes story, it would be the case of the attack dogs that did not bark.

John McCain, commandeering the spotlight as usual, did fulminate against the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” But the press focus on McCain, the crazy man in Washington’s attic, was misleading. His yapping was an exception, not the rule.

Many of his Republican colleagues said little or nothing. The right’s noise machine was on mute. The Fox News report on Mullen’s testimony was fair and balanced — and brief. The network dropped the subject entirely in the Hannity-O’Reilly hothouse of prime time that night. Only ratings-desperate CNN gave a fleeting platform to the old homophobic clichés...

Mullen’s heartfelt, plain-spoken testimony gave perfect expression to the nation’s own slow but inexorable progress on the issue. He said he had “served with homosexuals since 1968” and that his views had evolved “cumulatively” and “personally” ever since. So it has gone for many other Americans in all walks of life. As more gay people have come out — a process that accelerated once the modern gay rights movement emerged from the Stonewall riots of 1969 — so more heterosexuals have learned that they have gay relatives, friends, neighbors, teachers and co-workers. It is hard to deny our own fundamental rights to those we know, admire and love.

If only this sound logic was applied to race, healthcare, the banks and governance, then maybe this country can get it's act together to become a nation envisioned by the Founding Fathers as a place that's flawed but evolving into something of great value and tolerance, concepts all too alien in this fractured and alienated world.

You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train

Howard Zinn was a hero to me. Wise, nuanced and above all else, ethical, Zinn wrote history the way it should be written, unvarnished, accurate and from a point of view imbued with a sense of fairness and justice I have never seen in any other historian's writings. His People's History of the United States is a landmark piece, showing how the US was created from the perspective of the people who actually did the building, filled with prejudice, unenlightened self interest and stupidity while at the same time, showing that the nation created was valid and had real merit. The other quality Zinn had in abundance was the fact the man wrote like an angel.

"After the attacks of September 11, 2001, Zinn published a little piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled “Compassion, Not Vengeance.” Here is the last paragraph of the piece:"

“Our security can only come by using our national wealth, not for guns, planes, and bombs, but for the health and welfare of our people, and for people suffering in other countries. Our first thoughts should be not of vengeance, but of compassion, not of violence, but of healing.”

It doesn't get any better then that.

What the Supremes' Ruling Really Means

""The strength of America," Murray Hill Inc. said, "is in the boardrooms, country clubs and Lear jets of America's great corporations. We're saying to Wal-Mart, AIG and Pfizer, if not you, who? If not now, when?" Murray Hill Inc. added: "It's our democracy. We bought it, we paid for it, and we're going to keep it." Murray Hill Inc., a diversifying corporation in the Washington, D.C. area, has long held an interest in politics and sees corporate candidacy as an "emerging new market."

The campaign's "designated human," Eric Hensal, will help the corporation conform to "antiquated, human only" procedures and sign the necessary voter registration and candidacy paperwork. Hensal is excited by this new opportunity: "We want to get in on the ground floor of the democracy market before the whole store is bought by China." Murray Hill Inc. plans on filing to run in the Republican primary in Maryland's 8th Congressional District."

“All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.” - George Orwell

The keyword here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink. Doublethink is basically the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

– Part II, Chapter IX — The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism

Chinese Water Torture for the Gullible

Boogie Board

Very cool tech. No batteries, no power needed, eliminates paper, $30. Awesome and I like the name as well. Boogie Board - Rock on big boy!

The Loss of Party

The impact of tech on politics cannot be denied in spite of the disastrous decision of the supremes regarding unfettered money flowing into the bloated carcass of American Politics. At long last, the long desired demise of the two party system in the US is happening because the net allows for finer grained political views than Democrat or Republican to be disseminated into the world at little or no cost, a result which causes strategists of both parties to lose sleep at night worrying about lost revenues and influence, a situation yours truly finds to be most beneficial in a political system mired in corruption and incompetence.

"A year after George W. Bush’s chopper swung away from the Capitol and disappeared from sight, voters seem to have put his presidency behind them; they’re no longer willing to blame Republicans alone for high unemployment and rising gas prices, for home foreclosures and tuition hikes. The crises that Bush bequeathed to Democrats have now officially become theirs, and the notion of a great liberal realignment seems as retro as Friendster. A string of Democratic lawmakers, largely from rural and contested states, the kind of places that were supposed to now be more hospitable to Democrats than they were before, recently decided to pursue other careers rather than risk being turned out by wrathful voters. Party leaders who had once hoped to expand their majorities in November are now showing signs of panic as they scramble to stave off the prospect of crippling losses.

Having stormed the Democratic garrison in Massachusetts, Republicans might find this turn of events amusing — if it weren’t for the fact that it has nothing to do with even a hint of a resurgence on their part. The entire story line seems awfully familiar. It was only five years ago that Karl Rove, praised in Washington as a clairvoyant, was predicting his own conservative realignment, premised on a near-biblical exodus from the Democratic Party: a decisive number of black, Latino and elderly voters, persuaded by Bush’s re-forms of Social Security and immigration, were going to abandon the Democrats and enable Republicans to rule Washington for decades to come. That hallelujah chorus lasted for the few months it took for a Republican-dominated Congress to scrap Bush’s second-term agenda, leading to one of the more astonishing political collapses in history. Historians of the last century will note that one party — the Democrats — solidly controlled Congress, with only passing interruptions, for more than six decades, through recessions and wars and other challenges. The Gingrich-Bush-era Republicans, by contrast, managed to hold onto power for only 12 years; should Democrats lose their majorities in 2012 or even 2014, let alone this year, they will have ruled Washington for even less time than that.

The lesson here for strategists in both parties isn’t simply that making self-aggrandizing predictions is a sure way to make yourself look silly (though that wouldn’t be a bad one to take away, either). It’s more that this entire concept of Rooseveltian realignment is a wishful conceit that should be retired. The realigning swing of the pendulum is almost certainly a relic of another age, never to be replicated, or at least not in our lifetimes. One reason is that politics in the television (and now Internet) age are less transactional and more ideological than they were in the long period between the Civil War and civil rights. The old question of what a party can do for you, through patronage or populist economics, has largely been eclipsed by the question of whether a party shares your convictions — about the role of government, the use of force, abortion and stem cells. It’s probably harder to build an enduring majority based on, say, gun rights than it was to do so by doling out local jobs.

Even more consequential, though, is the fast-growing swath of voters who can summon no affinity for either party. As in other aspects of modern American life, brand allegiance in politics is at an all-time low; more than a third of Americans (and more than half of all Massachusetts voters) identify themselves as independents rather than as members of the blue team or the red. The most prevalent ideology of the era seems to be not liberalism nor conservatism so much as anti-incumbency, a reflexive distrust of whoever has power and a constant rallying cry for systemic reform."

It's only a matter of time where the majority of people running for office will run as generic independents with viewpoints nuanced to real personal beliefs and not to party line, a trend seen by Brown winning as a "token" Republican yet did not utter that term on his acceptance speech. Hopefully this independent movement will make it more difficult for the monied interests to funnel cash into campaigns but I am not too sanguine about this desired effect as he who has the cash rules and the supremes made sure that edict is written in stone.

The Next Revolution

The rise of the tablet computer will change everything in terms of how we deal with content. Why? Because true portability and real compute power combined with ease of use and proper form factor will transform computing into a wireless 24/7 connect space of unprecedented pervasiveness. Prior to these devices, nothing truly portable and elegant has come out save that of the smart phone.

Netbooks "kinda" work but one still has to flip out a screen and then type or use a mouse/finger pad to use the device, something not as convenient as reading a book or newspaper while sitting on the john.

With a table, if done right, fingers, stylus, keyboard or multi touch, combined with a cool interface, will enable one to interact with the system with appropriate "softness" like reading a book. If done right, everyone will want one, something Apple wants to happen big time.

As a suggestion, click on The Computing Surface to see the BRT blurb on how I would like to interact with one of these bad boys.

Addendum: I'll pass on iPad Rev 1.0 at this point in time as it doesn't have what I think is needed for this platform to be truly disruptive. Rev 2.0 might be but one never knows do one. :(.

Addendum 2: Touchco (The Computing Surface) was bought by Amazon. The battle for tablets has just begun.