Vaporware

Donald Trump in his office at Trump Tower in May 2016. | Mary Altaffer/AP Photo

How much is Agent Orange really worth? One will never truly find out but the take from Poltico piques one's interest, particularly when it comes to tech, code and just how viable is Trump's initiative in the online environment known as the net. 

In the computer industry, vaporware (or vapourware) is a product, typically computer hardware or software, that is announced to the general public but is late or never actually manufactured nor official.

He's known for making lavish claims about what his “brand” is worth. Others have punctured his estimates as wildly inflated, especially since the reputational hits he took at the end of his presidency. But now we have a new kind of answer, thanks to investors. The Trump aura alone — at least to a media startup — appears to be worth a neat $1 billion.

That’s how much secret financiers are investing in Trump’s newly formed Trump Media & Technology Group, which is going public by merging with a shell company called Digital World Acquisition. TMTG, as Bloomberg Opinion’s Timothy L. O’Brien and Matt Levine explain, has no products, no revenue, no cash flow, no known intellectual property, no big names attached and no “clear business plan,” only a wispy promise to build a new social media network (Truth Social) to take on Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and other tech companies.

The way TMTG has come charging out of the gate with no product and no revenue but ample investors has financial journalists comparing it to a meme stock (like Gamestop, AMC and Blackberry) — securities that appeal to naïve retail investors who willingly ignore business fundamentals and buy depending on which way the social media winds blow.

In other words ... vaporware.

Black Box

A rendering of Earth’s “black box” in Tasmania, Australia, a project to create an archive on climate change.Credit...Earth’s Black Box

A flight recorder is an electronic recording device placed in an aircraft for the purpose of facilitating the investigation of aviation accidents and incidents. Flight recorders are also known by the misnomer black box—they are, in fact, painted bright orange in color to aid in their recovery after accidents.

Now that we know what a black box is, consider the rendering above, intended to show the creation of a black box recording the slow motion entry into a hellscape of our own making known as climate change. Clilling is it not?

An example of a flight data recorder; the underwater locator beacon is the small cylinder on the far right. (Translation of warning message in French: "FLIGHT RECORDER DO NOT OPEN".) The warning appears in English on the other side.

In a remote part of Australia, a steel vault about the size of a school bus will record the Earth’s warming weather patterns. It will listen to what we say and do. It will create an archive that could be critical to piecing together the missteps, its creators say, should humanity be destroyed by climate change.

The vault, known as Earth’s Black Box, will be constructed in Tasmania, an Australian island state off the south coast. It will operate much like a plane’s flight recorder, which records an aircraft’s final moments before crashing. But the makers of this new black box — including data researchers from the University of Tasmania, artists and architects — say they hope it won’t have to be opened.

The way things are going ... said box will be opened, by whom remains in question, right?

Get Back

 

Get Back, the masterful Peter Jackson reconstruction of the 14 day push by the the Beatles to do one last live gig is poignant, insightful and accurate in terms of how chaotic the creative process truly is. In 1969, yours truly was 23, finishing up college and soon to go to Boston to study jazz and rock at the Berklee School of Music in 69-70. While there, I lucked out in putting together a jazz/rock band that cooked. Why is this old tale being told,??? Well, the creative process and an excellent adventure with the cops the day Armstrong landed on the moon parallels, in eerie fashion, what went down for the Beatles in their amazing roof top concert 52 years ago.

The creative process the four did, with the invaluable addition of Billy Preston on keyboards, rings true as music's collaborative, complete with asides, riffs and constant give and take. Accurate to a fault, Get Back evokes intense emotion for me as the fab four were really just that. One note most surprising were the quick and subtle connects to Mississippi Delta Blues heard through the entire film while originals were being created before the live performance at the end of the eight hour documentary.

To this writer, improv is the most fun. Non verbal, realtime and intense, the vibe generated by this film and by my time at an amazing school with fellow musicians of outrageous talent resonates to no end as being able to play and be accepted as a qualified peer was, and is, an honor most cherished by yours truly.

See Get Back to understand just how good the Beatles were when the pressure's on. 

“You’ve got to carry on until you get there,” Mr. Harrison tells Mr. McCartney as they struggle through early tries of “Two of Us.” Mr. Lennon becomes a blunt cheerleader: “I’d say improvise it, man.”

Mr. McCartney, tired of being the uptight taskmaster, briefly relaxes and sees the song start to take shape through a jam.

Sounds about right to me. :)

Unperson

Photo-Illustration: Sam Whitney; Getty Images

It was inconceivable that this was anything other than a reference to Syme. But Syme was not only dead, he was abolished, an unperson. Any identifiable reference to him would have been mortally dangerous. - Chapter 6 - 1984

Seems China is perfecting this tech but this time, its online social contacts, the digital equivalent of the terror known as 1984.

Censorship in China is about more than topics and keywords. It’s about destroying social resources. 

“EVEN IF I court disaster like an egg against stone or a moth to a flame, I will tell the truth about you and me.” So wrote Chinese doubles tennis star Peng Shuai. Her post lasted 30 minutes on Weibo before it was censored, and her name rendered unsearchable.

Though Peng had done the unheard of—accusing former vice premier Zhang Gaoli of forcing her into a sexual relationship—this is not China’s only high-profile story of sexual misconduct in recent years. The removal of Peng’s posts comes on the heels of the case earlier this year of scriptwriter Zhou Xiaoxuan, also known as Xianzi. Zhou’s own accusation, which originally went viral on social media in 2014, was against Zhu Jun, a news anchor for one of China’s main state-run channels and a household name. She took Zhu to court, asking 50,000 RMB (about $7,600 USD) in damages and a public apology for groping her in a dressing room during an interview. This past September, the judge ultimately decided that Zhou’s accusations had insufficient proof. Once again, Zhou took to social media, this time to criticize how the judiciary treated her legal team and detailing how she was barred from introducing evidence of the assault. Her social media accounts were subsequently shuttered.

End game ...

When civic spaces are closed and groups deleted, individuals with few or no connections outside of social media have backlogs of resources and connections taken away. In the case of WeChat specifically—which users in China utilize for chats, payments, blog publishing, travel, and other digital record keeping—a suspension or ban cuts a user off from many everyday communication and life tools.

In other words, one becomes an unperson ...

Nina rules :)

 “Into the Woods” on Broadway in 1987, starring (from left) Joanna Gleason, Robert Westenberg, Tom Aldredge, Bernadette Peters, Barbara Bryne and Chip Zien. Stephen Sondheim won a Tony Award for his score.Credit...The Al Hirschfeld Foundation. www.alhirschfeldfoundation.org

Yours truly has a guilty pleasure, Al Hirschfeld's amazing takes on broadway. Elegant, funny and above all else, graceful, they are a treasure to behold as per a Hirschfeld seen above. When combined with Sondheim, a match made in heaven is a fait accompli. :)

“Anyone Can Whistle” on Broadway in 1964, with Angela Lansbury (top), Lee Remick and Harry Guardino.Credit...The Al Hirschfeld Foundation. www.alhirschfeldfoundation.org

Hirschfeld always said he would rather be called a “characterist” than a caricaturist. His illustrations of Sondheim, the most complex character portraitist in the Broadway songbook, make you understand why. Caricatures are a shorthand for the physical traits that make stars distinctive: Angela Lansbury’s immense Tweety Bird eyes, for example, or Bernadette Peters’s Cupid’s bow mouth.

Hirschfeld nails such elements of physiognomy. He also endows them with the exciting emotional temperature that heats up every Sondheim song. The Lansbury he draws as the corrupt mayor Cora Hoover Hooper of “Anyone Can Whistle” (1964) and as the cannibal pie-maker Mrs. Lovett in “Sweeney Todd” are recognizably the same woman.

“Sweeney Todd” on Broadway in 1979, with Sarah Rice and Victor Garber dancing and, from left, Joaquin Romaguera, Len Cariou, Angela Lansbury, Jack Eric Williams and Edmund Lyndeck. It won Tonys for best musical and best score, among other awards.Credit...The Al Hirschfeld Foundation. www.alhirschfeldfoundation.org

If you know about Nina, you are a true devotee of Hirschfeld. :)

Stephen Sondheim, 1977.Credit...The Al Hirschfeld Foundation. www.alhirschfeldfoundation.org

Assassins

Stephen Sondheim, lyricist and composer extraordinaire, created art transcending the limitations of the musical with works like West Side Story and Sweeny Todd, provides a dark look into America's obsession with guns with a musical titled Assassins as said work, explains, in exquisite detail, why guns are so irresistible as the weapon of choice in killing presidents Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy.  Luckily, T. Roosevelt and Reagan survived.

Move your little finger and

  You can change the world

  Why should you be blue when

  You've your little finger

  Prove how just a little finger can

  Change the world

Backgrounder ...

One of his lesser-known works, “Assassins,” just started a new run off-Broadway by the Classic Stage Company. Originally produced in 1990, the musical is a collective biography of the historical figures who attempted to assassinate U.S. presidents, four of them successfully. Nine of the 13 assassins or would-be assassins are included, from John Wilkes Booth, who killed Abraham Lincoln, to John Hinckley, Jr., who shot Ronald Reagan in 1984.

These malcontents hardly seem like promising subjects for a musical. But Sondheim brilliantly deployed musical theater to explore America’s curious fascination with firearms and the pivotal role of assassinations in the republic’s history.

To Sondheim, assassins, like everybody else, are in pursuit of the American dream. As they battle delusions, fight against perceived political injustice, long for celebrity or seek community, they turn to guns to accomplish their goals. His score consists of uniquely American musical styles drawn from different periods of U.S. history, including ragtime, patriotic marches and folk ballads.

Sondheim c 1976

The new Inquisition

Mike Luckovich | Copyright 2021 Creators Syndicate

Slip sliding away ...

Mel D. Cole

Scary shit, you know, the trepidatious kind, the kind invoking chills running up and down your spine has arrived, especially when it comes to Trump, the repugs and their concerted effort to subvert democracy in America. The groundwork's being laid and Agent Orange awaits in the wings while the GOP continues to gerrymander and fine tune the corrupting of the election process for 2022 and 2024 while the dems sulk and do nothing. The Atlantic's incendiary piece, TRUMP’S NEXT COUP HAS ALREADY BEGUN will "warm" the cockles of your heart without question, right?

January 6 was practice. Donald Trump’s GOP is much better positioned to subvert the next election.

Technically, the next attempt to overthrow a national election may not qualify as a coup. It will rely on subversion more than violence, although each will have its place. If the plot succeeds, the ballots cast by American voters will not decide the presidency in 2024. Thousands of votes will be thrown away, or millions, to produce the required effect. The winner will be declared the loser. The loser will be certified president-elect.

The prospect of this democratic collapse is not remote. People with the motive to make it happen are manufacturing the means. Given the opportunity, they will act. They are acting already.

“The democratic emergency is already here,” Richard L. Hasen, a professor of law and political science at UC Irvine, told me in late October. Hasen prides himself on a judicious temperament. Only a year ago he was cautioning me against hyperbole. Now he speaks matter-of-factly about the death of our body politic. “We face a serious risk that American democracy as we know it will come to an end in 2024,” he said, “but urgent action is not happening.”

For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.

Don't say we haven't been warned. Time to wake up, don't you think?

Splinterlands awaits ...

 

America’s Natural Federal Regions

Meander: to follow a winding course applies here as America;'s following a meandering course in the throes of breaking up, something indirectly depicted here in the Natural Federal Regions map as the political and philosophical differences among Americans are too deep to paper over, especially in light of Trump, religion and Covid 19. 

For decades now, the United States has been stagnating, proving incapable of enacting meaningful reforms needed to survive the difficult first half of the 21st Century.

The causes of the USA’s terminal decline run deep, with unresolved contradictions piling up over centuries. Americans are only now perceiving the rot because the out-of-control pandemic has revealed its chronic lack of internal investment — and because the ubiquity of cheap communication has revealed the brutality at the heart of the violent State that has come to dominate the Federal Government.

BRT has talked about fragility with emphasis given to our two-party system as there is no flexibility in trying to iron out inevitable political differences residing outside the boundaries of a system as rigid as this. Nooze has a role in amping up the fracture as well. 

Pew Research Center’s political typology

— take the quiz, see where you land. I’m Outsider Left, mostly, if forced to choose.

In America, each party is a forced coalition of identity groups each receiving their news from for-profit media companies who optimize their programming for ratings in order to attract advertisers or subscribers. Money is now considered political speech, allowing the wealthy to buy politicians behind the scenes while the public is encouraged to believe this is normal. This political-media complex creates political division then offers simplistic narratives to describe it, encouraging people to believe this to be true democracy.

Splinterlands awaits. ...

You can't fix stupid/rev L

 

Photo by Brandi Alexandra on Unsplash

Yours truly has often said you can't fix stupid as stupidity's built-in, it's genetic and one cannot remove that sad state of affairs in the unfortunate unless ubiquitous genetic engineering goes mainstream. With what's happening around the world and ... in the good "ole" USA, it seems stupidity's gaining the upper hand, a most dangerous trend indeed.

“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than evil,” wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian. Penning this sentence ten years after the accession of Adolf Hitler to supreme power, these words reflected tough lessons soaked in blood. Bonhoeffer formed part of a small circle of resistance to the dictator in Germany, risking his life for an ideal.

End game ...

For you can fight against evil. Evil gives people a queasy feeling in the stomach. As Bonhoeffer continued, “evil carries with itself the seeds of its own destruction.” To prevent willful malice, you can always erect barriers to stop its spread. Against stupidity you are defenseless.

“Against stupidity we have no defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it. Reasoning is of no use. Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved — indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions. So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied. In fact, they can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make them aggressive. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

He's right