Yearly Archives: 2009

Bruce Sterling: State of the World, 2009

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Every year on The Well, Bruce Sterling does an “overview of Things in General, the State of the World, Where We Have Been and Where We are Tending.” I’ve cherry-picked a few thoughts from the latest installment:

“I always knew the “War on Terror” bubble would go.  It’s gone. Nobody misses it.  It got no burial.  I knew it was gonna be replaced by another development that seemed much more burningly urgent than terror Terror TERROR, but I had a hard time figuring out what vast, abject fright that might be. Now I know.  Welcome to 2009!”

“You know what’s truly weird about any financial crisis? WE MADE IT UP.  Currency, money, finance, they’re all social inventions.  When the sun comes up in the morning it’s shining on the same physical landscape, all the atoms are in place.”

“The sheer galling come-down of watching the Bottom Line, the Almighty Dollar, revealed as a papier-mache pinata.  It’s like somebody burned their church.”

“I keep remembering the half-stunned, half-irritated looks on the faces of those car execs when they were chided for flying their company jets to Washington to beg.  I felt sorrow for them.  Truly.  These guys are the captains of American industry at the top of the food chain.  Of course they fly corporate jets.  Corporate jets were *invented* for guys like the board of General Motors.  And now they’re getting skewered for that by a bunch of punk-ass Congressmen they can usually buy and sell?”

“Practically everything we do in our civilization is directly predicated on setting fire to dead stuff.”

“People don’t have to solve every problem in the world in order to be happy.  People will always have problems. People ARE problems.  People become happy when they have something coherent to be enthusiastic about.  People need to LOOK AND FEEL they’re solving some of mankind’s many problems.  People can’t stumble around in public like blacked-out alcoholics, then have some jerk like Phil Gramm tell them to buck up.”

“When you can’t imagine how things are going to change, that doesn’t mean that nothing will change.  It means that things will change in ways that are unimaginable.”

 

Dot Com. Smays Dot Com.

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The inauguration of President Barack Obama is just a couple of weeks away and it’s looking more and more like Barb and I will be in D.C. for the historic event. We’re told we have tickets. A friend of Barb’s has graciously provided a place to stay. And we have two insanely expensive airline tickets.

Given that our tickets are two of 250,000, we have no illusions about this adventure and are approaching it like Woodstock: cold, muddy and a lot of fun. No, I wasn’t there.

But now there’s some talk of tickets to one of the many Inaugural Balls. In for a penny, in for a pound. In the event we do get tickets to a ball, yesterday I got fitted for my first tuxedo since my high school prom.

There was some discussion of showing up in a powder blue number but the Sean Connery model (From Russia with Love) won out. All Barb would say about her new dress was, “It’s sparkly.”

Stay tuned as this story unfolds.

Gmail users can view PDF files w/o downloading

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I hate clicking a link and discover it’s to a PDF file and Acrobat Reader begins its torturous load. Or a PDF comes as an attachment to an email and I just want to quickly peek at the document. That hasn’t been a problem since moving to Mac.

And now Gmail users can view a PDF file without downloading it, thanks to a new “View” link. Clicking “View” quickly opens the PDF inside your browser, complete with the graphics and formatting you expect to see in a PDF.

When I’m asked, “Why do you like Gmail better than Outlook?” I struggle to give them a useful answer. It’s really a hundred little things like the feature above.

Playing For Change: Stand By Me

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From the award-winning documentary, Playing For Change: Peace Through Music, comes the first of many songs around the world being released independently. Featured is a cover of the Ben E. King classic by musicians around the world adding their part to the song as it traveled the globe. This and other songs such as One Love will be released as digital downloads soon; followed by the film soundtrack and DVD early next year.

Texting around the world

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Okay, I’m still in the ooh and aah stage with the iPhone. And I’m playing with texting as alternative to email and voice calls. My brother and his family are back home in Bandar Lampung, Indonesia, and it turns out we can text back and forth.

Yeah, I know I’ll probably get some huge-ass bill at the end of the month but if this is part of my 200 text messages, it’s pretty cool. A great way to stay closer.

An Oral History of the Bush White House

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Just finished reading a very long piece on the Bush administration in Vanity Fair. Almost 40 pages printed from their website. It reads like a very depressing, but gripping, novel. Painful but hard to put down. I’m posting here because I don’t consider this politics. If you don’t want to wait for The Golden Bush Years chapter in the 2080 history books, read this Vanity Fair account. Sort of a high colonic to start the year off clean. A few nuggets from the final page:

“Lawrence Wilkerson, top aide and later chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell: As my boss [Colin Powell] once said, Bush had a lot of .45-caliber instincts, cowboy instincts. Cheney knew exactly how to polish him and rub him. He knew exactly when to give him a memo or when to do this or when to do that and exactly the word choice to use to get him really excited.

Bob Graham, Democratic senator from Florida and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee: One of our difficulties now is getting the rest of the world to accept our assessment of the seriousness of an issue, because they say, You screwed it up so badly with Iraq, why would we believe that you’re any better today? And it’s a damn hard question to answer.

Meanwhile, the Taliban and al-Qaeda have relocated, have strengthened, have become a more nimble and a much more international organization. The threat is greater today than it was on September the 11th.

David Kuo, deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives: It’s kind of like the Tower of Babel. At a certain point in time, God smites hubris. You knew that right around the time people started saying there’s going to be a permanent Republican majority—that God kinda goes, No, I really don’t think so.”