The apocalypse of words

From my beloved.  I've added a bit.


We are on the brink of a new age. 
It's all about community. 
Float this. 
Clear that. 
"ASL" is geezer speak. 
Roll your own roll-your-own. 
The words aren't what they were. 
Cry out, blogosphere! 
Splog is an aggregate noun. 
Single. Word. Sentences! 
Always be launching. 
Clustering. 
We're about what Web 2.0 is about. 
An AJAX-driven GUI. 
The new is old. 
This will change everything. 
Hack it. 
MSM just doesn't get it. 
Folksonomy. 
The buzz is loud and clear. 
It's all changing. 
Podcasts. 
You need someone who gets it. 
Social is the new push. 
We shall transcend borders. 
Label what defies categorization.
2.0 is the new New. 
This is newer media. 
Faster. Faster!
On-demand streams. 
News clouds
What's the value proposition?
Hyperspecialization
Chase the short

This sounds like a fuckin' TED or Gartner Symposium keynote presentation.  No wonder I try and avoid them like a plague.

Still here

Why it's May 22nd and we all appear to be here, as fractious and joyful and broken and perfect as before.  I'm willing to bet that's the plan, contrary to recent efforts to make money off of absurd hopes from some kind of spacelift salvation.

Now, back to gardening, elderwrangling, and cat herding and rat whispering.

Lucy v. Charlie Brown

The final budget bill, and the entire manufactured crisis appalls me.  It reminds me of the advertisement for the National Lampoon many years ago: "If you don't buy this magazine, we'll shoot this dog".

 

Every year, the budget gets held hostage by some idiot -- I'm sorry, Representative or Senator -- who believe their re-election hinges on some marginally important issue. 

Many, if not all of the appropriations bills for FY 2011 were written and out of committee almost on time last year, well before the mid-term elections.  The Republicans used delaying to prevent them from being acted on.  They thought they could create outrage by delaying action, which they could used to their electoral advantage, and they did.  Score one for Lucy v. Charlie Brown. 

The Democrats never made the case at the time that they faced Republican obstructionism, or if they did, the message was so muddled as to have no effect.  The Village is complicit, because most of them don't understand the process, and their salaries are paid for by revenues from advertising sold to corporations which benefit from the broken process. 

The opportunity to discuss and debate policies and programs proposed in the President's budget request is intended to be in the Spring, by the committees responsible for governance and oversight of the programs to be funded.  You wanna wack funding for Planned Parenthood?  Great -- propose striking the funding line from the appropriation, and propose rewriting the authorizing legislation for the agency that is responsible for administering the grants to elminate their authority to do it.  Then vote on it.  If you don't win, you try again next year.  It's not sexy, but it's how our government is supposed to work. 

What makes for good goverment and good governance is so radically different than what is useful for electoral success -- particularly after Citizen's United and Gore v. Bush -- that I can't see a way out of the woods.

What Reich says

Busy with work, busy with life, and pretty much disgusted with the world.  What's truly appalling to me is that sound, sane voices like Robert Reich's aren't heard, aren't respected, and aren't heeded. 

That's all for now.

The Man in the High Castle

Not that I believe in conspiracy theories, but it's becoming more and more apparent that Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes are the direct descendants of Joseph Goebbels.  This little gem should put allow us to cast aside any doubt.

Targets

I know that I'll sound like a DFH and a socialist but: a developed country treats its mentally ill citizens with respect and provides medical care and support for them.  A developed country controls and limits access to deadly weapons.  A developed country encourages civil disagreement on political issues, but recognizes -- and when necessary, limits -- speech that incites violence. 

What, exactly, does this make us?

Much more to follow.

Mini Killer

I love small, fast, well-built cars.  They're fun, practical, and the tiniest bit socially responsible.  It's also a market segment that is barely acknowledged in the United States: we get the BMW Mini Cooper, while Europe has the Alfa MiTo, Fiat 500, Ford Escort -- you get the idea.  Americans, it's said, won't buy small premium cars.

Bullshit.

Take a look at how many Minis are driving around in cities.  That's a market segment, kids.

Audi seems to have realized this.  Or at least I hope so.  The pictures were taken on New Year's Day in Adams-Morgan.  Yes, it's an Audi A1, with Michigan manufacturer plates.  It's a sweet car.  Mind you, the copy  of Albert Speer's "Inside the Third Reich" sitting on the passenger seat was a bit off-putting, but still. 

Christmas Curmudgeon

I'm on Frontier Flight 790, flying from Portland to Denver on Christmas Day. It’s remarkably quiet and peaceful, and my row mate, her infant son and I have as a gift that rarest of modern travel situations, an empty middle seat. The air is remarkably smooth, and the snow-covered Sawtooth Range below me is a beautiful sight. I’m returning home to Mr. Gunn and the Dauphin, Tick Tock bin Trouble after a bittersweet visit with my mother – not because there was any particular flaw, fault, or fight – but because it’s painfully clear that with each day, a little bit more of what made Virginia Jean Kuehner Cory so special is lost to her, to me, and to the world.

For as much as we live in a material world, most of what matters to me is intellect, experience and memory. Thirty years ago, I rather spectacularly celebrated Christmas by buying my mother a stereo so we could listen to classical music for Christmas (never mind that I bought it out of money that I neither had, nor had any right to expect – but that’s a different story). Mom has used that stereo off and on for the last thirty years, happily pushing the analog buttons and turning the weighted tuning and volume knobs to pull classical and jazz music, and news out of the turntable, tuner, and CD player.

So watching her punch vainly at the buttons of the television and DVD remote, and seeing her increasing agitation with its failure to effect a desired response from the old stereo equipment was painful beyond words. My mother’s loss of what seemed to be an almost intuitive skill shocked me. I’ve long been accustomed (if disconcerted) to her memory lapses, her increasing repetition, her agitation at the new or unexpected. But this, this was completely other – every bit as disconcerting as her reaction to anesthesia after her most recent knee surgery. Here was something she had known and used for 30 years – 30! – and she was incapable of understanding that the modern remote would not work on her vintage stereo.

So much of what I’ve shared with my parents has been experience. That I can’t share that with my mother any longer is a cruel gift to receive. Was she happy I was with her, and that we shared a few simple meals, a couple of games of Scrabble, and some simple kindnesses? Yes, without doubt or question. Was I happy to be with her? Of course; and yet not one moment spent with her was without an underlying sadness and questions. How much more of her is there to loose? How long will she be able to live independently, as she does now? How pained is she by her loss?

I’m grateful that I spent four days with her, and that we shared some of our cherished holiday traditions – decorating the tree, shopping for clothes (for me – she wasn’t interested in shopping for herself), eating ridiculous Belgian chocolates – which seemed to bring her real happiness.

The greatest gift to her, however, will be peace: to sleep, perchance to dream, and to gently leave this life. I can’t offer that gift – but I hope and pray that she soon finds it.

Enough!

Let the Bush-era tax cuts expire.  Create pressure for real, substantive, and economically and socially beneficial tax reform.  This paper is a good explanation of the reasons why this is what's required.  Progressive taxation is a prerequisite for a liberal democratic society.  The last time I checked, that's what the United States Constitution created (although recent Supreme Court rulings seem determined to interpret it somewhat differently).

The United States faced a similar situation after the Gilded Era, and the set of political and social changes (which included an unsustainable 90% rate of taxation on the wealthiest Americans) also produced a physical and social infrastructure that created real productive capacity, human capital, and real wealth creation which lasted roughly from 1946 - 2006.  The radical restructuring of taxation that began with the Reagan Administration and was completed by the Bush Administration has gutted our productive capacity and human capital, and has spawned bubbles and ridiculous schemes to create notional assets (see: derivatives, credit default swaps, mortgage-backed securities) that masquerade as "wealth".  What they failed to do was support an educational system and physical infrastructure that trains people for all types of work, and allows rapid development and implementation of new technologies.  Anyone interview recent graduates recently for positions that require thoughtful analysis?  Notice real gaps in achievement and accomplishment among mid-career professionals due to a lack of ability to manage lifelong learning?  Thought these might strike a chord.  Drive anyplace, and tell me that roads today are better than they were in 1990.  Don't even consider that our water and electric systems have been appropriately maintained.  As for mass transit and rail transit, join me and my fellow commuters on Washington's Metro system to see just how badly that's failed.

And for my affluent and wealthy friends, a gentle reminder: countries with great inequality in wealth and opportunity have a tendency towards violent and uncontrolled change.  See, for example, 18th Century France and 19th Century Russia. 

Finally, a very simple truth:  if you want something good, you have to pay for it.  States are not magical unicorns that poop cupcakes.  They take real individual sacrifices to create common goods that provide individual and collective benefits greater than what can be accomplished individually.

"Do we need anything at the store?"

Four days in Portland for elderwhispering and elderwrangling with my mother: I knew it would be a difficult four days, but what I could never know is how difficult.

First, the good news: my mother's knee surgery was completely successful, and she is both mobile and as pain-free as an 87 year old is reasonably likely to be.  That's a great comfort to me, as I saw her become more and more lost in both chronic pain and in the desperation of being shut in -- to her home, her body, and a collapsing world.

Next, the bad news: my mother has senile dementia.  I hoped that the relief from chronic pain might also relieve some of the confusion that Mom increasingly displayed.  For years, my mother repeated herself in conversation.  I attributed it to not being engaged, and not engaging in, challenging intellectual activity.  Crossword puzzles and Scrabble aside, I'm not aware of my mother having bought a new book in years, nor had she expressed an interest in politics and current events since 2003.  "No blood for oil" was her mantra, and coming from a woman who was a lifelong Republican (though to her credit, she voted for Clinton both in '92 and '96, Gore in 2000, and Kerry in 2004) it was a testament to the cupidity of the Cheney-Bush Administration. 

But after that the world changed: We occupied Iraq, we muddled on in Afghanistan, our economy and society floundered,  and the losses in Mom's life kept piling up: the deaths of high school, college, graduate school, and professional friends were noted.  The fellow residents of Mt. Angel Towers moved in, settled in, and died.  Her sister, Monica Kuehner, died.  My father, George Cory, her divorced second husband, died. Her closest friend, Edith Throckmorton, medical librarian extraordinary, compulsive hoarder, and fierce curmudgeon, died. 

And I suspect that beyond the cumulative losses and failing joints, bits of my mother's body were betraying her.  Perhaps it was the neurological changes that 50 years of hard living -- by which I mean smoking like a chimney and drinking like a fish -- can cause in a body: Decreased bloodflow to the brain; loss of glial support cells; loss of neurons in the cerebral cortex; accumulation of toxins.  Who knows for sure, but the cumulative effect is the same: my mother is losing her short and medium term memory and other elements of adult cognitive function.

To be clear -- this is not Alzheimer's disease.  I haven't faced the horrors that other friends and acquaintances have with parents and spouses and friends who have been diagnosed with Alzheimer's.  My mother is still there, is still (mostly) content, and is still aware.  But things I've taken for granted -- like setting up a daily schedule, or organizing a bill paying and filing regimen, or even having a conversation with Mom where there was information exchanged and integrated -- none of these can be assured at this point. 

I realized this completely and irrevocably when on our last day together, my mother asked me not less than five times in 15 minutes if we needed to buy anything at the local grocery store.  We had, two days earlier, purchased milk, cookies, cranberry juice, and toilet paper to add to mother's collection of all of the above.  I threw out the existing milk, added the cranberry juice to the four bottles in the pantry, and wedged the toilet paper into the closet with the other 25-30 odd rolls.  (We ate one of the two bags of cookies).  So with each iteration of mom's question, I'd work through the list of items she'd likely be asking about, and assured her that she had many more of them stored in her house that she was likely to use.  I was for the most part patient with her -- though our family is infamously inpatient with each other, and my patience is often suspect.

What I'm trying to come to terms with is how to accept is that at the end of my mother's life -- and for many people, at the end of their lives -- the person who we know and love is lost to us before they die. 

And what I need at the store is the grace to understand just how to do this.