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I caught the end of the Oscars. Funny, growing up it seemed such a monumental event. In 1960, almost half of America watched the then Academy Awards, Sunday night only 5% watched the Oscars. The show was once a cultural event, such that you can ever say American culture. Certainly,
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The phoenix from the flame I have learned, I will rise You'll see me return Being what I am There is no other Troy For me to burn Friday was one of those brutal days in Chicago, 40 degrees, wind, and pissing rain, weather for a good thick
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Ran across a great interview with Hannah Arendt from 1964. Amazing how relevant her remarks remain, when most of what is said today is worthless tomorrow. In one part of the interview, she gets to the nut of politics, which is who makes the decisions and how that process is
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“What a world, what a world,” Victoria Nuland was supposedly heard muttering as she left the State Department upon offering her resignation. Boy, we got a new/old sanctions sherpa and then the lead US architect of Ukraine/Russian idiocy out the door in a matter of weeks. I guess
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Raise your hand if you ever heard of Daleep Singh? Not many, a few deplorables in the back. Mr. Singh was head of devising the White House Ruski sanctions, then left to go back to Wall Street, and now, incredibly, returns. The FT writes, “In 2022 he was one of
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I wrote a little while ago we live in hyper-, extra-, and post-constitutional times – comes today's Supreme Court ruling. I didn't realize, showing the little attention I pay to this all, that a Colorado state judge had convicted Trump of insurgency back in November – Lord. When
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Continued from (II) Life in the 21st Century is a reader-supported publication. Please become a paid subscriber. Specialists and Generalists The greatest change electric networked information technologies beget is a loosening of specialist control, requiring more whole, systemic views. As McLuhan notes this change goes deep, much deeper, into the
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Continued from (I) Today, the screen is connected across the planet receiving and sending instantaneous information and perspectives from which, tactility, the receiver is completely removed. “Our highly literate societies are at a loss as they encounter the new structures of opinion and feeling that result from instant and global
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Subscribe now Note: I have pulled thinking from Wiener's and McLuhan's two works – The Human Use of Human Beings and Understanding Media respectively – attempting to combine the similarity of their thought as a basis for what can be considered a politics of technology. The similarities are
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“The war in Ukraine was avoidable,” the excellent director Werner Herzog correctly states in a recent interview. But then looking back at 75 years of the American National Security State, how many military misadventures they've largely, or in part, been responsible for were necessary? Borrowing the words of
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Hey man you shouldn’t do that Don’t you know you’ll stain the carpet The FT has an amusing piece titled “Democrats are too scared of a contested convention.” As a former Democrat, I'm all for an open convention. At this point, it’s the only
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Thomas Halliday’s Otherlands is a valuable history book. It's a history of earth stretching back 550 million years composed of chapters of a variety of geologic periods and the life forms existing in each time. It's a book that would be more invaluable as series