Live Streaming Star in China

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From the New York Times: “Over the past year, as Covid-19 has severely limited our ability to interact with the world beyond our front door, livestreams have helped transport us to places we couldn’t visit, people we couldn’t see and events we couldn’t attend. In China, live streaming services command an audience of nearly 560 million, with streamers broadcasting to devoted followers who tune in every night. Successful live streamers can earn thousands of dollars each month in direct donations from fans, and those at the very top earn millions from brand sponsorships and major contracts. In the short documentary above, we enter two agencies that scout promising newcomers and mold them into high-earning stars. But what’s it like working for a company that engineers every aspect of your life — and then requires you to livestream it all day?”

Not sure which I found more frightening… the lives of the “stars” or their fans.

Tiny machines trying to kill us?

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“The Berserker series is a series of space opera science fiction short stories and novels by Fred Saberhagen, in which robotic self-replicating machines strive to destroy all life. […] The Berserkers’ bases are capable of manufacturing more and deadlier Berserkers as the need arises.” (Wikipedia)

I read my first Berserker story in the late 60s so, 50+ years ago? What if the COVID-19 virus (all viruses?) is a form of intelligence whose purpose/mission/raison d’être is to destroy all human life? Is the COVID-19 virus really a tiny Berserker machine?

Speaking of science fiction…

We won’t see the first movies about the COVID-19 pandemic until it’s over, right? But if it’s never really over… I’ll wager some early “treatments” are already being pitched. There have been so many movies about viruses and pandemics (link below), what’s the fresh take?

I don’t think you can make a movie about the COVID-19 pandemic of 202(?) that doesn’t have vax-deniers and conspiracy nuts as a major plot element.

Topless

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I’ve had the Land Rover for three years now and this is the first time I’ve gone completely topless. We’ll put the hard top back on later this month and I decided to remove the mesh top hoop kit early. Really kind of fun driving around with nothing between me and the sky. If I’m out and it starts raining? Everything gets wet.

“War is cruelty and you cannot refine it.”

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I recently finished Battle Cry of Freedom by James M. McPherson, considered by many the best single-volume history of the American Civil War. I wouldn’t know where to begin to tell you how much I enjoyed this book. We all know how the story ends, right, but I was on the edge of my seat till the final page. The mark of a truly great story-teller.

We all know about Union general William T. Sherman’s burning of Atlanta and his “march to the sea.” My simplistic Hollywood understanding of that chapter in the war was changed by this book, especially by this excerpt from Sherman’s memoirs.

“War is cruelty and you cannot refine it,” Sherman had told Atlanta’s mayor after ordering the civilian population expelled from the occupied city. But “when peace does come, you may call on me for anything. Then will I share with you the last cracker.” Until then, though, “we are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.” Union armies must destroy the capacity of the southern people to sustain the war. Their factories, railroads, farms—indeed their will to resist—must be devastated. “We cannot change the hearts of those people of the South, but we can make war so terrible . [and] make them ‘so sick of war’ that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.”

— Memoirs by William T. Sherman

The passage reminded me of a passage from a novel by Robert K. Tanenbaum:

“Peace is best. You should make every sacrifice to secure peace. When you absolutely must go to war, however, you must try to kill all the enemy you can as quickly as you can, holding nothing back, until they have surrendered or you have been defeated utterly. It is a great fraud to think otherwise and it prolongs the agony. It would be better if people said, if we fight, we are going to boil babies in their own fat and blast the skin off nice old ladies, so they die slowly in great pain, and we are happy to do this, because what we fight for is so important. And if they conclude that it is not as important as that, then they should fight no more.”

— Robert K. Tanenbaum, Act of Revenge

War as video game

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America’s Army is a video game “conceived by Colonel Casey Wardynski, the Army’s Chief Economist and a professor at West Point, the idea was to provide the public with a virtual soldier experience that was engaging, informative, and entertaining.” I got curious about this when I started seeing recruiting videos on some cable channels.

Not suggesting there is anything wrong with this approach, just that it got me thinking about what motivates a young man or woman to enlist in the military. Sebastian Junger alludes to this in his 2010 book, WAR.

“War is a lot of things and it’s useless to pretend exciting isn’t one of them. It’s insanely exciting. The machinery of war and the sound it makes and the urgency of its use and the consequences of almost everything about it are the most exciting things anyone engaged in war will ever know.”

“War is supposed to feel bad because undeniably bad things happen in it, but for a nineteen-year-old at the working end of a .50 cal during a firefight that everyone comes out of okay, war is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of.”

So, is it “defending the homeland,” or the rush of surviving a firefight? Or something far more complicated?

National Insurrection Day

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In all the millions of words written or spoken about the January 6 Insurrection, I don’t recall anyone describing what would have happened had the mob — and Trump — been successful. So I asked my friend Bob Priddy (the smartest person I know) to speculate.

“There would have been more lawsuits than we could count and Trump’s judicial appointees would support democracy, to his howling dismay and most Republicans and every Democrat in congress would stand together against any such illegal power grab. The capitol would become a fortress for the Trump mob while its leader quickly would be in custody on numerous incitement and conspiracy charges, be ruled incompetent to continue to serve under the 25th Amendment, and his Vice-President would emerge from his hiding place to proclaim the legitimate process of government would continue.  He, as the new commander in chief of the military and in exigent circumstances would in no way defend Trump (recall that in the immediate aftermath of January 6 most GOP’ers flatly and publicly blamed Trump and their cowering did not develop until he left office in the normal course of events — a situation that would not exist if the mob gained control of the capitol), would call upon the protestors to surrender or starve to death or be killed by military forces that would go room to room hauling people out or killing them. Congress, or as many members of it as survived, would reassemble; states would re-certify the election results and the certification process would be completed.

President Pence would, as he did, attend the inauguration of Joe Biden on January 20, wherever it would be held, and would leave Washington a hero rather than a temporarily-noble Trump nebbish who rose above himself at a critical time.

The following days could have been a despicable bloodbath but the insurrection would have been contained to the capitol.  There might be minor uprisings in several states but the National Guard would be activated by governors and the uprisings would have been put down and state courts and local prosecutors would have reacted as usual and constitutionally-punished the trouble-makers.

There would not be a civil war but there would have been blots throughout the nation that time would never erase.  But Democracy would have survived because the nation would not geographically divide.

Donald Trump would face criminal charges and unending civil lawsuits seeking damages to the Capitol and personal injuries by those who resisted the mob or private citizens whose well-being was threatened.  He would declare bankruptcy to escape payment of damages but would be allowed to keep his domicile under the bankruptcy code. The rest of his empire would crumble because it is built on paper and would return pennies on the dollar to satisfy judgments against him.  If convicted of crimes, he could not be put in prison but would instead be sentenced to house arrest, allowed outside for an hour a day for exercise restricted to holes 8-13 on the golf course at Mar-a-lago.

Upon his death, Mar-a-lago would become a national institution for insane oligarchs and in time be transformed into an Ellis Island-type of historic site.

Each year on January 6, or on the Monday closest to it, National Insurrection Day would be observed with parades and speeches focusing on the greatness of a Democracy that withstood its greatest challenge and would never fail.

And urine samples gathered from every member of congress ceremoniously would be poured on the grave of Donald Trump.

I’ll make the same prediction about Trump’s final resting place — and for the same reason — that I made for Rush Limbaugh. It will be inaccessible to the public. El Rushbo is in a private cemetery somewhere in the St. Louis area, not in his hometown of Cape Girardeau.

Who would win a war between the Confederacy and the Taliban?

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In a chapter titled Amateurs Go To War, Battle Cry of Freedom author James M. McPherson describes the South’s strategy:

“Jefferson Davis […] early in the war he seems to have envisaged a strategy like that of George Washington in the Revolution. Washington traded space for time; he retreated when necessary in the face of a stronger enemy; he counterattacked against isolated British outposts or detachments when such an attack promised success; above all, he tried to avoid full-scale battles that would have risked annihilation of his army and defeat of his cause. This has been called a strategy of attrition — a strategy of winning by not losing, of wearing out a better equipped foe and compelling him to give up by prolonging the war and making it too costly.”

I shared this with my friend (and historian) Bob Priddy, suggesting parallels to the Taliban strategy in Afghanistan. Bob’s reply:

You have come to a realization that the American military has not come to grips with since time began. We still fight our wars as if it was Breed’s Hill (not Bunker Hill), with one side barricaded and visible and the other side marching resolutely forward, sacrificing enough bodies that eventually the marching force will overcome the barricaded force by surviving numbers or will fall back, weakened and puzzled at the lack of success. It’ why we “lost” Vietnam. It’s why our two-decade effort at nation building in Afghanistan ultimately failed. The parallels of Vietnam and Afghanistan are marked.

We can’t make good Republicans (no snide comments about that phrase) and good Democrats out of people who see no such things, never have, and have never wanted them.

Jefferson Davis ultimately failed because he never had the cunning or the tools the Taliban has — although the white supremacist philosophy never lost. The Confederacy did. But white supremacy lurks in the philosophical underground tunnels of our time. We can be grateful that its ride into Washington in January was not as successful as the Taliban’s ride into Kabul.

Poor planning and inept leadership saved us this time.

Mass Murder Movement

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Author Tim Wise explains why COVID anti-vaxxers aren’t a MAGA death cult… it’s a mass murder movement.

When you would tell them repeatedly that wearing a mask was less for the wearer than for others, they shrugged. If other folks are at risk, they should stay home and let the rest of us get back to the gym, the hairdresser, concerts, movies, and tailgate parties before the big game. […] Their freedom to do as they pleased was more important than other people’s lives.

Suicidal people don’t act or think that way. Homicidal people do.

If you refuse a vaccine when you have no valid health reason to do so (as almost no one does), thereby keeping the virus alive longer by increasing the risk of mutations, you are saying that other people’s lives don’t matter to you.

I cannot weep for someone who thought the “blood of Jesus” was all the vaccine they needed.

On a personal level, treating deniers like pariahs means banishing them, metaphorically, to the cornfield. It means cutting them out of our lives entirely: no invitations to the cocktail party or backyard barbecue, no seat for them at the holiday table, and no invitation to the grandkid’s graduation, Little League game, or dance recital. Refuse to speak to them, break bread with them or communicate with them in any way until they get their shit together and learn to play by the rules of public health by which rational, decent people agree to play.

Till then, they have made their ICU beds. Now they can lie in them, and sadly, die in them — completely and utterly, alone.