Month: August 2025

We will never have the experience of hearing Jenny Lind singing, or Benjamin Franklin speaking. During their time on this Earth, there was no recording technology to capture their voices for future generations.

Similarly, we will never know what it was like to see a performance of the great stage actor David Garrick. His life came and went before the invention of film recording, so our knowledge of his performances will forever only be secondhand.

Each of these recording technologies represents a schism in human experience: Anything that happened before the invention of a given recording technology is, in a particular sense, unknowable.

I wonder what future recording technology will create a similar schism. Will some future technology, one that we cannot yet imagine, create new possibilities for preserving the human experience for future generations?

Perhaps people will look back ruefully upon our own era and say “Before 2030, we can never know what … was truly like.”

Yesterday the U.S. president took issue with the Smithsonian Institute for focusing on “how bad Slavery was”. An American history museum having the bad taste to discuss American slavery, he explained, is too Woke.

I wonder which aspects of being a slave in America he considers too Woke to discuss.

Would it be the dehumanization and violence? Being stripped of your basic human rights, treated as property, subjected to regular beatings, whippings, sexual violence, and other forms of cruelty intended to enforce submission and maximize labor output?

Maybe families living in constant fear of being torn apart by sale, with husbands and wives, parents and children being permanently separated, never to see each other again?

Or maybe the thing that’s too Woke to discuss is people being forced to perform backbreaking labor from sunrise to sunset in harsh conditions with inadequate food and clothing, while being stuffed into cramped housing that lacks basic necessities and causes disease and hardship.

Maybe the Woke part is discussing denying slaves access to adequate medical care, or the two centuries of intergenerational trauma precipitated by slaves having lived under the constant threat of violence and separation.

Of course we can all see the president’s point. He is a very delicate and sensitive flower, and those annoyingly Woke historians should know better than to disturb his fragile sensibilities.

it’s time for us to celebrate
that once upon this very date
was born the poet ogden nash
a poet who made quite the splash
if he were still alive he’d be
one hundred years and twenty three
but then again it must be said
he’s just as old now that he’s dead

Sometimes way too many things happen in the course of a single day, and you just start looking for an off switch. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there actually were such a thing?

You could then chill out for the rest of the evening, basking peacefully in the knowledge that nobody would be bothering you for the next several hours. Then in the morning, over a nice hot cup of coffee, you could flip the switch back on.

It has been 80 years to the day since the publication of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. The book is even more relevant today, given that the current U.S. Administration is trying its best to turn that novella into a documentary.

One particular quote from the book jumps out at me:

“If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

― George Orwell, Animal Farm

The self-evident truth of that statement was, until recently, simply taken as common sense in the U.S. But now things are different, as we have recently learned.

Telling people what they do not want to hear can now get you disappeared, and sent off somewhere to be tortured. To paraphrase Sinclair Lewis, it can happen here.

Step one: Watch in disbelief as the United States elects an insecure man-child as its president.

Step two: Watch nervously as the insecure man-child meets with the brutal dictator of Russia, upon whom the man-child has a huge man-crush.

Step three: Watch in horror as the insecure man-child leaves that meeting saying that the brutal dictator can feel free to continue to wage war against another nation that is both a democracy and a long time U.S. ally.

At this point, is anybody at all surprised by the sheer incompetence?

It was sixty years ago today
When the mop-tops headed out to Shea
They’d already been around a while
And were really coming into style
But never had there been a gig
To a crowd so very freakin’ big
So may I introduce to you
The act you’ve known for all these years
John and Paul and George and Ringo’s band!

Fast forward another decade or so. Everybody is wearing those future mixed reality glasses, at least when they are out and about in the world.

You will be able to use them for everything, from buying stuff to finding your way, to creating things in the air just by talking and gesturing. But if you can add, you can also subtract.

For people who need peace and quiet, the software for those glasses might provide visual filters to block out unwanted visual noise. This will be much like Apple earbuds and similar devices today, which provide filters to block out unwanted audio noise.

When you are in the middle of a busy restaurant, you might tell your glasses to replace everything around you with a quiet beachside café. You will still be able to see the things you need to see, but everything else will fade away.

This all sounds wonderful, but I can see some downsides. For example, if everyone can tune out dirty streets and homeless shelters, maybe fewer people will care to keep their cities clean or to help the needy.

I wonder whether the extreme contempt that the current administration is showing to the American people, the cruel stripping away of hard-won rights and services that we all thought we could take for granted, is going to eventually lead to another time of active political protest.

As I’ve mentioned earlier, the current U.S. president, in his narcissistic way, is apt to respond to a rainy day by firing the weatherman — just as he responded to a jobs report he didn’t like by firing the hapless employee whose desk it had landed on.

But he and his equally corrupt enablers might eventually find out a deeper truth: When an entire nation realizes that you have betrayed them just to line the pockets of you and your wealthy friends, it doesn’t take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

Here is one example of the resonance of Warner’s observation about the weather: During the Vietnam War era, the phrase was adopted to create a pointed variant: “Everybody talks about the draft, but nobody does anything about it.”

Around the same time, Bob Dylan, in his political protest phase, built upon it even more creatively with this lyric: “It doesn’t take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

That phrase was soon adopted by the political underground group “The Weathermen”, who were indeed trying to do something about the weather, rather violently, hoping to change the way the wind blows.

More tomorrow.