Ones and Zeros

The big word this year seems to be bipartisan.  Am I the only one who’s not concerned with this?  I want the right policies to do the right things to solve our country’s problems without creating new problems a couple years from now.  This isn’t bipartisan, this is thoughtful and realistic thinking with all the best knowledge and information we have on the subject.

Bipartisan is figuring out how to satisfy all the extremists, no matter how unfounded, illogical, crazy, and unscientific their opinions are.  I don’t care about that

I know we always won’t get it right, our information isn’t - can’t - be accurate enough for that.  There’s just too many variables.  But trying to please every nutjob in the country and on the radio and cable channels is not only a thankless job, but an impossible one.  Focus on “correct”, that’s hard enough.

It’s a really bad sign when an institution supposedly dedicated to ethical and moral behavoir is taking legalistic stands and blaming the media.  We expect that sort of thing from our worst politicians, not from a self-proclaimed institutional beacon of moral standards.

The Pope says through a spokesman that this crisis is a “personal test” for him.  He’s got that right.  But he omits that sexual abuses were personal tests for the victims too.   It’s not really about him is it?  So how will he do?

Separate from any homilies, and separate from any benedictions and statements of faith, the Church is a institution of politics and beaurocracy that’s existed for over two thousand years now.  It knows how to survive.  The only real question is if it will survive with something consistent with the stated beliefs of the Catholic religion.

William Gibson has said, “The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed”. But the future gets distributed more evenly over time. Bruce Sterling reports that the UN is going to be texting food coupons to 1000 Iraqi refugees in Syria in a pilot program. All the 130,000 refugees receiving food aid already have cell phones.

But there’s a corollary to Gibson’s statement. Call it Tangozulu’s corollary to Gibson’s Law: “The past is still with us, it’s just found a niche.” Older technologies, obsolete ways of thought, and older patterns of living are still around. Some school districts in WV for example, have given their teachers no funding for paper. Perhaps they’re planning to rely on slate tablets?