Wednesday December 5

We have a winter sort-of wonderland. We still have quite a bit of snow from the lake-effect snowfall yesterday and, overnight, some freezing rain and drizzle which makes things slippery. Thankfully we aren't going anywhere, I think. Plans have a habit of changing around here.

No mail today because of the funeral of GHW Bush. We saw most of the arrival ceremony Monday because we couldn't really avoid it--it cancelled the last half of Jeopardy. At one point Mom asked "how long they were going to draw the whole thing out?" She also asked if other deceased presidents had as much pomp involved in their funerals. I think it is a further proof that we have an empire (though, evidently, one on the decline) and empires have emperors. We simply call ours "presidents" and pretend that we have a real choice of who will occupy the throne.

An interesting notion: walking backwards into the future. Our culture seems to devalue the past and we don't really learn from it. Politicians of the 1930s put legislation in place to control banks and the big financial interests which the politicians of the 1990s dismantled which paved the way for the crisis of 2008 from which many have not yet recovered. We have quietly forgotten the Korean conflict and Vietnam--and learned nothing from either. I haven't even heard or read of anyone on the "lessons" of Vietnam for about 20 years now. Obama spent a lot of time exhorting us to not dwell on how we got into the financial mess but to just move forward. We are bogged down in Afghanistan (and Iraq and Syria and parts of Africa) and simply shrug when a military officer tells Congress that we have a stalemate but can't pull out because our (putative) allies can't defend themselves.

This is a long article reviewing The Curse of Bigness by Tim Wu. It makes a number of interesting points to chew on.

I got to this article at the Telegraph by checking a story on a prepper blog. I have read about the Chinese "social credit" system for the last few years so this isn't really a surprise. I just didn't expect it so soon. How long, I wonder, before we see the same here?