Technoblather

I would place myself somewhere between a technophile and a technophobe. I’m not sure what that should be called … perhaps a technodilettante would be closest. If a tool comes along that I think would improve my life and that of those around me, I try to learn how to use it.

Occasionally the motive isn’t quite as high-minded. Sometimes If it just looks like fun, I might be off and running with it as well.

For instance, I had a friend who was into personal computers before they were even called that. He would puzzle over a dark screen with bright green letters on it, trying to get the device to do something fairly simple, like transmit a page of text. Problem for this guy was, he didn’t know very many people who wanted to (or were able to) receive that page of text. Watching him sitting at a console with his furrowed brow I put his efforts down as harmless enough, but an electrified waste of time.

Within five minutes I had figured out what that little thing to the right in the photo was for (the mouse), and what the menus on the screen were for. Within ten minutes I had typed a paragraph and discovered the revolution that the commands “Cut” and “Paste” were for anyone who wanted to or needed to write.

And I was off. I joined a local Macintosh User’s Group, which was a bunch of bozos like myself who were excited by the machine and were eager to share every little new bit of information about it. We were fans in the truest sense, meaning fanatics.

One of the members of our little group was the local states attorney, and he was able to obtain copies of the few pieces of Macintosh software that were available to demonstrate for us. He had all of them because he had stolen them. I made a mental note never to trust this guy and then joined the rest of the group in learning what the software had to offer, which made me an accessory to piracy, I suppose.

My curiosity and sense of fun have carried me along for 39 years now, and I have owned quite a few Macintosh computers in that time. The Mac laptop I am typing this blog post on today cost half of what that first one set me back, and it is a gazillion times more powerful. I mean … a gazillion!

So those of you who regard these blog posts as a blight upon mankind, and cannot read what I just wrote without being nearly overcome with regrets that I am able to do so, may blame two things for this miserable state of affairs. They are the invention of the Apple Macintosh computer and my odd personality.

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For those who think that it couldn’t happen here, it already nearly did. There were many Americans who wanted us to enter World War II much earlier than we did, but on the side of the Nazis. Yes, friends, they wanted us to support the people responsible for the greatest horrorshow of the twentieth century. Which makes this video a sobering watch.

Fascists were out in large numbers in America in 1939 and they are out there now in numbers too large to ignore. The problem for you and me is that we can’t use the excuse that we don’t know what’s going on. This modern variant of the brownshirts/blackshirts consists of a group of people exhibiting the worst impulses of our species and which takes its energy from fear.

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Those of you who have younger children might have to explain the above cartoon to them. Not the carton of Asian takeout but the darker flat thing.

Watch their eyes go out of focus as you try to explain what a VCR and a cassette tape were and how people used to have to actually go to a Blockbuster store to pick out a movie rather than click on a streaming channel. It’s not that they don’t love and respect you but they might see your explanation about as relevant to them as how to churn butter or trim the wick of an oil lamp.

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We are told that artificial intelligence holds many dangers and that we might be made extinct once the bots of AI know everything there is to know about everything. After this past week, I think that those hazards might be preferable to what passes for intelligence now, in a world where in a single week:

• A senator who is angry with another senator jabs him hard in the back as he passes him in a hallway
• Another senator who is a panel member at a hearing threatens to vault over the table and attack a witness and must be verbally restrained
• A congressman is revealed to have used campaign contributions for Botox treatments and a porn channel subscription.
• University presidents are besieged by donors who are taking their money back because they aren’t doing enough to support Israel. On the other hand, they are also besieged by student groups who are threatening mayhem if they don’t do more to support the Palestinians.
• Every in-breath and out-breath of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce is being recorded even as the oceans rise and the glaciers disappear.
• An ultramarathoner admits she took a car ride for part of her route.
• A sports newscaster admitted that sometimes she just made s**t up.

Nope, I think I’d like to take my chances with artificial intelligence as opposed to the limited form we are presently dealing with.

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Rosalynn Carter’s most lasting individual legacy will be her efforts to diminish the stigma attached to people with mental illnesses and her fight for parity and access for mental health treatment. She also devoted her time to the Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregiving at her alma mater, Georgia Southwestern State University, to help families and professional caregivers living with disabilities and illnesses.

In 1999, then-President Bill Clinton presented both Carters with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor. He said they had “done more good things for more people in more places than any other couple on Earth.”

CNN Online

It’s nice to be able to talk about decent people once in a while. We all know people like that, and thinking about them can brighten a gloomy day. Most of the time they don’t get to be President and First Lady of the United States.

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