1. You young
folks must just be patient while I brag about something that will strike you as
so obvious as to be beneath notice. Some
days ago, Amazon shipped me a wrist heart rate monitor [it also does about
seven other things, but never mind.] When
it came, I put it on but it did not work – nothing appeared on the screen if I
tapped it. The instructions said to pull
the straps off, revealing a little projection that was to be plugged into a USB
charger. So I plugged it into a USB port
on my computer, but nothing happened [collective rolling of the eyes by readers
under the age of fifty.] I finally
deduced that a USB port is not a USB charger, and ordered one from Amazon. When it came I plugged it into an outlet and
plugged the monitor into it, and sure enough the monitor charged. But the time on the monitor was wrong [it is
also a watch, of course] and I could not change it, no matter how many times I
tapped. Back to the instructions, which
told to download an app on my phone [it simply assumed I had one.] So I did.
Whereupon my phone went looking for my heartrate monitor, synched with
it, fixed the clock, asked me for my height, weight, and age, and counted the
number of steps I took on my walk this morning.
Doesn’t that beat all? I am
feeling very twenty-first century.
2. Numerous
commentators have noted that Trump would improve his election chances if he
would simply take charge of the effort to deal with the virus rather than flubbing
that and demanding that the economy reopen immediately. Why is he behaving irrationally?
A suggestion that I have not heard floated on cable news: Trump is in the hospitality business. He owns hotels, resorts, and golf clubs, and leases
his name to those he does not own. He
must be losing a ton of money when everybody is staying home. And I do not think he actually has a ton of
money to lose. As always, he is acting
in his own short term self-interest. The
thought that he may be going broke is the only bright spot in this godawful
crisis.
7 comments:
Interesting to read that!
When Trump announced he was going to run for president I was rather surprised and wondered if he was doing it because he was a bit skint.
I'm impressed. I would have been totally flummoxed. Plus, I don't even own a smart phone. I relented and bought a Dick Tracey watch, so I now do have a phone, but that's it. I don't know an app from an apple and don't care to. Your gizmo reminds me of back when, when the latest electronic thing would arrive in the mail and in utter exasperation, we kids would discover that "batteries not included."
Jerry, Trump's presidency might have been prefaced with "batteries not included". That said, my sister recently bought me a smart phone. I'm still trying to figure out how to put batteries in it.
I think (wrt to your remark on why Trump doesn't become competent) that there's a real ideological element to it that is very important to his Republican underpinners. What they don't want is a change from death cult capitalism. What the disaster of "essential" workers being sacrificed and other workers being destituted and let without health reveals blatantly is what has always been there at lower rates. Suddenly guaranteed health care, guaranteed income, etc. seem to be getting normalized and the cult of the billionaire suddenly seems pathological. Against that they offer mass death. Those are the ruling class' choices and it's obvious to them that mass death is to be preferred. What I'm saying is this about Trump's pathology, it's about capitalism's pathology.
If Trump loses the election any slush funds he may have been receiving form shady Russian banks are likely to dry up. So it may well be that bankruptcy looms. If so it couldn't have happened to a nicer bloke.
Forget Zoom....you're on your way to becoming Hugh Hefner:
"When I studied the Playboy Mansion a few years ago—first the original gothic manor in Chicago, then the Los Angeles successor—I was interested in how it was already functioning, in the midst of the Cold War, as a laboratory in which new pharmacopornographic devices for controlling the body and sexuality were invented. Such devices began to spread through the West as early as the end of the twentieth century and with the Covid-19 crisis have extended to the entire population of the world. When I was conducting my research into the mansion, I was struck by the fact that Hugh Hefner, one of the richest men on earth, had spent nearly forty years lounging around at home, dressed in pajamas, a bathrobe, and slippers, drinking Pepsis and eating Butterfingers. Hefner directed and produced the largest-circulation men’s magazine in the United States without leaving the house, often without leaving his bed. Connected to a telephone, a radio, a stereo, and a video camera, Hefner’s bed was a genuine multimedia production platform."
This article is quite good on the pandemic and the direction our society/world order is heading...written by an interesting
writer who leans into Foucault and other critical thinkers.
https://www.artforum.com/print/202005/paul-b-preciado-82823
Thanks Jerry.
I just said to myself the other day that the way power and control over all of us are being increased during this pandemic at least in Chile has a lot more to do with Foucault and Nietzsche than with Marx.
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