Post Xmas Follies

So the Xmas Holidastrophe has passed with minimal bloodshed and recriminations; no damaged dishes or hurt feelings.  Yay!  Someday the horrordays will be enjoyable for me all the way through.  I just know it.

On the other hand.... it did have some very nice presents!  Here are my prizes in their awesomness (you do not have to be me to enjoy all of them - but it helps).

•  A Year With C.S. Lewis is a daily readings collection.  Very good stuff.  imho.
• The Fractalist, Benoit Mandelbrot's memoir.  Why?  "Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line" That should be a good start.
• Structure & Interpretation of Computer Programs is a book I browsed online and now want to read.  No, I don't program.  I mean, no I don't write code.  I mean...
• GEB: An Eternal Golden Braid I was given Doug Hofstadter's book in 1979 as a birthday gift.  That copy's seen me through many sleepless nights and was a good traveling companion.  The binding on my copy's become too frail to carry around much so I put it back on my wish list.  It's not a hard-cover but the covers are heavier as is the paper, so it's all good.  Back on the road!
• Hofstadter's Grandchildren, edited by Adam Cole is a collection of inspirations flowing from G.E.B. which I have been wanting for a while and am looking forward to browsing.
• The Rapture of The Nerds by Corey Doctorow is the funny to put all of the other books in my list in the proper perspective.  I see Doctorow, Vonnegut (Kurt, not David) and M. Atwood in some ways occupying the same space, but that's just me and your mileage may vary.  Still I'm halfway through this already and have been laughing out loud in various waiting areas today.  Fortunately, many of the people around me were also reading gifted stuff and were not bothered in the least.

So this ought to keep me off the streets for a bit.  Excellent timing too, since the first snow storm is coming in tonight!  Keep the radio tuned to the Weather stations.....

Christmas comes a few days early

When I returned to my home the other day I noticed a package sitting by the front door. Being the merchandising season, this wasn't too surprising.  It's also my birthday this week, so anything can happen.

When I brought it inside and opened it, I found a Chrome notebook.  Well happy birthday to me!  And none too soon; with the holidays upon us the whole family's been going a bit nuts, and I've been leading the trend.  A new piece of tech to obsess on a bit would be perfect to direct some of my crazy away from the wife and kids, and put it back up in my office where it belongs.

After unpacking and charging, I took it for a spin and found the besides the Chrome software, the device has been set up to look not only for WiFi but also for Verizon 3G network points.  Better still, the Verizon setup has a plan offering a hundred megabytes of data a month, prepaid, for twenty-four months.  To be sure, a hundred megs isn't much in terms of phone carrier service - a couple hours of video - but for my purposes that's just fine. Even better, when the data is expended for the month, the service is shut off until the first of the following month. I don't have to worry about someone grabbing the thing and playing Farmville all the way down to NYC in the back of the car.  Sweet.

Well, this post never made it to press last year - I wrote it in December of 2011 (or was it 2010?) shortly after "Mario" showed up.  It has been a great ride - although recently, Mario's hardware WIFI connection became cranky and one must not tilt the display after starting it for fear of disconnects.

Small potatoes, I say.  Besides solidifying a huge base of users, the experiment has unfolded as we see today, with numerous different companies selling Chromebooks as well as the rollout of related items like Google Play.  It's raised the stakes for tab-laptop developers, while making online stores more than a place to purchase books and music.  The question of the month is, What will Santa Google bring, this year?

Regardless: happy happy, folks.

Thank you, Sandy

For many people lives go on trajectories with a few collisions altering course now and then. Often collisions the result of events impacting others change many peoples' arcs at once: Megahurricane Sandy was one of those events, certainly. Like an earthquake, events of consequence have aftershocks; appearing 'randomly' in the days and weeks after. For folks in NJ and NY time, measured between now and now+1, is in deep freeze, waiting for it's Spring, for the return of light, heat, and consumer social structure. Even while the days shorten and the nights grow colder, they wait with forced patience.

Following the initial shock of awareness that something big has taken place, people outside the event locus pass through the experience in the third person. Some will be moved to help, be it for families, people they haven't met, animals separated from their owners. Others will ensure their ten fingers and ten toes are all still attached and move on, keeping a watchful eye on the weather glass for a time until the memory fades.

I fell into a rabbit hole for a while during the storm. We lost power in NH twice, each time for only a few hours (though many in the state were down for days). We traveled to outside NYC to be with family. Although my mother in-law was hospitalized with exposure (her home in White Plains had power resumed early Thursday the 8^th) all were of good cheer to be past the storm with no further family injuries. Returning home I became a radio of sorts, receiving all kinds of messages from everywhere and occasionally spitting out bits of static. Could have been from SETI @ Home. I don't know.

Today I went through my favorite RSS Reader program to catch up on the zillions of music, economic, and GooGly pages I follow, for the first time in a while. And there's a ripple, a little aftershock from Sandy: a posting from fellow music lover and former NJ resident Mitch Lopate on his TGStars web page. Adapting with less? Surviving and sharing? Whether it be in the form of changing weather patterns or the .0001%, these are good things to be thinking about daily, and working towards, little by slow if necessary. Because we're not going to have a choice at some point.

But anyway, the point of this blit was not to be all doom and gloom but to celebrate the fact Mitch called me within minutes of my post. And we talked, for nearly a half hour, about sustaining, family, NJ, WA, the Canary Islands, earthen homes, Mitch's music writings, the Zapatistas and their form of self-government, Economic Hit men, astrology, and What The Future Will Hold.

There are very few humans I can enjoy speaking with like this (though I have conversations like this with my dog Willow on occasion) and it was an absolute gift for me that Mitch decided to call. After thinking about this some I realized, the internets is frickin' awesome.

A Black Mark on Mitt's Choices for Advisors

I read a quickie-read book the past couple of days, called How to Get Away With Murder in America, that left me a little rocked.  The jarring part started in telling the central character's story, and reached a crescendo as it detailed the arc of his career and the people who helped him along.

The main character is a child of Cuban refugees who rose to become a senior-ranking member of the CIA, before taking a vice-presidency at Blackwater, specializing in political assassinations in Iraq and Afghanistan on orders of the CIA.  The book names him, and you can look for it if you like.  I'm not, because he's not the focus of this blog.

I love and respect a man in a uniform, but the thing is this particular man, prior to joining the CIA, worked as a bodyguard and criminal enforcer for a childhood friend, convicted cocaine trafficker Alberto San Pedro - one of the 'Cocaine Cowboys' of Miami in the 1970's.  Federal RICO investigations were initiated from information gathered by Metro-Dade investigative work on local murders and bad drug deals, which supported the case enough to convene grand juries to examine the evidence; Yet with no reason, the CIA defended this man from being questioned by a grand jury.

Now, for those jumping to call this a chop piece or fabrication, I suggest you re-review the sourcing before you call B.S.  There a great many pieces that line up and Evan Wright (author of this piece, and also of Generation Kill which was adapted for HBO) documents his own skepticism in the journey to identify people, places, etcetera.  

Perhaps, as the author offers, this man was trying to escape La Vida Coca when he entered the CIA.  Whatever.  There does not appear to be any evidence that his life in the CIA, once established, maintained a high degree of exposure to his prior life, and I would be the last person to fault him.  The fact that the man was successful at re-creating himself to promote the country's safety as a federal employee is for me, all good and I wish him no ill will.  In fact, as the author notes, he provided services in getting the CIA's Counter Terrorism Center (CTC) organized following 9/11 so far outside the CIA group think that we probably responded more quickly to terrorist threats thanks to his work.

It was another figure in the story, another CIA guy, named J. C0fer Blaack (sic) who helped the former 'Hard Guy' via promotions at the CIA and later, a good job at Blackwater, running their under-the-covers hit squad.  Black now has speaking engagements at places like the Aspen Security Forum with colleagues John Negroponte, Dennis Blair, Keith Alexander and others from the Intelligence community.  He is now also a military advisor to Mitt Romney and could end up in Mr. Romney's cabinet.

Why does this concern me?  After all, this was the guy who alerted the CTC to Al Qaeda in the late 1990's.  He was the guy who put the extraordinary rendition program on the front burner.  He was the guy who put the 'Hard Guy' mentioned above in charge of a team to kill or capture Osama Bin Laden - in 1996.

He was also the guy in charge in 2000, when his group received intelligence that two known Al Qaeda militants were en route to Malaysia for a meeting with others there.  CTC promptly sent officers who surveilled the meeting, photographed the participants, and promptly lost the militants.  Thai intelligence advised the CTC a few weeks later, that the two had boarded a flight to LAX, using their real names, and had landed and disappeared.  When notified, CTC checked some references to look for them, but did not alert the FBI or other law enforcement agencies of their presence in the U.S.

The two men later enrolled in flight school.  And later, still using their own names, boarded AA 77 as part of the 9/11 hijack team who rode that plane into the Pentagon.

No one will ever know whether the plot might have been foiled by investigators.  One hopes that it would have been.  

Mr. Black denied under oath testifying before the 9/11 commission that CTC had kept this information to themselves, and blamed the FBI whom he said had been advised.  In its summation, the commission concluded he had not alerted anyone.  

Black was not relieved of his duties until May of 2002, and not before he sold President George W. Bush on the CIA's ability to send paramilitaries into Afghanistan to rally the rebel forces and help (through massive amounts of air power) overcome the Taliban.  In just a few weeks or months.  Black  also sold President Bush on the rendition and torture policies the CIA adopted in Afghanistan (and later, Iraq).  Evans goes further, and asserts Black's efforts ultimately helped give POTUS (then, and now) a layer or two of distance from responsibility for actions taken on the ground by CIA or other armed forces personnel, by removing Justice Department oversight of renditions and removing POTUS approval for assassinations.

On the one hand, Mr. Black was not convincing in his testimony; on the other, his counsel to President Bush strengthened the power in Bush's office while diminishing rights of due process and personal freedoms.  One might argue that '...in wartime....' but such powers given a man will never be given back.  If by some miracle the spectre of terrorism faded tomorrow, another reason would arise to justify the need of keeping these powers.  Taking those powers out of the box was wrong on many levels.

If the GOP's candidate is successful this election, Mr. Black may find a cabinet spot.  By his lack of honesty shown to the 9/11 commission alone, I find this possibility execrable.  I do not want to even think what might happen should he find himself present, at yet another moment of presidential weakness.

Review I posted in Goodreads.com tonight

Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So: A Memoir by Mark Vonnegut

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Mark Vonnegut writes with the simple and direct style that attracted me to his father's writing. The content is quite readable, including descriptions of the mental illness that came in waves, from his childhood through his adult life. To say more would to spoil the story, so that's it! If you like K Vonnegut you will want to read this, since K is probably as real in your head as he is in mine - and the son speaks through him, more than a little.



View all my reviews