Hubris is a word Mr. Carlson does not seem to know: ‘Highly Offensive’ Tucker Carlson Messages Stunned Fox News Execs Before Exit: Report
I made a point of this, so might as well as point out After meeting with Holcomb's office, Republican lawmakers nix effort to privatize DCS attorneys
Working on the screenplay while drinking with Bob.
7:52 am
I kept working on the screenplay until about 9:30, along with showering and shaving. Then I went off to McClure's to catch the bus and get a pack of Luckies. I thought all was going well until the bus came. All I had on me was a $2 bill, and the bus could not take it. I sent the bus on, and called my sister. She was to meet at the west side Walmart. Instead, she came to get me here.
We got the new CPAP. I tried it out this afternoon, after she left. This will help.
She got to the food stamps office. Maybe they will get the information on my not working. I need to check on that tomorrow.
We came back here, and she helped me get "The Masque of the Red Death" up on Draft2Digital. After the nap, I found out there was a problem with the cover. I will have to see if I can attend to that tonight. For some reason unknown to me, I have not been able to access the site. Nor can I get to The Scotsman. All I know is it is a problem with this computer. I hope it is not my monitoring software.
I asked her to take up typing the remainder of my "Dead and Dying" stories. She is worried about timing, and I am thinking something is better than nothing. I too far behind in the schedule I set for myself back 2021.
Again, with the vague, nauseating headache behind my left eye, so I took a nap. There was no way II could concentrate on writing. Or reading.
Here I am at 5:50 pm.
Valerie Perrine is still alive, but not well: Ailing ‘Superman’ Star Valerie Perrine Finally Finds Her Hero: “The Guy Should Be Sainted”. You do not know Perrine, too bad for you.
‘Worst-case scenario’: Rick Wilson on Tucker Carlson, presidential nominee; but could he get elected? Hubris again seems likely. But Biden better start doing more union meetings and get a little more vinegar in his diet.
I have really neglected the pretrial detention journal. This weekend... I hope.
Pence appears before Jan. 6 grand jury in Trump special counsel probe, but did he say anything? Did he give the government proof of Trump's intent? Meanwhile, the world goes on.
My sister got talking about some kid who died in prison, was put in solitary confinement at 16. I had this in today's email and forgot to show it to her while she was here and just emailed the link to her: No Human Contact: On Solitary Confinement’s Origins as a Tool for Handling Mental Illness.
Taking a break to deal with my book cover.
sch 6:29
Last year, I wrote Writer: Mae West. Today, JStor published Mae West and Camp, which discusses briefly her plays and provides links to further discussion of those plays.
My sister told me her grandchildren have cell phones. One is eleven or eight, I cannot remember. This I think is nuts. She says to me to stop acting like an old man. Well, serendipity intruded in my life this evening. Thank you, The Bulwark, for You Have Permission to Be a Smartphone Skeptic:
These powerful instruments represent a technological advance on par with that of the power loom or the automobile. The achievement can be difficult to properly appreciate because instead of exerting power over physical processes and raw materials, they operate on social processes and the human psyche: They are designed to maximize attention, to make it as difficult as possible to look away. Their success can be measured by the fact that they have transformed the qualitative experience of existing in the world. They give a person’s sociality the appearance and feeling of a theoretically endless open network, while in reality, algorithms quietly sort users into ideological, aesthetic, memetic cattle chutes of content.
Importantly, the process by which smartphones change us requires no agency or judgment on the part of a teen user, and yet that process is designed to provide what feels like a perfectly natural, inevitable, and complete experience of the world. Smartphones offer a tactile portal to a novel digital environment, and this environment is not the kind of space you enter and leave. It is not a particular activity that you start and stop and resume, and it is not a social scene that you might abandon when it suits you. It is instead a complete shadow world of endless images; disembodied, manipulable personas; and the ever-present gaze of others. It lives in your pocket and in your mind.
This shadow world is always available to you. The price you pay for its availability—and the engine of its functioning—is that you are always available to it, as well. Unless you have a strength of will that eludes most adults, its emissaries can find you at any hour and in any place to issue your summons to the grim pleasure palace.
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No one wants to come down on the side of tamping off pleasures and suppressing teen activity. Nobody wants to be the wild-eyed internet warrior claiming some toxin that peer-reviewed studies have yet to identify has irreparably harmed their child. No one wants to be the shrill or leaden antagonist of a thousand beloved movies, inciting moral panics, scheming about how to stop the youths from dancing on Sunday. But commercial pioneers are only just beginning to explore new frontiers in the profit-driven, smartphone-enabled weaponization of our own pleasures against us. To limit your moral imagination to the archetypes of the fun-loving rebel versus the stodgy enforcers in response to this emerging reality is to choose to navigate it with blinders on, to be a useful idiot for the robber barons of online life rather than a challenger to the corrupt order they maintain. It is to substitute the arrested, cringing desire to be cool—and, if not young, youth adjacent—for the basic responsibilities of adult rule. And no one else will take up those responsibilities if we do not, although we will still be ruled all the same.
The very basic question that needs to be asked with every product rollout and implementation is what technologies enable a good human life? But even in a time of explainer journalism and “infotainment,” this question is not, ultimately, the province of social scientists, notwithstanding how useful their work may be on the narrower questions involved. It is the free privilege, it is the heavy burden, for all of us, to think—to deliberate and make judgments about human good, about what kind of world we want to live in, and to take action according to that thought.
KH calls me a luddite because I do not like my phone. I keep pressing the mute button when I am talking; it does not ring when there are incoming calls. It was interesting today watching my sister operate her laptop while uploading my play. She really does not know how to use her laptop - a very nice HP product - and she admits this. Programs kept popping up - McAfee antivirus (which reminds me why I got rid of McAfee years ago) - which annoyed yet did not know how to get rid of until I showed her to uninstall. As she said, she never worked in an office where she had to use a computer. (I also learned she had no idea how to save a file or type in a word processor). Yet, she finds her phone indispensable for getting from one place to another. I suspect she thinks me a Luddite, also. Thing is I learned long ago, computers are a tool and like all tools they have limits and bad uses. I truly think my spelling is worse after computers than before. Anyway, nice to see someone else who thinks there are limits to smartphones, that we need to be suspicious of them.
I have been working on the play and Draft2Digital, trying to fix the cover. It appears I need to delete today's upload.
Items from the past week, I have not had time to deal with (waiting on a phone call, KH):
- ‘It’s all in the damn history books’: David Lynch rails against the death of cinema - I really like Lynch's work, but I found out this week there is no way I can watch Blue Velvet at 6 am.
- 100 must-read classics, as chosen by our readers from Penguin; I have not read 34 of the books on the list. I also noticed I read a bunch when I was young and then a bigger bunch when I was in prison. I would not put Ayn Rand on any list.
- Finding an unexpected $1.5 billion could mean an avalanche of investment, but I bet Hoosiers will still be paying for school textbooks and our roads will be pothole laden.
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