bold bullets

It's been a while since I've posted here. It's not because I've gotten bored or forgotten. Indeed, there are four drafts sitting in my Drafts folder, all of which were eventually abandoned for various reasons.

Mostly, I just feel as though I'm banging my head very hard on a wall. Pound, pound, pound, pound.

First: The presidential election. McCain has tanked pretty badly so far; he seems to be battling senility or Alzheimer's, judging from his behavior in recent weeks. Exacerbating his situation is a running mate who seems very certain that she will be the president soon, while demonstrating a disturbing commonality shared with the current occupant of the White House in many respects, not least of which includes simple elocution. In the meantime, it seems McCain has resorted to a Manchurian Candidate strategy, even stating that Obama had had to return money to illegal Palestinian donors--who had bought T-shirts in bulk from his campaign website but listed an address that confused "Georgia" (the state) with "Gaza" (the strip). Wonderful.

Second: The economy is circling the drain. Or so the media would have one think. The truth is, it's the credit market that is going down; unless the commodities market begins to collapse, the real economy--you know, that thing you actually live in and which confuses you because life still seems normal even though the newspapers say it isn't--is more or less okay. It's a little harder to get a car or a house or a credit card, but that's okay--they should be hard to get. Of course, this is not to say the sky isn't falling; it may very well be, but it's because of large, dark, distant machinery grinding to a halt. There's not a whole lot you can do about it except get a cart and a reliable donkey and bone up on your horticulture. In the meantime, I get to enjoy the alarming experience of actually agreeing with President Bush in his insistence that the economy will be fine in the long run. Of course it will. Our society has been nothing if not resilient. The problem, of course is, how to ensure that resiliency in the future. We need to learn how to build a civilization that will last for thousands of years, come what may, not one which relies on meeting the needs of the moment.

Third: My occupational life. I flew to Washington DC a couple of weeks ago for a job interview. Since then, I have heard nothing. In the meantime, I'm bucking for a promotion at work, which is its own special little source of stress. I would rather tell Bossman where he can put it, but can't do so unless I have an offer in hand from somewhere else. Alas! At least I do live in a fairly nice city with many of its own appealing qualities.

Fourth: My family life. My sister is pregnant again. My parents are McCain supporters. Nuff said.

Fifth: I've figured out why The Sarah Connor Chronicles doesn't quite work. It's a fantastic show, let me say that first of all; I love how it not only has these terrific sci-fi elements but also focuses on the human element as well. An example of this appeared in tonight's episode as the climactic battle was juxtaposed with a reading of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz for a kid's book report.

However, the more I think about it, the more I think that Skynet's tactics aren't quite up to snuff. I mean, sending killer machines disguised as humans back in time to gun down key individuals?

Here's what I would do if I were an evil, globe-spanning AI with the ability to travel in time. Two possibilities.

Option 1: I'd send mobile copies of myself to, say, something like a million years before the present day. This is the most obvious one.
Option 2: If total causality collapse were to be too great a risk to exercise Option 1, I'd simply send small, almost unnoticeable machines to perform a few interesting tasks here and there: decreasing the structural integrity of a construction crane, say, or ensuring that someone's brakes fail at precisely the wrong moment. Why leave behind a chain of suspicious events when seemingly pure accident does the job equally well? To say nothing of the extremely unacceptable potential of human interference otherwise; Sarah Connor and her little coterie certainly seem to be quite skilled at staving off the Ts.

Happily, it seems that the show is working along those lines as well; the extremely unsettling Catherine Weaver would seem to be its embodiment.

However, the decided instability of recent events has me in a pessimistic set. We shall see.