The Night King

I'm sometimes asked "Why do you spend so much of your time and money talking about kindness to animals when there is so much cruelty to men?" I answer: "I am working at the roots." -George T. Angell, reformer (5 Jun 1823-1909)


Chris found an unconscious bleeding man in the street outside of work yesterday and ran to the Dunkin' for a cop. ("I'm ill. Run to the golf course and get me a physician!"--W.C. Fields)
Yesterday it took me 70 minutes, with the assistance of two computer techs, for me to sign on the computer at the VA.

Good news. The government is getting efficient. LED lampposts are being installed in cities and public places across the world, only partly because of their economical, energy-saving properties. With the new installations comes a wide range of sensors designed to capture data on public activity. As Chuck Campagna, CEO of lighting company Amerlux, told The New York Times, “We are opening up an entirely new area in lighting applications and services, including video-based security and public safety, parking management, predictive maintenance and more.”
“We see outdoor lighting as the perfect infrastructure to build a brand new network,” added Hugh Martin, chief executive of the company Sensity, which installed smart lighting at Newark airport. “We felt what you’d want to use this network for is to gather information about people and the planet.”

Long-time democratic politician and former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel will join investment bank Centerview Partners, a source familiar with the matter told CNBC Wednesday.

Just a month after leaving the mayor’s office of Chicago, Emanuel will be advising clients on mergers for Centerview, co-founders of the firm told the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news.

Curious that a guy would leave a city in bad economic shape and go manage  money.


And, from Boston:
June is Pride Month, historically a time to celebrate lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer history.

A group in Boston has announced plans to host a “Straight Pride" Parade this summer, although it's unclear whether the city will allow the event.

Mark Sahady, vice president of Super Happy Fun America, a group organized by three men who claim to advocate “on behalf of the straight community,” announced that the parade is tentatively scheduled for Aug. 31. Sahady included a proposed parade route that mirrors the path of the LGBT Pride Parade that takes place on Saturday.

On this day in 1944, Operation Overlord, code named D-Day, occurred--the Allied invasion of northern France. The business of fighting a war is probably not best done as an individual effort. Nor as a startup. Indeed, the very notion of democracy is probably antithetical to war; war demands structure, forced sacrifice of individuals, obedience and the centralization of decision-making. The success of power in war, the success of the militarized state, gives the state undue credit. The decision-making has been handed off in a democratic manner and it's time for the state to get on with it. But the process of democracy has nothing magic about it; it is a defensive system aiming at minimizing the damage to the voter. And in every war, one militarized system loses.

                                      The Night King

Communism was doomed from its inception. Adherents who sneered at the "invisible hand" saw a mysterious invisible force in history that picked its fights toward a idyllic endpoint of incentive-less, motiveless production of peace and wealth, leaving behind a path littered with the bodies of those poor souls only placed on this earth to facilitate as antagonists to communism's great march. This strange murderous idealism violated all the laws of human reality yet staggered on, storming trenches, deracinating appropriate families and slashing and burning the present to plant the seeds of the future. It is said that it attracted the idealist--but who could say its mayhem and murderous creed was, in any way, idealistic? No, it attracted the foolish, the embittered, the cynically ambitious, the irrational and the overtly psychopathic, who unsurprisingly rose in its hierarchy. But eventually, after years of misery and death, the cause flagged, failed and died.

The death of communism was perfectly predictable and those critics who predicted it can be rightfully proud. But they must be surprised by its stubborn death throes. How many people were drafted into its horrible morbid experiment? How many had to die to prove this was a stupid, unworkable and unnatural pipe-dream? And what are the responsibilities of those clear thinking observers who coolly watched this nightmare without interfering? After all, it took the Russian communist state three generations to die.

And how should those people react when confronted with communism's new iterations like socialism and Nazism?