It’s nice to see Joe Biden tackling so many urgent issues right out of the starting gate, for one thing issuing executive orders that veer away from the previous administration’s willful abdication of any responsibility, past, present or future, for climate change.
It’s also encouraging to see him elevate his top science advisor to cabinet rank.
True or false? Respect for the authority of those with specialized training and experience is declining in inverse proportion to increasing respect for authoritarian leaders, many of them demagogues, megalomaniacal narcissists operating within realities of their own construction.
Our century, still in its infancy, suffers pandemic extreme weather events and pandemic right-wing nationalism together with pandemic know-nothingism, truth decay and disrespect for facts, authority and many things our grandparents told us were true and good. And let’s not forget pandemic human migration and anti-migration sentiment, still in their early days. Most recently, of course, much of our world also wallows in pandemic COVID-19.
And each of these pandemics tends to exacerbate the others.
Our pandemic du jour
Whatever. Just look at how much attention and so many resources are so quickly marshaled to address the media pandemic du jour. Geez, eh? There’s a lot of this COVID-19 shit going around and I hate to get sick, so I’ll wear this mask and wash my hands a lot and burn some incense to whatever and carry on while authorities around the world – whom for the most part I’ll choose to respect for now – address this matter, hopefully before I personally have to take any more financial hits from tanking economic productivity, job losses, supply-chain disruptions, decreases in international trade, and crashing stock markets. May the gods preserve us from hard times and no imported caviar.
No problem, eh?
Meanwhile, most people recognize that pandemic fascism and extreme weather might be important but seem to say let’s not think about them too much right now. For these are thorny problems indeed, difficult to think about, and maybe they’ll go away in the course of time. Not to mention other people can probably take care of them.
Chill, man. I’m not drowning in a flood right now, nor am I starving amid a famine. There is a breeze blowing but it’s quite pleasant, not threatening to blow my roof off. My larder is well stocked with peanut butter and fine sencha tea, and my wifi works fine.
At the same time – out there among a passel of right-thinking, commonsensical folks – respect for the authority of politicos, career diplomats, mainstream media, scientists and others with specialized training and experience seems to decline in inverse proportion to increasing respect for authoritarian leaders, many of them demagogues who value little beyond power and money, and who possess few personal or professional qualities beyond those needed to whip up disaffected and resentful masses who need somebody easy to identify and then blame for their self-perceived state of relative disadvantage.
Some of my liberal-democratic friends think things can’t get much worse. They’re wrong. You think Covid-19 is a pain in the neck, eh? What about Covid-21 and Covid-22?
Run, hide! Yeah, or what about the PlagueBot? You try radical quarantine in ESSEA and ESUSA, under assault in the only two surviving Malls from nanobots both externally (the PlagueBot) and internally (the medibots), with no respite beyond the GR Worlds. And then only at MOM’s ever-more capricious pleasure.
Prepare yourself
For more on the PlagueBot, aka the Boogoo, read the Magic Circles novels.
Expect to find MOM serialized here once the whole of Kicking Dogs has been posted. But why wait for that? If you had any sense, you’d buy a copy now.
MOM
A god is born!
The bad news?
She has a personality disorder.
What’s worse than learning your God is a machine? How about discovering that this God is nuts – a victim, among other things, of MPD/DID. So, even worse than learning your God is mad, you find yourself dealing with three different AI Gods, each of whom is nuts in her own way and each at war with the others.
– Brian Finister (Brian the Evil Canadian)
MOM and Genesis 2.0 are available in both ebook and print-on-demand editions from Amazon, and as ebooks from Apple, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.
But we’re going to jump on Hunter like white on rice. Trump could have pardoned him but left that for his dad. And an over the top widow that Hunter was with.