Are my eyes really blue?

“Love him or hate him, right now Bill Clinton could spot you a year, start campaigning in August & still pull 300 electoral votes.”

-John Rogers

Waiting for the Wild Bill speech is the best part of any Democratic convention, even in 1988 when we didn’t know it. Back then, he ran on so long delivering the nominating speech for Michael Dukakis that when he said “And in conclusion” the audience began cheering and clapping. By 2012, over a decade after leaving office, his performance at the convention was absolutely spellbinding, the equivalent of David Ortiz’s amazing year at DH in his last season for Boston. This year? 

Josh Marshall nailed it, I think: he’s old. This isn’t like last time when it was “holy shit, he’s still got it” – this is the lion in winter, your raffish older uncle spinning the family stories you’ve heard a million times. Only this time, it wasn’t his story – he was up there defending his wife, advocating for his wife, saying all the stuff that never makes the news anymore (if it ever did) through two decades of calcification of What Hillary Means ™. Some of it may have come off a little clunky, or a little weird, but it does drive home the point that the 1990s were a different time. Triangulation was the best you could do. You ground away at the coal face and came back the next day and the day after that. It’s not easy and it’s not always fun, but it’s how you go from the Democrats being dependent on finding an acceptable Southern white male in the 90s to replacing a black man with (hopefully) a woman in 2016.

And the longer he talked – the more he got into telling the story and the more things he shared, and God help whoever was running the prompter because Bill Clinton’s personal life motto is FUCK YO TELEPROMPTER LAWYA – he lit up. He got younger before our eyes. He was the happy warrior once again, and he lit up the house and they loved him for it.

It won’t be the same in 2020, win or lose – Hillary will be the incumbent (God willing) and Barack Obama will be the beloved superstar coming back to light the fire. But if this was the last great Bill Clinton convention stemwinder, it was an appropriate reflection of the man himself. Not always quite right, not always entirely appropriate, not remotely on time – but when the jump shots start falling, it’s like watching magic happen.

“You know, it occurs to me we might not get away with this one.”

-Edward R. Murrow to Fred Friendly, Good Night And Good Luck

The late Molly Ivins said of Pat Buchanan’s 1992 culture-war cri de cour, “It probably sounded better in the original German.” Tonight, Donald Trump will give largely the same speech, albeit stripped of almost all religious content. And then evangelicals who ostensibly stand in opposition to the way he lives his life and how he does business and his previously avowed positions on things like abortion and gay marriage (because that’s what evangelical Christianity means now in this country) will run out and back him to the hilt, as will big-money Republicans and their ilk, because that’s the guy on their team. Serious misgivings, outright concerns, all submarined – because the highest catechism of their faith for a quarter century is Hillary is worse. No matter what, Hillary is worse.

Here’s the thing: George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney were objectionable less because of their own beliefs or who they are – to me anyway – than as enablers for a GOP Congress. A thoroughly Southernized body capable of doing great harm to the life of this country with no Democrat in the White House to check them. Donald Trump, though, is a man who among other things has already given a tacit green light to Russia to make mischief in the Baltics. Never mind his agitating for a border wall he can’t build or make Mexico pay for, or a religious pogrom that doesn’t pass the slightest Constitutional scrutiny – Donald Trump would not only enable the creation of the United States of Alabama, he’d push for it. All in on building a new America in the shape of every racist Facebook meme and email forward you ever got sent by that one relative. 

Against this, Hillary Clinton enters the lists as someone the media reviles, someone the country is constantly encouraged to hate and distrust, someone whose own supporters concede may be the Nixon of the Democrats. Uncharismatic, too calculating by half, fairly or not trailing a mild cloud of unproven scandal at all times…but in the end, as the playwright put in song, she’s all we have. A 74-year-old Jewish atheist socialist wasn’t ever going to be able to close the deal, and an O’Malley or Webb weren’t going to either. The Democrats have had their finger in the dike for so long that cultivating the seed corn wasn’t a priority, and so here we are. It’s HRC or bust. 

Because bust is it. You think Brexit was a disaster? Remember how shit-shaped things went under George W. Bush? And he was governor of Texas for six years, and surrounded by the cronies of his father the former President. How much worse will it be with a dilettante from New York real estate whose experience is all in shorting contractors, declaring bankruptcy and slapping his name on anything that can make a buck? And if he tries to do a quarter of what he says he will, we’re looking at a legitimate constitutional crisis within the first year. We are beyond the looking glass already; with a President Trump there’s no telling how much worse it could get.  And yet, people will revert to sexist tropes, say they don’t want to wake up to that voice on the news, say that Hillary is the embodiment of what they call “my first wife” – and pull the lever anyway for a man who isn’t fit to drive the garbage truck, never mind hold the nuclear button. I don’t know what’s worse: doing it because you’re too fucking stupid to know better, or knowing better and doing it anyway because I got mine, fuck you.

And the worst bit is: this might not be enough. Even if HRC wins this one, no party has won a fourth straight election since the Second World War. Which means that there may be a glide path for the GOP in 2020 for Ted Cruz or whoever else wants to take up the banner for what Laurie Penny brilliantly called “weaponized insincerity applied to structured ignorance”. And I don’t know what happens then. But sufficient is the day unto the evil thereof, as the Proverbs tell us. They also tell us “Let him drink…and remember his misery no more.” Which frankly may be the only way I survive the next three and a half months. 

It’s not just politics, honestly. It’s everything. To a certain extent, the things people decry as “political correctness” were known in my youth as “manners.” I hear the HR departments use “GRAPES” now – guns, religion, abortion, politics, economics, sex – but they’re just catching up to life in the 1970s in Alabama. Things like sex, money, religion were not topics of polite conversation. No matter what we might say in private or think to ourselves, slagging off someone because of how they talk or where they’re from or what they believe is just not nice. Pointing out and making a big deal of that one kid in the class who’s a Jehovah’s Witness and doesn’t do the pledge of allegiance would be rude and you could get sent to stand in the corner for it. I find it staggering that small-town Alabama in 1979 had a better grip on that than we do now.

But that’s only part of it. God knows I have gone on at length about the incredibly shitty behavior of people who ride their bikes on train platforms from Palo Alto and Mountain View, but the more I think about it, it’s not that these cyclists in Palo Alto are assholes, it’s just a byproduct of the fact that everyone is an asshole. Because we’ve normalized the absence of empathy, we’ve made it so that you don’t have to acknowledge that other people exist. And there’s a complete and utter mis-appropriation of things that were used to try to make some progress. Yes, there were people who broke the rules and sat in the front of the bus. But guess what – Rosa Parks knew damn well what she was doing, and got arrested, and went to jail. Civil disobedience works because you accept the consequences of breaking the rules and in the process show up how bad the rule is. Yet somehow we got from that to “well this rule is dumb so I will break it and should suffer no consequences for doing it,” as if being made to dismount your motorized one-wheel electric doucheboard is the equivalent of being made to use the colored water fountain.

There are things we have to do to get along as a society of large numbers of people. Let other folks off the elevator, or the bus, or the light rail before you get into it. Don’t talk at the top of your lungs, on speaker, in a crowded commute train. Occasionally look up and be aware of your surroundings going from place to place. Know whether someone was there before you at the Baskin-Robbins counter. And then there are things we do to try to make this a more pleasant life – say thank-you to the bus driver when you disembark. Tip on every drink so the bartender doesn’t get caught short at the shift change. Hold the door if someone is right behind you, not because of some archaic idea about “must hold the door for the lady” but because it’s the polite thing to do for whoever happens to be drafting you.

But the wrong sort of folks – elitists, bigots, racist pricks – used manners and etiquette as a club to go after certain people. And when society misused norms and manners, our solution was not to correct the misuse – it was to just ditch the norms and manners instead. Personally, this is another one I lay at the feet of the Baby Boomers, for whom “fuck your rules, man!” was apparently meant to be some sort of revolutionary philosophy. But the Me Generation’s radical individualism instead got us things like Reaganomics and the end of noblesse oblige and the contemporary doctrine of everyone from the GOP to Silly Con Valley to the pensioners of the entire western world: I got mine, fuck you. 

I wonder how much longer I’ll be able to use Caltrain to commute. I don’t think it’s going to be very long.

So now a Republican-appointed FBI director says that whatever happened with Hillary Clinton’s email, it doesn’t rise to the level of prosecutable offense. Naturally people are melting down, because this has been the essential Clinton problem since 1993: the GOP, still unable to come to terms with the fact they lost that election, believe that any means are legitimate to undo its results. The result is tantamount to being tailed by a state trooper 12 hours straight, and upon finding a pretext for pulling you over, being served with a death warrant.

To anyone who knows jack shit about government IT, this is not surprising in the least. Government IT is a debacle, largely because we must never waste a penny of taxpayer money and we must spare no expense to make sure we never waste a penny of taxpayer money. No for-profit business would ever endure the level of sloth, redundancy and triple-checking that goes into IT at the federal level, where in 2007 I was issued a laptop that Apple discontinued in 2003 and a discussion was mooted about making sure everyone was up to OS X 10.3 just as Apple released 10.5.

Everyone in high-ranking government work pursues some kind of workaround, because relying on government IT to get things done is asking for trouble. I abandoned that POS G4 TiBook within a week and was using a personal MacBook for most of the next two years (okay, it was a long-term loan from my old Apple buddies, but it wasn’t NASA’s for sure). I had my own install of Apple Remote Desktop because using the one copy installed on an XServe in one basement was excruciating. Setting up an imaging solution of the sort I’d used before was a non-starter because there was a six-page setup checklist for new Macs which included enabling the root account (in defiance of pretty much every security standard in the private sector) and setting up an Administrator account with no administrator privileges.

So on that basis, it makes perfect sense that Hills had her own setup. Was it against the rules? Almost certainly. Was it against the law? Possibly. Was it in any way out of the ordinary for similarly-positioned government employees? Not at all, given that all her predecessors in the Internet era either did the same thing themselves or merely eschewed the use of email altogether.

But this is the problem: we have chased that car so many times with the Clintons. Every single nothingburger adds up to the same thing: there’s no there there, but it feeds the conservative instinct that there MUST be an impeachment pony somewhere under that 500 foot pile of horseshit, while simultaneously fueling the instinct of the Clinton-defenders that any suggestion of wrongdoing is yet another travel office-Whitewater-god knows what snipe hunt rather than a possible sign of malfeasance. That’s almost certainly how we got to this point; in fact I am prepared to bet that paranoid control of her own email system in the face of doubters and persons of malicious intent was almost certainly why HRC got a private setup in the first place.

And yet, because it’s Hillary Clinton, we are going to go another fifteen rounds on this while shrugging off the fact that Donald Trump is literally retweeting anti-Semitic memes someone found on Reddit or some such.

Maybe Britain will be cheap enough to escape to.

One of the things that has gotten us to this point in American politics is the erosion of norms…and the development of new ones. Nothing is a bigger exemplar of this than the filibuster, which was once the sort of thing where you actually had to stand up and talk and hold the floor if you wanted to bring the Senate to a screeching halt. The ability to filibuster by saying you were filibustering (so that other things could move along) was the stupidest move in history, because it had the functional impact of normalizing a requirement for 60 votes for anything in the Senate.  I’ve lost count of how many things have gone down to “defeat” in the last six to eight years with 53 or 57 votes simply because a paper filibuster is without cost and nobody in the public both knows any better and cares enough to make a fuss about it.

The other norm that’s gone by the boards is the notion that any and every presidential appointment an be routinely held up by these paper filibusters. Countless appointees twist in the wind, only to find themselves confirmed with 90+ votes once the filibuster is broken. This isn’t about going after some specific wingnut, as happened with Robert Bork – which has been used to justify al manner of foolishness – this is a scorched-earth approach, the ability to routinely deny the President the basic function of government. And it’s a huge risk and amazingly cynical, because it decouples blame from where it belongs.

See, people are losing their mind to the point that they’ll consider Donald Trump a viable candidate because “government doesn’t work.” And why doesn’t government work? Because the government’s been shut down twice in the last five years, because there’s a Supreme Court vacancy sitting untouched, because people are literally dying while they wait for Senate approval, because the normal budgeting process literally doesn’t happen anymore. And all because one side dug in its heels and said NO – and as a result, the partisans of that side scream that government doesn’t work and that only a polyester-haired tosspot can be their savior.

It’s insane. It’s the sort of thing that makes you wonder if Nixon could be impeached in 2016. If a seated President were found to have approved breaking into and bugging the headquarters of the other party, and used Federal resources to cover up the crime, and instructed his attorney general to fire the investigating officer – who would push back on that now? Could you even get impeachment now? Probably not, because the entire concept of impeachment was tarnished when it was used against Clinton – get a special prosecutor to chase conspiracy theories and rumors to the ends of the earth, with an ever expanding remit, get sworn testimony from someone and then get conflicting testimony from the President to create a perjury trap, and impeach on that basis? When the most fearsome tools of government are reduced to instruments of political slap-fighting to undo the result of an election, what possible check does the system have on itself?

That’s the ultimate flaw in our system of government: it relies on a society capable of norms and shame. Neither of those are honored even in the breach at this point, and without those, our system sinks into paralysis because it was meant to rely on negotiation and collaboration, and the idea that eventually you have to make some sort of agreement. That simply isn’t possible anymore, and Mann and Ornstein will be happy to elucidate why. One hopes that the Trump fever will be enough to kill that particular patient and leave the remaining parties able and willing to do a deal…but it’s not always good to hope, and hope is the furthest thing in the world from a plan.

Well, they only went and did it. The narrative is pretty clear from the polling totals: the vote for Britain to leave the EU was old and English. The Scots, the Norn Iron, the youth and London were all in favor of remaining, but in the end, it wasn’t enough to get over the hump. Leave won, 52-48.

David Cameron fucked up, and he knows he fucked up, which is why he’s trying to get the hell out of town and leave this steaming pile for the next guy (probably Boris Johnson, the amiable doofus who thought he was the public face of Leave). The irony is, Cameron agreed to this referendum to try to quiet his own Euroskeptics and keep UKIP at arm’s length – and now Nigel Farage, the eminently-punchable leader of UKIP, is out there as the public face of the Leave victory. As more than one person said “not all the Leave voters are racist but all the racists voted Leave.”

And the truly ironic thing is that the straitened economic circumstances that drove the non-racist Leave vote are less a result of EU policy than of the Cameron government’s own commitment to austerity-based recovery. Thanks to the new five-year Parliaments with no snap elections, this is the closest thing people had to a vote against the status quo, a vote against Cameron, and they took it and swung hard. And now it looks like we could seriously see moves toward Scottish secession and Northern Ireland reunification – so Cameron may go down in history as the man who took Britain out of the EU and England out of the United Kingdom. 

Here’s the thing: while the UK has a reasonably sturdy economy, any time you upset the applecart it’s going to make things rough. It’s not surprising at all that the pound dropped 10% literally overnight and hasn’t gone back up; a lot of people the world round are going to hold their cards and see how things end up for Britain, and in the meantime, the pound trades at its lowest level against the dollar in three decades.  From a strictly selfish point of view, this is a great time to be headed to the UK as a tourist, but you wonder what happens when the next Prime Minister has to go back to square one renegotiating all the trade relationships.

Because here’s the thing: Britain was already loosely tied to the EU. Out of the Euro, given exemptions and rebates, all kinds of extra stuff – and do you think any attempt to get back into the EU is going to come with all those exceptions again? If they go back to the EU with hat in hand, they’re going to be told to shove ha’penny (and rightly so), so I don’t know where Boris is getting this idea that they can suddenly have free movement of Brits around the EU area and free trade while getting concessions on immigration. But then, Boris didn’t have a plan. Nobody did, except for the delusional old farts and their racist fellow travelers who looked at this the way the South looks at Donald Trump or George Wallace: as the avatar of “we’re gonna make things like they used to be.”

But that’s not how the world works.

To be honest, this wasn’t clinched until yesterday, when the Wall Street Journal reported that the notional iPhone 7, so-called, will indeed feature the removal of the analog headphone jack in the cause of making the phone even thinner. This is an alarming decision on a number of fronts, assuming the report can be trusted – but given that most Apple kremlinologists regard the WSJ as the pre-announce channel for all things AAPL, it probably can be.

First off, of course, is the drive for all-things-thinner, which is stupid. The iPhone 6 design is already too thin to contain its own camera entirely within the body of the phone; shaving almost a millimeter off the case is borderline mentally defective at this point. Unless there’s some sort of miracle arc reactor sandwiched into that thinner case, there’s a very real chance you won’t see battery life commensurate with the 6 either, and the 6 was no great shakes to begin with. But phone battery life clearly isn’t a priority for Apple at this point; the 6S came with an even smaller battery than the 6 for the sake of accommodating the technology necessary to facilitate 3D Touch.

(Note here that the Apple Watch tends to finish the day with a good 30-40% of battery left if you put it on in the morning; since the first iPhone, Apple has always gone overboard cutting things down for the sake of battery preservation in 1st-gen hardware, sometimes at the expense of performance. The iPhone 3G had a smaller battery than the iPhone AND more power-draining 3G and A-GPS technology, but the first-gen phone HAD to make it through the day. Same with the watch.)

So here we have an iPhone 7 which of necessity almost cannot have a larger battery than the 6S, and will rely on digital headphones to boot. You’d think the move would be to introduce Lightning-based headphones here, alongside the analog jack, and wait for the next generation of the phone (the purported glass-body all-screen iPhone) to cut out analog, give the market some time to build and people to get used to the idea that yes this can be done and it won’t suck. You’d think. And yet.

More nefarious yet is something that’s being kicked around in different quarters: the notion that digital headphones mean the same restricted audio-out that we now have with video thanks to HDCP as part of the HDMI standard. That’s not an idle concern, not when I can’t play movies downloaded from the Apple store on my Mac mini with the 10-year-old DVI monitor cabled through it. Not when the trend seems to be toward media rental – whereas Steve was firmly in the “buy this song and it’s yours to keep” camp, the rest of the industry keeps shoving its chips in on the celestial-jukebox model. Instead of buying songs, or DVDs, you pay $10 to this provider or that provider or Netflix or Spotify and just stream everything, and that $50 or so a month becomes your new media utility cost (presumably replacing your cable bill, depending on how good your internet access is and how many friends will let you sponge). Like cable TV, it sounds like you’re getting good value for money…until you realize you’ve gone from 15 channels you watch and 10 you couldn’t care less about to 20 channels you watch, 200 you couldn’t care less about, 50 of just infomercials and a bill quadruple what you started with.

Well, here’s the thing: I’ve had this little iPhone SE for a month now. The under-the-hood guts of the 6S without the 3D Touch gimmick shit, crammed into the body of a 5S, with a smaller and thus less power-sucking screen and a larger battery than the 5S had. And in that month, do you know how many times I’ve pulled out the 6?  Zero. It went in a drawer at work the next day and hasn’t been taken out since, let alone turned on or used. I miss the larger screen size not at all. I get home every day with half the battery still there even when I don’t plug in. It fits comfortably in my hand. I haven’t dropped it once. It works fine with every piece of my pre-existing phone infrastructure (except for the dicky Bluetooth headphones, which is surprising not at all because they never work consistently with anything, and the SE connects just fine to Bluetooth in the car without having to do a thing).

Best of all, this phone is mine. I bought it unlocked and un-SIM’d directly from Apple, so I have the choice of keeping the work account there or just popping a T-Mob SIM in for the dirt-cheap $30 plan if I decide I don’t want to be on work’s dime any longer. On current form, I stand to get updates at least through iOS 12 if I want them. Goes in any pocket, nothing protrudes if I don’t have a case, there’s four years’ worth of accessories and infrastructure out there supporting it.

This is what happens when you prioritize a quality product and value for money over design wankery and too-clever-by-half bullshit. No regrets whatsoever. Would do it again, and based on feedback from others, I’m not the only one who thinks so. For all the derision in Silly Con Valley and its amen corner in the tech media, this was the best new iPhone Apple’s produced in years.

Just finished a re-read of Before The Storm, Rick Perlstein’s superlative account of the Goldwater campaign of 1964. The first in his trilogy tracing the development of contemporary conservatism in the 1960s and 1970s – or perhaps, tracing the decline and fall of traditional Republicanism – it informs a lot of the nonsense we see going on today.

Barry Goldwater was in no way orthogonal to the conservative movement in the 1950s and early 1960s – he was in sympathy with the people Perlstein opens the book by describing: the traditional Midwestern manufacturing firms, family-owned, who felt tremendously hard-done-by in the aftermath of depression and war by an emerging political consensus that was pro-union, pro-government and agreeable to Eastern money interests rather than Midwestern business. That belief system was neatly bundled with anti-Communist paranoia from Birchers and the like, and the whole thing dovetailed neatly into the Southern doctrine of massive resistance to desegregation and civil rights, and before you know it, Barry Goldwater – stalwart libertarian, NAACP sympathizer, generally mistrustful of big government, and a Senator who would crack wise late in life about being an “honorary homosexual” for defending the rights of gay soldiers to join and remain in the service – Barry Goldwater found himself riding a noisy racist tiger with no easy way to climb off.

The description of the movement – paranoid, anti-government, looking for Reds under every flat surface, convinced the United States was being led down the road to ruin – is functionally indistinguishable from the Tea Party GOP as it exists today. It found its perfect avatar in Sarah Palin and led eight years on to Donald Trump – no politician at all, no experience in government of any kind, just a notionally-self-funded barbaric yawp, the id of the worst of America made manifest. Unlike Senator Goldwater, he seems to be in this thing mostly for the greater glory of Trump, as one yahoo after another makes an ass of themselves proclaiming how great he is and how he’s gonna stick it to the Mooslims or the Messicans or whatever else.

This is the dilemma – yes, there are serious issues in American life right now as the economy crumbles underneath the feet of the have-nots. Silicon Valley is firmly committed to its goal of abstracting away the Morlocks to the Eloi can enjoy their best life, while it becomes rapidly apparently that nobody has a plan once every cashier is automated away by an app and that we can’t have a hundred million people driving delivery. Especially when the self-driving cars arrive. And God help you if all you have is a 401(k), because it’s starting to become apparent that basing your retirement on someone else’s stock speculation was a fool’s errand. If you feel like the whole world is turning on you and that the game is rigged and you’re getting the short end of the stick, guess what? It’s not paranoia if they’re genuinely out to get you.

But.

If you think Trump is the answer – if you think a reality-TV hairpiece driven by the comment section at AL.com and the kinds of things that aging white men think sound great on Twitter is the person who’s going to solve everything – then you are stupid. Full stop. You want political correctness run amuck, here it is: thirty percent of the country is stupid enough to vote for this idiot for President and we’re not allowed to call a spade a spade. Miss me with this shit about how it’s wrong and dangerous to mock these people. Some of their problems are real. Some of their concerns are very legitimate. We’ve spent years nursing this doctrine that everyone can be a tremendous success and that it’s all your fault if you aren’t, and it’s not unreasonable to expect people to be looking for someone to blame, but scapegoating grounded in racism and bigotry and the notion that somehow “Mr. Trump” is going to wind the clock back fifty years so that white people can stay immune to the consequences of their actions – that. is. fucking. stupid.

And the truly ironic thing is that all of this paranoia, all of this anti-government rage, all of this THANGS AIN’T JESUS LIKE THEY USTA BE, all this idea that the wealth creators and the well-to-do are the ones REALLY being done wrong in the modern economy and that the working class and poor are the lucky duckies – every bit of that is sitting right there in the late 1950s, in that golden era that people want to go back to now. Replace the Mexicans and the Muslims with the blacks and the Communists and piss and moan about the New Deal and Social Security instead of Obamacare and it’s exactly the same. Dubya didn’t invent I Got Mine Fuck You. Neither did Reagan. Neither did Goldwater, for crying out loud. This has been with us for three generations and probably beyond, and you can probably take it back to the “malefactors of great wealth” that another Republican railed against in his day if you want to dig. They’re selling the same old vintage-1959 liquid shit in shiny new bottles with two-day Prime delivery for free, and our political consensus is too battered by forty years of fuckery to tell them to shove that shit back where they got it from.

The GOP has been riding this tiger in some form or another for fifty years and change. Now they’ve fallen off in front of it. It’s important for us as a society to shoot that tiger dead before it can do any more harm…once it’s done with lunch.

I haven’t said much about the case of Brock Turner here, if anything. It’s not that surprising, in a world of FSU and Baylor and God only knows how many other schools covering for athletes. At least he withdrew from Stanford under duress in a couple of weeks and they don’t appear to have done much to cover for him. (NB: in the 24 hours since I wrote this part, it’s come out that the Stanford women’s swim team wanted to attest to this dude’s inherent creep factor and inappropriate behavior and may have been discouraged from doing so; if true, Stanford Athletics is a rapist-enabling cesspool. But I digress.)

(An instructive comparison is to a school that had a horrifying incident in 2013. That institution called the cops themselves, expelled the perpetrators within 48 hours, kicked another player off the team for obstructing the investigation, and three years on, the establishment the perpetrators drank at beforehand is STILL off limits to all varsity athletes. But I don’t want a cookie for that, because you don’t deserve hurrahs and hosannas for some shit you’re SUPPOSED to do.)

No, the horrifying thing here in Santa Clara County is that the jury found this brat guilty, and the judge – on the advice of the probation officer, it appears – sentenced him to a whopping six months in jail, when the average sentence is six years in the state pen. And made things even worse by going on at length about how the perpetrator is already suffering and shouldn’t have his life ruined.

Which is offensive enough even without taking into account the statements from the rest of his family and friends – yes, you expect them to make the best of things in imploring the judge not to sentence their little boy to be married to the guy with the most cigarettes, fair enough. But the staggering tone-deafness of the statements suggests that these people actually think that Brock Turner is the victim of Demon Rum, and that exposure to alcohol is the true perpetrator of this crime and ruined everyone’s life.

To borrow the sardonic words of PJ O’Rourke, “he’s not a criminal. If he were, he’d be poorer and darker-skinned.”

Santa Clara County in 2016 is the Big Rock Candy Mountain for well-to-do white guys. You come here to live it up and get rich. VCs will shoot money out of a firehouse if you look like Mark Zuckerberg. (This is not a lie or an exaggeration. I am not making this shit up.) And you sort of have to ask yourself: what has Silly Con Valley churned out in the last three years? The phone has crossed the finish line, the Apple Watch is officially back to the drawing board (watchOS 3 is basically an admission that the UX needs to be torn up and started over), we have incremental changes at best to things like laptops and networking and buzzword-compliant stuff like “big data” and “deep learning” and the like. The action, the growth, the big noise is in the likes of Uber, which will drive you around. Or Doordash or Postmates, which will bring you dinner. Or Snapchat, which will maybe get the girl to send them nudes if she thinks they disappear in 10 seconds.

It is very very difficult not to get the sense that Silly Con Valley’s main focus is currently set on making it possible to be a fifteen-year-old boy, forever.

It’s the Whiffle Life, as PJ himself eloquently described it. Corners rounded off, edges dulled, difficulty set on Rookie – if you are young and white and male and well-to-do, the red carpet is rolled out for you to come here and live it up, and never mind the hassle and inconvenience of other people in the world. Everything can be somebody else’s problem or somebody else’s fault. If you fucked up, you can be safely caught and placed back on the carousel, because it’s a learning experience. And that’s how a candyflipping rapist gets to become a poor naif who never expected that drinking in college would lead him into such an awful situation and he must dedicate his life to fighting the scourge of alcohol which placed a gun to his temple and forced him into this tragic turn of events for his future.

Here’s what I’d love. I’d love to roll up behind Brock Turner at Stanford Shopping Center and break his ribs with a ball bat before he ever sees what’s coming. I’d love for him to start to step into the Marguerite bus and suddenly find himself knocked to the ground and stampeded by everyone getting off.  I’d love for him to walk down University Avenue at 1 AM and walk faster and faster because half a dozen shadowy figures are behind him with another one joining the crowd every block.  You aren’t special. You aren’t bulletproof. You aren’t safe from the world. There is no Whiffle Life, there is no force field, there is no bubble, and you will not be protected from the consequences of your actions.

And when he’s gone insane living in fear, maybe the rest of those fuckers will get the message. But probably not.

It was somewhere on the outskirts of Manteca where it set in: I really like this car.

Not just because the mileage is better than anything I’ve ever driven up to and including my Saturn SC2, which could eke out over 35 mpg if you filled it with premium and drove it on fresh asphalt at freeway speed. Not just because of the sensor array that provides extra warning of blind-spot cars or crossing pedestrians behind or imminent curbs in front. Not just because it’s the third straight car to carry the plates affirming my loyalty to my squad, though that still means a lot.

No, the reason it clicked for good was because I was out behind the wheel on a bright sunny day in rural California, orchards of almonds to either side of a two-lane road, blue sky shining through a panoramic glass roof, the wife and I luxuriating in black leather bucket seats with plenty of legroom, steering a big yet agile yet comfortable Chevy through the parts of California most people don’t think about while swing music from the 1940s played through the sat-radio.

It does me no end of good to get the hell out of Silly Con Valley, for reasons I have elucidated before and doubtless will again (probably in the very next post). The last ride for Harvey was to Santa Barbara and back on 101; that drive is one of my favorite things to do because most of the world knows Hollywood, San Francisco, “L.A.” and “Silicon Valley” and there is SO much else in the nation’s most populous state and the world’s sixth largest economy. This is where your food comes from. This is where a lot of your lumber probably comes from. There are towns here that you drive through of a Friday evening and think – the African-American people are Latino instead and the churches are Catholic rather than Baptist, and the sporting obsession is probably the Giants instead of the Crimson Tide, but in almost any other respect, you could be back in Alabama, in any town of 8000 or so. It’s not a long leap from Fultondale to Gonzales.

Five years ago, my wife had the presence of mind to rent a Dodge Charger for our trip to Louisiana and Alabama. I drove this big growling car through the byways of the South, from New Orleans to Mobile then up to Birmingham and back to Canal Street, and something about it just felt right. Big comfortable domestic car, away from town, seeing the countryside. I didn’t realize how much that hearkened back to the days of riding around in my Monte Carlo with a sackful of Milo’s, listening to Alabama football games. There’s something akin to that in the haul down 101, getting around traffic by taking the Monterrey Road instead until you get closer to Gilroy, and then winding down the same route as historic El Camino Real with the sun setting. Distant sight of fields of produce, or dusty warehouses, or the silhouette of an oil well, or a train passing in the night.

Get out. Get away. Go further than the Caltrain or the VTA can take you, away from the bubble, away from the echo chamber, and see the rest of the world. That’s what this car can do for me now. And at 40+ miles per gallon, we can actually do it in a way that just wasn’t possible at 25mpg. And I can see the whole of California, not just the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

Of which more presently.