Are my eyes really blue?

Ten years ago this week, the shit jumped off.  I got paged an hour before my usual start time on a Monday morning asking for all hands to come in because of a problem with the domain.  Turns out the infrastructure group had killed the primary domain controller, with no backup – meaning 1400 workstations would need individual visits to reconnect them.  We did it in three days, largely through the efforts of my own group, who would still be there at 7 or 8 PM at night when the actual domain admins – who created the situation – rolled out at 5 PM mumbling something about catching a train.  Not us, though – we gutted it out, we fought off ridiculous suggestions from uninvolved managers, we engaged in a floor-by-floor clean sweep, and we prevailed.  Within two weeks, we also had a massive viral outbreak – and again, floor-by-floor, hand-to-hand combat to clean it up.  And before the summer was over, we were at it again, upgrading Lotus Notes in the same fashion: floor by floor and hand-to-hand.

Memory is the great palliative. I remembered those times with a lot more fondness during the nightmarish run at work this spring.  I missed having my crew, I missed my gang, I missed shoulder-to-shoulder with the people who got things done, with lunch and the 4Ps and the Mudd House as our rallying points.  We were the greatest.  In my mind, the summer of 2003 is one big whirl of music from the newly-opened iTunes Music Store and cigars from Courtney’s place and mad dashes to airports and the swagger and confidence of knowing I was damned good at what I did and that any technical conundrum thrown at me could be thwarted.

But looking back and reading the blog posts and email and such, I was plenty miserable enough – enough, in fact, that I was talking about hoping this was my last awful DC summer even before the shit jumped off.  I was exasperated with technical limitations, with idiotic upper management, with clueless and obnoxious and antagonistic users, with rival technology units undermining us…basically everything that would happen again ten years later.  Technical swag was no match for the unholy trinity of money, politics and bullshit, then or now.

I suppose in the grand scheme of things, it really has been worse this time out, because I don’t have my old gang around me for support and because my physical health and well-being have had ten years to deteriorate. But everything else echoes perfectly.  Even my relatives were a problem back then – not to the same extent as in more recent years, but enough to have a deleterious effect on my quality of life.  And back then, I always had an escape plan – California.  I didn’t know exactly when or how, but I knew that someday soon I would punch out, eject, and my girlfriend and I would escape to Silicon Valley.  The West is the best. Get here, we’ll do the rest.

To hear others tell it, I’m apparently worse now than I was then, which isn’t surprising. I’m older, I’m frustrated that the same problem has come around again in exactly the same fashion, I’m feeling my age and thinking about my future, and the Grim Reaper’s always doing pushups in the corner and is, hello, undefeated.  I don’t see a long-term future for the job I do now, I don’t know that I want to stick around this employer much longer (not least because the questionable management is going nowhere fast), and I don’t want to have to work until I’m 70.  Then again, that’s how long the mortgage runs.

My incredible good luck continued – nine years ago this week, we arrived in California for good.  Within a month, we had a place of our own and I had a contract job that would turn into permanent employment within a year. I started to build a new life for myself, and successfully at that.  On aggregate, I’ve had a pretty good run on the left coast these past nine years.  But when it’s gone shit-shaped, it’s gone all the way.

It’s called life.  Best just to get on with it.

The jury more or less nailed it, for what it’s worth. Under Florida law, if a defendant kills someone and claims self-defense, the burden of proof is on the prosecution to demonstrate the killing wasn’t self-defense.  Which basically means you can start a fight with no witnesses, kill the other party, claim self-defense, and be assured of getting off scot-free because there’s no one to gainsay you.

It’s a hell of a way to run a state, but then, America’s flaccid wang is a hell of a state to begin with.  But it’s of a piece with other things, like North Carolina sneaking its abortion restrictions through on a bill to prohibit sharia law (proving that North Carolina Republicans are immune to death by irony poisoning). Or Texas calling one special session after another until they can hammer through a law that makes it illegal for a woman to use RU-486 – a far safer method of pregnancy termination than surgical intervention, and one that requires a doctor’s involvement in any event – in the privacy of her own home.  Or half a dozen states leaping at the opportunity to impose restrictions on voting in the absence of any preclearance mechanism for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The Civil Cold War is heating up.  The general result of the last two or three years of state-level activity and Supreme Court decisions has been to return to a pre-Civil Rights’ interpretation of “states rights”, apparently leaning heavily on the idea that it’s better to get forgiveness than permission and that the best way to bring about their own promised land is to implement it red state by red state while merely tying up the federal government otherwise.  No need to win even a single house of Congress, or the White House – six years of record-breaking filibuster numbers are all that’s required to grind government to a halt.

So where do we go from here? It’s unlikely that the Supreme Court will step into the fray on the side of the federal government; quite the contrary, based on what we’ve seen thus far. (The Court didn’t affirm gay marriage; they punted on an open-and-shut case of standing, and one where the decision has been specifically handcrafted to pass muster with the swing vote.) It won’t take long before there’s an entire block of states, all under neo-Confederate governance, with strikingly similar laws across the board requiring voter ID and tightening up non-traditional voting, regulating abortion almost out of existence, and putting a gun on every hip with a green light to use it. Basically, we’re headed toward secession on the cheap.  Once they create their old white man’s paradise, they may be reluctant to give it up.  And that’s when the trouble really starts.

I called it.  I called it twenty years ago. But hey, there was no difference between Gore and Bush, right?

So apparently in Florida, you can see something you think is suspicious, chase after it even after the police dispatcher tells you not to, get in a fight and kill the unarmed person you were chasing, skate for six weeks, and then get acquitted by a jury.

George Zimmerman is the poster child for the people who want to need the guns. He is the inevitable result of the NRA and its legal pursuits over the last decades. He should probably hang onto that gun, because there are plenty of people who wouldn’t mind picking a fight with him and “standing their ground.”

Garbage politics from a garbage state. Anyone with a lick of sense needs to stay the hell out of Florida until they get over their case of Wild West penis envy. I suspect it’ll take a while.

Nine years ago this morning, my fiancee and I woke up early and quietly let ourselves out of my ex-girlfriend’s place, where we spent our last night as residents of greater DC – because almost all our worldly goods were on a truck for California.  We stopped back by my old apartment, stuffed the last things into the cars, and I locked up and walked to the office to hand over the keys and the parking pass.  And when I walked back from the office to my apartment, I had the strangest sensation that I was rolling back the last seven years and for one brief moment, I stood there in front of the old WPA-era brick apartments as if it were the trailing days of autumn 1997 and I were seeing it for the first time.

And then we left.

The drive took two weeks, first swinging down south and then back up to St Louis before setting a more even western course – including a night at the Peabody in Memphis, a dash through tornadoes to a hotel in Russell, Kansas, a three-day stop in Colorado after my Saturn’s fan stopped working properly, and my worst night at a craps table in history at the Silver Legacy in Reno.  But for the most part, the memory is of emptying another $2 12-pack of soft drink cans into the front-seat cooler and covering it with ice from the motel’s machine, then flying down the road at a steady 75-mile-an-hour clip, smoking cigars from the care package my DC tobacconist had prepared as a parting gift and playing the BBC World Service on XM (occasionally interspersed with Top 20 on 20 or maybe even the Broadway channel if I felt particularly cheeky).  There were days we knew we had to make 500 miles before dinner, and there was nothing for it but to check the handheld radios, make sure we were in range, and put the hammer down.

It was a highly liminal state of being.  Ever since committing to the move a couple or three months earlier, I had resolutely not thought about California.  Wouldn’t allow it. I didn’t want to develop any expectations or preconceptions or anything that would ultimately lead to letdown or disappointment.  Didn’t think about where I might end up working, or where we might end up living – the one slip-up I did have was thinking “not long until I get my VW New Beetle!” and sure enough, it didn’t come along for over two years and had become a Rabbit by the time it finally did.  But in all other respects, I was blindly charging into the future and trying hard not to think about what came next.  The devil I knew, for once, was worse than the devil I didn’t.

Nine years ago.

That’s longer than my entire college life combined, longer than I spent residing in the DMV, damn near three-quarters of my entire relationship with my wife.  I did visit DC four times in the first year, and I’ve made it back four times since then.  I miss my gang to this day, I miss the mere fact of having that sort of gang, I miss being shoulder-to-shoulder with the Rifles of the–

–and yet it turns out that wasn’t enough to make work tolerable when California beckoned.  So it’s probably foolish to think that having that sort of crew again, even if it were possible, would be enough to make tolerable a job that in every particular is the equal or worse of what I ran out on in 2004.  This heat wave has even taken out the climate advantage, the last thing holding an edge for NowJob.  Workload? Same.  Responsibility without authority? Same. Duties well outside the remit of my actual job responsibilities?  Worse now, and with fewer co-workers and without my gang backing me up. Cigar shop to escape to? Shit, are you serious? This is California. Management without a clue? Worse, because instead of reporting to the best boss I ever had, I report to the sort of clueless hack who was his boss back East.  Money?  On paper I make more money – but once you adjust for the passage of nine years and the cost of living from Northern Virginia to Silicon Valley, I’m prepared to bet (but can’t afford to pay up) that the actual value of my compensation is, at best, dead level.

But I think the bigger issue – as with everything that seems wrong with my life these last sixteen months – is the age. Things that seem surmountable and plausible at 32 are a lot less so at 41. I’ve gotten married, I’ve got a house, I’ve been to Europe three times and seen the revival of Vanderbilt athletics and the reinvention of mobility computing – but because I’m doing the exact same job in an environment as close to the same as makes no difference, it feels like I’m stuck in the mud while my friends join new companies or get amazing promotions or just take the reins of their own lives and strike out in their own direction rather than treading water.

At some point – some way, some how – I have to stop defaulting to the devil I know. And that means learning to seek out the devil I don’t.  It’s not a small shift.

* A few weeks back, I had the misfortune to catch some CNBC show where a random scientist was being interviewed and some remark was made about how there need to be more scientists in Congress.

No there don’t.  There don’t need to be more doctors in Congress.  There don’t need to be more businessmen.  You know why?  Because there’s absolutely nothing preventing a Congresscritter from asking a scientist for information. Or a doctor. Or a businessman.  Government doesn’t run like a business, so the thought that a CEO would somehow have a better grip is ridiculous.  Government doesn’t snap to and do exactly what you demand, so a surgeon would be lost in the tall grass. Basically, what we need is what Great Britain has: parliamentary government, with no separation of executive head-of-government and legislature, plus a highly professionalized civil service.  That, more than anything we supposedly get from separation of powers, would get us back to a more center-seeking model.  A truly ironic thought as we head to the 4th of July.

 

* For that matter, the number one thing that Great Britain has over us right now is that their Tea Party is a mockable fringe that is considered beyond the pale by most of the country, rather than being in the drivers’ seat for the Tories.  Sure, David Cameron is worried about local elections in some spots, but the BNP is not setting the agenda for the Conservative Party.  British politics completely lacks that Southern-style religiously-motivated social-conservative aspect that has completely owned the GOP these last twenty-plus years.  Which is ironic for a country that we split off from over religious freedom, a country with a hereditary monarch who is head of the state church.  Happy Independence Day!

 

* Verizon Wireless has very impressive LTE speed.  Verizon Wireless has ridiculously overrated network coverage.  I mocked AT&T for “more bars in more places” but Verizon’s vaunted largest network seems to permanently run at about 2 bars everywhere I am unless I stand next to a tower.  As a result, my iPhone’s battery life is struggling – right now, it’s lost more power than the three-year-old-and-running-a-beta iPhone 4 I’ve been using to play podcasts nonstop for over two hours, and I’ve been trying to use the 4 to do some browsing and other stuff (with varying degrees of success; beta is still beta, and at one point I had to delete and reinstall Podcasts to get it going again).

 

* I don’t know what’s stranger: that I routinely walk out the front door with $2500 worth of amazing electronic wizardry in a bag over my shoulder, or that $2500 doesn’t seem like that much money for a laptop, a tablet and a mobile phone.  And this being June, it made me think that since my father died in 1998, the world has changed radically.  Never mind the iPhone – routine cellphone ownership and pervasive use of computers in the workplace were just becoming a thing. Broadband, text messaging, Wi-Fi, GPS, social networking, HDTV, digital media…as long as you can afford $99 plus a two year contract, you can basically do fucking magic by 1980s standards.  Just don’t try doing it on beta software, not if you’re trying to do production work.  The iPhone 4 is back in the drawer.

 

* So during the ten-day weekend a while back (a LONG while back at this point), it was announced that Super Bowl L has been awarded to San Francisco.  Meaning, of course, to Santa Clara, where the new 49ers stadium resides.  Resides in the middle of nowhere, to be honest.  Sure, there’s an Amtrak line nearby and a light rail track cutting straight through and they appear to be putting in a huge parking deck, but let’s be honest: all the action other than the game itself will be in and around San Francisco.

This is sort of the deal that pro sports teams angle for: build your team a nice new arena, generally at taxpayers’ expense, and you’ll be rewarded with A Super Bowl, or An All-Star Game.  Besides, if you don’t, they’ll move to Los Angeles (NFL) or Las Vegas (most everyone else).  In this case, a one-off event where the bulk of the action is happening 40 miles north.  Great job, Santa Clara!

Actually, right now, there are riots in Brazil over this – about the amount of public money going into the World Cup (and presumably the Olympics) when social services are strapped. And this in perhaps the most soccer-mad of all nations. But they’ve figured it out: big-time sports largely revolves around the siphoning off vast public monies to the benefit of the leagues and teams and federations.  And that – rather than any social instability – is why FIFA is so concerned about the rioting in Brazil.

 

*Speaking of riots, what the hell is going on down in Texas? The GOP tries to outlaw abortion by regulatory death (so much for the heavy hand of government regulation), is stood up by a legit filibuster for almost 12 hours, and then after forcing a close to the filibuster because of an alleged breach of a Senate rule, passes the bill after midnight in violation of a Senate rule.  I’ll probably have more thoughts on this later, largely around why the Feds reading your email isn’t a patch on the fear one should have of a state legislature getting full of themselves…

 

* Meanwhile, DOMA gets thrown out on equal protection grounds, Prop 8 remanded to the original ruling, and with no governor or attorney general willing to defend it, odds are pretty good that it’s a dead letter at this point. For all intents and purposes, gay marriage is legal in California. SF PRIDE this weekend will be a circus hitched to a tornado with a generous admixture of Mardi Gras, Wrestlemania, and a hanging.  Although in light of the Court’s turn on the Voting Rights Act, that’s a particularly unsavory and inappropriate reference.  Odd, isn’t it, that the world has supposedly changed enough since 1965 to invalidate VRA, but not so much since 1787 that the Second Amendment shouldn’t be a blanket license for unlimited private ownership of military weapons.

 

*The confluence of Paula Deen, Trayvon Martin and the functional crippling of the Voting Rights Act is unpleasant but informative, and drives home for me the point that we are still at least 25 years away from being able to treat the South as if it were any other part of the country. Segregation is still living memory, and there are people dismayed at the coming of VRA who have lived to celebrate its effective demise. That shouldn’t have happened.  VRA is in theory authorized until 2031, and that’s when we could get away with dumping sections 4 and 5.  Not now, and not in a world with the kind of voting shenanigans seen in 2012 – if anything, you want to repair Section 4? Apply it to the whole country.  Meantime, Texas and Mississippi have already announced they’re moving forward with their Voter ID program.  For fucksakes, rednecks, at least make an effort to pretend you aren’t dying to shit on the brown people.

 

* So apparently Edward Snowden didn’t realize this would be such a big deal, didn’t expect that Hong Kong would be as restrictive of freedom as he found it, took the job in the first place with the intent of ferreting out information about classified programs, says he has information to release about the US spying on other countries…

I’m done.  I’m through. I don’t know how many times I have to say it, but civil disobedience relies heavily on buy the ticket, take the ride.  Rosa Parks didn’t high-tail it out of Montgomery.  All Edward Snowden has done is prove that he is incredibly naive and appallingly stupid about the world outside his laptop – in other words, your typical Silicon Valley Millenial techie type.  All he needs is a neckbeard and a Google hoodie. By and large, what he’s succeeded in doing is striking up a string of international incidents, making the story all about him, and completely distracting from the fact that we still need to have a conversation about the balance between domestic surveillance and national security.  Sure, he did something important, but he also did a lot of stupid shit that’s going to bury the important bits.  Hero?  No.  Asshole?  Utterly.

 

* The great challenge in life is not changing the world, it’s learning how to cope with a world that doesn’t change.  And to borrow a line from the great Sinatra, I’m for whatever gets you through the night – be that prayer, tranquilizers or a bottle of Jack Daniels.

“We’re going to arrest anyone who commits a crime in front of this security camera. Now unplug the camera.”

That’s the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was unanimously re-authorized in 2006 by a Republican-controlled Congress and signed by George W Bush, but which today had section 4 struck down by the Supreme Court in a 5-4 vote.

Section 5 is what everyone was concerned with. Section 5 is the “preclearance” section, which basically says that jurisdictions that have a history of voting discrimination have to have any changes to voting law cleared by the Justice Department.  There have been over 30 such cases since the last re-authorization.

But section 4 lays out the formula for what constitutes a history of voting discrimination. Section 4 determines who is subject to the preclearance requirements in section 5.  And the Supreme Court tossed out section 4, on the ground that its formula and requirements as crafted in 1965 are outdated and that the country has changed; thus the Congress should rework section 4.

Two thoughts:

1) I’m sure Paula Deen and George Zimmerman will be relieved to hear there is no longer racism in the South.  Trayvon Martin may have a dissenting opinion, except he doesn’t because he’s dead.  So it goes.

2) In a Congress that won’t pass routine debt ceiling bills to authorize the money they’ve already spent, in a Congress that can’t pass an operating budget for years at a time, is there any chance whatsoever that the GOP will ever – ever – vote out a replacement for section 4 that even bothers to put its dentures in? In a world where the Republican party is indisputably of the South, by the South and for the South, the Court has asked the South to take charge of patrolling its own racism.

So does this mean an immediate return to Jim Crow? Not as such.  But stand by for things like an end to early voting, tighter restrictions on absentee balloting, ever-tighter mandatory ID requirements, and shorter polling hours on the big day – anything that tightens participation and makes it tougher to vote.  I don’t think the state of Alabama would have the balls to redistrict itself to eliminate the majority-minority districts and guarantee 7 GOP representatives from the state in the 2014 elections, but right now, there’s nothing to prevent it; they could do it and the only recourse would be a lawsuit after the fact.

SO basically the two memes floating around Twitter are both right:

1) “Privilege” is never having to worry about your rights being up for a vote.

2) Two justices appointed by Junior Bush just shitcanned the Voting Rights Act, but hey, Ralph Nader said there was no difference between Gore and Bush anyway.

Assholes.

It’s not looking good for young Edward Snowden. Flees Hong Kong ahead of an extradition request from the US – and color me shocked that the Chinese government punted – only to fly through Russia en route to – where? Ecuador, apparently, via Cuba. The optics are not good.

Far worse than the optics, though, is the prospect that he is now leaking information about how the US spies on other counties. It’s one thing if you’re concerned about how much the US is intruding on the lives of its own citizens – that’s a conversation that needed to be had ten years ago when Rob Watson of the BBC was interviewing me about it on a street corner in Georgetown, but as with so many things, let’s overlook how long it took Americans to notice there was an elephant in the bathtub and instead celebrate the realization that the circus is, in fact, in town.

But.

Other nations don’t have Fourth Amendment rights. Foreign countries – some actively hostile to US interests, many additional ones passive-aggressive in ways that would draw the envy of any southern sorority girl – are in fact legitimate targets of espionage. The days of “Gentlemen do not read each others’ mail” are long past. Intelligence gathering beyond our borders is a huge part of the reason we have a National Security Agency in the first place.

More to the point, it’s going off the page. Edward Snowden depicted himself as a martyr to privacy and the rights of the individual, and his defenders pointed out that he was hardly the indiscriminate naïf that Bradley Manning proved himself to be, because he was detailing the surveillance of Americans by their own government. But if he’s now discussing our intelligence arrangements vis-a-vis other nations, it seems to me he’s gone frog-sticking without a light. One almost expects him to pull the same “citizen of the world” dodge that jerk from Facebook tried to employ in the interest of ducking his taxes.

Nevertheless: buy the ticket, take the ride. Actions have consequences. Blowing the lid off the American intelligence machine at home and abroad is likely to have even more. Doing so in conjunction with a jaunt through countries whose leaders make up a nontrivial chunk of the USA’s official Legion of Doom for the last fifty years…it’s not the best way to present yourself as a simon-pure defender of constitutional liberty.

There is a very real possibility that when the smoke clears, Edward Snowden will prove to be a highly idealistic, highly unrealistic Millenial techie too far up his own ass to contemplate the real-world consequences of what he has done.

(seven!)*

 

So I have a beta of iOS 7 running on my old iPhone 4.  I did not want it on my production phone, because I’m not an idiot and I don’t use beta operating systems on mission-critical equipment.  I also recognize that putting a beta OS on a three year old smartphone is asking for terrible performance, so any concerns about speed, responsiveness, etc. will have to wait until a shipping version hits my carry phone.

Also a reminder: the 4 has a T-Mobile prepaid SIM and no data service.  This is basically an iPod Touch from 2010 with the additional phone functionality of a MOTOFONE F3 glued on.  Some functions may not be present at all or highly limited.

With that:

 

* The look of the thing, much-debated, strikes me for now as change for the sake of change.  This isn’t an overhaul of the design, this is a re-skinning for the sake of appeasing people who were bored of the old UI. The underlying functionality is the same – everything is where it was, this is literally just new chrome – and I don’t know if it’s just the newness, but it feels challenging in a way that recalls the move from Mac OS 9 to OS X.  And given what a radical change that was, it’s a bigger conceptual leap than should be necessary from iOS 6 to 7.

* When you zoom in the Maps app, you get a tiny scale bar in the upper-right corner.  I don’t think I’ve seen a scale reference on any smartphone map ever.  This is extremely cool and useful.

* Filters are a colossal waste of time, but it’s one of those things, like streaming radio, that are apparently the price of entry these days.  Could be worse; at least they’re not all cutesy animal names like Flickr’s filters.

* The touchpad to enter your passcode shows the background picture through the buttons when pressed.  Or through the hairline thinness of the buttons themselves.

* The new window-card app switcher is more or less a straight lift from WebOS, right down to the flick-up-to-dismiss. RIP WebOS, proof that it was really the best challenger out there to the iPhone had it only had smarter partners.

* Speaking of straight lift, Yahoo would be well within their rights to be FRISBEE pissed at the new Weather app.  I mean, it’s the same goddamn app.  It’s Samsung-caliber duplication.

* The prospect of Google Now-ish functions in the notification center is something I like, but when it’s bright and sunny out and the thing says “Partly cloudy conditions with low visibility” something needs work.  It hasn’t been sufficiently overcast all day.

* Although many will say it’s a rip-off, the new Control Center is something that the OS has needed since…well, arguably since day one.  One-touch access to the camera (remember when double-clicking the home button was the camera shortcut?) or the calculator (how often do I need that at the gas station?) or the timer (okay, if I cooked anything that needed a timer this would be good), plus iTunes controls, one-touch for AirPlay (basically the stuff at the far end of the old app switcher).  Best of all, one-touch for brightness, airplane mode, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.  Yes, it’s kind of crowded-looking, but I’m not sure how to clean it up; I’m just grateful to have it at all.

* I also like the new Calendar approach: opens to the day, from which you can back out to the month, and from there to the year – but I don’t dig having not even a dot on the date in month view to show something there.  The List view is also missing, which is something I’ve gotten a lot of utility from in the past.

* Handy that the clock shows how many hours ahead or behind the other world cities beyond your time zone are.

* The white translucent (or just plain white) backgrounds to everything really drive home the point: the white iPhone is the de facto “default” now.

 

I know and accept that this is the first public cut at re-inventing iOS.  Yes, it’s too clever by half IMHO, but it’s also the first cut.  One hopes that by October, when I expect a new iPhone, the UI will be polished and refined from months of contact with developers attempting real-world use.  As always, you have to trust the process.

Of which, etc.

 

 

* Shout out to Friends =)

“You know if we’d lost here in Vietnam, I think it might’ve driven us crazy. Y’know, as a country.”

-The Comedian to Dr Manhattan, Watchmen (1985)

Alan Moore was right. It did drive us crazy. It exposed the limits of America in the 1960s, it made us feel like everything we thought we knew was suddenly not to be trusted. Stalemate against a third-rate Soviet satellite state, corruption in the Oval Office leading to resignation, then the shock of an energy crisis and the coming of stagflation, and then Iran…nobody who saw Argo should wonder how Reagan could win so handily in 1980. People just wanted to forget it ever happened.

Flash forward twenty years.

The first decade of the 21st century was an unmitigated disaster. A controversial election, ultimately awarded to the candidate with fewer votes by a score of 5-4. Then, a rag-tag group of terrorists hits a royal flush on the last card. The country freaks out, the leadership capitalizes, and we go down a rathole of fear and paranoia and blind stupid panic for years. Incompetence is piled on incompetence. A great American city drowns. The economy treads water. The housing market inflates and collapses. The banking sector shits the bed, the economy implodes, and God sends us a messenger in the form of the ex-mayor of Wasilla to show us just how far we sunk. And so, we hand the reins to the nice colored fella…

…and we wake up the next morning and agree to forget how we got here.

The GOP was only too happy to hit the reset button and pass the buck. All the better: they could play scorched earth, launder their brand behind the “Tea Party” label, and rely on a tired nation not to want to re-litigate the past. Yes, we have tens of thousands of troops bogged down in two foreign wars, unemployment is skyrocketing, banks need massive taxpayer bailouts, General Motors is on the verge of collapse…and that’s just how it was when we woke up. No thought to how we got here. Not a lick of consideration to the root causes. Most importantly, no attempt to make sure it won’t happen again. Stock market is running away again, banks are steaming along knowing they have a rescuer of last resort, unemployment – real unemployment, not the formula figure – is still double digits, and the Republicans are running further to the right with every passing election cycle.

I think September 11 drove us a little crazy. It drove us into a world of pant-shitting terror and the kind of stupid that comes when you’re so scared you’ll hurt yourself, like the guy who sees a snake and breaks his leg trying to run. It led us to freedom fries and burning Dixie Chicks records and endless “reality” television and ever-more-drool-faced cable “news”. And we were so embarrassed at what we did to ourselves that we decided to make a fresh start from where we were, without ever correcting what got us there.

Which is how we got here, now. Am I disappointed in Barack Obama over his failure to curtail runaway NSA surveillance? Sure, especially when he campaigned against it five years ago. But I also know full well that had he shut it down in any meaningful way, the first successful terrorist attack would immediately lead to charges that he had kept us from being warned, kept us from defending ourselves, that his indifference to the terrorist threat had let it happen. Hell, that’s already the gist of the constant drumbeat of Benghazi!! from the GOP and its amen corner in the press. Imagine an attack on the scale of the Boston bombing, where the suspects aren’t reeled in by the end of the week, and imagine it happens six months after the NSA publicly shuts down the PRISM project. Guaranteed at least 66% chance of impeachment in the House within a month.

Obama’s had five years to shut this thing down. The Congress has had seven years to raise hell about it. The American people have had four trips to the ballot box where they could have held their elected officials to judgement over the invasion of privacy and the surveillance of an overreaching government. But nobody does. Maybe it’s because we’re still scared, maybe it’s because we don’t much care, but maybe it’s because we’re ashamed to go back and openly look at how we got to the point of needing that program in the first place.

Ronald D. Moore, in his Battlestar Galactica reboot – to this day, perhaps the best artistic comment on September 11 yet – put in Commander Adama’s mouth the cutting sentence “Sooner or later, the day comes when you can’t hide from the things you’ve done anymore.” That day may be here, it may not. But it needs to come soon. We as a nation have to confront what we did ourselves, and what we were complicit in allowing others to do in our name. We can’t agree to forget, we can’t agree to disagree, we can’t hush it up in the name of comity and good feeling – especially when those who were let up off the mat use it as an opportunity to pull the knives out again and blame others for presiding over the mess they made themselves.

I don’t know what it’s going to take. It’s not as simple as clamping down on big finance and taxing the ridiculously rich and muzzling the watchdogs of the surveillance state. It’s going to take some sober reflection, and some admission that we ourselves lost our damn minds, and acknowledgement that we handed the bullets to Deputy Barney Fife instead of Sheriff Andy Taylor. And we will need to learn and accept what we did wrong so that hopefully we won’t do it again the next time something bad happens.

But on current form, it’s not going to happen anytime soon. Nobody likes to admit they were wrong. We don’t do contrition. Not in America.

* Apple really is convinced they have the power problem licked. If they’re really allowing “true” multitasking and doing automatic background updates of apps and revamping the UI to the point that transparency is the new skeuomorphism, then either the 2013 iPhone will have an i7 CPU and 16 GB of RAM and an arc reactor in back, or it will be dead every day by 10:30 AM.  Door number three implies that Jony Ive and his gang actually graduated from Hogwarts and have licensed a Time-Turner or similar.  This one is the grand bull moose gold medal “I’ll believe it when I see it” of updates.

* No iWatch.  No iTelevision. No competition for Google Glass.  Let the howls of outrage commence.  And yet, when you think about it, the new-look iCloud is something that has to work to make possible all that other bullshit.  After all, centralized notifications – delete one place and it’s done everywhere – is the sort of thing you’d want working on any notional iWatch, correct?  Once iCloud is in place to act as the backbone for everything you want to pass between machines, it’s easier to just hang a watch off the same service.  Or a television. Or contact lenses. Or whatever.

* Note that iTunes Radio is free and ad-free with iTunes Match, which I’m already paying $25/year for.  Don’t know if that will do for Spotify or not, but iTunes in the Cloud and iTunes Match and now iTunes Radio are all part and parcel of something I’ve been thinking about for a while: ten years ago, Steve Jobs was pitching the Mac as “the hub of your digital life.” Your digital camera, your iPod, your CD collection, all flowing through your Macintosh.  Now, in 2013, the aim is plainly for iCloud to become that hub, for better or worse.  It’s not unlike what Google has wanted you to do for years now, although in Apple’s case it seems to be more about  “make sure all your devices are concurrent” rather than “be the central repository at which everything looks.” 

* Yes, this new iOS cribs shamelessly from Android, Windows Phone, and the late lamented WebOS.  I think at some level Apple has decided “screw it, if everyone is going to steal from everyone then we’re just going to take what we want and to hell with it.”  The result looks like all the best bits of other interfaces while still remaining iOS – the learning curve won’t be sharp at all.  At least we can hope.

* The filters thing is entirely out of hand.  I’m so over filters.  It’s getting ridiculous.

* Automatic web search from within Siri…using Bing. How things have changed.  If this were Yahoo, it would be huge, and sort of make sense – as it is, it’s just a little bewildering; the last thing Apple needs at this point is another frenemy relationship like the one that led to the Maps fiasco. Although having Wikipedia in Siri will do nicely.  Save me the time of launching Google, speaking the search term, scrolling down to the Wiki entry and tapping.

* It seems like the white iOS devices are now the official “default,” much the same way that the MacBook Air has become the “default” Mac. And much as I prefer the black, I think the white legitimately looks better without a case, especially with those well-lit low corner shots with the gleam of the chamfered aluminum.

* Once again, I’m convinced we are looking at October.  It usually takes four months.  Look for the next-gen iPhone to arrive with the fall leaves.