from Caesar Augustus that the entire world should be counted.” St Luke 2:1

I keep debating whether to close the blog, but something, an event, a feeling, a book comes to mind and I know I need to keep going.

Right now, I am watching Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe, a serialized story shown at the movies in 1940, about a superhero, Flash Gordon, who thwarts the evil plans of Ming The Merciless. The story is formulaic, with Flash bouncing from one harrowing deadly situation to another. No sooner is one threat extinguished, than yet another existential threat materializes.

We are obsessed with political melodrama in this country right now, with Good and Evil changing polarities like the alternator on your Plymouth Fury. Each month seems to come with its new episode, foreign intrigue, graft, collusion, plague, impeachment, more plague, more corruption, more graft, more foreign intrigue, more plague

Yada. Yada. Yada.

The political atmosphere has a superficial moral clarity akin to that of professional wrestling.

We even have billionaires wanting to conquer the world, who have allied themselves with “dark” forces, specifically the People’s Republic of China. It is a totalitarian police state that dictates family size, religious practice, and free exchange of ideas. The billionaires have powerful computational devices that can record almost every human activity, from where you buy your groceries to what contraceptive method you use, or don’t use. (If I’m exaggerating, it isn’t by much).

Now, of course, we have to play along with the billionaire oligarchs, because they stand for progress and couldn’t possibly harm us, since they wear nice crew neck sweaters and want the whole world vaccinated. We could have the first “business casual” police state.

They always expect their counting machines, observing machines, recording machines to work, as if their binary code will always be comprehensible. We fully accept the omniscience and invincibility of the high tech connected digital monolith. If Gates, Bezos, Dorsey, and Zuckerberg end up ruling the universe, it will be because we allowed them

Does anybody really think the codes and software and algorithms will live forever? Perhaps I should ask if anyone has a Beta-max© machine they could sell me. Or if they can receive an analog signal on their TV. Did you get your Sears Fall and Winter Catalog for this year?

To get you thinking, whether you want to or not, consider this. Why is one megalomaniac better than another? Adolf Hitler on the one hand, Bill Gates, on the other.

Good Public Relations and cheap dope help. Seriously. As long as you’re happy, what are a few million (or billion) dead people?