Kurt Vonnegut would be 94 today. His words and thought experiments shaped who I am. He made me a better person. I’m glad he kept his shit together for as long as he did.
From Kurt’s “Cold Turkey” essay in 2004:
“There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president”.
If you’re like me, then you may be looking for some distractions this week that don’t involve Twitter, the internet, television or even other humans. I’ve found solace in iBooks and the Kindle service. Hardbound and Viki for Wikipedia are also great distractions.
It’s a long holiday this weekend in the U.S. Here are a couple of excellent articles about the “Moral Economy” to keep you busy during your travels and parties. What’s the moral economy? Well, read them. They aren’t just smart, they are well written and often humorous.
The Moral Economy of Tech by Maciej (of Pinboard.in fame):
As computer programmers, our formative intellectual experience is working with deterministic systems that have been designed by other human beings.
From RT.com:
Coming out of the Stone Age, the chieftain and his descendants controlled the population and reproduction through a new hierarchical system of powerful elites which, much like his bloodline, continues to this day.
The gifs in the article are particularly rediculous but it’s an interesting finding. It also has a pretty good summary at the end.
The study also proved that all of us, no matter what race, nationality, or religion, are cousins from Africa, as 100 percent of the men tested descend from just one man who lived 190,000 years ago, more than a centamillennium before humanoids left Africa to explore the planet.
I like Louis CK unironically. I like him for the same reasons I like George Carlin, because he makes me think, then laugh, then think some more. I think both comedians are intellectual giants. Now Louis CK has created the anti-sitcom. It’s a tragic comedy minus the comedy. Horace and Pete is 10 episodes of raw humanity that is both disturbing and satisfying.
Horace and Pete focuses on a single family-owned bar but manages to cover a lot of forbidden sitcom territory.
These were conincidentally back to back in my pinboard reading list.
Imposter Syndrome or Not by John Scalzi
Also also, with respect to novels and fiction, I had been a professional writer for fifteen years before my first novel was published, so I had a decade and a half (not to mention several non-fiction books published prior to Old Man’s War) to get used to the idea that writing was a thing I could do.
By Cord Jefferson:
“Sometimes people are mean, and sometimes things will be hard. One of your jobs is to try and make sure that that never makes you mean and hard, too.”
Then later:
If you’re ever interested in feeling as if you’re on the verge of losing your mind, you need complete only a two-step process:
Find a way to give someone you love deeply a life-threatening disease, and While your loved one is at home battling death, stand in a restaurant line behind a person complaining loudly that their burrito came with sour cream, even though they asked for no sour cream, and they guess they’ll just eat it with the sour cream, even though the calories, but maybe they should get a discount now, or, like, a soda?
This is a terrific Vimeo short film. It’s high quality and tells an entire story in undfer 9 minutes.
An interesting study, the data of which, I have not verified.
If the poverty rates for each educational bin remained the same, then the upward redistribution of adults from the lower bins to the higher bins would have led to lower overall poverty. But that’s not what happened.
Later:
The big things that cause poverty for adults over the age of 25 in a low-welfare capitalist society—old-age, disability, unemployment, having children—do not go away just because you have a better degree.
True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.
— Kurt Vonnegut1
Happy birthday to one of the best people our species has ever managed to squirt out. Go read Slaughterhouse Five or Cat’s Cradle or Bluebeard or just read a bit about someone that knew a few things about humans.2
Probably. I’ve never found a reliable source for the quote.
