Category: Scarred Brain murmurings

Jimmy Buffett has died. (For future reference if the link breaks, this is to the NY Post story I saw bout it after seeing his name trending on TwitterX)

For most people, this is a bit of a sad celebrity aside.

For me, however, it’s bringing up all sorts of thoughts, primarily, “should I try to tell my mother about this?”

This is the day after I bought tickets for my wife and I to travel down to Biloxi to see her later this year. She’s in memory care. When I can get in touch with her, it’s never a sure thing that there’ll be a coherent conversation.

There are periods of lucidity, but most of the time, if a conversation starts, it goes nowhere quickly.

So, why would this have been important to me (and her)?

My parents followed his career, and were fans. They’d started following him as he’d peek in to his, alma mater, The University of Southern Mississippi. My dad was there 1969-73. My mother was in and out as her husband was off doing things in the Army as one of the last class of Lieutenant Dans for Vietnam. (He was in Infantry Officer Basic at Fort BenningMoore when the Paris Peace Accords were signed. (His Infantry Battalion was quickly rerouted to Okinawa with the end of hostilities. This also relates back to something my cousin and I were discussing, as he wants to meet up with my wife and I when we come down this fall. I have a strong suspicion that the Po’boy shop near his house is named for a guy who purportedly called my dad a draft dodger because he went to college to be an officer instead of enlisting. My dad wanted to be like his grandfather, who’d been an Army officer during World War I.)

My dad ended up spend nearly the next quarter-century on active duty as an Army officer. I have memories of Jimmy Buffett tapes coming through tinny speakers.

My mother got on a plane for the first time in 1973 to join her fresh 2LT husband in Okinawa after the redirection.

He’s now in Arlington. She’s back in memory care in Mississippi.

Do I even bother to try and tell her about it?

I really don’t know.

The music and lifestyle with which he made a name for himself really aren’t my cup of (“tea” would be in appropriate, so put in whichever boat drink you like…).

Though there were mentions in earlier parts of his career, I didn’t care much for the Marijuana references. I still have never smoked weed, despite my time in broadcast, and having MS!)

So a puzzling day two of what should have been a four-day weekend for me. Fair winds and following sea to Mr. Buffett. I want some coffee.

One of the things I’ve been kicking around today is where, logically, an appeal to authority who can use force falls. It’s not completely the logical Argument From Authority, but appeal to someone else who can do something, forcefully, bad to you.

I am really guilty of this, professionally; we can’t do what you’re trying to do because $rule.

In the political context, however, I think there’s something further. You think X should be a violation of Y law.

What do you want the enforcers to do about it?

Carry it through to the ultimate conclusion.

You’ve snitched; you’ve called the cops, now what do you think the cops should do?

I’m wondering if taking that sort of response is really a bad tack….

After a week off, I’m back to doing what I do on the weekend. Pretty much. I’m on puppy duty after an unspeakably long Friday.

It’s a situation where I’ve been handed something that, yes, I’ve done in hte past, but I really don’t have a good idea what’s going on, and my physical limitations are really negatively affecting my performance.

Maybe I’ll be better when I head there next week to try again. Maybe I’ll have more energy because I won’t have been trapsing around a very notable NoVA landmark.

Navigating that place is difficult for healthy people. For someone with the various malaise I have, it’s damned near impossible.

Even moreso when the neat indices are flirting with triple digits.

Thankfully, Remy, who’s written artfully about the Metro, perfectly-encapsulated the mood among the rich men North of Richmond.

Dear Oliver Anthony,

It's hard for us too. 😢

Sincerely,
The Rich Men North of Richmond pic.twitter.com/PSXiAJLAux

— Remy 💥😃 (@GoRemy) August 25, 2023

I think I got the WMATA short bus stuff figured out again. Need to have some more papers filled, and probably go into the District for an are-you-really-disabled exam.

Am I Sofa King done? *shrug*

I’ll keep trying until I can’t anymore.

Kind of how I roll. Always has been. But, legitimately, I’m near the end. A bit depressing?

Maybe.

Have I been listening to Exile In Guyville for unknown reasons? Yep.

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A lot of the thinking this morning is flavored by the latest WTF episode. Don’t wanna hear what I have to say? Okay. I’m going to keep doing and thinking what I want. I can leave.

But I am tired, and having vague flashes of dread about the full dose of the medication Tuesday.

Do I alter my plans to potentially accommodate a negative reaction?

I don’t know.

And worrying about it isn’t going to do me much good.

So, while I’m responsible for the dog the next couple of days, I’m going to try to enjoy that as much as I can.

And I guess we’ll see how the week plays out.

The tagline of this site is applicable again.

The too-cool-for-school crowd decided that the thing to do for private messaging would be use WhatsApp.

Yeah, about that.

Your messages are not irretrievable. Sorry, Hunter. No, Mister Lawyer, it’s not illegal. If the intended recipient got them, and stoed them somewhere accessible, they’re there to be snarfed.

CyberSekurity r hard.

Even if E2E encryption works, they do get stored.

Though it’s not straightforward, you can export ALL messages, and the contents contained therein.

These are not forever private if they’re stored somewhere locally.

If you’re trying to use them to avoid records being kept, that’s your issue.

I remember we when I was 42.

But the significance of it is from The Hitchhikers Guide series. The entire purpose “Deep Thought,” Planet Earth, itself, was to determine the meaning of Live, The Universe, and Everything.

After millions of years of work, it finished its research, and returned the answer — 42

I was reminded of this by reading this from Reason. The author who’d come in planning to write about the Dutch guilds as early versions of capitalist cooperation, asked several of the commonly-used AI instances when capitalism started.

All provided different answers, but none touched on what he wanted to write about.

I asked Microsoft Bing: “When was capitalism invented?” Bing said: “1776.”

An answer longer than 42, certainly, but still not correct.

It made me think of my time in college. There was a final in Business Law. One of the questions was pretty straightforward, and I eagerly went to work on it.

I used probably four Blue Books writing my response. Just me and my blue-black inked fountain pen.

I left the exam feeling great about what I’d written.

Being that it was finals, I didn’t see the professor in-person again. She did send me my grade via whatever messaging system the university was using in the dark basically pre-web days of the Internets.

Her response was something along the lines of “Well-reasoned using tort law. You should have used the UCC. C.“

I ended up with a B in the class, but it certainly didn’t give me the relaxing summer I’d been expecting; it still stings today about a quarter-century later.

But it ties back into the AI discussion because I think the author really showed the limitations.

So I wonder if there’s going to need to be two additional questions when you suspect someone’s used AI to do research.

While AI tools did you use?

Which questions did you ask? Verbatim. Justify how/why you chose those questions.

Bubuhbut they’re takin’ our jerbs!

No, there’s ways to use the tools. You just have to be savvy enough to ask the right questions, use multiple tools, and draw conclusions based on the varying results you collected.

This is not a one-shot effort.

But it also speaks to things like the scientific method where you publish everything you did so that others can reproduce your work.

THAT’S PROPRITERY INFORMATION.

No. No it’s not.

That sound you just heard was the sound of thousands of 80s and 90s MBAs’ heads exploding.

Spent a good portion of the day today finishing up The Most Hated Man On The Internet.

What a douchenozzle.

At the same time, so you’ve got pics of your boobies on the Intertubes, okay. You haven’t shown those to me willingly, so I’m going to ignore them. You’re human; you’ve got them.

That they’re up there has no bearing on how I view you.

And no amount of litigation is going to make them go away. Very few things actually ever get deleted.

You can find pretty much anything.

I’m sure there’s shit I said on Usenet, or on mailing lists when I was a teenager that I no longer thing. Whatever.

“I really don’t remember that,” is an acceptable answer if someone asks.

That’s true for an asshole missive, or pics of your tits.

If it was last week, that might be a different story, but you have to allow people to present themselves for what they are now, not what they were.

Does that make me a bit inconsistent considering how I treat some commercial companies? Yeah. But I do treat individuals differently.

But the main message is that, no, everything doesn’t actually get deleted.

I understand this is a problem for those who want to carefully-tailor narratives; we have always been at war with Oceana.

But I do take extensive notes, hide things in places where they’re not easily-found.

But very little of it actually goes away.

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Today is Fathers’ Day. I phoned my well-into-his-nineties’ grandfather, and texted my father-in-law.

Going to see my dad’s headstone is something I really don’t have the stamina for, unfortunately.

When you leave.

I’ve been following along with the news, especially the backlash retailers are experiencing with “Pride,” loosely after my apartment was flooded again at 0230EDT last Thursday morning.

I think things are kinda-sorta getting back together. We’ve got a lot of stuff that we’ve got to have hauled out, but we’re back home since Wednesday. Big thanks to my MIL for coming up to help with the cleanup and reorganization.

In amongst the chaos at home, I did watch the last episode of Vice News Tonight. I will have trouble missing it. They didn’t really say anything about that being the last episode. The episode, itself, focused on some guy who died in Mississippi under suspicious circumstances. Was he lynched? Um…he was not hanged publicly for the public to see. Nobody quite understands the circumstances of his death. But, that the Podunk law enforcement agencies haven’t spent considerable time and effort trying to find who lynched him means that he was killed like it’s still 1963. Nothing’s changed. (And that’s why it’s important that the cheerleaders for the party of Jim Eastland must come down to set things straight….)

I was more bummed about Kennedy’s departure from FOX Business. It was fascinating to see her transition from the token Republican on MTV to a Libertarian stalwart. In spite of her too-frequent dalliances with the NeoHips, I will miss her show.

Maybe I’d find something else. Maybe not. Whatever.

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But back to the not paying too-close attention to the news, there’s been a bit of controversy over Twitter’s brief cancellation of What IS A Woman?. While I’m happy Elon Musk overrode his employees’ inclination to bury it, it’s still something I really just don’t care to watch.

Without the burial, there’s nothing subversive about trying to find it. I simply don’t care about the movie, or its producer.

But with the controversies about what Target has done with transgender swimwear, too, it’s something I care very little about. While I think what they’ve done is a bad business decision, there’s very little for me to do about it aside from shopping there even less than I do now.

If that makes me a bigot, great. What was your name again? Where do you like do you work? Where to you like to shop? Great. I’ll make sure I avoid those places, too.

But that’s about all I’m going to say about it.

See the title. I have the right not to participate. I have the right to deny you my business.

I’m not going to proclaim loudly either of those choices.

If you think that makes me a bad person, again, Whatever.

Probably because I didn’t work yesterday.

I’ve been listening to things on Substack this morning. I do really appreciate the text-to-speech feature. Reading things is very difficult with my vision the way it is

Latest listen? Justin Amash’s birthday wish to F.A. Hayek. I appreciate the sentiments, but it doesn’t square well at all with the MiCaucs; laws are just to be ignored when they don’t suit whatever whim you’ve got at the moment.

And this is why the Libertarian Party of Virginia is gone.

Working within the system of laws is too mard, for Morans, we won, so GTFO.

.

If a law, or regulation tracing to it, is unjust change it. You can’t just ignore it.

Okay, CATO, we get that the Jones Act is stupid. Help someone on the Hill to pass a bill to repeal it. (Full disclosure on this — I do donate money to CATO…)

But beyond the justification of laws and regulations, the permanence is the problem.

Like the blessed Assault Weapons Ban, or the Bush Tax Cuts, sunset them. They address a particular problem for a fixed amount of time. If they’re still needed, pass a new law that does the same thing.

Been thinking a lot lately about Eddie Willers. (Cliffs Notes version…)

I started down this line of thinking after listening to an episode of Your Welcome where the guest posited that every single person can be best at one thing, and that it’s a good thing to promote that.

Mmm….not sure I agree. Can you be proficient enough at one thing to make yourself useful to someone else in furtherance of another goal? It Doesn’t Take A Hero. (Yes, the sorts of high school side reading that stem from being the son of an Army officer…)

Your abilities also change over time. Mine have been significantly affected (negatively) by my medical condition. So maybe I’m not what I was meant to be, what I’m best at, but I can still do various things, and derive a sense of accomplishment from doing those things that maybe aren’t my forte. But no matter what you end up doing, do it as well as you can, nad get the rewards from that.

And try to enjoy those rewards. (One of the places I really fall down; I beat myself for accolades…)

Back to Eddie, however — he’s not one of the bad guys, even if it’s not one of the incredible protagonists. He’s not stupid. I mean, in the early aughts, he might have driven a Dodge Stratus.

But that’s not the temperament he had in the book, or the movie(s).

He was always loyal to a goal set by someone else. I think there’s something admirable about that…even if he wasn’t doing the single thing at which he was best.