Brian Wilson

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A memento Brian left at an Iowa Ballroom to honor another groundbreaking rocker, who would in a few hours die in a plane on a snowy field a few miles away

 

One of my Facebook Groups is devoted to a Sacramento of the past. Comprised mainly of Boomers like myself, we talk about the old times and places. Someone brought up the time the Beach Boys came to Sacramento in 1963 to play at our Memorial Auditorium. Admission was something that would seem foreign today – something like $3. It seems these days with the near collapse of the recording industry (and pirated and cheap tracks on Amazon), a band must make their money on tour. Anyway, the concert was so good they made an album of it.

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Langston Hughes, George Orwell, and the Tea Party

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Waxing nostalgic about the Tea Party and how it was marginalized, creating the void that Trump would later fill, I thought I’d reprint a November 5, 2010 post from my long-neglected blog.

For those of you who brought your Langston Hughes collections, turn to the poem Harlem:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Hughes may have had a particular tragedy in mind, but despair is universal, and he eloquently captures its essence. Deferred dreams are met in different ways. Some people give up. Some get angry at the dream, or at themselves for having it. Some manage to savor the dream, whether they have any real hope in achieving it or not. Some sink into chronic despair. And some “explode” – that is, they drive themselves to some desperate act.

How does a dream explode?

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Got to Go…

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So Trump bailed early on the G7 and flew back to DC. He has put the NSC on standby in the Situation Room and the air is apparently full of Air Force tanker and other support aircraft crossing the Atlantic.

What does it all mean?

A friend of mine (jokingly) points out that Trump hates these G7 meetings and that perhaps he was using the Iran crisis as a “Get Out of Jail Free” card.

“Sorry guys, JD called and said I am needed back in DC. Have fun.”

My friend said that perhaps what JD called about was that what was going down in the Situation Room was in fact a poker game and that the boss was needed back pronto, if only to bring the McDonalds.

Maybe Trump did stage this all to get out of the G7. The end result is the same, for the remainder of the G7 everyone is going to realize that without the US there, whatever they say or do is irrelevant.

Trump was telling them, in so many words, that when it comes to the world the US is important and that they aren’t. Nobody needs Carney back in Ottawa or Starmer in London.

Given the meeting was in Alberta, maybe Trump even told Carney not to mess up the next US state before he gets back.

Worthwhile Reading and Viewing

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Chinese ports in Africa.

China–innovating not just imitating

Rare Earths: How did China become so dominant?

Outmanufactured: How China leapfrogged the West

Golden ages, and how they end

AI and hard assets

OTOH, what if we’re building too much AI infrastructure?

Real diversity needs borders

Content containerization ruined the web

A robot folding a t-shirt

and a robot tying shoelaces

A color photo from 120 years ago…enhanced, but not colorized.  BabelColour has found and enhanced dozens of old autochromes, here’s a post on how he does it

“What’s Next?”

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Wow.

So yesterday began with the court order regarding Trump and his deploying the National Guard to LA (descent of the dark fascist night), continued with a US senator (Padilla) doing an information op in order to further that fascist night narrative, and ended with Israel rolling the iron dice in Iran.

It’s going to be a long summer.

So a couple of things.

First, I had a long call this morning with a friend (who isn’t a taxi driver) who operationalizes Israel’s “Never Again” philosophy as “don’t cede the initiative.” If Israel thought that Iran was on the verge of a nuclear breakout, it would know that particular action would irrevocably change the balance of power in the Middle East and would act before it was forced to do so.

My friend pointed to two historical analogies. The first is the Six-Day War when Israel faced a dire strategic situation and took matters into its own hands. The second is the history of carrier warfare in the Pacific during WW II. That theater was about first-mover advantage, strike first and strike hard with everything you have.

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