The Illustrious Mr. Jobs

In another era it was Mr. Tibbs, "Virgil Tibbs."  ("Bond, James Bond.")  Sydney Poitier, America's first professionally recognized African-American actor, portrayed Virgil Tibbs, a police detective not unlike Santiago Tiago Vega in the current Showtime series "Penny Dreadful:  City of Angels."  Both series, "In the Heat of the Night" and "Penny Dreadful," culturally are relevant.  "In the Heat of the Night" began as a film and later was developed into a television series ironically starring Archie Bunker, America's most famous prime time racist played by Carroll O'Conner.  All of this valid and effective cultural commentary pioneered by Norman Lear has been overshadowed by a newly conceived and implemented pop culture forged by the tech companies.  All of it is based upon one simple postulate, relatively young and undeveloped publicly accessible wireless technology.  Publicly accessible wireless technology began with Bill Clinton.  He alone decided the future fate of the American economy.  Was he successful?  Was cluttering the world's airwaves with excessive electromagnetic energy necessary?  The world has used this, varying frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum since the inception of radio.  It has been done carefully and prudently and in moderation.  Space communications utilize microwaves.  Ultra violet and infrared as well as X rays and gamma radiation all are examples of differing frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum.  Always its use has been conservative and careful to ensure the health and well being of the human species.  Evidently Mr. Clinton and the rest have a death wish for the planet and our earth is in the throes of demise.  If something is not done our deaths will be ugly.  They will not be out of the ordinary, because the normal culprits will be responsible.  These culprits like depicted in H.G. Wells "War of the Worlds" will be simple.  They will be bacteria, fungi, cancer, viruses and all of the related issues in response to excessive heat and humidity.  Perhaps this is the goal.  Another clever and entertaining film entertains the notion of extraterrestrials colonizing the earth, building a heat producing and carbon excreting mechanism, and preparing our earth for their eventual inhabitation.  Of course they require a warmer environment than our earth provides.  There are a handful of interests that could benefit from a warmer earth.  America has lost sight of any of them, because we have been saturated with a disease pandemic.  That was convenient.  The Russian Investigation?  Putin desires a warmer planet and melting ice caps, so the shipping lane across the northern Arctic will open.  Those ice breakers are an expensive commodity.  All ready it has happened.  Energy companies benefit from warmer temperatures, because human beings cannot tolerate extreme heat.  We must pay for air conditioning.  In the film "Logan's Run" a dome has been built enclosing our living space, and citizens have a finite life expectancy.  At a particular point in their lives they must go to Carousel to be exterminated in a dramatic spectacle of sport.  Most of these scenarios have been thought of, but we are too busy absorbing the products of publicly accessible wireless communication.  I will admit owning a wireless portable computer is enticing.  It is a tricorder and a communicator in one.  This all ready has been thought of, but the technology was not available.  "Beam me up, Scotty."  What am I getting at?  Obviously I am not a huge fan of the wireless technology.  All you really need is a T3 line in your home and a routing box.  We are paying for the freedom to be able to dance around with our devices in our hands or laps.  Portable.  I don't have trouble sitting at my computer desk or in a comfortable chair while working on the computer.  I never wanted a smart phone.  The display is too damn small for me to be able to see it.  I don't need this frustration.  Back in the day if you had a two bits you could make a call from a weather proof and sound resistant phone booth.  If you were drunk and rowdy you could try to cram as many as your fraternity buddies into it as possible.  I miss those phone booths, although perpetually they smelled like wino piss.  Usually the listing you needed was ripped out of the onboard phone book.  I would not trust my home's security to an "app."  I don't use apps.  I use applications, programs created for the personal computer or PC meant to accomplish complex and creative things.  Pop culture, our newly created pop culture, uses publicly accessible wireless technology to entertain gullible minds.  How about an app that keeps track of all of your financial transactions and tells you which are suspect?  With bitcoin, Paypal, and Apple pay it could be difficult to keep track of your impulse buys.  Tina Fey promotes this.  Use your convenient plastic card to buy all you need without a care in the world.  Who cares if you have the money?  These things are not about which I wanted to pontificate.  Instead I wanted to expound on America's "Extremism."  There was a FB post recently that was humorous but true.  When told they would no longer be able to own slaves, America went to war.  We didn't negotiate the issue.  We didn't discuss it.  It was "All or Nothing at All."  Why was this?  The simple answer is to be able to discuss anything including Black Lives Matter, Civil Rights, or police brutality one is required to possess knowledge.  If you have not read, studied, or formed an opinion based upon reflection of events, history, and information you are not able to discuss.  You only will get angry. feel persecuted and threatened, and possibly respond violently to a threat upon your livelihood.  This is the way our Confederacy responded, and that FB post was accurate.  Why must everything be so extreme?  Why cannot their be peaceful protests?  The answer to that also is simple.  Do accomplish such a goal demands intellectual stability over emotional angst.  Human beings in most situations are better guided by their minds than their feelings.  When feelings become the center of our decisions, people get hurt.  It is a difficult issue, because our feelings are what make us feel human.  Without emotion life is empty.  Emotion provides us with love, fulfillment, happiness, grief, and inspiration.  Without these things life can feel meaningless, so a balance must be achieved.  The Extremism that has overtaken America is a result of ignorance, an ignorance championed by our public system of education.  We threw our populace under the bus, Rosa Park's bus, when Washington gave up on public education.  Once public education was the hub of American life.  Our entire lives circulated around our school, our teachers, our activities, and our childrens' achievements in preparation for working lives.  This was a time when the American economy still supported our traditional way of life.  All of that has changed, and our economy has become one of technology.  Everything in our lives circulates around publicaly accessible wireless technology.  For me America's traditional offerings are more valuable and more substantial.  Why would I use an iPhone to film a movie when the results are so limited.  Yes, traditional means at one time were more expensive.  Do be able to make a motion picture required a myriad of skilled laborers, equipment, and knowledge.  Cameras, dollies, cranes, microphones, lighting and sets were necessary.  Certainly we see the difference between this old school process and what "Render Man" provides.  "Ah "Render Man."  "Ah, Bach," as Radar would say on the television sitcom M*A*S*H.  What is Renderman?  Renderman was a computer application or program created by Mr. Jobs, which allowed film to be synthesized with digital rendering to create what appears to be reality.   Computer evolution became powerful enough to process billions of pixels of video quickly enough to appear to be real.  On the dark web Japanese game designers vocally professed that blurring the line between fiction and reality was their goal.  Let the Extremism begin.  Out youth's minds began to be filled with inflamatory images of fiction depicted as reality.  It should be of no surprise when maladjusted and discontent teenagers living near underground Molybdenum processing equipment blow their fuses and wreak havoc on Columbine High School.  Mental health is the same as it always has been in America.  We just have been all brainwashed into believing in iPhone fiction.  To be continued.