Rick Yancey’s The Fifth Wave is an extended allegory about the depredations and immorality of hypercapitalism as we currently practice it.

Once I realized that, I began liking the series better.

It is not a great series, but it’s a pretty accurate representation of how our form of capitalism (and perhaps all capitalism) leads to a war of all against all, the destruction of communities, the viewing of humans as interchangeable cogs, and the extreme power of mind-controlling propaganda.

I wouldn’t quite recommend any of the novels, but I thought this allegory was handled well.

No matter how many times the loopier parts of the left attempts to assert some sort of absolute right to migration, it’s not clear to me exactly why existing residents’ rights to control who immigrates and how is overruled or countervailed by any so-called right of immigration — especially if it’s just economic migration we’re talking about (which most of the so-called “Syrian” migrants into Germany actually were*.)

I’m not saying there’s not a philosophical case to be made for immigrants having greater rights than existing citizens and residents, just that I have not seen it. And no, your attempts to raise your status by showing how compassionate you are while never doing anything but meaningless signaling to demonstrate this does not count.

*Hint: if you’re skin is black, you’re probably not from Syria. The black non-Arab non-white population of Syria is so small that it’s not even tracked demographically speaking. So when the press reports all the “Syrians” migrating and their skin is very dark, they ain’t fuckin’ Syrian.

By the way, Apple’s Mac line would be a Fortune 500 business all by itself.

Apple can and is only ignoring it because I am sure the phone side of the business is running things internally now and doesn’t see “old-school” computers as important. Never mind that it’d be nearly impossible to port in any timely manner all the tooling and related infrastructure to Windows to develop iOS Objective C applications on that platform.

And never mind that when you abandon your early adopters, evangelists and power users, your platform soon after in toto soon goes down the toilet.

Absolutely huge strategic mistake. Contra Buffett, if I shorted stocks any longer, Apple would be on my short short list.

Not sure when I’ll do it otherwise, but if my 5K iMac craps out I will buy probably a 5K Dell or LG monitor, build a brand new Windows 10 box (alas) as Apple has clearly abandoned the Mac as an ecosystem.

They see it as necessary, but it wasn’t. They easily could have owned a larger and larger percentage of the consumer and business workstation market by catering to this segment. Instead, they are just going to throw away tens of billions of dollars of revenue thoughtlessly.

There still is an always will be an absolutely huge market or power users who will pay a damn lot of money for a decent machine — why do you think Microsoft is releasing the $3,000 Surface Studio desktop? They recognize Apple is abandoning that market altogether.

Yep, Apple just handed Microsoft the keys to the kingdom.

That Apple doesn’t understand that though computers are a small part of their revenue, they are the key to their ecosystem is just mind-boggling. To this day, you can only develop iOS apps on a Mac for instance.

Without Steve Jobs, it was inevitable for Apple to decline and make bad decisions as internecine wars took over. Just sad to see it happen.

Time for more Héloïse Letissier.

Such a beautiful song lyrically. Poetry better than most written in any language by “real” poets.

Interview with her (in English).

Even the YouTube comments about her are better than usual. Says it perfectly:

Technocrats operating with all data and no history are less tractable than evil, as evil almost by definition has a goal, an objective. Even if it insane, apocalyptic or deleterious to human health, something with a goal can be resisted and defeated.

Big Data’s ahistorical adherents have the “truth” in the data and the obvious-to-them veracity of their algorithms on their side, which in their minds removes the need for any more nuanced or contextual understanding. They are not evil because they do not even have the cultural or historical comprehension to proceed this far; in that, they are like children with a dangerous weapon they see as a toy: goalless but casually destructive.

Technocratic rule by misapplied data science shows exactly why we need the humanities now more than we ever have.

I must be a commie spy, too, like Trump and others — I’m linked to Russia. (Oh no!)

I’ve been near Russia. I was in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan once. One of our guides even spoke Russian! Scary!

I believe our air route there was partially over Russia, too. Double scary!

I have a friend who is teaching herself Russian. Obviously an infiltrator!

In other words, don’t buy really anything the press pens about Russia. A resumption of the cold war would be good for the defense industry and good for the elites — at least until the point it escalates into a nuclear war. And I am deliberately using the anachronistic term “Commie” to emphasize what is happening here.

It’s Iraq all over again, but far more dangerous.

I like nightmares. I enjoy scary dreams. Not retrospectively — at the time, even if I am not lucid dreaming.

Maybe because I felt so much dread and the imminence and actuality of violence as a kid that somewhere deep my mind craves still all of those things for their familiarity and for the anarchy of the abandonment of all rules of decorum and convention. It’s a kind of freedom, though a terrible kind — the sort where you can do what you want, but so can the werewolf attempting to devour you.

I don’t want to live in a dystopia, but in many ways I grew up in one so when I wind up there again in my dreams it feels like going home.