Not much of an intro today. It was a low-key weekend (after the out-way-too-late game night, at least) and a busy Monday.
It’s going to be hot and humid the rest of the week. Can’t say I care much for that combination. Hopefully, the A/C unit can handle it.
Anyway, on with the catch-up feed…
Today’s been another mixed-bag, newsfeed-wise. There’s a lot going on in the world right now and it seems most people don’t even come close to grasping just how much things will change, depending on which way some of it goes.
The big one, of course, is the ongoing Net Neutrality fight. But that’s running parallel to the continued fallout from all the revelations about how the NSA (and other agencies) have been spying on pretty much all of us. Both of those current events have some of the biggest players in the information game at one another’s throats. In the first case, it’s the content providers against the infrastructure owners. The the second, it’s companies like Google against the U.S. government.
Both of these fights are going to get a lot more messy before they get better. There are indications that there’s some heavy corporate influence shifting the sands of the Net Neutrality battle in ways that I (and many others) think will be very bad for the public in general. In the domestic surveillance case, a number of companies are trying desperately to regain the trust of their users (and their foreign business partners) by pushing back against gag orders and, apparently, gearing up for a drawn out fight with intelligence agencies and law enforcement.
There’s more than a little overlap in the “good guys” and the “bad guys” in these two arenas. I find myself rooting both for and against some companies (like Verizon, who stands a lot to gain if there’s no mandate for Net Neutrality, but is also in a position to fight against the government overstepping it’s bounds in the surveillance arena). It’s… problematic, to say the least.
All I know for sure is that the world has been changing really quickly over the past 30 years or so. For decades, we’ve been in a period of transition where out reach has extended beyond our grasp. Waters have been further muddied and vision blurred by high emotions and secret dealings. Even now I doubt we have anything near the full picture of everything going on in these two major battles.
This could go on for years. But I worry that the bulk of the public is either ignorant of the importance of these fights or already growing bored with the legal wranglings and semi-obscure technical specifications. Without the support of an knowledgeable public, the big players are free to do whatever they want, regardless of whether it’s good or bad for the rest of us.
Can’t say I care much for that.
But I don’t have any good solutions, either.
What’s sure to eventually be the big news is that it’s been clearly stated now that the decades worth of stories, characters, and places built up in the Star Wars Extended Universe is not at all cannon. (Oh, but, Lucasfilm says, they’ll happily pillage what they want from it as they’re building their new continuity.)
This isn’t at all a big deal for me. I’ve read, I think, two of the Han Solo books and a few issues of the comic from the 80s. I know a whole lot of E.U. stuff, but only because so many people I know dig it so much. So, I’m not going to miss it at all.
I do, however, expect there to be raging battles in various geek circles about this. Maybe not quite on Jar Jar Binks level when it comes to vitriolic hate, but it’s going to be a rough road.
The other big (and more important to some) news is that Catholics are about to get two new saints… both former popes, including John Paul II, who is just shy of being the most fast-tracked saint ever (I think). It’s kind of neat to think that I now grew up during the same span of years that a couple of saints walked the earth. It has a bit of an anachronistic feel to it. Modern saints don’t seem as flashy or awe-inspiringly amazing as the old ones do. Miracles are more subtle things now than they are in the Bible and the “amazing” life is often equally subtle. A steady push to be better, to do better, to put oneself out there and bear the ridicule and hardship of others as your own. In some ways, it makes sainthood seem just that much more attainable. Which, I think, is a good thing… maybe more people will work toward it.