The Turtle Boy of Austin
Testaceous land-waddlers incapable of generosity or gratitude
To live and die alone
Philosophical genius L. Wittgenstein sagely remarks: “If a lion could speak, we would not understand him.”
Turtle sex is as weird as you would expect it to be. In the case of the ornate box turtle, terrapene ornata, courtship begins with the male pursuing the female and bumping into her. When the male mounts his mate, he locks his legs into her shell. Several hours can pass before the male slides off or falls backwards and the pair go their separate ways. When I, at the age of nine or ten, caught a box turtle couple in our family’s backyard in Austin, Texas, in flagrante delicto, the mounted male was leaning backward like a water skier, while the bored female plodded along through the grass.
I later witnessed the results of that or a similar encounter. Trimming a hedge in our backyard garden, my father found a hole where a female box turtle had laid her clutch of eggs. We checked them now and then and were rewarded one morning when we found a couple of hatchlings pushing themselves out of …
Tech Jeremiad
Gates, Bezos, Musk, Brin Have Plan to Fry Your Brain and Eat It
Robots will punish you for wrong-think
The grim, absurd future of corporatized totalitarian tyranny in America is here
U.S. citizens no longer live in a democracy, but rather amidst the formation of an advanced system of corporate tyranny — one that controls most of our institutions and has its gaze set on the goal of colonizing the American mind.
Microsoft’s purchase of ChatGPT earlier this year is a distinct trail marker in the development of the next stage of the corporate colonization of our inner lives. Together with American regulators’ refusal to curtail TikTok use — as the Chinese government does with their own creation — the rise of chatbot software has revealed the corporate colonist”s endgame: Distribute soma in the form of hyper-addictive digital content that has already produced a pandemic of depression and suicide among teenage girls; then, with the population thoroughly distracted, construct the AI circuitry needed to fulfill capital’s long-held dream of "full automation." Then, ruthlessly surveil whatever …
The King of the Con
On the trail of Titanic Thompson
'In every bet there’s a fool and a thief'
Americans are the world’s greatest con men and biggest marks
The legendary American con man Titanic Thompson once said that “In every bet there’s a fool and thief.” Thompson’s refusal to be a fool, the role for which he had seemingly been destined from birth, helped make him one of America’s greatest heroes of the 1920s, the age when the American hero was born. As a thief, he rarely hurt anyone who didn’t deserve it.
Often described as a “sportsman” by his biographers, Titanic Thompson was an expert golfer and poker player for whom the abstract pleasures of such pursuits came second to their utility in separating suckers from their money. Though he never learned to properly read or write, his most powerful tool was a mind that could spin rock candy mountains as high as the Alps whose appearance would first tantalize and then paralyze his marks. It helped that Thompson was a master of the American vernacular as accomplished as any novelist or playwright that the …
