Saturday, September 01, 2018

it begins now

"Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome."
(Isaac Asimov)

I sat with him last Saturday night four hours as he breathed from a deeply restless but subdued place.

I sat with him tonight an hour and a half as his breath, gone, left his body quiet and still.

“Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth."
(Buddha)

Family gathers. It begins now. The way we navigate new transition.

Friday, August 31, 2018

for me it is new year’s eve

31 aug.

Comes September

A new year

Give a man a mask and he will show his true face. (Oscar Wilde)

It is time to face our true face.

Happy birthday, laddie!

Thursday, August 30, 2018

watching the play

When the time comes, do we expect anyone to do the right thing?

Becoming an ethical and moral individual requires self-awareness as well as a real connection with fellow beings.


An actor, whether true or charlatan, will ultimately exit the stage. 

Words, however trippingly, end

Wednesday, August 29, 2018

losing faith

Walking mountain

hot morning

Step by

step slowly

Tuesday, August 28, 2018

rooster call

Night holds on, barely

It’s only words, sounds of waking

Neutrinos billons of miles

And years from home

Monday, August 27, 2018

mourn the loss

Perhaps part of the outpouring for John McCain following his death is the stark awareness and contrast with that which is not John McCain in our midst. Not only do we mourn the loss of this funny, irascible, dedicated man — we also mourn the loss of the kind of man he presented to us to look up to, argue with, and respect. To respect a respectable man is ennobling. 

It is good practice to disagree with an agreeable man. Preferable to disagreeable men whose habits involve denigration and detraction, theft of honor for sport and personal profit.

We mourn the loss of McCain. 

He takes with him a good part of us.

Sunday, August 26, 2018

from huh, to care for, through in/as, to with

Jane Hirshfield says it well.

She does so by saying what poets have said about relationship with nature.

https://youtu.be/4MZl5mdCzuY

the physics of cyberspace

The power and extent of cyberattack possibility is under-emphasized and under-appreciated.

There is more here than the skin of a wounded executive in a compromised office of a vulnerable country.
Almost everyone who has studied NotPetya, however, agrees on one point: that it could happen again or even reoccur on a larger scale. Global corporations are simply too interconnected, information security too complex, attack surfaces too broad to protect against state-trained hackers bent on releasing the next world-shaking worm. Russia, meanwhile, hardly seems to have been chastened by the US government’s sanctions for NotPetya, which arrived a full eight months after the worm hit and whose punishments were muddled with other messages chastising Russia for everything from 2016 election disinformation to hacker probes of the US power grid. “The lack of a proper response has been almost an invitation to escalate more,” says Thomas Rid, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies. 
But the most enduring object lesson of NotPetya may simply be the strange, extra­dimensional landscape of cyberwar’s battlefield. This is the confounding geography of cyberwarfare: In ways that still defy human intuition, phantoms inside M.E.Doc’s server room in a gritty corner of Kiev spread chaos into the gilded conference rooms of the capital’s federal agencies, into ports dotting the globe, into the stately headquarters of Maersk on the Copenhagen harbor, and across the global economy. “Somehow the vulnerability of this Ukrainian accounting software affects the US national security supply of vaccines and global shipping?” asks Joshua Corman, a cybersecurity fellow at the Atlantic Council, as if still puzzling out the shape of the wormhole that made that cause-and-effect possible. “The physics of cyberspace are wholly different from every other war domain.” 
In those physics, NotPetya reminds us, distance is no defense. Every barbarian is already at every gate. And the network of entanglements in that ether, which have unified and elevated the world for the past 25 years, can, over a few hours on a summer day, bring it to a crashing halt. 
(—from, THE UNTOLD STORY OF NOTPETYA, THE MOST DEVASTATING CYBERATTACK IN HISTORY, Crippled ports. Paralyzed corporations. Frozen government agencies. How a single piece of code crashed the world. 
by Andy Greenberg (@a_greenberg) is a WIRED senior writer. This story is excerpted from his book Sandworm, forthcoming from Doubleday.)https://www.wired.com/story/notpetya-cyberattack-ukraine-russia-code-crashed-the-world/
A day will come, I’m sure, when I will look at these computational devices reliant on a fragile network of signals and switches as quaint relics of a time when information and artistic entertainment  flowed easily to them in homes and public places. They will gather dust.

I will be reading a book.

Underlining and making notations in margins.

The war will be history.