(Stacey with an e holding one of Kate’s famous red-velvet cupcakes with butter frosting. Photo Socotra.)

I am about done with the hot-button topics of the week. It is Friday, after all, and thank God for that. I was thinking, something I normally do right after mashing the “send” button on the story that the difference between Ike, love him or don’t, and the rest of our recent Presidents is that he is the one who was not a politician.

Not that you get five stars in the Army without being adroit at fun and games in a massive bureaucracy, but you know what I mean. Look at the men who followed him:

Ike was the only career non-politician in the crowd. Truman was one, Jack Kennedy another, Lyndon the consummate one, Tricky Dick a committed one, ditto Jerry, Carter was a semi-neophyte (and it showed) and Ronnie was a corporate shill who came to his calling relatively late in life. Everyone since has been playing the game first and foremost, and maybe that is why things are so screwed up. The money required to play means that those who have, get more.   By way of contrast, Ike was courted by both parties, and was a management guy of the first order. Not one inclined to rock the boat, but his response to the outrage in Little Rock was gratifying.

I also got some feedback that was along the lines of the line from True Grit: “That’s bold talk for a one-eyed fat man!” Specifically, the comments pointed out acidly that I am at the trough of Big Government and have been most of my working life. I take the point.

We are stuck with the colossal and unholy amalgamation of industry and the Armed Forces- an aggregation in which Acquisition of big-ticket systems is King and those who served are a bit of an afterthought. And there are not that many of us around, now that the Greatest Generation is passing.   The military industrial complex is real and a problem. Just because I highlighted the second accurate observation about the scientific-technical elite is no criticism of the first; we just are getting jerked around by the latter as well as the former..   Technology is something that our laws and lawyer-class are having a problem with. You saw the ruling by the Supreme Court that placing a GPS tracker on a known drug-dealer’s car for a month or more was an unconstitutional violation of his rights, and his conviction on cocaine charges was thrown out.

I think that is good- I mean, the argument that if you are not doing anything wrong why would you mind only goes so far. But the Court took its own sweet time getting to this ruling, as it always does, and there are far more issues at hand than any narrowly reasoned case can address.

I saw that Boeing is about to deploy a new system on its jets that will make them impervious to hi-jacking. Apparently the pilots will have a one-way switch to transfer control of the airplane to people on the ground, and it features automatic landing algorithms.  Sensors on the cockpit door would automatically engage the system and it is not possible for anyone to switch off the autopilot.

I guess this is a good thing, right? But the same article went on to describe the other component of the system- a passenger-monitoring device that will use “tiny cameras linked to specialist computers to record every twitch, blink, facial expression or suspicious movement made on board flights in order to identify potential terrorists.”

I can see this is going to make flying even more fun than it is now, and the system clearly has broad implications for all sorts of ordinary situations. Wouldn’t employers like this as a work-place tool? Any public place? Why would we mind, if we aren’t doing anything wrong, right?

I don’t know. I have often thought that the future was a place I only wanted to visit briefly. So, I walked over to Willow, the public place I like best at the moment and got a glass or two of Happy Hour White after work. Old Jim is back from a job he was doing in Maryland, and his vivacious wife Mary stopped in on the way back from the gym.

That was how, in a roundabout fashion, we became interested in what the couple next to us at the bar were up to. They were foodies, and engaged Liz-with-an-S in detailed conversation about the Nosh menu of bar food. The woman was a vegan, and opted for the barely-cooked broccoli salad while the man tucked into the fish tacos.

Jim was expressing some firm views about the deplorable state of post-secondary education when the cupcake arrived.

I have to say that it was completely magnificent, a thing of wonder. The butter-cream icing was improbably high, neatly decorated on the top, and the red-velvet cake below sinfully inviting.

I asked if I could take a picture of Kate Jansen’s example of master baking, and the woman- who turned out to be Stacey-with-an-E- agreed. She spent ten minutes after the shot disassembling the thing.

Jim looked over his Bud. I looked over the white wine. Any world that has Kate’s cupcakes in them isn’t lost yet.

I hope.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra www.vicsocotra.com