The memo from Legal was sort of stark. We don’t normally get simple ones from them, so it was a bit refreshing and new. Squeaky clean, in a way. They are normally sort of cloaked in terms of moderation. This one was blunt. “Avoid using terms like ‘good’ and the one that means the opposite.”

You can see the challenge to the Creative Section at Socotra House. The week that just closed out marked the best part of the warmest and welcoming summer season. Monday- the Day After Tomorrow- starts that Convention thing in Chicago. The kick-off memes for that dance started last week in a different city. The videos of smoke bombs and anguished messages were striking and showed some of the vocal disputes to come over the next 79 days.

We know. That is just getting started though it seems like it has gone on forever. And we think we understand why Legal wanted a quiet weekend. It is likely to be asses and elbows for them until 05 November, which will just start something else. A new pandemic was just announced to help us get ready. And, the newer of the two old campaigns just announced a new economic platform to fix all the things that got broken the last time we gave them a chance to make it work a little better.

The announcement was a direct lift from a previous effort to control expenses at the grocery store, or somewhere. It was apparently caused by greedy food merchants who suddenly pounced on something we had done all our lives. Back in 1971, President Nixon declared he would “create a new prosperity without war.” We know it now as the “Nixon Shock.” Among other things, it ended something called the Bretton Woods System, a fully negotiated monetary order between almost 50 independent states needed to defeat Germany and Japan. Those apparently were countries in Europe and Asia at the time, we forget why. The Nixon plan involved wage and price freezes, surcharges on imports, and the unilateral cancellation of direct conversion of the US dollar to gold.

You can see what that did to the price of that precious metal in the corner of the chart with which we started. We can expect all sorts of that manner of excitement in the 79 days until the election.

The Social Security anniversary was this week, and rather than using it as a metaphor for how everything in human societies work, we thought the one sentence summary was useful to help sum things up as we prepare to get rolling into the Fall. SSA is an enormous system of programs founded with the best of intentions to do some real good but managed, over time, to become something else that needed to be fixed with things that made it worse and ultimately- currently- became unsustainable.

That isn’t a horror show or a frightening tale intended to alarm. Without caution and observation, that is just how things work. And it is why Nixon did what he did and why we are about to do something similar with the expectation that it won’t work in the same exact manner. That is what we know as Progress.

We offer a couple examples to reinforce that perfectly average contention. The Secret Service is the most visible of them at the moment, though it is far from unique. The word this week was that a Special Agent assigned to a protective detail left her post without notification in order to breast-feed her baby.

The memo from Legal still glowed on the tablet on the table. DeMille gestured at it. “We are in favor of nurturing children. We on record supporting biological functions inherent to the well-being of our species. We do think that perhaps scheduling could be improved to facilitate mission accomplishment, since they already shot the target individual once already.”

Which brought us around to the last bullet on the agenda, so to speak, and get things cleaned up for the weekend. You might have heard about it. There has been a lot of messaging about the cyber stuff, and like you, we have received dozens of text messages on our phones from people we don’t now assuring us that with dramatic action all sorts of good things can be accomplished and a host of bad ones prevented.

All from our phones. But there was another one that occurred yesterday. A hacker with a user-name similar to a government organization we once worked for, individually and as a group, apparently gained access to another group’s data base of data bases. Shocking, right?

There was a little more this morning. Almost 3 billion records were lifted, which is a small number reflecting a few thousand million other numbers. That total may include the personal information of every American and member of the Commonwealth nations. A bigger population than that which composed the Bretton Woods nations. The report suggested that some of the information included the US Social Security System numbers.

We did not want to put the group at risk and assigned Splash to click on the link that promised to tell us if he (at least) had been affected. The algorithm asked for his first and last name, state of residence, and birth date. That is about what is required to visit our eye-doctor, so we encouraged him to do it.

In a couple milliseconds the screen produced five addresses in the state in which he currently claims to reside. We did not support his asking about any of the other states in which he claims or denies having had a residence. But the demonstration indicates that someone, not us, had access to everything linked to where we lived across at least several decades of time, with phone numbers and utilities and everything associated with them.

That other thing about cyber came up in our informal damage assessment. Famed social media giant Facebook just got in trouble for harvesting the personal pictures of a few million of its subscribers. Without permission.

They were working on something about facial recognition, which is a potentially useful thing for all sorts of purposes we are not supposed to categorize. But, we are comforted that in the likely upturn in all sorts of activity over the next 79 days, the system in which we live now knows us better than we do.

We are not sure if there is anyone up on the roof prepared to hose it all down and get it squeaky clean again.

After all, nothing has happened yet, right? Splash laughed, which is not specifically prohibited. “And they hosed down the crime scene within 24 hours of the incident. Now, it is squeaky clean.”

Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com