So, this was about as dramatic as storm clouds get in this life. But not off the top this morning. The dancing messages start the litany of vectors to them. We were told about the biggest US-Russia prisoner swap since the Cold War, more gold medals for the US, and more. The top of the coursing streams swirled with kinetic issues atop social sensibilities, some near and others more distant, but all part of the mass of data in motion.

Here, the FBI and secret service are at war on a variety of front including ours. The messaging in the campaigns is insistent as the themes are being laid out for the time available to drive them home. The more recent candidate appears to be in a period of refinement as new themes are installed.

To set today’s stage of tumult: a female boxer, medal contender, was knocked out in her round in 47 seconds by a competitor was a guy up until about fifteen minutes before the IOC approved “her” participation.

Then, of course, there is the possibility of general war. By that we call attention the recent anniversary of the outbreak of the Great War ninety years ago. That one commenced with assassination of a leader of state. We seem to have a rash of that going on at the moment, and one (or more) could spark an escalation previously unseen.

Afternoon reporting there were a dozen 6TH Fleet ships in the vicinity, so the potential for inadvertent involvement in something not of their making. You could ask the survivors of the attack on USS Liberty about situations like that.

With a step back to look at events, the tool of Israeli response in this round was relatively limited in scope but intensely intimate in application.

Ismail Haniyeh was the senior Hamas international negotiator. He killed on Wednesday in Tehran in, a dramatic direct attack. Other drama occurred in Beirut. A man named Fuad Shukr was the Hamas leader in Lebanon. He was killed shortly before the explosion in Tehran. Who is next?

Head of Hamas operations in Gaza is named Yahya Ibrahim Sinwar. He is the last of the top, or what was the top of the leadership until yesterday.

Anyway, today’s installment is the declaration of Iran’s Supreme Leader that there will be a direct response to the Israeli bombing of a Hamas official. A senior official. One so senior that it verifies existence of a specific target list prepared by professionals and in successful execution. Campaign success is of course a separate matter..

So, in addition to the. regular level of messaging, this one is intensely personal and demonstrably capable of providing sudden violent things. So, that is the level of tension inherent in the next exchange.

Meanwhile, we exchange prisoners with Russia over matters we would have to do a search for the back stories to give context. But it was eight individuals, biggest such exchange since the dark days of the Cold War. Resolution undoubtedly means something we haven’t heard about in campaign messaging or kinetic events. We watched the one in Moscow, live, with Mr. Putin at the foot of the jet-ramp on the red carpet flanked by the Czarist-era gray and gold garbed long line of bodyguards was kind of impressive.

So that is the start of the dance to the welcome of night. The one you might want to consider about how the new world works. “Meta” is the shorthand name of the corporate entity that owns Facebook. So, you could also call it “Mark.”

It was a cool case about all kinds of fundamental issues. The bumper-sticker one is that consumer personal pictures uploaded to the platform for shared- or personal- accounts were apparently harvested help formulate new facial-recognition technologies. “Billions of them.”

We know, worth a major uproar about this manifestation of the new now in which we torrent, with the relative certainty that the Meta data farm now has both of us in an exploitable, transferable digital file. With the selfie-orientation corrected.

We will get around to that in brief light-hearted appreciations over future episodes. It is interesting to see how the new capabilities already deployed around us will change the course of unfolding direct and dramatic events.

Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com