Of computers and politics

Two totally unrelated observations:

1. It recently occurred to me that I never use my “personal computer” for computing. Does anyone else? I use it for word-processing, music-processing, and Internet access, but the closest thing to computing I do on it is to add up columns of financial figures, which has about as much to do with math as a grocery list has to with writing, or “Mary had a little lamb” with music. Very little of my Internet use is for porn, but a friend of mine recently admitted that he got rid of his PC because he realized he was masturbating to Internet porn up to three or four times a day and it was beginning to affect his life (not to mention his penis), although he credits his good prostate health to this. The bit about the use of computers was brought to my attention by a book I’m reading on the history of astrophysics, which pointed out that every advance made in that field during the 50s through the 80s was made by advances in the computers which were necessary to make the fiendishly complicated and tedious computations which are called for in that work. Those were the days when computers were used for computing. Among the personal effects I inherited from my father, who studied chemical engineering at Case Institute of Technology, Cleveland, in the 20s, were a slide rule and a mechanical drawing set—old-fashioned heirlooms now, to say the least.

2. I may be accused of cynicism (how could anyone possibly harbor such a thought!?!) when I note the strangely muted reaction of the Republican Party to the news, broken during their convention, that the teenage daughter of the Republican nominee for Veep was knocked up “out of wedlock,” to use a quaint expression. (Why does wedlock sound so much like padlock? Even a little like hammerlock.) This is happening in the so-called “family values” party which usually considers unwed teenage mothers to be crack whores on welfare, probably knocked up by Democrats and liberals, and is being adroitly swept under the rug, although everyone knows perfectly well that if this had happened in the Democrat Party, the Republicans would be making hay of it. As it is, the Rude Pundit is predictably and characteristically making hay of Sarah Palin’s nomination, referring to the “repulsive cynicism of the selection of the obviously insane, stupid, and corrupt … Palin,” although Rude could make hay of someone picking his nose in public. I don’t know about “insane, stupid, and corrupt,” but it’s pretty clear to me that the woman has absolutely no qualifications for the office except that she’s a “social conservative” (duh!), which in the Republican Party now means little except anti-gay and anti-abortion (that’s their idea of “family values”), and maybe pro-guns and pro-death penalty. I haven’t heard whether she’s a born-again fundamentalist Christo-fascist, but that can safely be assumed without being stated. There’s something oddly fitting about the coupling of this politically correct nonentity with a doddering old carbon copy of the half-witted psychopath who has trashed and raped this poor nation for eight years. For the life of me, I cannot understand how anyone of normal intelligence could possibly vote for that pair. The answer, of course, is that there are millions of voters out there who don’t have normal intelligence.