Justice
Trump is pardoning quite horrifyingly criminal people, who committed fraud, stole money, and took everything from their victims (as he himself did, with Trump University). I think also of the mental state of prosecutors who labored mightily to convict these people, not realizing it is a lottery whether they will end up walking free at the President's whim.
But this is what happens when the electorate stops caring about justice. As I have said before, the surprise is, not that it happened, but that it happened practically overnight.
Domestic Drones
Some years ago, in my prescient way, I predicted that drones would start being used as a tool of domestic "law enforcement", and was horrified, not gratified, to hear of a government drone strike on the compound of a gangster in Haiti, which missed him but killed a lot of children.
Drones have been used in civil wars for years. "On the evening of the 3rd of December 2023, residents of the village of Tudun Biri [in Nigeria] had gathered to celebrate Maolud, an Islamic holiday marking the birthday of Prophet Muhammed, when, at 10pm, they were hit by a drone strike. Thirty minutes later, while those nearby rushed to the aid of the wounded, a second bomb fell on the area. In total, the government’s report on the strike claims, eighty-five civilians were killed in the strike, though Amnesty International and its local partners suggest fatalities number at least 120, with more than 80 hospitalised". "Death on Delivery", Drone Wars UK, March 2025.
Someday it will happen here, of course. Predator drones are being used to monitor large demonstrations; eventually, one will discharge a Hellfire missile. And perhaps it will be called an accident.
Camera Telescopes
I have been a frustrated amateur--very amateur-- astronomer since I was 13, who can never find anything. On a bad night, I can't even find the moon with my scope.
I am somewhat proud to have invented "Wallace astronomy", where I just randomly turn my small Dobsonian reflector until it is centered on a nebula or star cluster, then use software on my phone to identify what I am looking at. In the five years I have been using this method, I have identified 29 of the 112 Messier objects visible in our sky.
Years ago, I purchased an early-generation computerized scope. You pointed it at three bright stars, whereupon it supposedly "understood" the sky; you selected an object from a drop-down menu, and the telescope slowly turned to find it. I could never get it to work, of course. I gave up after I desperately instructed it to find the brightest, most recognizable object in the sky, the planet Jupiter-- and it pointed itself down at the ground. I donated it to our local astronomy society, whom I hoped could make better use than I.
I knew that there would eventually be another generation of the technology, which did not require a flawed human to set up, but which would simply scan the sky itself to find its location. That now exists; the best ones are beyond my budget (four thousand dollars or so) but there are cheap versions ($500-- but I'm skeptical). But they all have one thing in common-- you never see the object, but photograph it instead. And it seems that those photos are "shopped" by the software to make them more appealing to, comprehensible by, the eye.
This of course has already always been true of the glamorous, colorful images of distant galaxies, nebulae, outgassing star clusters and the like in astronomy magazines. Many of those phenomena may not be visible to the very limited human eye, and are translated into a sort of visual language for interested hoi polloi.
Almost all the nebulae and galaxies I can see through my 4 inch scope look the same: a fuzzy ball, distinct from the bright point of a star. That doesn't make the search any less interesting, nor deprive the discovery of a satisfying Click.
I can imagine an AI driven, lying version of the automatic scope which rewards the idiot user by serving up an image from its database, regardless of whether the scope is correctly pointed or not. After all, the poor human would be so disappointed... Astronomy as computer game.
CO2 cartridges
In the main article, I mention that when I began diving in 1978, buoyancy compensators did not yet exist; you had a very skinny, tacky yellow vest which could only be inflated by pulling a chain on a CO2 cartridge. Our insstructor told us the unforgettable story of the one time he had tried to inflate his vest, swimming back to the beach in heavy surf: the chain snapped right off. In the years I used that technology, I always wondered if the same would happen to me: but I never had to pull the chain.
In the main essay, not that you care, I read the abbrevation "BC" in a 1990's entry in my dive log, and wonder whether it could still be a reference to the earlier technology. I have concluded it couldn't be. Nobody ever would have termed the first generation Hail Mary technology a "bouyancy compensator".