I’ve been following this story (among others) recently. It’s a real tragedy.
And it seems to be a result of relying on computer technology. I don’t have a link to the story, but it seems as if the Kims used computer technology, probably Google Maps, to plot their journey.
The problem is, no computer map service I’ve used has been anything as near as accurate as I’d like. Accuracy has gotten better and better, but it still comes as no big surprise when Mapquest sends me the wrong way down a one-way street or instructs me to drive down a public staircase. Or when Google plots a Queen Anne address as being somewhere downtown.
In this case, the problem is not that the mapping service was aware of Bear Camp Road. While hardly a major highway, it is a route to the coast, one can save time and distance by using it, and it is passable to normal passenger vehicles. In the warmer months, that is. And that’s the problem: while the state highway map clearly warns that the route is impassable in the winter and to inquire locally before using it, no such disclaimer is present on the computer-generated map. And the computer merrily recommends the route regardless which time of year it is.
Had the Kims planned their route the old-fashioned way with a traditional map, odds are they wouldn’t have attempted to drive the route they did.
Upon reflection most of my most intense and memorable dreams are allegories, and last week’s nightmare was no exception.
I found myself in a large induction center, being processed into the military everyone around me informed me I had volunteered to serve in. Yet I had no memory of volunteering and didn’t particularly want to be a soldier and be ordered around at every senior officer’s whim.
Which, come to think of it, is much like the mythological “social contract” I keep hearing about. I have no memory of signing that, either. Nobody asked me if I wanted to live in a society based on class and state based hierarchies of authority; I was simply born into it.
It would indeed be a misfortune for the Democratic Party apparatus if Tim Johnson kicks the bucket or is permanently incapacitated, given the political affiliations of the individual who gets to choose his replacement.
But how much difference would it really be likely to make? Probably not damn much. Look, the Democrats are already proclaiming left and right how little they care about either their sworn duties under the law or their popular mandate.
The real difference is thus likely to be between: (a) a chickenshit Senate that refuses to investigate impeachable offenses because (much like the proverbial battered wife) they want the Republicans to love them, or (b) a kangaroo court Senate that refuses to because their Great Leader doesn’t want to be investigated.
Some difference.
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