Lessons from Daniel Ellsberg

Just finished reading Daniel Ellsberg’s “Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers” — a really great book, and a sad reminder that the institutional bureaucracy of the US government is capable of enormous evil.

There is no meaningful comparison between 2,000,000 dead in Indochina and the NSA PRISM program, but the mechanisms that kept us in Vietnam for 25 years are alive and well, and just as much a concern.

Rereading “The Ballad of Lost C’Mell” by Cordwainer Smith.

Smith didn’t write many stories, but they linger in my mind far more than most. The first one I remember reading was “No, No, Not Rogov!” — I forgot where I read it, or who the author was.  “Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons” was the same — the story burned itself into my memory, but I couldn’t remember where I read it or who it was by.

A couple of years ago the mystery resolved:  there’s a book that reprints his complete short works.  Some of the titles are so poetic:  “The Dead Lady of Clown Town”,  “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard”, “Scanners Live in Vain”, “The Colonel Came Back from the Nothing-At-All”.

http://www.amazon.com/Rediscovery-Man-Complete-Science-Cordwainer/dp/0915368560/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362700388&sr=1-1&keywords=cordwainer+smith