Frankenstein, version 1078.78, build 22

Medium has an excellent piece up ostensibly on the cozy relationship between the national security state and Google.  Its really much more about the foundation of American innovation since roughly the end of the first Bush administration, when the old cold warriors looked around at the wreckage of the world and, despite their eventual determination to burn their prophets, decided they needed to get the Internet into everything so they could control the world they'd won.

Grooming

I've been trying to understand my feelings for the Cosby revelations, the accusations from many women of various ages (is it now more than 20?) that Bill Cosby assaulted them, sometimes repeatedly, sometimes after drugging them, over the course of decades.  Cosby has had a shady reputation as a philanderer for years - but then what famous male entertainer hasn't? - and when the initial charges from Andrea Constand surfaced in 2002 everyone remembered a weird extortion attempt against him in 1997 that seemed at the time to be unhinged.  The very same emotional resistance to the notion of Cosby the philanderer helped push Autumn Jackson into Crazytown; the thoroughly tragic death of Cosby's son in 2001 in a botched robbery, and his cranky-old-man lecture tour where he somehow found the nerve to tell black kids that they needed to be better than white kids, all that made it just much easier for those of us who were male and of a certain age to hope for the best so we could continue to fondly remember the man who taught a generation of young men comic timing and the art of the anecdote.