Nixonland

I sort of finished this book. I listened to the last segment as I was going to bed last night and finished it after I woke up. It played most of the night. I'll be re-reading for the rest of today. It's full name is Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.

He makes a very strong case for how the fracture occurred and how we continue to be fractured. As always, I expect that whatever we think we just invented, relating to human nature, has been around forever, but we didn't have the bandwidth to learn about it. Did mass murders occur in the past? Yep. Planes crash? Terrorists attack? People die of cancers and plagues? Sure. So this fracturing may have gone on long before now. But that just accounts for the information that gets to us about events or issues.

This bandwidth goes both ways. You can now email, tweet or blog your malodorous misinformation. Or your stories about the books you read. What I think happened about the time of the rise of the supremely paranoid Nixon was that information gathering and dispersal was just taking an exponential leap. That's why it's not going to get any better. I guess what we need to do is to learn how to adapt to information overload.

I was just out watering and saw a happy little bee-like creature pollinating our flowers. Since all this "just letting you know/scare mongering" was on my mind, I began to think about Africanized Killer Bees. What ever happened to them? Maybe they adapted, lost their killer ways and are out taking the place of all the honey bees that are dying. Yep, information overload.