Orts #779

More American civilians have died by gunfire in the past decade than all the Americans who were killed in combat in the Second World War.
     --  Evan Osnos, Making a Killing, in The New Yorker, June 27, 2016


an abbreviated version of an abbreviated version of an article in the New York Times, July 6, 2016 https://erickoch.ca/2016/07/08/what-happened-to-futurism/

More than 40 years ago, Alvin Toffler, a writer who had fashioned himself into one of the first futurists, warned that the accelerating pace of technological change would soon make us all sick. He called the sickness “future shock,” which he described in his totemic book of the same name, published in 1970.

In Mr. Toffler’s coinage, future shock wasn’t simply a metaphor for our difficulties in dealing with new things. It was a real psychological malady, the “dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future.” And “unless intelligent steps are taken to combat it,” he warned, “millions of human beings will find themselves increasingly disoriented, progressively incompetent to deal rationally with their environments.”

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Bonus link: http://allofbach.com/en/bwv/bwv-726/
"extraordinary harmonies in this ultra-short organ work" of J.S. Bach
At this link  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LVm8Fl33jY  you can hear a different performance while following the score.