Burning Chrome

William Gibson
Burning Chrome (1986)

Burning Chrome, editado em 1986, é uma antologia de contos datados entre 1977 e 1986. Beneficiando do impacto de Neuromacer, estes textos partilham maioritariamente do mesmo universo da trilogia Sprawl e, até, personagens, como acontece em "Johnny Mnemonic". O excerto escolhido pertence a "Hinterlands".

If the first ones to come back had only returned with seashells, I doubt that Heaven would be out here. Heaven was built after a dead Frenchman returned with a twelve-centimeter ring of magnetically coded steel locked in his cold hand, black parody of the lucky kid who wins the free ride on the merry-go-round. We may never find out where or how he got it, but that ring was the Rosetta stone for cancer. So now it's cargo cult time for the human race. We can pick things up out there that we might not stumble across in research in a thousand years. Charmian says we're like those poor suckers on their island, who spend all their time building landing strips to make the big silver birds come back. Charmian says that contact with "superior" civilizations is something you don't wish on your worst enemy.
"Ever wonder how they thought this scam up, Toby?" She was squinting into the sunlight, east, down the length of our cylindrical country, horizonless and green. "They must've had all the heavies in, the shrink elite, scattered down a long slab of genuine imitation rosewood, standard Pentagon issue. Each one got a clean notepad and a brand-new pencil, specially sharpened for the occasion. Everybody was there: Freudians, Jungians, Adlerians, Skinner rat men, you name it. And every one of those bastards knew in his heart that it was time to play his best hand. As a profession, not just as representatives of a given faction. There they are, Western psychiatry incarnate. And nothing's happening! People are popping back off the Highway dead, or else they come back drooling, singing nursery rhymes. The live ones last about three days, won't say a goddamned thing, then shoot themselves or go catatonic."

Li anteriormente:
Mona Lisa Acelerada (1988)
Count Zero (1986)
Neuromancer (1984)

Losing Military Supremacy

Andrei Martyanov
Losing Military Supremacy (2018)

Subintitulado "The myopia of American strategic planning", este é um livro que os tudólogos da TV, que comentam chocarreiramente a guerra da OTAN contra a Rússia nas planícies ucranianas, obviamente não leram, ou preferiram ignorar. Andrei Martyanov, reconhecido especialista em assuntos militares e navais russos, era oficial da Guarda Costeira Soviética em 1990, quando assistiu à implosão da URSS. Este livro refere alguns mitos e erros comuns na habitual desvalorização da capacidade militar, tecnológica e económica da Rússia — bem como a profunda incompreensão da mentalidade e psicologia do povo russo e da sua história milenar —, que estiveram na base do presente enfrentamento (não esquecer que a primeira publicação data de 2018). Estes erros, repetidos a toda a hora nos meios de (des)informação, passam para a opinião pública um triunfalismo injustificado e perigoso, inconsciente das falhas, deficiências e limitações do lado atlantista, que podem levar, como último degrau da escalada, à guerra termonuclear.

Modern America is ill; she is not in a good place in any important metric which defines a prosperous and successful nation. Much more goes into success than mostly meaningless Wall Street economic indices and capitalization of the markets, let alone companies which produce nothing of value. It is difficult to explain to people who consider iPhones’ marketing gimmicks or another useless computer contraption in cars, or yet another wasteful feature on Facebook to be hi-tech. It is not. Money is not a good measure of human accomplishment—the new smart-phone and marijuana-addicted generation is not an indicator of any success just because they can afford yet another new model of some electronic toy, while being increasingly less educated, less knowledgeable and much less competent than the generation which preceded them. It is this generation which is already in the process of inheriting a country which in the last quarter century lost most of its appeal for the rest of the world as the bastion of democracy, human rights and sound economic model due to its hubris and the permanent wishful thinking moment it resides in. Today, any mentioning of “democracy”, “freedom of press”, of an incorruptible political class or of economic prosperity in relation to the United States will create an ironic smile at best, sarcastic laughter at worst, around the world, especially so in Russia. [...]
Pax Americana turned out to be just a figment of imagination of the American “academe” which for decades treated war and military power as merely a safe tool in the constant pushing of the American political and economic agenda on the world. This age is over. The main task today is to prevent by all means any possibility of this delusional, self-proclaimed exceptional nation unleashing Armageddon because of frustration with its own weakness which was so suddenly and brutally exposed for the whole world to see.