By Sherman Frederick/Properly Subversive
The New York Times recently told us the story of Tasha Kennedy. She wakes up at 4 a.m., puts on a pink T-shirt to drive to Plymouth, Mass., to show support for Lindsay Clancy, the mom on trial for killing her three children, ages 5, 3, and 8 months.
Sherman Frederick
She joins a small group of women dressed in pink, emblazoned with the words “Believe,” “She Needed Help,” and “Peace For Lindsay.” Already $1 million has been donated to a fund for Ms. Clancy’s parents.
This is America today, fueled by an ethos that holds no person is really responsible for their own actions. An unstable upbringing, the color of their skin, drugs, an alcoholic father, bullying at school, and gender dysphoria are common culprits these days. In Ms. Clancy’s case, her supporters say it was postpartum depression that really did it.
Look, I don’t discount postpartum depression and all the mental health issues that come with it. But in the end, Ms. Clancy gathered her children in a room and strangled them one-by-one. There is no moral scenario — no matter whether you think the crime is so heinous that insanity cannot excuse it, or so heinous that only insanity can explain it — in which she is “innocent.”
She did it.
And, no matter how you explain it, she must be separated from society for the rest of her days.
That’s how I’m seeing it. If you think I’ve got this wrong, let me know. I am listening.
PANDORA’S BOX
Talk about the proverbial “Pandora’s Box”; here come AirPods with cameras.
PCMag reports that Apple may have just confirmed that its camera-equipped AirPods are ready for launch. In a short video clip included with the macOS 26.7 release candidate, the company accidentally demonstrated how Visual Intelligence features would work with its long-rumored AirPods with cameras.
You will remember that in Greek mythology, Pandora was the first woman, created by the gods. Zeus gave her a sealed container and told her not to open it.
Of course, she did, and all the evils and miseries of the world escaped: disease, suffering, hardship, and other human troubles. Pandora quickly slammed the lid shut—but one thing remained inside: Hope.
There are a lot of things to worry about here, but frankly, all those worries are already out. Skynet has won. We currently live in a surveillance world, and with the advent of an AI capable of facial recognition and putting it all together with fragments of information gathered from everywhere, the idea of privacy has officially become a Mayberry notion.
On the upside of our brave new world, the always-on camera AirPods will enable the wearer to look at things and ask questions about what they are seeing. They might look at a landmark and ask “where am I?” for contextualized directions — “turn left before the red building on your right.”
There are, no doubt, hundreds of other silly little things to make life easier. But it comes at the cost of a complete loss of privacy that, even now, can’t be put back in the box.
(Sherman R. Frederick is a longtime Nevada columnist and journalist. You can reach him at shermfrederick@gmail.com.)
