Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Stacey Talbert, of course, is the cop who posted a weeping video about not getting her egg mcmuffin on time, and was immediately and virally mocked. It was really very funny because, you know, she’s a cop, and she was actually sobbing, and while I, too, consider the egg mcmuffin to be a culinary delight, and might be a bit distraught if it were delayed, I would never start crying about it.
But, I just read an article about her reaction to it and, well, it could have been worse. She started off by acknowledging that some of the memes going around about her are actually funny. This was gracious of her, because I know a lot of the stuff I’ve seen, and some of which I’ve written, was kind of vicious.
But then she said (I’m not sure if these were the exact words, but this is the gist) “I’m tired of people looking at us the way they do and I wish things could go back to normal.”
So, I was ready to blog about what a horrible, out of touch, condescending person she is to cry about her hurt feelings while the police are beaing protesters, tear gassing protesters, pushing people to the ground and bullying them, and sometimes even murdering them.
But, then I thought, hey, she probably hasn’t murdered anybody personally, and I can understand that she’d probably had a hard day at work. Can’t really understand why she’d post in on-line, but different people are different.
A couple of days of being mocked and reviled by most of the civilized world should be enough.

I started writing this blog, several years ago, because I thought of myself as someone with clear, and alternative, positions on all issues. My opinion of my own opinions is not as high as it once was.
I have opinions on most things, it’s true. Many issues about which most people would not even bother forming an opinion, to be sure. But, they are often not as clear cut, or as original, as I once thought, and I often find myself conflicted, and questioning them, and seeing both sides, which I hate, because I think the people on the other side are assholes.
Over the last few weeks, I have said things like “abolish the police” and “we’d be better off without the police” so it might be a bit hypocritical of me to complain about the fact that a lot of them are resigning. (e.g. police in Atlanta) Might be.
But the reason so many of them are resigning is because suddenly (not so suddenly, the police killings and the BLM movement started long before Trump became president) they are being told that if they kill black people, or any people actually, they might be disciplined for it.
Which kind of calls my bluff. We are going to see, here and there, examples of what happens when there are no police.
Will there be a massive outbreak of peace, love and understanding? That’s what it seems that we’re seeing in CHAZ, but all it would take would be one serious crime to tarnish that point of view.
Will there be, as the cop lovers constantly threaten, an outbreak of lawlessness?
There is almost no doubt that some crime will continue to happen. Some people are criminals, and they’re going to keep on being criminals whether cops are present or not. Most people, I reckon well over 90 and close to 99%, are law abiding most of the time. They might occasionally drive too fast, or take a quick left turn where one is not allowed, if traffic is light and they’re in a hurry, but they’re not out to kill anybody, or steal anybody else’s stuff. Rapes happen, with or without cops, and sometimes by cops, so I don’t expect the stats on that to go up or down much.
I guess, as with so many other things, we’ll have to wait and see. But, now, we may have some test cases.

I have long taken the position that one must separate the art from the artist, because otherwise you’d just be rejecting too much great art. Elia Kazan directed some great films, but his politics were reprehensible and he was narking on people to HUAC just as fast as he could. Salvador Dali and Ezra Pound were both Nazi sympathizers, and Picasso was totally abusive to the women he was with, at the very least verbally and emotionally. And I’m not going to refuse to watch the Police Academy movies just because O.J. murdered his wife. That’s not the movie’s fault.
I wouldn’t want to compare John Bolton’s book to an actual work of art, so that doesn’t really apply. But I also believe in another ancient piece of folk wisdom, which is “When your enemies are fighting, pass the popcorn.”
Because John Bolton really is a misanthropic warmonger, we’ve known that for a long time, and I don’t want to heap praise on him just for having written a book, which he probably didn’t actually ‘write’ himself, anyway. I do, however, look forward to reading some of the juiciest bits, like about how Trump begged the president of China to start buying American agricultural products, like, in October, just before the election, because that would help him get re-elected, and he added, just btw, that he was totally cool with China keeping a million or more Uighurs in concentration camps. I am looking forward to reading the bit about how Trump thought Finland was part of Russia, and how everybody in the White House thinks he’s a total moron, but I don’t want to see Bolton profiting from this book, when he was an ongoing part of this debacle, and not an unwilling ongoing part, either.
I’m sure somebody will hack, or just copy/past the relevant portions, and we’ll all read them that way. That’ll be cool.

Normally, I don’t get too bent out of shape over Facebook’s censorship policies. First, if you’ve ever seen a site with NO moderation, you know it can get unmanageable with blinding speed. There are people out there just itching to post the most offensive stuff they can think of, and their greatest goal in life is to fuck things up. Second, it hasn’t actually happened to me that often, and I can be seriously argumentative at times. If I make a comment on somebody’s post, and they personally delete it, that’s fair enough. I have the option of unfriending them, if I’m truly bothered.
But, I’m short a blog topic today, and this caught my eye.
The poster was complaining that Facebook had NOT taken down the photo, which was, indeed, in bad taste, at the very least. The caption said something like ‘have you ever seen a Jewish sky diver?’ and showed a picture of ash being flicked from a cigarette – a wee bit of holocaust humor.
It’s not that Facebook left it up that bothers me, offensive as it is, but their excuse: “Our technology reviewed your report…” That is, no human being ever saw this. A machine failed to make the connection between falling ash and 6 million Jews being slaughtered by the Nazis, I guess because nowhere in the meme did they see the words “Nazi” or “concentration camps” or “Death to the Jews.”
Mark Zuckerberg has almost 90 billion dollars and is the 3rd richest man in the world. He can’t afford to have a team of human beings checking through to see what’s offensive and what’s not?
Community Standards, my ass. Computers don’t know shit about community standards.

I’ve seen a couple of people today posted this article on Facebook, which I read, and think it’s rubbish, actually. It’s as if magazines need to find articles to fill up space, so they hire somebody to string some words together, and there you go.
The article is about a ‘scientific study’ that has determined that there are a grand total of 36 other planets in our galaxy that have intelligent life. They came up with some way of filling in a few numbers in the Drake equation, like the average length of time an intelligent civilization will survive (100 years? Seriously, 100 years?) and popped out the number 36.
They’re just guessing. Or maybe speculating would be a better word. Certainly a more generous one.
It could be 0. Maybe it’s a total fluke that life evolved at all. Maybe a lot of planets have life, bacteria and trees and stuff, but self aware life is a total fluke. Maybe lots of planets have self aware life, six legged giraffes and flying pigs and stuff, but technological life is a total fluke, that has only happened on Earth. Maybe.
But, if there’s one other planet like ours, it seems likely that there are thousands, maybe millions, given the fact that there are, like, a billion billion solar systems in our galaxy. And that’s what I believe to be the case.
It makes me think, though, as I occasionally do, of the Borra Trottier discovery, and how completely that has disappeared from the discussion. In 2016 Ermanno Borra and Eric Trottier, at Laval University in Canada, discovered signals emanating from 234 different systems (all of which have Earth type suns, by the way) and speculated that maybe these solar systems contained intelligent life.
Well, the scientific community did worse than reject their claims. They ignored them entirely. They ignored them so thoroughly that when I tried Googling Borra and Trottier separately today, I found a few firms named Borra, and a cave somewhere in Italy, and a Canadian hockey player named Bryan Trottier.
I did, however, find a scientific paper which supposedly was a refutation of their claim. Now, since it was a scientific paper a lot of it was way over my head but right in the first paragraph it said “In their analysis of 2.5 million spectra from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Borra & Trottier(2016) report periodic spectral modulations in 234 stars, and suggest that these signals may be evidence of extra-terrestrial civilizations. To further evaluate this claim, we observed a total of three of the 234 stars with the Automated Planet Finder Telescope and Levy Spectrometer…”
So, they looked at 3, out of 234, and they used a different method than Borra and Trottier, and they’re ready to call it refuted.
Well, I call bullshit. It looks to me like Borra and Trottier found something very interesting, and the rest of the scientific community is trying to repress it. Maybe they fear making contact with aliens (there is some logic to that), or maybe they’re just afraid of signing on to something that sounds a bit crazy, or maybe it’s professional jealousy, or maybe they are actually aliens themselves and want to keep all humans in the dark until the invasion fleet arrives.
In any event, I think a more serious, open minded study (like one that looks at 234 out of the 234 systems, instead of 3) is warranted. Not holding my breath, but I hope it happens some day.