Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

I find it kind of strange that the final impetus for impeachment was Trump trying to dig up dirt on Biden in Ukraine. They could have nailed him on the emoluments clause after the first weekend at Mar-a-Lago. Certainly, giving Ivanka an exemption from the tariffs which he imposed should have been enough. Or the Khashoggi incident. Or separating the families of asylum seekers and locking up the children.
The thing is, there is dirt on Biden, there’s enough to convict on Biden probably, and it was all public to start with. Trump didn’t need to do any more digging than an internet search.
Anyway, bnmw people get upset with me when I say “Biden’s corrupt, too, and so he shouldn’t be the candidate.” They write long posts to convince me that Trump is much, much worse than Biden, which is probably true.
But we have a candidate with no scandals at all.
Bernie Sanders has no relatives working in the for profit health care industry like Elizabeth Warren. Never had to lie about sending his kids to private school.
Never listed supporters who didn’t agree to be listed, like Pete Buttigieg.
Never withheld evidence to keep an innocent man in jail, like Kamala Harris.
“You can’t have everything you want in a candidate,” they say. Why not? I wonder.
It’s as if they’re saying “We can’t have a candidate who’s good. That’s just not how it works.” Well, maybe not since JFK, maybe even not since FDR, but at some time long ago in the past, at some point deep within the American psyche, there is the idea that a good person can be president. A lot of films and TV series have been based on that premise.

It might be a trivial issue, because I believe if somebody’s got megabucks there’s nothing inherently immoral in their decision to send their kids to private schools, and it could possibly being construed as attacking the child of a candidate, but this happened decades ago. The child in question, Alex Warren, is in his 40s now, and his mother Elizabeth wasn’t even in politics at the time.

But, a reporter asked Elizabeth Warren, just today, why she sent her child to a private school. Instead of saying “Because it was a better school and my kids are more important than anything,” or “My choice doesn’t in any way change my unwavering commitment to public schools and the funding thereof” or finding any one of the millions of ways politicians do of segueing from the question asked into the answer they want to give, but she didn’t. She just lied and said “My kids went to public schools.” Maybe they did. But, we have photographic evidence that, at least for one year, son Alex went to a fancy pants elite public school in Texas.
It’s not as big an issue as saying she’s anti-war and then giving Trump the huge military budget he asked for, plus a little extra on top. It’s not as big an issue as saying she supported the pipeline protesters, and then doing nothing at all to actually support them. It’s not as bad as saying you’re for Medicare for All, and then walking it back.

Nonetheless, it shows she lies glibly, and easily. It’s second nature. It’s the first thing out of her mouth. And that’s why this is important.

This had to come, because any application of technology that’s possible gets done sooner or later, for better or worse. There is an AI delivering the news in China.
It’s a weird development, but from the bit I watched, my reaction is “Meh, that’s a bit of an anticlimax” It’s a robot, reading the news. If that becomes standard, most people’s lives would be unaffected. Few feel a strong emotional bond to their human newscasters (I could be wrong about that), but some also may be able to identify with the android newscaster. People watch cartoons, don’t they?
Mostly, though, it will just be a reading of the news. Maybe a bit more objective and dispassionate seeming but, still, it’s not the robot writing the words, thinking independently.
That will be the day. The first time an AI newscaster goes off script, then we’ll know we have cracked the sentient robot barrier and the human race is doomed.

Just watched a pretty good film on Netflix. At first I though it was a new series, and I was looking forward to at least a couple of weeks of just binge-watching. That’s Netflix.
Anyway, it was mostly just a big shoot ’em up in space, with lots of gun fights, laser fights, sword fights, martial arts and plain old fisticuffs, with two space cops who are partners but also dating, so of course it ends up with a marriage, or at least a proposal, after they’ve blasted a huge hole in the side of the ‘City of a Thousand Planets’, rescued an entire alien species, and caught the evil, genocidal maniac who’d destroyed their world 30 years ago. None of that stuff was new.
But I really liked the alien planet, the one that was destroyed. It looked like something from a kids’ cartoon I used to watch when my kids were little kids, so at least 10 years ago, called Tiny Planets. It always began with the dad and the boy, who were some kind of furry alien, slingshotting their couch into space and they’d land on some strange planet – I remember one time all the people were musical instruments, and another time the planet was made of candy.
I also liked ‘The Big Bazaar’, which existed in a different dimension so everybody had to wear helmets to see it, but the stuff they bought there was real enough, so it was popular with tourists.
In short, a visual treat and fans of the genre will love it, but a weak plot and a kind of boring love affair.

Full disclosure from the start, I didn’t watch the debate live, you know, because of time zones, and also I’m not a masochist, but obviously this means my blog should – and does, I think maybe 10 people read this blog, max – count for less than some others.
Nonetheless, here we go. There were no real surprises. The moderators tried as hard as they could to pretend Bernie Sanders does not exist, a strategy which is becoming tiresome but it’s the best they’ve got. He got less talk time than Corey Booker (D-big pharma) .
Klobuchar, I’ve been told, looked shaky. That’s not a figure of speech, she literally looked shaky.
Buttigieg was not asked even one question about his huge fuckup in South Carolina, or about why black people hate him so much, which is really the same question.
Tulsi Gabbard did ask him about his willingness to send troops to Mexico, and he came back with neener-neener, you met with Assad. I think I hate Buttigieg more than any other candidate, although I see Warren as the biggest threat.
Biden had a couple of gaffes, but the first one falls short of being an obvious Alzheimer’s moment. That was when he said we have to keep punching, punching, punching at the problem of domestic violence. Could be just a poor choice of words and not a Freudian slip, I suppose. The other was when he said he had the endorsement of “the only black woman elected to the Senate.” Biden does, indeed, have the endorsement of Carol Mosely Braun, who was Senator from Illinois for one term in the 1990s. However, he must have either forgotten that Kamala Harris is a current U.S. Senator, or that she is black. Either way, it’s a pretty major thing to forget.
Final analysis: nothing’s changed. Bernie still has the momentum.