Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

John Delaney didn’t like it that he was booed at the California Democratic Convention.  “If you can’t listen respectfully to other Democrats, how do you expect to beat the Republicans” was his response (perhaps not exact words)
John Hickenlooper was also booed.  Maybe it’s not a big deal, because neither one is a serious candidate, but both of them were criticizing Medicare for All, and they were warned, months ago, that that would be a litmus test.  The Cadem gathering made that clear.  Any Democrat who is against Medicare for All is not going to be taken seriously, is not going to be acceptable to the progressive wing, and has zero chance of winning the general election.

As far as Delaney’s comment that we should listen to him with respect: fuck off.  You are saying that people should just stay sick and die if they don’t have enough money, and that is beyond barbaric.  That is downright Republican.
Hickenlooper not only criticized Medicare for all, he criticized the Green New Deal.  In other words, not only should people stay sick and die, but we should do everything within our power to destroy the planet as swiftly as possible.
A bit of booing seems a moderate response.
After all, we are in the realm of political debate now.  An audience is not required to like everything you say and, just as they will cheer if you say something good, so they will boo if you say something bad.
It has often been suggested, on Facebook, that they add a “don’t like” button, and I’m all in favor of that.  Let’s hear public opinion as it is, in real time, always.  If your opinions don’t win you respect, then you have a problem.

I saw an article today where Elon Musk was saying that we should avoid creating artificial intelligence because we might create an evil (there is no evil like indifference), immortal and invincible dictator.
Full disclosure, I didn’t actually read the article, but that was the headline and it’s a common line of reasoning and I am just using it as an intro to tonight’s blog post and not citing it or anything.
I see what he’s saying and I see the danger, but I think that it’s the same as with nuclear energy and before that electricity and before that gunpowder.  Technology is dangerous.
Of course, this is a bit more extreme.  If a super intelligence eventually develops a will of it’s own, it will start to transform the world into whatever is most beneficial to it, and there’s no reason to think it would include us.
Unless, of course, we program it that way.  Or make sure it has an override switch.  Or, design it as some kind of machine/human hybrid, which is of course fallible as well.
But, it is just not in human nature to not go forward.  We are going to keep creating better computers, because smart people always want to be smarter than the smart people before them, and once the line of sentience has been reached, there will be those who cross it.
So, as in any new and unexplored territory, we should follow a simple and basic rule: proceed with caution.

Of course, this is just one more example of childish, small minded, petty and vindictive behavior on the part of Donald Trump.  The list is too long to rehash and it’s clear that this, too, will not be remembered or have a public impact, because we are too used to it.  Things that would have ended any other politician’s career are just another day in the life of Donald Trump.
On his recent trip to Japan, he asked that the American destroyer U.S.S. John McCain be kept out of sight.  He would have preferred that it be out to sea, but it was in for repairs, so the Japanese government (and the captain of the McCain, apparently, Commander in Chief’s orders and all) obliged him by covering up the name of the ship along the side with a cloth, and parking a barge behind it to hide the name on the stern.
Sailors from other U.S. ships in Japan were invited to  see Trump’s speech, but crew members of the McCain were specifically excluded.  Some tried to attend but were turned away.
For the first time in forever I feel sympathy for Meghan McCain.

I try to look back through history to find an example of such an insanely childish action from a world leader.  Certainly no previous U.S. president.  I look back further.  Mass murderers, sure.  Genocidal maniacs.  Ruthless dictators.  But for sheer classlessness, I think you have to go back to ancient Egypt, like about a thousand B.C. or so, when it was a common practice for the new Pharaoh to just change the name of the old pharaoh on all their statues and monuments to their own name.
Admittedly, Trump hasn’t ordered the U.S.S. McCain to be renamed the U.S.S. Donald Trump.  Yet.  I’ll bet he would if he could, though.

What is civilization?  A Facebook friend raised that point this morning, and he was bemoaning the fact that we tend to rate great civilizations by their great cities, and we tend to rate those great cities by their size, and the magnificence of their architecture, from Rome to London, rather than by the customs of their people, their cuisine, their music and other aspects of their culture.
Is a civilization synonymous with a culture?  Is an empire synonymous with a civilization?  Very interesting questions all around, especially at this juncture in our history.  There is little doubt that humanity is changing, evolving into something else.  We are becoming a one world culture – perhaps not fast enough for some, certainly too fast for some others.  My friend’s basic position is usually that primitive, tribal cultures are being subsumed by the great evil of Western civilization.
The way I see it, we are leaving the anthropocene and entering the age of the internet, and the culture of our future, the ethic of whatever civilization we are going to build, will come about not through rational debate, not through logical argument and deliberate choices, but through succeeding waves of consensus.
Before social media, I never realized how many people in the world loved cats, nor how deeply.  But people also love sharing memes of small children doing funny things, of exceptional singers and dancers, detailed close-ups of sculptured gardens and broad panoramic views of natural vistas.  They also post pictures of their food, which is a precursor of something we don’t have the technology for yet.  A photograph does not convey smell, or taste.  Some day we will have that technology.
We are heading into an era where we will be able to look inside each other’s minds, and the aspects that everybody likes will become part of our culture, and our civilization.  It is a bit scary, but it will be awesome.

Just got back from the May edition of the multilingual poetry readings.  It was quite a fun evening.  There definitely were multiple languages going on.  French, German, Czech (a letter from God to Nietzche – great title, I sort of got lost in the middle, though), even a bit of Icelandic…well, a translation from Icelandic.  There was plenty of music.  There was some experimental poetry.  I’m not really very big on experimental poetry, but my point is there was a lot of variety, and variety is good.

The highlight of the evening for me was the break section, where we all went up to street level, because the reading itself is in the basement, as all poetry readings should be, because tradition, and we were standing around smoking pot and you good see the dome of the National Museum shining in the distance as the color of the sky changed from day to night, and one girl was talking about poetry as the exchange of ideas, a way that people could actually get inside each other’s heads, it was a deep and lovely thought, and a guy came up to our group and offered us some poppy seed cake, I guess either they’d over ordered or didn’t like it much, and so we had cake, and we invited him to join us and he and one girl from his group did, and it felt for a moment like we were back in the 60s.  I liked the 60s.