Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

(note – I am still a Gabbard supporter and she appears to be within a couple thousand donors of that 65,000 individual donor threshold, which may have been designed to keep lesser known candidates out of the debates but actually amounts to a buy-in, which should be against the rules, instead of being the rule.  I love her anti-war stance, her ‘lead with  love’ slogan, and her whole persona.  But, to love Tulsi is to love Bernie, too, because on most issues they are indistinguishable.)

I saw three articles today saying ‘Bernie is now the front-runner,’ which is kind of a left-handed compliment, as they say, because he’s been the front runner ever since he’s announced, but still…we’ve been begging the media to stop ignoring him, so if that’s what’s happening, I welcome it.
One was from Daily Kos, whose polls he keeps winning even though they sometimes do stuff like forget to interview anybody who’s under 30.  Another was from The New Republic, and a third was from Jake Tapper.
Well, three in one day is a big deal, it’s triangulation, maybe even a trend. I am glad they are recognizing the obvious.  Since Bernie Sanders has consistently been America’s most popular politician, for the last couple of years, it was kind of a no-brainer that if he announced, he would be that automatic front-runner.

Add to that, he’s in favor of Medicare for All (it’s his program), a $15 an hour minimum wage (which he’s won for employees at Amazon and Disneyland, without even getting legislation passed), legalizing marijuana, ending private prisons, repairing infrastructure and converting to a green economy (although Green New Deal is a much catchier title), and taxing the living shit out of the rich, all ideas which are supported by a large majority of the American people, and you’ve got an almost unstoppable candidate.
Almost.  The DNC will do anything they can to cheat him, and if they can stop him from having over 50% on the first ballot, they could go ahead and nominate whoever the fuck they please.

And then Trump would win again, but that’s just the way the DNC rolls.
So, front runner or not, he’s got his work cut out for him.  He doesn’t just have to beat old Joe Biden, lightweight Pete Buttigieg, corrupt Kamala, lame Lizzie, Amy ‘the mean boss’ Klobuchar and Kirsten ‘who?’ Gillibrand.  He has to beat them all combined.
A tall order, but I believe he can do it.

President Trump has got to be retarded, or something worse.  As evidence, let us consider some of his recent (last couple of days) statements on windmills.  He says that nobody will be able to watch TV if the wind is not blowing, but that’s not actually how things work.  He says they kill massive numbers of birds, but they don’t, really.  Oh, sure, occasionally a bird will fly into the blades, but there are more killed by the windshields of speeding cars and trucks, or by getting sucked up into jet engines.  Probably most of all are killed by toxic air, a problem the windmills are there to solve.  He says that they will reduce the value of your property by 75%, but there is no evidence to back that up, and he says that nobody wants to live near them, which is true, but nobody needs to, either.  Windmills can be placed in places where people never go, out in the middle of a cow pasture for instance.
He also says that the sound from the windmills can cause cancer, which is bullshit.  There are some environmental factors which can cause cancer, of course.  Smoking.  Getting too many X-Rays.  Using radioactive paint to make your skin light up in UV light, in order to impress people at costume parties.  Being in the vicinity of a nuclear meltdown.
But not sound.  Sound can make you deaf, but it’s not going to give you cancer.

Wind Power is coming, just as sure as the wind blows.  The only question is whether we’ll switch to it out of necessity, at some point 2 or 3 decades in the future when the oil has all run out, or now.
Now would be better.

My latest Netflix obsession is a show called Continuum, which is basically a formula cop show with a gimmick, but the gimmick is time travel, and I love time travel shows enough that I can overlook how much I hate formula cop shows.
Lady cop (kind of hot) from the future, teams up with a big, good looking, muscular man cop but he doesn’t know she’s from the future, he’s got a Hispanic last name for a few extra PC points, there is the tough but fair, skeptical but result minded precinct captain, the quirky nerdgirl with the computers, and lots of other cliches.  (Fortunately, they don’t have a forensic pathologist with a dark sense of humor)
She got zapped into the past along with a bunch of “terrorists” who I kind of sympathize with because the future is controlled by corporations, and aforesaid lady cop is flying around in a cop-o-copter, with all sorts of special weaponry and computer gadgets implanted so she can see stuff like with google glass and everything is recorded.
In the past (2012) she runs into the 18 year old (I’m guessing, but it’s that within a couple of years) version of the guy she knows as the Bill Gates of 2077, who is an old man, and I guess he hates himself, or the world he’s created, because he sent them all back to change things without any specific instructions.
And, also, he sent back a super badass cop and a bunch of criminals, which would seem like they’d just cancel each other out.

Sometimes it seems like being from the future can be a superpower in itself, like now that we’re in season two, she can become invisible, and there hasn’t been much explanation of it, I guess Mr. Younger Computer Genius managed to upgrade her supersuit, with capabilities it didn’t even have in 2077.
There’s also one character I like very much, because he was one of the gang of terrorists awaiting execution who got sent back but, whereas all the rest are like “Fuck, yeah, let’s change the past by killing all sorts of people,” and ladycop is like “I have to get back to my husband and son in the future” he’s like “Hey, I’m going to make a lot of money by clever investments and live like an early 21st century billionaire, because that’s awesome” and I’m like “Dayum, finally fantasy writers put somebody in who isn’t completely stupid,” so I like the show.
Another thing I like is that a couple of the actors from Travelers have put in an appearance, and I’m wondering, ‘what if they really ARE from the future and just messing with everybody’s heads by becoming actors and only playing people who come from the future,’ because that would be awesome.

There are serious problems facing the human race at the moment.  Overpopulation, global warming, refugees, economic inequality, racism, ignorance, hate, greed, and all the issues of privacy and individual identity that are taking place as computers become more and more intelligent and people start to live more and more online.
Nevertheless, people tend to have really strong opinions about guns, abortion, Israel and issues which are even less central to the human experience, like circumcision, and whether or not pineapple belongs on a pizza.  (I like it just fine, in case you were wondering)
Today, I saw a post about how dog pee was killing trees.  Seriously.  O.K., the example given was Manhattan, where there are far too few trees, but I still don’t see it as a major problem.  It has to be a pretty small tree, getting peed on by a large number of dogs, before it’s going to make a difference.

And, A dog has to pee somewhere. A tree, at least, is better than your house, or your car.

As laughably minor as this problem is, the solution is obvious.  Plant more trees. If the trees in urban areas were increased tenfold, which would be easy to accomplish as many streets have no trees along them at all, then each individual tree would only be pissed on 1/10th as much, which I imagine they can deal with as trees tend to be far larger than dogs.

Also, the trees would clean the air and save the planet. But let’s just focus on the dog-pee problem first.

Slovakia, our sister nation to the East, has elected a lady President.  Zuzana Čaputova’s main claim to fame is that, as a lawyer, she went up against big landfill, and she won.  Dragged on in the courts for ten years, but she got the landfill blocked.  So, she’s been called ‘The Slovak Erin Brockovic” and more power to her on that.  We need fewer landfills and better recycling to create a clean, stable environment for our future utopia.
Her campaign was big against corruption, and that’s another plus.  It’s also a big wait-and-see.  Plenty of politicians have got into office swearing to root out corruption and then changed their tune a bit when they realized how easy it was, and how much money was involved.
I don’t think it’s real relevant that she’s a woman.  I suppose it’s a good thing, just to balance the scales a bit, but there have been plenty of bad female leaders in history as well.  I like Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand quite when, but Theresa May … well, if Trump did not exist, all the stupidest leader in the known world jokes would have her as the punchline.  Identity politics is bogus.
At any rate, Čaputova seems to be all right. I am cautiously optimistic about her future, and Slovakia’s.  We will see.