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Well, I was letting my fingers do the walking through the Netflix offers, and I’d just started a show called Nightflyer when my wife got home.  She wanted to watch her soap operas, I was about to step out onto my balcony and smoke a big fattie, and I could see I wasn’t going to like the program much, so I haven’t even gone back to it.
This blog is about my reason why.

I do like science fiction, of course, and I’m not terribly discriminating.  Something can be a fantasy, and not very science fictiony at all, and I’ll enjoy it if the stories good and the characters compelling.  I enjoy post-apocalyptic movies, and view them as sort of an instruction manual.  If the apocalypse ever comes, the person who will lead the ragtag band of survivors, outcasts and mutants will be the person who’s seen The Postman the most times.  I particularly enjoy sci-fi with themes of space travel, robots, and AI.  That’s all stuff that I think is coming, it’s totally physically believable, and it’s important that they keep making lots of films about it so we can explore the ethical considerations.  I like sci-fi with lots of aliens, because aliens make very interesting people.  Of course, if we ever do make contact with an alien species, they are likely to make all films made up to that point seem quaint.  I even like time travel themed stuff even though it’s way beyond our current technology and I actually think it’s not possible.  I enjoy history as well as sci-fi, and it usually makes for a great story.
What I don’t like is telepaths.  While some people are good at cold readings, and can figure things out from watching body language and analyzing tone of voice, that’s not the same as actual mind reading, or being able to see the future, or stuff like that.

And, it’s a cheap plot device.  In the future, there will be all sorts of cool spy software, foolproof lie detector tests, future prediction algorithms, and more.  This whole ‘ship’s telepath*’ thing is kind of crap.  Why do they even need to bring telepaths into it, with nary a mention of how they came to be that way?
It’s a bit too much like magic.  No matter how dark the situation, somebody will come along and magic you right out of it.  That’s too easy.

*DeeAnna Troy was an empath.  That’s totally different.

We are the sum of what we think and do, and a lot of that is just distraction.
Yesterday, there was the big Facebook blackout, which I only realized this morning was system wide.  I thought I was being singled out and felt a great deal of self-righteous paranoia.  But, there was also a moment in there when I thought “O.K., if I’m blocked from commenting on Facebook, maybe I’ll find other things to do with my time, maybe I’ll start getting some things done.  I have poems to write, lessons to plan, and books to read.”  It was momentary, of course, and faded like a dream as soon as I got up in the morning and Facebook was back to normal.
It is sort of like marijuana.  Every now and then, I take a few days off, maybe even a week or two, to clear my head, and lungs.  I always tell myself that it will be a good time to get things done (poems written, books read, lessons planned, etc.) and it never happens.  I just spend more time watching TV and my Facebook comments get a little bit more barbed, and cynical.
Spent a bit of time browsing Netflix today.  Abandoned The 100 mid-episode because it was so stupid (the episode were they all eat some hallucinogenic plant and start seeing hallucinations which are all too neat as plot devices.  Really, the writers could have done a much better job of portraying hallucinations.  Like, it was especially absurd when Bellamy got the shit kicked out of him – by his hallucination. Hallucinations may seem vivid, but they do not actually manifest in the physical world)  So, I watched a couple of old episodes of Deep Space Nine instead.  Meaningless entertainment disguised as science fiction was replaced by slightly less meaningless entertainment with a bit thicker veneer of science fiction.
Still not getting stuff done.  We are, indeed, the sum of our distractions.

This morning I had left the house before I realized that I’d failed to charge my phone last night.  I was unable to contact anyone, access my routine morning Metro entertainment (usually Sudoku, but at the moment I’m also reading a crime story, which is especially interesting because it was written by my cousin.  Widows-in-Law by Michelle Miller.  Pretty good stuff.) or even see what time it was.
An hour or two ago I suddenly was unable to post any comments on Facebook.  I have no idea how long that will last or what it was I said.  I don’t know if I tripped an algorithm or somebody narked on me, like maybe one of the trolls I sometimes argue with.  It’s frustrating, though.  I don’t even know if I’ll be able to link this to Facebook.

On the one hand, it’s kind of just me and modern technology.  We don’t understand each other real well.  Also, it’s kind of an ‘if it rains, it pours’ thing and I’m just complaining about having a shitty day, but it wasn’t really a particularly shitty day.  I am in good health, I ate well.
A bit disorienting, though, and it does serve as a reminder of how dependent we’ve become on our interconnectedness.  On my Metro ride this morning, I had nothing to do but sit there and look at all the other people on the train who were, for the most part, an uninspiring lot, and a large percentage of them were engrossed in their own mobile phones.  But, just sitting there and looking at people is what I used to do fairly often.
I feel cut off by not having my posts or comments allowed, but up until about ten years ago, that’s a level of connectivity I never had at all.
People talk about how addicted people are to social media.  I say our lives have been enhanced by social media, and so it’s only normal to be a bit frustrated when it’s gone.  Hope we’re back to normal by tomorrow, though.

I’ve been hearing comments all day about what a dick Stephen Colbert was to Tulsi Gabbard, so I decided to watch the clip and check it out.  It’s not long.  Under eight minutes.  I thought I was probably looking at an excerpt, which would have been fine.  It’s late, I want to sleep, and I have a pathetically short attention span.  Half the time I just read a headline and go ahead and fire back with a comment.
But, no, that was the whole thing.  It was like the guest before her went over and they had to rush her segment before they got to the musical number.  That was problem #1.
Then, interrupting her while she was explaining her position on Syria to rephrase his original question.  “Shouldn’t we have a war in Syria?”  “I mean, really, shouldn’t we have a war in Syria?”  It was kind of dickish.  Maybe not as dickish as his “Aloha” comment of a month or two ago, but still dickish.  Then he went for the David Duke and Steve Bannon thing, how they’ve said they admire her.  It wasn’t really a ‘gotcha’ question, any more than the coup in Venezuela was a coup.  It may have been intended as a gotcha question, but Tulsi is a professional, and it was easily batted aside.  “You should ask them.”
I used to really like Stephen Colbert.  In his comedy persona as the over-the-top right wing pundit he was hysterical, and it was even more hysterical that actual right wingers liked it.  Sort of like with Archie Bunker on All in the Family, they didn’t realize they were being mocked.
And the time he hosted the Washington Press Corps Dinner was an absolute work of art.  Now, sadly, he has become like the journalists he criticized so roundly then.  Back to comedy, Stephen.  As a political pundit, you suck ass.

Nancy Pelosi said today that she doesn’t think it would be “worth it” to impeach President Trump.  This is the second time she has declined to impeach a criminally irresponsible, possibly mentally retarded Republican president.  She also “took impeachment off the table” for George W. Bush.  In hindsight, (although there were plenty of people at the time saying this with foresight) not impeaching Bush sent a signal to the Republican party: You can just keep on lowering the bar, there is no Republican so stupid, so incompetent, so criminal that we will make the effort to impeach them.  Go ahead.  Run the absolute worst candidate you can find.

She says it will ‘divide the country.’  This is total bullshit.  The country is already divided.  It’s rich v. poor, coastal v. flyover, young v. old and, most relevantly, people who seriously want to see Trump impeached v. people who love Trump.
And now we know which of those two sides Nancy Pelosi is on.  Sure, she just got a nice little voter rights bill through the House, with provisions like making election day a national holiday, and banning gerrymandering, but I’d like to see how they’re actually going to enforce that one.  Nothing’s being done to address the crooked machinery of the Democratic leadership, so it’s a bit less impressive.  Also, she’s dismissed the Green New Deal as “the Green Dream or whatever” and she’s not all that keen on Medicare for All.
She is nothing but a 1%er looking out for the interests of the rich.  She is a traitor to the Democratic party.  She is an enemy of progressives.  The good people of San Francisco should seriously start looking for a progressive to challenge her in the next primary.  Just about anybody would be an improvement.