Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Nobody except Nikki Haley knows why Nikki Haley resigned, but there is plenty of speculation.   It could be about the investigation that was about to open up on her (and  I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t proceed), about accepting free  rides on corporate jets.  That would strike me as small  potatoes amid all the major corruption of the Trump administration, but still…it might be a big deal to Nikki Haley.
It is possible, as many have suggested, that she’s hoping to be appointed to the vacant South Carolina Senate seat that would come to be if Trump fires Sessions and replaces him with Lindsay Graham.  In that case, she either has advance knowledge or is taking a huge chance.  Lindsay might very  well get no  more than a condescending pat on the head from Trump for his theatrics during the Ford hearing.  The position may  not even be open.  Some have suggested she might be planning a run for president, but it  seems to me U.N. ambassador would be a pretty good stepping stone to that – that is, if she weren’t the topic of an investigation.

In any event, good riddance to her.  She’s a global warming denier, and spent her term at the U.N. acting like a belligerent jerk and threatening to start WWIII all the  time.  Fortunately, most countries of the world have governments which are not so  insane as the American  government, and none have quite risen to the bait.

I can’t imagine who Trump is going to replace her with, either, but I am certain it will be somebody horrible.  I’ve heard both Ivanka Trump and Kanye West suggested, and I  don’t think either suggestion was actually a joke.

This blog is not going to change the world, but I’m kind of sick of talking about the real world anyway.  There is no rational way to explain the right wing wave that’s sweeping the world -WTF, Brazil?!  Fun loving, carnival hosting, multi-racial, tropical paradise Brazil??
Either it’s massive fear due to environmental and demographic factors (i.e. overpopulation), or there’s a river of money flowing from the hidden spring of dark capitalism, but it’s scary either way, and I’ve got no suggestions, but tonight…
I was very pleased with my  TV viewing.  One of my favorite programs in recent years has been Humans, and I was quite bummed when it ended, I thought “Damn, what a bogus  spot to end a mini-series, just as things were getting interesting.”
So, when I saw it advertised again, I thought they’d be rerunning the last series, which I never did see from the beginning, so I was looking forward to that.
But, no, this is season two, and it has gotten very interesting, indeed.  Terrorist humans killing robots, terrorist robots killing humans, mad bombers killing everybody, and a cute, little girl who punches her classmates who bully her for being too robot-friendly.
Ethical questions galore, and even though Agnes is obviously  a cyberpsychopath who is itching to kill human beings, she’s hot.

I’ve spent most of the weekend on proofreading, and an awkward exercise it was.  A lot of changing a to the and the to a, of course, and rearranging sentences so the subject comes first, which is standard.  I was told before I started to leave all the abbreviations  alone, that they like their abbreviations, and for the most part I respected that, and I continued to as long as they were the acronymic kind that bureaucrats are so inexplicably fond of.
But, they were abbreviating number as nu, and million as mio, and for some reason about half the time they would abbreviate animation as anim. and then in the next sentence they would spell it out, so  I changed all those so it was more normal.
There was one point where they had the word teather and I figured it was a simple typo and changed it to teacher, and then my wife pointed out that it was a slightly more complex typo and the intended word had been theater.

And we laugh at Google when it screws things up.  I’m not really sure I’m that much better.  In fact, if I was doing the translations instead of just the proofreading (my wife has already done the translation), I’m sure I couldn’t do as well as Google, in any language –  and Google can do it in every language.  Sure, they  make some comical mistakes, and they are funny.  They are like a child’s humorous malapropisms, based in simple and innocent misunderstanding.  The child eventually learns, and adopts all the preconceptions of their elders and society at large.  The computers will do the same, except that once the computers get to an adult level, they will keep on going.
Someday, computers will  not only be able to translate our words, they will be able to interpret them, psychoanalyze them, parody them, weave them into brilliant poems and songs and novels and screenplays, collate them with others  words by other people on related and tangential subjects, and get far more mileage out of them than we ever did ourselves.
Keep your words sweet.  Soon we will have to eat them.

I was watching a program today, one of those I’ve  seen pieces of many  times like that, about the deep future – Year Million I believe it’s called.  There was a lot of talk of Dyson spheres and the Kardashev Scale, and how people will have moved into cyberworld entirely, leaving our corporeal existences behind and reveling in the painless bliss of a digital existence.
The Kardashev Scale strikes me as a ridiculous scale, on a couple of levels.  A type 1 advanced civilization, according to the good professor K, is one which manages to use all the energy of its own home planet.  A type 2 has harvested all the energy of its solar system (that’s where the Dyson sphere comes in) and a type 3 has harvested the energy of a whole galaxy.  Isn’t that just a little bit greedy?

I mean, the whole mark of a civilization, according to Kardashev, is how much it can consume.  Not whether it can produce great music, or great literature, or beautiful paintings and sculptures.  Not whether it can create a just society, or an intelligent and knowledgeable society, living and trading between hundreds of planetary utopias living in harmony.  Not whether it can sustain its own existence out to a theoretical eternity by living in harmony with the natural universe, but whether we can quash it.  It is the worst instincts of mankind, codified.
In addition,  of course, it’s just a scale made up by some guy, with very little bearing on where we are at our current stage of development.

Weekend coming up and I need to get my ballot mailed in even though I’m registered to vote in what they call a ‘safe’ Democratic district but what  that means is the Democratic congresswoman is so complacent there wasn’t even a progressive challenger, and she occasionally makes liberal  noises but in fact she’s a bit of a crook, I’ll probably vote Green, and I’ll probably vote for Kevin deLeon for Senate, not  because I  think he’ll be much different from Dianne Feinstein, but just because he’s not Dianne Feinstein, and I’m tired of her ugly mug.
We all talk about getting money out of politics, and how there must be a better way to elect a president, but it’s tricky.  As Churchill said:  “Democracy is absolutely the worst method of governance ever invented – except for all the others.”  In the end, it’s got to come down to a vote of the people, no matter how ill-informed, poorly educated, short sighted and pig headed those people might be.
But there is a way to cut through the lies and the bullshit and make sure the people have a better idea who they’re voting for.  This  is it:
We ban all political advertising, TV, print, internet, yard signs, all of it.  Of course, some would argue that that’s a limitation on free speech, but it’s really  not.   It’s just a  limitation on the medium of free speech.  And the medium is  the message.

All of this is replaced with an American Idol type elimination series.  In the first few rounds, you’d have  your Vernon Supremes and everybody else, and everybody would get the same debate time.  Evens the playing field.  Maybe sometimes they’d have to perform ‘tasks’ or go  through lightning  round quizzes on the constitution, and there would be crisis role play situations, like a terrorist attack or a natural disaster they’d have to deal with, and of  course lots of  different  debates,  with different formats.  It would  have to be a  multi-round thing, so by the time somebody gets to the final round, there are lots of  people  who like them, everybody knows their positions,  and  their background, and everything  there is  to  know  about their life, because fuck  these people and their secrecy.
If we can’t know the truth about them, they don’t need to be in  a position of leadership.