Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Well the excrement has struck the proverbial fan in the Old Kavanaugh hearing.  From one witness to 3, maybe 4, with a few more salacious details.  Will ‘boofing’ be this decades ‘Long Dong Silver?’  I don’t think so, not near as funny, but what would I know.

I still wish they would have rejected him because of the plagiarism, technically they could have got him disbarred and maybe worse for that, but at least removed from consideration.  But no, nobody even talks about the perjury any more, because grabtitty at drunken teenage parties is what everybody wants to talk about.
I suspect the noise is now too loud to be ignored, although the Republicans keep going down, and down, and there is no bottom, so who knows?
And beyond just the perjury, there’s the totally political angle.  He is a right wing judge, as right wing as right wing can be, and that will make 5, and that means the U.S. is fucked, and there are profound implications for  the rest of the world.
So, what happens now?  Two possibilities:  Republicans stay true to form, and ram through the confirmation  anyway.  Might hurt them in  the mid-terms, might not, but if they keep going the was they’re going, they’ve got to go over  an edge at some point.  Or, two, cooler heads in the party prevails, the nomination  is withdrawn,  and  maybe there won’t be time for anybody else before the midterms.  Wouldn’t that be nice?

I was watching a futuristic thing on TV today, and some scientist was saying how glorious it all  would be and “I sure which  I could be around to see it.”  Well, that is not an uncommon sentiment, nor one with which I disagree.  There is, however, kind of an implication: that the future is set, that if we were able to look into it from right now, there’s one reality that we’d see there, just as if you fly to Paris, you can look in a guidebook and see what’s going to be there.
The future is not pre-determined.  I am absolutely convinced of that.  It depends on everybody’s actions in the present, and there are so many random factors that the possibilities are more infinite than the number of possible moves in a game of chess, the number of possible designs for a snowflake.
There are the dystopian environmental nightmares, the dystopian fascist nightmares, the dystopian tech gone wild nightmares, like when AI takes over, and for each and every possible dystopian future, there is a corresponding utopian future, but they don’t make a lot of movies out of  those because they don’t have all the chase scenes, and fighting, and laser beam battles in space, and slave planets with girls in skimpy, primitive looking outfits, and that’s really all the audience wants.  Who wants to be confused with ethics, or possibilities?
I think the main thing we need to remember going forth…well, two main things: first, we should remember that the future is not pre-determined, we can make it whatever we want to be, and second, our books and movies aren’t generally a very good guide, because they leave out all the peaceful and calm narratives because, even though they might be the pleasantest futures to live in, make dull stories.

I didn’t actually see the debate, and I know my Facebook filter is set to Democratic Socialist, but it seems to me O’Rourke probably won  the debate, and will  probably win the election.

I’ve seen a lot of mainstream publications talk about how Ted Cruz is an expert debater, but I don’t get that… he lost the Republican debates to Donald Trump…how good can he be?
Of course, all my Berniecrat friends are going on about Beto’s ‘true to form’ line, and it does sound like it was a pretty good zinger, but one comment put things into perspective.  One person wrote that among Texans who love their guns and hate immigration, Cruz probably won the debate.

That’s true, and it brings up a greater point.  People who pay attention to politics, people who have opinions, have already made up their minds.  These debates are to help people who don’t really pay any attention to make up their minds.
And, forgive me for being a bit judgemental and sexist, but this is true.  When Texas women who hadn’t been  paying particularly close attention suddenly saw Ted Cruz and Beto O’Rourke on the same stage last night I’ll bet a lot of them asked themselves “Which one of these two would I rather see 3 or 4 times a week on the evening news for the next 6 years?”, and I’ll bet that out of all the women who asked themselves that question, close to 100% are going to vote for O’Rourke.  They  might not tell their husbands that, but they’re going  to.

Watched a film last night about AI, called ‘Upgrade.’  It was intense, lots of gory fistfights, a few shootings, a couple of exciting car chase type scenes involving driverless cars, and some interesting conversations about the  ethics of machines  taking over human  bodies.
Like so many of these movies, it’s basically ‘Invasion of the Body  Snatchers ‘ or ‘Rhinoceros’ (a Gene Wilder classic).  I’m  not too worried about AI, I think machines can develop a very high degree of intelligence, and will  be able to mimic human reactions quite accurately, before they  ever get infected with that itch, that nasty thing that people get, where they want to kill everybody and take over the world, but I have to say that with  a couple  of caveats.  One, that if I’m wrong and they DO develop that craving, we’re fucked.  Once they become better than us, they will become better and better than us and there is no way we’ll  be able to compete.  Second, there are a whole lot of people out there, smarter and more knowledgeable about AI then I am, who ARE worried about it.
Here’s the thought that struck me today.  We’ve all noticed that Republican voters tend to fear intelligent and educated people.  It’s a strong American trait.  To some extent, it might be true everywhere, but I’ve never seen it  as strong as I’ve seen it in  the U.S.  I noticed it clear back in  the 3rd  grade.  And you have to try and understand them.  When you’re struggling in school, when you see other people for whom it’s easy, it must be galling.  Resentment leads to reaction and, knowing they’ll  never get to be any smarter, they want terribly to bring smart people down.  Well, now smart people get to feel that sense of inadequacy, that sense of fear,  that there’s  going to be others smarter than us.  The fact that they aren’t even  human is small consolation.

They have re-opened the Solar Observatory in appropriately named Sunspot, New Mexico, after almost 2 weeks, and boy-howdy have they got a humdinger of a cover story.  Porn.  Child pornography, which I’ve been hearing a lot about lately.  I’m not saying nobody ever looks at child porn, but I don’t think it’s as prevalent as the recent number of arrests would indicate.  I mean, lots and lots of people look at regular, adult porn, probably all the gay people like gay porn, which is probably between 5 and 10% of the population, and there are subsets who get off on bondage porn and other kinky shit, but child porn?  Are there really that many people attracted to small children?  I suspect it just makes the story  a bit more dramatic.
They say a janitor at the facility – not one of the scientists, not a person who was critical to the operation – had child porn on his computer.
For that, they shut down a facility which gazes into space with high powered telescopes?  For that, they stopped observing sun spots (which could seriously endanger the Earth, and the more we know about them the better) for two whole weeks?  For that, they swooped in  with helicopters, an army of agents, and more secrecy than the Normandy Landing?  And that was something they couldn’t tell the sheriff of the town?
I’m just not buying it.  I think the janitor is being  framed, to cover up something much bigger, and that’s not really fair.  If it was aliens, the public deserves to know.