Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

I must confess, I haven’t read up on this  thoroughly, so my information on the case is made of of headlines and teasers and comments.  Partly, it’s because my time has been limited lately and I’ve been trying to follow other news stories, but mostly I’m  just  waiting for the  dust to settle a bit  before going  in.
So, everything that’s said in this evening’s column should  be taken  with  a grain of  salt, probably a whole bunch of grains of  salt, but I think this is much ado about something fairly close to nothing.
First, Facebook has never hid the fact that they were willing to sell your data.  It is, in fact, what they do.  It’s how they make their money.  While lots of people now are outraged and threatening to leave Facebook, it’s nothing compared to the number who would leave if they started charging $10 a month for a membership fee.  So, that’s the deal.  We get the free service, they get to  sell our  information to advertisers.  It makes sense.  I get more ads than I’d like directed to  old men, but I can’t complain too  much.  I am the natural target for those ads.
I’m not even sure that Cambridge Analytica did anything illegal.  Is political advertising illegal?  I’m pretty sure  it’s not, although maybe it should be.  Did Facebook’s people, or  the Cambridge Analytica people, actually work with Trump’s campaign?  I suppose that might be a little bit suspicious, especially  since Cambridge Analytica (guessing by the name) is a British firm.  Still, are we  going to start distrusting them like we do the  Russians?
Also, (and here is where I really need to read up a bit, and  will before I start typing away again) what were the ads like?  If they were anything like the ones put out by  the Troll farm  in St.  Petersburg, then the main problem  we have is that American voters are really, really  stupid.
I’m fairly sure that is  actually true.  But, it’s not Mark  Zuckerberg’s  fault.

Winston Smith worked  at the  Ministry  of Truth, so it was  his  job to make old  newspaper articles, which contradicted the governments current position, disappear.  I don’t think we are quite, literally, to that point  yet  but today I  felt we are close.  I’m probably just  being paranoid, but here’s what happened.

Some Hillary acolyte infested my page today with a post saying “This is your daily reminder…” and a graphic about Hillary Clinton’s popular vote win.  Now, these people who keep bringing that up remind me very much of the people who, during the primaries, kept demanding that we PLEDGE to vote for Hillary Clinton if she got the nomination.  The ‘correct the record’ trolls.  The theory seems to have been that sheer persistence would wear us down and we’d eventually agree with them.  As we saw the morning after election day, it was a false assumption.  So, I try to counter them every time.
So, I went to Google, and I was looking for a particular graphic.  One from after the New Hampshire primary, showing Bernie winning with over 60% per cent of the popular vote, and right next to it the delegate count, which showed a tie.  I tied in New Hampshire primary and got mostly stuff from 2012.  So I typed  in New Hampshire primary 2016.  It was amazing how many more memes there were about the Republican primary than the Democratic one (which actually did  reflect the news coverage of the time).  So I typed in New Hampshire + Democratic + primary + 2016.  It didn’t help.  I still got things from other states (I considered using one from the Wyoming primary which said almost the same thing, but by this time I was getting irritated.   I know that graphic exists but, by now I was feeling a lot like Winston Smith.  I knew the item had existed, but I was scrolling through pages and pages of pictures and not finding it.

And then I lost track of the post entirely, although I’d opened Google  in a different tab. I never saw it again, and I never found the  graphic.
Maybe I’m paranoid, and this was all  due to my general incompetence with computers.  And, just maybe, I’m not.

O.K., here’s the situation, don’t really want to write about the poetry reading, it went O.K., there were some interesting moments but I thought my work was the best and my work  wasn’t really that good, but I heard a few interesting things, saw a lot of people, had a couple of interesting conversations, and smoked a couple joints.
Don’t really want to write about the news of the day, because it has become repetitive.
I guess I’ll write about the Uber accident in Arizona.  It’s sad that a self-driving car killed somebody, and of course I’ll bet her  family and friends are upset about it.  We still don’t know much about the accident, although there was apparently a person  in the car, so he’ll know more, but it did strike me odd that it was doing 40 in a 35 zone.  You’d think, since they’re programmed, they’d be programmed to stay under the speed limit.  I’m sure the programmers figured “Well, everybody in Arizona drives 5 or 10 miles over the limit and you have to stay with traffic, you know,” because that’s the kind of stupid shit people say, totally ignoring the inflation of acceptable speed factor.  I’m sure it was not their actual intent to kill somebody.  But, a person is dead, so it’s kind of manslaughter, and they broke the law (the speed limit) with premeditation.   Is there such a charge as premeditated involuntary manslaughter?
On  the other hand, I’m hoping that driverless  technology will  be cleared, like maybe the woman just drunkenly walked right in front of it or something, but there I’m letting my desire for driverless cars override common decency.

By all means, let there be a thorough investigation.  Uber is cooperating with that (like they’ve got a choice) and the National Transportation Safety Board is opening an investigation.

Which is something they’d never do with a human driver.  So, driverless car accident investigations will be like air traffic investigations.  To a conclusion, which is followed by remedial changes.  Driverless cars, therefore, will get better and better at avoiding accidents, and human drivers will continue to be human drivers.  This is a bump on the road, but they will prevail.

I did get started on the proofreading, and I’m about halfway through it.  It’s not the kind of thing I’d buy, but it’s easy enough to read, and grounded in  solid psychology.  We also got the current poetry book, Paradox, off to CreateSpace, the publisher of self-published work, so that’s a huge load off my shoulders.  On Rheets 2017, I at least got all the poems in order, which is the hardest part.  Started reading a new book, it was cheap on Kindle and friend recommended.  Again, not exactly the kind of thing I’d read (Hit Man with a heart of gold), but the story’s well told, and it’s bite sized, easy reading.  Each chapter is one victim (sometimes it winds up being more), so it is to reading  books a bit like watching a TV series is to a movie.  Each bit is readable and doesn’t make you think too much, and a lot  of the character  development gets repeated.
What I DIDN’T get done was  to write any new poetry for tomorrow night, I’ve got a great idea but I have tried to write on this theme before and I’m disinclined to repeat myself, I don’t wan’t to be like Monet, painting the same damned lily pond over and over again, even though it was a lovely lily pond.  The theme is dark and light, how when you turn out the lights and go to bed, a whole world opens inside your head, so an entire universe inside a very small space like the Tardis or Orion’s belt in  Men in Black.

Oh, well, it is time for bed now  so I will sleep on it.

One of the reasons – the main reason – why I am still glad Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election, despite the neverending shit show that is President Donald Trump, is that if she had won, it might  have been a fatal blow to democracy.  She rigged the primary process, which is about as undemocratic as you can get.  Not just cheated a little bit, all politicians do that.  I  mean rigged, as in there was a predetermined outcome and she was determined that that be the outcome, no matter what the will of the people.  And the will of the people was against her, so that by the time of the Arizona primary, the cheating had become blatant, and infuriating.
So, if she’d been elected, it  would have been a confirmation that rigging works, that you can totally thwart the public’s desire and get away with it.
Of course, democracy ins’t out of the woods yet.  America made its choice, and they chose a retarded, narcissistic individual.  I’m not blaming the American public – there was no real choice.  I’m just saying democracy’s not out of the woods yet.  He makes a mockery  of the office, and the press acts as if he’s a normal human being.  He admits to lying to the Canadian Prime Minister and we’re so used to it everybody just shrugs.  So, democracy could  just die, buried under the fat man’s weight.
Or, one other possibility occurred to me today.  It was a quote from a retired general, Barry McCaffrey, who said that Trump  is a threat to America’s national security.

Now, McCaffrey is retired and well within his rights to express an opinion.  Also, I don’t think he was suggesting the option I’m about to mention, and I’m not suggesting it, either.  I’m just saying that if there was, at this point in history, a military coup, a lot of Americans would support it.  A lot of  liberal Americans.  It would, though, be the death of democracy.