Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

O.K., this happened a couple of days ago, but pretty much every comment I see on it misses the main point. One of the many wildfires raging throughout the American West at the moment was started at a gender reveal party. Now, a gender reveal party is a harmless bit of fun, where expectant parents invite friends and family, to announce whether their upcoming baby is going to be a boy or a girl.
So, instead of saying “Hey, people at these parties should be a bit more careful with the fireworks” people are raging about what a horrible thing gender reveal parties are, which makes absolutely no sense. It’s like hating Nickelback. Once the mob has picked somebody, or some thing, as the worst thing in the world, most people just go along, whether it makes any sense or not.
It is entirely possible to have a gender reveal party without an open campfire, or fireworks. It is entirely possible to have one indoors. It is entirely possible to have one at a restaurant, or at someone’s home.
On the other hand everybody, whether they are attending a gender reveal party, a family reunion, a team building picnic, or a rock concert, should have enough sense not to play with fire during the late summer months in regions which regularly burst into flames.
Don’t make things about something they’re not about. That’s just silly.

Well, in almost any argument you wind up using numbers and/or percentages, and it kind of depends on what point you want to make. In the case of the effect of the Sturgis motorcycle rally, it sounds really scary to say that 250,000 cases of Covid 19 are attributable to the event.
But, is it? The event took place almost a month ago, and they say the incubation period is two weeks. So, in that 250,000, they are counting anybody who got infected by somebody who was at the rally. It’s fair enough to do that, but it introduces a lot of other variables. Are they sure people caught it from somebody at Sturgis, or maybe somewhere else? There were 375,000 attendees, roughly. The number of people they have had contact with over the past 3 weeks has to be in the double digit millions.
I heard last week about the first death from Sturgis, but I haven’t heard of any others since, and deaths count a lot more than number of cases. I’m guessing most of the people who were in attendance are still alive, and of that number most are probably saying ‘See. We’re still O.K.’ because that is human nature.
I’m going to continue wearing a mask wherever mandated by law, and maybe even a bit more than that, because I’m in my 60s, not in peak condition and, therefore, somewhat vulnerable and I don’t believe in taking unnecessary chances, but I don’t think Sturgis proved how dangerous it is. Maybe the opposite.

“You have to accept reality” the lame-ass Biden supporters say, but that is bullshit. The reality is our existence is temporary and meaningless, we are the temporary residents of a small planet circling an average sun somewhere near the outer edge of a galaxy containing billions, uncountable billions, of stars just like ours, and each is separated from all of the others by a black void of complete nothingness so wide that we could not cross it in a thousand lifetimes, at speeds we are capable of traveling at.
The current reality is that in one nation on that planet, the current choices for leader are both horrible old men who think the people with the most money are the best and most deserving people, and the people of that country have no chance to choose a different direction, even though some of them would like to very much.
No, I’m not accepting it. Screw your reality. I will create my own.

Democracy is a fine idea, a beautiful idea, a poetic idea. The rule of the people. Government by the governed. The problem, unfortunately, is that people are not that good at governing.
Some are pretty good at inventing and engineering, some have a green thumb, others are good at painting pictures or making beautiful music, and some can prepare a meal which leaves people feeling content, perhaps even rapturous.
But governing?
Most of us can’t even control our own children. A lot of us can’t even govern ourselves. How are we supposed to know how to govern a world which fights us at every turn, a society which has more variables than all the people living in it put together?
Well, we do have computers to help, and history. Even though we have to assume that most of that is wrong. Just knowing how much the politicians, and the press, and the rich people who are actually governing the world (quite badly, by the way) are lying to us today, it can be safely assumed that they’ve been lying to us forever. We also have things like language, logic, and the scientific method.
We need to develop a system that does more than just give decision making power to people who can control the most other people’s minds. We need a system which is designed to find the best solution to every problem. A system which allows for all facts to be put on the table, and analyzed, and several possible solutions to be suggested, and analyzed, and so on with scientific method until we actually find solutions.
I once thought the internet was going to be just that. But, it is not. Not yet, anyway.

When I saw the headline “Four Boats Sink in Trump Boat Parade,” my initial response was to laugh. HaHa, they couldn’t even arrange a nice boating day on the lake without screwing it up.
Then, I read a bit more about it, and saw some pictures, and I saw it differently. There is a certain image we have of Trump voters. The pickup trucks. The beer, and the accompanying beer bellies. Guns. Oh, my yes, lots of guns. And maybe a trailer, or a rickety old shack with a front porch, and a rocking chair, and a sad looking old hound dog. So, I pictured a bunch of rednecks out in rowboats and waving Confederate flags around, while drinking beer and shooting holes in the bottom of their boats, which is not entirely unbelievable.
But, this was not that. This was people in very nice boats, some of them quite large, and there were more American flags than Confederate flags. These were people with money. And there were hundreds of them. Now, at a street demonstration or political rally, if you are talking hundreds it is already a loss. But when it’s a parade of yachts, with an average of 6 or 7 people to a boat, you’re talking an impressive crowd.
The news that four boats sank, because that many boats on a small lake was churning up the water pretty good, pales next to the news of the boat rally itself.
Could Biden get hundreds of boats out in support? Not even close.