Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

I was watching reruns of Deep Space Nine today, I sort of mix it up, Voyager for a while, TNG for a while, and DS9. I just cannot decide which of those I like the best.

One episode I was watching today was when there was a transporter accident and Sisko, Bashir and Jadzia, who were beaming down to some conference at Star Fleet Headquarters, instead beamed through a micro-singularity which was intersecting our section of space-time and arrived a couple of centuries too early.
Now, this was supposed to be a near future Earth, and I don’t remember what I thought the date was when I first saw this in the 90s, but it was 2024. In the 90s, that still seemed like a million years into the future.
It was sort of a fascistic America, where all the poor were herded into ‘sanctuary cities’ which were open-air prisons of a sort, gated ghettoes, future Andersonvilles.
Anyway, Sisko and Bashir got rousted by the cops for sleeping outdoors and thrown into one right away, but Dax managed to meet a famous billionaire who invited her up to his place to use his ‘interface.’
With 2024 just four years away, I’m kind of impressed at those 20th century writers’ grasp of the future.

In the learn something new every day department, here is something I’d never heard about in all my life until yesterday: Benford’s Law. I was watching a show called Connected, a science thing, and they were talking about it, and I’m kind of weirded out. First, it seems mathematically ridiculous.
The apple falling from the tree moment came when Newcomb (who was about a half century for Benford, but Benford elaborated on the theory a bit and so it’s named after him) noticed that the first pages of a book are almost always worn more than the later pages. I’ve noticed that, too. It’s just obvious that more people have read the beginning of the book than have read the whole book because it’s an included set. All the people who finished the book started the book, but not all the people who started the book finished it.
But Newcomb took it a bit further, and Benford took it a bit further, and now it’s used for all sorts of stuff like finding bots on the internet and tax fraud and stuff, but, like I said, it just makes no sense that the number one appears as the first digit something like 25% more than the number nine. In Poker, a pair of threes is exactly as probable as a pair of fours.
Yet there’s a lot of math, and science, that says it’s a real law. So, I tried keeping it in mind today as I did a couple of Sudoku puzzles. Didn’t make them easier. Didn’t make them harder.
Second, I’m wondering how many other people know about this law? Is it common knowledge that I just never knew about, or is this something nobody knows about. Let me know.

There are two ways you can talk about politics: you can present your position, your ideas, your ideology, and then support them with arguments moral, or financial, or scientific, citing expert sources and real experience, and others do the same, and then you debate back and forth for a while, or you can just throw all that out the window and talk about it as a sporting event between two teams you really don’t care about very much.
I am sometimes dismayed that we seem to do far more of the latter than the former, but what’s really bad is when we don’t know the difference.
So, let me get my ideological objections to Kamala Harris out of the way first, before we get to the horse race: as Attorney General of the State of California, she showed clearly that she was on the side of the corporations. She failed to prosecute the CEO of Wells Fargo and he’s now in Trump’s cabinet. She has been a great friend to the private prison industry, with the argument that letting too many people out of prison would deplete the prison labor force. And she tried to block exonerating evidence for a man who was on death row. This is a horrible, evil, will sacrifice anybody for power type woman, and I don’t want her to ever be president of the United States.
Now, back to the horse race. It’s not surprising. She’s popular with the DNC and she’s a twofer on the identity politics thing, which is really important to the average vbnmw voter.
But, she brings nothing to the ticket. Anybody that is impressed with Kamala Harris was probably voting for Biden anyway. She won’t raise enthusiasm among black voters, certainly not in California, where many of them have been her actual victims.
And California is a more or less safely blue state. This pick didn’t help that, it endangered it.
She certainly doesn’t appeal to progressives but, again, not surprising. Ever since they forced Bernie out of the race, they’ve done everything they possibly can to piss his supporters off. No Medicare for All or Green New Deal or Legalization of Marijuana in the platform, Bill Clinton’s dismissive speech at John Lewis’ funeral, allowing Kasich (a Republican) to speak at the convention, and now this. But she probably doesn’t appeal to those ‘moderate Republicans’ they are trying to appeal to either. Like Tim Kain in 2016, she only appeals to people who would be voting for the ticket anyway.
Maybe the Democrats will win no matter what, because maybe people really are well and truly sick of Trump. But, just like in 2016, the Democrats aren’t actually doing anything to make that happen.

Because my kids never, ever want to watch anything I want to watch, yesterday I told Sam he could pick any movie on Netflix, as long as it was in English. I’ve done that before, and we usually wind up watching some hideous crime show or a police drama.
He selected Terminal with Tom Hanks. I’d seen it before and not hated it. Tom Hanks is almost always enjoyable to watch, and it’s sort of a cute story, as I remembered it.
But, as I was watching, it seemed more and more an indictment against U.S. Customs and Immigration, and the American mentality as a whole. They treated the guy as a criminal, and couldn’t even locate a translator for
him, although when they needed somebody who spoke Russian, they called on him, I guess because they thought the two would speak the same language, i.e. foreign.
It reminded me “As Good as it Gets” with Jack Nicholson. The first time I saw it I thought it was funny. The second time I saw it, I thought a bit deeper. This was a story about how if you’re a waitress and your kid is chronically ill, you are shit out of luck in the USA unless some creepy old rich guy becomes obsessed with you and pays all your bills. But, presented as a romantic comedy.
The USA is not just falling apart now. It’s been rotten to the core for a very long time and people are just beginning to realize it.

As anybody who knows me already knows, I am a big advocate of the Green Party. Their platform is virtually identical to Bernie’s platform, and the emphasis is on saving the planet, it’s right there in their name. I am rather fond of planet Earth, and I am a greater patriot for it than any specific country on it.
So, I was just on a comment thread a couple of minutes ago where some fool was saying “They aren’t a big tent party. There purpose is not to win but just to disrupt elections. And they’re backed by Russia.”
Well, they are a big tent party, all you have to do is go to their website and you’ll see they have positions on everything from Black Lives Matter to taxing the Billionaires. They are big tent, they are fucking huge tent. As far as winning goes, that still depends on the people. If everybody voted for who they liked, and read something more than what is in the papers, the Greens would win in a landslide.
But it’s the Russia comment that bugged me. We are hearing this more and more, and the Democrats have not even officially picked a candidate yet. There is absolutely zero evidence of it, and plenty of reasons for disbelieving it.
Russia has not been the Soviet Union, has not been a communist state, has had no ideological beef with the U.S. since 1989. Russia and the U.S. could be allies, could be trading partners.
Putin is probably far more concerned with politics in Ukraine and Georgia than he is with what’s happening in the U.S.
Also, no interference is necessary. It is pretty obvious that the U.S. is imploding all on its own.
Yet, we’re hearing this Russia, Russia, Russia shit even earlier and louder than we heard it in 2016. Why?
It’s because the Democrats know that they might well lose the election and they don’t really care, they get to stay rich and in the game, but they are going to need somebody to blame the loss on. So, Russia.
It’s all bullshit.