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Like decent human beings everywhere, I am extremely distressed by the verdict in the trial of the murderer, Kyle Rittenhouse. Sure, we knew this verdict was coming, but that doesn’t really soften the blow. More than that, I am extremely disturbed by the obvious bias and unprofessionalism of the obviously racist judge. Even more than that, I am disturbed by the large number of white racist sympathizers on my Facebook page. Sure, I always knew they were there, too. They defended George Zimmerman as well, and were unbothered by the deaths of Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland et alii. Too many alii to count.
I have lived outside the United States for over 20 years now, and count my blessings every day. I live in a city with excellent public transport, me and my family can visit a doctor any time we feel like it, and my kids have gone to schools which are far less violent and social strife infested than those in the USA.
I guess its hitting me more today than other days just how incredibly racist the USA is. I can’t claim that there’s no racism in the Czech Republic. Gypsies, and anybody who looks even slightly Arabic, get nasty looks all the time, and sometimes more direct discrimination. But, most of the time, nobody’s killing anybody.
With this verdict, everybody around the world can clearly see how incredibly, intolerably racist the USA truly is. I am very, very glad I no longer live there.

A couple of days ago I watched ‘Red Notice’ on Netflix, an entirely forgettable film starring The Rock, Ryan Reynolds and Gal Gadot. Exactly what I expected, and what the trailers had portrayed. It was a totally formulaic film about cons conning cons, in glamorous settings. Rome, Paris, Cairo, Bali. Lots of fancy fighting, lots of gunplay, lots of chase scenes where they destroyed the local fruit market, glamorous gatherings of hyper-wealthy people where the women were all gorgeous (Gadot, of course, but the woman who was the top interpol cop was no slouch herself) and the drinks no doubt of the most expensive variety.
I enjoyed it, as I enjoyed the Laura Croft movies, the Indiana Jones movies, the Jason Bourne movies, and the James Bond movies, but they do all blend into one another and this certainly wasn’t one of the standouts.
Then I read an article this morning about how it was the top grossing weekend release ever on Netflix. Well, looking at the comments below that article, it became clear after reading 5 or 6 comments (nobody reads all 758 or however many there were) that I was well within the consensus. Most found it a mildly entertaining but insignificant piece of fluff, some were a bit harsher.
So, why was it such a hit? Other factors must have been at play. A dearth of anything else interesting on Netflix, or just an increase in their number of subscribers, which could mean that every couple of weeks, a new film will take that ‘most viewed ever’ crown.

Then, yesterday, I watched a movie which I highly recommend, but doubt it will get the same viewership, because it’s a film which will probably only appeal to intelligent people. It was ‘Radioactivity,’ a biopic of Marie Curie. It was history, it was science, it was definitely a film which dedicated feminists should love, it was an intense drama about a complex character, and it explored in great detail the ethical question of how much we should trust science. It was done almost all in flashbacks as she lay dying, but it had lots of flash forwards as well, Hiroshima, Cernobyl, and such, but also touted the benefits of X rays and radiation therapy.

Popular tastes demand sex, violence, beautiful locations and perhaps an occasional flaunting of the laws of physics. But there are films out there for other tastes as well. I’m grateful for that.

Elon Musk (net worth approximately 281.6 billion dollars) has chosen to engage in a twitter war with Senator Bernie Sanders (net worth approximately 2 million dollars) because Sanders had the audacity to say that Musk should be paying more in taxes. It’s not a new thing for Bernie to say. He’s been advocating for higher taxes on the rich for his entire political career, and before. It’s not personal.
To put this into perspective, Musk has approximately 100,000 TIMES as much money as Sanders. He quite likely makes Bernie Sanders entire net worth in a day, probably before brunch. For him to be calling Bernie a taker (as he did) is absolutely absurd. But what really started it off was his tweet, responding to one of Sanders suggesting he pay more taxes, saying “I keep forgetting you’re not dead.”
Fuck you, Elon. There was a point in time when I actually admired you. Your plan for a Mars colony was cool, I like the idea of electric cars and cheap solar panels, and the big boring machine. But now you are on my shit list. My number 1, exclusive, elite circle of hell shit list, which includes Whoopi Goldberg, James Corden, and Bill Clinton. These are people who have attacked Bernie without any reason or justification, with sneering comments and unfunny jokes.
You have declared yourself an enemy of Bernie Sanders and that makes you an enemy of me, and anybody who wants to see a more fair and just society. A slight increase in your tax rate (which is all Sanders is asking for) is far too little in my eyes. If I was king of the world, I would see you stripped of all your wealth and have your smug tongue ripped out of your mouth by rabid weasels. I wish you nothing but personal misery from this point forward.
It is what you deserve.

Many years ago, I think it was shortly after Isabel was born, but we were having the poetry readings in a youth hostel near Výstaviště, and at the previous reading a friend had given me a poem of his (which had bombed terribly) and asked me to edit it. I think he was expecting something a little less drastic. The original piece presented an interesting thought, which was why do we represent the heart as a symbol of love when it is essentially an organ of the body, why do we romanticize the moon when it is essentially a rock floating in space. But, it was filled with whole paragraphs of scientific information and nomenclature, was a few pages long, and didn’t really flow as a poem.
I reduced it to a sonnet.
This morning, as I got up to go to the bathroom, I thought about how our bodies trigger our decisions throughout our lives. We may decide, in our heads, who to marry, but we never would have been with them, perhaps might have never even known them, if our bodies weren’t sending us signals.
In a very real sense, we are what we eat. For some reason, my palette is particularly attracted to sweets, and fatty foods. I love the side bits of bacon as much as the middle, the skin of the chicken just as much as the inner flesh and, even as an adult, cotton candy (that’s candy floss to you Brits) is my idea of heaven on a stick. And it shows, in the physical world, because we do, in a real if not totally literal sense, become what we eat.
Our bodies make a ton of decisions throughout our day to day lives, when we get on to a train, do we stand up or sit down, do we go out in the evening or are we, by that time, too immersed in the couch to get up, decisions which affect everything that follows, all of the roads not taken are taken over by the one which was, which was probably decided by your body.
It was an interesting thought, but all I wrote was this:

Our bodies make the decisions
far more than our heads
if I didn’t have to pee
I wouldn’t get out of bed

Had a conversation IRL this afternoon with somebody I haven’t seen for quite a while, Covid and all, and it turned into a very interesting conversation, indeed. We started off talking about cryptocurrencies, which I have avoided from the beginning and intend to keep on doing so, but he’s eager to jump in the game. This led to a rich v. poor conversation, and he advanced the theory that eventually all the governments (and corporations and billionaires) will shift to bitcoin and at that point they’ll just dump real currency entirely and everybody who’s not invested in cryptos (or stocks and such) will just be shit out of luck, the Morlocks to their Eloi, I suppose, but it should be remembered that the Morlocks hunted and ate the Eloi, and not the other way around.
Anyway, that led to a conversation about the different paradigm shifts that could change humanity entirely. Of course, no one can predict the future with any degree of accuracy, but we discussed a range of things which could totally alter the world, and that was one.
Another was artificial intelligence, which we are both convinced is just around the corner. Also, we agreed that it’s not just AIs having as effective an intelligence as humans, but that, whereas humans think in a linear fashion, and can generally only process one idea at a time, an AI program will be able to see any situation holistically, and thus not only reach conclusions quicker, but reach conclusions that no human being would ever be able to dream of. They will be well beyond thinking outside the box, they will design their own boxes, much bigger boxes, and we will be left scratching our heads. Whether this will be a good thing or a bad thing for mankind is debatable, but it will be a very big thing.
Another was the end of racism due to the human tendency to breed, and with each generation the races will become a bit more mixed until eventually race will be a moot point, as we will all be such mongrels it won’t matter. He estimated that as ‘within 100 years,’ I’m a bit more pessimistic, but we agreed it was likely to happen.
Another was just the general advance of technology, and robots, making human labor unnecessary, and then what do we do with 20 billion idle hands? I have quite a few ideas on that topic, but perhaps that’s a blog for another day.