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The news that Donald Trump has been convicted on 34 felony charges is good news, indeed. Like Al Capone, he is being sentenced for the least of his crimes, not the ones he really should be serving time for but the ones which they could nail him on. Still, Al Capone did go to jail, and did die there.
So, I suppose this is good news for Joe Biden, which does not make me happy. He is, in the most generous description, a senile old bastard and, at worst, which is the way I see him, as a genocidal monster.
So, how does this affect the upcoming election? It just confirms what I’ve been saying for a long time: this is the worst election in American history. The two major parties have dropped any pretense of letting the voters choose the candidates. The Democrats are scared to death of a new Bernie Sanders arising, and the Republicans have been kissing Trump’s ass for so long, they cannot detach.
The two candidates will be Joe Biden and Donald Trump and there isn’t a goddamned thing the American voters can do about it. We have no say. The U.S. is no longer a democracy.
Will they still have debates? Maybe not, if Trump is actually in jail by then, which suddenly seems like a real possibility. If so, that would be a lucky break for Biden, who can barely get through the sound bites they write for him without sounding less coherent than that old geezer in Better Call Saul who was in a nursing home and dinging his bell like crazy. If debates take place, Biden will come off looking just terrible. But, no debates will further emphasize the fact that the voters don’t really matter in this election. Certainly, their opinions don’t.
If Trump is actually in jail, a lot of people will be shocked to realize that he can still be on the ballot. Fine. Be shocked. But he still could win. Which might lead to a bit of a constitutional crisis if he is still in jail come January. I guess whoever he picks for veep would have to step in. But, I’m not sure. This would be, after all, the first time that has happened.
Or, if Trump’s in jail, a lot of people could assume Biden is the only choice and he’ll wind up winning with a Soviet style majority. Even if only 20% turn out to vote.
It will certainly be interesting to watch. An election between a creepy old man with Alzheimer’s and an actual convicted criminal. Some might say tragic. But, in view of the real tragedies unfolding around the world, which Biden is fully in support of, I’m going to go with comical.

Woke is a silly term. Grammatically it just doesn’t sound right. “I am woke,” or “He is not woke” sounds like you should be saying ‘awake’ but you’re trying to be slangy and hip.
Still, it is a common term and has taken on a meaning of its own, and it seems as if we’re all being forced to pick a side.
On the one hand, the ranks of the ‘woke’ (Good lord, that even looks stupid when I write it) include people who are obsessed with identity politics and prefer arguing about semantics and getting status points for being on the currently popular side of issues (virtue signalling) than they are about fighting for real change.
On the other hand, the ranks of the ‘anti-woke’ are dominated by racist sociopaths who love sexism, large vehicles which put massive amounts of carbon into the air, and guns. Lots and lots of guns. They are flag-waving, bible-thumping, anti-science whackadoodles and they love movies where the rogue cop ignores all the rules and tortures confessions out of drug dealing terrorists who kidnap politicians’ daughters.
So, if I were forced to make a choice, I’d side with the ‘woke.’
But, here’s the deal. We are not forced to make a choice. We can be ‘a bit woke,’ ‘not very woke,’ ‘woke in some ways but not in others,’ or ‘what the hell do you even mean by that?’
In any event, I hope this stupid word passes out of the public consciousness sometime soon.

First, this wee rant is going to contain spoilers, so if you plan on watching Black Mirror and enjoying it, maybe skip this, because of the spoilers, of course, but also because I thought for the most part it wasn’t very good, and I don’t really recommend it, which is another reason I don’t mind including spoilers.
I mean, I watched all five episodes in two days, so I’ve got to admit there are worse things on Netflix. There have been plenty of shows I have quit on in the first ten minutes. That’s one advantage of television over the cinema, particular television with nearly limitless content. There’s no need to stay until you get your money’s worth, no need to watch something you’re not into.
But, do not confuse ‘there are worse things on Netflix’ with a recommendation. The fact that I didn’t hate it as much as I might have is a pretty low bar. If that was a literal bar, you could step over it in a casual walk without breaking your stride. Basically, I just can’t see why people rave on about this series.
First of all, only two out of the five were science fiction at all, which is not a criminal offense, but a series that promotes itself as dystopian sci-fi, and then just turns out to be dystopian bullshit is doomed and predestined to disappoint sci-fi fans, of whom I consider myself one.
Werewolves and Demons are not science fiction. A story about mass murderers with a sex dungeon is not only not sci-fi, it has been done to death. The last two series my wife has forced me to watch, and probably a dozen or so over the last few years, have had that stupid theme.
And the one with the astronauts and their robot replicas left on Earth would have worked much better if they’d actually set it in the future, and not had them living on an Earth where the cars still didn’t have seatbelts, and the allusion to the Manson gang was heavy handed. Also, I really, seriously, hated the ending. I mean, what the hell did he gain by killing the other guy’s wife and kid? That’s just nuts, and astronauts are not chosen for being nuts.
Joan is Awful was probably the least awful of the bunch, but even there, the idea that the internet will steal our privacy is not exactly original, and the whole bit about Salma Hayak playing Cate Blanchett playing Joan didn’t really make any sense and wasn’t terribly funny, unless for some reason I don’t know Cate Blanchett is like an automatic punchline.
So, I award the whole season zero stars and urge you to watch something, almost anything else.

Facebook! I am pissed off with you! Two reasons!

Here’s the situation. First, I’ve been getting a lot of really creepy posts from a site which is called Poetry, Art and White Lace Beneath the Great Willow. I don’t know if they are at fault or if their only crime is sloppy moderation, because that’s always a possibility. I am not blaming Facebook for this. People post a lot of shit everywhere, because for some reason people just love being assholes. They spray paint crap on public monuments, they throw litter on the grass in public parks, and they do it on purpose because they hate the world.

The posts, in the most recent cases, were announcing the deaths of Simon Cowell and Sylvester Stallone, which sent me straight to their Wikipedia pages to check, which is what I always do, and they are both alive and well, I was glad to see.

So, I’ve tried to block and hide posts from that site and I get back ‘Action cannot be completed at this time’ and the best I can do is report them.

So, this morning, not wanting to go through the whole foofaraw, I just hit the X at the upper right hand corner and got back the reply “You will see less posts like this.” Facebook, what the hell is wrong with you? Never mind the fact that what I actually want is to see NO posts from this site, and NO posts of this nature, and that it’s really the lowest of the low to post a post saying somebody is dead just for shits and giggles, when they are actually still alive.

The thing that pisses me off is the obvious grammatical error. Fewer posts, Facebook, FEWER! Not less. Less is for uncountable items, i.e. less truth, less justice, less oil, less sunshine. Fewer is for countable items, like posts. One post, two posts, etc…

I don’t feel I’m being overly didactic. I don’t worry about putting a preposition at the end of the sentence, because there are so many phrases in English where we do that that the rule is meaningless. I don’t worry too much about misplaced commas, and I’m willing to overlook a lot of misspellings as possible typos.

But this is a very easy rule to learn, it is easy to check for and apply, and it is an important distinction.

Do you hire grammatically challenged people to do your programming and formatting? Does nobody check stuff before you make it part of your standard format? Is this the way youwish to present yourselves to the public?

For shame, Facebook. For shame.

Elon Musk, over the past couple of months, has revealed himself to be an extremely right-wing, horrible, possibly insane person. There were the mass firings and the revelations from many former employees about how horrible of a boss he is, several tweets which were severely uncool, and posing for pictures in Qatar with Jared Kushner.
However, as the shakeup at Twitter continues, some things have been revealed. In particular, the fact that the FBI was telling Twitter which accounts should be suppressed, for instance anybody talking about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which is now more relevant than ever.
This is huge news, it broke weeks ago, and not nearly enough people are talking about it.
I’m really conflicted about this. On the one hand, it indicates that I was right, the Hunter Biden’s involvement in Ukraine was a big deal, and my suspicions that the CIA was behind the Majdan coup of 2014, in which the legally elected (but Russia friendly) president of Ukraine was deposed have somewhat more justification than me just whistling in the dark and assuming that the U.S. government is evil just because they always are.
It is also a real solid indicator that free speech in the U.S. is severely compromised, and public information is largely shaped by the government, with the FBI acting as the Department of Propaganda, what Orwell called Minitru, it’s where Winston Smith worked in “1984.”
And it’s all due to Elon Musk storming in and smashing the place up. Like the blind pig that sometimes finds an acorn, or the stopped clock that shows the correct time twice a day, this one worked out for him.
One additional thing, before I go back to thinking of Musk as a horrible human being, with all the patent stealing greed of Thomas Edison minus Edison’s actual inventiveness: I think he will, despite all the fooforaw, eventually make money on Twitter. Sure, quite a few celebrities have canceled their accounts but there are still millions of people who use it to shout at the world every day, and will continue to do so as long as it exists. It is, as the saying goes, too big to fail.