Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, we all know that things like Citizens United should never have been allowed to happen, and we’ve all seen how America has slowly turned into something that works for the billionares far better than for the rest of us.

However, one thing that strikes me as extra cynical is that over and over I get political ads which imply that the way one wins elections is money, that if we spend less than our opponent the election is lost. These same emails always ask me to “chip in” – even though often teh candidate asking me for money is nowhere near my district and sometimes when I dig into them they have absolutely zero chance of winning.

I really hate the phrase “chip in” at this point. I know it’s intended to be emotionally manipulative, to make me feel like I am not doing my part if I don’t send money to everyone.

So, one of the big problems we have in America with having a two party system is that it seems like what happens is one of tha parties aligns with the desires of the rural areas and the other party aligns with the desires of the urban areas.

As you all know, I’ve long been a proponent of ending the two party system (although not in favor of replacing it with fascism AT ALL) in favor of a multiparty system like you see in Europe. I think a big vehicle to help this happen and to help our representitive government better represent us is ranked choice voting.

Anyway, back to my original point. I saw a bunch of posts on facebook about wind energy and someone said it was bad for livestock. I assumed this was just going to be the usual lies from the right but no, in fact, there does seem to be some truth to this. Apparently there’s something called ‘turbine hoof’ – the constant vibrations through the ground disturb the cartilage and damage the livestock.

So, right now, the GOP is trying to literally end democracy in America. At CPAC they’ve announced their intention to end it, Project 2025 and Agenda 47 make it clear that their intentions are to completely screw over all urban voters to give the rural religious nuts everythign they want.

However, the way we’ve gotten to where somewhat less than half of the country is willing to vote for someone who is literally tearing down the bedrock of our country’s basic foundational concept is that we’re not listening enough to the needs of the rural voters and addressing them enough. Me, who occasionally studies the power grid and is a big proponent of fuelless energy sources, had never heard of turbine hoof and this, friends, does not appear to be bullshit, numerous studies seem to show a measurable effect here.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I think we can fix whatever’s wrong with the way the turbines are mounted, geared, or whatever so they don’t cause whatever vibrations are doing this. But I think we better add to the list of requirements for turbines going in near livestock that they can pass a test that they are turbine-hoof safe. And in general, we need to be careful.. if we don’t want to either have to fight wars or be destroying people’s lives, we had better make sure we aren’t the tyranny of the majority powering our cities off of technologies that are hurting the livestock of our neighbors.

So, apparently Trump is hoping that the Supreme Court (although the Supremely Corrupt court might be a better name) ruling that presidents have immunity for official acts applies to crimes you committed in order to become president. He thinks he should get out of the felony in New York because after all presidents have immunity. I don’t think we really want to go down this road – I would hope even his followers, as much as they’ve drank the flavor-aid and lost the ability to think rationally, woudl recognize that we don’t want to say that anyone who wins election has immunity for anything they had to do to win.

Honestly I’m going to have to write a whole rant about 1) How America is America the enslaved, one of the least free nations in the world and 2) how the supreme court granting presidential immunity is right in line with their tendency to say cops can murder anyone they want, steal anyone’s money they want, and that’s just fine. We are lucky there are as few bad cops as there are or things would be truly unlivable around here, because the criminal justice system is incredibly corrupt and seems to have lost sight with what the founders originally wanted for our country.

But even beyond that I have come to suspect that people will rationalize *anything* that “Their side” does. Not everyone, mind you, but enough folks to make for a major problem. Trump shouldn’t be able to be elected dogcatcher and neither should any other republican, but instead the GOP voters are about to vote themselves into a nightmare fascist dictatorship. And I suspect taht while right now they love it, they’re loving owning the libs, this is so fun.. when their friends get taken to the concentration camps, they may not love it so much any more.

One huge problem I think we face is the output side of every child left behind. The kids aren’t educated enough to realize what’s happening.

Anyway, we still need ranked choice voting.

I never thought I would find myself writing this blog entry.

I am arguing that we should not punish Donald Trump.

Now, we should draw a hard boundary between him and the ballot box – not ever permit him to be president again. This is not a punishment, though. This is to prevent him from hurting us, and to prevent him from hurting himself.

I have come to believe that Trump is already in hell. He’s so deeply afraid he’ll fuck it all up that he can’t stop lying repeatedly out of fear, he’s so deeply convinced he’ll never be good enough that he causes mass havoc everywhere he goes trying to convince everyone he’s better than everyone else.

I suspect he’s locked in. I suspect he barely has any free will at all, but that there’s a hurting, self-aware, worthy person inside him. I think we should try and find ways to help him not hurt any more. I see nothing to be gained by punishing him – he’s already punished himself more than we ever could.

I agree he did a lot of damage, and got people killed. But hurting him because he hurt others just makes everyone worse off. A eye for a eye makes everyone blind.

I want to believe we can learn enough about biological neural networks to let him out of the jail he created in his mind. Certainly I am far less incarcerated than I was ten years ago. In the meantime, just declare him ineligable to run for office, and move on. And try to think of ways to release him from the fear.

So, Elon Musk, who is increasingly competing for the title of world’s worst human being, has announced he’s going to create a LLM called “TruthGPT” in order to “Correct for chatGPT and Microsoft’s biases”.

It’s really alarming that we have increasingly got large numbers of delusional people wandering around being programmed by mass media blatently lying and *they can’t figure it out*. They’re the wise ones, those of us who use actual reality as a measuring stick are the sheeple. Fox News has to pay out to Dominion but the Fox Fooled remain convinced that Fox was telling the truth the whole time.

I mean, anyone with the self awareness of a carrot ought to be able to figure it out at this point. Trump is a lying liar, the evangelicals are batshit crazy, and generally conservatives break shit when they try to run the country because they optimize for more yachts for the billionares rather than looking at actual objective data. These people are anti-expertise, anti-science, and pro-religion. It’s not a big shock that they tend to run things off the rails.

I don’t have any suggestion on how to improve the situation. Make humans smarter? I don’t know how we do that short of eugenics, and we all know how *that* ended last time someone got the bright idea to try it.

Depressing. My paws remain crossed that the good guys build the singularity. I’ve been running on the basic theory that if you made a unbiased AI it would have useful things to say. I have to suspect any AI with “Truth” in the name will be about like Truth Social – i.e. Yay KKK! Yay hate! Yay killing gay people! Yay killing Democrats! Yay cheating to win elections! And so on.

So, the GOP now has a plan to finish burning America to the ground so they can loot it for their billionare friends who will then run off to private islands. They’ve managed to get enough wing nuts in the House that they can keep the normal wheels of democracy from turning, and all of these wing nuts are delightedly announcing they will not raise the debt ceiling.

Now, in a rational world there would be some hope that this would force a redesign of the resource allocation system, since it’s kind of stupid that we’re forced to loan money into existence – although not as stupid as the fact that we spend more on our military than our next five competitors.

This, however, does not appear to be a rational world. Therefore, my assumption is they will play chicken until they’ve succeeded in setting fire to the constitution, destroying America’s credit and economy, and generally doing as much damage as they can.

I have to give Russia props. Q was a very clever scheme. It made it so a requirement with the base was to be delusional and/or mentally ill. I do wonder if Russia also controls Tucker et al. Of course ironically Russia is also burning to the ground, having let their idiotic war continue into the winter despite the clear message of history.

I have to wonder if as Elon discovers that he’s not a free speech absolutist after all (wow, that idea makes me giggle at this point) if he’ll start to realize everything else that’s wrong with the libertarian point of view.

So, I was watching Call The Midwife the other day and they had someone who was dying from being a broke alcoholic who was drinking methylated spirits – aka denatured alcohol. And I had a interesting realization – we do often see places where humanity chooses money over people’s lives – a recent example was Tesla removing the radar from self-driving EVs, increasing undoubtedly the number of people who will die so that Tesla can make slightly larger profits. And of course we get outraged in cases where this is done.. like the Ford Pinto.

But.. denatured alcohol is a clear case of us deciding killing people is acceptable if the alternative is threatening the government’s profit. There’s no reasonable reason for denaturing alcohol.. other than, it enables us to sell alcohol and know it will only be used for sterilization. The reason this matters is that there’s a huge tax on alcohol. We do the same thing with kerosene – we sell it for heating and aviation use untaxed and for road use taxed and we dye it and trust people to follow the rules based on the dye. We *could* do the same thing with ethanol, but we don’t – instead we risk killing people – *knowing* that people will die – and the government officials probably feel smugly satisfied about this solution.

Now, the government is well aware that broke addicts will buy denatured alcohol and be killed by it. It’s more important to them to not lose whatever tax dollars they would lose to people knowingly cheating by buying denatured alcohol than that those people live.

This isn’t surprising. The government has always acted as if there’s a fairly low price on human life. We accept our police murdering innocents, we accept the government executing innocents – in both cases possibly because there’s no alternative.. we accept the government not enforcing environmental safety regulations, we accept people destroying the water table with things like fracking – in general, the government puts a very low value on life. (We routinely commit mass murder so various corporations can make more profit). But denaturing alcohol demonstrates just how low – of course the government probably thinks it’s a feature, not a bug, that broke addicts are who gets killed off..

So, I can’t think of one on the left off the top of my head, but I’m absolutely sure that there are. Anyway, you’ve all seen these fake news sites that deliberately spew lies – they’re very popular on Fox, for example – in order to try and delude people into voting for specific agendas.

The problem with this type of well poisoning is we live in a democratic republic. People are making decisions based on the information they learn and hear. If they learn information that isn’t true – they will make the wrong decisions. Probably the best demonstration of this is the events of Jan 6, in which a group of deluded and misled individuals tried to overthrow a fair and free election – but also Tucker Carlson attempting to lie about the Jan 6 committee results in order to keep the Big Lie going is another example of this rather egregious well poisoning.

Let me make this clear. The ship of state is steered by the people. By lying to the people, you are causing them to believe things that aren’t true. A large number of them are apparently gullible enough to believe you when you insist there’s no iceberg. They *will* run the ship into it, and *you*, Alex Jones/Tucker Carlson/Other similar entities, *will* be on the ship when it sinks and you will drown with the rest of us. So, tempting as it is to become a billionare by lying repeatedly to the people, a better choice, in terms of having a good life and the rest of us having a good life too, is to *not do that*.

It’s stupid and shortsighted behavior. *among other things*, you have no proof about what happens after death, and given that the gravity well of earth is such that all your mass, energy, and information are likely to remain right here, reincarnation is the most likely hypothesis which means it is entirely possible to be stuck with the bad decisions you made for longer than a human lifespan.

Side note, I think Alex Jones nicely demonstrates how the Bible got written. Someone very much like Alex Jones wanted to control folks and so, like Alex Jones lied a lot and claimed to know the mind of God.

The current pope is almost certainly aware that Earth is above carrying capacity and that post peak oil it’s very likely a lot of people – many of them Catholics – are going to starve. He’s still egging on the fork bomb that is religious humanity by not encouraging birth control. Why? Market share.

That’s also what this abortion thing is really about. A bunch of scared old white dudes afraid that whiteness might lose market share. (God I Hope so. We are quite often a plague on the world)

It’s true that if you don’t care about misery – and obviously abrahamic religions like to *cause* misery whenever they can get away with it – probably gives the priests a feeling of power but certainly boosts their pocketbooks – pushing people to have Babies Ever After is a good way to boost your market share.

And, lately, we’ve observed another interesting problem – if the minority is willing enough to cheat – and majority is not willing to call them on it and do whatever it takes to undo their cheating – then the minority gets to have tyrannical power over the majority. I get the feeling this was predicted in the federalist papers.

I guess it’s not a surprise that religious folks are authoritarian. It is kind of a surprise how many people believe the blatant and easily proven false lies of the right. One of my favorites is about how we can’t switch to electric vehicles because the power grid can’t take it. Get this – a gas car uses more electricity (by the time the oil is pumped and refined) than a electric one. And if we count *total* watts – well, let’s just say moving oil around has a lot more line loss, so to speak, than moving electricity around.

But, the conservatives never stop the lying. They’ll claim that solar panels and wind turbines use more power to make than they generate – when the amount of power either generates in a week would turn it into incandescent gas several times over.