I realize it’s going to take me some work to get my email all off of Google, not to mention all my drive documents and all the other things I’ve come to trust them for.
However, their choice to change the Gulf Of Mexico to the Gulf OF America indicates their willingness to kowtow to our current, obviously evil administration. The message is clear. They’ll probably give out information about you happily. They cannot be trusted.
So, I’m having a very hard time taking Robert Reich seriously. He’s talking about oligarchy, but he’s clearly got no shortage of money and he does things like posting things on “How to stop trump” – that are behind a paywall. If making money is more important to him then stopping Trump, clearly he doesn’t really think Trump is the threat that he claims him to be.
In other, more disturbing thoughts, clearly Trump and the republicans do not plan on there being any more elections – or if there will be any, they will be heavily rigged. Otherwise they’d understand that we can now do everything they are doing.. that every check and balance they have smashed we can now ignore as well.
So, I hear that Trump fired the federal judges that were investigating them. The president *should not have the power to fire judges*. The president should *be investigated for doing this*. Of course, we all know Trump belongs in the slammer and that the Republicans have become the most epicly corrupt party in American history – helped with a a nonstop lies and propaganda news network (Fox)
So, Trump is talking about ending FEMA in favor of having individual states have their own emergency management systems. Now, this clearly is going to lead to a much less efficient system, because most of the time most states don’t need emergency management but when they do, they’re going to be in the middle of fires, hurricanes, etc.
Bear this in mind, Republicans.. as your house burns or is wiped away by hurricanes or whatever.. and it takes far longer than it used to to get help, and the help is less effective and less coordinated.. Trump is making things worse, because that’s what Republicans do, especially lately.
My hope is that all the many, many MAGA-ites being hurt by Dear Leader will remember getting their face eaten and in the future vote against right wing stupidity. Of course, odds are no, because Fox will continue to hold them in thrall.
I was talking about Mitch’s blatant cheating to pack the supreme court and someone on Quora pointed out that the Democrats started the move down the slippery slope with Harry Reid. Well, yes, okay.
It occurs to me that one thing politics needs very badly is a truly nonpartisan body that exists only to make sure that both sides (or all sides, if we could leave this two party stranglehold behind) follow the rules. Someone who can give a black card to Mitch – or to Pelosi – or to anyone who tries to tilt the playing field.
I’m not sure how this would work – it’s clear the people don’t care about fair play at all or they would never have elected Trump (of course, we don’t know that they did – one reason I wish we did have blockchain as one path of our voting process is we could test vote aggregation for honesty, something we cannot do now)
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.