Never been one to let the carrier drop

One silver lining about yesterday’s riots – unless we are total hypocrites (and make no mistake, we are total hypocrites and what I am about to write will not come to pass), we can never again start or feed (by sending guns or troops) a war to “make the world safe for democracy”. We have demonstrated that we have no moral superiority, that we are not and never were the side of the angels, and that in fact our system of government will eventually hand nuclear codes to a toddler.

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/533172-zimbabwean-president-capitol-riots-show-us-has-no-right-punish shows that I am not alone in thinking this. (Of course, I’ve been sharply critical of the USA’s tendency to be murderous thugs, a oil company with a army, for quite some time now – and we also have a recorded history of overthrowing democracy in order to install totalitarian regimes, so “Making the world safe for democracy” was never really anything but a convenient excuse for being abusive in the ways we wanted to be.)

Another article that says things better than I could: https://eand.co/this-is-why-america-is-becoming-a-poor-country-41a8d6003e90.

I know that lately it’s been hip and happening if you’re on the right to ignore reality. After all, we’ve seen the Laffer curve not work out time and time again, and yet you all keep voting like you’re Charlie Brown running to kick a football that by now you should be able to figure out that Lucy is going to yank away from you. You all remain deeply committed to the idea that the invisible hand of the market will fix everything – and let’s not even talk about the obvious economic sense of solar and wind, and your attempts to lie to the american people – some of which are apparently dumb enough to not understand that the grid has required some energy storage in order to remain stable for the last 50+ years.

But let’s talk about what voting for the right in a modern context means.

It means “People who have bad luck should starve and die.”

It means “If you happen to live in a watershed where fracking is occuring, you deserve the cancer that’s going to kill you. You also deserve the bankruptcy that our horrible, corrupt, broken healthcare system will push you into for treatments before you die.”

It means “I believe in freedom only when it’s a freedom I want to have”. In particular, you shouldn’t have the freedom to mess with your blood chemistry – unless it’s with alcohol – but you should have the freedom to carry a tool for killing other people. You shouldn’t have the freedom to do *anything* if you’re black.

It means “The police should kill any non-white people they want to, for any reason, and I will cheer them on. Murder of innocents by police and by our army is perfectly acceptable.”

It means “The rich deserve to be able to enslave the rest of us.”

It means “We should choose the dumbest possible way to generate and use energy if it makes the people who are currently rich richer.”

It means “Corporations should be more important than people.”

It means “You should be educated with a series of lies that matches how we’d like you to see the world so we can go on raping, murdering, and looting”

It means “If you are not a white male, you deserve to be a third-class citizen”

It means “Capitalism is more important than people. If capitalism isn’t compatible with mass automation, continue with mass automation and just let the excess workers starve to death. They are worth nothing anyway.”

It means “Life is cheap.”. In fact, we underline that fact with the USA’s COVID death record.

It means “Justice is for sale to the highest bidder.”

And, lately, it means “The majority’s votes only count if the majority voted Republican.”, along with the corollaries of “If you can’t win, cheat” and “lying about voter fraud in order to cheat your way to a victory is totally valid.. if you’re a republican.”

It means “Every child left behind”. It means standardized tests and money/funding are more important than teaching. After all, gotta make those profits at the standardized testing companies. It also means the rich should have a good education and the poor should have a bad one so we can make sure they remain poor. And of course, it means we should lie to our children – we should pretend there is any reason at all to think the Bible is anything other than a bunch of stories written by a bunch of people 2000 years ago, for example.

I’m not even going to touch the subject of religion, since there’s a whole category on this blog specifically for that.

I could go on for a while..

There was a additional point which occurred to me. In the middle of a pandemic, with people starving, people having trouble paying rent, the US government thinks more toys for the military are far more important than a $2000 check for people with income under $152k. Make no mistake, more than $2k of your tax dollars are going to military toys, and the senate overrode the president’s veto on this. Keep in mind everyone in the senate with the possible exception of Bernie has a net worth well north of a million dollars. So, these millionares think it’s more important to keep the big bucks going to the socialism-for-mass-murderers system that is the US military contractors and the military-industrial complex, but you, the people? No. You don’t deserve that money. Better to spend it murdering.

In this particular case there is a clear party divide. The democrats would give you a check, but the republicans think you deserve to starve so they can add another million to their bank account. Those of you who say “Voting democrat is stealing money out of my wallet” – no, both parties are taking money from you. The difference is the republicans think you especially deserve to have your money taken if your income is below average, and also think that the money shouldn’t go to help the starving and sick, but rather to go to more toys for blowing things up, which will be used to commit murder.

So, as of right now, the US is now *double* our closest competitor in terms of COVID cases – and our closest competitor is *India*, a country with 3x the population we have.

I’m inclined to blame a lot of things, including a incompetent, incredibly selfish government (especially the Republicans) which is only interested in it’s own selfish ends and not the needs of the people it is governing, our capitalism as a religion (call in sick for work? You’re barely making rent as it is..), our incredibly awful medical system that exists first and foremost to make more billions for the billionaires, with taking care of the health of the people who use it as a very distant second, let’s not forget our president who has the mentality of a toddler and the IQ of Alexa – he keeps thinking – and telling people – and apparently a lot of people are dumb enough or brainwashed enough to listen – that it will just go away. And of course let’s talk about how people on the right are both dumb enough and delusional enough to politicize *wearing a mask*. I guess the good news is there will be less of them next year, but the bad news on that front is unfortunately most of the ones who will die have already reproduced.

Yes, there’s plenty of blame to go around. But will we learn? Will we stop spending trillions on tools to blow up other countries so we can steal their oil and start spending trillions on price-no-object health care?

No, probably not. In the meantime a large and disturbing number of people want to overthrow the results of the current election (I can tell you, after personally digging through millions of rows of data, that the number of people cheating on the election is statistically insignificant. It wouldn’t even change a election won by only 20k. Republicans have just increasingly become believers of “if you can’t win, cheat” – and what better way to cheat than by claiming the other side cheated? I mean, it worked in 2016 – while we know Trump used to walk in on teens in beauty pageants and there’s any number of creepy pictures with him and various young girls, the message was pushed hard that Clinton was running a child sex ring. And people bought it.

I guess I shouldn’t let these things bother me since after all there is nothing I can do about them. But it is depressing as anything.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/what-republicans-are-doing-worse-treason/617538/

– I think this article does a good job of pointing out the obvious.  Republicans, in their quest to be as awful as possible and hurt humanity as much as possible so a few individuals can get further ahead, have finally gone over the watershed line and are now advocating to throw out the result of a free and fair election. They are living in a interesting cloudcuckooland where if someone didn’t vote for their Dear Leader, their vote must be wrong – they are now screaming “Count all the republican votes. Throw all the democratic votes out.”

I’m impressed, yet again, by their awfulness, greed, and stupidity.

So, one of the challenges that I’ve talked about repeatedly is how money isn’t value, it is a pointer to it. And I think this is a important thing to remember, just in general. However, someone who will remain nameless talked about how Biden “was going to stop all fracking and it was going to make things more expensive for me”.

Well, first of all, Biden’s not going to stop all fracking. He’s just going to keep us from expanding fracking. But second of all, fracking is something we do that increases costs to all of us enormously. It’s a monumentally dumb thing to do because we’re damaging the most valuable resource on the planet, water, something we all need, in order to get something that’s readily available, energy. (The sky is literally raining soup here.)

The thing that you have to remember, when thinking about this, is fracking’s cost is hidden in the future. It’s huge – probably trillions of dollars – but you don’t pay it now, you pay it 20 or 50 or 100 years from now.

If you don’t frack, we have less natural gas and we have to depend on other sources of power. (The same friend pointed out that there are clouds and days with no wind – I didn’t point out about hydro and pumped storage, or flow batteries, or electrolysis and hydrogen.)

Now, if we do the sensible thing (solar, hydro, wind, next-gen nuclear) all of the sources of power will be considerably cheaper in measured cost to get them than fracking. The cost of energy *in real resources and human lives* will go *down*.

If we do frack, we destroy the groundwater, we lose millions of gallons of water to the process, and we condemn our children to have to spend trillions of dollars cleaning up our mess. Naturally republicans are in favor, because to them, the money *is* the value. They see it making greenbacks now, and the idea of tracing value flows instead of tracing money is beyond them.

It opens a interesting side idea. What about a government where in order to serve as a congresscritter, you have to show certain abilities? A meritocracy, in other words. I would *love* to see a sport pilot license as a minimum requirement to be a congresscritter. (Learning to fly a airplane teaches you a lot of important life lessons). Even more interesting would be one in which you had to show significant proficiency in C. (Hey, at least that way I’d know they knew what pointers *were*)

So, our strategy for COVID vaccinations is both lousy and stupid.

I quote USA TODAY: “More than 12.4 million vaccine doses have been distributed across the U.S., while nearly 2.8 million doses have been administered as of Thursday, per CDC data”

We shouldn’t be handing the task of figuring out who gets vaccines to the government. We shouldn’t be doing *anything* to overcomplicate this. Whoever shows up to get a vaccines, gets vaccinated. First come, first serve.

While we may minimize deaths by trying to vaccinate the most vulnerable first, we are probably maximizing spread, because these are the people least likely to be travelling, working, etc. The most optimum situation is to just get shots in arms, as quickly as posssible. Ask people to make their best guess as to what wave they should be in, and then show up and get vaccinated.

We’re not going to hit the most optimum choice of who gets vaxxed when no matter what – I’d need weeks of playing with a computer to even approximate the right answer to that. But by trying to optimize it,  and inserting a bunch of bureaucratic bullshit, we might well hit the most pessimal case.

So, my basic message – which will get ignored – is, people running the country, every person who gets vaccinated is a minimum of one less case, and if they’re a busy, active, travelling, or interfacing with the people case, it’s like 3-300. Until we’re down to less than a million vaxes in reserve, give it to anyone who will take it.

One of the things I really struggle with re: Trump – and a friend of mine reminded me of this the other day – is that, angry as he has made many people, and as much damage as he has done, it’s difficult to call him a worse president than Dubya.

The reason for that is, Trump didn’t start a war. Dubya killed at least a million innocents in a war over false pretenses that was largely to make money for America’s oil companies and military-industrial complex.

Now, Trump did many things that one would have expected to start a war. I think some of what happened here is the world recognized that he is, in fact, a toddler, and used some forbearance – partially because we cannot afford to have WWIII. (And hopefully – this is probably too much to ask, but hopefully – we will retool our democracy so that the loser of the popular vote can never again get into office, since that would have saved us from *BOTH* Trump and Dubya. Of course, it’s unfortunately also a open question whether Hillary would have started a war with Russia.)

However – with the side note that the jury is still out on how much Trump egged on a war between the left and right by repeatedly lying to the very gullible – Trump only got about 200k innocents killed as compared with Dubya’s million – and that’s based on the very difficult to verify theory that a more capable leader would have done a better job of managing COVID. (I do note we’re coming up on *double* the number of cases of our closest competitor – and they are a country with 3x our population – but I also note that America’s very stupid money-above-all-else capitalism-throw-everyone-but-the-billionares-under-the-bus was always going to result in us having the most cases)

My hope is that we’ll learn from all this. Another thing I was thinking about while I was doing my finger exercises today is that one of the big problems with America and maybe just with humanity in general is that money tends to buy power, but having excessive money tends to lead to brain damage. (From my point of view, having excessive money is also usually a sign of brain damage – unless you’re planning to build some enormous project like a spacecraft or a singularity, having excess money is letting the tool use you instead of using the tool – and I’ve known some pretty unhappy billionares personally or two-degrees-of-seperation, so I know of what I speak here. Not being able to have enough even when you have too much is a disease)

Another problem I suspect that comes up is that the children of billionaires never have to solve any really difficult challenges so they don’t learn as much as the children of other people, but they still end up with excessive amounts of power because they inherit the money. This is another good demonstration of part is wrong with Trump (who is one of the worst businesspeople I’ve ever read about – as I’ve mentioned elsewhere if he had just put the money from his father in a mutual fund he’d have a lot more money than he does, and of course we all know about his leaning on America’s “Socialism, but only for the rich” by having repeated bankruptcies.

Anyway, despite my criticisms, I am still thinking Trump deserves recognition as a Republican who’s managed to not start any wars.

So, this marks 300 hours since I installed a hour meter on my mixer (June 27th, I believe)

(Test at https://www.idrlabs.com/4-axes/test.php)

I can’t decide if I’m sad that I’m not more ‘woke’ or happy – a lot of the questions in the quiz make me question whether 100% woke is a wise place to be.