Author: admin

Sometimes I forget just how wonderful it is simply to be able to be here on this planet. It is all too easy to take that for granted.
Then I remember how miraculous all this is, and what a privilege it is simply to be alive.
And I remember to be grateful.

Watching the shenanigans of the current U.S. administration feels for all the world like watching a pack of five year olds acting out. Which may be why something about it has been nagging at my brain.

I think I finally have it. These people remind me of the “He-Man Woman Haters Club” from the Spanky and Our Gang movie shorts in the 1930s.

All the stories in those films were essentially about a gang of little boys trying to punch way above their weight. And like our current president, those little boys had a definite problem with equality between the sexes.

Spanky’s club even had an anthem: “We Are He-Man Woman Haters… We Feed Girls To Alligators”. That also might help to explain why the president decided to call his fancy new concentration camp “Alligator Alley”.

One line stood out for me in Jimmy Kimmel’s opening monologue:

This show is not important. What is important is that we live in a country that allows us to have a show like this.

That is such a perfect thought, and so beautifully stated. Yet the junior league mafiosi who are pretending to run this country keep trying to paint Mr. Kimmel as some kind of figure of hate. But you can only gaslight millions of people for so long.

Meanwhile, in just the last few days that guy in the Whitehouse talked about openly embracing hate, spread bizarre conspiracy theories about painkillers, and made a utter ass of himself in front of most of the leaders of the world’s various nations. Maybe we’ve got the wrong guy in the Whitehouse.

Is it too late to elect Jimmy Kimmel? He seems a lot more qualified than the guy who currently has the job.

As much fun as it is to develop a time travel story on-line, recent events have convinced me that I need to put that little project on hold. The real world is turning out to be far stranger than anything I could dream up in science fiction.

Yesterday the president of the United States made a big public speech, telling everyone that pregnant women should not take acetaminophen (eg: Tylenol) because it will give their child Autism. Not surprisingly, that assertion is inconsistent with actual science.

In fact, since other painkillers such as ibuprofen are unsafe for a developing fetus, acetaminophen is one of the few effective ways to relieve pain during pregnancy. And complications from chronic pain are far more likely to harm the child.

Chronic pain elevates maternal stress levels, triggers inflammatory responses, and reduces uterine blood flow needed to delivery oxygen and nutrients to the baby. This can lead to premature birth, low birth weight, altered brain structure and developmental issues later in life.

But facts don’t really enter into the conversation here. This president is an opposite man: He says and does racist things while claiming to fight racism, calls his adversaries antisemites while lionizing people who push “replacement theory”, and rebrands the Department of Defense (whose main purpose is to prevent war) as the Department of War. The list goes on.

And now, true to form, he has given us another opposite man moment: He is giving a big headache to companies that make pills to fight headaches. He is also endangering lives in the process, but I am not that sure he cares about such details.

A time travel story needs to begin with a premise, and some premises are more common than others. For example, it has a common trope in time travel scifi circles to day that “Everyone kills Hitler on their first trip.”

Then again, in nearly all of the actual scifi stories where somebody goes back in time to kill Hitler, things end up going wrong in one way or another. That’s probably because time travel gone wrong makes for a more interesting story than the alternative — a straight ahead win for the good guys.

To me what is most interesting about this particular trope is the “pre-crime” aspect of it. Young Adolf has not actually caused the death of millions of people, or even risen to power. Arguably his greatest crime is making bad art.

So he were actually to be killed, to prevent a future that would therefore never happen, would that actually be justifiable? Can you really justify a capital crime in the name of something that doesn’t happen?

I have a cool idea for a time travel story. The premise is a touch farfetched, but then again, reality itself seems pretty farfetched these days.

So my story should fit right in. I’m still developing it, but it’s starting to come together.

Over the coming days I will be sharing my process. More tomorrow.

The Madness of King George is one of my favorite movies. A British film released in 1994, and adapted by Alan Bennett from his own 1991 play, it tells the true story of how King George III gradually went insane while he was still on the British throne.

The bizarre $15 billion law suit against the New York Times, which was just summarily dismissed by a clearly nonplussed judge, makes me think of that film. At what point does it become officially obvious that the leader of your country has bats in his belfry and is totally out to lunch?

At what point do even the people who voted for him realize that he has become totally bonkers, wackadoodle and is nutty as a fruitcake? And then what do they do when they finally admit that he has gone off his rocker, is mad as a hatter, and isn’t playing with a full deck?

Maybe there’s a metaphor for that.

Today I woke up early, and made massive changes and upgrades to the software project I am working on. Miraculously, it all still works, and nothing broke.

I call that a good day.

Of course today we immediately cancelled our subscription to Disney Plus. As patriotic Americans, we felt it was our duty.

The people who are attacking the United States of America from within need to be stopped, which means that we need to do everything we can as citizens to stand up for our nation and for its Constitution.

The specific attack this time was not merely outrageous. It was designed to be outrageous, to leave decent people sputtering, and to make us believe that the First Amendment is no longer in effect.

Kimmel was literally fired for telling the truth — for pointing out that the MAGA gang is trying to score political points from the killing of Charlie Kirk. That is exactly correct, and in fact obviously so.

What the MAGA gang (I think Kimmel nailed it with that phrase) is doing is deeply insulting to the memory of Charlie Kirk. How are they choosing to “honor” a man who believed in open debate? By simply labeling anything that they happen to disagree with as hate speech and summarily cancelling the speaker.

I am sure that Charlie Kirk would be utterly disgusted by what Carr and his fellow MAGA uomini di disonore are doing in his name. As Americans, we have an obligation to not let them get away with it.

Now let’s extrapolate into the future, based on what we currently know to be true. We are about to enter an era (we haven’t quite entered it yet), when your smart glasses will be able to record every moment of your life.

This will include not just your words, but also your gestures, your facial expressions, how you interact with different people, how you respond to the things that you see and hear in the world around you. In short, an enormous amount of data that represents you will be available for number crunching after the fact.

People in our generation might resist this data gathering, but people who are young children today will accept it and take it for granted. To a generation born into that future world, the services provided by the companies who gather that data will be too compelling to reject.

Now fast forward another hundred years. Those children will have lived out their natural lives, and they will be dead and gone.

But they will also have left behind a lifetime of moment by moment data. Future A.I. — much more advanced than today’s A.I. — will be trained on that data,

People will no longer ask “What would great Great-Grandpa John have said?” They will simply be able to ask him, and he will answer in his own voice, with the thoughts and opinions that he had held for his entire life.

The people in that future will look upon our own era as a kind of dark age, perhaps the way we regard the ancient world before the invention of writing. They will find it hard to imagine a time so primitive that you couldn’t do something as simple as have a conversation with your ancestors.