Cloud Based BS Detector Needed to Combat Jewish Space Lasers

I’ve reached that point where “Something oughta be done” this last week when I heard about the Jewish space laser that caused the wildfire storms that California went through a few years back.  

This came from Marjorie Taylor Greene, the representative from Georgia elected last election that has made a name for herself for her unflinching support of the former president and of conspiracy theories like those of QAnon, that claim Washington is run by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles that were supposed to be overthrown and arrested when Trump won the last election.  

Oh…  In case you don’t know, the date of the mass arrests and executions has been pushed back to March.  After the storm of retribution QAnon supporters expected didn’t happen, and they took their conspiracies into more private platforms where they could trade non-facts with other conspiracies the way bacteria and viruses trade bits of DNA with each other to make their variants, believers in this variant of the conspiracy are now saying that, because of some obscure law passed in 1871, the United States stopped being a democracy at that time and became a corporation.  This means that citizens are not obliged to obey any law or amendment to the constitution passed since then.  And, on March 4th, after the former president marches forth from his golf resort in Florida, the storm they were hoping for in November will take place, resulting in Trump becoming the 19th President of the United States (After Ulysses S. Grant, the 18th and last president before this transformation that the rest of us miss).  

I have to admit, as someone who spends a significant portion of his time trying to think up alternate histories to turn into fantasy and science fiction stories, these guys get a lot of mileage out of what they find.  

But I digress…  I found a tweet that had Rep. Greene’s original Facebook posting.  I’ll provide it here so you can look at the source material: https://twitter.com/JustinGrayWSB/status/1354870334655262724

What the gentlewoman from Georgia does is string together a number of relationships between different individuals who were connected to or involved with the fires, efforts to put them out, etc., and then draws a set of baseless conclusions to infer that the fires were caused by lasers (secretly) placed in orbit to concentrate the sun’s energy into energy to beam to Earth.  She at least has the good will, if one could call it that, to suggest that the fires themselves were a mistake, a result of using new technology, but that the people who created the lasers got help from the then governor of California, Jerry Brown, that allowed them to escape blame and recoup their losses from the fires.  It also, conveniently, cleared the land where former Gov. Brown wanted to run his “pet project” for a high-speed rail line through California.  A win-win for those involved.  

I am wondering why this gem of a statement wasn’t made public before the election.  But then, I unfortunately decide that it probably wouldn’t have made a difference.  Because the people that elected her probably hold the same beliefs that Rep. Greene does.  That the election was stolen.  That Trump was chosen by God to lead this country.  That he will return in triumph in the spring to lead the country once more.  

Something like a Jewish space laser is a trifling thing in the face of much grander “truths.”  

What it makes me want to do is…  “Do Something.”  Find a way to show just how crazy this thinking is.   Find a way to show the “Truth” with a capital “T” in bright, blazing letters, each a mile high, blazing bright in orbit where everyone can see it.  Someplace where one can point it out and say, “There!  Right There!  You see!  That’s It!”  

Unfortunately…  I have no idea how to put mile long letters into orbit.  Let alone how to build them and make them burn with such a brilliance, as well as do it with adding to the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.  

Technology has created a situation where the “Truth” can much more easily be obscured and replaced. 

No…  Wait.  That’s not true.  What technology has given us is the means by which people can present and disseminate their beliefs, or the myths they want to propagate to like minded fellows, much more rapidly than ever before.  The same technology that makes my phone scream with an Amber Alert when some poor child has been abducted in my area can send an alert telling others that the satanic pedophiles have targeted their child and you need to lock yourself in your safe room and load your guns NOW and hold out until March when the 19th President will make everything right.  You DID save enough MREs to get to March, right?  

It still leaves me with the job of figuring out how to deal with a world where so many people just believe what they want, no matter how far out stupid it seems to me to be.  And the tools, processes, and means I learned to use all these years to determine for myself what was right and what was wrong, to tell truth from fiction, or even worse from lies, seem slow and outmoded.

My mom used to tell me when I was growing up that it’s the fact that people will believe what they want that make life a horse race.  Ok.  I get that.  But some people are trying to a mane and a saddle on a dune buggy, call it “Trigger,” and say it’s a horse.  And I, we all, need to get better at pointing this out and telling them that just because they say it’s a horse it can’t fit in the starting gate.  

I have no answers for this right now.  Just the need and the desire to fulfill it.  I promise to share any answers I come up with.

The Slow and Steady Advance Goes On...

Last Wednesday, my uncle, Jerry Melton, passed away.  

There have been other people in my family that qualified for the term, “Uncle Jerry.”  But when I used it, I was always referring to my father’s younger brother.  I loved Jerry for being my uncle.  But more than that, especially as I got older, I liked him for being a genuinely nice individual.  The expression he carried on his face most often was a warm and friendly smile.  A smile of anticipation.  Of what you were going to tell him had being going on in your life.  Of his chance to tell you some story of something he had heard that was funny and entertaining.  

Both sides of my family were avid story-tellers.  Uncle Jerry stood out in the way he told them.  They way he would bring you into them, to the point you would see the person he was describing, or would remember clearly the moment he was talking about if you had been a part of it.  And when the punch line came, he’d laugh in a way that invited you to laugh along with him.  Even if the story was something embarrassing you had done (like the time I bought new clothes to play golf with him and my dad and then promptly fell into the mud while playing the first hole), you’d laugh because the way he told it you could see the humor in it.  And it left you no choice but to laugh with him and everyone else that heard it.  

At the time of his passing, Uncle Jerry was in an assisted living home due to an increasingly debilitating condition he had.  It was hard to see him like that, the last few times I visited him there.  But even then there’d be a smile on his face when we came to see him, and his eyes would be bright as he listened to what we had to say to him.  As if we had reminded him of some of his stories that he would be telling us had he the wherewithal to do so.  

It was sad, though not surprising, to hear of his passing.  It has left me feeling lost and depressed.  

The title of this entry comes from a quote from Henry James, the famed novelist from the turn of the century.  I was reminded of his quote after hearing the news about my uncle.  

“Life is a slow and steady advance into enemy territory.”  

The quote captured my attention from the moment I came across it.  It so perfectly captures the growing sense of incredulity one feels as the years pass, as “comrades in arms” on this advance fall by the wayside, as the terrain surrounding you becomes more and more alien and foreign.  After ending the call with my dad where he gave me the news, it came to me that I no longer had any uncles.  Jerry was the last.  The routines that had formed the boundaries of my life as a boy, visiting on holidays, catching him up on what I’d been doing between visits, feeling his genuine interest and affection, seeing him smile, listening him tell a story I may have heard countless times before, but which could still make me laugh despite that because of the pleasure he took and gave in telling it.  Those routines are gone.  Casualties of this steady advance.  From a homeland I can’t go back and see again. 

Sadness…  Such sadness…

I once heard that there are three stages of extinction a person goes through.  The first is death, the Physical Extinction.  The second, is when the last person that knew you personally is gone, and there is no one around that has a direct memory of you.  The third and final form of extinction is when your name is last spoken, when the last record of you is lost, destroyed, or thrown away, when history has forgotten you.  

Only the very famous, or the very diabolical, get to survive past stage two.  That is the way of things as we march forward.  Toward some objective that we can’t clearly name.  For a victory we’ll probably never see.  But while I march... While we march together, I will remember  my Uncle Jerry.  I’ll keep going forward, if for no other reason than to keep saying, “I remember him.  A kindly man whom I loved and appreciated and helped me learn to laugh at myself.”  

Good bye, Jerry.  Thank you for making this advance so much more bearable, and being such a good comrade along the way. 

The Habit of Democracy

This week’s blog entry is prompted by the events that took place on Capital Hill in Washington, D.C., this week.  But first, I want to relay a story about by own political history that I think is relevant.  

My political life began in 1976, when I was fifteen years old.  It happened one afternoon, sometime before the election that year.  I walked into our home in Ontario, California.  I was coming in from someplace.  I was heading to someplace else to do something.  I don’t recall where I was coming from or where I was heading.  But what happened in between has stayed with me clearly all these years.

Crossing through the family room toward the kitchen (maybe I was coming in to get something to eat?  Sounds right for a fifteen year old), I spotted something on the side table next to the couch.  It was one of those sample ballots they send out that list the candidates and propositions and which give you your polling place, back when you only had one day to vote and only one way to do it.  This one was my dad’s.  His pen was laying next to the ballot on the table.

I don’t remember what prompted me specifically to do so, but I decided to sit down and read through the ballot, and to use my dad’s pen to mark what my choices would be if I had been allowed to vote.  It may have had to do with the influence of the circle of friends I had, all of whom were smart guys that thought and talked about all manner of things, including, especially at times, about politics.  I went through the ballot, reading about who was running or what change in the law was being offered.  After I had checked off my choices, I set it back down and went on my way.  

Later, coming from my bedroom, I spotted my dad sitting on the sofa in the family room.  I noticed the sample ballot on the coffee table in front of him.  When he spotted me on my way to the door, he waved me over.  

“I wanted to ask you something…”  He picked up the ballot from the table.  “Did you fill out my sample ballot.”  

“Uh…  Yeah…”  The way he said it told me something was up.  

“I thought so.”  He gestured toward the love seat catty-corner from him.  “Have a seat.  I want to have a talk with you.”  

What followed was a long, and increasingly heated discussion about every single choice I’d made in his ballot.  At first I tried to just get out of it, answering his questions about the choices I’d made with, “I dunno…” or, “I just did…” with shrugs of my shoulder.  But my father wasn’t having it.  “You just checked it off without thinking?” he’d reply.  I started getting angry at his implication that I wasn’t all that bright, and at the idea I was in trouble because my choices were different that his.  I began to fight back, giving my reasons, arguing back to his arguments, and to his counter-arguments, and then his counter-counter-arguments.  

The final item we discussed was a proposition to include non-smoking sections in restaurants.  The first of its kind in the country.  I had checked off, “Yes,” to the proposition.  My dad leaned in on me heavily.  

“You’re basically telling other people how to live their lives!” he insisted.  “That you don’t want them to smoke because you don’t like it.”  

“No!  I’m saying that I have a right to live my life as I want to.  But if we go to a restaurant to eat, and someone sitting next to me is smoking, then I HAVE TO smoke whether I want to or not.  Is that fair?  We should have separate places so I can not smoke and they can if they want to.”  

After I was done, my dad sat there and looked at me…  Stared at me, it felt like.  After a few moments, he shrugged. 

“Ok.”  He set his sample ballot down.  He got up and moved toward his bedroom.  

But I wasn’t done.  Before he was out of the family room, I called out to him.  “Is that it?” 

He turned back.  “Yeah.  That’s it.”  

“I’m…  Not in trouble?”

“No.  You’re not in trouble.”  

“Ok…  So…  What was this about?”  

He shrugged again.  “A lot of what you choose on the ballot was different that what I would chose.  I wondered where you got your ideas from.  I wanted to make sure you weren’t just picking what other people told you to pick.  That you were thinking for yourself.”  

I thought about that.  Dad waited while I thought.  Then, I asked, “So…  What did you decide?”

“That you were thinking for yourself.”  He lifted his shoulders in a question to me.  I shrugged back.  He went on to wherever he was going.  

Since that time, I became an avid participant in our country’s political process.  I have voted in every national election, every state election, and every municipal election except one.  I have learned what most people learn that the process isn’t perfect.  That your choice may fail in any given election (my record on picking the winner in Presidential races is 5 out of 11), and that you sometimes have choices that make you hold your nose.  But you do it, hope for the best, then move on to the next election.

This is the habit of democracy.  

The people that ransacked the Capital Building do not have that habit.  I remember in 2016, after the election, reading examinations of those that voted for Trump and discovering that a significant proportion of them were new to the process.  People that had, due to feeling disenfranchised, or feeling the system was rigged against them, or other similar reasons, stayed out of the process but came in to support Trump when they heard their beliefs echoed in his words.  And when they didn’t get their choice elected the second time they tried, they became angry and gave into the impulse to destroy the system they had little trust to begin with.  

I had the experience of seeing the first three people I voted for President lose.  Deal with it.  

This doesn’t explain all of those that participated in the insurrection.  There was a news item on the radio that the average age of the people arrested after the violence was over 40 years old.  Much older than the average when similar riots had taken place previously.  Rioting is a younger person’s game.  The indication was that more established Trump supporters had gone to hear him speak, then followed the angry, vocal, and more violently prone newbies to democracy to the Capitol Building, getting swept up in their rage.  

And it also doesn’t quite explain the politicians that are parroting Trump’s lies (and that’s what they are, even if he has come to believe them after repeating them so much) about a “stolen election.”  These people are also following this crowd, hoping to gain their political support for future candidacies they wish to pursue.  This makes them more crass and indecent in their political viewpoints than the disappointed voter who got swept up in the moment, though not by much.  

Which is one of the most important points my experience with my dad taught me, which is lost upon these people.  My father had that talk with me, not to convince me I was wrong and he was right, but to make sure I was thinking for myself.  Once he was clear on that, he walked away, even if he didn’t agree with the choices I had made.  This is something I’ve experienced countless times in my political life in the forty-five years since that conversation.  That there will be people who will disagree with you on an issue or about a candidate, no matter how “obvious” the correct choice seems to you, or how “logical” or “moral” an argument you make with them.  When you meet someone like that the best, the only course of action, is to say, “Ok,” and leave them with their opinion, make your own choice, then win or lose wait for the next election. 

That is the one habit of democracy that is essential to keeping it running peacefully.  

My Life v8.5

The start of a new year is when a lot of people make the effort to change their life.  Resolutions are made to do the things they’ve been meaning to do for some time.  Stop smoking.  Lose weight.  Get a new job.  Finally ask her out.  The list is as long as the number of people on the planet.  

I don’t like “resolutions.”  Because along with the making resolutions there is the tradition of watching yourself fail at them.  The gym membership that goes unused.  The unopened pack of cigarettes that gets found in a drawer.l  The stumble and fall off the wagon.  

Following a year like 2020, I wonder how basic these resolutions have become.  Instead of getting a “New” job, how many people are resolving to simple find employment.  A continuation of a process forced upon them because of the virus induced recession.  

I don’t like resolutions.  But, I do like goals.  And one thing 2020 gave me, which I referenced in a previous blog entry, was a desire to be more positive and optimistic.  A desire to change my life for the better.  So, instead of making a list of resolutions, a list of things I would really like to see happen, I am writing up a new version of my life as if it were a program, an application I might download to use to get something I want done.  This can be considered a rough draft of the latest version of “Me” that I want to upload into the shared world that we are calling “2021.”  There will be bugs.  It will need to be redrafted when internal conflicts and loops are discovered.  It is an on-going thing.  Such failures are part of the debugging process and do not represent a critical failure unless I decide to discontinue the reprogramming process.  It is the embodiment of the Japanese saying, “Fall down seven times, get up eight.”  

So here are the features I am rewriting my life to include in “2021.”  

My Life v.8.5

First, a change in motif.  “Make Progress in Life Everyday.”  That is the theme behind the changes.  This theme is intended to do two things.  One, to give me a focus each day when I wake up as to how I want to go.  To move toward a life I choose to live, as opposed to just dealing with the existence I am going through based on the circumstances surrounding me.  As the Kabbalistic seers of might say, it is an image of the Future I want to see reaching back into the present to make the changes it needs in order to Be.  The destination of the journey in more layman terms.  

Two, it is incremental.  It won’t happen in a day or week.  It might not even be realized by 12/31/21.  It is something to move toward every day.  Maybe three steps today.  Maybe five.  At least one.  I might get pushed back a foot or two.  But I’ll do my best to make up ground the next day, and the day after that.  

The specific features I want to include in this update are…

Travel.  This was the first thing I wrote in my journal yesterday when writing out by hand what I wanted in 2021 that was absent in 2020.  It is probably the most significant loss as a result of the pandemic.  I have become used to going to places I haven’t been each year, and not being able to do so diminished my life experience.  I want to correct that.  

I started the process when I rescheduled the flight to Japan I was supposed to take in April last year.  The airline allowed me to do so without and fees to change the date, though any further change will cost me.  I’m now scheduled to fly into Haneda Airport on October 1st.  I’m hoping by then enough people will have been vaccinated to relax all the travel restrictions thrown up as obstacles.  I want to include the side trip to Korea, my first visit to that country, while I’m there.  I’m also hoping to go to a World Science Fiction convention this year.  It is scheduled to be in Washington, D.C. in August, which will hopefully give me a chance to see our nation’s capital for the first time and add a stadium, or maybe two since Baltimore is relatively close, to the list of Major League parks I’ve seen games in.  I am going to plan for too many trips instead of too few.  

Writing.  This was something gained in the Year of Loss that 2020 was.  I had stopped writing out of frustration.  I started again during isolation.  This year I finished an outline for one novel I’d been stuck on for years to finish its rough draft.  I started revising the rough draft for the fantasy novel I did finish.  The ball is already rolling in this area.  

To pick up the momentum, I’m going to schedule different writing activities during the week.  To start, on Sunday, I’ll work on my blog.  A weekly goal to write something coherent to share.  On Saturday, I focus on shorter work.  Short stories I want to finish and submit.  I will set myself a goal of a new submission every month.  I’ve done this before.  This is where “Fall down seven times…”  will be used to its fullest.  

A Home.  This is the scariest.  It is the one I always felt was out of reach.  It’s the one change that I wonder to myself, when my pessimistic self is on the ascent, if I’ve waited too late in life to even try.  But, I’ve decided to be positive.  Optimistic.  To not let feeling helpless get in the way.  I’ve spoken to a realtor and a lender.  I have about half of the money I need to make it affordable.  Getting the other half is the problem.  Thinking I’m only halfway there makes it feel more doable.  I’ll hold on to that feeling and explore my options.  

A Partner.  This is the most amorphous but also constantly pressing desire.  It’s also the one I feel I should keep deliberately vague.  I think my problem in the past has been being too specific in what I was looking for in someone to be my significant other.  Focusing on “features” I wanted for this “component” in life, rather than the feelings I wanted to convey and feel coming back.  Right now I just want to acknowledge the space in my life I want to fill, and let it pull me in whatever direction I should go.  That sounds so new-agey.  But it has the advantage of not having been put into practice before.  

I will end here.  There are more features, along with some of the tools I am collecting to use.  But this is the napkin diagram of “Me v8.5” that I want to release to the world.  The work has started.  I hope to announce a release date soon,

I enthusiastically wish you all a Happy, Healthy, Prosperous, Empowering New Year and hope to see you all achieve whatever Dreams you may have.  

Ever Forward!