Rotten at the core

Why are we voting today? Because the system is riddled with antiquated garbage.

It gets far worse than that. The American political system was not designed to support a representative democracy — it’s a shell game to prop up oligarchs, in a way grossly distorted by 18th century slavery. It is a terrible system that is primed to be gamed, and produce contests like the current churning pit of slime. It continues because Americans are educated to believe that the founding fathers were like demigods, that our constitution is a religious document, and that everything about the establishment of our country was noble and well-meaning. None of that is true.

It’s a system that deserves to be burned to the ground and plowed with salt. It’s a false democracy; a special effect, a bad joke. A power-sharing arrangement between unscrupulous demagogues and slavers. The two party system “divide et impera” splits us amongst ourselves, so that we don’t wake up and build guillotines. That we haven’t, yet, is shame enough to bear. But we will, eventually, we will.

I don’t approve of that outcome, largely because I think it will just be an opportunity for a fresh set of oligarchs to wrench the system to their benefit.

I don’t even know how the election will turn out today, but when the process is so terrible, it doesn’t really matter much for the long term future of the United States. One result is definitely better than the other, but I dread the ongoing mess of the next election, which will probably begin in 2017 and drag on for years. Again.

Done.

ivoted

We got to the polls as soon as they opened…and there was a line! In Morris! I got my ballot immediately, but then actually had to wait half a minute for a voting booth to open up.

I was voter #5 at my polling place. Millions more will pour in today.

I hope they all vote as well as I did.

Why’d you have to go and ruin it?

Brandon Levston had an encounter with a road-raging Trump supporter. It’s kind of awful: the road rager uses racial slurs, dismisses his wife’s protest with “be a woman”, and declares that black lives don’t matter, repeatedly. The video is definitely not safe for work.

WMC Action News 5 – Memphis, Tennessee

And then, as the Trump-lovin’ asshole walks away, Levston throws his own insult at about the 3:05 mark and calls him…

…transgender faggot…

And with that, they both get thrown into the basket of deplorables. I guess some bigotries just stick around forever.

OK, a lot of people are saying Levston did not say the slur — it was the Trumpkin. It’s not clear: Levston is laughing just after the comment, and it blurs together with the voice.

I’d love to hear from Levston himself to clear up the ambiguity. It may well be that only one of them needs to go in the basket, but it’s going to need to be a bigger basket.

Minneapolis mayor responds to Trump’s assertions about our state

I felt the same way about the recent Trump rally — he knows nothing about this state. Betsy Hodges expressed it beautifully, though.

Donald Trump, you need to know a few things about Minnesota that your ignorant tirade in Minnesota today revealed you do not know and I fear you are incapable of understanding:

1) You say “don’t let them roam our communities” like you have already created the fascist state you are hoping to turn this country into. This is America, Donald, and the Somali people of Minnesota and Minneapolis are not *roaming* our communities, they are *building* them.

2) Minnesota has problems, that’s for sure. All states do. There is poverty, and violence, and despair, and those have consequences – in every group, in every community, including the people you addressed today. But we aren’t like you, Donald. In Minnesota we respond to those challenges with kindness, not hate; by pulling together more rather than less; by appreciating one another more rather than less; and by working harder, not by giving up on one another. Everything you’ve done in your life – from your business practices to your sexual assaults to your Islamophobia to your constant blaming of others for the problems you’ve created yourself – betrays your ignorance of those values. But they are Minnesota values and we will vote them on Tuesday.

3) Minneapolis is a better, stronger place for having our Somali and East African immigrants and refugees in it. It is a privilege and an honor to be mayor of the city with the largest Somali population in this country. Your ignorance, your hate, your fear just make me remember how lucky we are to have neighbors who are so great.

4) You did get one thing right today, though. “Four years, you can forget it,” you said. Indeed. You can forget it.

Exactly right.

Quaint relics of the pre-Internet era

Who else remembers the days of the BBS? Back in the 1980s I used to hang out on various dial-up bulletin boards, before the internet. They weren’t truly interactive — some used only a single phone line, a few fancy ones could handle a couple of simultaneous connections, but generally you’d log in, browse a couple of messages other people had left, maybe leave one yourself, and log out again, all at 300 baud. When the fancy 1200 baud modems came out (I bought one that was military surplus), my old Apple II struggled to keep up with the furious data rate, and I actually wrote my very own telecommunications program — in 6502 Assembler, of course, using the wonderful ORCA macro assembler package — and took the daring step of cutting a lead on my mother board to enable interrupts, and building the program around a custom interrupt handler just so it would stop dropping characters. I was a true nerd.

It all came rushing back with this article in the Atlantic, The Lost Civilization of Dial-Up Bulletin Board Systems. I abandoned them in the 1990s when the Internet became ubiquitously available, although still often through dial-up lines from home. Apparently some tiny number of them still hang on. There are actually 20 dial-up BBSes still running, somewhere?

But every mass extinction has its holdouts. Even today, a small community of people still run and call BBSes. Many seek the digital intimacy they lost years ago; 373 BBSes still operate, according to the Telnet BBS Guide, mostly in the United States. Many are set up to be accessible via internet-connected tools like Telnet, a text-based remote-login protocol originally designed for mainframes.

Did any direct-access, telephone-dial-up BBSes survive the internet’s proverbial asteroid? Sure enough, there are about 20 known dial-up BBSes in North America. And of those, only a handful have been running non-stop since the mid-1990s. These are the true dinosaurs walking among us. Who dares to run such antique systems, and why? Have any of them been left running by accident like the BBS in my dream? I had to find out.

Yes, why? I want to know. It turns out that many of them are just kept up for nostalgia’s sake, but others are…are you surprised to learn that they’re maintained by delusional right-wing paranoids?

Ten years ago, when I dipped back into BBSes, I still got a sense that many sysops ran them to provide a libertarian alternative to the internet. Among them, the unoppressed who wanted religious freedom, the unsurveilled who wanted freedom from surveillance, and those prepping for the day when BBSes would provide shelter after the internet came crashing down.

It was never an alternative to the Internet. It couldn’t be. You’d have to argue that the Post Office was just a slow version of blogging if you go down that path.

Duh.

I took the Pew Quiz just to check my views with my party affiliation — you never know, maybe I’m actually a Republican deep down inside, and I’ve been voting incorrectly for the past few decades. It was disappointing.

pewquiz

Hey, is that arrow labeled “YOU” a few pixels shy of the left edge of the scale? And is the average member of the Democratic party actually what I would consider a horrible conservative?

Positive evidence for Hillary Clinton

She seems to have been a successful advocate for science and mathematics, and for education in general with a great track record since her days in Arkansas.

I was a child in Arkansas while Hillary was empowered to make a focused effort on improving outcomes for children. From fourth through ninth grade, I attended a “gifted and talented education” (GATE) class, a program built as part of Hillary Clinton’s reforms by the Standards Committee. The classes were loosely structured, with no rigid testing schedules or rote memorization, but they encouraged critical discourse and embraced creative divergence. GATE opened my eyes to a world of opportunity.

Hillary Clinton’s educational reforms were year-round. From seventh through 12th grade, I was able to attend multi-week, residential summer learning programs at small universities across Arkansas that offered middle- and high-schoolers immersive camps in fields like mathematics, theater, geology and more. Charismatic professors taught all of the programs. Most importantly for my family, they were provided by the state of Arkansas at no cost to students. The programs, known as “Academic Enrichment for the Gifted in the Summer” (AEGIS) started in 1984, a year after Hillary Clinton assumed the chair position of the Standards Committee. By the 1990s, AEGIS had ballooned to more than 25 programs serving thousands of students every summer. The program would not have existed without Hillary Clinton’s leadership.

Mathematics and sciences (or what we call “STEM” today) were of particular importance to Clinton. In a 1983 interview with the Associated Press, she remarked, while suggesting that Arkansas had overemphasized athletics, “I think it’s time for getting a little fanatic about math and sciences.” STEM is the foundation of today’s technology industry, and only a handful of pioneers in the public education space had the foresight to appreciate its value for future members of the workforce. By far the most significant impact Hillary Clinton’s educational reforms had in my life was through her work to create a free public boarding school for math and science nerds like me: The Arkansas School for Mathematics and Sciences (ASMS).

That also explains why the Republicans hate her so much. She fought ignorance, which is the core of the Republican party platform.

ORANGE BLOVIATOR GO HOME

So, Donald Trump paid a visit to Minnesota today, which was odd and pointless. This state is pretty much a lock for Clinton, but he flew in, claiming that there’s going to be a surprising upset in the state. He drew a few thousand deplorables to cheer him on, like this fellow:

trumpminnesota

I don’t think that’s the kind of appeal that will work here, and it’s kind of delusional of him to think so.

He also spent a lot of his time raging about those horrible immigrants in Minnesota.

Trump charged that too many Somali immigrants were admitted with faulty vetting and later recruited by radical elements. “A Trump administration will not admit any refugees without the support of the local communities where they are being placed,” he said. “It’s the least they could do for you. You’ve suffered enough in Minnesota.”

We’ve suffered? Hang on there — we have a lot of Hmong and Somali immigrants here, and they don’t make us suffer. They’re good people. I’ve got a fair number of them in my classes, and they do as well as the third and fourth generation immigrants (like almost all of us) and as well as the native population. I don’t resent them at all, I’m glad to have them here…so what is this bullshit with a loud-mouthed New York millionaire tax-dodger flying in to tell us who belongs here and who doesn’t?

The person I’d like to kick out is a certain ranting orange thug. You know, the kind who encourages his fans to murder people.

The power of self-delusion

the-exorcist

William Friedkin, the guy who directed the Exorcist movie, has written a rather unreliable account of the activities of an official Catholic exorcist, Gabriele Amorth. I say unreliable because, I’m afraid, he sounds rather confused.

I am an agnostic. I believe the power of God and the human soul are unknowable. I don’t associate the teachings of Jesus with the politics of the Roman Catholic Church. The authors of the New Testament—none of whom, it is now generally believed by historians, actually knew Jesus—were creating a religion, not writing history.

I had no particular interest in the spiritual or the supernatural when the writer Bill Blatty asked me to direct the film of his novel, The Exorcist.

…

More than any film I’ve directed, The Exorcist inspired me to the point of obsession each day as I made it. I rejected all constraints, creative and financial. The studio, Warner Bros., thought I had taken leave of my senses. I may have. I made the film believing in the reality of exorcism and never, to this day, thought of it as a horror film.

There is a video of a woman undergoing exorcism. She thrashes around violently, she growls and howls, she curses in Italian. There is absolutely nothing supernatural on display, although it is also illustrated with a still from The Exorcist of a possessed girl levitating. This woman does not levitate. Her head doesn’t spin around on her neck. It’s all sadly mundane and shows a person suffering from some kind of mental illness, nothing more.

So Friedkin takes the video to some real doctors. They are non-committal; this is a problem they wouldn’t know how to treat, they come right out and say “this isn’t demon possession”, they suggest that there isn’t necessarily anything they could do, they agree that religion may be a useful palliative, and they explain that they have a patient with similar symptoms, and “we’re treating her with medication, giving her psychotherapy, creating a safe environment. She gets better.” How does Friedkin interpret this? As an affirmation of the supernatural.

I went to these doctors to try to get a rational, scientific explanation for what I had experienced. I thought they’d say, “This is some sort of psychosomatic disorder having nothing to do with possession.” That’s not what I came away with. Forty-five years after I directed The Exorcist, there’s more acceptance of the possibility of possession than there was when I made the film.

No there isn’t. It’s astonishing how he imposes his own beliefs on a natural phenomenon. And then he has the confidence to say of Amorth that He has performed thousands of exorcisms successfully. That makes no sense. Even the specific person he describes in this account he has to admit has been “exorcised” nine times, and at the end of the story is still having these seizure-like episodes. Is he going to call these nine successes?

I don’t believe in demons, but this account sure convinces me of the power of people to lie to themselves. There’s nothing heroic or noble in that, and in particular, there is nothing admirable about a man who uses religion to perpetuate damaging dishonesty about human behavior.