Caitlyn Jenner is not ready for prime time

There is currently a recall election for the governor of California and according to the way the system works, there are two things to vote on on the same ballot: Whether to recall the current incumbent Gavin Newsom and, if that vote garners 50% + 1 of the vote, then who should replace him among all the people vying for the position. As I have written before, this is a strange system in that in a highly contested race, it is possible for the incumbent to be voted out by getting just shy of the 50% mark and be replaced by someone with a much smaller fraction of the vote.
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We are truly a barbaric nation

The evidence for the above claim lies is in the way we treat people for even minor offenses.

An inmate who spent 22 years in solitary confinement in an Illinois prison after being arrested for stealing a hat and a dollar bill is campaigning for legislation to end a practice that he says drove him to self-mutilation and a suicide attempt.

Anthony Gay said he was “tortured for decades” by his isolation for up to 24 hours a day in a cold, tiny cell he likened to a dungeon, and was denied access to necessary mental health care.
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Gay was first arrested for robbery in 1994 for his involvement in a street fight, in which he stole a hat and $1 from another participant. A subsequent probation violation put him back in jail, and a violent altercation with another inmate landed him in solitary confinement.

From there, Gay said, things snowballed. He was resentenced to seven years for the original robbery charge and reacted badly to the solitary confinement, resulting in more time alone.

“I would cut on myself, I would act out, throw urine, liquids,” he said. “They would extend my time and things of that sort instead of allowing me to see mental health [professionals] and taking it as a health concern.”

That, he said, led to the “psychological torture” of 24-hour solo incarceration, with occasional breaks of no more than one hour.

“It’s dark and it’s cold as a dungeon, psychologically anyway,” he said. “The light is dim in the room, it just seemed like the walls are caving in.”

Who can blame someone for acting out and becoming suicidal when they are tortured like this? It would drive anyone insane.

The latest flareup in the Middle East

Once again, we have a flare up in the Middle East between Israel and the Palestinians. As of yesterday, 65 Palestinians, including 16 children have been killed, and at least 365 people have been wounded, while six Israelis have been killed.

And once again we have the US reacting in predictable ways, with most of the political establishment repeating the myth of Israel being the plucky little underdog facing a huge sea of enemies, the David battling the Goliath of Arabs, when in reality it is Israel, possessing one of the most powerful military machines in the world, that is not only the Goliath that arrogantly throws it weight around but is backed up by an even bigger Goliath in the US, that supplies it with massive amounts of military and other aid and protects it diplomatically. Biden has repeated the ritualistic statement of unwavering support for whatever the hell Israel does, couched in the language that it has the ‘right to defend itself’, coupled with the usual call for all sides to end the violence, which ranks right up there on the scale of uselessness with the calls for ‘thoughts and prayers’ after every mass shooting in the US.
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How stupid can some people get?

Unless you are a small child or flying for the first time, airplane flights are a drag. No one takes airplane rides for the fun of it. The whole business of going to the airport way ahead of departure time, going through security, and sitting in a cramped seat for hours, has eliminated any pleasure that the experience may have originally had, at least for me. You do it because you must.

Any person who has ever had their flight canceled at the last minute knows that it causes a real disruption in one’s plans, even if it was just a vacation trip. So it baffles me when people who had planned to travel by air do things that they must know will get them kicked off the plane.
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An inside look at the awful working conditions in ‘fulfillment center’ warehouses

A recent episode of the radio show Radiolab had a story from seven years ago by an award winning writer and investigative reporter Gabriel Mac who managed to get hired at an internet retailer warehouse. The show is careful not to mention the name of the company where he was a ‘picker’ and worked in a giant warehouse that was the size of about 17 football fields, referring to it by the generic name of Amalgamated. He said that at the beginning of the day they are given these scanner devices that tell them where to locate an item on the shelves to put it in a plastic bag and place it on a conveyor belt. The items seem on the surface to be placed on the shelves at random with the same item scattered all over the warehouse and placed in bins with other unrelated items. But the seeming randomness is misleading. The computer knows where things are and they have been placed so as to make collecting the items ordered by customers quicker.
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Film review: The Day Shall Come (2019) and FBI entrapment

Back in 2019, I wrote about a comedy film that had just been released that I wanted to see. Unfortunately, because of the Balkanization of offerings that streaming has created, a problem that I wrote about recently, I could not because it was being streamed on Hulu for which I had no subscription. But my daughter visited me recently (we are both vaccinated) and she subscribes to that service so we watched it.
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An in-depth look at the trans experience

The radio program On the Media devoted this week’s entire 52 minute episode, titled Trans* Formations, to talking with trans academics, doctors, activists, historians, and artists, starting with a discussion on the many anti-trans laws that are being passed in state legislatures around the country based on various misconceptions and outright distortions. While the earlier efforts to pass bathroom bills seem to have run out of steam, the recent efforts to keep trans women from taking part in sports and athletics seem to be more widespread and successful.
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