Trump, Flat Earthers and the Idiocracy

With Donald Trump as president, conspiracy theories are in vogue. Everything "the media" reports is fake news or a coverup: global warming is a hoax, the Democrats really were running a child sex ring out of a pizza joint and it was Ted Cruz's dad who killed JFK. The New York Times, Washington Post and NASA are all spreading lies and hiding the truth.

In this day and age, no internet conspiracy theory is too stupid for conservatives and the religious right. Including the idea that the earth is flat. Yeah, you read that right. There are still flat earthers around, and their number is increasing, no doubt spurred on by Trump's dumbing down of absolutely everything.

Flat earthers believe that we never landed on the moon. That the International Space Station isn't in orbit. That SpaceX rockets are going nowhere. That Dish Network satellites are not in geosynchronous orbit, even though they are continuously beaming programming to millions of people's houses when they point their antennas at that particular point in the sky. What keeps those Dish Network transmitters up there, in exactly the same place, all the time? Hot air balloons? Magic?

They say it's all a hoax.

The Flat Earth Society held a conference in Denver just two days ago. Most people think that a spherical earth is settled science, resolved long ago, after the Vatican debacle with Galileo 400 years ago, and the burning at the stake of Giordano Bruno for the heresy of believing that the earth orbited the sun.

A spherical earth is not rocket science. The ancient Greek mathematician Eratosthenes figured it out with simple geometry 2,000 years ago. He realized that shadows cast by identical objects on the summer solstice had different lengths depending on how far north you were. He used those measurements to calculate the earth's circumference, and his estimate was pretty much dead on.

No two flat earthers can agree on exactly what the earth looks like, but essentially they believe that the earth is more or less shaped like a pizza, with the North Pole at the center. Antarctica is a huge ice crust around the outside. There is no South Pole -- it's a lie concocted by Roald Amundson.

According to them, the earth is a fixed, non-rotating disk with a radius of about 8,000 miles. That means that the circumference of the pizza is about 50,000 miles: that would make the coastline of Antarctica 50,000 miles long! Antarctica is an ice wall that is somehow impossible to fly over, because, well, what would be out there?

Some of them have the earth flat as a pancake, while others have it like a fried egg in a bowl as a nod to Eratosthenes (and reality).

This invites many questions. If the earth is a pizza, how does the sun shine on New York when it is dark in Shanghai? Why does the sun rise at different times in New York, Minneapolis and LA? If the earth is flat, all three cities should be seeing the sun at the same time in the same place. Why do we have time zones?

If the earth is a pizza, why is the length of the day today, 11/18/2018, 9 hours 27 minutes in Minneapolis, and 10 hours 50 minutes in Miami? If the North Pole is at the center of the pizza, how come the sun never rises there from September to March, and always stays above the horizon from March to September?

If the earth is a pizza why is it summer in Argentina and South Africa when it's winter in the United States and Russia? What makes lunar eclipses? Why do we have tides?

If the earth is a pizza why can't Canadians ever see southern hemisphere constellations like the Southern Cross? How do GPS satellites work? What keeps them up there? Why can we see the International Space Station going overhead, on a completely predictable schedule, moving at 17,000 miles an hour? Or does NASA have a gigantic fleet of drones flying around the world at all times pretending to be the ISS? Where is that in the budget?

The flat earth conspiracy completely ignores the realities of actual, measurable distances between points on the planet. Remember the "Mercator projection" from grade school geography? By projecting a spherical earth onto a flat surface it made the polar regions appear artificially huge:

Notice how Greenland is much bigger than South America? In reality, Greenland is 836,000 square miles and South America is almost 10 times larger, at 6.888 million square miles. The flat earthers put the North Pole at the center of the pizza to prevent land mass distortion in northern latitudes. Problem solved!

Except it's not. Flat earth maps completely distort the shape of southern hemisphere land masses, or the distances between them. Australia is squashed north to south and stretched east to west far beyond the actual measured distances, in much the same way Greenland is distorted in the Mercator projection:

Sphere:   Pizza:

Speaking of Australia, anyone can personally test whether the earth is flat for a few thousand dollars: just fly from Sydney to Johannesburg, South Africa. You can fly on Qantas for about $2,200. The route looks like this (it's a curved line because the earth is a sphere and we're looking at a two-dimensional projection):

You fly due west from the eastern coast of Australia, the entire length of Australia, then hit a looong stretch of the Indian Ocean, then Madagascar and then South Africa, until you finally reach Joburg. That takes 14 hours (it's two hours faster flying the other way because the earth's rotation creates a tail wind known as the jet stream). That's about 6,800 miles, and averages about 485 miles an hour.

During the flight you can look out the window to make sure you're really over Australia and the ocean the whole time.

Now, if the earth is a pizza, what is the flight path for that journey? According to this flat earth map, the flight path from Sydney to Johannesburg should look like this:

You would fly northwest out of Sydney, passing over Indonesia, the Philippines, the China Sea, China, India, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and finally South Africa.

Instead of flying over southwestern Australia and the Indian Ocean, you would never fly over those areas and would spend all your time over northeast Australia, the China Sea, Asia and Africa. How do the airlines keep curious passengers from looking out the window and seeing China when they should be seeing ocean? Video monitors displaying computer generated 3D scenes built into the windows?

This distance is, according to my rough measurements, about 9,400 miles. Which means, for a 14-hour flight, it is going 671 miles an hour. The maximum speed of planes like the Airbus A380 or the Boeing 777 is around 650 mph. But flying the other way, from Joburg to Sydney, takes only 12 hours (again, because of the jet stream). That's 783 mph, almost 20 mph faster than the speed of sound.

But let's say that Qantas is in on the conspiracy, and instead of flying a straight line to conserve fuel, they fly along the latitude lines to maintain the conspiracy that the earth is a sphere, like this:

That distance is about 11,500 miles, which means the aircraft would be flying at 820 mph to complete a 14-hour flight, almost twice as far and twice as fast as it would have to fly if the earth is a sphere. Now, the speed of sound is 767 mph. Why don't these planes produce sonic booms? Oh, there's no such thing as the sound barrier? Or they do it far out at sea? I get it.

(Question: if the earth is a pizza, why did sailors bother to invent latitude and longitude lines in the first place, and waste all that time sailing along them instead of going in straight lines?)

But it's much cheaper to prove that the earth is a sphere. Let's say you live in New York. Take a yardstick and put it in the ground on a sunny summer day. Scratch the ground where the shadow falls. Measure the distance between that scratch and the base of the yardstick. Then call your friend in Florida. Have him do the same. Your friend's measurement will be shorter than yours (no penis jokes!). Then call someone in southern Argentina, where it's winter, and have them do the same thing. The shadow will be shorter still. Do it in winter and you get the opposite result.

Because the earth is a sphere.

It is no surprise that most flat earthers use the bible as their primary source to "prove" that the earth is flat. Like the Inquisition, they want to preserve the idea that the earth in general -- and Christians in particular -- are the center of the universe.

Because if the earth is just another planet around just another star in just another galaxy, among millions and millions of galaxies in an ever-expanding universe that was created in the Big Bang 14 billion years ago, why would god care about some schlub on disability trolling the internet in Mobile, Alabama? But if we're in that most special place, the absolute center of a universe, on a pizza that was built specifically for us, naturally we're the most important creatures in all creation.

Aside from religious pomposity, people want to think the earth is flat because they want things to be simple. They don't understand what gravity is, or how big the earth actually is, or how it could spin without throwing us off, or how far away Australia is, or what Antarctica is like. These same people don't "believe" in quantum mechanics, but the semiconducting chips in their cellphones still use quantum tunneling, and the inverse of Einstein's photoelectric effect forms the basis of the LED screens they stare at all day.

Some people just want to read the bible and pretend the world is constructed just the way some Middle Eastern desert nomads thought it was 3,000 years ago.

Welcome to the idiocracy.

GOP Jesus

Why Do People Hate Donald Trump So Much?

Quora produces some very fine answers regarding the political issues of the day. I've seen some pretty amazing ones these last few months and have enjoyed many great debates and discussions of late. Of course, Trump being Trump really helps.

Here is (hands down) the best fact based take down of him I have EVER seen. It makes it even better that it comes from a US Marine. A perfect summation of all the people that support him as well...

I’ll take a stab at this. Before you pass my answer off as “Another Liberal Snowflake” consider that 1.) I’m a right-leaning centrist who has voted Republican way more often than Democrat, and 2.) if you want to call someone who spent the entire decade of his 20’s serving in the Marine Corps a snowflake, I’d be ready to answer the question what did you do with your 20’s?

Why Liberals (And not-so liberals) are against President Trump.

A.) He lies. A LOT. Politifact rates 69% of the words he speaks as “Mostly False or worse” Only 17% of the things he says get a “Mostly True” or better rating. That is an absolutely unbelievable number. How he doesn’t speak more truth by mistake is beyond me. To put it in context, Obama’s rating was 26% mostly false or worse, and I had a problem with that. Many of Trump’s former business associates report that he has always been a compulsive liar, but now he’s the President of the United States, and that’s a problem. And this is a man who expects you to believe him when he points at other people and says “They’re lying”

B.) He’s an authoritarian populist, not a conservative. He advances regressive social policy while proposing to expand federal spending and federalist authority over states, both of which conservatives are supposed to hate.

C.) He pretends at Christianity to court the Religious Right but fails to live anything resembling a Christ-Like Life.

D.) His nationalist “America First” message effectively alienates us and removes us from our place as leaders in the international community.

E.) His ideas on “Keeping us safe” are all thinly veiled ideas to remove our freedoms, he is, after all, an authoritarian first. They also are simply bad ideas.

F.) He couldn’t pass a 3rd-grade civics exam. He doesn't’ know what he’s doing. He doesn't’ understand how international relations work, he doesn’t understand how federal state or local governments work, and every time someone tries to “Run it like a business” it’s a spectacular failure. See Colorado Springs’ recent history as an example. And that was a businessman with a MUCH better business track record then Trump. We are talking about a man who lost money owning a freaking gambling casino.

G.) He’s unethical and always has been. As a businessman, he constantly left in his wake unpaid contractors and invoices, litigation, broken promises, whatever he could get away with.

H.) He is damaging our relationships with our best international friends while kissing up to nations that do not have our best interests in mind. To his question “Wouldn't’ it be great to have better relations with Russia?” The answer is Yes. But RUSSIA has to be the ones who earn that, who must stop doing the things that are damaging to that relationship, or we are simply weaker for it.

I.) He has never seen a shortcut he didn't’ like, and you can’t take shortcuts in government. “Nuclear Option, Remove the Filibuster, I’ll change the Constitution by Executive Order…Don…what happens when you remove the filibuster and the other side retakes the majority in the Senate? Suddenly want that filibuster back? What happens if you manage to change the Constitution by Executive Order and an Anti-2A President wins the next election?

J.) He is and always has been an unabashed racist. Yes, I’ve seen your favorite meme that claims he was never accused of racism before the Democrats…Absolutely false. See the Central Park 5, the lawsuits and fines resulting from his refusal to lease to black tenants, the 1992 lost appeal trying to overturn penalties for removing black dealers from tables, his remarks to the house native American affairs subcommittee in 1993. The man sees and treats racial groups of people as monoliths.

K.) He is systematically steamrolling regulations specifically designed to keep a disaster like the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis from happening again.

L.) He speaks and acts like a demagogue. He sees the Legislative and Judicial branches of government as inconveniences, blows up at criticism no matter how deserved and actively tries to countermand constitutional processes, not to mention attempts to blackmail and coerce people who are saying negative things about him

M.) His choices for top positions, with the exception of Gen. Mattis, who is a gem, have been horrendous. A secretary of Education without a resume that would get her hired as a small town grammar school principal, A secretary of Energy who didn't know the Department of Energy was responsible for nuclear reserves, an EPA head whose biggest accomplishments to date had been suing the EPA on multiple occasions, an FCC head who while working for Verizon actively lobbied to kill net neutrality, and an Attorney General who thinks pot is “nearly as bad as heroin” and asked Congress for permission to go after legal pot businesses in states where it is legal. (There goes that great Republican States rights rally cry again, right? *Crickets*) An Interim AG after Firing his First AG who’s appointment is probably unconstitutional.

N.) He denies scientific fact. Ever notice that the only people you hear denying climate change are politicians and lobbyists? 97% of actual scientists studying the issue agree that it’s real, man-made and caused by greenhouse gasses. Ever notice that every big disaster movie starts with a bunch of politicians in a room ignoring a scientist's warning?

0.) He does not have the temperament to lead this nation. He is Thin Skinned, childish, and a bully, never mind misogynistic, boorish, rude, and incapable of civil discourse.

P.) He still does not understand that the words he speaks, or tweets, are the official position of 1/3 of the US government, and so does not govern his words. He still thinks when he speaks it’s good ol’ Donald Trump. It’s not. It’s the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. You have probably spread a meme or two around talking about how no president’s every word has ever been dissected before…YES, THEY ALWAYS HAVE. It’s just that every other president in our lifetime has understood the importance of his words and took great care to govern his speech. Trump blurts out whatever comes to his mind then complains when people talk about what a dumb thing that was to say.

Q.) He’s unqualified. If you owned a small business and were looking for someone to manage it, and an unnamed resume came across your desk and you saw 6 bankruptcies, showing a man who had failed to make money running CASINOS, would you hire him? He is a very poor businessman. This is a man it is estimated would have been worth $10 BILLION more if he’d just taken what his father had given him, invested it in Index Funds and left it alone.

R.) He is President. But he refuses to take a leadership position and understand that he is everyone’s President. Conservatives complain about liberals chanting “Not my President” while Trump himself behaves as if no one but his supporters matter.

S.) He’s a blatant hypocrite. He spent 8 years bitching Obama out for his family trips, or golfing, or any time he took for himself, and what does he do? He was already on his 20th golf outing in APRIL of his 1st year in office. He constantly rants about respect for the military, yet can’t be bothered to attend the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day because of a little rain. (And that excuse about Marine One not being able to fly in the rain is HILARIOUS.)

I could go on, but I’m risking Carpel Tunnel, and I’m not sure how much longer I’ll have health insurance.

Edit:

Ok, Ok. Based on the most common feedback in the comments (Including the offer of a Marriage Proposal - - my wife was not amused) I’ll see what I can do about T-Z

T.) He’s a misogynist. It's not really ok in this day and age to be a misogynist, but it’s not a huge deal if you’re a private citizen. It’s a pretty big deal if you hate half the people you’re elected to lead. The disdain for women seeps out of his …whatever…. and he just can’t hide it.

U.) Face it. In any other election “Grab Em’ By the Pussy” would have been the end of that candidate’s chances. Back in the 90’s I used to marvel about how Teflon Bill Clinton was. I no longer do. The fact that he managed to slip by on that is as much a statement about how much people hate Hillary Clinton as it is about what is wrong with politics in this country right now.

V.) He has one response to a differing opinion. Attack. A good leader listens to criticism, to different points of view, is capable of self-reflection, tries to guide people to his point of view, and when necessary stands his ground and defends his convictions. Any of that sound like Trump. His default is not to Lead, its’ to attack. Scorched Earth. The Jim Acosta reaction is a good example. There was no defense of his convictions when Acosta was asking him repeated questions about his rhetoric on the caravan. His response was to attack Acosta.

W.) He takes credit for everything positive while deflecting blame for everything negative. Look at him with the Stock Market. He’s been bragging about it since day one, and to give credit where credit is due, speculation on coming deregulation early in his presidency did fuel some rapid growth, but to pretend that its’ all him, that we’er not in the 9th year of the longest bull market in history and THEN, when the standard market volatility that deregulation inevitably brings about starts to show up? Yeah. Look at yesterday. Hey! Stock Markets losing because the Democrats won! Do I need to bring out the Stock market chart for the last 10 Years again?

X.) He emboldens the worst among us. Counter-protesters are slammed into by a car while countering actual Nazi rally, and the response is there’s fault on “Both Sides” The media is at fault for a nut job sending them and Donald’s favorite targets pipe bombs. The truth is not all Republicans, not all Trump Supporters are racist, fascist lunatics. Many are just taken in by the bombastic personality and are living in an information bubble made worse by the fact that they unfollow anyone and ignore any source of information that makes them feel uncomfortable. People on the left do that too. The Biggest problem the right has right now is that the worst of the Right is the loudest and the most in your face, and the actual right, especially the Freaking PRESIDENT needs to be standing up and saying No. Those are not our values.

Y.) He seems to think the Constitution of The United States, the document that IS who we are, the document he took an oath to support and defend is some sort of inconvenience. He demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of Constitution, from believing he can alter the 14th through executive order, to Thinking The practice clause in the first amendment somehow supersedes the establishment clause (not that he really understands either) or that the practice clause only applies to Christians. Or his attacks on freedom of expression and the press. He repeatedly makes it clear that if he’s read them, he does not understand Articles 1–3, and that’s something he really should have before he took the job, because they’re not going away.

Z.) I’ll use Z for something I do blame him for, but the rest of us have to carry the blame too. Polarization. This country is more politically polarized than I can remember in my lifetime. Some of you who are a few years older than me may remember how it was in the late 60’s when construction workers in New York were being applauded for beating up hippies, I think it’s pretty close to that right now, but that was before my time. And he is the cause of much of the current level polarization, but also the result. It didn't’ start with Trump. We’ve been going down this road I think since the eruption of the Tea Party in the early years of the Obama Administration. I do hope the tide turns before it gets much worse because the thing that scares me more than anything is what if that keeps going the way it has been?

Is Pence on the Outs?

Just after last week's election, Donald Trump asked Mike Pence, his current vice president, to be his vice president:

“Mike, will you be my running mate?” Mr. Trump asked Vice President Pence, who stood up, raised his hand, and nodded.

“Will you? Thank you. O.K., good,” the president said. “That was unexpected, but I feel very fine.”

It was very weird, but I knew exactly what it meant: it was the kiss of death. Trump is going to dump Pence in 2020, or maybe sooner.

Why? He doesn't trust Pence. Precisely because Pence is trustworthy. I am certain that Trump absolutely hates Pence. Notice how every other person in Trump's administration is somehow corrupt or crooked? Mike Pence is the only exception.

A typical example is Trump's choice for attorney general, Matt Whitaker. Whitaker served on the board of a company that scammed would-be inventors out of millions of dollars. Whitaker would threaten with his status as a former US attorney when customers complained about being screwed. The company was shut down by the FTC in March 2017, and was under investigation by the FBI during the period Whitaker acted on behalf of the company. Litigation is ongoing, which means that Whitaker has an inherent conflict of interest as attorney general.

Pence, on the other hand, tries so hard to keep on the straight and narrow that he won't eat dinner alone with a woman other than his wife, or have drinks with another woman unless his wife is there. This earned Pence heaps of criticism and ridicule from all sides when it came out last year.

Is Pence pussy-whipped? Is he so out of control that he doesn't trust himself alone with another woman? Is he a terrible drunk who gets all handsy? Is he a closet homosexual who secretly hates women trapped in a marriage of convenience with a nutty religious woman?

It's probably a good policy not to go dine alone with women socially. It's definitely a good idea not to drink at parties without your wife. Or ever. Alcohol has destroyed tens of millions of lives, and is involved in most car crashes, rapes, and crimes in general. It is a scourge on society. (Trump's single redeeming value is that he doesn't drink.) But categorically refusing to have business dinners with women as a matter of policy is discriminatory and wrong.

Trump knows that the only reason Pence agreed to be his running mate is that Pence fully expected Trump to be impeached before he served his full term, and that came a step closer to reality when Democrats took the House last week.

It is quite possible that once Mueller releases his report, the Democrats in the House will have sufficient cause to initiate impeachment proceedings against Trump for all manner of crimes, but most particularly tax evasion, money laundering for the Russians for decades through real estate deals in New York and Florida, and obstruction of justice in the Russia investigation and the firing of James Comey.

That will mean a trial in the Senate. The Republicans will have a larger majority in the Senate next year, and some of Trump's greatest Republican critics will be gone. But there may be a few Republicans who still have souls and will side with the Democrats if they smell blood in the water. Because no politician actually likes Trump, because they all know he'll stab them in the back when it suits him.

Pence is the tie-breaking vote in the Senate. That means could vote himself president in a deadlocked impeachment proceeding. And Trump could not have that.

So now Trump is constantly asking whether Pence is loyal. Which is a joke, because Trump is loyal to no one. Just ask Jeff Sessions.

But the only way to remove the vice president is through impeachment: unlike the attorney general, Trump cannot fire Pence. That leaves Trump in a bind, because there's been no evidence that Pence has done anything illegal, other than whatever obstruction conspiracy he might have been involved in with Trump.

Which means that to take out Pence, Trump would have to take himself out. Which, if that goes down next year, could make Nancy Pelosi president. Wouldn't that be hilarious?

Education Is...

Trump Claims to Support the Military. Do They Support Him?

Prevailing wisdom would have it that members of the military would favor Donald Trump, given his bombastic speeches and militaristic stance. But is it really true?

During the Vietnam War Trump got four college deferments and a fifth one for "heal spurs." Those heal spurs would prevent him from marching, Trump said. Because Trump thinks the the only thing soldiers do is march. 

But there are countless military jobs that don't require marching: flying airplanes, driving trucks, fixing engines, loading torpedoes, constructing facilities, handling logistics, cooking meals, policing bases. And many of these jobs were on American soil, especially if you volunteered instead of letting yourself get drafted: one of my former bosses became a programmer at Fort Huachuca for the duration of the Vietnam War.

Do our troops really appreciate a president who is a rich, spoiled draft dodger that thinks they're all marching morons?

Trump has constantly denigrated the military's primary mission for the last seventy years, keeping the peace in Europe and Asia. He keeps whining about how those countries aren't paying for their defense, but the fact is, our troops are there so that we have control and avoid more wars like WWII and the Korean War.

Keeping Russia, China and North Korea in check is a vital mission, and keeping Europe, Japan and South Korea in our column is solely for our benefit.

We spend more on our military than the next ten or twelve nations. The reason we have the world's biggest military is because our troops are everywhere, and we want it that way. If we abandon our missions across the world and pull our troops out of Germany, Japan, and South Korea, then the military budget would have to come down drastically. Because our troops would sit around on American bases with no mission.

In the last weeks of the midterm elections, Trump played the race card and started screaming about the caravan of women and children traveling through Mexico. He sent 5,600 troops to the border, where, because of the posse comitatus act, they stand around doing nothing, eating MREs instead of real food, wasting their time and hundreds of millions of our tax dollars on a nonexistent mission.

Do our troops really appreciate being props in an election year stunt?

Last year Trump insisted having a military parade on Veterans Day 2018 with tanks and missiles. When the Pentagon told him it would cost too much he huffed that he would go to France because they have better parades.

So Trump went to France for Armistice Day, to attend a ceremony for the troops who gave their lives in the Great War. But it was raining, preventing the helicopter from flying. Trump didn't want to spend two whole hours in the car. So he cancelled the event and stayed in the American embassy, watching TV and tweeting. Somehow, that didn't stop his chief of staff, John Kelly from attending, or keep Angela Merkel or Emmanuel Macron away from similar events.

Do American troops appreciate being dissed by a draft-dodging pussy? Did American troops in Vietnam cancel their helicopter sorties because of a little rain?

The United States has been fighting the war in Afghanistan for seventeen years. George Bush botched it from the get-go, allowing Osama bin Laden to escape into Pakistan. In the 1980s the Soviets were fighting the same Taliban thugs we're fighting today, only back then Ronald Reagan was funding bin Laden and the Taliban.

After a pathetic surge in Afghanistan, it's clear now that Trump is losing the war. To be fair, it's probably a war that can't be won. But after claiming that Bush made a huge mistake by invading Iraq, a war that Trump has falsely stated he opposed, Trump is just equivocating, afraid of being the one to lose Afghanistan instead of making the hard decisions. So our troops are trapped in a hellish desert purgatory that we're still spending trillions of dollars on.

As long as the Taliban can hide in nuclear-armed Pakistan and fund themselves with opium they export to US streets, where thousands of Americans die from heroin overdoses, there is no path to an American victory.

Do our troops appreciate being trapped in a pointless stalemate because they can't go after the enemy?

Trump's implicit racism, from his post-Charlottesville comments to his Mexican drug-dealing rapist tirade to his disrespect of a black soldier slain in Africa, probably does not endear him to to the troops. The military is more diverse than American society at large:

The Department of Defense publishes regular studies that compare the civilian labor force to the composition of the military. Their 2014 report states: “Although racial minorities make up 23.4% of the civilian benchmark (the civilian labor force age 18 to 44), 32.9% of DoD’s enlisted forces in FY14 are racial minorities.”

Hispanics, in particular, make up a significant fraction of the armed forces: 18% of the Marines, for example. Do they appreciate how Trump characterizes people fleeing horrendous situations in their parents' countries of origin as diseased terrorists?

Finally, it is clear that North Korea is playing Trump for a fool. A few months ago Trump claimed he had eliminated North Korea's nuclear threat, and that he "fell in love" with Kim. New satellite imagery has revealed that Kim Jong Un has duped Trump:

North Korea is moving ahead with its ballistic missile program at 16 hidden bases that have been identified in new commercial satellite images, a network long known to American intelligence agencies but left undiscussed as President Trump claims to have neutralized the North’s nuclear threat.

The satellite images suggest that the North has been engaged in a great deception: It has offered to dismantle a major launching site — a step it began, then halted — while continuing to make improvements at more than a dozen others that would bolster launches of conventional and nuclear warheads.

Trump is a blustering, blundering fool when it comes to military matters. He increasingly ignores his general's advice. He does not appreciate the military's missions or their sacrifices, and views them merely as pawns in his sadistic games.

Sort of like Jeff Sessions.

What America Actually Fucking Looks Like

Our new members of Congress...

Here We Go Again. Again.

Here it is: your weekly dose of mass murder. 

An armed man dressed in black opened fire late Wednesday night inside a crowded country and western dance hall in Thousand Oaks, Calif., killing at least 12 people, including a sheriff’s deputy who had responded to the scene. The gunman was also dead.

This story refutes every talking point gun nuts make about mass shootings.

Witnesses recalled a chaotic scene at the bar, which was filled with hundreds of people, many of them college students: A gunman opening fire, first at a security guard, as patrons dropped to the dance floor, hid under tables and broke windows to escape. 

The number of people wounded was unclear, but the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office said about 22 people had been taken to various hospitals.

The county sheriff, Geoff Dean, his voice cracking, identified one victim as Sgt. Ron Helus, who was shot when he entered the building.

And then there's this:

A witness interviewed by ABC7.com said that the violence started when the gunman walked up to the entrance to the bar, shot a security guard and a cashier, and deployed a smoke bomb.

Donald Trump and gun nuts keep telling us that more guys with guns will solve this problem. But the first ones to get shot were the bouncer and the cashier. Then the guy started throwing smoke bombs, making it almost impossible for anyone else who might have had a gun to shoot back. Because they would have no way to tell who was who in the cloud of smoke. Besides, carrying a gun while dancing is a terrible idea, as the FBI agent who accidentally shot someone on a dance floor could tell you.

But the assassin could fire blindly in any direction and hit more victims, shooting them like proverbial fish in a barrel.

Then a cop with a gun came in and was immediately killed.

Trump responded to the synagogue shooting by criticizing the victims for not having enough guards and guns, and saying that the shooter should be executed. This just shows how stupidly dense he is: there aren't enough security guards in the country to guard every synagogue, church, school, night club and dance hall. And the threat of execution is no deterrent to suicidal maniacs. In the end these killers shoot themselves, or commit suicide by cop.

And now we know who the shooter is:

Authorities identified the shooter as Ian David Long, 28, a Marine Corps veteran who was visited by the Ventura County sheriff’s crisis intervention team after a call of a “subject disturbing” at his home in Newbury Park in April. He was never placed on a mental health hold, and Sheriff Geoff Dean said Long may have been suffering from PTSD.

This country trained a man to be an efficient killer, sent him off to a war that messed with his head, and then turned him loose on society. Then he used the military tactics our country taught him to kill a dozen people and wound dozens more.

People will be eager to blame this man's mental state for the shooting. "See," they'll say, "he was crazy." Yes, he was. But the gun lobby put the weapons in his hands and pointed him at that dance hall.

Some may try to paint the Thousand Oaks victims as casualties of a war that has dragged on for 17 years with no resolution in sight. And they wouldn't be wrong if they painted the shooter as one of those victims. Despite a half-hearted surge last year, Trump has done nothing but lose ground in the war in Afghanistan.

But the real problem is, again, that we let any random person with a questionable psych profile have as many guns as they like through a perverse, willful and wanton misinterpretation of the Second Amendment of the Constitution so that gun manufacturers can keep raking in the dough and gun nuts can get their rocks off.

Online Voting Would Be a Tremendous Blunder

It's incredible how people just don't learn. Case in point: this glowing article about the wonders of online voting using blockchains. 

Like everything to do with computerized voting, this is a totally idiotic idea if you favor free and fair elections. If you're the Republican Party or Russia's GRU, blockchain voting is great because you can easily dictate the result.

The promise of blockchain is that it's decentralized and somehow magically invulnerable to fraud and theft. This is manifestly untrue.

Nine times out of ten when you read about Bitcoin -- the most prominent user of blockchains -- it's because someone got ripped off for millions of dollars. Fraud and theft are rampant with Bitcoin: blockchains do nothing to stop that.

The author thinks that people can use their phones and home computers to vote online. This is totally naive and completely idiotic: personal phones and and home computers are the most insecure devices on the internet. They are riddled with viruses and malware, because the average person doesn't take the most basic security precautions, and the operating systems are inherently insecure because they allow users to install new software, like the voting app.

Yeah, blockchains might be a technical solution to the "double spend problem" (though I am skeptical about this -- the blockchains have to be hosted somewhere, and how secure are those systems?) .

But the real problem is the application used to register your votes. Phones and home computers will never be secure enough to ensure that the candidate you selected in the app is the one that actually receives your vote on the back end. Malware on your phone could be used to select a different candidate from the one you picked, through an infinite number of possible hacks.

Even if the voting app were magically made bulletproof, the companies that control the app stores and the web browsers (Apple, Google and Mozilla) are the companies that will control your vote. How can we trust that the programmers didn't put some kind of backdoor into the app?

Then there's authentication. Many states require picture ID to vote. With app-based voting there is absolutely no way to ensure that you were the person who cast your vote. (And no, taking your picture or your fingerprint when you vote on your phone isn't any kind of proof because those things are already available elsewhere.)

Instead of showing up at your polling place, the government would have to send you some kind of authorization or password to vote. That goes through email or your phone's text app. These are not secure. These authorizations could be intercepted anywhere along the line, and anyone who has your phone or your login will be able to vote in your stead. A hacker who got hold of the database of voting authorizations could cast millions of votes.

Voter information is exposed on the internet all the time (for example, in Georgia, and this Republican contractor). Inevitably this same mistake would happen to the authorization file.

But the ultimate reason that you can never use computers for registering votes is that there is absolutely no way in hell to do a legitimate recount. Recounts are totally impossible with any form of voting that does not use a physical token, like a paper ballot.

I'm a computer programmer, I don't believe for one second that you can guarantee that every vote will be properly counted with blockchains. Blockchain systems are supposed to be wonderful because they arrive at a "consensus," essentially some kind of majority rule. That means that there will always be disagreements, and they will be arbitrated by some kind of consensus mechanism.

If a single entity controls more than 50% of the hosts, they can dictate the results. This is an acknowledged problem with Bitcoin (known as the 51% attack), and they just shrug it off. Well, they argue, no single entity could control 51% of the Bitcoin miners.

But this is false. With Bitcoin, it's completely possible for one country (China, for example), to devote sufficient resources (large numbers of fast processors that do bitcoin mining) to gain a 51% majority.

What computers will store the blockchains used for voting? Anyone with a server? Including servers in China and Russia? Or servers authorized by the federal, state and local governments? Clearly the latter.

Whoever controls those servers controls the vote, with no possibility of a recount, because there are no physical ballots, because everything is done in the computer.

Because the basis of our system is the secret ballot, there can be no link between you and your vote in the system. That means you cannot validate that your vote was properly recorded: you just have to trust that your vote goes through. This comes up often during recounts in close elections: ballots are discarded if they can be linked to individual voters -- that is, if they have signatures or other identifying marks.

I agree that the voting process is often manipulated for partisan gain, for all the reasons specified by the author of the article:

Messing with polling stations is one of the most common voter suppression tactics. Across the country, polling stations have been closed in minority neighborhoods, had their locations changed from election to election, and have been kept understaffed, or inaccessible, or ill-equipped, so that voters must stand in line for hours.

But the "blockchain solution" would allow Russia or China or Julian Assange to completely hose every election in the country. They wouldn't even have to do much hacking: if they hacked just one race, every other race in the country would be in doubt, throwing the country into total chaos.

Paper ballots are the only viable solution for free and fair elections. Yes, it's still possible to mess with them through official fraud, ballot box stuffing, criminal poll workers, theft, and so on. But these issues can be mitigated through proper election monitoring, hand-counted audits of random precincts in every jurisdiction and well-established chain-of-custody procedures.

With computers, everything happens in a black box that no one can see inside and no one can verify. This will always be the case, no matter what kind of mumbo-jumbo blockchain snake-oil salesmen spew at us.

There is no magic internet or computer-based solution to voting. Physical ballots that allow for manual recounts are the only verifiable voting mechanism. Instead of wasting time on pipe-dreams about blockchains and the internet, the federal government needs to step up enforcement of voting rights to ensure that local officials don't screw with the vote. Early voting should be the norm everywhere, and election day should be a holiday so everyone is guaranteed an opportunity to vote.

Remember, a successful hack of the an election doesn't actually have to install a particular candidate in office: it just has to cast doubt on the result, leaving the country leaderless and divided.

Election 2018 Predictions

Election 2018 predictions....

Dems take the House with the total number at 234 (GOP at 211). Honestly, I think it's going to be more but I wanted to go conservative on this one.

GOP holds the Senate but only because of Mike Pence. That's right, I'm predicting a 50-50 tie in the Senate. GOP will pick up North Dakota and the Dems will pick up Nevada and Arizona. Claire is going to hold on in Missouri.

Dems will add 8 to their column in the Governor races, picking up Georgia, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, New Mexico, Ohio and Wisconsin. The GOP will pick up Alaska.

How did I arrive at these conclusions? Pretty simple, really. Look at the states with heavy urban areas. More voters means more Democrats. Rural states and areas will hold for the GOP.

I also think that Trump beating the xenophobic drum of immigration is sub moronic considering he could be claiming credit of the economy.

For Millenials...