People have told me that it’s impossible to day trade and consistently make money, and yet I’ve done it since I was 21 years old.

Conventional wisdom only works on the conventional.

These space tourism posters are so great.

I don’t understand — will never understand — people who don’t support space exploration. Seems like a repudiation of a fundamental human urge for no good reason at all.

Yes, space is vast and inhospitable. We won’t by building Mars colonies any time soon. And we won’t be leaving the solar system soon. Perhaps ever*.

But.

Just because something is difficult and doesn’t have obvious immediate rewards is the reason to do it.

The mindset of pulling back into our little shell and not seeing what’s out there over that vast horizon is the neoliberal outlook of only the next quarter mattering, the deification of immediate and tangible profit over any normal human desire.

People argue that it’s not economically viable. Even if that were true (which it isn’t), these same people will and did argue that it was inevitable that we parceled out billions and trillions of dollars to insurance companies, banksters (TARP), and either condoned or ignored outright financial calamaties like the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Hell, we could have had a dozen Mars colonies for the amount of money we’ve frittered away on those frauds and debacles alone.

*Though most people have a real problem conceptualizing deep time. A 787 hopping halfway across the world in 10 hours would seem utterly incomprehensibly magical to a human from 200,000 years ago. What can we do in another million if we survive that long? Who says we will even have physical bodies or finite life spans then? Etc.

It’s wise for Sanders to stay in the race.

If Clinton is indicted, which is certainly possible, he’ll then be the nominee. He is smart enough to know this.

Describing something as a social construct and then dismissing that as meaningless is fucking stupid.

Nearly everything that humans care about, everything that defines their lives, is a social construct.

Gender, money, art, happiness and the pursuit thereof, love, success — every damn last one a social construct.

Social constructs are the analogues of physical laws, but applied to the human phrenic space. These constructs can be bent a little and shaped from nascence to near adolescence, but once established in most people they are as strong as carbon steel.

Inspired by this post, which I was thinking about again today.

Hypocrite liberals, critical of the drug war but perfectly ok with taking away much-needed opioids from chronic pain patients in the name of morality.

Over-prescribed? Maybe. But I’d rather err on that side than consigning millions of people to debilitating pain and thus condemning them to an existence bounded by constant agony.

As with abortion and reproductive rights, your morality and sanctimony should stop at someone else’s body.

Increasingly likely that Trump will be president.

Think he’s pretty much a shoo-in if it ends up being Trump vs. Clinton. No one is passionate about Clinton, not even her supporters — and millions of misogynistic freaks will turn out just to vote against her.

It’s going to be an interesting few years.

Let’s hope the Repubs pull some convention shenanigans and shoot themselves in the face.

Let’s talk about Carol some more.

She doesn’t like the person she’s become. She’s a killer — who has only killed to protect herself and her friends. But a killer nonetheless and now she’s having to grapple in the new calm — a reprieve from constant combat — with the realization that she’s finally found something outside the realm of enforced domesticity that she’s good at, and it turns out to be that her new expertise is as a ruthless incredibly effective death-dealer. A person who scares people. Unwittingly, with the best of intentions, but scares them nonetheless.

She sits alone on her bed and makes a list in her notebook of all the human beings she’s ended. And it’s 18 people, as far as she can remember. It could be more. She lost count.

She doesn’t like who she’s become even if it turns out that she likes the thrill of combat, craves the electricity it sparks across the skein of the world, lighting dark corners that should not be lit, never be lit.

Later when she’s captured and on the floor crying, her captors think she’s afraid. And in a way she is — but not of them. She’s afraid that she’s going to have to slaughter them all and she doesn’t want to. No, that’s not quite right. She wants to not want to. In her captor, the woman who is so hard, so jaded, that she’d murder another pregnant woman without a second thought, she sees herself or perhaps a future self if she continues walking her current path.

And Carol always gets the best lines. When her captor asks Carol, still under the illusion that she’s afraid of them, “Are you going to kill me, little bird?” Carol answers, “I hope not.”

The wish is sincere, but Carol knows what she will have to do to escape and how it will play out. The people who captured her though dangerous are rank amateurs compared to her. And Melissa McBride being a great actor delivers the line perfectly, with the edge of threat admixed with the air of truth. The line steals the air from the room. That’s when her captors begin to get an inkling that they’ve not captured some affrighted little nestling but pure monstrous chaos dressed up like a timid housewife.

Alicia Witt as Paula (Carol’s captor) in this episode is also just a wonder. She packs so much pathos and darkness into 42 minutes that it’s hard to believe. Just a command performance from Witt. Unbelievably well-done.

Carol is experiencing PTSD. She has a panic attack while being held, further leading her captors to believe she’s weak. But she’s panicking because she knows that she can and will kill them all. She was out of combat for long enough that a normal life seemed possible. She met a guy she liked. A guy who is a little afraid of her, but who likes her, too.

And then attempting to protect someone she’s thrown back into it again.

The situation forces her hand, but oh how her hand wants to reach for that gun, that knife, to strike that death blow, to pull the trigger over and over until everything in sight that was moving is forever stilled.

Carol has found her talent, or it has found her, but it turns out that like a lot of feelings and situations that just show up in life unbidden, it is antithetical to who we thought we were and who we want to be.

There is, she knows, no way this ends well. She cannot go back to who she was. That person is long dead. But she cannot continue to be who she is. That is not a way to live, not even a way to survive but rather one where she is just the same as the walking dead — some very much corporeal ghosts she herself has created — all around her.

At the meta level, I am glad the writers of the show built up the mythos of the gunslinger and then are now tearing it apart — showing that it is a form of death worship, unsustainable if fascinating and exciting.

It was easier to pull this off with a woman character who even with our best intentions we still see as softer, gentler. And then we get Carol handing out death like a modern Abaddon. Then she has a Scrooge-like premonition of her future self in the form of Paula to further reinforce the idea that her prospects are not bright, that no one’s can be when death is all that is over the horizon. Having Carol’s captor also be a woman who is so broken by constant killing that she can’t even realize how broken she is also allows this idea the room it needs to breathe.

I could write books about this — but Carol is the most interesting, the most fully fleshed out and the most fascinating character I’ve ever seen on television. Melissa McBride should win all the awards for making her live. Carol is more real than some real people.

And The Walking Dead amazingly still continues to be the best-written, tightest and best-acted show on television by a damn far margin.

Fun notes:

• It’s heart-wrenching when Carol stops and composes herself to impersonate the now-dead Paula on the walkie-talkie.
• When Darryl at the end after Carol and Maggie have rescued themselves asks her, “Are you good?” and she says, “No.” Notice that it was not, “Are you ok?” It fit perfectly with something Darryl would say and has said, but also had a much larger meaning. So well done.
• The last men Carol kills, she kills on the “kill floor” of a former slaughterhouse, which is where Carol and Maggie were being held. She literally had the enemy meet her on the “kill floor” by impersonating Paula. Dang.

BTW, I do not support Bernie Sanders because though I like his ideas, I think he would get utterly steamrolled by special interests and entrenched powerful entities behind the levers of government. For that reason I think he’d be even less effective than the utterly milquetoast Obama — thus a complete dud and waste of office space.

He’s the junior senator from Vermont and while that is not nothing, I don’t believe he has a good grasp on what it takes to run a country as large and diverse as the US.

That said, he’d be better than HRC because it’s extremely unlikely he’d entangle us in any foreign wars. She probably will, and also will be a complete shill for Goldman Sachs et al.

There are no good candidates in the race who have any chance of winning.

Fuck The 100. After hearing good things about it, I was going to give that show another try after watching and disliking the first four or five episodes.

But not with storytelling like that.

BTW, The Walking Dead has a storyline with a well-developed and interesting lesbian couple who did not die right after consummating their relationship — and has gay male characters (Aaron and Eric) who are also really well-done, buy they are more in the background as compared to Tara and Denise.

Bad writing, The 100. Very bad writing.

(Yes, I know there was an earlier TWD lesbian character played very capably by Juliana Harkavy who was killed — but everyone dies on TWD. Everyone. It’s worse than Game of Thrones. And it was a pity, as she was one of my favorites of the side cast — Harkavy played her wild and loose and all chopped up inside, like the world she inhabited.)

I wonder if the organizers of the protests against Trump at rallies in St. Louis, Kansas City, Chicago and other cities are smart enough to recognize that Trump expected — craved — protest and violence at those rallies?

The best thing those protesters could’ve done is stayed away.

Trump and the protesters — one side in on the plan, the other unwitting pawns — have secured his victory most probably in those states and in the general election. Not that it’s their fault — they just aren’t very savvy, not nearly as calculating as Trump and his campaign.

No, I am not a Trump supporter in any way but I can recognize a damn set-up when I see one.

Trump wanted his supporters and potential supporters to see a bunch of brown people fighting against “making America great again,” wanted to have the media broadcast for free the imagery of “scary” black people taunting little old ladies for supporting Trump.

And he got it.

Good work!

Hail tonight! I grabbed a hailstone from outside and could see the deposition layers of ice.

Our container garden plants probably got destroyed. We’ll know in the morning. But it’s early in the season; we can re-sow and be good to go.

Still annoying, though.

Such a great cover. Rachael Price just could not get any better.

To be creative, work alone.

For me personally, this is so very true. I don’t think I have ever had a good idea or done any real or important work in a group.

I just can’t. Being around people makes me watchful, wary and not very thoughtful.

Your results may vary.

All ya’ll probably know that essays are my favorite sub-domain of literature. Befitting this preference, these are the physical books I sprang for because my love of essays exceeds my antipathy to meatspace books — and more are on the way.

Haven’t started any of them yet. Got some textbooks to finish. Even I can only read a few of those at a time combined with little else while working, or risk brain meltdown.

Yeah, some men actually do listen to women. Their music I mean. And more than that. But here we are talking about music.

The first 10 songs in my current playlist:

All female-fronted. Not at all unusual for me. 90% or more of what I listen to is either female-fronted or all women. I don’t listen to albums, though, and haven’t since the 1990s. I just don’t like enough songs on the average album to make that worth my while.