It’s not fair that some people are intelligent, kind, interesting, lovely, empathetic and strong.

I say this only with affection — but screw you, Daisy Ridley, let other people have a chance! I mean damn.

As a writer (even though he is not my favorite writer), I’ve always felt the most commonality with Kurt Vonnegut.

I am more like he was than I even realized, though.

INTERVIEWER

Did you take a degree in chemistry at Cornell?

VONNEGUT

I was flunking everything by the middle of my junior year. I was delighted to join the army and go to war. After the war, I went to the University of Chicago, where I was pleased to study anthropology, a science that was mostly poetry, that involved almost no math at all.

Another very observant high-IQ person who has no ability at all in math. Supposedly we don’t exist, but actually it turns out we really, really do.

I understand how scientific reasoning and playfulness work, even though I have no talent for joining in. I enjoy the company of scientists, am easily excited and entertained when they tell me what they’re doing. I’ve spent a lot more time with scientists than with literary people.

I could never be a scientist, either, because being untrainably terrible at math precludes that, and also finding it excruciatingly boring certainly doesn’t help. At the same time, though, I feel no commonality at all with the pretentious and usually incredibly-ignorant lit set.

Back to Vonnegut, though. In 1993, I saw him speak in an auditorium at the University of Florida. As with writing, he had a talent for it and was insightful, droll and did what few teachers actually did in that he actually conveyed some important knowledge to me.

Very much worth the drive and what for me at the time was expensive gas. The talk itself like most of the best things in life was, however, free.

Calling people or implying that people are racist Nazi slimeballs for not enthusiastically embracing Clinton is not helpful, most especially if those people are other women. What the progressive left should be doing is holding Clinton to her commitments and statements made during the campaign when Bernie was a real threat, not demeaning women who aren’t blindly cheering Clinton’s coronation.

As they say, just sayin’.

I had high hopes for Wikileaks as compared to what it’s delivered. It been obvious for a while that the org is not really about transparency, but rather about being partisan hacks.

However — and this is a big however — what it releases is either true or not regardless of why it was released. The two have absolutely nothing to do with one another.

The moronic left (which I alas now include Sarah Kendzior as a part of*) now believes that Wikileaks is unconscionably terrible and are all racist Nazis because they released items about Clinton and because David Duke tweeted something supportive about the org.

As far as anyone can tell, all the doc dumps were real, the beliefs and statements genuine; none were ersatz in any way. Their truth value is not affected at all even if Hitler himself rises from the grave and declares them, like, the best doc dumps of all time. How can this not be obvious to everyone?

Yes, Clinton’s staff really did write emails where it seems they’d rather self-immolate than give a crap about the poor. True whether or not Clive Bundy prints the documents out, throws them on a four-poster bed and rolls around them while moaning periodically.

It’s just so disheartening to see so many people you thought were better than this go full moron. I can’t make sense of it. Fear? Or are all humans just this broken and it emerges mainly when they care about something enough, that they essentially lie to themselves about reality?

*And if you think this means I am on the right, oh god you really don’t know me at all. I am far, far to the left of Kendzior, who would’ve been in 1970 a barely-left centrist Democrat.

Holtzmann outtakes — I’d recommend not watching unless you’ve seen Ghostbusters.

Driving in Israel
Across from Gaza
Tanglefoot stretched across the Negev scrub
And you think
People live this way

Every day they see this thin wire
Leading lines for a photograph of a dual captivity
And that’s just how it is

On the beach in Tel Aviv,
A topless woman with a rifle
(Really cuts down on the sexual harassment)
And a few miles away women
Who can’t leave their own house
Without a male minder

I’ve seen these things
And wondered
How we made it this far

Just dumb luck
Intelligence is a parasite
Piggybacking for a time
And soon will abandon its host

I saw the world and it saw me
But wires pulled taut across
The desert of my own mind
Have so far kept me from the answers

One thing I do really like about Timeless is that the main character, Lucy, is in the humanities. She’s a historian. Rare to see in a show like this and welcome.

She doesn’t fight (much). She doesn’t shoot people. She figures out things with an unbelievable treasure trove of facts and historical context.

That I can get behind.

Another thing: both episodes I’ve watched have explicitly dealt with the racist history of the country and not just swept it under the rug. Damn admirable.

Show won’t be renewed, I’d guess.

I really like all the new electronica/dubstep/trap that sounds like an Atari 2600 having sex with a lawnmower in a microwave.

I would not have liked this music at all when I was 16, but now I fucking love it.

I wouldn’t say Timeless is a great show.

Relies too much on tropes and other narrative shortcuts; doesn’t focus on characters in the first episode. Lot of lazy writing.

But that’s not why people hate it, of those who do. No, that’s because the main character is a woman, many of the other castmembers are women or black, and they are truly foregrounded in the narrative. And it’s a “mainstream” show, not one that is targeted at another demographic.

Here’s a capture of all the main cast:

Wonderful diversity. The white guy is the token.

As movies worsen, TV gets better. My partner and I were just talking about that yesterday. These days, mediocre TV shows usually have higher quality than all but the best movies. True of Timeless, too.

For all its faults, the first episode of the show had a nice twist at the end that I did not anticipate. The show it turns out wasn’t quite as spineless as I thought at first.

I see both and sympathize with both sides of this.

The problem is that you just cannot sterilize the interactions of humans as much as some people (mostly on the left) wish they could be. It is just not possible, period.

I understand that it is tiring for women to get approached constantly. I understand that 100%. At the same time, there is this.

The most “thrilling” thing about him was not, of course, his ideas, but his “seniority” and “accomplishments”, i.e., the power he ostensibly wields. It was the false hope that she had impressed a senior member of her field intellectually that constitutes the violation here, not his incapacity to be impressed by a beautiful woman’s mind.

Mostly these discussions seem to promote (as the piece points out) the infantilization and removal of agency from women, and the solving of problems using methods by which they simply cannot be solved.

They should not assume, not at any time, that they can treat them as equal, autonomous adults, capable of managing and challenging boundaries. They should see them as extremely vulnerable. They should box them in.

No one — as I’ve pointed out before — gives a fuck about equality in most cases. It’s mostly just a contest for who should be able to wield the power unaccountably in each situation. Historically, it has been white males. It is worth fighting that. It is not however worth replacing it with its opposite IMO, or even with pretending everyone is a sexless, agamous automaton.

However, the end result of no one ever being attracted to anyone in any situation that vaguely has to do with work — well, we just aren’t robots and won’t be anytime soon.

I want to treat women as equals, not as wilting flowers who have no outside life and no capacity to handle the vagaries of the world. That’s all.

Strange to see the Democrats beating the drums of war about Russia.

Much has changed in my life; used to be mainly a Republican prerogative.

Wouldn’t be surprised if Hillary Clinton makes some huge missteps there (as is her wont) and leads us into a real shooting war followed by a nice little nuclear exchange.

Duck and cover.

Why has no one written a book about philosophy and metaphysics called “Kant Touch This?”

I did find this, though.

The new Westworld explicitly references Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

It’s my favorite book and theory that is almost certainly wrong but is so interesting and fascinating that it leads in all sorts of still-fruitful directions.

I say Jaynes’ theory is almost certainly erroneous, but there has to be I think some explanation for the huge transformation of humanity that occurred about when he delineates it. If it was cognitive in nature, something big happened then and we’ll probably never know what.

I’ve noticed this among scientists and people in IT, too.

It’s not just lack of time, most often. It’s extreme incuriousity and even disdain for anything that can’t be neatly defined in an equation or some other “empirical” systematization.

But when I get that big promotion at work even though I am not technically as good as you, here’s why: I spent a whole lot of time studying sociology, psychology, writing, politics and anthropology (and many other fields) so that I can find out what my boss needs and do it before she even knows she needs it, and I can write a damn nice business case that people ask me to use as a template for all other company business cases. I can also outmaneuver the galoot in the other department who is attempting to sabotage my work using my knowledge of psychology and sociology, and in addition I can gauge the tone of a meeting better than most of my peers using those same tools and get my way far more often than I would otherwise. Furthermore, I can in my own field and quite a few others ascertain the rough directions they are going to determine how to position myself better for the future.

None of this I would be able to do if I hadn’t intensely studied other fields other than my own on my own time. Absolutely none.

And these are just the ones that help me at work — others such as ecology, literature, critical theory, genetics, biochemistry, philosophy, linguistics, philology, paleontology, geophysics, neurology, aircraft design and so many more just made me a better and more capable person in general.

A silo is fine, if you want to be constantly confused, bamboozled and befuddled by the world.

Otherwise, step out. Step the hell out.

This sort of practice was inevitable.

In the first stages of general purpose computing, it was about empowering the users — about making their lives better and due to the embedded values of the hippies and weirdos who pioneered personal computing, this stuck for a while.

It means that mobile and desktop searchers will end up seeing different results.

Google is not just launching the mobile search index to run alongside its desktop index, it will become the primary index.

This has nothing to do directly with profit, even. It has to do with control and the primacy of the wish to assert that control to disallow unwelcome freedom and initiative.

Soon the world will be well beyond Orwell — unpermitted thoughts will be impossible to think because any method of discovering those ideas will be controlled by a few companies that are the seigneurs presiding over all culture, deciding what one is allowed to think and what one is not.

Welcome to the future.