Metal-Free Belts for Airlines

 It’s good that someone manufactured belts without metal that clear TSA screening at airports It saves time if passengers keep their belts on. Although there are a variety of ways to build a metal-free belt that won’t set off metal detectors I like the belt designed with the sort of nylon and plastic heavy duty snap-links used on sturdy backpacks.

Ranked Choice Ruin of Honest Elections

 

Ranked choice voting is the fact of life in Alaska now. In my opinion the system was created to help Lisa Mussorgsky win elections in the state. Lisa M usually doesn’t get the Republican nomination though she describes herself as a Republican. She runs as an independent. Ranked choice voting allows Democrats to vote for her first and their own Democrat candidate second while Republicans vote for their nominee first and Lisa second, and between the two Lisa Mussorgsky wins the election (in theory).

A voter may tolerate just one choice and hate all the rest. Ranked choice voting forces bad, capricious choice voting. If there is one good surgeon in a hospital H.M.O. and the remainder are drunks and dopers, and patients need elect one surgeon to work that day at the hospital yet most patients are ill-informed of surgeon quality, how is the well-informed voter to rank all of the dopers and drunks knowing they should all be condemned? Failing to make the secondary votes can harm the opportunity for the one good flesh-cutter to serve.

Ranked choice voting makes the election process opaque rather than transparent. Few voters understand how second third and fourth place choices contribute votes for candidates if their first choice doesn’t win or if votes from others put someone over the top. Smarmy advocates for ranked choice voting denigrate opponents saying that the process is childishly simple and that anyone can understand it. That is simply false. It is easy to understand how to work ranked choice voting and rank non-choice choices for particular candidates in an order. What isn’t understood is how the votes are counted or added up to elect a winner.

One wonders why voters should be forced to indicate support for candidates they may not like at all and wouldn’t vote for in any circumstance I order to avoid default support in some kind of obscure second and third choice tier voting tabulation that defaults to those that did rank choices having more election power if one chooses not to rank alternative choices. Let me give and example.

In the 2024 Presidential election there are no good candidates. A voter may believe all of the candidates are idiots, unqualified and will do a bad job at leading the nation. None will eliminate national economic methods that cause global warming or deterioration of the ecosphere with an ongoing mass extinction of life on Earth, none will balance the federal budget and none have expressed- beside Donald Trump, a plain intention and ability to swiftly end the war in Ukraine and Russia (Ukraine is attacking Russia with missiles and drones now). No candidate has a plan to eliminate poverty, create a national minimum income for all Americans, most don’t have a plan to secure the southern border against illegal migration or increase the taxes on the rich significantly. So a voter sees one candidate that might, marginally be acceptable and males a choice to vote for that candidate, then if ranked choice voting existed the voter would be forced to indirectly vote for several others to fill the second through fifth place spots and they are all reprehensible to the voter.

So the voter gets to the polling booth and begins selecting candidates they hate as ranked choices for slots two through five. I stipulate that an Americans Communist Party candidate, an American Nazi Party candidate, an American Jihad against America candidate, an American anarchist party candidate and several other reformers are in the election. So the candidate picks Ron DeSantis for first place and then faces the challenge of how to vote for the others in order not to water-down their own first choice vote by not voting for the also rans. That is the problem with ranked choice voting. Another issue is how ones ranked secondary choices might help elect some other candidate one hates, and maybe everyone hates, because no one ranked them first and placed them in second because the others were worse.

You go to a restaurant and rank your choices from a menu for what you might get. Everyone in the restaurant is also voting an five menu selections for what they might get. The one with the most first place votes might not actually be what everyone gets. If there are two reasonable choices on the menu and three bad ones that everyone hates, yet half of the people in the restaurant would never tolerate the other treasonable choice it seems possible that one of the reprehensible third through fifth place choices may win the election if they are everyone’s second choice. If the first place votes were tied between the two candidates from the rhubarb and broccoli parties the third party knockwurst party could take the cake; that can’t be certain since the tallying process for ranked choice voting is Byzantine bull.

Ai it's a stronger season now (a poem)

 

A transparent life brought
balance to rivers of colors
merged with time
wasting footsteps naught
silence wrapped, packaged
overhead wordless judgments
set aside too restless for decorating props
of primitive historical records spun
from the barrel of a gun
ai.

Mud Sucks (a poem)

Knee deep the mud sucked
oyster shells cut
mosquitos bit
while a deer paddling
didn't see the hammerhead's smile
saltwater shared a horizon
without ripples
below the surface
with the tide out
a piddling river carved a channel to the sea
time swallowed whole
sunrise, sunset and night.

Desiderata of the Spiritually Dead (poem)

 

The spiritually dead can’t be killed again
born in death they remain in death
eternally

  Something could disturb the dogmatic slumber
while high roads rumble
the future never rests

  Perchance to dream
spears through gathered twilight
without a sense of it at all

  A spark, the call
to eternal life presented
to wake the dead went unheeded

  A white throne’s eternal judgment
while staring out into deep space
from a mountainside

Technology libraries up notches
cut into force fields
binding  nothingness together.

The U.S.A. likes Crazy, Incompetent and Swinger Presidents Apparently

 President Biden's international policy of supporting protracted war with Russia via Ukraine seems to continue to be ramping up toward nuclear conflict. Recently he green lighted F-16s for Ukraine's Air Force and is training the pilots in the U.S.A. Along with HIMARS missiles, cluster bombs and lethal drones as well as intelligence from satellites etc President Biden has gone full in for some time to defeat Russia militarily in Ukraine and areas it has reclaimed as part of historical Russia formally. The high risk of nuclear was with the very least a divided east-west economic alignment while global warming is increasing and reinforcing itself as it does via more water vapor that is itself a greenhouse gas rising into the sky from warmer oceans and air simply is not rational policy. The United States of course is willing to accept that, or at half of the voters are, while the other half would seemingly support Donald Trump who is the Democrat's best argument for re-electing President Biden. Donald Trump is a slouch at reducing global warming although he apparently would supporting ending the war on terms Russia could accept and that might lead to a reunified planetary economy.

I am not happy with two quite elderly candidates leading the Presidential race- and no one can doubt that President Trump's reelection campaign wasn't full of good new ideas or energy and was instead a reflection on how great the nation was. He seemed to feel that everyone understood how great he is and his re-election was a shoe-in. His response to the election loss was characteristic of his ego that is equal in a different way to Joe Biden's and was if not criminal, less than desirable. Mr. Trump is a better choice than Joe Biden for the reasons of war and the role of Mr. Biden as a global warming spoiler who doesn't actually get much done to fix the issue. Not that a single Democrat candidate in 2016 had a good environmental economic plant to completely change the way humans do economics starting in the U.S.A.--that is what the world needs now.

Democrats and NPR promote racism and seem to disrespect art as an occupation, or at least writers that are self-employed and artists-for-themselves crafting nice stories. Race conflict is easy to fan and distracts voters from solvable issues and the idea that tax increases on the rich or reforming economic practices might be a good idea. The prospect of either Joe Biden or Donald Trump being elected is demoralizing. One knows that atmospheric heating will increase and political b.s. will prevail as normal if a nuclear war doesn't occur.

Regarding Russia; its leader is bound to pursue policy that restores its historical boundaries-anyone elected President would need to do so. In order to bring Russia and China back to the fold the United States needs to end the war by recognizing Russian ownership of Ukraine and portions of Eastern Ukraine. Within five year os that kind of ending a normal economic situation could be restored. Especially if a free trade zone existed instead of a DMZ between the two nations east and west business would flourish their locally even if no one has a post-war ecological economic plan that would have no fossil fuels being released into the atmosphere from the area.

The war will end eventually and it is important to not only end the war, it is also the preferred alternative to have a warm peace rather than a Cold War after a cease fire and perhaps armistice. Intelligent leaders would understand the utility and value in that, the sooner the better.

Trump on his way to Fulton County Jail ( video)

 Interesting questions that specialists in relevant legal matters could answer; could Donald Trump sue Fulton County prosecutors for frivolous charges regarding the 2020 Presidential election if their case collapses easily or if a Federal Appeals Court overturned a possible conviction on all 18 charges?

https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/donald-trump-fulton-county-jail-georgia-indictment

Should there be some sort of Federal oversight of charges concerning federal elections- maybe a Minority Report Prepeals Court, before state courts hear cases in order to checkmate specious, politically motivated charges in one move before a tedious 130 move court marathon moves its way through courts and media during an election cycle?  Do state charges against a political candidate a priori interfere with elections and should that be legal and acceptable social and political conduct?

Cap and Trade is Smoke and Mirrors

The cap and trade policy to rectify the over-emission of greenhouse gases seems to be a convenient way to let the rich continue polluting practices through straw man methods of diverting attention from their dirty practices.

 Humanity hasn't a pervasive surfeit of good judgment or intellect. There are brilliant inventors that produce new technology and billions of followers that use it. Once the technology exists the users believe it to be existentially kosher as received technology from an advanced civilization (their own) that is the embodiment of Hegel's notion that the German state is the highest form of Spirit evolving to realize itself in history. For those users any challenge to its value to society including negative impacts on global warming is equal to economic heresy. The thoughtless will be idling their large truck motors in driveways adding greenhouse gases until it is too warm for gasoline powered vehicles without the tanks blowing up.

Emissions into the atmosphere that are greenhouse gases needed be measured directly, quantifiably and as point sources without Byzantine policies pointing away from the reality before them via cap and trade to the benefits somewhere else at an undisclosed or known location over there. Land that is wild or health ecologically speaking need be conserved and increased in its own regard without being attached via cap and trade to a business hostage relationship.

Directly tax to extinction large greenhouse sources and zone laws to reinforce existing wilderness and plan good policy to increase it. Cap and trade is a way for the rich to feel good about themselves flying in private jets globally. It isn’t a policy that ordinary American automobile drivers will ever use. Even Air Force One burns 4,600 gallons of fuel per hour–couldn’t the brilliant Biden administration puppeteers innovate a better way to travel?

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cap-and-trade.asp

Bits of Light (poem)

 

More than a speck of dust
each of an infinity of planets
where life could grow
and merge to know

Of a wealth of divine plans
For the benefit of man
With one life timed
fortunes of fate sing the chorus

Quanta and gluons
Fused with sparks of light
Earth where being emerged
Spans in gravity through the night

In the midst of forevers
outside entropy’s shadows
beyond the nothingness of nevers
the Earthy silence glows.

Reflections of Rejections (the poem)

 

In the mud puddle rejection glimmered
while another new thought awoke
a parchment place for a script  began to simmer
inspiring an author’s next joke

  Everything was doomed with original sin
no story was good from any striving man
where were the words to clear the rejection bin
what could be known of plain divine plans

  Square pegs in round holes
with such is victory assured
my way and highways
winning can’t be demurred

    And yet rejections rocket
like crumbling cliffs time assured
trust in breaking composite sprockets
stanzas and paragraphs so pure

  Hope in the Lord before life fades away
papers dropped float in troubles
alive to fight another sunny day
Jacob learned of mankind’s skill making rubble.

A Ron DeSantis Term ; Better than the Biden Agenda?

 

Republican Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has a few qualifications other candidates don’t in 2024 yet are they meaningful? As captain of the Yale baseball team four years his batting average was .336 and in one year he hit 44 home runs. As a captain in the Navy he attended the JAG college for lawyers and worked with a Navy Seal Team as a legal adviser.

Military understanding through experience can be a useful piece of training for a President who must be the commander in chief of the nation. Mr. DeSantis apparently did okay working in Iraq since he received a Bronze Star for the service.

As an alum of Harvard and Yale he understands the Ivy League and eastern establishment yet doesn’t actually seem like one of the establishment types like the Obama’s, Bushes and Clintons, Bidens etc although G.W. Bush was somewhat more Texas than Washington D.C. DeSantis is intelligent enough, perhaps more than enough, to be President while still understanding ordinary people. Being elected twice to be the Governor of Florida supports the notion that he has some experience administering the law of a populous state.

Democrats have elected lawyers to the White House three times in a row and thereafter the nation became heavily in debt, divided politically and racism was encouraged while the idea of hate speech led to de facto censorship in social media. Donald Trump as President has struggled with the problems of being a target of Democrat legal maneuvers. Mr. Trump isn’t a lawyer and draws lawsuits and charges like flies with his volatile discourse. Much of his time in office was devoted to legal defense against Democrat legal offensives like the Russian collusion adventure. Republicans could stand to have a competent lawyer in the Presidency in order to sort things out.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/08/18/brett-odonell-desantis-gop-debate-00111713

Sure it would be great to have a great environmental economist with military experience and the idea of taxing the rich enough to eliminate poverty , resurrect environmental health and end the Ukraine war well enough to assure that it won’t recur and Russians can do business with the U.S.A. again. It’s rare to find a perfect candidate though.has

No Better Idea (a poem)

 

The animals war in the heat and mud
was over food, cilia moving power
labels on soup cans rotting away
motivations to be and become
victors while rain fell
dreary drizzles with grey clouds
dominating pain’s sharp breaths
the poet classified as allied agony’s
friends with friends first
before foes could live without gun shots
cluster-bombs scattering body parts
social classes structured
stratified demolition of reason
for the heat and mud
with buildings crumbling
like the opportunity of day
when night falls.

Deep Space Question Mark Could be Tip-of-the-Iceberg

 The appearance of a vast right-wing question mark in deep space discovered by the James Webb Space telescope during its five-year mission to seek out and discover strange punctuation marks possible left by extraterrestrials has given jitters to those that don't believe the Lakers will win the N.B.A. title next year. There is no reason to worry though when the question mark may be interpreted scientifically as a sign to wonder about.

Special expert Sheryl Luna said the question mark could be intentional misdirection to cover up dark matter impacts on gravity repulsed by dark energy to extra dimensions-possible more than several thousand; a government could be supplying aliens with enough weapons to defend themselves gainst the loss of gravitons across whole parsecs of deep space.

Former aspiring astronaut-artiste-candidate for mayor of Bidansky Eddie Rivers considered the question mark in light of quantum configuration criteria pertaining to authorized cosmology and determined the mark is best employed as a 'standard candle' to measure the distance the aliens are from finding there way home to the lost civilization of the federation of nations with balanced budgets.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/question-mark-deep-space-james-webb-telescope/

The Desert Space (poem)

 

Gradient illuminating sight
unlike darkest night
just before dawn
when sunlight rises
with a world colored
for a few hours
a sense of peace passing through
then is gone.

The U.S.A. Shouldn't Provide Military Support to Ukraine

 There is unlikely to be global stability until the U.S. recognizes Russia's historical ownership of the Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Russia is trying to assert its historical boundaries suppressed by the Soviets and dittoed by the Clinton-Obama-Biden leadership. Degradation of the Arctic littoral environmentally, a divided east-west economic world order, piling up U.S. public debt, non-cooperation against terrorism- just so western arms dealers and ideologues of the Democrat Party establishment can have an obsolete, perennial, Orwellian-like war to prop up a paranoid Europe. The war is senseless, stupid and should be ended by a right-thinking Republican candidate for President if elected.

Election Interference of State's Rights in Georgia?

Georgia’s case against former President Trump on 13 felony counts related to trying to swing the bad presidential election vote total his way is of course part of the general Democrat Party hatred of all things pertaining to Donald Trump. Mr. Trump himself declared the prosecutor to be left wing, and that is the paradox.

Democrats tend to identify President Trump and his supporters as the far right and tend to exaggerate any sort of political charge against Republicans. The January 6th protest wasn’t a Tienanmen Square quelled by tanks-it is being taken apart post hoc by vindictive Democrats. Democrats persecuted President Trump with a majority in the House by investigating a demonstrably false collusion with Russia to swing votes or steal the election of 2016 and later with the impeachment vote.

The prosecution of Donald Trump and eighteen others defends state’s rights against federal interference. That’s the paradox; that a southern black female prosecutor- Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis- would be defending state’s rights in Georgia against a white northerner (well, for most of his life Trump was a New Yorker) that felt a need to get help or at least to admonish Georgia election officials to count all of the votes honestly. Mr. Trump might not have pressured Georgia election officials to the extent that Al Gore, G.W. Bush and legions of lawyers pressurized Florida officials in counting votes in the 2000 Presidential election yet he did apparently ask some state personnel to make sure the election was honest so far as I know about it (and that isn’t much).

State’s rights pushing back against Federal pressure and overreach is an old sore spot in the states that even became fuel for the civil war. Maybe the Proud Boys and the Georgia prosecution team will find themselves on the same page about that.

Sentience and Evolution Differ

Human sentience rise far above the form of evolution that inheres within nature; therefore humanity in a real sense may be said not to evolve as much as to be self-determining. Evolution is natural sequential change of mass subject to the laws of thermodynamics. Time is evolving matter measured by human sentience in an orderly progress at a constant rate of change. Albert Einstein informed humanity that time and space are united and differ in rate of change from one place to another, or if one is in motion or at rest. Evolution is the change of mass observed by sentient beings when its molecular and atomic structures change with interaction and thermodynamics. Mass in various fields may change within structured parameters in regard to its material of composition and forces acting on it. Humans with sentience have placed themselves apart from natural forces of evolution and the pace of non-sentient animate and inanimate matter to a significant degree.

It became fashionable during the Obama administration for politicians to say that their point of view was evolving. Evolution as a popular theory and explanation was taken to encompass human behavior too even including government. G.W.F. Hegel believed evolution was being done by a spirit that was coming to realize itself in history and further that the German government was the highest evolved state. The United States today with 31 trillion dollars of public debt and running the ending of the Cold War in reverse has demonstrated the silliness of Hegel’s thesis from The Phenomenology of Mind that a government could be the highest form of evolution.

It is alternatively possible that material evolution occurs with a small part of the mind of God within and infinite Multiverse with variegated mechanics perhaps also given some sort of orderly progressive structure in order to accomplish some teleological destiny. Though God may know all things before they exist and the end state of every possible Universe before its creation He may yet have some reason to let self-awareness arise for individual sentient beings existing within one of His Universes. Mass arises from energy interacting with fields and sentient minds are embedded within mass with an evolved state with select configurations to support it.

Sentient minds arise from an evolving Universe yet are superior to it qualitatively speaking if no morally. Morally people are in a fallen state as they are subject to the thermodynamic fields in which they exist. That desire for more energy and food as mass along with procreative drives brings them to sin exist other people existing as material objects-in-themselves too. Mind may try to subdue and control thermodynamic drives yet they are ubiquitous and ever-present too-even if just a desire for water to quench thirst. When a Democratic form of government elects leaders that promote evolution as a rationale for governance they are employing and excuse for elites to disregard the advise and consent voluntarily for of governance with the consent of the governed for an elitist ethic that excuses anything at all as just evolution. Democratic governments are not evolving entities-they are instead stable, representative bodies following stable rules assuring equal protection of well understood and just laws for all citizens. That is quite different from an imperialistic pursuit of advantage fr elites or cliches and special classes with the prevailing ethic that anything is OK if you can get away with it.

Lawmakers and chief law enforcement officers should not treat laws and a democratic constitution as a malleable tool for evolving unfair advantages for special interests if they have the opportunity to do so, or gaming the constitution to let one’s proprietary laws be implemented and efforts to make subsequent changes to those laws illegal to bring about.

It is wrong for politicians and media elites to pretend that evolution is a good or even necessary reason for abandonment of human ethics and government standards that are plain, open and just. The human mind and human democratic or republic governments are made by and for humans apart from the thermodynamic challenges for natural evolution although they be cognizant of it. Human political representatives have responsibilities that cannot and should not be obscure through the smokescreen of evolution paradigmata. Post hoc it is fine for historians to note that governments have ‘evolved’ over time in response to external challenges or social corruption ad of course rarely in response to rare political wisdom donated by some one or few benefactors of society. In real time it is simply wrong to excuse corruption and bad governance with the rubric of evolution.