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?