Three Billboards

Last night, Nathan Jr, Dr Desert Flower and I went to the old La Paloma theater in Encinitas where they were showing Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri.  We'd heard it was good.  Mistakenly thought it was a Coen Brothers movie, as Francis McDormand is it in the lead role,  and the 90 year old La Paloma was somewhere we'd never been, so we bought our tickets in cash at the old time box office (they don't take credit cards), sat in the dilapidated non-reclining seats (circa 1928), and breathed the chilly air of the theater, waiting for the show to being.

It is a somber, moving film.  It is a Very Violent film.  It is a sad film.  It's a well acted and well directed film.  And, as someone who lived in semi-rural the South for 16 years of his adult life, I'd say it is a fairly accurate depiction of life, prejudices, and culture in rural American "fly-over" country.   Beautiful country-side combined with a deep, thick, undercoat of lawlessness and a loose-sense of imposed community that often times runs no deeper than superficial pleasantries.

Francis McDormand should win an Oscar or Golden Globe for her role.  Woody Harrelson is great in it, throughout.  Sam Rockwell - who admittedly is NOT one of my favorite actors as he often plays a goof (Hitchhiker's Guide), clown, a fool, a cocky & flawed playboy (F is for Family) - makes you Hate him, viscerally in the first 2/3rds of the film.  Clarke Peters (Lester, from The Wire) is under-stated in the movie.  I don't want to spoil it, but it was both a great movie and very disturbing at the same time.

After the movie, we were all somewhat down, silent, depressed, retrospective... pondering life & existence... akin to how my buddy Ryan and I were after seeing Schindler's List in Atlanta back in 1993, but without the genocide.  So we got a good meal and some strong drinks at the Encinitas Bier Garden, before driving back up to the homestead.

Dougie v Woody - Today

Today, Alabama voters go to the polls to choose between Dougie Jones (from Twin Peaks, but better...  since the Alabama Dougie Jones can complete full sentences, prosecuted hateful racists and segregations who bombed churches and schools in an effort to terrorize black Alabamians) and Woody (from Toy Story, only worse... since Woody would never try to seduce or molest a mall worker, a 16 year old, or a 14 year old girl; Woody never got banned from the Gadsden AL mall for hitting on high school girls in the food court).

When I look back at Bob Packwood, Gary Hart, and William Jefferson Clinton's inappropriate sexual misconduct and behavior while in office, it makes my mind spin and leaves me in disbelief that miscreants like Drumpf and Roy Moore can appeal to more than 10 or 20% of the voting population who think just like them, or who idolize them.  How can CINOs (Christians in name only) line up in support of Drumpf and Moore?  I understand how neanderthals who think just like Moore and Drumpf can align themselves, rally, and support such creepy adolescents who never learned how to be a civilized adult man in modern society.  I get that, I know - and have worked with people - who think a lot like Drumpf and Moore in many ways... I've met them, and I know they exist.  I know they are not a majority (though they are delusional enough to THINK they are the vast majority).

When I hear people on television refer to the "Great State of Alabama" I ask myself "how can a state's voters elect anyone who has a recidivist history of sexually preying upon teenage girls, calling them at high school while they're in trig class, approaching them at the mall, trying to make out with them and grope them in his car parked behind restaurants in Alabama, when he was More Than Twice As Old as they were?"  This was not 18 or 19 year olds with someone in their 20s.  This was 14 and 16 year olds with an adult man who was TWICE as old as the teens at the time.  District attorney, State Judge, then State Supreme Court Judge... twice, after he refused to up-hold the Constitution of Alabama and the Constitution of the United States, and had to be removed from office, twice.  In ANY OTHER State, Roy Moore would be toxic, polling no higher than 20% of the other troglodytes in the electorate who make the worst people in society feel better about themselves.

Steve Bannon - (approximation)

I used to live in South Carolina, for 16 years, and in South Carolina, Governor Mark Sanford was run out of office for Far Less. Roy Moore could not be elected to any office in South Carolina, despite what Steve Bannon might try to spin.

Trump Family's Arrested Development

Dr Desert Flower and I have been catching up on old seasons of Arrested Development on Netflix while her shoulder (post-surgery) and my left elbow (compressed bursa) recover and heal.  With the recent Russian emails that have been revealed that clearly show collusion between the Trump family during the presidential campaign in July of 2016, and the Russian governments and government surrogates, DDF and I came to the revelation that the Trump family and the Bluth family are remarkably analogous.  If you're a fan of Arrested Development, read on, you may enjoy this post and could possibly provide comments to make it even better.  If you're no fan of Arrested Development, or have never watched the show, I recommend reading no further, as this post will probably just seem byzantine, trivial, and over-extended in its comparison.

From left to right: Buster, Maeby, George Michael, Lucille, George Sr, Lindsey, Tobias, and G.O.B. (pronounced "Jobe")

The characters in Arrested Development and their Trump analogues are as follows:

George Sr = 45 Himself; enriching his family by buying cheap desert acreage that the federal government will build a wall upon, running a fake university, repeatedly bankrupting the family business, a chronic philanderer who cannot keep it in his pants, throughout his whole life, multiple shady business associates.  George Sr is Far More Intelligent, conniving, devious, wily, and successful than 45 in myriad ways... but as the head of the family, there's similarities. (a 70% match)

Lucille = Ivanka; looking out for herself and her own financial gain, sleeps with George Sr, hyper-focused on appearances, is cut-throat and evil to the core. (a 80% match)

G.O.B. = Donald Jr; oldest son, incompetent, buffoonish, clueless, talentless, sycophantic son who ardently longs for his distant father's approval, full of hubris, arrogant douche bag without the intelligence or talent to back up such arrogance, causes the family intense pain, embarrassment, and catastrophic failure, repeatedly. (a 98% match... G.O.B. is much funnier, and less of a douche)

Buster = Barron; Overly attached to his mother, immature, youngest son (a 60% match)

Tobias = Eric; goof, no-value-added (a 40% match, since Tobias is a flawed character we know, and Eric is just a rich frat boy douche who hunts endangered species like Elephants in Africa)

Lindsey = Tiffany; adopted, clueless, left out of the picture (a 40% match)

Michael = Jared; boyish, has some clues but not enough, son-of-a-formerly-rich-father-who's-gone-to-jail, In WAY Over His Head, doomed to failure (an 80% match)

Maeby = 45's grand children we don't know about yet ( < 50% match)

{Late addition}
Kitty (George Sr's mentally unstable secretary) = Kellyanne Conway; both mentally tenuous, extremely dangerous, and both have "the crazy" in their eyes, but Kellyanne weaves lies much more effectively.)  (a 90% match)

{Late addition}
Ann = Sarah Huckabee Sanders; both come from narrow minded fundamentalist families, though Ann is far sweeter and more attractive than her press-secretary-wanna-bee-mean-girl-who-wants-your-lunch-money Huckabee Sanders.  Both have a mean streak inside them (Ann going off with Steve Holt... Sarah being herself)  {Thanks Jen H for these observations and suggestions!}

Stan Sitwell = Hillary Rodham Clinton, with hair; consistently the foil against the 45 administration, consistently has tried to defeat them but has not been successful in vanquishing them.

George Michael = ?  No equivalent in the 45 administration observed, yet... but stay tuned

Barry Zuckerkorn (played by Henry Winkler, the Bluth family lawyer) = Marc E. Kasowitz; incompetent, shady, does what he's told badly. (a 85% match)

Pence, Spicer, Massive-Foreheaded Stephen Miller, Christie, Gingrich, and Bannon don't have direct Arrested Development analogues that I can think of... at this time.

All readers' comments and suggestions are welcome.  This post will be updated as 2017 progresses and new information is revealed.  DDF and I thought it was pretty funny that there's so many similarities.

Go FCC Yourself!

gofccyourself.com

Last Sunday night, John Oliver on Last Week Tonight reminded all internet users - left wing, right wing, trolls, white hats, black hats, everyone - how important Net Neutrality is, and how the newly appointed FCC commissioner Ajit Pay wants to reverse the Net Neutrality rules put into place during the Obama administration.  You see, Pai (pronounced 3.141592654), a former Verizon lawyer,  is an ideologue who believes that  "the more you regulate something, the less of it you get".  What he doesn't understand is that Title I and Title II of the FCC Net Neutrality rules, are not trying to regulate free and unfettered access to the internet, No, Not At All.  What they are trying to regulate is that internet service providers (ISPs) cannot scale back, throttle down your speed, in favor of their own content that may be competing with what you wanted to watch / see / download on the expensive and slow internet connection you have in America, land of the gouging ISPs [Asia's and Europe's ISPs are far better, faster, less expensive, and have multiple choices for hard wired as well as WiFi, while in America we're stuck with basically 5 monopolies who put their customers last].

"Why does this affect me?" you might ask?  Well, if you use an internet connection, it can and will affect you.

The most basic, simple example is as follows:  Say you want to download a show, and binge watch the whole season of it some Friday or Saturday, from Netflix or Amazon.  BUT, you have Comcast as your ISP... and Comcast has a series that is Similar to what you wanted to download and watch, so Comcast could then Easily reduce your download speed (loading.... loading....) for your Netflix or Amazon show while opening up extra fast-pass lanes for their own Comcast series that they want everyone to watch instead.  Your download becomes so frustratingly slow, that you search for something else... and your ISP (who knows that you were Just trying to download one of their competitor's products) SUGGESTS you watch their own 'original content series" instead.

Evil.  Despicable.  Enraging.  Yes.

And it is not just movies.  The same can be said for songs, youtube videos, live streaming, anything that requires data transfer, into and out of your home, your office, your mobile telephone, your iPad.  You THINK you're paying for 30 Gig a minute, or 100 Gig a minute, but every time you test it on a bench mark site, you find that it is 1/10th that speed for downloads... because you're not downloading the "recommended content" that your ISP wants you to see, is pushing at you, promoting to you, and making money from providing to you.

So John Oliver recounted how the first time Last Week Tonight did this 3 years ago, that they crashed the FCC website in minutes once the show aired.  And Oliver went on to state how TODAY, for this new period of public comment, the FCC has made it Much Harder to make comments on their website, requiring a multi-step search and entry process, one which Last Week Tonight streamlined by buying the URL gofccyourself.com - witty, hilarious, and most importantly, Easy to Remember.

So before I started this post this afternoon, I tried out the link.  You have to enter in your name, address, and phone number (perhaps for the re-education camps that 45 will implement in the future?) ... and you have to click on the     "+ Express" blue button on the top right of the page once it loads.  --------------------------------------------->>>>>>>

gofccyourself.com

But then you can write in, how you feel about having your internet speed reduced just because of your ISP monopoly's desire to push preferred content at you, instead of what you want to watch, see, hear, read about, download, upload, or enjoy.

For an example of what you could say, I have partially excerpted my entry here, to help spur creative ideas and other responses:

"Title 1 and Title 2 were created TO REDUCE or make it harder for ISPs to throttle, slow down, and give preferential treatment to content.  Ajit Pai is right when he says "if you regulate something, you don't get more of it, you get less of it". Exactly, Regulate ISPs who throttle content and slow down their competitors.  Get rid of Title 2, and throttling will become rampant, common place, ubiquitous.  Pai is right, but in the opposite way his idealogical mind thinks.  "

You can cut and paste mine, if you like, or create your own version.  But I encourage you, regardless of what part of the political spectrum you believe you are most closely aligned, to make your voice heard.  ISPs want to throttle EVERYONE down, to reduce our already slow American internet speeds even further, and promote their own ISP content preferentially.  This affects EVERYONE who uses the internet in America, except perhaps for ISP executives who have fiber optic nodes installed in their homes and who self-exempt from the throttling.

Take 5 or 10 minutes out of your day today or tomorrow, and let your voice be heard.

gofccyourself.com

Mr.Robot + Black Mirror + Inauguration = Tristesse X Hopelessness

Southern Poverty Law Center's Hate Map, screen capture 4February 2017

Back in January, I was stuck in a coach seat for 5 hours on a flight to Atlanta on a business trip.  My company decided it would save money by having all employees travel by coach globally, so instead of working and being productive on my company laptop on projects and presentations that I needed to get done, I watched Mr Robot, season 2, on the 4 x 6 inch screen on the back of the Delta Economy seat I had in row 35 of a 38 row 737 out of San Diego.  I'd not seen season 1 yet, but WOW, Rami Malek's & Christian Slater's performances and Sam Esmail's writing and directing is impressive, moving, engaging, amazing. Link here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4158110/

I made it through the first 4 episodes on my way East, before Inauguration day, and episodes 5-11.5 on the 6 hours in-seat on the way back West, the week after Inauguration day.  After working for 2.5 days at home, some kind of viral or bacterial infection set into my upper respiratory tract that made it impossible to work (talk, think, sit upright, answer email) last Thursday and Friday.  Stuck on the couch, I found that Amazon had Season 1, which I dove through in-between napping and resting on my sick days off.

The more news I listened to since returning home, or social media I visited online, the more national stupidity (mostly willful stupidity) I encountered, and I sunk deeper into a darkness that inspired me to look for "Mirror Black".  Well, I found a Funny-or-Die "Mirror Black" 2 minute spoof on Amazon that was amusing... but it was not Black Mirror on Netflix that I'd heard so much about: "The New Twilight Zone", riveting, enthralling, frightening... Well, Friday afternoon, night and all day Saturday (today) I spent watching Seasons 1, 2, and 3 of Black Mirror.  "Depressed" ... "disheartened" ... "keenly aware of threats"... "rather hopeless" ... this is the darkness that has descended over me.

With a white supremacist from fake news "Brietbart" named to Drumpf's national security council (links here, here, and here) pushing his fear & hatred agenda into POTUS's ear while violent domestic fringe groups cheer and "retweet" (Hate Map here, so you can see who is indoor backyard who really hates you)... my binge watching of such depressing material was fueled amply.  I will never look at another CD, DVD, USB port, social media post, "like", or online "comment" again in the same way that I had for the previous 1/4 century that the internet has existed and has been accessible to the masses.  "Dystopian" should not be applied to Mr Robot nor Black Mirror, since the future predicted in both series is far darker, depressing, and unsustainably self-destructive than "Dystopian" typically implies.

I think I am probably not going to post too much this year.  Backlash from the right wing fringe who have hijacked our democracy, including Federal scrutiny is something I don't want to have to deal with, and possibly something that I don't have the band-width to deal with, as I analyze all the Black Mirror and Mr Robot data I've recently assimilated.  I need to digest, ruminate, and consider the rapid degradation of rights in Umerika and to the whole planet has experienced in the last 2 weeks.... and perhaps we all won't be here in another 2 or 3 months with the patients running the asylum as they are.

Waking Up to a Non Fact Based World

On Tuesday night, November 8th, I was very disappointed by the preliminary national election results coming in that I went to bed hopeful.  Hopeful that I'd wake up to a new brighter November 9th, along with my other fact-based fellow US citizens.

Instead, I woke up to the realization that the White Walkers (aka the Walking Ignorant) have chosen not only the most unqualified candidate for POTUS in the history of our democracy, but also a majority (54 of 100) Republican senators who
- will approve SCOTUS nominations be more like Thomas and Scalia
- deny climate change exists
- believe that women should make 76 cents on the dollar that a man makes
- like pre-existing conditions and denied health care, when they'll finally repeal the Affordable Care Act
- want the United States to look more like the failed state of Kansas than the flourishing Republic of California
- want their wives and daughters to be 9s or 10s and that it's fine to "grab them by the pussy" when they have celebrity status
and...
- who do not care about actual facts. Facts, verified and authenticated, not Brietbarted, not trumped up, not delusional and paranoid fabrications.

The Down Jones has plummeted 750 points in less than a day as I write this last posting.  There's no sense or use in worrying or hand wringing.  All I, my family, and my friends who live in a fact based world can do now is endure the next 2 years, and then the next 2 after that.

I'll be advocating that the Republic of California build a wall on our Eastern Border, to stop the influx of non-fact based immigrants who embraced Breitbart and Infowars over Politifact and Snopes (and The Guardian, and The Economist, and every reputable media outlet and fact checking source on the planet).

And since history has proven that fascist regimens and the masses who support them are unkind to journalists, intellectuals, and others who live in a fact based world, this will be my last JustJoeP posting of the year.  Perhaps the last one ever, as there's really no sense to shouting into a hurricane's wind anymore.  The vast majority reject the facts I present, and it just makes my voice hoarse over time.  Mike Judge's prescient film Idiocracy and Scott Adams' predictions almost a year ago were more accurate than any logical, fact-based citizen of the world were willing to believe.  Heck, even Michael Moore - who is often incredible hyperbolic - was accurate in his Trumpland predictions.

The White Walkers have won for a generation.  Winter's not coming... Winter is here, already.  It arrived November 9th, 2016.  America, you had a pretty good run... 240 years.  Now, it's the Chinese's turn I guess.  Commenting further here will only damage my and my family's best interests, so with a heavy heart, I say good bye to blogging and social media.  My real friends, those who live in a fact based world, still know how to reach me.

Adieu.

Doug Applegate Over Slimey Issa Anyday

I came home from donating blood today, to find this smear campaign against Colonel Doug Applegate from the California Republican Party in my mail box.  The former Colonel is running against THIS CAR PROTECTED BY VIPER Darryl Issa, king of meaningless subpoenas as the chair of the United States House of Representatives Judiciary Committee.  I unfortunately moved from the reddest of red counties in California (Orange) to North San Diego County where Issa is the entrenched Congressman.

If I was an ignorant, apathetic, or uninformed voter, I Would Have been ALARMED by this inflammatory mailer... look at all the horrible things Applegate wants to do to the booming California economy and tax paying citizens!?!?! How terrible!!  (an uninformed Independent voter might say) Then, I read the fine print:  "Sources: US Energy Information Administration (EIA); Progressive Democrats of American candidate questionnaire"

OK, so the California Republican Party is scared that Issa might lose, they're cranking up ads and mailers to try and smear Applegate, and they're using "Progressive Democrats of America" (PDA) to try and facilitate this?  It sparked my curiosity, so I started google searching it... turns out, PDA is outraged that their words are being twisted, and they're punching back.  I found a link (here)
http://pda.nationbuilder.com/applegate_vs_issa  that explains how the CA Republicans are using EIA future projections and PDA Democratic endorsements to double down on stupid, clinging tightly to fossil fuels, the Republican status quo, and ignoring climate change the inexorable progression of time.  No, Douglas Applegate is not "WRONG for our Economy"... unless the "our" there denotes Republican dinosaurs who deny facts of peer reviewed science, and who want to go back to the 1950s America that they loved so much (except for those 90% taxes on the upper income brackets that were in place during Ike's administration).

Applegates ubiquitous TV ads are factual, and damning of Issa.  The entrenched Congressman Did increase his personal wealth to multi-millionaire status while in Congress, and is cozy with Donald Drumpf.  I hope Drumpf's millstone sinks Issa into the depths of the Pacific Ocean off the continental shelf, 3 miles off-shore of Carlsbad.

Play fair Republicans.  Own your personae, don't try to denigrate your opponent.  You're the party of rich & selfish guys who want to keep the status quo, or go backwards in time, without a T.A.R.D.I.S.  In California, which added 300,000 people, and which has lower unemployment than the rest of the country, where there are 75 craft breweries within a 30 mile radius of my home, where well regulated business are prospering, and where one can find more electric vehicles on the roads than in any other state in the U.S., I really don't want to go back in time.  I prefer to progress forward.  Thanks.

Last Weekend's Epiphany on The South

Last weekend, Dr Desert Flower and I went down the hill on Alga Road to go see Free State of Jones at the Cinépolis in Carlsbad.  It exceeded expectations, despite what the critics on IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes say, it was a great film that shined a light on the racist, bigoted, arcane & persecutory laws & culture engrained in The South - in this case Mississippi.  McConaughey was great in it, but so were Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Mahershala Ali, and a host of other excellent actors.  Having lived 16 years of my life in South Carolina, I can talk about how it felt, what I heard, and what I saw when I lived there... I'm not an outsider who never lived nor experienced the hatred and bigotry in the work place, in public places, and in conversations about it with my friends and co-workers who were trying to rise above the ugly, despicable, evil past that ensconced The South before, during, and after the Civil War, and still lives and breathes today (sorry SCOTUS, racism and bigotry are NOT dead even after we elected a black President; they're still alive and well in many parts of The South.

Then, when we got home after the movie, we watched Bryan Cranston in the HBO movie All the Way, where he portrayed LBJ accurately.  The movie portrayed the hatred and bigotry of The South (again, Mississippi leading the way... but other Southern States agreed with them) very accurately as well.  Not only was it well acted, but well written, nuanced, well researched, and well directed.

After watching both of these films so close together, whose settings were 100 years apart, but which accurately and poignantly portrayed the racism and hatred in The South that is still alive today, I am resolved that I never want to move back there and live there again.  Perhaps in another 100 years, after I am ashes, the progress seen since the Civil Rights legislation was passed in the 1960s MIGHT continue and the old entrenched racists die off, with their progeny becoming slightly more progressive and color-blind - similar to how Gay Rights & Equality was unthinkable 20 years ago by main stream America, and now it is an accepted fact for 95% of the country.  But I won't see it in my lifetime.

I am not a hater, and I still firmly believe that there are many very nice, very accepting, very civil & loving people in The South, both in the states that voted for George Wallace, and in the states that didn't.  I've met and worked with many of them, or they were my neighbors & friends.  But the fact remains, that there's a solid double digit percentage block of Southerners who still think lynching is a good idea if they can get away with it, who believe Klan meetings are an acceptable form of social gathering, and who have a false-superiority complex in regards to anyone who is not Caucasian - black, brown, Asian, Jewish, Catholics, Sikh, Muslims, included in their fearful hatred & loathing.  Trump's tapping into their base with his rhetoric and his re-tweets of white supremacists, and "the worst" is manifesting itself amoung us in America.  I do hope that in November 2016 we can close the Trump chapter and not open up a "Wallace 2.0" era of the American political landscape.

No, I'll take the multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-lingual melting pot that is California,
any day over any of the nicest places in The South.  Yes, it is expensive to live in California, but the weather is great, the people are nicer, the hatred is (I've seen) less wide-spread, the wildlife is more diverse, the waves are at least 10X better than the East Coast, the population is more heterogeneous & diverse & growing (+300,000 residents last year! We're gonna add another congressman or two at least in the next census, making the most populace state even more populace!), the businesses RUN BETTER and are safer (and growing), the wine is better, Science is accepted and not argued against or 'disbelieved', the State budget is balanced (after getting a Democratic governor, finally!), the humidity is lower (in Northern San Diego County, at least), religion is less invasive & pervasive, and the people are more accepting of everyone, not just those who look like themselves.

Confused & Self Loathing, Not a Terrorist

The scared, self-hating, confused little boy who used to be named Omar Mateen was NOT a terrorist.

He was
- a former physical abuser of his ex-wife, before their marriage failed and ended in divorce
- an openly angry and expressive of disgust when with his father in Miami when he and his father saw two men kissing and the son became outraged that men would do that
- a Grindr profile user, where several users blocked him because he was 'creepy' (as I just heard on All In with Chris Hayes)
- a Jack'd profile user (yet Another Gay Men's chat and dating website)
- a frequent visitor to The Pulse night club in Orlando before he went on a killing spree in the early morning of June 12th, right after 'last call' at 2am, armed with a legally purchased AR-15
- completely ignorant of the dichotomy, animus, and outright armed hostilities between Hezbollah (fundamentalist Shiites in Lebanon) and ISIS / ISIL  (fundamentalist Sunnis in Iraq & Syria) when this confused & stupid little boy called Orlando 911 and 'pledged his loyalty to ISIS', AND Hezbollah,  AND the AL Qaeda inspired Tsarnaev brothers of the Boston Bombing.  When you DO NOT understand the centuries long hatred and conflict between the diametrically opposed groups such as Hezbollah and ISIS, and you claim allegiance with BOTH of them, you're ignorant, a fool, and incredibly desperate for someone, ANYONE, to like you, claim you, want to support you.
- A natural born US citizen (Queens NY), not an immigrant
- formerly on the TSA No Fly list & investigated by the FBI after he bragged at work (as a security guard) that he knew the Boston Marathon bombers, that he knew people in ISIS, and that he was a big deal among terrorist organizations [the FBI investigated this little punk Mateen for 10 months, interviewed him with an under-cover agent, and then had 2 formal interviews with him, before finally finding he was 'all talk' and had no actual affiliations to any organizations]

Granted, much of what comes out as "News Coverage" immediately following such horrific and despicable acts is frequently inaccurate.  But it has been 36 hours, and Actual Journalists like Chris Hayes are on the scene, interviewing people who had friends killed, who had been at the night club before the shooting, who had talked to this turd Mateen on gay men's hook-up aps, and the stories are being reported in the LA Times, Washington Post, and other reputable, researched, long-standing journalistic sources.  Even the shooter's own father has told reporters that his son was not stable and angrily blew up when he saw openly expressive gay people with public displays of affection. Nobody ever loved nor will ever love dead Omar.

So wether it is a public marathon in Boston, an African American church in Charleston, a Californian social worker office, an armored US Army Texas military base (Ft Hood), or an elementary school in Connecticut, each of these delusional, hateful, fearful, unloved, incapable-of-loving, heavily armed, NRA endorsed, socially out-cast, social rejects continue to inflict pain and sorrow upon American citizens who have DONE NOTHING to them.  Meanwhile, complete dumbasses like Drumpf try to say they "predicted" this, and thank themselves for their inaccurate self-proclaimed false prescience.

Congratulations to Walmart & Dick's Sporting Goods for no longer selling AR-15s (following Sandy Hook, and the potential of class action law suits and horrible publicity).  Shame on every other gun dealer, gun show participant, re-seller, and NRA stalwart who continues to try and defend "the right" for every miscreant, dumbass, and confused little boy in America to buy & own assault weapons.  What pathetic hunters and terribly inaccurate marksmen they must be! (I used to be qualified as a 'Sharpshooter" by the NRA, 35 years ago... and can still hold my own at a gun range [indoor or outdoor] with a BOLT Action rifle. A real man doesn't need a semi-auto nor automatic rifle to defend himself, period. Anyone who disagrees is compensating for their lack of marksmanship, or their inadequacies in the bed room or elsewhere.

Love will always over-rule fear and hatred.  Fear & hate are effective in the short term, but over the log term love will Always win out.

Dark Money - Jane Mayer

For the first 2 days of my drive across the Pacific, Mountain, and Central time zones, I listened to the 15 CD set of Jane Mayer's comprehensive book Dark Money.     Listening to the book-on-CD, it 

- kept me awake

- pissed me off

- educated me on how Charles Koch once ran for Vice President of the United States and lost miserably, on the Libertarian ticket

- how the Koch brothers recruit other multi-millionaires and billionaires to unite against anyone who opposes their 0.01% agenda

- explained how Sheldon Adleson funded Gingrich to the tune of 42 million dollars of attack ads against Romney that ultimately helped Obama defeat the embodiment of "corporations are people my friends"

- described how the Koch brothers reverse engineered the successful 2008 Obama campaign's data analytics of voter rolls, so that after the 2010 census, local and state districts were gerrymandered so effectively as to nullify the popular vote.  North Carolina was their laboratory, and it proved so successful, that even though Obama won the popular vote in NC in 2012 by more than 2%, the state went for the Republicans by having sparsely populated red districts overwhelm more heavily populated but under represented urban, educated, and poor democratic districts.

- told me how the Koch brother's father made his fortune building refineries for Stalin and Hitler

- spoke about how Charles Koch was raised by a militant German nanny, brought over from The Third Reich, until he was 5.  His nanny returned to The Third Reich after Hitler invaded Poland and France, so that she could be closer to her people and rejoice in her country's victory.  She also used to severely physically punish Charles, and enforce daily castor oil & enemas if 8am bowel moments were not produced punctually.  

- detailed how the Kochs, and all of their 0.01% friends, firmly believe that all you need to do in America is work hard, and you WILL BE successful, even though nearly all of their wealthiest friends inherited all of their wealth and they never lived in poverty or fell upon a temporary period of struggle without sufficient means to meet basic necessities even once throughout their lives

- revealed how even though David Koch suffers from cancer, and donates heavily to various cancer research foundations and hospitals, Koch Industries fights every worker's comp & injury claims from anyone exposed to benzene, leaky butane pipe lines that explode, or coal wash pond toxins; that leukemia you have, you got that on your own, pal.

- went into extensive detail how the Kochs hired private detectives who ineptly tried to smear Jane Mayer after she published a 10,000 word magazine article on them by inaccurately stating she plagiarized and misquoted her sources (this is my third Mayer book, she's fastidious in her research and thorough reporting).

- detailed how the Kochs pay college students to take courses in "free market" and "Austrian Economics" through charitable grants, in an effort to try and recruit a larger army of like minded followers

- described how the Kochs are actively reshaping tenured professor ships by funding the publishing of poorly researched and non-peer-researched publications that support their agenda and spread disinformation that "think tanks" then quote to further confuse the masses

- repeatedly described, at every level of their operations, how the Kochs try to obfuscate, and secretly attempt to conceal their profile, their operations, their purpose / intentions, using misleading names on foundations, and labelling voter suppression efforts and entitlement roll back initiatives as "voter wellness" and "election reforms".

After I finished this book-on-CD series (lucky I had a 6 CD changer in my 2007 Mazda, so I could drive for hours without having to change any CDs) I called my Godfather and talked to him as I drove along I-10 in Florida, passing multiple Florida State troopers in the median who all drove Chevy SUVs or low profile Cameros or Chargers, and discussed how great of a study Mayer's work was.  He and I had a great chat on the morning of the 13th, and it was refreshing to speak to another like-minded, well informed adult about American politics and how the richest 0.01% are carving out the country in their own graven image and laughing at the rest of us, all the way to the bank and the ballot box.  

It'll be interesting to see how 2016 turns out, with self-funded Trump, only-evangelicals-love-me-Cruz, boy-in-a-bubble-Rubio, and semi-reasonable Kasich do next Tuesday.  Hillary Clinton has a good chance of beating them all, especially if it is  3 way race with Trump stroking his ego as an independent.  I am not sure Bernie can deliver a victory for the Democrats, since so many Americans don't understand what a Socialist Progressive is, or how Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, Head Start, Pell Grants, the VA, Worker's Comp, the EPA, the Voting Rights Act, the Interstate Highway System, Municipal Water Systems, City Parks, Public Beaches, the National Park System, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Centers for Disease Control, and the National Institutes of Health are all agencies that were created by, or further the cause, of Progressive Socialism in the United States of America.    The "great good" of all of us, not just those who have inherited the most money.

The Revenant

Yesterday afternoon I took my retired parents to the Carlsbad Cinépolis to see the movie The Revenant.  Cinépolis costs more then a normal movie but it has drinks service during the film and you get to sit in the reclining leather chair with foot rest and assigned seating so that know one blocks your view.  Headquartered in Mexico City, Cinépolis has multiple theaters in Southern California.  I had seen several films there previously, and I was not disappointed.  

My father absolutely loved the leather recliner and catered atmosphere.  I ordered a pineapple martini and he ordered an Icee, raspberry flavoured, with my mother abstaining from any delicious beverages.   The theatre darkened, and the film began.   

I will not spoil the film The Revenant but I will say that it is an excellent piece of cinema. There is a substantial amount of blood and violence depicted in the film.  Filmed in Canada i& Argentina the scenery is spectacular.   If you go into the theatre with any romantic or idealised notions of the 1800s in the Western North America, you will find those notions quickly obliterated in the opening 10 minutes of this film.  The next 2 1/2 hours continues to grind the heel of reality brutally into the romantic illusion to destroy any idealized notions of the "Wild West".  

Leonardo DiCaprio's Golden Globe was well earned.  This movie is a cinematic masterpiece.  If it does not get an Oscar there is something wrong.  

Intense. Remarkably sad. Violent. Carnal, base, unaccountable evil, juxtaposed with magnificent scenery, fantastic acting, cut to the bone writing, and superb direction... I will go see it again with DDF sometime later this month.   (She had to work, while I hosted my visiting parents).   

If you are squeamish about blood and violence, then you probably should not pay the price of a theatre ticket to go see this… But you will be missing out.  

On a closing note, Tom Hardy shows that she can again play a complete asshole, like unto his Batman Bane character, if Bane had been a mercenary & ruthless fur trapper in the early 1800s.  Since this theatre was the same theatre I watched Mad Max Fury Road, Hardy's performance impressed me tremendously.  Also, being fluent in French, I was able to understand the slang spoken (and written) in French without subtitles, which was an unexpected pleasure.  

If you have cats...

Don't get these:

Unless you're trying to give them a heart attack.

Driving While Black & Not Using Your Turn Signal, Deadly in Texas

The death of Sandy Bland in Waller Texas is senseless, despicable, and never should have happened.  Being taken into custody for "failure to use her turn signal"?  Seriously?

She "had been was combative on the side of the road" Sheriff Glen Smith told a reporter.
Salon link here: http://www.salon.com/2015/07/16/video_shows_that_african_american_woman_who_died_in_custody_did_not_assault_an_officer_as_police_claimed/

If you pulled me over for failure to use my turn signal, and asked me to step out of the car, I would have been verbally and physically very unreceptive.  Really, a turn signal violation?  If Sandy Bland had been a rich white woman, she'd be alive today.  She either would never have been pulled over, or an expensive lawyer would have been secured on July 10th when she taken to the county jail; she would have posted bond, and she would have posted on The FaceBook about how inappropriate the sheriff's deputies had been in pulling her over in the first place for something that everyone has done at least one forgetfully, or frequently done willfully.  Forgetting to use a turn signal is not a reason to get a ticket (a warning, maybe, sure), or to be taken out of your car, or to be thrown to the ground and knelt upon by an obese sheriff's deputy, or to be put in jail, or to remain in lock-up for 3 days.

I Do Not Know if Sandy Bland committed suicide or if someone came into her cell and strangled her with the plastic bag.  I think the former is unlikely and the latter is pure evil.  Hopefully a ligitimate coroner's inquest will get to the facts clearly, and quickly.  I Do Know that there was no reason to pull her out of her car, to incarcerate her, or to leave her in a jail cell for 3 days.  Write her a warning or a full fledged ticket Sheriff Glen Smith (which she could have fought in court), Even If she is being resentful or verbally combative or physically resisting the sheriff's deputy's draconian behavior.

Despicable.

Yeah, we live in a "post racial era".  Right.

Cumberbatch's Imitation Game

Dr Desert Flower and I went and saw The Imitation Game last night at our favorite local theater, and it was a really good movie.  I'd wanted to see the film after reading several cryptography books and novels where Alan Turing is often a central character, if not repeatedly mentioned as the father of modern computer science.  I was not disappointed.

38 year old Benedict Cumerbatch played Alan Turing extremely well, with a range of emotion and affect, delivery and neurosis, fully embracing the quirky genius.  I will be quite surprised if Cumberbatch does not win Golden Globe awards and Oscar nominations.  Whenever Cumberbatch spoke in a very low voice, slowly, recollections of Smaug inevitably entered my linguistics centric mind, but luckily the scenes were so fluid and changed so often, that the tone was never Smaug-like for more than a few seconds.  I still think Ricardo Montalban played a much better Khan than Cumberbatch did in the recent Star Trek incarnation.

Director Morten Tyldum did a wonderful job of weaving the school boy, post-Cambridge, adult, and post-WWII Turings into a beautiful mosaic that held the audience's attention.  Though we saw it on a Tuesday night, the theater was actually packed, surprisingly.

I would have liked to have seen More focus placed upon Turing and what his team did after breaking the Enigma code in 1943, and how they selected and parsed out information to MI6 so that statistically, the Nazis would not notice that the code had been broken… but the film glossed over that part and had it covered it more, there might have been a Nolan-esque 3 hour movie.

If you've not seen it, it's worth going to the theater (and not waiting for Netflix or Amazon) to see.  I think you'll like it as well (and if you don't, or you didn't like Alan Turing's work, his personality, his scientific work, or the person he was…  then, well…  you probably can't be my friend).

Hobbit 3 - The Battle Of Five Writers

This morning I wasted $7 and 2 hours of my life enduring the bastardization of a film loosely based around the Tolkien mythos, entitled The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies.  Eh, it really wasn't a battle of five armies.  And if you've read the book - as most Americans over 30 have - then you won't recognize most of the plot from the movie since it really doesn't have hardly anything to do with the book.  (and Jackson makes it actually 8 armies…  but I don't want to get into minutia) 

Peter Jackson did a great job in the Lord of the Ring Trilogy, sticking as close as he could to the 3 epic novels in 3 epic movies.  In the Hobbit movies, he drew out what could have been done in about 3 hours into 3 separate, painfully embellished films.  This last (thank goodness!) installment could have been wrapped up in about 30 minutes.  Instead, Jackson, and his fellow conspirators Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyen, and the increasingly annoying Guillermo del toro eviscerated J.R.R. Tolkien's beautiful little book, The Hobbit, and turned it in a misplaced love story, a personal blood feud, a father-son-angst conflict, and a mockery of the original Tolkien novel.  

To understand & appreciate how completely divergent The Battle of Five Armies was from the original Tolkien work, all one has to do is to look at the original Tolkien / Jackson ring trilogy epics, and then do a (1-X) calculation, proportionally.   So if in your perspective, Jackson got 98% right on the ring trilogy movies, in this final installment, he gets 2% right (1 - 0.98) = 0.02.  If he got 75% right in your perspective originally, then he's gotten perhaps 25% right on this last movie (1 - 0.75) = 0.25.  

There was no love story, between elves and dwarves or between anyone else, except for Smaug and his gold, in The Hobbit.  Yes, Tolkien wrote dwarves as greedy, and Thorin's grandfather as driven mad by the wealth, but Jackson and his cabal of co-conspirators created ridiculous plot devices that were not needed. 

The physics of a drawn bow, to propel an arrow through the air, are NOT purely the elasticity of the bow string, but the tension in that string and the elastic bending of the bow (as seen clearly in a simple long bow, or multiplied in a compound bow).  So when Bard (the Animated version was So Much Better!) uses his son's shoulder as the bow, that's a cute "father & son moment", but that arrow wouldn't have flown more than a few feet, much less several hundred feet, through the leathery hide of an ancient red dragon, through heart muscle, and killing one of the most vicious and formidable creatures ever to be characterized on the written page (think about it…  what other creature of mass destruction, pure evil & super intelligence have you ever read as much about in a beloved novel, and even cheered for (as I did, in the previous film, and this travesty as well)?  Jackson and his writers needed to spend less time launching water balloons with surgical tubing sling shots, and more time in Physics 101 class.

I half expected to see Paul Atreides (from Dune), riding along with the Northern Orc army - what's a matter Peter, were Wargs too hard to animate?  Or perhaps too deadly when matched against several hundred Iron Hills dwarves (who brought with them, no cavalry, but later, ram sheep conveniently appear)?  So many inane sub-plots and tangents…  I mean… it was great to see Radagast again… but the entire scene in which he appears… was not in the book.  Great to see Hugo Weaving (Agent Smith) as Elrond again… but in The Hobbit he never leaves Rivendell.  

There's so many things incongruent with Jackson's ham-fisted, market-driven re-writes of The Hobbit that it would take dozens and dozens of pages to describe, in even the briefest detail, and frankly, I don't have that kind of time to waste.  I am just delighted that Jackson cannot rape another Tolkien film, since the Tolkien family has not signed over rights to "The Silmarillion", and I hope in my lifetime, they never will.  

In The Battle of the Five Writers, J.R.R. Tolkien is soundly defeated.  Marketers rejoice, globally, and those who have never read the book will likely remain ignorant - reading takes time, and everyone lives connected to their digital devices, with the attention span of an impatient & unrealistic corporate board, expecting immediate results, gratification, satisfaction… which just leads to stagnation and disappointment, long term.  Much better to have video games, and plastic play toys, and to try and inspire fabricated dreams of interspecies romance, than to make a movie based solidly on the original work.  Pathetic & sad.

I was considering titling this "The Desolation of Smug", or "Jackson-itis" (the disease where you get infected with so much hubris, that you band together with other writer-directors [like del toro] who also show the same symptoms, and then you create an abomination, a bastardization, a remarkably ugly and painful vehicle that movie-goers have to endure while they were expecting 'this won't be so bad…  will it?'), but when I saw Jackson had teamed up with 3 other writers, the Battle of Five Writers sounded much better.

ALEC - Associate Producer of Creating Horrifying Things

If you are unfamiliar with the pervasive, universal, insidious evil that ALEC (The American Legislative Exchange Council) does, just watch the HBO John Oliver "Last Week Tonight" episode from last week.

I had thought that I'd mentioned the corrosive molecular acid that ALEC uses for their life blood, here on JustJoeP in the past, but a google search and a blog search turned up nothing.  So I'm laying down a place marker here.

Embed video here:

John Oliver Explains Net Neutrality, Perfectly

Last Week, Tonight's host John Oliver is another person who is perfect for the job he is in.  He does an amazing job in HBO's Last Week Tonight each Sunday.  I laugh, I want to cry, it's funny, enraging & relevant all at the same time.

Last night he explained Net Neutrality, and how evil the Obama administration is for taking Comcast's top lobbyist (Tom Wheeler)  and installing him as the head of the FCC.  (Vice covered it here (link) as well, but I didn't see it on Vice last month, and Oliver made it MUCH funnier)

Hooray for John Oliver!

FCC.GOV/Comments...  come on internet trolls & haters.... there's just 118 days left for you to let the FCC know exactly how you feel.

My name is Prince Oberon, you keeled my sister...

I watched GoT's "The Mountain and the Viper" last night, and I kept thinking near the end of the episode of Mandy Pantinkin's "My name is Inigo Montoya, you keeled my father.  Prepare to die."

I will not spoil it for you if you have not watched it on DVR or Amazon or HBO-to-go yet...  but I was a little disappointed at the ending.  No, I was very disappointed at the ending.  If you're looking for extreme violence, the "The Mountain and the Viper" will satisfy your blood lust.

Bloody Heart Virus

If you've not already changed your passwords you use to access your favorite sites, you should today (or soon).  This Heart Bleed virus is really annoying, has gathered up tons of account passwords to online email and shopping accounts, and made me waste 15 minutes of my life changing passwords on a bunch of pas that I now have to re-type and re-remember each time I go to different sites.  Annoying.

To see if your favorite site is infected with the Heart Bleed virus, you can use this tool:
http://filippo.io/Heartbleed/
I cannot vouch for the veracity of this tool, but Kasperski seems to think it is a good tool I guess (I do not use Kasperski, just read about it online)

Where Is 9M-MRO?

9M-MRO is the tail number of the Boeing 777-2H6-ER aircraft that was designated as Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing last week.  The location of the aircraft, crew and passengers, remains unknown, but on Friday night (US time) the Malaysian government issued a statement that they believe the plane's South and Westerly flight paths towards the Indian Ocean - instead of the NE direct route intended to go to Beijing over the South China coast line - were the result of a hijacking, and are now treating the disappearance of the plane as a crime.

While this may sound grotesque, I hope a debris field or fuel slick in the Indian Ocean are found soon.  Why?  Because if the passengers are still alive, they are imprisoned, hostages, or worse.  If they are all dead, then their families can begin to have closure and mourn their losses.  

Why would they be alive, and the plane possibly landed somewhere?  Well, consider the following evidence:
- Rolls Royce's monitoring system (9M-MRO was equipped with RR engines, instead of GE90s) continued to get satellite "pings" from the plane, for more than an hour past the time it was supposed to land in Beijing; meaning, the engines were still on, and still running.
- The built in Boeing transponder that sends out location signals was manually turned off over the middle of the gulf of Thailand, just after Kuala Lumpur air traffic control handed over guidance of the air craft to Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon, in southern Vietnam).  
- The pilots (Zaharie Ahmad Shah [Zaharie was also qualified as a flight instructor] & Fariq Abdul Hamid) never checked in with Ho Chi Minh city.  They told Kuala Lumpur "Good night", and then turned their plane around, away from the Beijing flight path, over the Malaysian mountains, and out towards the Indian Ocean.
- yes, both the pilot and co-pilot were Muslims
- Not a single cell phone, black berry, iPad, iPhone, smart phone, smart watch, laptop, tablet, or other device carried by the 227 passengers has been answered, or has sent out any kind of tweet, FB post, distress call, text message, or anything else.  If the passengers (from 15 countries, most of them device happy Chinese) are alive, all of their electronic devices have been totally confiscated.  Missing not a single one.  If the mobile devices had been destroyed, then they would not be "going to voice mail" or ringing without being answered.  They would be giving "no longer in service" responses, from their respective mobile provider networks.

So where is 9M-MRO?  Why don't I call it MH370?  Well...  my theory is that it will never be seen again as MH370, unless it has crashed somewhere and a debris field is found, or a fuel slick spotted in the Indian Ocean.  Instead, either a "State Actor" or a "Non State Actor" has stolen the plane, killed or imprisoned everyone on it, and they are in the process of re-painting it to look like another country's airline 777...  probably a United States based airline, like Delta, American, or United, or a Emirates or Qatar airlines 777.  If there is an old, abandoned WWII runway somewhere near the Indian Ocean, and Zaharie was able to land his plane there, my guess is it being repainted, the electronics are being re-configured to send out a less conspicuously serialized signature that no longer resembles MH370, and the plane is being loaded with fuel, and (probably) explosives, or a WMD.  

What would a State Actor do with such a stolen plane?  Well, "Red Dawn" showed what Cubans could do to the US with troop carriers disguised as commercial airlines.  Tom Clancy probably has several novels that could provide a road map as well.  It would have to be a state actor with few connections to the west - like North Korea or one of the former Soviet "disillusioned-stans".  If it is a non state actor, like Al Qaeda, Basque Separatists, Philippine Separatists, Shining Path, or a Bond villain, then all sorts of terrible things could be planned.
- fly it into a large commercial building, ubiquitous in SE Asian capitals
- fly it into a military base, again, ubiquitous 
- fly it into an LNG plant in the gulf (many to choose from)
- fly it near a US Carrier task force, and detonate a nuclear device within the plane, before the navy shoots it down
- land it in a Western airport, and then detonate the WMD (nuclear, chemical, or biological, basically destroying that airport for that city)
- execute one passenger every time a US drone strike takes place, anywhere in the world (it is well known that Al Qaeda fears drone strikes more than any thing else), delivering the video of the passenger execution to Al Jazeera each time it does, so it can't be traced as to where).  With 227 passengers, that will halt the drone  strike program.  

Like I said, I hope a debris field is found soon, and the families can begin the mourning and closure process.  If their family members are still alive, nefarious things are going to happen to them, or they will be used as bargaining chips and more pain and suffering and death will be brought to more people in the world.  

I theorized this on Monday of this week, when everyone in the media and all pilot experts were saying "it is too early to tell" and "we should not speculate".  BS.  Many humans are evil, and the smart ones who are evil have nasty plans for the rest of us.  Plan ahead to deal with such evil, and minimize its impact on the world.