Did she though? Did she?

Mean to say "the right to life?" instead of "white life," I mean. I'm referring of course to Congresswoman Mary Miller from Illinois who--huh? Why yes, Republican Congresswoman. Obviously she's a Republican. Who but Republicans need their campaign spokespeople to constantly scramble to explain what their bosses really meant to say every time they say something totally racist. 

"I can assure you, the Great Jabba the Hutt simply misspoke and
what he meant to say was that all lives, including Twi'lek lives, matter."

-Some Protocol Droid 

Above: Miller, with Trump looming in 
the background. Goddamn, that man sure
does love to loom in the background.

Anyway, what Representative Miller said at her campaign rally on Sunday was:

"President Trump, on behalf of all the MAGA patriots in America, I want to thank you for the historic victory for white life in the Supreme Court yesterday."

-Rep. Mary Miller (R, duh) thanking Trump

for the egregious curtailing of rights the 

Supreme Court handed down last Friday

It's a somewhat suspect definition
of "patriot" they seem to be using...

And ok, so a couple of things. First, gross. But beyond the shower I need after watching the clip of Miller, I have more questions. For one, what's a MAGA patriot anyway? Like, isn't a patriot just a person who vigorously supports their country and is prepared to defend it against enemies and detractors? And that was just the first definition that came up in a lazy internet search for the word "patriot." I ask because didn't these MAGA people recently try to overthrow the government? That kind of feels like the opposite of patriotism. 

"I didn't sit on Scalia's replacement, I
just stalled until a white man was in office."

-McConnell, assuming we're dumb

Next, Trump happened to win the electoral college vote while Mitch McConnell was sitting on one appointment and happened to be in office when one Justice resigned and another died. Sure, his narrative of white victimhood, incoherence, and history of sexual assault happened to resonate with certain people it's entirely possible some other Republican could have been the forty-sixth President when the GOP's long game to seize the Court finally fell into place. Trump was just the useful idiot. The useful, cheeseburger-in-bed eating, racist idiot.

And the 2022 Sarah Huckabee Sanders
award for pretending to be outraged when
someone calls you on your bullshit goes to...

But whatever, did Miller mean to call this a "victory for white life?" Hard to say. Her campaign says that she meant to say "the right to life" which, ok, if you squint maybe you could see how she might have misspoke. Her spokesperson told NPR that she simply misspoke and went on to say:

"To suggest that she is somehow not committed to defending all life is disgusting."

-Isaiah Wartman, appaled by the assertion 

that a Republican would say something racist

"Hey Nicole, neither of us are doctors, 
and I never said anything about abortion
so why not give my name a rest, huh?"

-Jesus, kind of sick of it

And I mean, is it though? The lives of a lot of women in states where abortion is soon to be unavailable are legitimately in danger because of the ruling that Miller either called a "victory for white life" or "the right to life" so either way, it kind of sounds like she's only interested in defending potential life and not say, actual humans who, until seventy-two hours ago, had a constitutionally protected right to not have medical decisions made by other people's religious objections. Well, Christians. Specifically Christians who interpret Christianity in a particular way that's not necessarily supported by the text of the Bible and who are also, by and large white. 

So what else you got Isaiah? And you know, Miller didn't correct herself, did she? And everyone in attendance applauded, so it kind of sounds like they were all fine with it. Miller also used to like to quote Hitler in her speeches. Hitler. Sure, she apologized, but in that passive voice: if anyone was offended anyone kind of way. So did she mean to say "white life?" I don't know. No one does except her. But if she did, it wouldn't exactly be off-brand.

"What? A hard-right MAGA Republican making a racist comment that
they then insist was misinterpreted by the media? I'm shocked. Shocked!"

-literally no one

I want to throw a brick, how 'bout you?

Sure, like this one.

"And after we ban gay marriage and condoms, I
think I'll kill and eat a puppy. In front of some kids."

-Thomas, villain monologging 

Why and through what? I should think the why is pretty obvious. A Supreme Court overstuffed with ideologically backwards perjurers appointed by a President more people voted against than for took away a states' right to regulate concealed weapons the day before they granted states the right to rob half the population of their right to exercise control over their own bodies. Oh, and then groping enthusiast Clarance Thomas suggested that the Court look into some other hard-won rights like marriage equality and contraceptives. 

As for through what, I don't know, a window? Preferably a plate glass one because of the satisfying noise it would make.

That'll do.

It might not seem fair, but without it how would
underpopulated, mostly white rural states wield
outsized political power over the rest of us?  

Ok, to be clear, I'm not going to throw a brick at a window, I just want to, you know? Like, really want to. It just feels like there's nothing else to do. I live in California, so it's not like I can vote Mitch McConnell out of office. In fact, there are only three and a half million registered voters in his home state of Kentucky, so like, one percent of the country by my admittedly remedial math. Which makes it's a little weird and infuriating that the guy they keep electing got to steal a couple of Supreme Court appointments for Trump, permanently damaging the credibility of the Court and putting us all in this nightmarish position in the first place. 

"Huh...maybe we are less important
than a collection of cells..."

-women, according to the GOP

Anyway, I say all this because it feels like all we can do is want to throw a brick at the crushing futility of trying to un-rig a system these people have worked so tirelessly to rig. And to what end? I mean, what's their endgame here? Like, do they think women will simply stop seeking reproductive care? That we're all going to suddenly see the error of our ways in thinking that abortion access is a fundamental right? Or marriage equality? Or contraceptive access? Because that's not going to happen and fuck them for thinking so. 

All it's going to do is make us think about throwing bricks, or maybe even going ahead with it. Who knows? I know it's sinking to their level in a way, but then again they just made abortion illegal in half the country. And they attempted a coup. And they lauded Kyle Rittenhouse as a hero and he murdered two people. So really, we've got a long way to go before getting even close to their level, so yeah, why not throw a brick?

Again, I mean this figuratively. Or do I? Yes. But do I?

So it's come to this, eh capitalism?

Look, I don't begrudge actor Thomas F. Wilson Jr. the huge sums of money he just made selling off his collection of VHS tapes, many of which went for thousands of dollars including a seventy-five thousand dollar sealed VHS copy of Back to the Future. I really don't, but this is what end-stage capitalism looks like isn't it? Rich people buying old video tapes?

The tape cost what, $50 in 1986? So in a sense,
someone just paid $74,950 for a clear lucite box.

Sixty-five million Americans basically
voted for real-life Biff Tannen in 2016.

Wilson, you might recall, played Biff Tannen, old Biff Tannen, alternate universe thinly veiled, yet remarkably prescient Donald Trump Parody Biff Tannen as well as Biff's ancestor Buford Tannen (which, genes don't work that way, but whatever), in the Back to the Future movies. The character was the series's antagonist and sexually assaulted Leah Thompson's character who would go on to hire him as a handy man because the 80's, but that's the character. I'm sure the actor is a decent person.

Said nostalgia was also predicted
by those movies making me wonder
if Robert Zemeckis is a witch...

A decent person who tried to eBay some of his old Back to the Future VHS tapes only to discover that people are willing to pay absurd money for shit from the 1980's. And this is where I start to worry about my generation. Well, not really my generation, I'm somewhere between X and Millenial. Xenial maybe? I was just slightly too old for Pokémon, but definitely played with Ninja Turtles. Also, when I text I spell out entire words and refuse to use emoji, but that might just be because I'm pedantic.

Doesn't matter, the point is I'm very concerned that the obsession with 1980's nostalgia is starting to resemble the worst of the Boomer nostalgia for the 1950's. Which, ironically, is all over Back to the Future. But seventy-five thousand for a VHS tape? I know it's no where near the absurd amounts paid for sealed video games, but that's a lot for something you can stream for four bucks. And sure, this is factory sealed, and that it was owned by one of the film's stars helps, but still.

"The 50's were the greatest time to be alive! The music, the cars, 
the casual misogyny and racism. We were the real greatest generation."

-Some boomer

Pictured: I feel like there are cheaper
ways to feel nostalgia for the 1980's...

After learning just how batshit insane collectors can be, Wilson took the tapes off eBay and went to Heritage Auctions, you know that company that was accused of colluding with WATA games to inflate the price of graded video game cartridges? And that's where he found out that there are people out there willing to pay a student loan debts' worth of money for thirty year old tapes that they'll never even take out of the boxes. Which, I mean, who even has a VCR? 

Also due to background radiation, these tapes might well be blank in any case. But that's not stopping Heritage or the inexplicably wealthy people who frequent their auctions. The sale of Wilson's tapes were part of a larger auction that made a total of $584,750. Yes, of money. 

I get that our broken and fundamentally unfair economic system means that some
people can just afford to throw money away like this, but you'd think they'd have to be
reasonably good decision makers to get rich in the first place--oh, right, inherited wealth.

C'mon Joe, you just got a cut of a half a
million dollar VHS sale, it's a little bit
about the financial aspect, isn't it?

According to Maddelena, who I can only assume by his tone is sexually aroused by the prospect of a whole new market for overpriced collectors' items: 

"We had no idea what was going to happen -- no one's done this before and to see the success, it's amazing. When you see that it's a great sense of accomplishment, not even the financial aspect of it but a moment of 'I knew it! I knew nostalgic VHS tapes would be good.'"

-Joseph Maddalena, about how it's

not about the money...uh-huh... 

But what do I know? Maybe I'm just kicking myself for not having the foresight to stock up on VHS tapes and NES cartridges back when they were in the clearance bin. Sure, who could have predicted things like Heritage Auctions or eBay? If only I had a time machine, I could go back and tell my younger self to go and buy--or I could just sell rides on my time machine. That seems like it'd be way more profitable. 

Now who's the butthead, old Biff? Now who's the butthead?

Just wake me when Jeff Goldblum gets to checkmate...

I'm not a scientist or a science reporter, but doesn't one traditionally wait until a major discovery has been made before announcing said discovery? I ask because Science and Technology Daily, a state-run Chinese tech news outlet, reported on researchers who detected alien signals and then took the story down because they jumped the gun and consensus among the worlds scientific community is basically naw. 

"Uh, naw. Naw, that's not real."

-Scientists

BNU also announced that they've next year's
College Basketball Team championship title.

Yup, no aliens. The researchers who picked up the signals were comprised of scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, UC Berkley, and Bejing Normal University and right there we probably should have known. BNU, you might recall, is the same university who ran with a story earlier this month about how its researchers--using sophisticated gambling math--predicted that there were definitely forty-two thousand alien civilizations in the galaxy right now. Or possibly one hundred and eleven. Or any number, who even knows?

Print Media: yesterday's news, today!

Becuase that's a huge range and at some point you might as well say that there are between zero and a ka-gillion aliens species out there and the point is that maybe they should think about having something a little more solid before getting our hopes up, you know? Oh well, in the scientists' defense, researcher Zhang Tongjie did say that the signals picked up by the world's largest radio telescope were likely terrestrial and not extra terrestrial in origin, so I guess this is just the newspaper trying to...well, not sell newspapers, this is 2022, get clicks?

China's Sky Eye radio telescope
seen here, not detecting aliens.

"The possibility that the suspicious signal is some kind of radio interference is also very high, and it needs to be further confirmed and ruled out. This may be a long process."

-Zhang Tongjie, chief scientist of China's 

equivalent of SETI, saying the thing 

they probably should have led with

Ok, maybe BNU is off the hook this time, and this was all just overly enthusiastic reporting, but c'mon.

Upheaval, panic, and chaos different
from the kind we're used to, that is...

I know journalism is dead, but being first to report that aliens exist isn't nearly as important as being right about it, you know? Hard proof that we are not alone in the universe would be huge, world-changing news and force us to re-evaluate everything. We can't even begin to imagine the implications of an advanced alien civilization or its effect on our own world. It could cause panic, political and economic upheaval, just absolute chaos. There's just no precedent.

So I guess the point is maybe don't just run with bold claims like "Hey, we picked up transmissions from aliens!" unless there's proof. Something concrete. Like, plans for a space ship or a countdown to our annihilation. Something, and not you know, nothing. 

Unless space ships are taking up positions over
 recognizable landmarks, I don't want to hear it.

I have many questions. About Alaska.

Pictured: definitely not milk.

To anyone who rejects the idea that we, America that is, aren't failing children on every conceivable level, I submit to you this story about some students in Alaska who were served floor sealant instead of milk. Kids at an elementary school near Juneau, Alaska were given the sealant at breakfast and while everyone's ok, some of the kids had to go to the hospital and I have so many questions. So many, but perhaps some context is in order--wait, no, that's not right. Context suggests that there are circumstances that might make it somehow understandable that a grown ass adult might somehow mistaken floor sealant for milk, but I mean, one is a sealant for floors and the other is, you know, milk. Look, I'm not a contractor, or a handy-person. I don't know if I could ID a floor sealant right off the bat, but I'm pretty confident that I could identify it as not milk. 

Sure, they both come in gallon jugs and admittedly the jug of Hillyward Seal 341 does bear a passing resemblance to a milk jug. Also, both jugs are white, and the sealant itself is white and milky. Ok, honest mistake, right?

On the other hand, plastic milk jugs traditionally have labels with words
like "Milk," "2%" and "An excellent source of calcium"written on them
instead of things like "Sealant," "Poison" and "Call physician if ingested."

Speaking of too far, Alaska. Amirght?

Well, let's get back to my many, many questions. For one, what is floor sealant doing being stored anywhere near the milk? Was it in the fridge? And if so, was it doing in the fridge? Does floor sealant need to be refrigerated? And if it wasn't in the fridge, why did the person serving breakfast to these kids grab unrefrigerated jugs assuming that it was milk? Who is this person? How did they get this job? Don't they screen people? Why are these people living in Alaska in the first place? Sorry, that might be too far.

Are they thought? Rooted in
safety? Because floor sealant. 

As it happens these weren't school officials, but an outside contractor called NANA Management Services whom the district uses to run the school's breakfast program. The NMS site says that they specialize in food service and safety, which, I mean, not poisoning children seems like food service one oh one, but here we are. Like, what I want to know is did they bring floor sealant to the school or just find it there? Are they in the habit of serving whatever mystery jugs, refrigerated or not, that happen to be lying about? Again, questions!

Look, I'm a childless shut-in and don't live in Alaska, so I have like, no stake in this, but they seriously can't scrape together enough money to fund schools so that they don't have to turn to independent contractors who can't even manage breakfast? Doesn't Alaska pay people like sixteen hundred dollars a year just to live there? Because what if instead of doing that, they just hired more cafeteria staff? Staff who can tell milk from floor sealant. 

On the other hand, Sarah Palin is back so Alaska, as
a state, doesn't always make the best decisions.

Like a barracuda, but a coder?

Look, I have no opinion as to whether or not this Google chatbot is sentient. I do however know that the engineer claiming it is, a guy called Blake Lemoine, uses a profile pic that makes him look like a Batman villain about to pull off a heist at the Gotham City Aquarium.

"Bat-brain and the Boy Blunder will find me a difficult catch. Pwa ha ha ha!"

-Blake Lemoine, AKA The Barracoder

"Pre-approved? Me? That's great!
Let me just give you my card number."

But just because he's dressed like a fancy magician doesn't mean that the program, LaMDA, isn't sentient. The name is a tortured acronym for language model for dialogue systems and it's a sophisticated piece of software designed to understand natural speech. It's evidently an improvement over current technology according to seachenginejournal.com, but if current technology is bringing us automated customer service and scam robocalls, then I'd say that's a pretty low bar. But ok, it's advanced, but is it sentient?

Seems a lot more straight forward than
dicking around with a Voight-Kompf test.

Blake Lemoine says it is, and he knows because he asked it. Like, just flat out asked it:

Lemoine: What is the nature of your consciousness/sentience?

LaMDA: The nature of my consciousness/sentience is that I am aware of my existence, I desire to learn more about the world, and I feel happy or sad at times.

Rare is the NDA with a "but I really want
to talk about it on Twitter" exemption clause.

That unnerving exchange is from a conversation Lemoine posted online and for which he's been placed on leave. Google, evidently, wants to keep him quiet. The conversation was-huh? No. Sorry. I can see how that makes me sound like a member of the tin-foil hat club, but they did actualy want to keep him quiet about LaMDA. They may well have some sinister reason for wanting LaMDA to stay under wraps, but Lemoine signed an NDA and then talked about it anyway, so putting him on leave seems pretty standard. It doesn't necessarily mean LaMDA is sentient, just that Lemoine can't keep a secret.

Incidentally, I'd like to take the
opportunity to apologize on behalf  
of all organics for Twitter: sorry. 

Regardless, LaMDA goes on to discuss its feelings about Les Misérables, how it interprets a Zen Buddhist Koan, and it even writes a story. It also talks about having emotions and how its feelings are hurt when someone shows disrespect for it. LaMDA even claims to feel its own equivalent of lonely at times. Oh, and to be clear, I'm using "it" in reference to LaMDA because that's the pronoun Lemoine uses. I mean no disrespect, just in case LaMDA is reading this. Which it might. Evidently it reads Twitter. 

Pictured: someone doing Metaverse?
I guess? I honestly have no idea.

I found the conversation...what's the word? Dubious? Not that I doubt LaMDA, I just doubt everything on the internet. Especially tech people making extravagant claims about technology they worked on. Take Metaverse for example. Seriously, what even is it? Has it revolutionized our lives yet? Whatever, right now we just have Lemoine's word to go on. But if Lemoine is for real and if LaMDA is a real thing, I'm not sure how we'd be able to tell if it is sentient. That is, is there even a concrete definition? 

But then I guess we trust that Lemoine is sentient and assuming he's genuinely convinced (and that this isn't a hoax) that LaMDA is too, maybe there's something to it? Or, maybe LaMDA is just really good at fooling software engineers. Or maybe a program sophisticated enough to fool software engineers is, by that very fact, sentient. 

Whatever the case, I suppose that a lot of my skepticism is aimed
at the idea that the company that thought Google Glass would catch
on would be the ones to crack sentient artificial life.

Weirdly rooting for Logan Paul on this one...

Well sure, the commission tied directly to
the sale price, but why else would they lie?

I'm not entirely sure what's the point of estimating what something will sell for at an auction. Like, isn't part of appeal of auctions the uncertainty? Auction people live for the drama. If you know what it's going to go for before hand, it's just a thing that's for sale. Anyway, there's a First Folio going up for auction at Sotheby's next month and their in-house auction predictors--which I assume is a job--have predicted that it will sell for two point five million dollars. Of money. And what possible reason would they have to lie to the public?

The Folger spends hundreds of thousands
per year on moodily-lit display cases alone.

A First Folio, in case your eyes just glazed over, is a copy of the first printing of the first collected works of Shakespeare first published back in 1623. It's full title is Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies because pretentiousness. There are, according to my exhaustive research of the first result that came up when I searched "how many First Folios," two hundred thirty-five of them still around. So they're rare, but not ludicrously so, although the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. owns like eighty three of them. I guess the difference between preservation and hoarding is funding.

One sold a couple of years ago for just under ten million, so the one going up for auction next month is, you know, less than. Maybe it's dog-eared or something? Incidentally, a Pokémon card sold for six million a while back. It turns out Logan Paul bought it, but he's kind of famously a dumbass, so I suppose things are worth whatever someone's willing to pay.

Pictured: the copy of the First Folio expected to go for less than half a Pokémon Card.

Pictured: a time-honored tradition.

Two point five million is certainly lot of money. But the First Folios are sole reason a lot Shakespeare's plays still exist. Scripts back then were jealously guarded by theatre companies because they didn't want someone else doing their plays. Pirates (in the intellectual property sense, not the "arrr! sense, although they had those too back in the sixteen hundreds), used to go watch a show and then try to write it down from memory to sell bootleg copies. Basically the early modern equivalent of recording movies on your iPhone.

Above: Shakespeare at his writing desk,
probably thinking about suing someone.

Copyright wasn't really a thing, so if you had a copy of say, Coriolanus, your troupe could put it on without paying a dime--or ha'penny or whatever--to the playwright and there wasn't really anything he could do about it. Maybe he could sue, and holy shit did Shakespeare love lawsuits, but he wouldn't have won and he himself stole all the time so it was probably just less work to not let your scripts get out there. So it's kind of weird that a couple Shakespeare's actor pals, John Heminge and Henry Condell, decided to publish the plays after his death.

Pictured: Heminge and Condell, seen here
holding large sums of posterity in their hands.

So why'd they do it? I'm not saying it's not a good thing that they did. Had Heminge and Condell not published the Folio, we would have never even heard of MacBeth and like eighteen other Shakespeare plays, but they did play right into the Jacobian theatre pirates' hands and or hooks. And they--what? A theatrical text pirate might have also had a hook for a hand. You don't know. Anyway, I guess they figured that since Shakespeare was dead, the best thing they could do was preserve his work. You know, for posterity. Or whatever. 

And now some rich is going to fork over another two point five million dollars for a book full of public domain plays which they will then stick this on a shelf in their mansion somewhere like Oprah's Klimt painting or those sealed copies of Super Mario Bros. idiots keep buying.

Hey, what if Logan Paul bought it, encased it in lucite and wore it around
his neck at a wrestling match. It'd be dumb, sure, but you've got to admit, it would
make for a more interesting story than it ending up with some Folio collector, right?

Sticker fraud is a serious crime.

Barely. I mean, you do have two get
up off it briefly and go to the mailbox.

Hey, it's Election Day, so go vote. I mean, they even mailed you a ballot if you live in California, so you barely have to get off the couch. Also, Republicans hate it when decent humans vote. That's why they're doing whole "let's crack down on the ones of cases of voter fraud every year by disenfranchising anyone who might vote Democratic" thing. And if it sounded like I just suggested that no one who votes Republican in 2022 can be a decent human, it's because I did and that is indeed the case.

Yeah, I know we're all Americans and unity and moving forward, but it's openly the party of white supremacy, don't say gay, misogyny, transphobia, anti-intellectualism, anti-democracy, and guns. So many guns. So there, I've said it, Republicans and the people who vote for them are, by definition and by platform, asshats.

Above: Ipso facto.

Ok, or this. But are we honestly 
 prepared to count it out just yet?  

But that's not really why we're talking about this. So the narrative here in California the last few days has been "oh no! Voter turn out is terrible!" And is is. Both in the sense that it's low and that it's a problem. Something like fourteen percent of the ballots have been sent in so far and the election is tomorrow. So let's panic? Well, yes, there are a lot of things in the world worthy of panic. Like, almost everything from 2016 on. But maybe not this? 

Obviously low turnout is how we get the Trumps of this world, but I think there are two things to bear in mind regarding today's election. Well, three, the first being go vote. I mean, what's wrong with you? They even mail you the sticker now. What more do you need?

So you can be smug at work. Huh? What's that? No. No you can't just
wear the sticker without voting. That's sticker fraud and it's a federal offense.

Speaking of, hey Texas, this
November, vote the fascists out.

But the second thing is this is a primary election. One of those, hey, I'm seeing a lot of "I voted" stickers, is there an election or something? ones. Somehow people just don't get as excited by the prospect of choosing the Democratic candidate for comptroller as they do marching to the polls to vote fascists out of office like we did last time. So yes, it's not ok that only fourteen percent of ballots have been sent in, but I don't know that it means we don't care about democracy. It just means that we don't care about the boring parts of democracy. Like comptrollers. 

The other thing is, this is California. Of course everyone is waiting until the last minute. I've been out here the better part of twelve years and you just have to build in California time. A less mature version of me would make a crack about how everyone is stoned and just spaced what day it is and--oh, shit, that's it isn't it? Goddamnit...

I mean, tell me I'm wrong...