The thunderous "wah-wah" of a sad trombone:

"Waaah...the racist lunatic we support
lost the election...waaaaah..."

-these people

So the bad news is that a few hundred people turned up in D.C. for that dumb rally in support of the people charged in the Capitol riot, but the good news is that only few hundred turned up to support-wait, like, do we have to call January 6th a riot? A riot is something that breaks out at Target on Black Friday over flatscreens. The January 6th thing was thousands of right-wing nutters who planned to seize the government, kidnap or murder officials and instal the former host of The Apprentice as dictator for life. I just feel like riot doesn't cover it.

Oh, the gold Trump statue guy.
I'm sure he's got lots of great ideas
and fair-minded opinions to share.

Anyway, the event's organizer, Matt Braynard, told reporters that:

"This is about the many people who were there that day who have not been charged with violence, not have been accused of assaulting a police officer or destroying property, and the disparate treatment they've received. This is about equal treatment under the law."

-Matt Braynard, hoping anyone reading

his comments is unfamiliar with the internet

Regular, of course, being a relative 
concept when it comes to these people.

So, couple of things. First of all, he said that it's not about the people who were charged with violence, which is weird, because Braynard told Mother Jones like, two days ago that the rally was 100% about the people who were arrested and charged and in fact he called them political prisoners which is horseshit. Breaking into the U.S. Capitol building, assaulting police officers and shitting on the floor and then going to jail for it doesn't make you a political prisoner. That just makes you a regular prisoner. 

"Hold your fire, they're white!"

-these cops, evidently

And what disparate treatment is he even talking about? I think most everyone watching on January 6th had the same thought, which "how quickly would these assholes have been gunned down if they weren't white?" Every time a pack of white dudes is feeling under-appreciated, they grab their assault rifles, pile into their pick ups and break into a government building. Look, I'm not pro-hail of gunfire, but any one of those "protests" would have been met with a hail of gunfire if they weren't white. 

So like I said, the good news is that today's parade of fragile white people whining about how they've been mistreated was only a few hundred, and there weren't any major problems, but it's still pretty disheartening that there were any. 

I think they've got that upside-huh? Oh, they're protesting because the people who
tried to overthrow the democratically elected president faced consequences for their crimes?
I see. I'm sorry, how is the right more patriotic than the rest of us? I'm genuinely asking.

Sure, mammoths, why not?

"Well well well...looks who needs our help..."

-some mammoth who's never 

going to let us hear the end of it

A genetics professor is this close--sorry, you can't see my fingers, but trust me when I say I'm holding them a scant distance apart. Anyway, he says he's very close to being able to use genetic sequencing and gene splicing to re-create woolly mammoths. And get this, he teaches at Harvard, so he's probably not a nutter. Oh, and also get, he wants to do it because he believes that herds of genetically resurrected woolly mammoths will actually help fight climate change. Amazing? Sure. Unbelievable? Maybe. In need of some context and qualifications? Absolutely. It's science, so let's walk it back a bit.

"Actually it started pretty mad-scientist-y,
the fact that African elephants were better
surrogates was just a happy coincidence."

-Greg Church, PHD

What George Church, head of the Wyss Institute at Harvard, wants to do through his company, Colossal, isn't cloning. Instead, they call it de-extinction (which, I think they made up) and the idea is to splice preserved mammoth genes into the species' extant relative, the Asian elephant and create a kind of elephant/mammoth hybrid. Which, to be extra complicated, will be carried to term by African elephants. And that's not like some arbitrary mad scientist, just for the hell of it kind of thing, it happens that African elephants are larger and can more easily carry the Asian elephant/mammoth hybrids to term. 

Yeah, it...it was us. We're basically the
worst thing to ever happen to this planet.

Ok, but what, you might reasonably ask, the hell is the point? According to Colossal's website, the result will be "a cold-resistant elephant with all of the core biological trains of the Woolly Mammoth." Yeah, you persist, but why? Settle down, we're getting there. These mammoths, when they died out uh...somehow, left a void in the ecosystem of the Steppe. The grasslands were replaced by marshes and wetlands which aren't as good at absorbing carbon and now the permafrost is melting and we're pretty screwed. Ecologically speaking. Colossal's sorta mammoths would, in theory, fill that niche. 

Confirmed: old people still exist.
Better luck next time Peter...

Cool, where's the catch? There almost certainly isn't one as far as the science goes. I mean, sure, the tundra now isn't anything like the tundra thousands of years ago, but I'm sure re-introducing mammoths into a climate that's like way warmer won't have disastrous consequences. But what's giving me pause is who's backing this endeavor: venture capitalists. Ugh. The Winklevoss twins are involved along with Peter Diamandis who, a few years ago tried to cure aging by throwing money at it. I...I don't think that panned out. Oh, and Tim Draper. Remember Tim Draper? He was the guy who tried to break California up into a bunch of smaller states.

How come? Who can say why any of these rich d-bags do any of the things they do. My first thought was that he didn't want his taxes going to the poorer regions of the state, but then it occurred to me that he probably doesn't pay taxes to begin with. I guess he just wanted to carve out some kind of gross, libertarian, venture capitalist utopia where he and the other riches could invest in start ups and write their dumb books about how to get super rich without working a real job. 

Step one: have a shitload of money.
Step two: invest in a bunch of bullshit until something pays off.
No, I didn't read his book, but I stand by my summary.

The solution to a lot of problems
is tax the shit out of billionaires.

Anyway, I don't know, as suspicious as I am of anything so tainted with venture capitalist interest, maybe Church is on to something. Maybe mammoths will trample down the moss or whatever he thinks they'll do and save the planet. But there's a part of me that can't shake the feeling that maybe instead of chasing after these crazy sci-fi, Jurassic Park solutions to climate change, we shouldn't just tax the shit out of some billionaires and use the money to plant trees and put up solar panels. 

She uh...she gets the irony, right?

And just like that, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett hands us the perfect description of two thirds of the Court: a bunch of partisan hacks.

Of course she insists that they're not a bunch of partisan hacks,
but isn't that exactly what a partisan hack would say?

No, really, the bill allows any rando to
sue someone who has an abortion. So
in many ways, Texas can go fuck itself.

In a speech at an event celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the University of Louisville's McConnell Center--as in Mitch, gross-- Justice Coney Barrett explained that it was her goal to convince us that the Court "is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks." And look, I don't want to tell her how to persuade people, I mean, she is a lawyer, but maybe maybe it would help if she didn't try to make the case at a building named after Mitch McConnell, two weeks after siding with Texas's bullshit anti-abortion/bounty-hunter law. I mean, that's pretty goddamn hack.

Madison never saw automatic weapons
and armor-piercing rounds coming. They
 would have been like phasers to him. 

Barrett insists that she's an originalist which means that she supports the original intent and wording of the Constitution, but mostly that's just what conservatives say when they leap to the defense of the gun lobby or when they rob women of basic body autonomy. The Constitution is a two and a half century old document and is constantly interpreted to meet the needs of the time. It's why so many people have assault rifles. The Court decided that when James Madison wrote about a well organized militia in the age of breach loaders, he also meant that your racist uncle could stockpile an arsenal of assault rifles in his basement. It's nonsense, but here we are.

Marriage equality is another thing the
Right pretended was about originalsim,
but really they just don't like gay stuff.

But interpretation is also why you can marry whomever you want. Because things change. And they know that and they're not there to offer an originalist interpretation anyway. They're there to impose their worldview on the rest of us, exactly like Amy Coney Barrett says they're not. Despite her protestations--or at least refusal to to express any opinions during her hearings, she's been vocally anti-choice her entire career and that's why she's there. That and because Mitch McConnell stole the appointment from Obama.

It's like, a third hack. A third.

Either Scalia died too close to the 2016 election or Bader Ginsburg died to close to the 2020. Not both. But that was the brain-meltingly hypocritical case made by Mitch McConnell when he sat on Merrick Garland's nomination and then when he rushed through Coney Barrett's. And since Brett "I Like Beer" Kavanaugh is only there because the electoral college handed Donald Trump the presidency over the will of the voters, I'd argue that the right-wing tilt of the court is entirely due to partisan hacksmanship. 

So while it's maybe not fair to say that the Court is "a bunch of partisan hacks," after all, some of them are duly appointed and reasonable people. I think it's completely correct to say that it's stacked with partisan hacks. 

I mean, is there anything more partisan hack-y than a sitting
Supreme Court Justice giving a speech at an organization named for
the partisan hack you basically stole a seat on the bench for her?

Nuhura!

You heard me, as in new Uhura. Actor and singer Celia Rose Gooding is playing a younger version of Uhura on Strange New Worlds, which, if you're a big huge nerd like myself is exciting news. If you're not, you'll have to take my word for it. 

Nuhura!

In a sci-fi arms race between Trek
and Wars, I suppose we all win.

Also a powder, because this whole thing is going to be Star Trek this and phasers that and if that's not your cuppa, you'll want to bail out now. Anyway, Strange New Worlds is like the ninth or tenth Star Trek show, and the fifth one in the last couple of years and I'm simultaneously stoked--do people still say stoked?--and also trepidatious. Trepidatious because holy shit, at some point enough is going to be enough and even big huge nerds like myself are going to say there're are too many Star Trek shows, but until that day comes, stoked. 

She also often got the short skirt, because 
Gene Roddenberry was kind of a creep.

So SNW (acronym!), if you're not in the know, is a prequel to the original show and a spin-off of Discovery which introduced Anson Mount playing Captain Pike and Ethan Peck as Spock. It's set on the Enterprise pre-Captain Kirk, so they could have gotten away with a bunch of new characters, but instead they are throwing in some younger versions of the original crew including Nurse Chapel, Doctor M'Benga (the Enterprise had two doctors, Bones was just the most famous one), and Cadet Uhura which I think is especially awesome because the character often got such short shrift on the old show.

Given the ship's endless supply of
no-name crew, couldn't they have
mind-wiped one of them instead?

Such a big deal was made about how progressive it was to have a Black woman on the original Star Trek--and it was legitimately a big deal--but at the same time she was basically a secretary and Kirk routinely shouted at her. Because the 1960's. Like, there are episodes in which she just doesn't appear in, with no explanation as to where a senior member of the crew is, and one time a sentient robot probe erased her memory. She had to be re-educated, loosing her entire personality and was essentially a new person from that point forward, but then she was just back at her desk the next week like nothing happened.

She didn't fare much better in the movies. In Star Trek III, they leave her back on Earth while the menfolk go and search for Spock, and in part VI, she's seen fumbling with a bunch of Klingon-English dictionaries as though part of her job wouldn't include being fluent in the language of the Federation's greatest foe. See? Short Shrift, made all the more frustrating given the character's (and actor Nichelle Nichols's) likability. 

Nerds at sci-fi conventions know more Klingon
then the ship's communications officer whose
actual job it is to speak Klingon. I mean, c'mon.

Get it? Sounds like oral sensitivity? 
Thanks for keeping it classy screenwriters
Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman.

Some of this was kind of made up for with Zoe Saldana's take on the character in the J. J. Abrams movies where she gets more to do, but at the same time she often got relegated to the role of Spock's girlfriend and target of Kirk's groping (no, really). And the less said about her aural sensitivity line, the better. No, you know what? Let's talk about that. In the reboot movie she complains to Spock that she should have gotten a better assignment since she's demonstrated her "aural sensitivity." 

Yup, they gave her a blow job joke. Lucky for us 2021 isn't 2009, and with the new Star Trek shows making way more of an effort to not be so gross and misogynistic, I'm hopeful that Celia Rose Gooding's Cadet Uhura will get better treatment than her predecessors. Of course, Alex "Blow Job Joke" Kurtman is also the show runner, so who can say?

Hey, here's a fun fact that speaks to how much the writers cared about the character:
Nyota Uhura didn't get her official, canonical first name until two thousand nine.
It took them forty three years to even bother to name the character. 

Marc Lore: Urban Planning Wizard

Cities have been a thing for what, ten thousand years? And Serial Entrepreneur and Investor has been a job description since never, so I guess what I'm saying is that I don't have a ton of faith that former Diapers.com founder and Walmart e-commerce CEO Marc Lore is going to be reinventing cities anytime soon.

Look out Uruk, here comes the Diapers.com guy with a better idea!

He didn't specifically mention hover
cars, but there's probably hover cars, right?

Does that make me a nay-sayer? Maybe, nevertheless, nay I say. According to Lore, telos was a term coined by Aristotle meaning end goal or purpose. I'm not sure how Lore would know that since Aristotle died twenty-three hundred years before the invention of the Ted Talk but here we are. Anyway, Lore is embarking on a project to build a planned city named Telosa--so like, telos with an "a." Lore says that Telosa will be as diverse as New York, as clean and as efficient as Tokyo, and as wisely and as equitably run as Stockholm. 

It will be ecologically sustainable and house five million people. The whole thing will cost about four hundred billion dollars and will be built over four decades, somewhere in the desert, the exact location is still TBD. Holy shit, a brave new world is dawning! 

I mean, most of the planet will be a desert soon, so really, they could built this anywhere.

Pictured: everything wrong
with capitalism. 

Great, sign me up. Except don't sign me up because good intentions aside, serial entrepreneur and investor isn't a job and this whole thing smacks of the kind of billionaire bullshit that gave us rich people riding a dick rocket into low orbit. I'm not trying to be a jerk to Marc Lore. In his promotional video he touts the project's goals of equity and sustainability, and these are laudable. But his idea is basically why not build a city that doesn't suck? which is what everyone has wanted since the hunter gathers settled down and built roads and sewers and Starbucks. 

Maybe he can put together the investors to pull it off, but when it comes down to it, he's a capitalist rounding up other capitalists to invest in his city. And isn't capitalism the thing that's created the unequal and unsustainable situation we find our planet in in the first place? The answer I'm looking for is yes. I'm not saying I have a better idea, but leaning in to the one that set the Pacific Northwest on fire might not necessarily be the way to go.

"What are you talking about? Unfettered capitalism has worked out great for us."

-Rich people

"Sure, it seems unfair now, but wealth is going
to start trickling down any minute. Trust us."

-What the rich have been

 telling us for forty years

Like, investors don't invest their money in things without some assurance of a return, so right from the start, this thing is already fundamentally about making money and not, as Lore says in his commercial, "people centered." Am I just being cynical? Sure I am, but it's hard not to be. I mean, look at literally anything happening in the world right now. But I'm also hugely suspicious of utopian billionaires. Marc Lore is no Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk in terms of net worth but he's still a rich I think we've all learned not to pin out hopes on the rich because they're not looking out for anyone but themselves.

Above: and artists rendering of
basically every billionaire in America.

I mean if they--that is the people who control most of the world's wealth--wanted to, they could, as a class, wipe out hunger or homelessness or cut global carbon emissions. But they don't because then they wouldn't have the one thing that gives them power over the rest of us. So it's all oversized checks and grand charitable gestures, but at the end of the day they're still sitting atop their hoards like tax-dodging Smaugs, so what's in it for them?

"Sure, that would make more sense,
but I've already made up a name so..."

-Marc Lore

But let's say Lore comes up with the billions of dollars to build his city. Wouldn't that money be better spent fixing cities that already exist? Having potable drinking water in 21st century America is not a given, so why not do something about that? In California, PG&E shuts off our power because they spent all the money we gave them to fix the grid on bonuses for their CEO's, so maybe give us a hand? Or he could slap four hundred billion dollars worth of solar panels on everyone's roofs. My point is there's probably better, more efficient people centered things he could do with the money, but they're not as sexy and don't make for great pitch videos for investors.

Or, and I don't know, go with me on this, but instead of waiting for a bunch of billionaires to play Sim City with real money, what if there was some kind of system where people had to contribute a portion of their income to say, some kind of governmental agency, and then they use that money to provide municipal services or improve infrastructure? 

Yes! Like taxes, except what if rich people had to pay them too?

Thanks Hiram...

Just...just don't be a goon, alright? I dropped my ballot in the mail today and-huh? What ballot? I'm glad I pretended you asked. My ballot for the recall election, and no, I didn't procrastinate, I just moved back to California and only now got it in the mail.

Above: me, filling in a circle as emphatically as one can. 

If it ever seems like I'm being harsh when
I call it the party of garbage people, bear this
in mind: fake ballot boxes. I rest my case.

If you don't live here or just haven't been paying attention, when it comes to elections, California is...I don't know, what's the phrase? Fucked? There's this system by which if someone can get enough people to sign a petition, it triggers a recall. The problem is that the number is pretty low (12% of the votes cast in the previous election for the office you want to recall), so like, any asshole can do it. And by any asshole, I mean the state's Republican Party. Remember them? They were the ones setting up fake ballot boxes during the 2020 election.

Anyway, making things even worse is the fact that you vote on whether you want to recall the Governor, and if you do you can then vote for one of a number of replacements. And that number is a staggering, eye-watering forty-six. Forty six. 

A menu with too many choices almost guarantees disappointment.

I mean, an American Gladiator-like
 competition would actually be more
democratic then this nonsense.

A veritable goat rodeo of third tier celebrities, fringe loonies, and randos. And whoever gets the most votes is the new governor. But hey, that's democracy, right? But hang on. If Governor Newsom looses, then the winner is whoever gets the most votes of the forty-six other possible contenders, so our next governor could easily be someone who gets like ten percent of the population actually voted for or ever heard of before. That's how Arnold Schwarzenegger got to be governor that time. I guess he was kind of ok? I don't know, I didn't live here back then.

But no such luck this time. Of the challengers the front runner appears to be Larry Elder, an anti-mask, anti-vax libertarian who wants to fight homelessness by suspending the Environmental Quality Act...for some reason. 

He knows this state is on fire, right?

To be clear, they want to recall Newsom
because the pandemic isn't over because
they won't wear masks like Newsom asked.

You might be asking yourself: "holy shit how is this even how this works?" Well, obviously Republicans who, butthurt about having to take simple precautions to save lives, have taken it upon themselves to harness the general misery to try and seize power. But we can also blame historical Republicans for the system that makes it possible. Although this was back in the olden days where instead of disenfranchising anyone not a white male, they were actually about suffrage and fighting corporate interests. 

The idea was to make it easier to get rid of shitty elected officials without having to go through an impeachment process which, I mean, we could have shaved years of the Trump era if this had been an option.. But the bar to trigger it is just so low and the way the replacement is selected is just so objectively batshit, I don't understand why someone hasn't fixed this yet. If Newsom survives this, maybe he could, you know, do something about it?

Pictured: Early 20th century California governor Hiram Johnson,
whose fault all of this is, seen here threatening us? I guess?

I have opinions about other people's dogs

Pictured: the 1986 Oscars were also not
Burning Man, but we're not discussing that.

Hey, I'm back and I'll even spare you the embarrassment of not even noticing that I was gone. I was not at Burning Man, which is to say I was in the desert, in the place where Burning Man usually happens, doing Burning Man stuff, but I was instead at an event that was similar to, but legally distinct for liability purposes from, Burning Man. The actual event was cancelled because people are dumb and think there are microchips in the vaccine, so where we are. Or were, not at Burning Man for a week. And now I'm going to talk about it.

Evidently EDM is a strong organizational
motivator. That or people just really love
doing drugs in the desert. 

The unofficial event was unofficially called Renegade Burn and it was pretty good. It lacked the organization, art, and infrastructure of the real thing, but we managed. A group on Facebook materialized after the announcement that it was canceled and self organized a rough approximation of the city layout that I think people more or less stuck to. And, while not anything anyone had any control over, the weather was decent, which, in the sun-blasted wastes of northern Nevada, is never a given. All in all it was a good year, and no, I didn't take any pictures, so you can relax. I'm not going force you to sit through my vacation slides this year.

But I am going to make you sit through my opinions about dogs. Or, more precisely, dog owners. There were dogs out there this year, which is something that's not been allowed at Burning Man for years, but this being an unofficial thing, all bets were off and a lot of people brought their damn dogs. And you know I'm not a pet person, but let me be clear that my issue is with the people and not the dogs. I am dog indifferent. Dognostic, if you will (you shouldn't). But I certainly don't want to see them come to harm and come to harm they did.

I look at this and feel nothing. I know, I'm the worst.

First timers are invited to roll around in it,
but they're, you know, sentient and can
make their own terrible decisions. 

Renegade Burn happened in a dry lake bed in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. The ground is made up of a sometimes compacted, sometimes not, dry, powdery dust that's like super alkali and awful on the skin. People can wear shoes, but dogs can't. And did I mention how hot it can get? Because it can get hot. It was in the upper 90's a lot of the time and dogs have, you know, fur. Or hair. Or both? I don't know, I'm not a vet, the point is dogs didn't evolve for this climate so what is with these people who thought their dogs would like to spend a week panting and limping around on dry, cracked foot pads?

What's worse is that people are now finding dogs wandering the desert because the asshats that brought them couldn't see their way clear to keeping an eye on them. So now they're lost. Awesome. Again, I don't care about dogs, but I do care that people take care of their dogs. I mean, I'm not a monster. Cold and unfeeling, sure, but not a monster.

Pictured: Somebody's dog. Is this your dog? If so, what were you thinking?