A Curious Little Blog

There is a popular video on YouTube right now, a skit from Saturday Night live about a game of " Black Jeopardy ."  If you haven't seen it, you should, both because it is funny and because I think there are a lot of things about race relations in America to learn from it (though perhaps not always the things that most people take from it). But I don't want to talk about race relations; I want to talk about politics.  At one point, Tom Hanks's character responds to the Jeopardy "answer" "They out here saying that every vote counts" with "Come on, they already decided who wins even before it happens."  And in the skit, it is axiomatic that this is a standard view of blacks in America, as well as an assumption shared by many whites.  This strikes me as extraordinary. I say it is extraordinary, although I grew up among people who thought along similar lines.  What is extraordinary is that no political analysts that I am aware of ever

That grandiose title is simply meant to convey that people can be stupid about some things and not others.  I enjoy a good collection of people saying stupid things on the internet as much as anyone; this one , for example.  All of these are cases of people being too ignorant for most people even to fathom, but let's consider how they are being ignorant for a moment. Several are, of course, about spelling, or knowing the sound of a word without thinking of what it really represents:  "hall of cost" for holocaust, "meaty oaker" for mediocre (that one gets me every time), "flaming young" for filet mignon, "synonym rolls" for cinnamon rolls, "Rosetta Stone" for Rosa Parks.  Although they evince terrible spelling, in none of these cases is the person getting the meaning wrong because of misunderstanding the root.  The last one is not so much spelling as a person who has heard a name getting it mixed up with something that sounds simil

This election is going to be bad for conservatism no matter what the result.  I think the tendency is for conservatives, even those who don't like Trump, to think that a victory for him would still be marginally better than another Democratic presidency.  That may be -- but then again, it may not be.  I know the primary reason for this feeling is that it is the only hope of keeping the Supreme Court from being completely liberal.  This is true, but I'm not sure this is a winning battle in the long run.  Conservatives hope the Supreme Court won't invent new "rights" and entitlements that further expand government and limit freedom, but liberals have little to fear from an activist conservative court because conservative justices are, on principle, opposed to activism from the bench.  Moreover, the court system as a whole is so filled with liberal judges that conservatives often need the Supreme Court to overturn lower court rulings that have already been made and s

I read a few weeks ago that Elon Musk, and apparently a lot of other people, think we are very likely living in a simulation .  His argument goes like this: The strongest argument for us probably being in a simulation, I think, is the following: Forty years ago we had Pong--two rectangles and a dot. That is what games were. Now 40 years later we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously and it's getting better every year. And soon we'll have virtual reality, we'll have augmented reality. If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality. Although this seems to be a popular view among the technological elite in San Francisco, there are people who disagree.  Some people think it is more likely that humanity will destroy itself before we get to the level of simulations required.  Another line of argument is that the technology is harder than Musk is giving it credit fo

For conservatives, this is a sad election any way it turns out, but there are advantages as well as disadvantages in every situation.  I haven't gotten the sense that either major candidate has a big advantage to this point, but it seems that the edge is to Clinton.  If that happens and we do find ourselves with a third consecutive Democratic win in a presidential election, obviously that wouldn't be good for conservatives on the whole.  On the other hand, a Trump win might be even worse, so let's consider the possible advantages that might accrue to conservatives from a Clinton victory. The one thing that everyone is concerned about is the Supreme Court.  It is almost inconceivable that Hillary Clinton would not appoint a very liberal justice to fill Scalia's spot, and there may be two or more retirements in the next four years as well.  The Supreme Court, which has been pretty tightly balanced for years now, would become (barring unprecedented rejections on the part

Typically, the vice presidential candidate is viewed as an attack dog:  someone who can make edgy attacks on the other side while the presidential candidate remains dignified.  This is exactly reversed in the Trump/Pence ticket.  Trump says edgy things all the time; Pence is a stabilizing influence who pooh-poohs his running mate's wilder attacks. We have never had a president who wasn't an avowed Christian.  I was struck by the fact that both Kaine and Pence seem to be serious in their faith, unlike many politicians who are Christian mostly because it is a political disadvantage not to be, at least nominally.  But we will have an atheist president soon, I would venture.  Kaine and Pence grew up at a time when most Americans were raised Christian as a matter of course.  I think the next generation contains many more people who were raised either indifferent to religion or hostile to it.  I would be surprised if we didn't have an atheist or agnostic president in the next 2