Wait a minute. Here they come again! Everybody DOWN! Damn it. Okay, that was just a pizza delivery to the neighbors. You can all stand up again.
Oh, hi. Kind of caught us at a bad time, actually. We are in the midst of a coordinated drone attack. No, not the military kind they use overseas. These are domestic drones of the kind you can buy at the corner store. As you may have heard, there are now hundreds of thousands of these suckers. The skies are black with them. One flock covers three whole states, and when they move … oh, it’s like THUNDER! (No, wait … that was the buffalo, as described by a space archeologist on Star Trek. Sorry.)
Now, when I say “attack”, I don’t exactly mean they are targeting us. It’s just that there are so freaking many of these things, it starts to feel like an assault after a while. The pizza delivery joint down the street is using one. So is the florist. And last week our nasty neighbors bought one for their fourteen year old, and the first thing the little sucker did with it was drop a water balloon on the man-sized tuber. (Actually, he rather likes that in as much a there hasn’t been a lot of rain lately … but that’s not the point!)
The ones that really annoy me are those mosquito-sized drones. I don’t even know how they manage to engineer a flying machine that tiny. Where do they find bicycle parts small enough to make that thing fly? They somehow even designed them so that they can replicate themselves by dropping little developmental nodules into standing water, which later hatch and …. hey … or maybe those are just mosquitoes. Okay, um … forget that last bit.
I should put out notice to our neighbors that their new-found obsession with drone technology is a bit like whacking a hornet’s nest with a stick. They need to be reminded that we have a mad scientist in residence by the name of Mitch Macaphee. He hasn’t taken much notice of the flying machines thus far, buried as he is in his laboratory. But I think it’s just a matter of time, frankly. And yes, he is the designer of Marvin (my personal robot assistant), but don’t let that fool you. Not all of his inventions are non-threatening lumps of useless technology. (Sorry, Marvin.)
Gary Johnson, on the other hand, is clearly not the brightest ex-governor on the porch and hasn’t made much of a case for why young people should give their vote to a ticket that’s floated in part with Koch money, most likely. Perhaps his supporters are not aware that he would slash spending on just about any program that ever benefited them in any way. If American style libertarianism is about anything, it’s about that. Not that it’s likely to be much of a problem – he, like Stein, have no conceivable path to victory in this election. All they have is an extraordinary opportunity to hand Donald Trump and the hyper-reactionary Republican party an electoral victory this November that they don’t deserve and that will have repercussions for many years to come.
something more appropriate to the century we’re living in. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has suggested we start recording on cylinders or wire. Damn it, it’s been done, Marvin! Come up with something new, like, I don’t know … recording on bricks.
What would light a fire under these voters? Well, a more determined and effective candidate, for one. The Democrats have a good platform, they just need to push it harder. But there’s also clearly identifying and characterizing the opposition, not in terms of the singular problem of Trump but rather the broader Republican party as it is currently comported. Trump is a bombastic idiot and a hypersensitive man-baby with tiny hands, but his xenophobic rants reflect the core of the party that nominated him. Clinton should make that clear.
Marvin (my personal robot assistant) tends to get a little busier in the Autumn months. I think he may have volunteered for one of the political campaigns, actually. He seems to be taking an awful lot of phone calls just lately, and one of our friendlier neighbors (i.e. the guy without the pitchfork) told me Marvin was handing out flyers in the town square. (Fun fact about this little burg: the town square is round. So why don’t the cars have square wheels? Riddle me THAT, Batman.)
Truth be told, I have seldom been so gob-smacked by the stupidity of a presidential candidate. Sure, Dubya was a tremendous dumb-ass. Sure, Dan Quayle couldn’t spell and thought Mexicans spoke Latin. Sure, Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson apparently thinks “Aleppo” is the name of a new recreational drug. Donald Trump is in a whole other category. Basic concepts about the nature of the world appear to be beyond his grasp. At the forum, he repeated his opinion that we should have “taken the oil” when we invaded Iraq. Asked to elaborate, he poked around the notion of leaving a few people there to stand guard over it, as if it was a small, contiguous, manageable object and not a massive natural resource that’s part of the geology of that unfortunate country.
That said, we do have uses for our time. Matt is chasing birds around most of the week, though he does show up regularly to continue our glacial-pace production on the next collection of songs. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has been taking an automaton sabbatical these last couple of weeks. (His battery pack has been removed and put on a deep charger. We may end up having to jump start him like a ’95 Buick LeSabre.) Mitch Macaphee has taken off to check on his property in orbit around Proxima Centauri (Proxima b) – he’s gotten very jumpy now that the astronomers have stumbled onto that little piece of celestial real estate. Not sure what he’s been doing up there.
I am a fan of the Majority Report, particularly of their interview segments. This one is a must read for anyone frustrated with the state of legislative politics both on the state and the national levels. Dailey has done a deep dive into the Republican strategy to control redistricting after the 2010 census. Their calculated assault on the democratic process was wildly successful and will probably guarantee them House majorities for the rest of this decade and beyond. Using big data, sophisticated demographic mapping, and enough money to tip the balance in key state-level races in key states (i.e., states that would be redistricted after 2010), the GOP ran the table, catching the Democrats flat-footed. It’s a sobering indictment of the Dems’ lack of engagement and a real must-listen.
Proxima b, as a staging area for some of his experiments. Why pick that one and not, say, Wolf 1061c? Well, it’s closer, for one thing. Like I said, the fucker is impatient as hell – he doesn’t want to spend a lot of time in transit. And while he does do some of his mad science work in remote areas of our own planet, Proxima b (or “Sven Njordlosc’s planet” as Mitch strangely calls it) gives him the space to do fun stuff like change the composition of the atmosphere or switch the gravity on and off a couple of times in rapid succession. Great times!
Conway is a good con artist. I suppose you could find her convincing if you choose to forget that in 2012, Trump was birther-in-chief, claiming that his operatives were turning up “unbelievable” stuff on Obama’s birth certificate – a campaign that was always about race, about being the “other”, about legitimacy. I suppose you could buy what she’s selling if you choose to forget the last year or so of fevered rhetoric – NOT gaffes or errors, but deliberate, repeated statements – about immigration, about foreign policy, about law enforcement policy. And I suppose you could believe Conway’s contention that Trump is a hard-working, honest fellow who treats people well if you haven’t been paying attention to the last 30 years of his very public life. I guess you can believe whatever you want to believe if you try really, really hard.