Political Issues part 1: Health Care

I'm what I call a progressive democrat.  I put the word progressive in there to separate myself from institutional democrats because the democratic party has been almost as corrupt as the republican party.  Well... not the recent republican party.  That group of politicians is a criminal organization... flat out... no exaggeration: the GOP is no better than the Mob, the Yakuza, or a drug cartel and Trump is not the source of it... but he brought it up into the spotlight, and is making things worse.  What galls me though is that his supporters still support him.  I'm told it's because his supporters believe the crap he spews at his rallies, and they ignore pretty much everything else.

It's a fact that Trump lies constantly.  The first one I remember was when he lied about something he said during the presidential debate.  During the live debate broadcast on many channels including Fox, Trump claimed that not paying taxes makes him smart.  The next day when he was asked about it, again on national news, he denied he ever said it.  It jarred me at the time, and I had no idea it was going to be his standard operating procedure.  He provably lies all the time... and it doesn't seem to bother anyone that supports him.  If he claims he's doing good things, why do they believe him when everyone else is saying that he's making things worse?

I meant that introduction to try to explain my political mindset so I could start this essay with the reader understanding me a little.  I suppose my railing against Trump also gives a clear indication of my political views, but the conclusion of this essay was meant to be that Trump is awful and his supporters are being dumb to support him.  So, I'm going to bring up issues that are important and that pretty much everyone has strong opinions on, and ask you (the reader) to think about the issue separate from politics and propaganda terms.  I'm going to start with health care...

Health Care
Currently, each of us that has a job pays some amount from each pay check for health insurance.  That money goes to a corporation.  Then to use the insurance, you provide your information to a medical facility of some kind and you still pay a portion of the bill.  The medical facility tries to get money from the insurance company, and for simple things like check ups, it's pretty likely it'll work okay.  But do you have a story of a time you tried to get money from an insurance company and had to argue with them to get covered?  Have you heard of others having a difficult time getting coverage?  I understand that an insurance company wants to make sure that a big claim is not fraud, but think about what is happening...

You pay money every month.  According to this website (https://www.ehealthinsurance.com/resources/affordable-care-act/much-health-insurance-cost-without-subsidy), the average family plan costs over $1100 per month.  Some companies subsidize part of that cost, but if you get paid twice a month that means up to $550 per pay check.  You can look at your own pay stub to see how much it is if the insurance is coming out of your check.  If you're paying individual, you might be paying $100 to $200 a pay period.

What that money goes to is a company owned by a small number of people, with a small number of chief level officers.  Lots of people are employed there, so the fact that it creates jobs is good.  But, the money is not divided fairly.  You already have the notion of insurance fighting to not cover big expenses.  To be clear, you have been paying this insurance company likely for years, and possibly decades... possibly $1100 a month... for a total of tens of thousands of dollars.  And insurance companies fight you when you need some of that money back.

While they're fighting you, the bigwigs in the company get million dollar bonuses on top of extravagant pay.  The average CEO for example gets paid 300 times what the average normal employee gets.  Three hundred times!  According to this article... it's 361 times: https://aflcio.org/press/releases/ceo-pay-soars-361-times-average-worker.  Average pay in this country is about forty-five thousand dollars a year.  That would mean that the average CEO gets paid about sixteen MILLION dollars a year.  Think about that money while you remember that insurance companies try to avoid covering people whenever possible.  Sometimes there is fraud.  I'm not going to deny that.  I'm saying that insurance companies pay their CEOs a lot of money while at the same time fighting to not do what insurance is supposed to be for... and we have co-pays.

I have a personal story about health insurance companies that is relevant.  I worked for a software subsidiary of one of the big health insurance companies a number of years ago.  I have a clear memory of a year where we were told that the parent company was not doing well financially, so no one was getting a raise that year... not even a cost of living raise.  It was that dire according to them.  But when the public numbers were announced, the CEO got a bonus in the millions of dollars.  A bonus.  Millions of dollars.  At the end of a year where we the employees were told the company wasn't doing well.  I had someone try to explain that you have to do that to keep the CEO interested in working there... but... that's fucking ridiculous.  The CEO is not doing a very good job if the company isn't doing well enough to give out cost of living raises.  Why reward that?  What were they doing with their really high pay?  Why do they get millions in bonus when none of their employees get a cost of living raise?

What I'm trying to point out is that the health insurance industry is for-profit and it's something of a scam the way it is now.  Do you agree?  Do you agree that we pay a lot of money into a system that does what it can to deny us coverage (use of our own money) while lining the pockets of the people at the top with our money?  Do you feel like it's good that the people at the top end up with millions or billions of dollars while their employees struggle?  Or while you are the one giving the company that money?  Would you choose to allocate the money that way?  And do you like that because it's a for-profit industry, denying as much coverage as possible is how they increase their profits?  Think about that motivation.  The health insurance company who's purpose from our point of view is to help us with unexpected big medical costs so we don't end up bankrupt or in deep debt, actually has the purpose of making a profit for the owners.

So, do you like this system?  Do you like the way things are now?  What if I told you that you could use the same set up where money is taken from your pay check directly, but you'd pay less?  What if I told you that in addition to you paying less, all those employees in the health insurance industry would have jobs... just for a different organization?  And would it tickle you as much as it tickles me that the super-rich sacks of crap that have been scamming us for years would no longer have us as a source of income?  How is that possible?  Switch to government-run tax-funded health care.

The common complaints I've heard about such a thing...

• Where will you get the money?!  Well, it's still coming from us, but we pay less to taxes, and save money by not paying the for-profit health insurance companies.  The money comes from the same place, just goes through a different path and doesn't cost as much.
• But I don't want to pay for someone who is mooching off the system!  I actually agree with the basic idea that I don't want to pay for a mooch.  But I think there's an incorrect idea that all people who are currently unemployed are mooches.  That's unfair.  I've been unemployed before and was part of the statistic.  I got unemployment pay and had the option of that cobra health insurance.  But I found new jobs and got back into paying into the system.  I've been paying health insurance companies and taxes since 1996 with only the small breaks of unemployment in there.  I think you need to worry less about people mooching, and remember that you'll pay less for a government run tax-funded system regardless of mooches.
• But this is SOCIALISM!  Yup.  And?  So what?  Our police force is a government run tax-funded program too.  So is the military.  So are public schools.  So are fire departments.  So are road and bridge maintenance.  Suggesting that an idea is bad because it fits the definition of socialism is dumb.  Instead, look at the idea.  Who cares if it fits a political term or not?  I'm not suggesting we turn the United States into a big socialist country.  That wouldn't work either.  I'm suggesting we use socialist ideas when they're good.  I'm happy to use capitalist ideas when they're good... but in the case of health care, the capitalist idea leaves us with incredibly rich people at the top charging us more than is necessary to provide a service that isn't as good as it should be.  I prefer the good idea to the bad idea.

If we switch to health-care for all, run as a government program, we as citizens pay less money; get better service; AND there's this incredible added bonus that a poor family with a child that has a heart defect doesn't have to go into debt for the rest of their lives to save the child's life.  I very much love the idea that the money I pay would go partly to helping people in real need.

I'll end the section on health care there.  I hope you got something out of reading all of that.  I think I'm going to make this its own blog post, and create another one for the next section.  As I create more sections, I'll go back and edit links into each post.  I think the next section will be about that salary gap I mentioned...

Movie Review: Star Wars Episodes 7 and 8... another attempt

I've already written a lot about my thoughts on the new Star Wars numbered episodes.  Specifically at this point it's episode 7 and episode 8.  To set your expectations early: I dislike them both vehemently.  I very much like the new characters.  Those are great, and I understand we couldn't build an adventure story on sixty-year-olds... so new characters were necessary.  I have no complaints there.  But the treatment of the setting and the old characters appalls me.  Also, the writing for the plot is extremely lazy.  I will give credit that some of the specific lines are well written.  I loved the exchange between Han, Chewbacca, and Finn on Star Killer base when they're talking about their plan.  I'll also give credit and say that the actors did great jobs.  No complaints about the actors, and it upsets me that some people have given any of the actors a hard time.  The actress who played Rose comes to mind.  There is no need to spread hate that way.

But yes: the movies themselves were offensively poorly written, and I am furious at the writers for mucking things up so badly.

Back to my point about having written a lot already...
Episode 7 review
Episode 8 review
Episode 8 review #2
A review of the flaws as I see them in episodes 1 to 7


There are more blog posts I've written about Star Wars, but those are the ones relevant to this review I think.  If you want to understand my severe dislike for episodes 7 and 8, those posts might help.  I'm going to try to collect my thoughts nicely in this review though, in hopes of having something I can present to help my friends understand my point of view.  I feel like I must not be conveying something right, because I still have friends who defend the movies.

I'm going to start from a different spot than I usually do.  I'm going to start from where I believe Episode 7 should have started from, in an attempt to convey something that is agreeably better than what they actually did.

To do that, the set up is that nothing new about what happens after Episode 6 comes out for 30 years unless you look at the novels.  Episode 7 is coming out, and you have an enormous fan base that loves the original trilogy and wants to know what happened.  My expectation was that episode 7 would be a re-introduction to the setting including some of the history of what's been happening; including what the existing characters have been up to;  including introduction of new characters; and including introduction of the new problem the heroes have to overcome.

Episode 7 failed on most of those points.  It was a weak re-introduction to the setting.  It barely hinted at all that time that's passed.  And the old characters are broken up and doing... exactly what they were doing before episode 4... Luke was hanging out doing nothing; Leia was participating in the rebellion; and Han was back to smuggling.  And the final failure is the introduction of a new problem the heroes have to overcome... because it's the same problem from the original trilogy.  The Empire is still the fascist organization with military control over the galaxy, and rebels are still the underdog group.  They're just called different things.  The only thing episode 7 accomplished was introducing new characters.

So, not only did episode 7 fail to deliver what I hoped for, but it couldn't even manage any originality.  They even make fun of themselves for it with the comment about a bigger death star.  But it's such a copy of episode 4 that it's hard to understand why more people aren't upset, and really hard to understand why no one on the project spoke up to tell everyone else they had to write a new script.  My episode 7 review has a pretty good list of the copies.  It's pretty blatant once you start thinking it through.

It's in that review too... but I really dislike the treatment of Han in Episode 7.  I get that Harrison Ford wanted his character to die, and I can really appreciate a death in the story that has meaning and which can elicit tears.  But Han's death felt dumb.  Kylo tricks him with acting like he wants his dad's help to come back to the light side, and the savvy smuggler that has been dealing with people for years just falls for it.  I get that a father likely has a big blind spot about their kids... but we can show that Kylo is callous and evil plenty easy with Han not ending that way.  I feel like the writers failed to make a good end for one of the best characters of the original trilogy.  And I'm mad at them for it.

I'll also mention my hate for the utterly stupid backbone of the plot, which was the holographic star map to Luke Skywalker (another copy from episode 4: droid carries data both sides want...).  Why would you need a path through space to get to a point in space?  That would be like saying: I need to get to San Diego, but the starting point is Montreal... no matter what.  That path between those two places is the only way to get between them.  It's really dumb.  All you need is the destination... and you can get there from anywhere else.  No need for a path through space.  And then for some reason the map is broken into two pieces.  The Empire and R2-D2 each have one piece of the map, and the sought after chunk was recovered on a desert world in a dingy sand town.  Who came up with that crap?

We find out later why Luke is missing, during episode 8, but at this point, all we know is that he's missing and everyone wants to find him.  And there's a dumb map... instead of just coordinates that can be transmitted in a few seconds.  I hate the map.  And I hate the "Luke is missing" story foundation.

As I said above, what I wanted was to see the familiar, and to learn the changes.  What episode 7 should have done is opened up with Han, Luke, Leia, and probably Chewbacca.  We would probably find out Luke has successfully been running a jedi academy for decades, Leia is retiring from government service finally, and Han wants them to go on a vacation.  But they get sucked back in to something... the First Order is a small up-and-coming military organization that is causing problems, including reports of First Order assaults including some lightsaber wielders.  Ben Solo is introduced as a student of Luke's... before he's gone to the dark side... so we can see that moment and understand it better... probably in episode 8.  It would matter so much more.  Rey is a pilot they run into, and Luke sees her potential and it's easy to sweep her into it.  Finn is something they meet during the first real battle with the First Order, and he surrenders to them... and they find out Finn is not a clone like previous troopers.  Poe can be a current member of Rogue Squadron who are sent as escorts for whatever mission occurs.  The old characters working with the new people can pass the torch.  Luke sees Rey in trouble and he throws his lightsaber to her... and at first she's confused, but then starts wrecking house...  First Order retreats, and Snoke and his Knights of Ren suffer their first real defeat.

If Harrison Ford is insistent on his character dying in episode 7, maybe we see Kylo turn on the group.  Han is aghast, and asks why... begs him to stop.  They're alone for some reason.  Whatever.  Kylo tells him that he joined the Knights of Ren months ago... that his power is greater than it ever was under Luke's instruction.  Han won't get out of the way.  Kylo kills him to get past, and it affects his character for the rest of the trilogy.  Chewbacca catches up at the wrong moment and sees it happen, and starts shooting at Kylo who runs to catch up with the First Order and leaves with them.

Really... I just can't figure out why nothing changed in 30 years... Empire, Rebellion, and all the old characters are doing nothing.

Episode 7 could have been so much better.  I'm upset that it didn't come close to its potential.  But it did give us two things to work with for episode 8...

• Rey's mystery parents
• Snoke and the Knights of Ren

And to move into my episode 8 portion of the review: Everything that episode 7 bothered to set for episode 8 is cast aside as meaningless.  The big reveal about Rey's parents is that they weren't anyone special.  Okay.  So, a fairly major part of the previous movie is turned into a statement about how you don't have to descend from someone special to be special.  That's fine.  But they got that point in the most ridiculous time-wasting way.  They set us up with all this intrigue about who here parents were, and then let us down.  It was anti-climactic, and not nearly as fascinating as other options are based on the setup given.  I want either for Rey to have been from no one special and make that point, or have Rey be the child of someone cool... maybe Obiwan Kenobi's granddaughter and explain how his life was more interesting than we thought.  The combination of making us curious and then laughing at us with the completely different direction is offensive.  [Edit for clarification]:  It seems to me that episode 7 was setting us up for the cool parents track, and episode 8 favored the track where you don't have to come from something amazing to be amazing.  Both are fine by themselves.  But we got a whole movie bringing us along on one track, and then the other movie made the first one meaningless.

The second bit about the Knights of Ren and Snoke was disappointing too.  I'll admit that how Kylo killed him in episode 8 is pretty cool, but suddenly that set up was thrown away too.  Who were the Knights of Ren?  Where did another powerful dark-side Force user come from?  Is this finally our window into part of the past thirty years?  No?  Oh... it's just a mechanism for Kylo to overcome an obstacle?  Okay... well... I guess that part of episode 7 was useless too.  We had setup, and then it gets thrown in the trash.

Don't forget to take a look at my two reviews of episode 8 I linked above.  But I'll try to convey what I think in a clearer way here.

Episode 8 is a pile of garbage with a couple okay nuggets if you scrounge for them.  I already mentioned that it throws away groundwork laid by episode 7.  It seems to want to be a stand alone movie that craps on the Star Wars universe with it's intentional choices, and also with its ignorance of Star Wars seen in some super lazy writing.

The premise of the movie is that the rebels are fleeing the empire again, but this time a hyperspace jump won't do the trick because they have a new sensor thing that lets them figure out where you went.  And we end up with the dumbest chase scene of any I've ever heard of.  That includes the chase scenes in Benny Hill which are at least amusing.  And this is the backbone of the plot for this movie.  Other things happen around it, but the writers went to a lot of trouble to make crap up so the Empire is on the heels of the Rebels for most of the movie... and the rebels are running out of fuel.  The writers had to invent a new sensor and invent the problem of running out of fuel.  A severe flaw to this setup is that the rebels are all just sitting on their ships for the whole movie and the Empire is just sitting on theirs.  They don't bother calling smaller faster ships.  They don't send their own bombers ahead.  I mean... Kylo did destroy the hanger with the rebel fighters in it.  The bombers ought to be able to fly faster than the behemoth ship the rebels are on.  What a horribly lazy backbone for the plot.  I hate it.

All the other parts of the story are built around that.  Let's start with Finn.  Finn meets Rose, who is a fine character, and they come up with the idea about breaking into the empire ship to stop its tracking device without them knowing it's not working, so the fleet can jump away.  And actually... I could get behind that idea.  And if they had a small ship they could use and the rebels dump their trash... to hide the ship that's got most of its systems shut down... we use an idea like in Empire Strikes back to camouflage a ship.  Something we've seen before, but used differently.  I like it.  They sneak aboard the big ship and try to complete their plan.  It's maybe a bit much of a copy of shutting down tractor beams... but it's better than what they did.

They decided they needed a code breaker to fool some sensors on the imperial ship.  And of course, none of the rebels you have handy are capable of this feat.  I'm sure they're all just accountants and massage therapists.  So, how do you find a code breaker?  You take a ship and jump through hyperspace to find someone at an opulent casino town.  Good thing the rebel leaders didn't know that ship was available to send someone to send a message asking for help.  Nope... they waited for the base that should have communication equipment strong enough to send a message all over the place.  Good thinking rebel leaders.  Why bother using the small ships you have to save people at all?  Why use them to get your message out now instead of later?  I hate this part of the writing too.  It's awful logic.

So anyway, Finn and Rose go on their adventure where we get the bluntly stated message that business is immoral.  They sell weapons to whoever can pay, and profit on war and misery.  That's a fine message, and I agree with it, but I didn't need it to soak up 45 minutes of my precious little time of a new Star Wars movie.  It's like the pod races in episode 1... completely offensively useless.

They find their code breaker and leave the planet after getting to ride some nice animals.  And we get hit over the head with the "business is immoral" message again.  They make their way back to the slow chase scene that's happening and manage to get on the bad guy's ship.  Hooray!  But wait!  They completely fail at their mission and only through the blessing of plot armor do they get away... so they can meet back up with the people they left much earlier in the movie.

The one good thing to come out of this entire side quest is that Finn gets to know Rose better and he realizes that Rey isn't the only person he cares about helping.  He realizes he wants to help the rebellion against his former masters.  That's good... but it could have been accomplished entirely without the waste of time and definitely more easily if the movie wasn't built on the slow chase in space.  Corporate greed could have been detailed if the setting for the movie had included cities and rebels looking for help.  Rose and Finn might easily have ended up working together on whatever other plan was given... even using the bit about him trying to escape to find Rey and the humor of Rose stopping him from fleeing.

We have Finn figuring out he wants to help the rebellion and we have that scene where he's chosen to give his life to destroy a battering ram weapon that will expose and probably kill a bunch of the people he's chosen to help.  It's actually a really good moment for Finn, but Rose comes screaming in and rams him out of the way... an act that would probably kill them both at the speeds they were going.  Her reasoning is that love will fight off the darkness better than destroying things.  Except... now the big gun fires, and all their friends are exposed and probably screwed.  It was dumb, and robbed Finn of a pretty awesome hero moment.  But I can understand them not wanting Finn to die yet.  I just think their explanation is lousy.

That's Finn's arc.  Holy crap there's so much more.  Okay... let's hit Luke's arc next.

We come to find out that Luke's character has been assassinated like Han's.  We went from the original trilogy where Luke is the most optimistic person in the galaxy who redeemed his horrifically evil father that had been responsible for countless deaths... to the frightened pessimist who was willing even for a moment to consider killing his nephew?  What kind of awful writer comes up with that crap?  I can imagine a Luke struggling with running a Jedi Academy, but considering killing his nephew when he forgave and redeemed his father is not in the character.  It's wrong.  It's bad writing.  It's offensive to the character of Luke Skywalker.  I despise this aspect of the movie.

What episode 8 should have done for Luke is give him a GOOD reason for having gone off to be alone for a while... maybe even answer why the map from episode 7 was a path instead of a set of coordinates by saying that reports of Luke had been found on each point along the way... Luke is looking for something pretty hard, and purposely avoiding contact to keep his trail as hidden as possible.  You wouldn't want to bring the First Order to the places he's been and endanger the innocent people there.  But we didn't get a good story for Luke.  We got utter garbage.

And the garbage for Luke ended with him dying at the end of the movie for no reason at all.  He was tired?  Again, I'm fine with handing off the story to the next generation in the Skywalker story (because that's what the numbered episodes are), but there was no reason to kill off Luke, and so much awesome potential for keeping him around (not in ghost form).

Han is dead; Luke is dead (but presumably a ghost); and no new scenes can be shot for Leia because Carrie Fisher passed away.  I hate the writer... what's his name?  Rian Johnson?  I think it's awful when actors are given a hard time for something they had no control over.  The person that should be shunned from the entertainment industry for this pile of crap is Rian Johnson.  That guy sucks at writing, and his ineptitude destroyed something that should have been wonderful.  He deserves punishment.  Yes.  I'm currently angry as I type this.

I think that covers Luke's arc.  Let's look at Leia's arc.  And I guess Poe's arc, since her arc is entirely about Poe.

She plays a part in Poe's arc... which is pretty good actually.  But it's basically three scenes... maybe four?  Leia looks brokenhearted as she chastises Poe for spending so many people's lives on the attack against the big ship at the big movie.  It's Poe's first look at the burden of leadership and making those kinds of decisions.

Then Leia gets blown into space and uses the Force to survive, but now she's stuck in a medical bay for the majority of the movie.  If we didn't have the slow chase scene restraining us, it would have been much easier for Leia and Poe to separate and for Poe to have to deal with a different commander.  But because they were writing for Poe... Leia got a stupid story.  I'm offended by the writing here again.  Awful backbone to the story strikes again!

Leia is back again later, and she sits in the old rebel base waiting.  Poe sees his people struggling against the empire again, but this time he makes the decision to save lives instead of wasting them on a slim to nothing chance.  Poe has character growth.  Yay!

This is also the moment where Finn ignores the order and almost has an awesome hero moment, but I already wrote about that.

The last bit of Poe's arc is the passing of the torch from Leia to Finn when he realizes the animals got out of the back of the base somehow.  She has her line "Don't look at me.  Follow him.".  I actually like that line... but Leia is criminally under used in the movie.  Poe got his epiphany and growth which is good.  Leia got to sit there and have her most exciting moment be surviving being blown into space.

Then finally there's the Kylo and Rey story arc.  Mostly... I just don't care about their arc.  Kylo was emotionally wronged and he decides that killing everyone he doesn't like to start over is the way to go.  And Rey is written sort of... bland.  Or maybe the character isn't bland.  Maybe it's the story she got stuck into.  I don't know.  I guess my complaint with their arc is not very specific.  But for the two new main characters who are Force users to not really leave an impression... something is wrong with the writing.

One more thing I'd like to mention that my brother pointed out before I noticed on my own: the brand new use of a hyperdrive as a weapon.  He correctly pointed out that if a smaller ship on the verge of destruction can jump to light speed through a fleet of enemy ships and destroy all of them... it's a technology that would have been weaponized a long time ago.  Why aren't all missiles hyperspace missiles?  Just start to jump to hyperspace a little before hitting the target and bam... instant winning.  Why hasn't this been a thing for a long time?

I guess that complaint can be tacked on to the backbone of the plot.  Because part of my issue with the slow chase is the re-defining of star wars technology... and the only reason is to make the writer's job easier instead of adding to the story.  Write a better story, and you don't need to resort to waving the magic wand to change things to the way you need them to be to make your weak story work.

All in all... the prequels are still worse than 7 & 8, but 7 & 8 are awful and I hate the writers for doing such a ridiculously poor job on something so meaningful to so many people... so meaningful to me.

Making Sure I Blame Trump For the Right Things

Let's start with: I hate President Donald Trump.  The man is crushing the ideals of our country and lying about helping anyone but the super-rich.  He's an awful president, and an awful human.  I hope he lives out the rest of his life in unending despair over the realization that he IS actually as bad as most of the country knows him to be.  I want him to suffer complete depression to the point of sobbing until his eyes sting and his throat is raw and in pain... multiple times per day.

The man is a piece of garbage for a human being that deserves to suffer for all the misery and destruction he is raining down on this country and the world too.

I hate President Donald Trump.

With that out of the way, I saw an info-graphic that at first I was just going to re-post on Facebook, and then I remembered that I should fact check things.  So, here's the info graphic, followed by a point by point investigation.

Most Days Vacationing
He hasn't reached the end of his 4 years yet.  Hopefully he won't get 8.  But, it seems that while he takes more vacation per unit of time, he hasn't reached the point of taking the most in total yet.  So, we should be clear: the image isn't exactly correct in its word use.  My source.

While the image doesn't address this specifically, I think it's worth mentioning that while the numbers are apparently unsupported in other memes, Trump does seem to spend the most of our tax money on his trips too.  And the fact that he goes to his own resorts is objectionable for two reasons: 1) As president and by constitutional law, he's not supposed to have business interests anymore because it's a conflict of interest between his profit and the people he's supposed to represent, and 2) he's spending unnecessary amounts of our tax money on his own luxury.  The additional source.


Most Games of Golf Played
Well... it's funny that there's a website dedicated to the topic of how much golf he plays.  Here's an ABC News article about it.  And here's a CNN article about it.  After all the bluster Trump made about Obama playing golf, it's a little funny and a little annoying that Trump is doing more than what he complained about when it wasn't him doing it.  This one seems to be true, even though he hasn't completed a term yet.


Least Amount of Bills Signed
So... here's a good article about this being true... but I'm not sure I care about this one.  More bills signed means more destruction of the American Ideal when it's Trump doing the signing.  He's ruining things... I don't want him to sign more bills.  So, I guess I'm trying to point out that the number of bills doesn't matter as much as the quality of the bills.  But then... by my measure, Trump is failing hard too.  And this does still count as an example of Trump's ignorance or lies depending on why he made the statement that he signed the most bills since Truman.


Lowest Approval Rating
Not sure I need to look this one up.  Well, that's surprising.  Wall Street Journal says that his approval rating is going up after the Putin thing... but is still the lowest approval rating.  I'm not surprised it's the lowest... just that it is going up.  His supporters have no idea what they're doing I think.  His supporters make claims of patriotism, and then support Trump more for betraying our country?  I don't get it.  Anyway... verification of the above findings from the Hill.  And an interesting and in-depth look at the numbers on Vox.  All together, we have verification that he does in fact have the lowest approval ratings of any president in recent history.  No surprise... since he's the worst president ever.


Most Provable Lies Told
Holy crap this one is easy.  The man is a pathological liar.  I remember the first one I noticed still.  It was during the presidential debate.  In reaction to someone accusing him of not paying taxes, he responded that not paying taxes made him smart.  Then immediately after (maybe next day), he denied he said it.  He said it on national television during the presidential debate, and he claims the next day that he never said it.  It's astoundingly stupid.  And the people who voted for him didn't care I'd guess... despite one of the biggest problems in our economy being that rich people avoid paying taxes.  So many of the programs that we all use and rely on are paid for by taxes... and rich people avoiding them keeps huge amounts of money out of the tax system... so we can't afford as much.  Trump is part of the problem and he was proud of it.  And all the rest of us who are scraping by suffer for it.

Here's the snopes article about the lie I remembered.

And here's the politifact article about him being a ridiculous liar.

Trump is such a piece of garbage.


Most Cabinet Resignations
I don't know what to think of this one either.  The people he put in power are (except for one-exception I can think of) horrible people that have no skill related to the position they were put in and in many cases have conflicts of interest that would make them work against the best interest of the organization/department they took control of.  Scott Pruitt comes to mind as the head of the EPA.  I hate Pruitt too.  If I saw him on the street I'm not sure I could stop myself from beating him until he needed a visit to the emergency room.  That man did so much damage and is so obviously evil (destroyed environmental protections to allow big corporations to pollute more freely and therefore have bigger profits) that I'm glad he resigned.

Anyway, I don't know if it's the most, but there are plenty of ways to see that there are a lot...
- wikipedia
- nytimes
- NPR (this one supports the "most resignations" claim)


Most Criminal Indictments
I'm having a hard time finding a source for this one because most of the pages coming up are about the specific Mueller indictments of Trump.  I am failing at verifying or denying this one.  Maybe with more time.  But instead I'm going to suggest you do your own research on this one.  It's easy to find that he's being accused of lots of things, and has been for years.  His shady business practices are easy to find, including his racial discrimination for renting out his apartments when he was younger, and plenty on how Trump likes to screw over investors: Vox (I like this one) & USA Today for example.


Final Thoughts
Trump still has supporters.  People who believe he is good and that he will help them.  Except during his tenure so far ALL of his actions have been to support the super-rich or to be able to make claims.  And example of that is giving the coal industry help so coal miners can keep their jobs.  But even IF he did make a difference for people who have depended on being a coal miner for their profession... what he did was the wrong thing.  Keeping those people dependent on an industry that SHOULD die is awful.  What should have happened is using tax money to help transition those companies and the employees to something better.  Anything better.  Any type of alternative energy would have been better, and provide training for the coal miners to have a skill that's useful in the future.

But his supporters are going to cling to things like those new stories about him helping coal miners while ignoring the down-sides of the same story, and ignoring that things like Trump's tax plans being tricks.  Think we're getting money back because they're cutting taxes?  Did you get your $100 or so?  Hooray for you.  Now when you retire there won't be any money in the programs we pay into to have money for retirement.  Now programs that we depend on won't have enough support.  Guess who REALLY benefits from that tax plan...

go ahead.  Guess.

I'm sure you realize that the richest people in the country get the most money from that tax plan.  If our taxes get cut by 1% and the average salary of $40,000 per year would mean getting back $400, what does that mean for the CEO who makes on average 300 times what their average employee makes?  Are you really happy about your $400 a year when the people at the top are getting back $120,000 per year based on a 1% tax cut?  That tax cut would be three times what you make on average.  The programs our government runs for us... like the military, law enforcement agencies, schools, public works (road maintenance and so forth), fire departments, and so on... all depend on taxes.  I'm not suggesting our government spends taxes well right now... but I am suggesting that tax money is necessary for us.  While we're getting back $400, we're losing things that we need.  And those rich assholes are getting enough money to pay for whatever they need, and possibly buy a boat too.

Trump is so bad for us.  I hate that man.

d20 vs 3d6 re-hash

I've written about this before, but it was an emotional reaction to a bad experience.  I'd like to try again with less emotion and more numbers.  To get there I'll need to tell you what I'm writing about.  As the title mentions, this is meant to be a comparison of 1d20 versus 3d6.  What the heck does that mean?  If you're a table top role-playing game (TTRPG) enthusiast, you probably know, but I'm trying for a wider audience.

The comparison is between two resolution mechanics for table top role-playing games.  In those games, most of the participants control characters in a setting, and they try to accomplish goals.  For example a character named John might be trying to shoot a target with a bow and arrow.  Do they hit the target?  The resolution mechanic decides for you.  If we left that decision up to the story-teller (game master), it has a strong chance of degenerating into arguments about fairness.  Instead, you use dice to allow a fairly random number decide for you.  And this blog is meant to compare and judge two of those dice mechanics.


Basic Explanation of the Two Dice Mechanics

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The 1d20 mechanic refers to using a single twenty-sided die to get your random number.  This comes from a large pool of games that fit into the "d20" category, and started with Dungeons & Dragons.  If I refer to a d20 game specifically in the future in this post, it'll probably be Pathfinder (PF), because that's the only d20 game I play these days.  Your character will have a number (often called a modifier) that you add to the result of your 1d20 roll.  That number is compared to a difficulty score of some kind.  An important point is that a 1 on the die can be an automatic failure and a 20 on the die can be an automatic success.  I'll clarify using the example of John the Archer shooting a Target.

John is a fairly average person with a little skill at archery.  For the example, let's say that when he takes a shot with his bow, he has a +4 attack modifier.  When he rolls his d20 to see if he hits a target, his possible results are 5 to 24.  The target will have an Armor Class (AC) which is a number that represents how hard it is to hit.  In this case it's primarily based on how small the target is.  Let's say for ease of example that the AC is 15.  I chose that number because it means John has a 50% chance of hitting the target.  If he rolls a 10 or below, he misses.  If he rolls an 11 or above he hits.  As something that will become important later, D&D and PF use a 6-second round that abstracts some of the action.  In that 6 seconds, John shoots once, so the effort of aiming at the target and even possibly moving to a firing position are included in that time.  It'll become clear later why I mention this.

The 3d6 mechanic refers to using three six-sided dice to get your random number.  I know of this choice from GURPS.  But really, this can represent any dice mechanic where you use multiple dice to get your number.  The important aspect is the multiple dice.  And lots of good TTRPGs use multiple dice in their resolution mechanics.  I just chose GURPS because I LOVE GURPS (Steve Jackson Games).  And I am very familiar with the math around the GURPS die mechanic.  In this case, your character will have a skill instead of a modifier like in Pathfinder.  Whatever that number is, is the number you have to roll less than or equal to in order to succeed.  There are modifiers too, but they refer to something different in GURPS, usually around outside factors that affect the outcome (PF has those too, but uses the word modifier to refer to the "skill" number as well).  I'll make it clearer with John the Archer shooting a target...

John is a fairly average person with a little skill at archery.  For the example, let's say that his bow skill is 11 (ever so slightly above average).  In GURPS, one round of action is one second.  There's no abstraction of action.  Each second you say what your character does specifically, so for purpose of making this roughly equivalent to the D&D/PF mechanic, we have to say John is aiming for 3 seconds with his bow (3 seconds of aiming gets you the highest bonus possible).  This will get John a +5 to his skill for the attempt for an effective skill of 16.  But GURPS does like its modifiers.  Instead of the Armor Class of the target representing an abstraction of how hard it is to hit, GURPS has modifiers for how far away it is, and how small the target is.  So, for matching the examples, let's say the target is far enough away and small enough that John has a -6 to hit from where he is, resulting in an effective skill of 10.  John has a 50% chance of hitting his target because half the possible results on 3d6 are 10 or below (3 to 10) and the other half are above (11 to 18).

Hopefully that gave you a good foundation.  I see two factors as being important to the comparison: Reliability of Skill and Improvement of Skill.  Actually... here's a collection of diagrams you might find useful in understand the linear probability versus the bell-curve.

The bottom two charts show the probability of each result.  You can see that on 3d6, the probability is higher in the middle, and low on the ends.  On a d20, the probability is the same across all results.

The top two charts show the same orange line for individual result probability, but includes a line for rolling less than or equal to that value in yellow.



Reliability of Skill

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What I mean by reliability of skill is how much your character can depend on their skill.  If a character spends resources getting "good" at something like archery, what does that mean in the game?  If a character in Pathfinder spends character resources like feats or improves their dexterity to get a higher bonus on ranged weapon attacks, does it make a difference?  If a character in GURPS spends character resources, like character-points, to improve their dexterity or their skill with a bow, does it make a difference?  Does having a higher mod or skill make the skill more reliable than having an average mod or skill?

In d20, if I use feats and attributes bonuses to get my attack modifier from +4 to +7 at first level, that's 3 points higher, which means a 15% better chance of hitting a target because three of the twenty possible results just switched from being a miss to being a hit.  In our example, we go from a 50% chance to a 65% chance.  That's pretty good.

In 3d6, if I use character points to improve my bow skill from 11 to 12, so that in our example my effective skill is 11 instead of 10, the probability goes up from 50% to 62.5%  The jump in percentage is close enough, and 62.5% is still a lot better than 50%.

But are those percentages reliable?  The Law of Independent Probability means that each die roll has an equal chance of coming up on any value, regardless of any rolls before.  So, saying something like "come on... I'm due for a 20" makes no sense.  Just because you haven't rolled a 20 on a d20 in a while, doesn't mean you are more likely to roll one now.  It is possible for a person to roll five or under for twenty rolls in a row.  Just because you rolled low doesn't mean you're due for rolling high.  With that +7 modifer trying to hit the AC 15 target, you only have to roll an 8 or above to hit it... but the d20 makes up for 20 possible points of your roll.  It is responsible for 20 points.  Your attack mod of +7 is only responsible for 7.  So, there's no guarantee at all that you're going to hit because every value has the same chance of coming up on the die, and the die is responsible for more of the needed final result than your skill is by a wide margin.

With 3d6 we have the introduction of the bell curve.  On 3d6, there are 16 possible values, but the combinations that result in them are counted at 216 possible combinations of the three dice.  Only one of those combinations can make the result of 3.  And only one can make the result of 18.  So, each of those results has a 1 in 216 chance (0.46%) of being the result of rolling 3d6.  A result of 10 or 11 however each has 27 combinations that can result in that number.  So, a 10 or an 11 has a 27 in 216 chance (12.50%) of being the result of rolling the dice.  You might already have figured out what this means, but just in case: rolling any extreme result is far less likely.  If my effective skill for shooting that target with a bow is 11 instead of 10, the probability the dice will result in a number 11 or lower is actually 62.5% because of that lovely bell curve and the normalization of results by multiple dice.

A modifier in Pathfinder using the d20 system that has similar probability to a skill in GURPS is not as reliable because 1d20 has an equal chance of coming up as any result.  Working your butt off to make a character with a high attack modifier (which they don't make easy) does not mean your skill will be reliable because of the d20.  Making a little effort to make a character with a high attack skill in GURPS makes a noticeable difference in reliability.  You get more from your effort as the player.

I suppose I'm diverging from objective comparison at this point.  My personal experience with trying really hard to make a character in Pathfinder who has a great skill at using a weapon in hopes of not really missing has been that even if you make every choice to make that character's attack mod huge, the whim of the d20 has more sway over what actually happens than all the effort I put in.  I find it frustrating when I go on a bad rolling streak and end up missing four attacks in a row when I was supposed to have an 80% chance of success.  Doesn't the +7 to hit mean that person is noticeably better at hitting a target than the person with a +1?  But the d20 matters more than the skill in the final result, and it is perfectly possible for four rolls in a row to just suck horribly.

For player satisfaction with their character, I believe it is important for the player to feel like their choices in building the character matter and have an effect on things like their ability to use a skill they put some effort into.  In that scale, I feel like 3d6 is leaps and bounds better than 1d20, because of the tendency to roll a result as the bell curve predicts.  If I get my character's skill up to 14 for example, the probability of rolling that or less is 90.74%.  And when you roll dice in practice, they really follow that probability.  So, I feel like I accomplished something by getting the skill up to 14 instead of 10.  It makes a real difference.  Even if I got an attack mod up to +7 (for a 90% chance against an AC of 10), there's no tendency by the single die to be a 3 or above.

An easier way to think about the difference between 3d6 and 1d20 as it relates to reliability is this: The d20 has 20 possibly combinations, and 3d6 has 216 combinations.  With a +0 attack mod in d20 against an AC of 10, you get 10 results out of 20 that are successful.  With a +5, you get 15 results out of twenty.  It's a linear progression.  With a skill of 10 in 3d6, you have 108 out of 216 that are successful (50%).  With a skill of 14 (one quarter of the way through the possible values like an increase of 5 in d20) you have 196 out of 216 (90.74%); The improvement on the bell curve is better, and therefore more reliable.


Improvement of Skill

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I would say that one of the reward feelings that makes playing the game fun is the feeling that your character became stronger in some way.  In Pathfinder that means when your character gains a level.  A few things change and your character is stronger in a few ways than they were before.  If we're talking about a character where your attack modifier is important, it usually means your attack modifier goes up by 1.  So your chances to hit go up by 5%.  BUT... the way Pathfinder is (and its relatives are) designed, the challenge increases at the same rate.  That Armor Class number goes up on the bad guys too.  So, you're not getting a 5% boost.  You're breaking even.  Maybe the game tricked me into being happy about the level up in that way, but really, the attack modifier changes (and saving throws, and skills, and so on) don't really matter.  The game is designed to maintain the same level of probability of success for all 20 levels.  And if you reach level 20, and have a +20 attack modifier (or likely +30 with magic, high stats, etc), the die still accounts for most of whether or not you'll hit a foe because their AC is probably going to be 40 or above.

Sure if your character went back to face some of the same kinds of foes they did when they were level 1, they'd crush those foes easily.  But the game generally keeps you looking through the keyhole where your challenges are equal to you.

In GURPS, when you spend character points that you earn, you pick what gets better, and if your combat skill to attack with is what you choose, even going up by one can make a big difference.  If you bump your skill from 10 to 11, you're getting a 12.5% boost, AND it's more reliable that you'll roll 11 or below on 3d6 than it is that you'll roll 9 or above on a 1d20.  Get your skill up to 16 and you've maxed out your probability without considering negative modifiers at 98.15% chance of success.  Anything above 16 is beneficial mostly to deal with negative modifiers.  But when you increase a skill in GURPS, you're actually making a noticeable difference.

Part of the strength here is that attack and defense are handled differently in GURPS than in Pathfinder. You roll to see if you succeed.  The defender might have the option of rolling to see if they can defend.  So, your skill at attacking doesn't have to reach a ever increasing goals of difficulty.  If your opponent is particularly good at defending though... you might have to get clever by maneuvering them to a position where they can't defend for some reason (there are rules for this in GURPS combat).  Or you might have such a high skill that you can use fancier attacks like a feint to make it harder for them to defend against the next attack.  Or you might work with a friend to flank them, making it harder for them to defend.  Or you might use some other tool in your arsenal.  But for progress in the difficulty of the challenge, GURPS relies on the cleverness of the players instead of keeping the probability essentially the same for everything you try.



Final Thoughts

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It's very difficult to keep emotion out of writing this because I enjoy playing in a good campaign, and when the play experience is a negative one, I become frustrated that my precious small amount of free time I can give to TTRPGs just got so thoroughly abused.  I prefer the bell-curve to the linear distribution because it makes me happier about the character I created, and it makes me happier about how sessions go.  Sure... things can still go wrong, but it's rarer and more meaningful (in my opinion).

Make America Great Again: the Broken Slogan

On the surface, it sounds like a nice slogan.  It sounds hopeful of repairing damage and doing good things to make this country great.  Again.

But the slogan suffers from a couple big problems.  First is that it's unclear about when in United States history it was great that we're trying to go back to.  Is it when slavery was legal?  Is it when black folks and women couldn't vote?  Is it when government stopped representing the people and became a plutocracy?  Is it when we made the mistake of including religious language in anything legal (like when "under god" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance, or when "in god we trust" was added to coins)?  Is it the great depression (because we do seem to be trying for that one)?  What point in our history are we actually trying for?

The second problem is that the person who is using that slogan for his presidential theme is not only failing at making this country better, he seems to be actively working against the country.  He's not trying to make America great.  He's trying to make money for himself and for other super-rich people in this country at the cost of our environment, our economy, our foreign relations, our internal relations, and our future.  There are three big things this country was pretty great about at some points in our history, but he's definitely actively working against those.

#1: Religious Freedom
This country was never a Christian nation... nor should it be.  The founding fathers were building something intended to be free of government sponsored religion.  Government is specifically supposed to be agnostic to religion.  I put the link there so people understand what agnostic means.  Actually, I'll explain too: It just means in this case that government can't acknowledge religion; support religion; oppress religious belief; or in any way favor one religion over another.  It has to act like there's no religion.  And that's a really good thing.

If somehow, the country decided that Ancient Egypt had it right, and passed law that we all had to pay homage to the sun god Ra on a weekly basis, and that all churches would be torn down, and rebuilt as places of worship for the various Egyptian gods... Christians would be pissed off.  So would I really... but I'm trying to make the point that while many vocal Christians seem to think this country is a Christian nation and would be better if more of their religion were applied to government and public services (for example in public school).  But that's absolutely false.  Christianity is not deserving of favoritism.  No religion is.  Any religion that becomes a state religion would mean government is suddenly not representative of the people, and it would mean that it is unfair to everyone who doesn't believe in that religion.

But vocal Christians: take heart.  Separation of church and state is good for you too.  You just don't realize it because you think your religion should have favor and that laws should be made to favor your beliefs.  But separation of church and state (part of the first amendment) protects you from having to deal with someone else's religious beliefs.  It means that government is a body that tries to be fair to all of us.  And you can practice your religion at home or at church or where ever you like as long as you don't infringe on anyone else's rights.  That's a really good thing.  You just need to really think about the fact that Christianity has held a place of favoritism and that it shouldn't.

Now how does this relate to MAGA?  Between having Pence as his Vice President; playing up his religious side; and putting the religious fanatic DeVos in charge of Education in the country, Trump is sending the message that he's trying to put religion into government.  If DeVos and people like her succeed, this country will get worse in terms of its ideal, and in terms of education.  Forcing (for example) science teachers to teach that intelligent design is as valid an explanation for the universe as the Big Bang, Abiogenesis, and Evolution means the dumbing-down of our children.  When a child is told that Intelligent Design is how the universe came about without any evidence of that being the case (and no: the Bible is not evidence.  It does not have supporting evidence itself.  Faith is not a valid source of evidence), that child is taught that believing things an authority figure tells you is necessary and to not question it.  If that child asks for evidence, the only thing that can be offered up is faith.

Then when that child is faced with having cancer, faith is the tool they turn to.  Faith that God will get them through it.  The people who will actually try to get them through it are medical professionals from researchers to nurses to doctors.  Without people looking for evidence based knowledge in our world, we wouldn't have medicine (even old world medicines were scientifically discovered... it worked or it didn't, and the things that worked stuck around); we wouldn't have electricity to use; we wouldn't have cellphones; we wouldn't have cars; we wouldn't have air planes; and we wouldn't computers or the internet.  Pushing faith on our children ruins the inquisitiveness children naturally have.  It tells them to shut up and just believe what they're told.  Faith is a crutch and an anchor.
Don't get me wrong.  I believe in an individual's right to have faith in their religion so long as it doesn't infringe on anyone else's rights.  And I understand how having faith in a higher power can console a person dealing with rough circumstances.  But making faith into a value for our government and public schools is horrifyingly damaging to all of us.

And if Trump's goal is put more religion into our country, I dislike his version of making America great.

#2: Inclusiveness
We proudly called ourselves the melting pot nation.  We had immigrants from all over the world and that was a good thing.  Our strength came from diversity.  We all worked together to make something better.  Now... I'm not pin-pointing this because there's almost always a nationality or categorization that got stepped on.  Africans (including Americans with ancestry from Africa today), Mexicans, Irish, Japanese, Jewish, LGBTQ, and probably more I'm not thinking of at this moment.  But this country's ideal of being inclusive and being strong by its diversity is awesome.  And it's one way we should be trying to make this country great.

But in Trump's MAGA plan, we have the demonization of Muslims, Mexicans, the Media, and Science (and anyone who values science).  I'll talk more about science in the next section, but instead of Trump being a leader who tries to bring people together, he's doing everything he can to divide us.  Our government is set up currently to help him starting with the two party system.  If you're a Republican, you hate everything the Democrats stand for, and if you're a Democrat, you can't believe the stuff the Republicans are doing right now with their majority in every part of government.

Trump is talking up the problems with people coming here illegally and distorting it wildly so he can use it as a flash-point with his followers.  He's suppressing the research his own people did as best he can about how good illegal immigrants are for our economy.  Not only that, he plays up the lie that they are a drain on the economy.  He's also claiming that the people coming here are criminals of the worst sort when evidence of crime research suggests that illegal immigrants are far less likely to commit crimes than citizens.

What does Trump get out of this?  He gets to have a topic he can work his followers up about at any time he likes to distract from other awful stuff he's doing.  He's using it as a tool to divide us.  And what harm is there in being mad at people coming here illegally?  The people coming here are human beings... like us.  They have crappy circumstances and they're asking for help.  Where is our compassion?  Where is the compassion that Christians are supposed to have those in need?  It's really weird to see heavily religious people taking the exclusionary stance of kicking out people that need help.  But Trump is managing to play the religious card and the callousness card at the same time.

Why aren't we looking at our immigration policy?  Why isn't that the bad guy here?  Does anyone really think that immigration policy is protecting us from terrorist attacks?  Really?

And if you want to say that allowing more people into the country means a drain our economy... look again at the research.  Here's an article that goes over it.  Make sure to read the whole thing.  Or do your own research.  A Google search for something like "illegal immigrant effect on economy" should bring up a number of sites you can check.  Doing your own research is better than taking my word for.  But the point is that our economy is not suffering from illegal immigration.

To make this country great, we need to make our immigration policy less complicated and time-consuming.  And we need to stop being racist or discriminatory.  No more trying to make it legal for Christians to discriminate against LGBTQ in business.  No more shouting about illegal immigrants.  No more blaming all black people just because some black people commit crimes.  White people commit crimes too.  They're just favored in our justice system and they get away with it more.  Like Brock Turner because of Judge Aaron Persky.  That's flat out bullshit is what that is.  Oh here we go... what I was looking for.  You can do searches to verify the facts yourself, but here's an article comparing Turner to Cory Batey.  In one case we have a white guy serving three months for the same crime a black guy is serving 15 to 25 years for.  Unacceptable.

And Trump is pushing for divisions.  He's actively telling his followers to hate the media, to hate illegal immigrants, and to hate democrats.  It's in televised lives speeches.  He's not even trying to hide it.  He's just a power for dividing us, when we should be standing together against him.  What a piece of crap our president is.

#3: Science
We used to be a super power in the world due to science, technology, and education.  We led the world.  We put a man on the moon.

But now we have people like Trump and Scott Pruitt (who thankfully has left the EPA) who are actively denying science in favor of loosening restrictions on polluting industries... so they can make more money.  The coal industry?  Really?  Let them pollute more so they can continue being profitable?  Sweet Baby Jebus on a Stick... what kind of dumb ass solution is that?  I know there are coal workers who's jobs depend on those companies.  But what about a government offered amount of money (we're doing bailouts all over the place, why not do it this way?), that comes with the requirement that the company transition to clean energy.  Pick a different energy source like wind, water, geothermal, solar, or whatever qualifies as clean energy, and the company gets money to support the pay of its workers and to support learning the new technology.  All its workers get training in something they think they can do and want to do in the new company.  It's scary but the transition has to be made.  It's not an option.

Anthropogenic (Human Influenced) Climate Change is real and it's a danger to us now, to our children, and to future generations.  The denial of it only benefits the super-rich assholes that own and run the fossil fuel industry.  Here are a couple NASA articles: Consensus and Evidence.  As always though... do your own research.  The only people denying it are those with something to gain from the truth being hidden.  And Trump wants the money that comes with supporting big-oil.

So, instead of a country excited about science and making leaps and bounds toward a brighter future, we have an administration that denies science in favor of profits for the super-rich, and pushes religion in school instead of critical thinking.  The MAGA plan is to stop people from trusting science.  This is horrendously bad for us.  When fanatically religious parents of sick children let their children die because medicine is against their religion... we've hit a terrifying low for faith versus science.  This shouldn't be a thing.  But you can find plenty of news stories about it.

And that's the America Trump is pushing... he's pushing for people to lose trust in science, and he put the idiot DeVos in charge of educating our children.

Conclusion About MAGA
The MAGA agenda and strategy is terrifying because people seem to think Trump is doing good things.  It's astounding to me that his actions and their results are being ignored by his supporters.  And I didn't even talk about his awful tax plan.  A brief mention of it: It benefits the super-rich.  It give the middle and lower classes a tiny amount of money back, but hamstrings government programs that middle and lower finance people need.  So, for those super-rich assholes getting millions back to hide overseas and take out of the economy, we get an illusion of benefit covering up a big loss in support.  The man is a slimy car salesman, and he sold his supporters on a lie.  It's the entire basis of MAGA.  Tell people something they want to hear or give them an enemy to be angry about, and then do things that benefit the people in power at the cost of the people our government is supposed to represent.  It's big damn lie.

Movie Review: Star Wars Episode 8 - The Last Jedi

The short version of this review is that even after several viewings, and about half a year since it was released, I still hate Star Wars Episode 8 - The Last Jedi.  And I'm genuinely deeply upset at the people who put that movie together, and the one before it.  Oh, and I'm upset at people who say they like the movie.  I feel like they gave up expecting something good, and are just accepting the crap that's being put out for the numbered episodes.  And the Star Wars universe means too much to me to just accept it, and not speak out.  So, here I am writing another review for the new Star Wars numbered episodes.

George Lucas has an impressive imagination and an impressive ability to draw from other sources to make his own story.  But his ability seems to fail completely when he doesn't have anyone willing to point out bad ideas.  He's responsible for the original trilogy, but he wasn't the famed creator of Star Wars then.  He was just a movie maker working with lots of experienced people who pushed back and prevented him from doing something stupid like making Han a weird lizard man or making C3‑P0 into a slimy car salesman type.  Sadly, one thing seems to have slipped through by the end of Return of the Jedi... the use of Ewoks instead of Wookiees in the ground battle on Endor.

The next thing we get from George is the Special Editions, which made some tweaks to some special effects that were very pretty.  But it also brought back the unnecessary scene with Han talking to Jabba; unnecessarily changed the ending celebration in Return of the Jedi; and drastically changed the character growth of Han Solo by poorly editing in Greedo shooting at Han first.  What a stupid idea.  I'm guessing George wanted Han to not be a "bad guy" for callously shooting Greedo.

But Han shooting Greedo and it not affecting him any more than motivating him to toss the bartender a coin... is exactly what Han needs to be.  He's the selfish smuggler that has lost his value for life.  The scene tells us all we need to know.  Han is in trouble with a crime lord for failing to deliver some goods.  Han loves his ship (Greedo suggests Jabba might take Han's ship as payment).  Han responds by saying "over my dead body", to which Greedo says, "That's the idea".  Han shoots him under the table, and Greedo never gets a shot off.  This shows us how practical Han is... and very specifically that he's not a "good guy".  George's concept of his own character is shown to be wildly broken by his change in the Special Edition release of the original trilogy.

Next we get the prequels.  They're garbage stories with nice special effects.  It would take me far too long to re-hash everything that's wrong with the prequels, but they represent George's attempt at giving us new Star Wars stories after he became the legendary creator of Star Wars.  By this point, no one was going to tell him his idea was awful.  And we end up with Jar Jar Binks stepping in poop to be funny.  We end up with thrilling senatorial discussions to entertain children.  And worst of all, we end up with a story not even close to the set up George gave himself in episode four.

Obiwan Kenobi told us what should have happened in the prequels.  Instead of a stupid pre-adolescent child version of Anakin and about half a movie wasted on pod races, we could have had an interesting story of how Obiwan Kenobi met a great pilot, and noticed his connection to the Force.  Yoda can warn him that something is off, and Obiwan can decide to train Anakin anyway.  In Episode 4, he tells us that he was the best pilot in the galaxy (possibly hyperbole), a cunning warrior, and a good friend.  Obiwan gives the impression that Anakin knew of his son, and wanted him to have his lightsaber.  The prequels do a fine job of working with the idea that Obiwan told Luke the almost truth of his father becoming Vader... but they ignore the timeline.  And then don't bother using clues like Luke's uncle being involved and knowing Luke's father.

I'm going a little off track.  I'm trying to point out that the prequels were almost entirely George's doing, and he was out of control.  The result was really crappy stories that include things like Jedi being cannon-fodder; Quigon Jinn; Jar Jar Binks; some kind of awful political maneuvering; pod races; horrible romance scenes that aren't believable at all; and gobs of choices made to show pretty special effects instead of telling a good story (like the 45 minutes lightsaber fight on the volcano planet and near a lava river).

The prequels are awful.  But they are in the same story as the prequels.  They are the story of Anakin Skywalker.  Episodes 1 to 6 are the rise, fall, and redemption of Anakin Skywalker, and episodes 4 to 6 are excellent.  It's a great story.

When I hear that there's going to be an episode 7, I expect it to be an episode in that story.  I expect to hear what has been happening to the characters that are still there.  I expect new characters... sure... you add characters to the story, but I wanted to see the story of Han, Luke, Leia, Chewbacca, R2, 3PO, and Lando.

I LIKE the characters introduced in Episode 7 - The Force Awakens.  Rey, Finn, Kylo, and Poe are fun characters. But that's really all I like about Episode 7.  The story is a literal copy of Episode 4.  If you want to read more about that, you can read my review of Episode 7.  But beyond it being a copy of Episode 4, it wasn't a movie as a part of the numbered episodes of Star Wars because it didn't continue to the story.  Maybe as standalone movies, unrelated to the original characters it could have been better, but there's still the problem of it being a copy.

What they should have done with Episode 7 was re-introduce us to the Star Wars Universe.  Give us the familiar characters, and at least hint at what happened in the past 30 years.  Maybe talk about the decades of work to free star systems from the remnants of the Empire.  Show Luke running a Jedi Academy. Show Han running the intelligence portion of the New Republic military, and getting wind of a remnant of the Empire that has managed to hide and grow in power.  There's plenty of room to introduce the new characters.  Rey can have been a baby dropped off at the Yavin IV Jedi Academy in an escape pod.  We still get the mystery parents thing.  Or Luke is just her dad, and he's trying to raise her and train her at the same time.  Finn is still an escaped storm trooper of the new non-clone kind, and Poe is the operative that runs into him while working for Han Solo.  We don't have the stupid map thing that they did.  And we don't have another super weapon.  We do have a new story to tell.

But we didn't get that.  And it's not George's fault this time... he handed over the reigns.  But by doing so, we got no underlying vision for where the story should go, and we got people starting from scratch... and just throwing in familiar faces as supporting characters.

Again... to tell that story... it shouldn't have been numbered episodes.  But it also shouldn't have made nothing change in 30 years with respect to the state of the galaxy.  The First Order is the Empire.  They are still the military power in the galaxy, and somehow the resistance is still the rebellion.

What Episode 7 gave us for set up for the rest of the new trilogy was a very weak offering.  We got that nothing changed; the there's some mystery dark side Force user that we don't know the origin of; and there's a new Force user with a mystery past that is going to be one of the hero's of the story.

Along comes episode 8.  And what does it do?  It chucks the meager offering in the trash; chucks the old characters in the trash; chucks the flavor of Star Wars in the trash; and builds an amalgamation story that fails at being engaging.

What happened in Episode 8?  There's a casino world where Finn and the new girl go... and we get a story about the evils of capitalism in war... which is a fine concept, but not what I look for in Star Wars.  And it's just a time waster in Episode 8.  Nothing of value comes from that side story that couldn't have been handled in 3 minutes of movie a different way.  The trip to the enemy capital ship for Finn and company is also useless.  It gets no one anything.

The setup for running out of fuel while trying to escape the bad guys doesn't fit in the Star Wars universe either.  And it leaves us with a terrible set up where Leia and company are stuck on a ship for most of the movie.  Just flying away from the bad guys.  And Leia's shining moment is being sucked out into space and surviving.  ugh... so dumb.  Abysmal waste of one of the original characters.  And she's gone now.

What happened to Luke?  When did the most optimistic and motivated person from the original trilogy become a dispirited sap?  His dad wiped out the Jedi Order, and made the galaxy suffer.  And he had hope his dad could be redeemed.  But he considers killing his nephew instead of talking to him about the darkness he perceives?  Terrible writing.

There's more.  But I've already written about a lot of it here and here.

I feel like something I love is being abused.  It hurts my heart.

As a side note: I think the actors all did fine work.  No complaints there.

Politics: Socialism, the Dirty Word

Let's start with the meaning of the word.  Unfortunately, the definition isn't really precise.  There's a really long wikipedia article about it, that is worth reading through, even if you don't read every word.

The short version of the definition as I understand it, and as I use it, includes the idea that the government controls some resources for the benefit of all its citizens.  Maybe my definition is off.  But I think I'm close enough for a working definition.  To give you an idea of my definition in practice: I consider the fire department to be a socialist construct.  Our tax money is used by our government to provide a service we don't all use, but which we want in place.  It has the potential to benefit all of us.  It's there for all of us.

And I don't think anyone wants to complain about paying taxes that are used to fund a fire department.

But, if you say the word "socialism", it seems to draw a nasty reaction from a fair number of the people I communicate with.  The word seems to be a dirty word, and when people argue against another socialist idea, universal healthcare, the argument made is simply that it is socialist as if that ends the argument.

But it really doesn't make a good argument.  Police departments, the military, public school, road maintenance, child protective services, and as already mentioned: fire departments, are all socialist concepts.  Tax money (resources) from all of us supports those services that all of us do or can benefit from.  Are those bad ideas because they are socialist in nature?

Let's consider the idea of universal healthcare, and take it past the point where someone calls it socialist in a dismissive way.

Right now, because medical costs can get to be enormous, most of us have a health insurance membership.  Usually, some part of our pay from our jobs gets taken out automatically and sent to one of these health care companies.  Then if we have a medical need that costs money, we get in touch with our health insurance company, and ask them for money.  This is the maddening part.  They can deny us coverage... they don't have to give us money.  If they can find an excuse, they can deny us coverage.

Okay, there's a more maddening part.  While we're giving them money so they can deny us coverage, they're paying the top-level people millions of dollars a year.  In bonuses.  I worked for a software branch of one of these health care companies, and I have a very strong and upset memory of being told there would be no raises that year because the company overall wasn't doing very well.  And then that same year, the publicly traded company announced its numbers and the top-level managers were getting bonuses in the millions of dollars.  I was very angry.

That's the capitalist way of doing things.  And for the most part, I think that the competition of a free market is a good thing.  But for healthcare, I think it's a bad thing.  When the poor family has a 6 year-old with a heart problem that needs incredibly expensive surgery to live, their options are limited.  One of those options is going into incredible debt that the family is likely to never recover from so the child can live.

Money decides who gets medical help.  And that means that a lot of people don't get medical help they need.  At the same time, there are very rich people sitting at the top making more money in one year than most of us will make in a life-time of work.  This situation makes me angry.  Selfish people making money from the suffering of millions of people.

Now instead of the capitalist solution, let's just think about the socialist solution.  I know the word makes some people cringe, but it shouldn't.  It's just a different way of doing things.

Medical costs might still be enormous if all we change is the health insurance industry.  And we probably still need insurance in case of big medical costs.  Changing it from a private industry with those jerks at the top making millions of dollars from denying us coverage, to a government run organization that provides service to all citizens, changes it from a decision based on whether you have money, to a decision about whether the medical need is genuine.

And no one at the top is making millions of dollars.  In your paycheck, you'll still only see a similar amount taken out of your check.  Maybe less, because we don't have to cover the salaries and bonuses of rich jerks.  We don't ruin the job market because we'll still need people to run the new health care organization.  We make things better for people that need medical help (which I'm in favor of).  And the only people that suffer from this change are the rich jerks that were screwing over millions of people including their employees (which I'm also in favor of).

It's a simple good idea that is seemingly opposed because it comes with the word "socialism".

I'm not suggesting we turn the United States into a socialist country.  But some things like road work, and fire fighters, and police, and public school are better when the population of the country comes together and helps each other out.  By that I mean: we all accept that our tax money gets spent on those things.  And Universal Health Care is an excellent example of something that should be tax funded and provided to all citizens.

One argument against it that I'd like to address is the one: I won't use it, so why should I pay?  It's very selfish question.  Right there you have an answer.  You should want to pay because it helps humanity.  Other people.  Like you.  Maybe who aren't as lucky as you having perfect health and never needing medical attention.  But there's also that you can't know you'll never need it.  That's what insurance is for.  And maybe we can also remember that we're trying to be part of a country... a group of people that supposedly are part of one "tribe".  If you choose to not pay into the system, you're not part of it.  If you don't want to be part of the group of people, then I hope you're not being a hypocrite by benefiting from anything else the government provides.  Like roads.  Or the protection of the military or the police.  Or school.

I completely agree that things like computers, cars, houses, and so on should be part of a free market.  But services that are necessary to live shouldn't be decided by capitalism.  Medical care is not a luxury, and I'm not okay with punishing a family with a sick kid for being poor.

The combination of capitalism and socialism is possible.  We're already doing it.  We just need to do it better.  And socialism has to stop being a dirty word.  We need to start considering ideas based on their merit instead of their label.

The Lobby System is Broken

Maybe being a federal level politician shouldn't be a path to becoming a millionaire.  No.  Definitely.  It shouldn't be a path to becoming a millionaire.  The motivation for choosing to work for the public shouldn't be huge sums of money.  It should definitely be fair pay... enough to live comfortably, and be able to support yourself after you serve until you can find your next source of income, but not millions of dollars.  And the thing is that I think it's already set up like that for how much tax money gets spent on representative salary.  But there's a HUGE problem: there's no law preventing those representatives from taking money from special interest groups or individuals.  It's perfectly legal to buy a politician.  And that politician can then push for laws that benefit the small entity that bought them, even if it's against the interests of the American people.  This situation is wrong.  And it keeps lobby groups like the NRA in power.  For example, it allows them to dictate to our politicians that we can't do research into gun violence.

No one who truly wants to end the threat of children dying in school wants biased research.  Research that starts with a conclusion and then publishes false findings to support their claim will fail to protect anyone.  What we (who want to protect children) actually want is unbiased research because we want a real reliable path to take to protect life.  The NRA blocking any research is a direct declaration that they care more about protecting their gun collections than stopping the deaths of children in school.  And the response we get from them is a claim (from Wayne LaPierre) that the NRA has supported the background check system for years, and that armed guards in schools will solve the problem.  But both claims fail the logic test.

First the claim that the NRA has supported the background check system doesn't make sense.  If that were true, the background check system wouldn't be so broken.  Politicians would have jumped all over the chance at improving the system because the left side of politics wants that, and if the NRA wants that, then so do the right side politicians that they own.  So, if the NRA has been supporting better background checks... where is the improvement?  I don't see it.

Second is the claim that armed guards at schools is the answer.  There was an armed police guard at the Parkland Fl school shooting.  He hid.  He didn't help.  And if he had run in to fight the criminal shooter, could he have prevented ALL of the deaths of the innocent children and teachers?  Or would that solution just have curbed the number a little?  Do we have to accept that 7 people would have died instead of 17?  I mean, sure it's better if only 7 die, but why do any children have to die in school?  That's absurd.  No amount of arming people at schools will protect all children.  More guns is definitely NOT the answer here.  But hey... why not allow the research to be attempted?  What if more guns turns out to be the answer?  I doubt it, but if you (the NRA and people that believe them) are right, then the research will show that.

It is my contention that the lobby system should be destroyed.  It is my contention that our representatives should be held responsible to the people they represent.  If we make it illegal for our representatives (from the top to the bottom) to receive money or anything of value from anything other than their tax funded salary, at the risk of losing their jobs and facing jail time, the lobbies suddenly don't have power.  Any politician that accepts money would immediately not have power to do what the big-money-entity wants, and I doubt any politician wants to spend time in jail.  Sure they'd try to find ways around it, but the moment any politician gets caught and faces consequences, the willingness to risk it goes way down.  We'd just have to hound our politicians and make sure they stay honest.

Maybe we'd start to see tax policy that actually makes sense.  Hold billionaires accountable for their taxes so our government wouldn't have to sap the lower and middle classes so much to fund useful programs.  Maybe we'd start to see environmental protections improve again despite the coal industry trying to keep making money off it's dirty practice.  Maybe we'd start to see programs that make college public, so our kids don't have to start their lives as adults in the workforce at a deficit.  Maybe money would stop going to big tax breaks for huge corporations and rich people, and start going to bolstering law enforcement, fire fighters, public school teachers, road and bridge maintenance, government provided health care (instead of the horrid private industry that makes the people at the top rich while we have to fight to get any money when we actually need it)...

We NEED the government to represent us instead of people with money.  We NEED this to stop being a plutocracy, and start being a representative democracy.  And we NEED our children to be safe.  Period.  This is a first world country right?  Let's start acting like it.