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Showing posts from August, 2017

Audio Book

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I've said it before... I keep threatening to turn my new sci-fi book MIZ,  Time Tripping With Amazing Females into an audio book, with me doing the reading. "Goodreads" the super duper book blog lists... Audio Books Narrated By Their Authors (87 books) ... So it's not unheard of. Many of the author/readers are famous writers like one of my idols Neil Gaiman, and media stars like Amy Poehler and Tina Fay. There needs to be an old-guy-sci-fi reader in that group. So I've started recording my audio book.                                                                         Me and an Airedale making an audio book Three chapters in the can! But not edited. All those star writer/readers have producers and high power editing programs. Not me. Even though I had several jobs in the olden days where I edited tape a lot, I am so far a novice digital editor. But I'll get better. Plan is (once I get rocking on editing) to put a new chapter on the MIZ bo

Pretty Big "Hard Core"

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There It Is... Lots of statistics-and-survey types have been saying the Trump hard core is "somewhere in the mid-30% area. "Hard core" means... you know, hard core . The latest data (Gallup here, but Pew and other credible researchers) confirms.  Roughly one of every three Americans approves of Trump as President. That's a historical low for this stage of a presidency, but it's still a formidable group of people - ABOUT 89 MILLION ADULTS (out of ~248 million).                                                                            Trumpsters Despite historically low total approval ratings at this point in the presidency, Trump’s approval among Republican voters is 79  percent. According to Gallup: Politics          Republicans 26%;   Democrats 29%   Independents  42% Trump Approval                 79%                         8%                               31%         % of Population                 20.54                        2.32%        

What's "White Nationalism?"

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S'plain Yourself, Scooter If I say... as I said in a preceding post about pardoning Sheriff Arpaio... that President Trump's "base," the firmest core of his supporters, are White Nationalists, what am I saying? Here, Let Wikipedia tell you... * White nationalism  is a type of  nationalism  or  pan-nationalism  which holds the belief that  white people  are a  race [1]  and seeks to develop and maintain a white  national identity . [2] [3] [4]  Its proponents identify with and are attached to the concept of a white nation. [5]  White nationalists say they seek to ensure the survival of the white race, and the cultures of historically white  states . They hold that white people should maintain their majority in majority-white countries, maintain their political and economic dominance, and that their cultures should be foremost. [4]  Many white nationalists believe that  miscegenation ,  multiculturalism ,  immigration  of nonwhites and  low birth rates  among

Happy to be Wrong!

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Mr. Predictor* Predicts Biblical Plague In May, 2016, I put on my W orst Case hat, slipped on my magic Prediction Ring , and in stentorian tones pronounced: Zika = Abortion Explosion! What's a "Pro-Lifer" to do? [Then I politicized shamelessly] Thanks in part to slow thinking House Republicans, the zika virus is about to invade the U.S. South and bring  a plague of Biblical proportions. Every pregnant woman's baby-to-be will be threatened with horrible birth defects, life destroying defects. Without massive intervention, a whole generation of children and their families will be deeply scarred.  Microcephaly  is but the most obvious, and there are more and more discoveries of tragic impacts of this mosquito-borne disease. [I blathered on .  I called this prediction just at the Zika peak in south and central America.] Then..... In my copy of Science Magazine, arriving today (mine comes late)... Zika has all but disappeared in the Americas.  B

Political Grousing

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Joe Arpaio PARDONED * The absolute “play to your base” play. And the base is now clearly defined: white nationalists. There you go. *credit !

Cross Promotion

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How about this black background? This is a copy of a post on me humble book blog . I love this topic (games changing the world), and I put it on the book blog because games play a big part in the book, A Reluctant God. ARG Predicts Why Some Men Don’t Work: Video Games Have Gotten Really Good NYTimes piece , July 3, 2017 Millennials - mostly male millennials - are working fewer hours and playing video games more hours. Big story, that.  ... Go on, take it to another level, whip in a little sci-fi: The Dream Game:  The common citizens of the Empire of Earth, those billions who populated the twenty terraformed planets and Mother Earth herself, led lives of great diversity, almost totally in the virtual worlds of shared dreams. The Dream Game. Approximately 99% of humanity spent most of their lives in the Dream Game   Dreaming became the superior form of virtual reality. VR, in all its verisimilitude, lacked the direct connection to the primitive brain tha

This Just In, Death Lurks!

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Which Extermination Do We Prefer? credit I occasionally post strange stuff (not strange to me, of course) to a Disqus " conversation " in their Sci-fi category - sort of a sub-Reddit.  Following discussions on the existence of UFOs and the A.I. takeover, I wrote this, which seemed in general step with the stuff I put on this blog. So here: seniorjunior (scooter duff)   @seniorjunior  an hour ago The (eagerly awaited by some) Final Blow to human life might be an invasion of a powerful, pitiless bunch of aliens who think we are just spiffy hors d’ oeuvres. We sci-fi nuts keep dreaming up new apocalyses when a real one is floating around all over. One of the certainties of massive over-population is that a "die back" is cooked into the craziness. "We're all gonna die!" screams the heroine. True, of course, but all at once? Possible. The speed with which viruses mutate is 1.) Scary as heck, and 2.) a powerful argument for the

Super News You Haven't Heard About

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Oh Sure, You've Heard About the Latest Trump Noise...      ...But so very much important, significant, progressive, hopeful news is buried under the crashing cymbals of our Distractor in Chief.      Like this earth-shaking bit... * " Fifty-six percent of doctors registered either strong support or were somewhat supportive of a single-payer health system, according to the  survey  by Merritt Hawkins, a physician recruitment firm." 56%!  That's way up from just a few years ago. How come? you might ask. Did docs suddenly become libtards? Why would they care when they get paid, how they get paid? And that's it... getting paid through the tangled morass of for-profit insurance companies' rules and legal dances (different for every company) is a pain in the prolapsed rectum. "P hysicians often say they are tired of dealing with billing and paperwork, which takes time away from patients," is putting it more politely. A one-doc office might have

Why I Keep Worrying About China

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Robots.... Note:  No humans around *                                                                                        AND they broke the Guinness record for dancing robots Ok, maybe I'm a bit alarmist. Then I heard about their "quantum radar" that sees stealth airplanes quite clearly. (More on that later.) Eeeeek! * Axios ** Nerdist

He was Loaded

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The Locked and Loaded edition  Our President (yes he is, whether we like it or not) says so many outrageous things so often, that we hardly have time to comment on the last one before a new one comes along. Finally, his "locked and loaded" comment in a blast at North Korea just kept coming up in my mind until it boiled over into my commentary basket. This time I did it over at YouTube, another part of the Google-topus. To see a video version of a Scooter rant, check out "Locked and Loaded" here . (If you are not into Spider solitaire, just check the first two and a half minutes. But then, you'll miss the brown dwarf.)   p.s. El Presidente said so many outrageous things last night in Phoenix (22 Aug), it might take me weeks to pick one for comment. I know, 'thank heavens.'

"Some Fine People"

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WOW! What a Picture Worth, oh, 63,000 words It was in the NY Times Sunday Review Click  HERE  for...

The Real Cost of Crazy

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"Hey, lots of leaders were narcissists"  (Lunacy Notes before Lunatic Blocks the Sun)                                                        Just hope it's not total                                                                   "How about that Alt-Left?"        What to do? How to respond? My reflex action is to rant through the NYTimes, the Washington Post or maybe Breitbart (but they are too crazy today, cheering for Their Guy, to even consider).   Here's what I ranted to The Times' Frank Bruni column " Can’t Eclipse the American Spirit:" NYTIMES 8.16.2017 will duff Tijeras, NM   20 minutes ago "Lunar" is the base word behind "lunatic." Maybe I'm crazy to see the connection? For all of us who have been preoccupied with DJT's mental state, now we can see the actual, on-the-ground results of having a president who is suffering (ha!) from malignant narcisissim. The tragic, bizarre, shout

Rant Highlights

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In the Daily Gush of Olde Scooter's "Comments," the Occasional Bon Mot (more mot than bon) Here's a sample The story was about how Stephen Bannon was thought  to have orchestrated an anti-H.R. McMasters campaign to oust the  general from his National Security Adviser role by calling him a "globalist." Salon 8/14/17                                              Bannon                                            Globalist Scooter spake: The brain-twisters on the Republican (and moreso Trump) payrolls have demonized the word "globalist." They demonized "diversity" and "sustainable" and "progressive" and many more. This propagandist's trick of changing the very meaning of our vocabulary is insidious and deeply dangerous to the free exchange of ideas. Robert Mercer's (and Steve Bannon's) Cambridge Analytica uses Big Data and advanced Artificial Intelligence to direct this mutation of language. What F

NYTimes.com "Pick" Comment

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Post The Sinclair Sneak Attack * How a Conservative TV Giant Is Ridding Itself of Regulation By CECILIA KANG, ERIC LIPTON and SYDNEY EMBER  ... Thence a story on how the Sinclair Media giant is becoming gianter. (More giantly?) It's the right-wing local TV  version of Fox News. It is growing into a monster, due of course to Trumpian  deregulation  which allows greater and greater media consolidation, something I fear and loathe for the reasons below. This "comment" was the "most liked" and a "Pick" by the comment moderator.  NYT Pick                                                                                     Number 1 and a Pick** will duff   Tijeras, NM   5 hours ago Once, local TV news operations were profoundly important players in their cities. The regulatory environment encouraged them to be independent journalists who kept the local governments' feet to the fire with in-depth inve