Blackmoor Vituperative

I don’t mind that the vast majority of Star Wars’ sequels and spin-offs have been declared no longer valid by Disney (what nerds call “canon” — or “cannon”, if they are exceptionally illiterate). I only wish Disney had taken the additional step of declaring it all no longer canon, and started over from scratch. The Force Awakens would have been vastly improved if it had not been dragging along the baggage of the last 40 years. Every time they trundled out the cast from the 1977 movie (including the robots), the film ground to a cringe-inducing halt. What’s more, the most egregious plot holes were directly the result of shoehorning those characters into the story.

Ah, well. The film appears to have served its purpose, regardless. It’s the most successful toy commercial ever made.

Here is what I am using now in Firefox:

• bug 489729
• Context Search
• Cookies Manager+
• F.B. Purity (and hide the Trending pane)
• gtranslate
• Lastpass
• MapQuest search
• Tab Mix Plus (I set it to open my “home page” in new tabs, and to reload a tab when I double-click the tab)
• uBlock Origin
• Xmarks Sync (I synchronize bookmarks, but not passwords, and I turn Xmarks’ “Discovery” features off.)

In the future, everyone will be poor except the rich
In the future, everyone will have guns except the poor
In the future, everyone will be the color of cafe-au-lait
In the future, everyone will be beautiful
In the future, everyone will be obese
In the future, everyone will think they’re smart
In the future, everyone will be stupid
In the future, everyone will be happy
In the future, everyone will be angry
In the future, everyone will be sad

A brief reminder of what’s real and what’s not.

1. Danger posed to us by immigrants: not real.
2. Immigrants fleeing imminent death: real.
3. Danger posed to us by Democrats going door to door to confiscate our guns: not real.
4. Danger posed to us by heavily-armed right-wing “patriots”: real.
5. Ghosts, angels, gods, demons, devils, ancient astronauts, bigfoot, flying saucers, homeopathic “medicine”, and cow-mutilating aliens: not real.
6. Being more likely to die of heart disease, cancer, or chronic lower respiratory disease than from all other causes of death combined: real.
7. Vaccines causing autism: not real.
8. Measles, mumps, and whooping cough making a comeback because parents decide not to vaccinate their children: real.
9. Conspiracy among scientists to promote “the global warming scam”: not real.
10. Global temperatures increasing faster than was predicted 20 years ago: real.

Superman reminds some kids how Americans are supposed to act.

You are three times more likely to be killed by an acquaintance than by a stranger.
(https://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2009/offenses/expanded_information/data/shrtable_10.html)

I find it disappointing to learn how many otherwise reasonable people are willing to say unkind things about people they do not know: i.e., southerners, gun owners, Muslims…

Prejudice and irrational fear make a poor basis for public policy.

Fun fact! The US Post Office is one of the very, very few parts of our federal government that is authorized by our Constitution:

“The Congress shall have Power […] To establish Post Offices and post Roads;”
— US Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 7

(That same clause authorizes what we today call the US Interstate Highway System.)

As for the USPS losing money, it does and it doesn’t. It routinely makes more than it spends on actual operating costs. The “losing billions” that people sometimes refer to pertains to payments made into a fund for employees’ future retirement for the next 75 years. These payments are the result of a 2006 law passed by Congress, and it’s a requirement that is imposed on no other public or private institution.

But when you see people talk about the Post Office “losing billions”, that’s what they are talking about: failure to pay into a fund for the future health and retirement benefits for people who are not yet born.

If I were conspiratorially minded, I would think that this unique requirement was imposed on the USPS specifically to drive it out of business, by the same people who today call for its privatization because it “loses billions”. But that’s just crazy, right?

I’ve reached the end of Misfits (eight seasons on Netflix, but there’s only eight episodes per season). While it’s a bit uneven, and sometimes it takes some effort to care about the characters, I like it so much more than the current seasons of Gotham, Agents of Shield, and Heroes Reborn.

The thing that irks me most about Heroes Reborn, and why I won’t be watching it anymore, is the tiresome “there’s no time!”/”it’s too dangerous!” enforced secrecy, without which the whole plot would collapse like a punctured bouncy house. If the main characters just had a five minute conversation, they could save us all the trouble of sitting through a dozen episodes of nothing. But no: there’s no time/it’s too dangerous! “No time” is right: life is too short to watch an exercise in padding.

Agents of Shield is just boring. I don’t care about the characters, don’t care about their mission, the plots are dull, the villains are dull, the outfits are dull, yawn, goodbye.

And Gotham… I liked the first season of Gotham, but FFS, I get it: the red-headed kid is the Joker. Except he’s not, because the Joker won’t show up for another 10-15 years (after Batman does), and when he does, whoever he used to be is a huge mystery, so he can’t be some famous over-the-top psycho from when Bruce Wayne was a kid. Seriously, he’s way over-the-top. Jim Carrey in The Mask is looking at this guy and going, “Whoa, dude: dial it back a notch.”

I hope Powers comes back for another season. The first season was slow, the production values are… frugal, and Eddie Izzard’s character will probably not return (he was the shining beacon of the first season), but I would still like to see where it goes from where the first season left off.

There should be a name for the phenomenon of, “I’m right to believe this even if the reasons I state for believing it are false”. I see it all the time. Guns. GMOs. Black pets around Halloween. Being offended at someone’s costume. No matter how portentous or trivial the topic, facts just don’t seem relevant. It’s not a “liberal” vs “conservative” thing, either: it’s universal.

But it’s easier to block people who spew nonsense than argue with them. It’s not like an argument on the Internet ever changed anyone’s mind, anyway.