SciFi Weekend: Doctor Who; Sherlock; Sense8; The OA; Travelers; Westworld In Chronological Order; Carrie Fisher; Father Of The Bride

December 25, 2016 — Ron Chusid

While waiting for the Christmas Special, The Return of Doctor Mysterio, we have The 12 Doctors of Christmas video above.

This will lead us into the upcoming season, to start in April 2017, which will be Steven Moffat’s last as show runner. He talked to Digital Spy about his plans:

If you’re expecting a grand finale to the Steven Moffat era of Doctor Who, then you might want to think again.

Moffat told press including Digital Spy that his final episodes of the BBC series will be about “pushing forward” – not bringing anything to a close.

“With Doctor Who, you never want to have finished the story – I’m not going to do that,” he insisted. “I want Chris [Chibnall, the new showrunner] to come in and have a brilliant time, so I’m not going to wrap it all up.

“So no… it’ll still be pushing forward. The thing is, people don’t really care about me or Chris, that’s the absolute truth. It’s heartbreaking, but it’s true – so the departure of a showrunner and the arrival of another one doesn’t really matter very much, ’cause no-one’s ever heard of us!”

Whether Peter Capaldi remains after Moffat stays might depend upon negotiations over pay, as the BBC has cut its fees in recent years.

Steven Moffat also has an interview with the BBC over the upcoming season of Sherlock, to premiere on New Year’s Day:

What do you mean when you say ghosts of the past are coming back?

By ghosts of the past we mean consequences. There are consequences to the kind of mad cap in-the-moment fun lives that Sherlock and John and Mary lead. There are things that have happened, there are enemies that they have made, there is damage that has been done and some of that is coming back to visit them. There will be surprises and when some of those surprises happen you’ll think “ah I should have seen that coming”.

How have the main characters developed in this series?

That’s the whole story of this series, so I’m not talking about that! Events get out of their control for a while and we see them in their darkest hours and in their highest moments.

How does Sherlock feel about John and Mary’s new addition?

The thing about Sherlock Holmes is that he is a grown-up. We always like to pretend he’s an absolute lunatic but he does things well and he straightforwardly adores John and Mary, they’re his best friends. So he behaves probably better than most young men behave when their best mates are having babies. He’s pretty good at all that.

Netflix released the Sense8 Christmas Special on December 23. At first it seemed an unlikely show to have a Christmas Special, but in retrospect it made a lot of sense. This provided a way to get reacquainted with the characters during the two year hiatus between the first and second season. The slow pace of the show worked well here. Not all that much happened to advance the story lines of the characters, giving plenty of time for holiday celebrations and the obligatory orgy scene.

Netflix also released two genre shows around the holidays, The OA and Travelers. I have not had time to see either, but The OA has been receiving a fair about of buzz since released. More information at Variety, Vox, and The Atlantic. The Travelers (trailer above) has an overall plot line similar to many science fiction shows including 12 Monkeys, Legends of Tomorrow, and Continuum in which time travelers from the future try to prevent a catastrophe in their era. This differs in that the travelers do not physically travel through time. Instead their consciousness takes over the bodies of others at the moment of their death. Here is the official synopsis:

Hundreds of years from now, the last surviving humans discover the means of sending consciousness back through time, directly into people in the 21st century. These “travelers” assume the lives of seemingly random people, while secretly working as teams to perform missions in order to save humanity from a terrible future. These travelers are: FBI Special Agent Grant MacLaren (Eric McCormack), the team’s leader; Marcy (Mackenzie Porter), a young, intellectually disabled woman in the care of her social worker, David (Patrick Gilmore); Trevor (Jared Paul Abrahamson), a high school quarterback; Carly (Nesta Marlee Cooper), a single mom in an abusive relationship; and Philip (Reilly Dolman), a heroin-addicted college student. Armed only with their knowledge of history and an archive of social media profiles, the travelers discover that 21st century lives and relationships are as much a challenge as their high-stakes missions.

Westworld is one show which in which things would be much clearer if viewed a second time. While watching the season finale I was thinking it would be even clearer if recut in chronological order, as some have done with a work by creator Jonathan Nolan’s brother–Christopher Nolan’s Memento. Of course it would be much harder to rewatch the entire season of Westworld as opposed to a movie such as Memento. These issues have been solved at The Outline where there is a recut version of Westworld season one in chronological order in which what they call the “normal” parts are sped up. This reduces the video to only ninety minutes.

As of time of writing this on Saturday, Carrie Fisher remain in intensive care after suffering a heart attack on Friday while flying from London to Los Angeles. She survived thanks to passengers on the plan initiating CPR. Hopefully she has a full recovery. We do need Princess Leia back to lead the rebellion against the evil empire when Donald Trump takes over in January.

For the last few months Father of the Bride has been the movie which means the most to me personally, still recalling watching it on ancient video tape when my daughter was a long way away from this point in her life. Therefore it caught my attention when I was scanning entertainment news for this post and saw that E! News had an article on the movie entitled How Realistic Is Father of the Bride? Fact-Checking the Classic 25 Years Later.  572 guests!!! I’m going to have nightmares tonight contemplating that.

After the show received quite a bit of controversy, A&E has cancelled Escaping The KKK.

Posted in Science Fiction, Television. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . No Comments »

Julian Assange On The Election Of Donald Trump And Defeat Of Hillary Clinton

December 24, 2016 — Ron Chusid

Julian Assange and Wikileaks had a significant impact on the Democratic Party. The revelations in the leaked email led to the removal of Debby Wasserman Schultz as chairperson of the Democratic National Committee and very likely had an effect on the results of the general election. La Republica interviewed Assange. This is what he had to say about the United States election:

WikiLeaks published documents on Hillary Clinton and the US Democrats. How do you reply to those who accuse you of having helped to elect Mr. Trump?
 “What is the allegation here exactly? We published what the Democratic National Committee, John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, and Hillary Clinton herself were saying about their own campaign, which the American people read and were very interested to read, and assessed the elements and characters, and then they made a decision. That decision was based on Hillary Clinton’s own words, her campaign manager’s own words. That’s democracy”.

Do you agree with those who say that it was a hit job, because you hit Hillary Clinton when she was most vulnerable, during the final weeks of her campaign?
“No, we have been publishing about Hillary Clinton for many years, because of her position as Secretary of State. We have been publishing her cables since 2010 and her emails also. We are domain experts on Clinton and her post 2008 role in government. This is why it is natural for sources who have information on Hillary Clinton to come to us. They know we will understand its significance”.

So Clinton is gone, has WikiLeaks won?
“We were pleased to see how much of the American public interacted with the material we published. That interaction was on both sides of politics, including those to the left of Hillary Clinton those who supported Bernie Sanders, who were able to see the structure of power within the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and how the Clintons had placed Debbie Wasserman Schultz to head up the DNC and as a result the DNC had tilted the scales of the process against Bernie Sanders”.

What about Donald Trump? What is going to happen?
“If the question is how I personally feel about the situation, I am mixed: Hillary Clinton and the network around her imprisoned one of our alleged sources for 35 years, Chelsea Manning, tortured her according to the United Nations, in order to implicate me personally. According to our publications Hillary Clinton was the chief proponent and the architect of the war against Libya. It is clear that she pursued this war as a staging effort for her Presidential bid. It wasn’t even a war for an ideological purpose. This war ended up producing the refugee crisis in Europe, changing the political colour of Europe, killing more than 40,000 people within a year in Libya, while the arms from Libya went to Mali and other places, boosting or causing civil wars, including the Syrian catastrophe. If someone and their network behave like that, then there are consequences. Internal and external opponents are generated. Now there is a separate question on what Donald Trump means”.

What do you think he means?
“Hillary Clinton’s election would have been a consolidation of power in the existing ruling class of the United States. Donald Trump is not a DC insider, he is part of the wealthy ruling elite of the United States, and he is gathering around him a spectrum of other rich people and several idiosyncratic personalities. They do not by themselves form an existing structure, so it is a weak structure which is displacing and destabilising the pre-existing central power network within DC. It is a new patronage structure which will evolve rapidly, but at the moment its looseness means there are opportunities for change in the United States: change for the worse and change for the better”.

In these ten years of WikiLeaks, you and your organisation have experienced all sorts of attacks. What have you learned from this warfare?
“Power is mostly the illusion of power. The Pentagon demanded we destroy our publications. We kept publishing. Clinton denounced us and said we were an attack on the entire “international community”. We kept publishing. I was put in prison and under house arrest. We kept publishing. We went head to head with the NSA getting Edward Snowden out of Hong Kong, we won and got him asylum. Clinton tried to destroy us and was herself destroyed. Elephants, it seems, can be brought down with string. Perhaps there are no elephants”.

While there is potential for significant harm under Donald Trump, bringing down such a tremendous force for evil on the world stage such as Hillary Clinton would be a great victory.  While the revelations from Wikileaks were damaging to Clinton, it is not clear how much they actually affected the election. They primarily acted to verify criticism already being made of Clinton by Sanders supporters and her opponents on the left.

Having Wikileaks as a major news story in October was probably harmful in that this centered much of the discussion in the final days of the election on Clinton’s flaws as opposed to Donald Trump’s flaws. The polls seemed to show signs of limited memory on the part of many voters as Clinton’s lead seemed to grow or diminish based upon which candidate was receiving the most coverage. With Donald Trump staying quieter in the final days of the campaign, it did probably hurt Clinton to have her flaws dominate the news between the Wikileaks revelations, along with further discussion of the FBI investigation of her email.

FiveThirtyEight.com tried to objectively measure the degree of damage done to Clinton by Wikileaks but the answer is not clear to them either:

There just isn’t a clean-cut story in the data. For instance, you might have expected a decline in the percentage of Americans who trusted Clinton after Wikileaks began its releases. As Politico’s Ken Vogel pointed out in mid-October, both Trump campaign officials and even progressives said the Wikileaks emails revealed that Clinton would be “compromised” if she became president. But the percentage of Americans who found Clinton to be honest or trustworthy stayed at around 30 percent in polling throughout October and into November.

The evidence that Wikileaks had an impact, therefore, is circumstantial. Trump, for instance, won among voters who decided who to vote for in October 51 percent to 37 percent, according to national exit polls. That’s Trump’s best time period. He carried voters who decided in the final week, when you might expect Comey’s letter to have had the largest impact, 45 percent to 42 percent. (Although, Trump’s margin among those who decided in the final week was wider in the exit polls in some crucial swing states.) And while Clinton’s lead was dropping in the FiveThirtyEight polls-only forecast before the Comey letter was released, the drop accelerated slightly afterward.

Of course, one thing didn’t sink Clinton. The evidence suggests Wikileaks is among the factors that might have contributed to her loss, but we really can’t say much more than that.

Julian Assange also discussed other topics. Among the most interesting was the status of opposition voices in Russia:

“In Russia, there are many vibrant publications, online blogs, and Kremlin critics such as [Alexey] Navalny are part of that spectrum. There are also newspapers like “Novaya Gazeta”, in which different parts of society in Moscow are permitted to critique each other and it is tolerated, generally, because it isn’t a big TV channel that might have a mass popular effect, its audience is educated people in Moscow. So my interpretation is that in Russia there are competitors to WikiLeaks, and no WikiLeaks staff speak Russian, so for a strong culture which has its own language, you have to be seen as a local player. WikiLeaks is a predominantly English-speaking organisation with a website predominantly in English. We have published more than 800,000 documents about or referencing Russia and president Putin, so we do have quite a bit of coverage, but the majority of our publications come from Western sources, though not always. For example, we have published more than 2 million documents from Syria, including Bashar al-Assad personally. Sometimes we make a publication about a country and they will see WikiLeaks as a player within that country, like with Timor East and Kenya. The real determinant is how distant that culture is from English. Chinese culture is quite far away”.

The Guardian, in its coverage of this interview, did point out how bleak the situation is in Russia:

Dozens of journalists have been killed in Russia in the past two decades, and Freedom House considers the Russian press to be “not free” and notes: “The main national news agenda is firmly controlled by the Kremlin. The government sets editorial policy at state-owned television stations, which dominate the media landscape and generate propagandistic content.”

Posted in Bernie Sanders, Civil Liberties, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Politics, Scandals. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , . 2 Comments »

Right Wing Media Distorts Isolated, And Inappropriate, Attack On Ivanka Trump

December 23, 2016 — Ron Chusid

While Donald Trump was tweeting about expanding the nuclear arsenal yesterday, another controversy arose when Ivanka Trump was harassed by another passenger on an airplane flight. The right wing media quickly took advantage of this launch an overall attack on the left. With all the sensationalist reports in the media, fortunately there is a more reliable account from another passenger who posted about it on his Facebook page.

The passenger who confronted Ivanka Trump was removed from the flight. From the account of the witness in the Facebook post it does sound like it was a reasonable decision. The other passenger’s case is also not supported in light of this tweet prior to the episode: “Ivanka and Jared at JFK T5, flying commercial. My husband chasing them down to harass them.”

It has become conventional to give the children of a president a certain amount of privacy. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are in a different situation than recent presidential children such as Obama’s daughters because of their actual involvement in Donald Trump’s transition, which is expected to continue after he takes office. That still does not justify intentional harassment of them. The fact that they were traveling with their children is further reason to give them a little privacy.

This was one person acting badly. It hardly justifies sensationalism such as the cover of The New York Post, which declares: Heir Strike–Now Dems are attacking Trump’s kids. An opinion piece by Karol Markowicz also takes advantage of this to attack the left in general, ending with this unsupported conclusion: “The left is trying to turn the whole country into a liberal safe space — safe for them, dangerous for anyone who disagrees with them. They’ve lost their minds.”

Donald Trump’s election has raised a lot of emotions in response to the xenophobia, racism, and misogyny raised during his campaign. In this case, the reaction was excessive and inappropriate, but it hardly reflects on all liberals. Having followed many heated elections, I have found that Clinton supporters have often been the most intolerant of those holding different viewpoints that I have seen. This, of course, does not apply to all Clinton supporters, and many of us on the left saw both major party candidates as being near equally repulsive.

Despite the erroneous argument in using this incident to attack the left in general, I do agree with Markowicz on one point. Ivanka Trump is hardly the person in the incoming Trump administration for the left to concentrating our opposition on. She gave a rather liberal speech at the Republican Convention and, as I pointed out earlier in the month, has been advocating for action on climate change. It would make more sense to encourage her to try to influence her father in a more liberal and tolerant direction, as opposed to attacking her.

It is no surprise that an isolated individual acted badly, or that the right wing media would take advantage of the episode. It is also no surprise that social media provided valuable information beyond what was reported by the news media. What I did find a little surprising in all of this is that Ivanka and Jared are flying coach, which is uncomfortable even when you don’t have someone harassing you.

Posted in Blogs & Social Media, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton. Tags: , , . 5 Comments »

Donald Trump Calls For Expanding Nuclear Weapons

December 22, 2016 — Ron Chusid

Maybe Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin aren’t such great buddies after all. After Putin said his country’s nuclear potential needs fortifying, Donald Trump tweeted: “The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.”

This is counter to the trend since the late 1980’s of reduction in nuclear weapons. Recent presidents from Reagan to Obama have supported reductions in nuclear weapons. with Ronald Reagan having spoken out in favor of eventual elimination. At his second inauguration in 1985 Reagan said, “We seek the total elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth.” Barack Obama called for “a world without nuclear weapons” while in Hiroshima last May.

As on many other issues, Trump has made many contradictory statement statements regarding nuclear weapons and it is difficult to predict what he will do based upon a single tweet. Among his controversial statements on nuclear weapons was his refusal to rule out the possibility of using nuclear weapons against ISIS. Although the Clinton camp was highly critical of him regarding this, his position was essentially the same as Hillary Clinton’s position in 2008 when she criticized Barack Obama for saying he would not use nuclear weapons against terrorist groups.

Posted in Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, National Security, Ronald Reagan. No Comments »

Clintons Continue To Blame Others For Their Loss But Democrats Must Face The Facts To Recover

December 21, 2016 — Ron Chusid

Normally when someone loses an election they keep relatively quiet. I thought that the horror of seeing Donald Trump being elected president would at least be balanced by being through with the Clintons. That has not been the case. Since losing the election Hillary Clinton, who has never had a very good record on First Amendment issues, has essentially been promoting censorship when calling on Congress to take action against the “fake news” which has been negative towards her, along with fueling the recent surge in anti-Russia hysteria. The Clintons are also keeping Democrats from taking an honest look at why they lost with their constant claims that they lost because of Russia, James Comey, angry white men, Bernie voters, Stein voters, and the media, never taking any responsibility for the terrible campaign Clinton ran and her flaws which kept people from wanting to vote for her.

Michael Daly commented on this at The Daily Beast:

Former President Bill Clinton is quick to apportion blame for his wife’s defeat.
“James Comey cost her the election,” Clinton was quoted telling a group of holiday shoppers during an impromptu chat in a Westchester County bookshop last week.

But he has yet to place any blame at all on an otherwise great man with a great fault who bears considerably more responsibility for Hillary Clinton’s loss.

That man is Bill Clinton himself. His great fault is one he shares with his wife; they too often act as if rules that apply to you or me do not apply to them.

Clinton apologists totally ignore the fact that there would have not been a criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton if Clinton had not violated the rules regarding handling email, as documented in the State Department Inspector General report, and then go on to repeatedly lie about the situation.

Similarly, Clinton would not have been harmed by the hacking of John Podesta’s email (regardless of whether they were Wikileaks source–which has not been proven), if the email did not contain such incriminating information about the actions of Clinton and the DNC.

It would have also been better if Clinton had come clean on everything months earlier when the scandals broke, rather than engaging in a coverup, putting herself at risk of all hell breaking loose in the final days of the campaign.

None of this might have mattered if Clinton hadn’t run such a terrible campaign. This includes the mistakes made in states such as Michigan, and ignoring the advice of Sanders supporters. Asawin Suebsaeng wrote:

Ever since election night—when Hillary Clinton tanked and Donald Trump became the next leader of the free world—the most prominent allies and alumni of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign have maintained a succinct message for Team Hillary: We. Told. You. So.

In the final months of the brutal and chaotic 2016 campaign, there were plenty of Democratic activists freaking out about Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania (the three states that ultimately cost the Democrats the White House) and Clinton’s fatal shortcomings there. Many of them were envoys of the Sanders camp who wanted to help fix those problems, including Clinton’s difficulties with the block of the mythical “white-working-class,” economically anxious voters who Sanders had championed during the primaries.

“They fucking ignored us on all these [three] battleground states [while] we were sounding the alarm for months,” Nomiki Konst, a progressive activist and former Sanders surrogate who served on the 2016 Democratic National Committee platform committee, told The Daily Beast. “We kept saying to each other like, ‘What the fuck, why are they just blowing us off? They need these voters more than anybody.’”

Later in the article:

“The Clinton campaign believed they had the strongest and brightest people in the room… and they had no concept of why people would choose Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton,” Kleeb continued. “They mocked us, they made fun of us. They always had a… model that was supposed to save the day. We were street activists and they don’t get that. And that’s a fundamental divide. They ran a check-the-box, sanitized campaign. And voters don’t think like that. You don’t win elections that way.”

Clinton failed to take advantage of what the Sanders campaign had already figured out about the electorate in 2016, and ignored the voters who backed Sanders over her in the primaries. Dave Lindorff discussed how It Wasn’t the Russians: Hillary Lost Because She Blew Off Sanders and His Voters:

The truth is that it was Clinton’s own actions that lost her the support of Sanders voters. Her repeating lying about Sanders during the campaign, and her gratuitous dissing of Sanders and his supporters even after it was becoming clearer that she would win the primary because of the corrupt support she had lined up from the party’s unelected so-called “super delegates,” and her decision in the fall, after winning the nomination, to ignore the 13 million Sanders voters from the primary and instead to pursue the support of what she hoped were disenchanted Republican voters upset that Donald Trump had won the Republican nomination, all doomed her in the general election.

If the Democrats are to recover, they must learn from the mistakes they made in nominating a flawed candidate such as Hillary Clinton,  along with also suffering loses when running as a Republican-lite party in 2010 and 2014. It does no good to claim Clinton did nothing wrong in the email/Foundation scandals as many Clinton supporters still argue, or to place the blame on others for losing the election.

Posted in Bernie Sanders, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Politics, Scandals. Tags: , , , , , , . 5 Comments »

Trump Sons Selling Access To President-Elect In Exchange For Donations

December 20, 2016 — Ron Chusid

Under the best of circumstances there will be major conflicts of interest and ethical problems when someone with business interests as vast as those held by Donald Trump becomes president. One argument often given for supporting Trump was that he was so wealthy that he would not need to take advantage of using his government position to make money. This assumes a type of ultra-moral human which Trump has given no indication of being. It remains to be seen how Trump will act as president but there are already questions raised by the actions of his kids. The Center For Public Integrity reports that Donald Trump’ sons are selling access to their father:

A new Texas nonprofit led by Donald Trump’s grown sons is offering access to the freshly-minted president during inauguration weekend — all in exchange for million-dollar donations to unnamed “conservation” charities, according to interviews and documents reviewed by the Center for Public Integrity.

And the donors’ identities may never be known.

Prospective million-dollar donors to the “Opening Day 2017” event — slated for Jan. 21, the day after inauguration, at Washington, D.C.’s Walter E. Washington Convention Center — receive a “private reception and photo opportunity for 16 guests with President Donald J. Trump,” a “multi-day hunting and/or fishing excursion for 4 guests with Donald Trump, Jr. and/or Eric Trump, and team,” as well as tickets to other events and “autographed guitars by an Opening Day 2017 performer.”

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Trump team is disputing the connection between Trump’s sons and the event. A spokesperson stated, “Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump are avid outdoorsman and supporters of conservation efforts, which align with the goals of this event, however they are not involved in any capacity.” The Wall Street Journal disputes this:

The filing with the Texas secretary of state shows the Trumps were registered as directors for the nonprofit on Dec. 14. The registered agent for the group is Gentry Beach, a longtime friend of Donald Jr. whom the president-elect last month appointed to his inaugural committee…

In addition to Mr. Trump’s sons, two top fundraisers for Mr. Trump registered with the Texas secretary of state as directors of the nonprofit: Mr. Beach, an investor, and Tom Hicks Jr., son of a Dallas billionaire. Both are listed as co-chairmen for the fundraiser, and last month Mr. Trump appointed them to serve as finance vice-chairmen for his inaugural committee.

This sounds like the same type of influence peddling by the Clintons which Trump criticized during the campaign. Rather than draining the swamp, the Trump family appears to be swimming in it.

Beyond this, there are serious questions raised by Trump’s children being on the transition team while also planning to take control of the family’s business when Trump becomes president.

Posted in Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Scandals. Tags: , , , . 1 Comment »

Record Number Of Electors Refuse To Vote For This Year’s Dreadful Choices

December 19, 2016 — Ron Chusid

The bad new first is that Donald Trump has received enough electoral votes to become president. The good news is that Hillary Clinton lost again. As expected, the attempts to deny Trump a majority in the electoral college were totally unsuccessful.

In a year with two of the worst candidates imaginable, a new record has been set for electors who failed to vote with their state’s votes, with more likely to have switched their votes if not for state laws interfering, along with the realization that it was a futile effort. While it is unprecedented to have this number of “unfaithful” electors, there weren’t enough to change the result:

Ultimately, Kasich earned one vote from an elector in Texas. So did former representative Ron Paul (R-Tex.). In Washington state, three electors cast votes for former secretary of state Colin Powell, while another voted for Faith Spotted Eagle, a member of the Sioux Native American tribe from South Dakota who opposes the Dakota Access Pipeline. Pence earned the requisite electoral votes to serve as vice president, but in Washington state, Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) also earned some votes.

Politico points out that some of those who attempted to vote for other candidates were replaced by other electors under laws in their states:

Seven Democratic electors attempted to vote against Clinton — four in Washington state and one each in Minnesota, Maine and Colorado. But three of the seven who attempted to buck Clinton were replaced by state election officials, raising questions about whether their “faithless” votes will be counted. In Colorado, a leader of the anti-Trump Democratic electors, Micheal Baca, was replaced by Republican Secretary of State Wayne Williams for his attempted faithless vote.

The majority of the electors who voted for someone other than the winner in their state were Clinton electors, therefore barely impacting Trump’s total. Some Democratic electors had the goal of voting for a moderate Republican in the hopes that there would be anti-Trump Republican electors willing to do the same. An additional elector in Maine initially voted for Bernie Sanders, but a second ballot was held after his vote was declared out of order. He gave his reasons in a Facebook post.

Having the popular vote winner fail to win in the electoral college, along with the attempts to alter the results in the electoral college, has raised questions once again as to whether the electoral college should be abolished. Of course Republicans will never go along with abolishing it as long as the situation benefits them, having won two elections in recent years despite losing the popular vote.

Sparsely populated red states receive more electoral votes per voter than many of the larger blue states, although this year the demographics of the swing states were more important in determining the outcome in favor the the Republican candidate.

It should be kept in mind that there is no way to know who would have won if the election was based upon the popular vote. The candidates would have used a different strategy than they used in 2016. Donald Trump might have won the popular vote if this determined the winner by campaigning for votes in large safely Democratic states which he ignored. He also might have achieved higher turnout in red states if the number mattered.

While the electoral college is in need of reform, we also need to look at the nominating process which failed miserably this year in providing Trump and Clinton as the major party candidates.

Update: Electors in Colorado and Minnesota also tried to vote for Sanders but were prevented from doing so.

Posted in Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Election Reform, Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton, Politics, Ron Paul. Tags: , , , , , . No Comments »

SciFi Weekend: Holiday Shows (Doctor Who, Sherlock, Sense8); Holiday Gifts; Metropolis; Star Trek Discovery Casts Lead; Humans; The Man In The High Castle

December 18, 2016 — Ron Chusid

We have now gone almost a year without any new episodes of Doctor Who. (At least there was Class, along with seeing Matt Smith on The Crown and Jenna Coleman on Victoria). Peter Capaldi and others have filmed the above message in advance of the Christmas special, and Capaldi has been available for interviews, including the one below:

Doctor Who does have some famous fans, including Prime Minister Theresa May, who has said she always watches the show on Christmas Day. Peter Capaldi responded to hearing this by saying, “I hope she takes this message of kindness and tolerance and compassion to heart.” When asked about whether he plans to leave the role, Capaldi responded by saying, “not for a long time, I hope.”

In another recent interview with Digital Spy, Steven Moffat has suggested someone else for the Doctor to meet, but does see a potential problem. “I’d like Doctor Who to meet the real James Bond, that’d be awesome. They wouldn’t get on at all. He’d shag his assistant!”

The fourth season of Sherlock begins on New Year’s Day. (They don’t worry about competing with the Rose Bowl in the U.K.) There have been hints that it might be the final season in light of how busy Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman are, but Steven Moffat denies it will be the final season.

Among other things I’ve recently learned about Doctor Who, Matt Smith has a sister, who is one of the girls in the above video.

Gizmodo lists The Best Gifts for Doctor Who Fans. Of course I already have my own full-sized Tom Baker scarf and a sonic screwdriver.

If you prefer a different franchise, and have a big budget, Ars Technica reviews a $434 replica light sabre. Or, if you want to build your own Death Star, here is how to begin.

We have become accustomed to seeing special holiday episodes of shows from the U.K., but I believe it is a first for Netflix to do this. The trailer for the Sense8-Christmas Special is above (to be released December 23). I have seen conflicting reports as to whether they will wait until May (as the trailer states) versus releasing the second season this month. Presumably the trailer has the most up to date plans.

In other genre news this week, Sam Esmail (Mr. Robot) is planning to do a miniseries of the 1927 classic science fiction movie, Metropolis.

The lead has been cast for Star Trek: Discovery. Sonequa Martin-Green (Walking Dead), will play a lieutenant-commander. Unlike previous Star Trek series, the show will not center around the captain.

Humans ended its second season tonight. (I have the season finale downloaded but have only watched through the seventh of eight episodes). The series raises many of the same issues as Westworld. It lacks the budget, the hype, and the big stars, but it many ways it has done an even better job. AMC will be starting the second season in the United States on February 13.

Amazon started the second season of The Man In The High Castle. While I am still early in the series, it looks good so far. The show which includes Nazi occupation of the eastern United States now seems more relevant with just over a month to go until Donald Trump becomes president. Deadline also recommends another new streaming show released on December 12, OA on Netflix.

Posted in Science Fiction, Television. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . 1 Comment »

The Search For Excuses For Clinton’s Loss Continues, Dividing Clintonland

December 17, 2016 — Ron Chusid

Hillary Clinton and her supporters continue to blame others for her loss to Donald Trump, despite a poorly run campaign with an unpopular candidate. James Comey was a hero to Hillary Clinton and her supporters when Comey announced his recommendation against prosecution, but now, along with Vladimir Putin, he is receiving the blame in Clintonland for Hillary Clinton’s loss. Attacks on the FBI by John  Podesta have now prompted Loretta Lynch, generally seen as an ally of the Clintons, to break rank and defend Comey over both the investigation of alleged Russian interference in the election and the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails. CNN reports:

Attorney General Loretta Lynch defended the FBI’s handling of investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election, swatting away criticism from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman as uninformed…

Much of the trashing happened in The Washington Post, where Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta lambasted the agency as slow to respond.

“He’s not involved in the ongoing investigation so he wouldn’t be privy to everything that would have been done or said to that. But as I said, he’s entitled to his opinion,” Lynch said of Podesta. “I can tell you that this investigation was taken seriously from the beginning.”

Lynch repeatedly declined to address Podesta’s specific allegations, saying she could not comment on an ongoing investigation. But she suggested that the longtime Democratic power-broker was tainted by his political connections and was not an unbiased observer.

“I know also because of his involvement with the campaign, he’s going to have a certain interest in this and a certain view of that,” she said. “Everyone has a great deal of respect for him. So I allow him that opinion, but I disagree with that.”

Lynch also declined to say whether the investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server earned more attention from law enforcement than the Russian hackings, saying it would not “be helpful to try and draw equivalencies to any investigations.” But she broadly defended the government’s handling of cyberthreats as “extremely high quality.”

Even back when James Comey was a hero to Clintonistas, there was selective hearing of  his statement which pointed out both carelessness and dishonesty on the part of Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton frequently lied about this initial FBI report. Clinton’s statement that, “Director Comey said my answers were truthful” was the first lie listed by Glenn Kessler (listed in no particular order) in his listing of The biggest Pinocchios of 2016. Hillary Clinton’s frequent lies during the campaign negated any advantage she might have had over Donald Trump, who has shown very little regard for facts or reality.

Julian Assange continues to deny that Russia was the source of the leaked email.  Regardless of the source, the media coverage continues to downplay the fact that Hillary Clinton lost for many reasons unrelated to the Wikileaks email, and that she deserves any negative impact from the information revealed about her campaign regardless of its source.

Sam Kriss has made comments in Slate regarding the question of Russian interference in the election which are similar to my previous posts on this topic:

It’s possible that the Democratic National Committee leaks were caused by Russian hackers—but given that the hack took place thanks to John Podesta clicking on a link in a phishing email, displaying all the technological savvy of someone’s aunt extremely excited by the new iPhone she thinks she’s won, it could have been anyone. The “leaked” CIA concerns over Russian meddling were quite clearly leaked deliberately by the CIA itself, an organization not exactly famed for its commitment to the truth; they’re the conclusions of an investigation that hasn’t even happened yet and on which there’s no consensus even among the gang of petty Caligulas that calls itself the intelligence community. Still, it’s possible. Countries sometimes try to exert influence in each other’s internal affairs; it’s part of great-power politics, and it’s been happening for a very long time. When Americans meddled in Russia’s elections, it was by securing victory for Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s very own Donald Trump, a man who had sent in tanks to shell his own parliament. Leaked cables suggest that Hillary Clinton’s own State Department interfered with the political process in Haiti by suppressing a rise in the minimum wage. And American involvement in the politics of Chile, Guatemala, Indonesia, and Iran was mostly through military coups, sponsored by none other than the CIA. There was no question of these countries repeating their elections; anyone the generals didn’t like was tortured to death. Next to the mountain of corpses produced by America’s history of fixing foreign elections, a few hacked emails are entirely insignificant.

Whatever Russia did or didn’t do, the idea that its interference is what cost Hillary Clinton the election is utterly ludicrous and absolutely false. What cost Hillary Clinton the election can be summed up by a single line from Sen. Chuck Schumer, soon to be the country’s highest-ranking Democrat: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” As it turned out, he was fatally wrong. It wasn’t the Russians who told the Democratic Party to abandon the working-class people of all races who used to form its electoral base. It wasn’t the Russians who decided to run a presidential campaign that offered people nothing but blackmail—“vote for us or Dangerous Donald wins.” The Russians didn’t come up with awful tin-eared catchphrases like “I’m with her” or “America is already great.” The Russians never ordered the DNC to run one of the most widely despised people in the country, simply because she thought it was her turn. The Democrats did that all by themselves.

What the Russia obsession represents is a massive ethical failure on the part of American liberals. People really will suffer under President Trump—women, queer people, Muslims, poor people of every stripe. But so many in the centrist establishment don’t seem to care. They’re far too busy weaving themselves into intricate geopolitical power plays that don’t really exist, searching for a narrative that exonerates them from having let this happen, to do anything like real political work.

Posted in Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Politics, Scandals. Tags: , , , , , . No Comments »

Quote Of The Day: Jimmy Fallon On The DNC Hack

December 16, 2016 — Ron Chusid

“The Democratic National Committee was actually hacked because one of its directors clicked on a fake email to change his password, which gave Russia access to his account.

Then Hillary said, ‘I can’t believe you’d be so careless with your email!'” –Jimmy Fallon

Posted in Hillary Clinton, Humor and Satire, Television. Tags: , . No Comments »
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