Because many years ago my laptop camera light kept coming on inexplicably, I have had a piece of post-it note stuck over the lens of my camera lens long before I learned from Edward Snowden that the NSA and other people can commandeer the camera and use it to observe you and, since they can disable the light, with you being none the wiser.
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Anyone who has been a long time reader of this blog knows that I have not been a huge fan of Hillary Clinton. But the idea that she and Donald Trump are equally bad is preposterous. There is simply no comparison and Seth Meyers, in his update on the state of the election, does a wonderful job of comparing the negatives of both candidates, starting at the 6:10 mark. And he does not even mention Trump’s sociopathic levels of lying and his ignorance of major issues.
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Yesterday, the Chicago Cubs beat the Cleveland Indians in the deciding seventh game of the World Series of baseball, an odd title for a contest in which the existence of only one Canadian team prevents the entire season from being an all-American affair. There had been hopes that the local baseball team would add to the national championship already won earlier in the year by the Cavaliers basketball team. In that case, Cleveland had fought back from a 3-1 deficit to win the last three games and the series but this time it was the reverse and the Indians blew a 3-1 lead. I think the reason is the Curse of Wahoo.
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For some time now, the Republican party has taken the position that if they cannot win the presidency, they will basically bring government to a halt. This was explicitly stated by senate majority leader Mitch McConnell when he vowed in 2009 to use that strategy to make Barack Obama a one-term president. That particular goal of course failed but the idea of obstructionism has persisted.
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You have to hand it to President Obama that he is a natural when it comes to appearing on TV. He seems to be perfectly relaxed and informal, and yet is able to avoid making the kind of gaffes that can occur when your guard is down. This video of him interacting with children who came to the White House on Halloween illustrates how he can goof around with children without looking awkward or ridiculous.
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In a new poll, people rated Donald Trump as more honest than Hillary Clinton by a margin of 46-38%. This is ridiculous but it just shows the power of Trump repeatedly referring to her as ‘crooked Hillary’ like he referred earlier to ‘Lying Ted’ Cruz, thus shifting attention away from his own repeated falsehoods.
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The British TV series available for streaming on Netflix is set in the near future and each episode features a new story with a different cast and deals with the impact of technology on people’s lives, especially miniaturized communication technology that does not yet exist but seems tantalizingly possible, such as tiny chips embedded in our brains that record every aspect of our lives and can be played back at will or software that, by accessing as much information that exists about a person, can re-create a replica that is indistinguishable from a person who died, or immersive virtual reality worlds that are indistinguishable from the physical one.
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The amount of money that is spent on US elections is ridiculous. Each major party will spend around the order of a billion dollars on presidential elections. The reasons for this are many. The fact that the date of the elections are fixed in advance means that a new campaign starts as soon as the earlier one ends, and even earlier, and more time correlates with more money. Another reason is that campaign finance laws are almost non-existent, thus enabling wealthy players to buy access and thus influence candidates via campaign contributions.
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Although the media is in a lather over the latest news about the FBI director James Comey’s letter that there have been new emails regarding Hillary Clinton, to be quite honest, I cannot see that there is anything there. After all, the emails are not to or from her. I do not expect this news to create a major shift in people’s decisions on how they will vote because the news is vague and the whole email story so old. It does seem that Comey seems to be too anxious to hold press conferences and put out statements on issues, contradictory to the usual protocols. I commented on this tendency back in July.
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