Well the press got their way and Biden stood down, or was it Trump? Who knows, but those that make a buck out of this will and the people who will suffer most from this are, we the people.

And the thing I worry about is can we even have a real election anymore? Or did all of MAGAs harass the honest vote counters into resigning? Because they did and they don’t mind threatening, attacking, hurting or even killing anyone who thinks differently to whatever they feel passionate about.

And they have people who actually believe the lies they spin, that 2000 election was stolen, abortion apparently justifies them murdering abortion providers, because they have actually murdered people in the past, even Pelosi’s husband wasn’t safe, and while they accuse us of ... while they are already doing it. And they are not opposed to making up whatever nonsense they want: that the left want to turn the kids of conservative parents into lesbians, gays, transgender... whatever? Seriously? We had that discussion in my high school and they didn’t turn any of us into transgender, gays or lesbians or whatever...
There is no doubt we will soon be living in a tyrannical system, and many on the front lines are already there, aka people who count votes.

And who will save us? In WW2, the US, and whatever vestiges of the the British empire still standing stood against the nazis, but now it’s not like Russia or China will save us, they will likely be quite happy with us being kept like mushrooms in the tyranny republicans will bring down upon us, rewriting our history, and killing most of us off. (Drink bleach!)

I doubt there will be any freedom left but eventually the economy will get better for more of us and freedom will come again, but perhaps not for a very long time. Not until Fox News and the right wing machinery that props up the conservatives has been destroyed.

Because this article indicates how close they think they are from being unassailable. This is indeed truly worrying. Because it means they have destroyed our democracy. And this is indeed extremely worrying for everyone.
Although republicans are passing off Trumps comments as nonsense, as per normal.

But why in the goddess’ name would you vote for someone who other members of his party consider ‘nonsense’?
This must be the aim of the 2025 project.
And we know the country is moving to the middle, if not left, with the increase in people coming from the south, Mexico and other countries, younger Americans are tending left as well. And all this tends to be bad for the future of republicans, so with all these existential threats to the viability of the Republican Party.

Also republicans have been able to demonstrate that they can follow through with plans to steer to their agenda, as we see explicitly with the reversal of roe v wade and moving the country to the right or at least moving the direction to the right. The right have a habit of moving through people nevertheless they still manage to adhere to their agenda.

Yellow headlines seem to be a fact of life.

One such headline, hidden behind as paywall: suddenly there aren’t enough babies. The whole world has declining birthrates.

And we may have already hit the point of population stability and in decline. I think this is probably a good thing. There are too many humans already and our biosphere just isn’t coping with all of us. But we all know economics far outweighs our environment and what is good for one is utterly dreadful for the other, oh the wisdom of idiots, if only our environment was an important resource we could turn into money... as opposed to just vital for sustaining us. But once again the conservative right can’t think much beyond what suits them and think women should just pop out babies for the sake of economic stability and hence they ban abortion. Similarly who cares about wetlands when they can be drained and turned into farmland, cha-ching.

I know you’ve heard it before but if they were genuinely serious about pro-life, they’d help these poor women who now must care for a baby they never wanted. I know these pro-life types like to think they are doing a good thing by giving all these fetuses a life but what kind of life will they be getting? The road to hell is always paved with good intentions.

But as I’ve said before abortion has always been about building armies. And a good soldier was born merely to die because putting him back together after war would cost the male taxpayer way too much of his hard earned money. Some of their reasoning is so naive they think that women will automatically love this nuisance just because they gave birth to it? Perhaps some women will fall in love with their babies but there are no guarantees.

I remember a discussion had with a woman about drinking alcohol while pregnant, many women won’t drink alcohol when pregnant for the sake of her fetus, but that is a choice many women voluntarily make, the woman I was talking to just assumed women must do this, and I said it was the woman’s choice. There are many pitfalls women chose not to engage in because she is pregnant but it is her body and her passenger is just an experiment in DNA.

How many baby boys will be hurt by women forced to give birth to them? We can still send them off to war... I am sure the urgency to ban abortion is because the US struggled with 2 wars under Bush.

We also know the conservatives say they value life but their actions never really seem to demonstrate what that means, especially since actions speak louder. I think conservatives want the right to kill at will including anyone they dislike for whatever reason. Why else would you want women to die, not pay women to have the children they so desperately want them to have. Or the healthcare needed, or for food, or even child care, education...

With men refusing to wear masks in the height of covid, stand your ground laws and abortion, I think they want to kill us. Killing people who drive into our drive-ways, shooting sprees of random strangers to people who may not be strangers. Whipping these people into a killing frenzy needs to stop.

I have often said reality is by consensus, and people have replied, no it’s not.

I wonder how people explain the reality of Americans who want trump as president. Of course if you don’t it means these other are out of touch with reality.

In my previous blog entry I wrote about descriptions of reality as being very subjective and therefore if we describe reality with adjectives then those adjectives are really important. For instance Trump holds a rally, how the rally is described is full of subjectivity. I can see how those attendees might describe the rally differently than other people, and while most often our view of reality is colored in for us with statements like ‘they are out to get us’ and
‘the election was stolen’... why try to determine an independent view of reality when it involves a lot less thinking to accept someone else’s view of reality? Each time a world view is accepted, it becomes a stronger reality for those who believe it, and thus it becomes a consensus for those who ’share’ or ‘adopt’ a version of reality.

While no one is suggesting an election was not held, some would prefer one reality over another. And that description of the reality is where the choice of interpretations is made. It is easy to see beyond this consensus if we believe either someone else’s reality or have thought enough about the subjectivity of reality to realize they’re maybe more interpretations.

When presented with a version of reality we must always ask ourselves how would they benefit from this version of reality. For Trump it is pretty obvious. He benefits most from the reality he’d have us believe.

For years I believed whoever the president of the US pretty much uniformly represents the people of the US, but then those photos of Abu graib came to light and I expected the people of the US to rise up in horror of what was being done in their name. To my surprise in the country where I lived at the time no reports were made of outrage within the US of what happened at Abu Graib. I was shocked there was no outrage because those photos were sickening to me in the extreme.

Then Israel started saber rattling at Iran somewhere around then and although the internet was young, YouTube had a video of an Israeli man saying to Iran: we love you. Then the Iranians responded in kind.

It is easy to believe that a country uniformly believes the message presented by their leader, whether it is the US president, or any other country. And for me that included Israel but from this wonderful video, shows it is not.
I think in the case is Israel, Netanyahu benefits despite when his reign ends the damage that may be done to Israel if it doesn’t persist in its militancy, a terrible catch 22? And demonstrates the selfishness of Netanyahu.

Politically the country I was living in at the time those photos from Abu Graib came to light may have benefitted from not showing the outrage Americans exhibited. As we saw when occupy started in the US people all around the planet took to their tents. It makes sense since the country I was living in had followed the US into Iraq. Perhaps they suspected rioting would ensue regarding Abu Graib? Besides I think there had been some fights breaking out between Muslims and white pride types in that country already. Certainly that country’s prime minister lowered the tone of his rhetoric after the fights started breaking out. No doubt because these white pride types were adopting his vision of reality.

All the time we are given versions of reality, based on what someone would have us believe, be careful what you believe.

I’ve been reading about Hannah Arendt. Initially her book Eichmann in Jerusalem was on sale at Amazon, but it’s at the library so I will eventually read it there but then later I was listening to someone tutoring and referred to the banality of evil to a student. I then wondered if reading Eichmann in Jerusalem is a common part of the US high school curriculum. It is not although I think it would be worthy for teenagers to think upon.

I wonder how many people know Arendt coined the term ‘the banality of evil’? I later read on the internet that there was nothing banal about the evil of Eichmann.

While the author of the article understands the point Arendt is making it seems they want to assert there is something like an objective evil, like those trite documentaries on murder crimes on TV as if it’s so easy to dismiss a murderer as something other, no longer worthy to be called human. And thus the only valid way to describe such a person as ‘evil’. In my opinion this is lazy thinking.

Evil, a concept straight from religion being the complete opposite of good, seems like it is never seen as subjective. However eastern religions are better at seeing the subjective nature of opposites. Yin has some yang in it and yang has some yin in it. Can we see black without white/light? Therefore it is necessary to walk the middle path, according to eastern religions because it would seem the more we avoid evil the more evil we invoke?

Subjectivity speaks to the banality of evil, but not just evil. All things have a subjective side to them, even that chair in the corner of the room. You may think it’s ugly, I might think it’s useless, someone else might think it’s priceless. While the description of the chair may be subjective, that it’s a chair and its current location is based on some kind of objective reality. Evil is a description so therefore is subjective.

I get it, I don’t want to see any similarity between me and the person who does something evil. But the reality is we won’t know if we could until we’ve walked that proverbial mile in another's shoes. Is it easy to see beyond the story we tell ourselves of who we are? Because we are all cogs in the machine. While some people say we have no free will, which might be another extremely lazy thought process that allows us to take no responsibility for our actions. But it can be very difficult to say no, I will not do this job. And we all may wish to be the one to say, no I will not, we
never know we will or won’t until we are actually in that position. Especially when we feel threatened which may be possible in a situation like Eichmann might have found himself. Did he see his neighbors shot in the street one morning? [I actually haven’t even read anything about Eichmann so I know nothing about his situation at the time.]

Especially if he believed the then Nazi rhetoric that the German army was unstoppable and would not stop until all of the world had fallen under their power. Also plausible. And the consequences of not doing the job seemed unlikely because this was the story of that German society was telling itself at the time. Besides how would the conversation go, no I am not going to send people to their death today? In Nazi Germany I doubt this would’ve been met with “sure, okay”. Could he have resigned? In our society it is possible but getting a good job in the US is difficult enough, besides your kid might need that medicine that is covered by the employers health insurance.

And who was responsible really? The train driver? The people who laid the tracks? Hitler? The guards? The people who didn’t run away, rather than get on the train willingly... (aka victim blaming. Gandhi said the Jews should’ve just suicided or turned themselves in) besides if Eichmann hadn’t done it, it is possible that someone else might have?

I rather wonder how at the trial they got a conviction but how could they not convict him? Either convict them all or none I suppose. But conviction is necessary because we must say, no, never again in spectacular style to underline the message that what they did was completely unacceptable.

But lessons are learned. Make sure you are never get caught, a lesson well learned by American moguls. In her book blood on their hands, the owners of corporations ride high on corporate income while the corporate businesses just
squeak by and employees are forced to live on minimum wages. While this is a book about newspapers, this corporation is hardly unique and has been a business model employed in any number of corporations.

One could see that as an evil too but the cogs aren’t seen as being particularly evil despite how many families or children are hurt in the process.

The evil of denying abortions to women who need them as emergency healthcare, how many (potential) families are destroyed in the process by ignorant politicians voting for stuff they don’t understand or really care to understand. This is an evil too but are they caught up as cogs in a machine?

I used to know that I was such a genius that all my thoughts were so brilliant that every one of them so dazzling that all must be waiting on baited breath for my very next idea...

With my self-assured knowledge of my wisdom, I told a friend when I get out of the swimming pool, my husband and I both need to use the bathroom, each of us for different reasons.

My friend said ‘fascinating’ in an Oscar winning voice performance.

I was lately looking at Steven Pinker book, ‘a sense of style’, and I think Pinker needs such a friend as mine. Or perhaps Pinker is so utterly brilliant he no longer has friends who are of equal intellect to his own and thus he knows he knows better. I started reading the beginning of the ‘sense of style’ where he belabors the need for brevity. Advice I definitely wish he thought to heed when he wrote ‘the better angels’. While I agree with the thesis of ‘the better angels..’, it was long like 7000 x7000page PhD theses.

I hope I am hyperbolizing but I am not sure I am. I get he thought we’d all disagree with him so he wrote it thus to beat us all into submission. And the point of such a thesis is to bore readers to death so they start to skim. Indeed to me he was preaching to the converted: we indeed are a much less violent society.

For me it was the realization that public executions are no longer happen in most of the world. Also we don’t do witch burning anymore. In my opinion our society has gotten less violent because women have been gaining more power, and as women get more power the safer and better society will be. I did not see this in Pinker’s book, what I saw is that he expressed was that it was correlated rather than causative. I believe women’s power is causative.

The proof of this I think is in Afghanistan, before the US invaded they had public executions and it is possible that there was no other country where women had less power, except perhaps some African nations according to wikipedia and amnesty international countries performing public executions in 2012 were Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Iran and Kuwait. And it seems the taliban are back at it.

While men might think it’s wonderful having so much power, I think that all that power probably hurts men too.

While this is about how the accumulation of wealth and how this even hurts the rich, it’s not a big leap
to assume that the same is true for power. In some ways i think this is even more obvious because the power men exert is very conformist, so men must conform otherwise be ousted.

As I am sure I’ve said before and I know I am not the first, that society is no better than how the weakest member of society is treated. Gandhi and Maya Angelou have both said similar. And the best possible society will be when each member of society is treated with equal respect and everyone’s time is treated as equally valuable.

Our society is heading in that direction because sooner or later republican men will realize that they are living fossils and women do have value.

Such a sumptuous production and it really showcases Christine Baranski’s comedic timing but wow! how boring these women lives must have been.

The horror of learning the Brooklyn bridge was finished with a woman, Emily Roebling, as the supervising engineer is also astonishing, but it'd be interesting to see how if a women was the supervising engineer for such a bridge today would be received. Although at the time Roebling wasn’t the only woman doing extraordinary things. There was also Clara Barton was starting the Red Cross and I am sure many others.

A lady’s maid is angry after she tries to seduce a man who refuses her, her response is the height of misogyny. Instead of attacking the man who refused her, she goes after his wife. I know I’ve been told by women that they can’t be a misogynist because they are women. But women are apart of the audience that is society and while men learn misogyny, so do women.

And as I’ve said on this blog before, men will never ever say they are sexist, and getting anyone to admit to either sexism or misogyny is impossible. No one is sexist or in anyway a misogynist, yet here we are.

I think we are living through the perfect example of misogyny at the moment especially in the USA with the reversal of roe v wade.

It is the perfect proof women serve only 1 purpose, reproduction. It is their only useful function because men think they can do everything else. And this is seen if a woman has an ectopic pregnancy in Texas then it's medical system will not help her as punishment and if she dies, oh well. And before you say the chance of having an ectopic pregnancy is so small, why worry? It’s 2%, and if you think that’s small, that is 2 in 100 pregnancies. [The main problem is uninformed politicians creating laws they know nothing about. Damn republicans.]

But that is because these old men who are using status quo creep as I called it in my previous blog entry. While some of these men say we need more children, which I think stems from the problems the US military experienced during the Iraq invasion, the army wants recruits with little education, language is the only exception, aka English, is enough, and if they die it really doesn’t matter, indeed it saves the republicans money.

Banning abortion has always been about building armies.

Mainly old men think women’s work is absolutely worthless because men pay nothing for it, or at least decide it’s worthless because nice marriageable women do it for free. The work of making a home, raising kids, and all the sundry jobs of managing a home is just done by a woman and thus is worthless because it’s done for “free”.

But how quickly do people forget the lessons of Nicolae Ceaușescu.

Who forgot that raising human beings was really about taking on apprenticeships? Producing homosapien mammals is easy, ban abortion. But turning those homosapien mammals into human beings is an apprenticeship. Each individual learns how to be one from whoever apprentices them. When a baby first opens it’s eyes, assuming it can see, is that it learns to understand what it sees. Then the baby learns to talk out of necessity. Crying is kinda frustrating because the apprentices’ master/mistress has to figure out what the cry means every single time.

No doubt it is during this time a baby learns it’s value, learns how to love, learns how important it is in the eyes of others, and how can it learn to be ‘normal’ when it is not treated like a normal human being.

I know there have been many parenting styles advocated by various men such as John Watson  and the awful theory of behaviorism and treating babies as if they were robots. And I wonder if this resulted in the plague of serial murderers during the 60s?

Raising, or rather apprenticing a child is fundamental to our society, because the next generation will eventually run our society.

I don’t know if males or females are better at apprenticing humans after birth, but in my experience women are much better at systems than men. When it comes to systems men should just go home. Whereas women absolutely rock systems. A home is a system and men just are hopeless at managing the system that makes a home. Often men pretend it’s beneath them to do women’s work but I think the reality is men are just pretty bad at it. And thus women are much better at writing software. Again men should just go home. Software has become truly bug ridden since they forced women out. Imagine if Apollo 11 had to shutdown and reboot in the middle of a lunar landing like every other app does now.

The problems with systems is that multiple things must be achieved simultaneously. Like being in the kitchen waiting for food to cook might allow time to empty the dishwasher and put dirty dishes in. Time to wipe benches and then putting tools away. Food prep may allow time to inventory food in the kitchen for the next shopping expedition. Doing the laundry gives mental time to prepare a list of meals for next week, and folding laundry may inventory detergent, how everyone in the household is coping with their lives… And in such a short time a meal has been prepared, the dishwasher unloaded, and reloaded, laundry and psychoanalysis done. Vacuuming and washing floors may allow mental time to plan more tasks, inspect and care for items in the household.

Far too difficult for the average man, mind bogglingly easy and incredibly boring for the average woman.

A male friend suggested a woman surrounded by men must be very frightening, because they are so much bigger, on average, than she is. Yes. Especially is the men are all well acquainted with each other like a sports team.

But if not it might work to her advantage because men are unlikely to rape a woman in the presence of strangers, even male strangers.

And in the case of Rolling Stone magazine, did they seriously think men who know each other would admit they raped the woman?

But more importantly if a woman is to manage half the population of the world, surely she must have more intelligence to do so, even if it’s something as nebulous as ‘emotional intelligence’ or it might be she will use her possible smallness to illicit the protective nature of some men. But men are raised all over the place. Some are taught to respect all women, some learn to treat everyone with equal disdain and do whatever they want because they were never given boundaries. Yes, I know not all men, but I think I said that already in this paragraph and last month’s blog entry.

Do men know women manage them? I don’t know and perhaps some women don't know they are doing it and dont do it well.

I do think Peggy Scott was very lucky to meet with the Baranski character, this was a time when the concepts of eugenics was very common even amongst the upper classes in New York, although they do portray the racism she very likely experienced very often, realistically and hopefully less often today.

And of all the women portrayed in the show, Scott, who was based on real people of the time, and the servant women probably have the most interesting lives. Yet when Miss Brooks takes a job teaching it is frowned upon and vehemently discouraged by her aunt.

My husband calls this show the gilded cage.

I went to college/university and got degrees in physics, math and computer science, and although there were not many other women in my classes I didn’t feel singled out or special.
But in one computer science class the guys couldn’t figure out a solution to a problem, I told them, yet they said no, I have no idea why, but they went to the teacher asked him and he said what I said. Perhaps I should’ve said: I told you so, at the time but for whatever reason I didn’t. I knew I was right because I’d already tried what I told them and it worked.

I took a job and was told by a Greek male working there he told his wife he was smarter than her and if I don’t tread on his toes I’d be alright.

Later I got a different job at an extremely testosterone based corporation, and then the fun and games really started, but that is a completely different story and for another time.

Fast forward to my retirement. I retired in my early 30s. I got sick of the sexism. Retiring came with other benefits too, it gave me time to think.

And of course this is the essence of sexism, time. Men have more time on their hands. Too many women throughout history have died early because of how dangerous birthing is. But because becoming a human being is really an apprenticeship, many women have had to apprentice too many children. Then there is all the ‘make work’ as George Orwell called it in ‘Down and out in Paris and London’. ‘Make work’ keeps you busy so you aren’t doing other dangerous stuff like: thinking. Of course too many women were never even given the tools to use their spare time usefully anyway, these tools are the tools to read and write. Women have all this 'make work' of making themselves thin and attractive as possible, thus exercise. Shopping for food and clothes, getting their hair fixed and done, managing a household, cleaning, cooking, washing clothes and cleaning, planning and preparing food, then monitoring and managing the mental health of the household, which is largely dealing with her apprentices and her husband and other sundry family members. 

In retirement I discovered the internet. The internet was wonderful because I finally made a real friend. And it didn’t matter what I looked like, people could only see what I showed them.

My friend was into alchemy, a science he might say is about the transmutation of symbols. I’d say everything is a symbol and the way we differentiate between symbols is by the symbols they are stored with. And all learning really is: is adding symbols and building indices between symbols. There seems to be neat distinct symbols, but they really might be seen as blurring together, the math end of the Tao of physics? (as in the dance of Shiva, the wave like nature of photons… everything becomes a wave, de Broglie). I digress.

Because my friend was into alchemy, a woman who wanted to do a radio show on alchemy turned up and wanted us to audition for her show. During my audition she asked why very few women are interested in alchemy.

She didn’t like my answer, but it did start me thinking.

First of all I thought the question was rather sexist, did she ask men why so many men get into alchemy as opposed to women? When and why had I been elected as spokesperson for my entire gender? And why don’t we ask men ever things like ‘why did he rape her’? Or why didn’t he leave her instead of beating her? Yet we always ask what was she wearing and why didn’t she leave?

I think my answer was kinda sexist at the time because I didn’t really seek out women as friends. Men seemed to do and think on more interesting subjects than which guy they liked, or how their relationship was progressing, if they had apprentices, their kids…

Over time my ideas of feminism changed.

It started in the beginning with all these viagra spam ads. I guess the people selling internet viagra suspected most people on the internet were male, men have the most money to spend, especially old men. The kind who are most likely to need viagra. Perhaps the kind of man too embarrassed to get a prescription and then get the prescription filled.

I don’t know.

I know there were rumors of breast enhancement creams, the kind that enlarged your boobs by rubbing them with this cream. Apparently this didn’t sell nearly as well because these ads were extremely rare. Perhaps they thought only men used the internet.

Anyway the viagra ads always talked about babes in bikinis.

It seemed to me that the dominant member of our species needed something very important from the least important, and do women need men at all?

In our society women very much need the protection of men from men. Yes I know the refrain, not all men. But the reality is men can go nuts and it’s just like trying to figure out if this snake is venomous or not. It is vital before figuring out if this guy is safe or not; besides a snake says it’s a snake upfront unlike men, dangerous men can hide how dangerous they are for a very long time. So even the safest of men benefit from the violence of the dangerous men, and this is where men get their power, we have no idea which are the dangerous men waiting to become extremely dangerous and those who are safe. So women and men go about trying to please all men.

And for every dangerous woman, there is an insanely dangerous man somewhere in her history. In Eileen Wuornos’ case it was her grandfather. And perhaps he had a dangerous mother or father, I don’t know. But violence begets violence and it takes determination, hope and options to get someone out of the cycle.

Besides some men are raised to feel entitled to all that free labor that comes with the way most daughters are raised. I know I was raised to believe men were entitled to ogle me, fondle me, and I was not allowed to complain about it. Thank the goddess for #MeToo.

I was raised to make sure the house was clean and if it is to be clean it was my responsibility. Perhaps I was raised to bring children into the world, be a stay at home mother and cook and clean and do all those miserable chores women are supposed to do. I could do it too. I found I kept my apartment clean and neat when I lived alone.

But men feel entitled to leave their stuff wherever and I blame a man’s parents for this.

Also I have no idea how men become so fragile, does no one say to males as they grow up, deal with it, like they do to females? Instead we maybe let in on this grand secret somewhere around prepubescence that every month in our lives we will suffer from PMT and then bleed and we will do this every month unless we get pregnant or die. There are no vast industries trying to solve the issue of PMT. I found the trick later on, for me anyway, was no gluten. I stopped eating gluten and all my problems with hormones disappeared instantly, I am not certain it would solve any other women’s hormonal problems but it definitely worked for me. There are massive industries behind our daily bread and who cares about women anyway.

Yet I still see these articles telling me that unless you have celiac disease there is no reason not to eat gluten. I don’t have celiac and yes not eating gluten worked for me.

So what if it potentially inconveniences about half the adult population of the planet, thus turns women into a stereotype that allows men to scoff at. Indeed turning women into jokes is the way men deal with women. And thus they keep us separated and talk about how putting women together causes catfights, whatever.

And women believe this because this is what they hear men say so it guarantees that catfights ensue. And if they don’t then it’s ignored and the stereotype remains intact.

Every now and then I hear of places were men are banned but those stories in the news are quickly erased. These places sound very nice.

Briefly women have all the power in the universe, somewhere in their late teens if women want moon rocks, men start building rockets. No one tells these women to expect it or what to do about it. and it’s only been very recently that women were allowed to build their own rockets.

But do men go about trying to keep women in place? No. I don’t think men decided to, but I think it’s been a creeping status quo. 

With more and more men making names for themselves in the list of social accomplishments, i.e., writing books on … whatever, men telling us everything, men running most countries, men doing everything, and women trying to attract a mate, after all men even have to do all the work there too, except she has spent her days trying to be as pretty as possible to make herself appealing to as many men possible and she has to be young so she can survive child birth as many times as needed. But in the end she might possibly die in childbirth anyway. Besides not every woman who lives, like every man who lives wants to write books based with important ideas. Some men do, most men don’t. Some women might but have to fight even harder to have those ideas heard. After all, which great luminary was a female? Too many people want to line up (namely males) behind great men, and then think of why J K Rowlings was told to publish with initials rather than her first name, male publishers just knew boys would never read what a woman wrote. 

Perhaps this is hangover misogyny from the previous generation of men onto the next generation of males, creeping status quo. Look at the problems Katie Bouman endured when she lead the team to make an image of a black hole. Trolls all over the place were trying to diminish her achievement, with nonsense like she didn’t make as many saves as other team members.

Thus was there a need to educate women, worry women with politics and the need to vote? She only had to be around long enough to pop out some kids, raise/educate/apprentice them until she died. Either because of childbirth or a beating at her husband’s hand.

And I’ve heard men say such things as that a woman is basically a rubber band, babies basically just slip out of women. (I dare you to read this link.)

Essentially a woman’s primary purpose is to advertise her DNA by being an ornament. She was never raised to showcase her intelligence, intelligence is the domain of males, writing brilliant books on the thoughts of man was what men do, women’s thoughts are pretty much forgettable. Unless a man claims her thoughts and then they may be good after all. Think of Emmy Noether (who?) basically fixed relativity which Einstein made famous or Rosalind Franklin (who?) yeh I had to look her up too, she found the structure of DNA but fortunately some guys got the Nobel prize for that (because fortunately for the Nobel prize committee she died, unfortunately for us because who knows what else she’d have found if she’d lived longer). And these are just two women. 

All the time women think and say things that men steal. Like the concept of equality. Equality is the thing of females, women think of themselves as equals, men do not. Men are always looking to where they fit in a power structure, they never/seldom see themselves in an equality, they are too busy looking up and down. Yet men cleave to this concept of equality and put it up front in their countries constitutions, and while its may be in the countries constitution it is seldom practiced. 

I will continue my quest to understand the problems of the patriarchy.

As an addendum I’d like to point out those ‘petty jealousies’ that a Barbie said in voice over, get a great many women killed. I am worrying that those 'petty jealousies' are so dangerous and are being described as merely described as ‘petty’. But of course this film was in the guise of a kids film and hence does not address the serious problems women face with the reality of the patriarchy, that some men feel they are obliged to monopolize the full attention of a woman they treat as basically a servant.

Previously I said that I don't blame girls for not knowing where the Kens' sleep. I now wonder whether the it was an attempt to illustrate the problems with 'power'. Did men really engineer our society to diminish the power of women?
Probably not deliberately. So why do women have so much more power now? In my opinion it is because our society isn't dependent on women reproducing and thus women have more time and then have more money. While women have been spending all their time making themselves attractive (to men and each other, but now more than ever women are obliged to look attractive to other women because we've internalized the sexist need for women to be ornaments, it is women's only real purpose (or our genetic material is the only reason society's collective idea behind  women's individuality)), woman have to manage homes which entails cooking, cleaning and the family's social interaction and psychological health.

The other thing I think worth noting is that Ryan Gosling won so many awards for him singing ‘I’m just Ken’. He did a great job and he was charismatic, but so was Margot Robbie. Her falling down when she was so depressed was funny and brilliant. And her telling off the builders was excellent, ‘we don’t have genitals’…

Do we go out of our way to reward men for acting more like women?

Why do we reward men so much for doing introspection? Showing their feminine side? And then there was the hot single dad in ‘bad moms’, and abalone females reward male abalone by conceiving more of their children if the male imitates a female abalone. I’ve read this but I can’t find a reference now. Perhaps the female is selecting for novelty or intelligence or ingenious?

Is there more at work here?  Ryan Gosling claimed disappointment over Margot Robbie and the director of Barbie Greta Gerwig neither being recognized by the Oscar nominating committee?

I am pleased Ferrera and Gosling were nominated but Robbie was an excellent and intelligent choice for Barbie and Gerwig did a brilliant job. 

Have you ever noticed that no man when asked if he’s being sexist ever admits to being sexist? I am sure the Oscar nominating committee will also say they were not being sexist. 'They just hide it better’.

Why are people drawn to the unknown and wrap their brains around this mysterious topic and
put all kinds of things in there? But of course they do, and label these boxes religion, evil... Do
people also do this for random number generators?

I guess they do, remember those magic 8 number games, where you ask a question and the
magic 8 comes back with a random response.

I asked ‘why do my farts smell so good?’ And it told me to concentrate, so I asked the same
question and it said ‘without a doubt’. I do think I had been wondering why no one else agreed,
with probably hints of ‘are they all jealous?’ And now magic 8’s answer makes complete sense.
So the magic 8 answered question number 2 “why are people jealous of my farts?” because this
is science after all, I wanted to verify I was right;) And it said couldn’t predict... damn magic 8
ball’s limited vocabulary. I am sure it knows that my farts smell of rainbows and unicorns
breath... and people wish their farts were courted by the top French perfumeries as mine would
be if only they knew...

Of course these thoughts result from me reading Perfume by Patrick Suskind on one of my
business trips to Stockholm. I would buy a paperback before leaving and read books in the
evenings when I had nothing better to do but drink too much alcohol and dream of better things.

But there are so many random number generators out there. Astrology, tarot cards, I-ching, all
these fortune telling devices and there are so many more. Asian blood typing, the Myers-Briggs
personality profiling systems  (I know when I’ve answered those questions there are questions I could go either way
and do regularly) Chinese astrology... it goes on and on. But are they real? Probably not. I have
been described in so many ways and despite the number of fortune telling devices describing
me as tenacious I don’t see myself as being so. (Of course loved ones may see me so, I don’t
know, but then isn’t everyone somewhat tenacious?) There is an appeal to see who we are but
then who we are may only be in perspective. We may all be somewhat fluid in who we are, or
not. I haven’t met or know everyone currently alive on this planet.

But then I have known people who have completely made me up. I’ve been defined as someone
who orchestrates minions across the planet to attack other people... (!) Like I haven’t got more
interesting things to do. I’ve been defined as playing scrabble to mess up other players moves...
I guess they assumed I could read their minds to know where to mess up their future moves...

I feel that I am fluid somehow essentially, but then if I am it doesn’t necessarily make it so for
everyone else. Nevertheless I want to fit in, I want to gaze deeply into the mirror and feel
defined, understood, well I think it’s true, and I assume others do too.

I thought of dropping in a random number into the output of a neuron and see if I could get the
neural network to learn. I don’t see why it wouldn’t work eventually. Ha! Another patent, not
likely, but I am figuring out how I might get it to ‘learn’ even as I type.

I run a science group, which is the siren call for every nut job on the planet and person who
wants to sell shoes (at the moment anyway, it was dead celebrities for the longest while...) and
one of our nut jobs wants us to believe AI is coming for you, your money and women...
I can’t read his blather about AI but I countered his silly YouTube documentary with ‘what is the
purpose of thought?’. Curiously when Chomsky dismissed AI, a whole lot of guys came on and
dismissed Chomsky.

In my opinion we evolved the ability to think as an aid to help us survive. AI doesn’t need to
survive, and if it did it would be wrestling all the other code running on the computer for RAM.
But it doesn’t. I have a hard disk full of AI and neural networks I wish would wake up and debug
itself, but it never will, not until I write all the code to allow it to do so. Besides what does
‘survive’ actually mean?

But AI is nothing but a tool, that can be misused, just as a shovel can be misused. But if AI is
doing what it is meant to then AI will be useful. Also how can they say that AI thinks when no
one really knows what thinking is anyway. I think they defined it as something like we present
information to an entity, then the entity to which the information is presented responds, kinda like
a computer after you click a button for it to do something you want.

Another person is fascinated by aliens on other planets... and he regularly puts a post on the
group saying aliens will communicate with us via DNA or AI or what ever ‘woo’ technology de
jour is. Or even that we’ll be able to detect aliens by their use of AI. I say rubbish. Aliens will be
using tools, just like we are/might.

Because in the end we as a species are all looking for a mirror to gaze deeply into and that is
their and our motivation for seeking each others existence out, it is our reason for SETI.

But we’ve known this for as long as we’ve read sci fi on aliens and definitely when people used
to watch Star Trek in the 60s as the world preparing to walk on the moon for the first time.

And just as I thought I was about to coin the term ‘anthropologists in space’ google tells me the
internet has already gone there well before I even thought I would type that.

But no matter the tech we put the ‘woo’ in there. Nothing beats the human imagination and it’s
power to put ‘woo’ into a random number generator, or anything really.