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The crunch time at my day-job has begun and with it the loads of overtime hours that are extended to the workforce. Luckily this is not retail or some construction type work, I work in an office, listening to podcasts while processing endless reams of paperwork helping people get the non-profit health insurance plans that they seek. So, while it is not physically taxing, but it saps energy and takes time.

This means the early morning time I usually employ for writing this blog will vanish most days and with it the posts. Mondays are different I tend not to work overtime on those days, so I am going to attempt to maintain at least a weekly schedule.

Good news is that lunches remain productive for my novel writing and with 60,000 words down and 30,000 or so to go I still look to complete the 1st draft of my next horror novel before the end of the year.

The election results here in the USA are concerning. If the president elect does as he has threatened, then in all likelihood terrible times are ahead. Perhaps he will be satisfied with merely looting the treasury and a civil war among his staff will limit damage, but it is not an outcome I would wager on. There is naught to do but fight in every legal way possible and preserve strength for the upcoming battles. World War II was not settled when the Allied force fled from Dunkirk, it looked dark, but in the end the fascist were defeated. Last week was a battle, not the war.

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So, not the classic album from Fleetwood Mac but rather the black comedy/satire film starring Cate Blanchett.

Elevation Pictures

Written and Directed by the team if Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson, Rumours is set during a working dinner for the G7 leaders, the chief executives, Presidents and Prime Ministers, of the leading democratic economies, as they attempt to draft a provisional statement concerning some crisis left by the script undefined. Dur the course of the dinner, which takes place in a gazebo, the supporting staff vanish, and the world leaders are left to their own inept devices while confront by undead bog bodies and mysterious giant forest brains.

With haunting cinematography from Stefan Ciupek and a striking color pallet the film has an impressive look to it and is further enhanced by a cast is excellent actors including Charles Dance as an American president with a wholly unexplained strong British accent.

The script provides numerous humorous incidents and character studies and yet for me failed to land fully. The target of the satire, ineffectual leaders providing only rehashed, recycled, and generic observations on problems facing the world is sharp enough the point of the satire seemed to have passed me by entirely. It was clear that the filmmakers have little regard or respect for world leaders but provided no other path or course of action.

The film doesn’t go as far as to live wholly within a realm of ‘dream logic’ like something from David Lynch yet and it is beyond our own sense of reality. (The lack of any ‘protective services’ is simply never addressed. In the film’s world the U.S. President, not to mention the others, simply have no one guarding them day and night.)

What enjoyment I derived from viewing this film lays entirely with the cast and their performances, particularly with Cate Blanchett who simply commanded my attention every moment she existed on the screen.

I honestly am glad I took the time to see this in the theaters, but I also cannot recommend this film as anyone reaction is likely to be so idiosyncratic as to make recommendations pointless.

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The fundamental forces are fascinating and mysterious elements of the universe. Electro-Magnetism harness and yoked by humanity powers our modern life. The Strong nuclear force binds the cores of atoms together. The Weak Nuclear force drives decay and radioactivity. Leaving gravity exerting the least force of the four through teamwork that extends across the universe proves stronger than all the rest creating black holes and breaking physics itself.

But the ultimate fundamental force is Motivated Reasoning.

Motivated reasoning is the power that makes 1984’s Big Brother a terrifying possibility. It is not that everyone knows the truth of a situation and simply complies out of rational self-preservation but rather once a desired outcome is formed how easily we craft elaborate justification and logic chains to bind ourselves to the fiction that produces the satisfying result.

It powers out divisive and partisan politics. As parties move and reform around new priorities and populations very few former members leave for pastures more in line with their stated positions but rather the people find circuitous routes of reasonings that ‘justifies’ their loyalty to new positions.

Motivated Reasoning extends its deceptive grasp beyond politics. It reaches wherever emotion and identity impact. Show me something that is important to a person sense of self and there you will find motivated reasoning.

This force is particularly dangerous because it is so subtle. Working its way on us from our subconscious influencing the very things we give any weight to before we are even aware that we have given something a value of importance. People rarely ask themselves, ‘Why do I think this?’ ‘Why do accept this?’

I am no more immune to motivated reasoning than any other person walking this planet. I try, I try very hard to interrogate myself as to what is beyond my acceptance of a fact or my ‘gut feeling’ on any subject, but being human, being a creature of socialization, I fall short as we all do. But we must try.

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I ended up taking two days off this week, Wednesday and Thursday to watch rocket launches streamed live. Originally it had been just Wednesday as June 5th had been the originally proposed date for the Integrated Flight Test 4, IFT-4, for the Starship/Superheavy launch system but when the date slipped to Thursday, I just added an extra day off in my request and took both. (After yen years of working for my currently employer and thanks to a muscular union I enjoy a decent amount of paid time off every calendar year.)

Wednesday, I watched the Starliner, a crew vehicle from Boeing, launch on its first crewed mission. The launch went well but problem have arisen and Boeing continues to suffer for the evolution of its corporate culture. At the time of the writing the issues look to be something that can be dealt with, but I would not rule out the possibility that the crew will need to return on a different vehicle than the one that launched.

Thursday’s launch was much more interesting to me. The massive, almost inconceivable system that is the Superheavy booster and its mated large vehicle, Starship may represent an impressive leap forward in space access if everything can be made to work at projected. The ‘if’ in that sentence is not meant to disparage but a simple recognition that the engineering achievement is challenging and not all goals can be achieved. That’s why this is test flight 4, bit by bit and flight by flight a lot of being learned about the technical challenges this project represents.

IFT-4 succeeded in its mission objective and then some. The enormous booster returned to Earth for a soft ‘landing’ in the Gulf of Mexico, though the precision of the landing still needs to be studied and verified. The Starship vehicle achieved it orbital velocity and planned trajectory. (This flight was never intended to actually go all the way to orbit.) Reentering above in Indian Ocean fully under control even as the thermal protection system failed in spots, damaging some of the control systems. The fact that Starship is so large that is casts a shadow in the hot plasma of reentry and can transmit live video to the Starlink constellation of communication satellites is in itself a major evolution in what we can see and learn in space travel.

When I first searched for the live stream of the launch, I ended up on the scam site impersonality SpaceX’s official stream. The AI faked Elon Musk was as impressive that the rocket launches themselves. For at least the first round of ‘deposit one crypto coin and I’ll match it without another, doubling your money’ of pitches I just accepted that Musk, a known promoter of crypto, was real even if the deal stunk to high heaven of scam. (No one gives away free money.) I found another stream to watch and enjoyed the launch with all its excitement.

The fake Musk scam sort of invites all sort of sharp definitive opinions about the eccentric billionaire and illuminates for me the Manichean way so many people view the world. Something or someone is either ‘good’ and praiseworthy or they are ‘bad’ and worthy only of contempt. When focused on a particular thing or person these opinions are often not static. Musk when he touted environmentalism and saving the ecology through electric cars and such was praised, rightly so, by the left. When he assumed control of Twitter and unbanned a number of quite distasteful figures he became a subject scorn. The truth of the matter is that he has done both good and bad, he views have been both right and wrong, but it’s very hard for people to hold such complex views. The founding of the United States of American was a fantastic advancement for human liberty and American is awash in the sin of slavery and most of the men who founded this nation with high ideal of freedom were also enslavers. Both things are true. America is neither inherently good nor inherently bad, but so many insist on one or the other viewing the opposing facts as mere footnotes.

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My sweetie-wife and I returned to the San Diego Zoo yesterday morning and here are a few photos from that walk through the zoo.

African Grey

Swamp Monkey

A lovely Path

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The recent solar storms with their massive CMEs (Coronal Mass Ejections) produced auroras that were visible in 49 of the 50 states. San Diego was high enough in latitude that the lights should have been visible here.

Low clouds came in throughout the weekend and anyone on or near the coast lost all access to the night sky. To see the shimmer elusive lights in this area would have required a drive east into the less populated regions of the county, avoiding the light pollution of modern lift, and escaping mother nature’s ill-timed blanket of clouds.

Alas the cough that has deviled me since late January has yet to be broken by modern science and I simply did not want to drive for an hour or more only to be incapacitated by chilly air induced coughing.

So, the lovely northern lights I did not see. Even with that bit of bad luck I am not depressed or saddened. I have a new novel concept that is coming together, I had a nice celebration with my sweetie-wife for my birthday and we are enjoying a rewatch of the fantastic film Dune: Part 2.

Best of all no rejections from agents or publishers arrive on my birthday.