Yesterday was the least productive writing day for me since October, after interrupted sleep Sunday night I managed just 500 words and an evening or mindless tube watching with a tv that has no tubes.

Via HBO Max I have been watching in bits and pieces Wonder Woman 84. It is quite the disappointment. It insults the audience’s intelligence by explaining the meaning of scenes, and not deep thematic meaning put plain here’s what happened meaning.

While the GOP engages in insane plots to subvert democratic rule in the United States my conservative friends rank rant about cancel culture apparently having forgotten the real reason the USSR was a threat was not their gun control laws.

On the brighter side January will bring Series two of Staged and the debut of WandaVision so 2021 doesn’t look entirely bleak.

SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company, is busily transforming humanity’s access to space. The Falcon 9 rocket’s first stage booster is an achievement of engineering with its fly-back and landing capability that allows its reuse with only limited reservicing between flights.

However, the second stage of the Flacon 9, the bit that accelerates the payload, cargo or manner spacecraft as of 2020, is not recovered and still represents a significant investment in money and resources that is simply thrown away with every flight. The ‘ammunition model’ of spaceflight, a mindset carried over from the development of rockets as weapon systems is unsustainable for affordable, frequent access to orbital space and beyond. The Space Shuttle developed by NASA in the 1970s and utilizing that decade’s peak technology failed to deliver on its overly ambitious dream of weekly flights to orbit and in the end proved to be too expensive in money and lives to continue operation.

In order to advance humanity’s flights into space SpaceX is developing two new rocket systems, a super heavy booster, and a fully reusable vehicle that booster will put into space named Starship (Though it must be noted it is a spaceship and has non capabilities related to stellar travel.)

Starship is massive and its operational plan requires novel flight dynamics, using one entire side as a heatshield as it returns from orbit, and then translating from basically a ‘belly flop’ attitude to nose up engines down to land in the same manner as presented by countless 50s SF movies.

This week a full-scale test version of Starship, Serial Number 8 or SN8, was flown to 12.5 kilometers and then executed the ‘belly flop’ flight plan. Elon Musk, SpaceX’s CEO, gave an estimated of a 1 in 3 chance of success for the test. After all this had never been done before.

After flying and performing the complicated attitude changes nearly flawlessly SN8 just before touching down suffered a failure of some type in the engine systems, note the bright green in the rocket exhaust in the video, landed hard and exploded.

Some have called this a failure as though this was a terribly thing.

Failure is the lesson before success.

Failure is necessary.

Failure is not the end it is the beginning of wisdom, knowledge, and victory.

First a Note: Posting has been sporadic this month because this is when the day job starts swinging into high gear as the Annual Open Enrollment Period of Medicare Advantage Plans opens up and that means I get to work overtime. I don’t have to work it, but I do like the extra cash and that means I will often miss regular updates to my blog.

I don’t need to tell you that 2020 has been a trying, taxing, and tumultuous year. No matter who you are or what you do your life has been impacted by this year’s seemingly endless calamities. I have lost a dear friend to the pandemic and another friend has lost his spouse and partner.

And yet setting aside the distinctively American historical roots and traditions I think I can be thankful for a least a few things this year.

I have my health. Neither my sweetie-wife nor I have contracted COVID-19 and we are both still fully employed. This year saw the publication of my debut novel and, despite the pandemic hammering books sales around the globe, my relations with the publisher and editor remain strong. Science has promised a brighter future with multiple effective vaccines seemingly just around the proverbial corner.

Our celebrations will be simply this year. Just my spouse and I maintaining social distancing for ourselves and our community. May your days be brighter and may the coming season bring you a bountiful harvest of things to be thankful for.

Election season concludes tomorrow with the US’s official election day, this year November 3rd. The consequences of this year’s election are incalculable but include, redistricting for control of congress, America’s standing in the world, to future of deep and binding relationships with out allies, corruption of our democratic institutions, the rule of law, but perhaps most pressing and certainly most immediate if the course of the pandemic in the United States.

The COVID-19 pandemic has, due to the bungling of this administration, killed more than nearly a quarter of a million people in America. Our winter of discontent is unlikely to become glorious summer with the narcissistic, intellectually challenged, corrupt crime family of the Trumps still occupying the administration.

To save the nation, Trump must be turned out.

To save our national soul, Trump must be turned out.

To save our lives, Trump must be turned out.

Here is a chart showing the course of the pandemic in the US and it’s plain that the projections of horrific and unsustainable.

8_US Cross Curves

People often say vote like your lives depend on it, this election is not hyperbole.

It’s not new or shocking to state that Trump cares for no one but Trump. Those who expect or hope that his brush with COVID-19 and his mortality will somehow implant the barest empathy for another human being are deluding themselves. A person in the mid-70s is set in who that are and in Trump’s case that is an immoral, narcissistic, sociopath interested only in his own well-being and wealth.

In addition to this the pressures of the election and his immunity towards state and federal crimes along with civil threats including $400 million dollars in personal debts coming due in the next four years provide incentive, beyond his inherent selfish needs, for Trump to do whatever it takes to retain the office of President of the United States.

Which of course means interfering in the process the approve the vital vaccine we need for COVID-19.

The FDA wants to publish guidelines that any vaccine before approval must first have its participant monitored for two months following their last does, waiting to see in adverse events develop or if the vaccine’s protections show signs of being only a short duration. This reasonable, if still highly rushed, guideline is quite acceptable unless your eye is on election day in which case this is terrible. No vaccine can meet this guideline and be approved before November 3rd 2020. Of course, interference from the White House undermines confidence in the vaccine and damages intake of this vital measure to protect our health, our lives, and our economy.

Trump doesn’t care if the vaccine works.

Trump doesn’t care if you die.

Trump only cares for Trump.

Trump only wants to win and your corpse is an acceptable price for that victory.

No, this is not about the Presidential Debate last night September 29th.

The New York Times has an interesting story about a tech start-up in Massachusetts that is raising funds and planning to construct a test reactor for nuclear fusion.

Working with MIT the start-up Commonwealth Fusion Systems hopes to have their reactor built in just 3-4 years and if all goes according to their plans producing net gain energy from fusion.

We have seen this road before and it has, to date, only led to washed-out bridge, collapsed tunnels, and chasms yet to be spanned, but things are impossible to achieve until they aren’t. This is not some fly-by-night operation working without the benefit of major scientific and technological might and several physicists have publisher papers agreeing that this approach looks sound.

It may still fail.

It may yet be another crushing disappointment.

It may also work.

We need something like this. While viable fusion power would attract attacks from both the lest and the right it would be a huge leap forward in de-carbonizing our energy systems.

This week reports began popping up here and that that women in an ICE detention center, one that is operated by a private contractor, have been subject to unwanted and unnecessary hysterectomies  with some referring to the doctor alleged to have done this as ‘the uterus collector.’ These reports come from a whistleblower from inside the system.

It is important to note that at this time we do not yet know the accuracy, validity, or truth of these reports. Whistleblowers can be wrong, can have incomplete information, or even be untruthful or they can expose gross wrongdoing that authorities want to conceal.  Those of us on the outside need to make sure an honest independent investigation is performed and trust to the results. Congress has started one and we need to keep our eyes on that.

With all that said if these allegations are accurate or close to accurate this is some NAZI level shit.

I am not one to throw around comparisons to NAZIs or Stalinists. These types of verbal assaults are usually the product of intense partisanship and not a considered judgment based upon historical context but post WWII forced sterilization of black and brown people? That is straight up racist NAZI shit.

It is no revelation that those are those on the right obsessed with birth right citizenship and ‘anchor’ babies. It would not take a stretch of the weakest imagination to contemplate a racist, nationalist, medical professional sterilizing non-white women to eliminate the possibility that they may give birth while on American soil.

That is conjecture. Right now, we do not know the facts, but have an administration that dismisses the deaths of Americans that it does not consider as its supporters. ( The offensive comments from the president that if you take out the deaths from ‘Blue States’ we’re doing well with the pandemic.) And that the head of our government considers people from Mexico to be ‘rapists and murderers.’ Is it really that hard to believe that it may have attracted racists zealots to its border enforcement programs?

The horror I am referring to is not the dystopian political landscape, nor the hellish pandemic scarred terrain of our future for the next few months but rather to dark cinema, frightening film, that will shortly be coming into and enriching my life.

This week year 11 of the Horrible Imaginings Film Festival. Two years ago, the festival moved from its native city of San Diego to the Santa Ana in Orange county about an 80-minute drive from my home and in anticipation of days going back and forth to the festival I took several days off extending my weekend to five days. Of course, the pandemic has shattered these plans but the festival’s director Miguel Rodriguez has managed to keep the celebration alive by movie it online and this weekend I will still be watching blocks of short films and several features all of these from around our world. It will not be the same without the mingling in the theater’s lobby, discussing the films we just watched with the fans and filmmakers but in the depressing times we must find what joy we can.

This weekend will not be my only excursion into unknown horror cinema. Sunday night while doom scrolling through the terror that is my twitter feed, I came across a link of an older Finnish horror movie that the tweet described as a were-reindeer movie. I mentioned it to my sweetie-wife, who has a love of things Finnish, and soon we discovered the film The White Reindeer from 1952 was a Cannes and Golden Globe Award winning film inspired by pre-Christian Finnish folklore. Well, damn! That’s something we both need to see and bang a Blu-ray of a recent restoration has been ordered and should arrive from Germany later this month.

Motivated Reasoning is the process where, quite subconsciously, a person used their reasoning to arrive a conclusion that conforms to their already held preconceptions and notions avoid the unpleasant dilemma of changing their opinion about a subject.

People utilize their motivated reasoning skill in a variety of settings and problems but it always occurs for subject to which the person has attached a high personal value, usually related to an identity or core personality self-image. A person who thinks of themselves as generous will find all manner of ‘reason’s when faced with evidence of selfishness. A person devoted to a political faction will construct elaborate chains of logic to maintain that their chosen position and party are ‘good’ and not tainted but some misdeed. An artist who has poured deeply person feeling into a work is likely to reject criticism rather than reevaluate their process or technique. All of these actions and example are not evidence of a person being ‘bad’ or dishonest, often the motivated reasoning takes place below the level of awareness, it is a defensive mechanism.

The best way to combat it is to question not that which confronts your world view, or that which attacks your directly, but question those things, evidence, and conclusion that make you feel warm and safe. The lie that is most dangerous is the lie we want to believe. Seek out evidence and arguments contrary to your positions, and not argument that have been filtered through allies presenting the counterargument or you will simply be swayed by their own motivated reasoning. When you reach a conclusion that is alignment with what you already accept as right and proper be merciless on yourself for flaws in your reasoning and logic. This is not easy and it is a never-ending process but you cannot reach truth via self-delusion.