The presidential election is a fraud but I have some ideas

I've gotten into some arguments and discussions with several people over the presidential election.  I'm now convinced that the presidential election is a gigantic fraud, a big show put on for voters while rich people rig the "smaller" elections for their own agendas. But I don't like the idea of a president anyway. It's just a polite word for King. What's the difference?  You don't select the president. If you sat down and thought over which person you'd really like to be president, before any party primaries, I can guarantee you that your particular choice won't be elected. It's all compromise, and the less money you have, the more you will compromise.

If I could redesign our constitution I would abolish the presidency with its odious hero worship overtones, and replace it with an executive committee of boring technocrats. There would be a national election, but only for parties, and the committee membership would represent the exact proportional results of the election. If the independents got 5%, they'd get 5% of the committee membership. 

I would also institute a credentialing system for journalists who would write for public, nonprofit entities. For profit entities would not be allowed public bandwidth. No more ads! Well, that's actually complicated, because of free speech. I would want to provide a forum for free speech without marketing the air time. Here's how I'd do it. People would vote the use of their air time. Every citizen in the broadcast area of a station would own exactly the same share of air time per year, and you can decide exactly how that will be used. Actually the government would have to maintain a forum station, limited by money of course. Honestly, the whole point of this exercise would be to eliminate annoying advertisements while providing a forum for annoying opinions. That people could turn off whenever they wanted. Or rebut, on air. 

I'm really getting some good ideas, now that I'm redesigning the government. I might even run for president

Into the Future very slowly

I haven't done an installment of "Into the Future" in a while. That doesn't mean I'm going to do an installment now, though. I'm just noticing, and thought I'd point it out to myself. I've soured a bit on the whole computer programming thing, because it's taking longer than I thought. I read all these stories on the internet about old people my age learning programming in one year, but I'm not even close to really getting even one basic language.  I originally envisioned, when I began the project, that by this time I'd be programming my raspberry pi to send security feed from my porch GoPro directly to my phone, and sending my drone on search and destroy missions against the neighborhood dogs. I expected my life to look something like this:

My wife relaxing on the couch while our robotic servants await commands. Notice the robot dog, it would have an adjustable bark volume. 

But this beautiful vision has not materialized. I'm still floundering around learning basic PHP:

<?php echo 'hello world, where/'s my goddamned programmable drone?' ?>

Actually not even sure that will work, it usually takes me three or four tries to remember how to do the quotes in the string. One problem with learning style is that I don't do organized lessons very well. Nor have I stuck to learning one language. I kind of do some reading or a tutorial, try something, get some basic few lines of code to work, get overexcited, get a huge idea for a neat application, try to write it, get lazy about the exercises in whatever instructional book or tutorial, fail spectacularly at implementing the big idea, break down, sullenly go back to tutorial, mechanically churn through a few lessons at a listless, once a week pace, think up a reason I should actually be learning some other language, start a new tutorial, forget everything I learned about the other language. And the robots wait for instructions, mute and immobile. 

In this way I've learned a little bit about Visual Basic, C, JavaScript, Python and PHP. And it took all my willpower not to dump PHP to learn Ruby.  And I haven't really done anything interesting with any of them, but I've made some magnificent plans, imagined some really cool applications, with all of them

I've saved the movie industry from themselves, again

We've been watching Stranger Things, the 80's nostalgia sci fi series, and enjoying it even though I feel it signals another milestone in the ongoing contraction of Western civilization. I could not have enjoyed it in the actual 1980s when the movie themes so lovingly restored in Stranger Things regularly enraged and disturbed me whenever I found them, i.e., the repetitive telekinesis trope which I've always disliked, especially in "science fiction". I originally disliked it because I felt it didn't belong in science fiction because I had a young man's idealistic and naive view that there was something intrinsically valuable about maintaining some pure platonic version of a genre, but now I realize I just found telekinesis boring. I find the electrodes on the heads boring and the dumb experiments the phony scientists performed in all the movies on the telekinetic "mutant" person bored me. I mis-attributed my own anger and frustration to a more flattering cause: Righteous concern for scientific truth.  I was just bored. I know it was boredom, because I love another 1980s trope in Stranger Things: Alternate Dimensional Reality, especially an Alternate Reality with spooky resonance to our own, blinking lights, ectoplasmic portals, shadow worlds, I adore that stuff and want more of it, and as a younger man I never made a fuss about how completely nonsensical the science behind the Alternate Reality was. A physicist might groan when they see the Alternate Reality Part of the show, especially when the characters in the show talk about "Alternate Dimension" as a synonym for "Alternate Reality", but I didn't care in the 80s and I don't care now, because it entertains me. 

As a young man in the 80s, I spent more time than I should have trying to fix the telekinesis trope in my mind, by thinking up scientific explanations and rules for the telekinesis. But I think these explanations would not have worked for popular movies; too cerebral and time consuming. So I've come up with an explanation that utilizes my favorite Alternate Reality trope: All humans have an alternate monster self in the alternate reality, some of us have plant-like, relatively motionless monster selves, some have moving monster selves, but everyone's monster self corresponds with their psychic power; mind readers have monster selves with antenna, telekinetic people have monster selves with long tentacles, maybe there are monster selves with the ability to fly, granting the human the power to teleport. 

This would be a very cool movie, and it would certainly spice up the monotonous lab scenes with electrodes and nosebleeds and crushed product placement

I will write the graphic novel, I promise

"The Art Zone": A creepy new web comic!