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[00:00:00] Do you like conversation on a variety of topics? Feel like no one wants to talk about the things that interest you? Tired of only hearing the same political, sports, or catastrophe talk? We feel that way too. Join two high functioning geeks as they discuss just about anything under the sun. We can’t tell you what we’ll be talking about each week because we don’t know where our brains will take us.
It will be an interesting conversation though, so hang on and join us. Here comes the Relentless Geekery.
Alan: Okay, almost there.
It’s amazing. Once you have something like settled as to when you’re supposed to be somewhere, calls come in. They’ve been waiting for the entire morning. And so I’m thank you for your patience. Okay,
Stephen: I just I got back just [00:01:00] a few minutes ago from voting. I wore the perfect shirt. I’m not arguing. I’m just telling explaining why I’m right.
Alan: Exactly. I wore my tigers are powerful, but they take care of their young kind of shirt. So I guess that’s also, so it’s always good to start off with a rant. Mike,
Stephen: there we go. Is that better? Can you hear me better now?
Alan: It’s pretty good. Geez, stop. I I, healthcare in the United States is a little zany.
I, I have a UHHS clinical pharmacy every month a call to make sure that the combination of things that I’m taking to make to lose weight, fight diabetes, be a healthier person, all that’s coordinated. But then when you try to get like a refill where they change the dose, you find out that Mount Jaro, going from 10 to 12.
- that it’s going to cost more. And there was a, there’s an assistance program, but somehow it not only doesn’t apply, it has edged upwards. We started to be at 2. 5 and work your way up, and it was the same. Now it’s going to change. [00:02:00] And I find out that I have gone to the Boulwell Center, which is downtown Cleveland, or actually the east side campus of Cleveland compared to 960 Clegg, which is my west side thing, and that they don’t have the same deals.
And, the person that was my clinical pharmacist contact, that just changed because someone was retiring and moved to, wrong term, moving to another position and I got handed off. But that handoff has been horribly fumbled. So I don’t have the advocate that would help clear all this stuff, and, because Colleen and I have had two trips, five day trips out of town, I really had to like, get it to get to me next, last week before I got out of town, and they didn’t.
No mail order, no, even where can I pick it up? And now I have today. As my target data go pick it up and I’m having to do the calls and the legwork and the and who don’t need to get this approved And I really will be paying double the price to make sure that I don’t do without it for two weeks.
But why isn’t there an automatic little tickler in the file that says, when this goes up, get it approved and get the consumer to approve. Yes, I don’t mind you doubling [00:03:00] my price. And it’s not going from 8 to 16. It’s going from 120 to 260. So it’s real money, and it’s weird to say I really want it, so I’ll cover it, but it should never have gotten to this place.
And some people are very friendly, and other people are very much I have a script in front of me, I’m going to read through this script, and I don’t know who to send you to next, and, can you find, I had the name Matt. I don’t have a last name for Matt, so I can’t even look up in this, and just, in every way that this should be, easy not to be weird, if this wasn’t, um, obesity and diabetes medicine, what if this was dementia medicine?
And I’m Now a week without and so I’m getting and how am I or chemotherapy
Stephen: pills or
Alan: on like that? I could be dying I could be not able to think as clearly to get through this all and Colleen and I say this all the time You know we’re relatively sharp. How do people handle this who don’t know what if this doesn’t work, what do I do next?
If I get frustrated, do I have emotional issues that I blow up and don’t get it done [00:04:00] at all? And then you find out that people aren’t taking their insulin or whatever else it might be. And it just, I, all those things about, Hey, universal healthcare, God, it’s so hard that only 32 of the top 33 civilized countries have figured it out.
We seem to not move towards it and be able to do it. And I wish it was only optical, but it really is very practical and applying right to me as I have to negotiate. And it isn’t like on the ocean, it’s a shoal filled coast and I keep hitting things, oh I’m sure I’ll get it resolved, but it’s going to be now not showing up on my doorstep easily.
I’m going to drive on voting day and on day one, I want to be packing and thinking of a wedding that we’re going to. And shouldn’t I be doing that? Thinking of, hey, we’re going to Colorado. What do you wear in Colorado? I should bring my hiking boots. Instead, it’s this weird little, I don’t know, the practicalities keep getting Ridiculously difficult instead of get it for me here.
I’ll drive. I’ll walk across the street to my regular pharmacy But they don’t carry it and all [00:05:00] that stuff so rant off except
Stephen: I
Alan: kind
Stephen: of can’t believe it I just can’t believe it’s this weird. I just saw a study And I apologize. It’s been a couple of weeks. I don’t remember who did it, but it was not like an American based country.
It was like some international company, whatever they were doing, some data calculation, and they took the nine largest countries in the world and compared all their healthcare and it boiled down to the U S was number nine in quality of healthcare out of the nine top countries were number nine. But.
We’re number one in cost
Alan: and cost exactly. So that efficacy, what do you get for your money? We stink and they fight for the stinky system. Instead of saying we could work this all out. And even like a thing that really got me was when I first started with you, HHS was because I had.
Melanoma. And they said, we have a system where all of our people talk to each [00:06:00] other. And it’s important to have, even before there was HIPAA, there was at least a concerted database of all these things that they’re all looking at the same files. And you don’t find out that somebody is overscheduling you or under prescribing you or whatever else it might be.
That has fallen apart in our current system where everything has become an individual cost center. When I go to the blood lab, or the x ray place, or the MR place, all those things, they’re not one system that is all talking to each other. Each of those things sends you separate bills, and they don’t use the same system to figure out You, if you’re going to get, at one point, when I was going to, I had my atrial fibrillation, and I went in to get my cardioversion done, and they said, oh, nobody scheduled an anesthesiologist for you.
And it’s you need that, right? Yes, we absolutely need that. Can you get one here in real time? No, it’s all da. And this isn’t the first time, and luckily it has never been life threatening, or, I don’t know, it’s deeply inconvenient. I was working back then, and I just took this day [00:07:00] off.
Now I have to give that day back and try to get another day, and then it’s not a day wait, it’s three weeks wait. Da. I A lot of those things, maybe it parallels a little bit, you and I have seen, they continually do this game of, we’re going to centralize operations so that they’re all efficient and everybody talks to each other.
But then, we want to have some kind of independence or profit mode or whatever that makes it fragment again, so it’s all little pieces that talk to each other, maybe and work all that out. And then in each of those transitions, it gets to each of those, or into the spectrum for three months, and then otherwise everything is in the middle for we used to have that system, but they’re redoing it, and so we don’t have bad data, we have no data, and things like that, or it’s hey, that’s a year old a lot of things change for me in a year, do you have the fact that, it has been I wish that it was that all being healthy was a matter of tell me what to do doctor.
I’m a diligent patient. I will do those things. I’ll take the pills and I’ll do my rehab and whatever else it might be, but I don’t want to get two or three different stories and I don’t want to ever fall through the cracks [00:08:00] and that has happened. A ton of times.
Stephen: Oh, my God. And worse. And, someone could correct me on this.
But worse, a lot of time, the doctors are constrained, whether voluntarily or not, that they can’t look at you and say, you’re unhealthy because you weigh 500 pounds. Lose some damn weight, quit eating the nachos while watching TV and go walk around the block a couple of times. They can’t say that because they’ll get sued and then if somebody has a heart attack or something, they’re like the doctor didn’t give me anything to take care of it.
The doctor, it’s a bad thing. And worse, sometimes there’s medicine, we have 10 choices. The doctor may choose choice three because that one’s giving the most kickbacks. So it’s money going into their bank. So that’s the one they recommend. Even if they know choice number nine would be better for your particular situation, they don’t get money from that one.
And that could be a little cynical, but tell me I’m wrong.
Alan: I’ve only had. Small suspicions about that kind of thing, but I [00:09:00] have seen some evidence of that where it’s not even necessarily the doctor In order to get not sued they follow protocol and this is the officially approved protocol And so it’s if it is that try that drug first, even though lots of other things about a person’s condition say Almost certainly the third drug will be the one that will be the most efficacious, but you have to go through the first two because they are lower cost or longer established or whatever.
And I get that. You want to go with the generic drug. I do. I want to pay zero or eight dollars. I don’t want to pay 120. And yet, There’s something about cutting to the chase. Time is always of the essence when you’ve got a condition that really worsens if you don’t treat it and kill you while you’re waiting for treatment.
And so I’m, I, it isn’t maybe it’s, I’m not fully paranoid about it, but I ask questions about that. I think I’ve mentioned many times before. I have Jardians and Jardians in the United States system is hugely expensive. So I went to a Canadian pharmacy and I had understanding by the doctors, all except one, that, it is, it’s a [00:10:00] civilized country.
It is a first world country. You’re going to get, but don’t go. And I had done the research. Don’t go to Singapore or Turkey or other places that might source it because you might be getting floor sweepings in a capsule. They really don’t do all the FDA control and the assay that you get checked to make sure it is what it says it is and at the right dose and that it’s pure, that there’s not anything other monstrous thing in there.
And so the fact that I’ve had to do that in order to, I’m a solid citizen of the United States, take care of me,
Stephen: do all the, oh I, and the whole, I’m not saying every doctor does that or is like that, but our system definitely lends itself to that style of thing happening. And we know for a fact, you got that argument.
Of course, our pills work. My, my friend is going through chemotherapy for the bowel cancer. And the pills are a thousand dollars a pill. He’s a pill. And the pharmacy [00:11:00] companies say yeah, we’re gonna charge that much because we had years of research, we had all this, that, and the other thing.
And that’s very true and I can’t deny that. But I also can’t believe that the pills are 1, 000 each. It’s,
Alan: there’s a scene in Princess Bride, where they’re like, you pay no money for a miracle, you get a cheap miracle. You know what I mean? I really, I talk often about, one of Colleen’s and I, my biggest goals is, the longer you stay alive, the more they’re going to take care of things.
There are going to be cures for everything. Cataracts or bowel cancer or whatever else it might be and you just have to stay in the game Don’t go to gambler’s ruin and take yourself out of it You have to stick around and yet when it first comes out, I expect prices to be high but then when you find out the places that they don’t let it go for the 7 years 17 years i’m trying to think what i’ve read that it’s Officially in the market and they have full rights and nobody can do a generic without violating patent But then it should come on to the market where now They’ve made their money and so the whole world should [00:12:00] benefit.
That’s what the whole patent and copyright and other systems were designed. You find out that now they make a knockoff that’s like a a what do they call it? A chimeric molecule where it works the same, but it’s a mirror image, but it isn’t the same. So you can charge differently or they change it slightly and renew the patent on that while still keeping the trade secret to themselves.
So some things that should have gone. Out to the public in seven years, they’re like 56 years now because they’ve learned to play this game like Disney, how they manage their movies and what an odd going back into the vault. Honestly they, there’s money to be made from being a monopoly and everybody knows that.
But that’s why we have the United States and it’s good system of government say. We understand you need to be able to make a profit. We’ll see about that good system of government tomorrow. And that can be our segue, but I just, I went, when I find out that companies are like that, it makes me actively seek.
I don’t do business with people that’s their business plan, not to make a fair amount of money [00:13:00] and not to like, and to keep something from the public that could save people’s lives only because of the profit motive. That steps over into evil. You know what I mean? I don’t want people to steal from you.
I don’t want it to be, Hey, now we’ve got knockoffs without you having made quotes the right amount of profits, but everybody can do a spreadsheet that says if I have what I have to make all the money that I put into research and advertising, whatever else over the next seven years, here’s what the pill should cost.
And then after that, it’s a different ball game. Instead of saying I’m on the gravy train and I’m not giving it up. That just
Stephen: seems so. Because once you’ve got a billion dollars, you really are hurting and you need that second billion dollars because it’s just
Alan: the entire yacht. I could, it is
Stephen: so hard to survive, and it’s funny, we did see this thing in a Ironman three with that drug, because the Senator was trying to get it for his daughter who was crippled and didn’t care what they did to get it. It’s what he wanted.
Alan: Exactly. So it, hey, we haven’t gone [00:14:00] to vote yet. We did not vote early.
We’re doing it today because somehow that seems so. I just wrote a big post. I really am optimistic. I really think. think and feel that the United States has seen enough of we’re not going to become Nazi Germany, we’re not going to become a fascist regime, we’re not going to turn the clock back 250 years where women couldn’t vote, they were treated as chattel, people were enslaved, all the things that are like wrapped up in nice words like originalism.
It’s crazy to think that we, the most advanced country in the world, are voluntarily going to go back to pretty much the dark ages. And because there really are lots of women, lots of minorities, no matter how many attempts they’ve made to disenfranchise us, anybody, I think that despite all of that, there’s going to be a huge vote.
Whatever we have complained about with apathy being, hey, only 56 percent of the people vote. If you get 80 percent of the people to vote the voice of the people is going to be, we all [00:15:00] benefit. We’re all in this together. Nobody wants climate change. Nobody wants anti science. Nobody wants nobody to be educated, like planks in the opposition party’s platform.
I really am an independent compared to Republican or Democrat, but the reason that I espouse democratic values is because every time that I look at what the Republicans are proposing, it’s so repugnant. It’s so unbelievable that they are, women back into the kitchen, minorities. We want to be able to screw with you or deport you, but not treat you as human beings, not treat you as equals.
And I really think that people have had enough. And no matter what the disinformation and propaganda. People know who’s going to take care of them. People know that we are in really good shape because of good policies about employment, good policies about foreign competition. Why would you stop that?
No matter the lies about, hey, the United States economy is in shambles. It’s not. Stock market is up. Unemployment is down. Everything is working fine. Do anybody who asks the question, are you better off [00:16:00] now than you were four years ago? All kinds of people. That are more secure in their homes, better health care, happier with their kids education.
Stephen: Mongoloids say, no, I’m not because that’s what they’ve been spoon fed to say. And luckily, you
Alan: know, there’s a big bell curve. There’s not enough mongoloids to overcome all the decent rational people in the middle. There’s a big bell curve. It might be that the rapacious crazies here and the idiot crazies here, but there’s a whole bunch of people that they just want to Have a family.
Raise their kids. 2. 4 kids in a white picket fence house, and I want to be safe on the streets. I don’t want gun violence. I don’t want my daughter to be at risk of She makes a mistake with a bad boyfriend, and now she might die because of So anyway, I really think that there’s enough stake and awareness by most people that they’re gonna say, I have a mother.
I have a daughter. There’s no way I’m gonna let them get brutalized by this regime. Come on America, come on good men, come on women, [00:17:00] don’t let us get dragged back into terrible times. If all they’ve got is we think it should be this way because there’s Bible quotes about it. You can be wonderfully religious, believe in God, believe in salvation, and not listen to the charlatans who are taking the worst quotes, the worst.
Old Testament quotes, partial quotes out of context, built into that. How about Jesus Christ? How about love your neighbor? How about the beatitudes instead of all the fucking things they quote about what’s wrong with people? What has to be stopped? It’s not about that. It’s about making it so that we are all together in love.
Stephen: Over the last couple of weeks. Trump has really spun off the rails. I haven’t heard a single thing. He said that policy or what he wants to do. It’s just been hate filled rhetoric, spewing out of his mouth, attacking people, insulting people. And I’m sorry, I don’t respect too many politicians because of the way that job has grown in our country and what it [00:18:00] entails.
Same thing as what we were talking about the pharmacy corporations a minute ago, but I can at least. Give some respect to some of them democrats or republicans when they’re like look you know I believe differently this is what i’m trying to do for good for the country and I can believe they really think that I don’t respect this Dillweed at all, not as a politician or even as a human.
And it makes it so hard to not want to just punch somebody in the face that says I’m a Trump supporter for the sole reason that they can’t think on their own and they’re being spoonfed. And we’ve got issues in our family right now because my brother in law is a big Trump supporter. And I, me and Colin, Colin being who he is, said, I can’t.
Be around people who are trump supporters. He’s like not only that I had problems with my uncle before that So we both said look we can’t be around him this holiday season I’m, sorry and my mother doesn’t understand that and we’re like we just cannot be around [00:19:00] him if this is what he’s supporting It was already Tense with him for the last 20 years, but knowing he’s a Trump supporter, whether it goes Democrat or Republican today I can’t respect this anymore.
And I said, I don’t want to be around them and it’s causing issues in our family.
Alan: Some part of being in this world is setting boundaries, learning what things you’re willing to put up with. And that freedom of speech isn’t the right of him to yell to make me feel it. One of the big reasons that I have confidence in what I’ve said, it has nothing to do with, the good.
I think that humanity has fatigue from certain things. If you keep telling people to be hateful or afraid, it works for a certain amount of time. But after a while, you get to look around and say, funny, my country is not being invaded by immigrants. Funny, the thing that you said is sure to happen hasn’t happened.
So you’re a liar. And people rebel against having been [00:20:00] lied to. But he lied
Stephen: the last time and people still say, oh, it was so great.
Alan: I think that we’re going to have enough people that have woken up and saying, that’s never been true. It’s only been used to either cow us or stoke us. You know what I mean?
To get us all crazy angry so that we’re not thinking rationally. I think that people just, we’ve had it now for eight years of being bathed in all this stuff and the realities of there really is Russian disinformation and there really is, fascist things trying to happen. But the way that they work is by getting people, having people be continually angry and afraid and after a while, just I don’t know, this is sad.
Disaster fatigue kicks in. Terrible hurricane, let’s help Haiti and the Dominican Republic. And after you’ve been bombarded by all the ads that say, hey, send us money, you’re just I don’t want to move on to the next disaster, though that seems to happen, but I’ve done my piece. I don’t want the only thing in my life to be, oh my God, it’s a disaster.
Oh my God, it’s getting worse. You have to find those let’s go for a walk in the forest where it’s, every time I go for a walk in the [00:21:00] forest, it sure makes me feel more peaceful. And you get to be thinking about. This is still available. We, there might be, and maybe the, unfortunately, the media lead into this.
There’s so much to be gained from sensationalism and awfulness, hurricanes, floods, famine, etc. But you ever, the day to day life of most people is My car has gas, my house is heated my, my kids go to school, everything is safe and moving forward and we’re building a better world. And the things that people talk about destroying that world, they don’t seem to come true.
Or they create them to make them come true. You know what I mean? That it sure seems to be true. A plank of the Republican platform to wreck things and then accuse the others of not fixing it quickly enough. If you hadn’t wrecked it in the first place, if you hadn’t tanked the economy or, stopped the pandemic response team from doing what it could before we lost a million people to COVID.
And we’ve talked about this briefly. Why isn’t, why aren’t certain people [00:22:00] considered to be war criminals? They really did, through their either agency actively or through their neglect, let people die that could have been saved. And I really want it to be, who do we think is going to take care of us the best?
If we all work together, it’s not communism, it’s being neighborly. It’s what you do. Hey if you need a lawnmower for the afternoon, I’m happy to let you borrow mine. It’s not that they have the right to my lawnmower, it’s that banding together to do things for insurance or to do things where the whole neighborhood doesn’t need a posthole digger.
If one guy has it, this guy has the posthole digger and I have the bread machine. And this, there’s, it. There’s so many ways again, the specter that’s often raised is that’s a communist idea. No, it’s just friends helping each other out It’s you know, if you have a snowblower, then maybe you’re gonna do your neighbor’s walk as well And next
Stephen: time they’ll
Alan: take a turn.
Stephen: But the thing is, ask all these people going. Oh, that’s communist. That’s fascist Okay, can you tell me the definition of communism and fascism? They’re like it’s [00:23:00] we can’t do that. That’s bad Okay. But why is it bad? What’s, what does, what do they do? It’s just not our way. That’s not they don’t know a thing about it.
They just, that’s what he targets those type of people. That’s why when you get the people that actually can think and analyze, they look at going, yeah, that doesn’t make a lot of sense, and do things with personally with him. When he first announced he was running back in 2014, 15, there was an article in Newsweek or money magazine.
One of those that was talking to an interviewing multiple companies that worked for Trump contracts, consulting, building Mar a Lago, building a tower, building, doing this, that they would give them a quote. It’s a million dollars for this plan. Okay, great. Do it. We need it. We’ll give you a deposit.
Get started. Okay, we got started. We need some money. Here’s a dollar or two. We need more than that. We’re getting it for you. We’ll keep going. Okay, wait, now that you’ve done three quarters of the project, we want to change all of this. Okay that’s gonna cost more. No, I’m not paying [00:24:00] more.
You do it the way I want, or I won’t pay you anything. And then they get done and they’re like, Oh, take me to court if you want the money. We can’t we have no money. Of course you don’t. How many companies he did that with? And this is the, Oh, he’s a great businessman president. And then the second one that was even more personal, our yearly conference in January used to be at the Arnold Palmer golf resort.
And many of the people working there were immigrants. They had green cards. They weren’t citizens, but they worked there. And we were talking about the president race and the election, blah, blah, blah. And he was president at the time. And they were like, chuckling as they’re giving us, refilling coffee and stuff for so why are you laughing at this?
He’s you people don’t realize. That almost every month that he’s saying, Oh, I’m flying to China to do this. I’m going down to this state and I’m going to do this, that he would not do that. He would come here and golf the whole weekend. He’d run out the whole place and golf. So [00:25:00] people wouldn’t know he’s here.
We see him at least three times a month on the weekends. And I’m like, How can a president be president and then go golfing? And it wasn’t like they had any, a pony in this race. They were, they knew it. They saw him. He was there. He was lying so he could play golf. And then on Monday, they’re like, Oh yeah, I didn’t do this on the weekend.
Good for you. Yeah. You people are freaking morons.
Alan: The, the amazing thing is how many times he’s done those things. It was known about him that he was a bad negotiator, that he stiffed all his contractors, that he lied like in his, 18, 000 documented lies. He didn’t make a mistake. It wasn’t that it was taken out of context.
He lied his ass off the entire time that he was in office. And since then. And I don’t know why that’s not enough to have people say, of course, he can’t be trusted. Of course, he’s saying anything he can because they
Stephen: want stupid gold sneakers and China Bibles that say, make America. How can you make America great when you’re buying China Bibles?[00:26:00]
Alan: I, like I said, I have confidence that those, the worst, the stereotype of those terrible, stupid, supportive people, it still isn’t that the United States is not an evangelical Christian It is mostly Protestant, mostly Catholic, some Islam and some Jewish and so forth. But the evangelical crazies are the loudest of those groups.
And so they keep on they’re the ones that first started. We’re a Christian nation. No, we’re not. And by law, we’re not. And we’ve never been. And yet it is a communist. So what am I saying? A Nazi thing straight from the Goebbels playbook of if you repeat a lie often enough, some people start to believe it.
And they’ve been doing that repetitious lie forever about what they want to become reality. It isn’t that way, but they’re going to act as if it is. They create a world that is damaging to every other world. And then whenever the worlds collide, they do what they can to just destroy other good things, because they can only see, I do [00:27:00] indeed want only white wealthy landowners to be in charge, and they have to be of the right religion, they have to go to the right country club, they have to those things that we as a country have rejected again and again, and including white healthy landowner males like me, I don’t think that’s the way the world should be, that only I should have the vote, that I should be able to like, hurt people because of, you name it, their sex, their color, their economic status.
There’s so much to be gained from equality, from opportunity, from everybody having an equal stake in the game. I don’t want it to be. Now that I’ve got mine, fuck all the rest of you. It very much is. Everybody keep doing this good thing. We all benefit from the new medical development, the new restaurant that I’d like to try.
You know what I mean? The new clothing design. What
Stephen: was that? I saw an infographic and I didn’t verify it. I don’t know if it’s completely true, but it was speaking of how many [00:28:00] tech devices medical and inventive tech devices are from Puerto Rico that how many experts they have creating these things in Puerto Rico.
It’s like the biggest country creating Innovative new medical devices. I didn’t verify that, but I’m like, if that’s true, that’s what people, they don’t, Oh, I don’t believe that because Trump said differently and how many venues told him this time? No, you’re not doing a rally here because you owe us from last time.
Alan: That’s what makes America great and a good businessman. Exactly. You’re going to have to go have it in a, an anonymous hangar somewhere because you screwed us the last time. And at least it’s not. It’s fool me once, shame on you. You know what I mean? Not fool me twice. We don’t let deadbeats continually string people along.
And that guy is the deadbeat to end all deadbeats. You know what I mean? The fact that he can send people in to negotiate for him. And they’ve got to be like, I know that he’s putting me in the lion’s den here. He’s been a liar and a fraud again and [00:29:00] again. How do I present him as if Don’t worry. This time he’ll come through.
Characteristically of the last hundred times, the last thousand, I
Stephen: don’t recall a time ever in our lives that I’ve heard one side or the other. So many saying, yeah, I’m Republican, but I can’t support Trump. I have never heard that before. What’s that tell you? The people that brushed elbows with him and hear his are saying, no, we can’t do that.
Oh, they’re traitors. They’re bought by the. The Democrats have so much money, they’re buying Republicans to change their votes. Really? Come on! You believe such nonsense!
Alan: When it used to be that there really were philosophical differences and that was the discussions of, we have an economy, how do we treat the economy differently?
We have education, we have foreign policy, whatever else it might be. And it might’ve been that there was a different idea of the direction in which we should go, but it hadn’t become this ridiculous cult of
Support things that are obvious [00:30:00] lies in order to have party loyalty. They’re There’s been too many but hopefully some people have read them all the psychological analysis of what goes into a dark triad personality they’re narcissistic and they’re totally unempathetic They will manipulate their Machiavellian and everybody who’s read that would say That’s obviously that guy and the only way he wins is if he’s allowed to do those things You can’t have that happen in a vacuum.
It’s like being gaslit. You can only be gaslit if you’re willing to believe the next lie that the guy who has continually tried to undermine your confidence, you identify that, and then you can shake the shackles off. The Republican party has been a long time coming to. There’s he’s not the guy that’s going to win for us.
He’s actually destroying things that we as Republicans have built as well as the Democrats. He’s destroying the country. He’s consorting with our enemies, the Republicans who have for a long time been good on national policy. It was about a strong America, not consorting with Putin and, Kim Jong un or ill, or you don’t mean like fact that he starts [00:31:00] to cozy up to the worst dictators in the world and look at Orban’s suppression of press, religion, basic rights, and say, yeah, let’s be more like that.
Doesn’t that raise everybody’s hackles and say don’t let that happen. And I’m really, I’m hoping, like I said, that we’ve gotten, we have more than enough evidence, and it isn’t always about people thinking rationally and looking at the evidence, but just the feel for how icky he is, what a terrible rapist he is, what a terrible racist he is, that he’s, he doesn’t treat his wife well, doesn’t treat none of them.
She’s on the next
Stephen: one with the, on the next one against the current one. And
Alan: I
Stephen: really hope
Alan: That’s got a kick in for somebody like, If this guy was, I don’t know, the head of the PTA, I wouldn’t want him to be put up for a bigger position in the PTA, because we know he’s a piece of shit.
We know he’s a terrible human being, and he doesn’t have any shame about it. There’s no reason he’ll ever change [00:32:00] his ways, because he doesn’t think he’s done anything wrong. He will do anything and everything, and that anything has already been done. slid over into such terrible behavior that I just hope that whatever that, that moral sense that comes from being a human being or being any kind of religion, the golden rule kicks in, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
And seeing a guy that doesn’t have that in him, there’s gotta be something that says, he’s bad. He’s dangerous. Don’t support him, push him aside and get somebody better. The fact that The Republican Party caved to him long ago during those first debates and then every time that he made changes as to who’s going to be the head of the Republican Party, who he’s going to have in his cabinet, seeing all the worst people be dragged in, seeing how many criminals he actively gave a bye, and in fact, when they were finally convicted of something, he gave them a pardon.
Something’s got to kick in that says, this guy’s just so oily, such a fucking scorpion, such a nasty human being. I really hope that For [00:33:00] all those aspects, it doesn’t have to be even the preponderance of data, except for many people, they’ll be, I just can’t let I’m a contractor. I can’t let a guy that screws his contractors get away with this.
You know what I mean? I’m a scientist. Whether you’re Republican or Democrat, you can’t have a guy that just dismisses the truth of how science works and how it makes the planet
Stephen: better. But he can do that because he is extremely smart. He’s been, he’s told us how smart he is that he’s, the smartest there is.
And, because he remembers things like Hannibal Lecter. Who else remembers that? He’s amazing. If this
Alan: wasn’t so terribly dangerous, this would have been great comedic material to be. It has. Have you watched Colbert? That’s, but everywhere everybody should have stepped back and said, the emperor has no clothes, laugh him out of town.
And if he won’t leave, run them out of town on a rail tar and feather dismiss him from. Having any influence, stop putting a mic in front of this maniac. You know what I mean? Especially with what he did with the mic recently. I [00:34:00] honestly, that’s like you can’t talk about anything with being a prime example of terrible behavior.
You know what I mean? He’s a pervert. He’s not safe walking into partially clothed teenagers during the teenage Miss USA pageant. Every one of those things, making fun of a crippled person. It must be that everybody in the world has seen something like this. It’s so repugnant
Stephen: that they’re like,
Alan: He
Stephen: awful.
Which is why the people that support him and dismiss that rep pregnancy are repugnant to me, and I just can’t be around
Alan: them. And that’s, that is, I understand that I, the people that I tried to have discussions with you, Knowbody we’re in Mensa, so you’d think good segue. So good. Yeah. Rational.
Exactly that every discussion would be what are the facts and what conclusions can we draw from those facts and to see how they’ve also been. Emotionalized, made savage, lost in the weeds, why are you wearing your MAGA hat? Are you really proud of what’s happened so far and you really look forward to more of it?[00:35:00]
Whatever your intelligence is doing, it’s betraying you because you’re all about rationalization instead of seeking the truth. And I think that’s a characteristic for 90 percent of the smart people I know. Mensa is not 51 49. All kinds of people are, we just can’t believe that the word is being so bamboozled.
Why hasn’t, haven’t people come to better conclusions? So it’s an amazement and a tearful acknowledgement of they’re really, you can fool most of the people most of the time. You know what I mean? If you do it in all the ways that we’ve perfected propaganda, perfected misinformation. And yet still there’s just enough people have seen him to be like, I don’t know what to do, but I know that’s not the guy.
And you, I, like I said, I don’t know that I’m. necessarily democrat or republican. But if independent, looking at, what do I want? I want Kamala Harris. I want her good policies on how we’re growing the economy. How we’re creating opportunity. How we’re gonna have more about equality and diversity.
And the people that immediately [00:36:00] jump to, trans people in bathrooms and getting sex changes in school. That’s your return. Obvious, insane things to say that you’re so scared or so delusional that you I, it I, Many of those discussions aren’t discussions. Nowadays. I like wow if that’s your starter argument.
We’re already done. You’re
Stephen: Casey said, I don’t really care for either candidate. I said, that’s fair. I felt that way most of the time It’s like they’re politicians. What are they lying to me? Go look at the record of any president. What did they promise? What did they deliver some are better some are worse?
And what did they say they were, and then they did the exact opposite. Some are better. Some are worse. I’ll give you that politicians in general. Aren’t my cup of tea. I don’t trust many of them, but I don’t care about, I honestly don’t even care what any of their policies are. Just all these other humanistic factors of his that he [00:37:00] dismisses and denies and Steps upon make him.
I don’t care if he’s Democrat or Republican. I’m voting the other guy because you’re not even a worthy human being. Yeah. End of story. I’ve dealt with narcissism. He’s such a narcissist and it destroys lives. And this is the man that would destroy the country with his narcissism. With the magnitude of it.
Alan: It, this is this, To me, this argument doesn’t ever get enough traction, but remember there was a book a while back called Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten? There are so many things, just like the little sayings that you learned from your parents, the little fable with a moral that you learned, all you gotta do is apply them.
This guy has cried wolf countless times, and it’s never been true, so stop believing him. This is again, the emperor’s new clothes. When you’re like Everyone’s going to be shined over by this guy until the little child says But he’s naked. What is everybody seeing that I’m not seeing? This is not reality.
Sometimes out of the mouths of babies, you have to have that. And there’s so many things that if you [00:38:00] just say, I don’t know, in ASAP, you, I’ll stop there because I think that most people don’t want to think that by going back to being childish with the way to do this, but the golden rule, it really is.
You want to have someone who, Does unto others as he would have done unto him, and at least doesn’t do unto others things he’d hate to have done to him. And when you see someone that isn’t at all using that, the most basic part of us having a working society, what is fairness? What is, how do you make it so that you can negotiate in good faith?
We’re not going to have the same opinion all the time, but you have to at least come to, we can meet somewhere in the middle by compromising. When you see that it’s all about. Absolutism and extremity, fanaticism, if you don’t have to know about what kind of fanaticism is. You know that doesn’t work in a pluralist society, in a society that’s made out of all kinds of people.
And that’s it. It doesn’t even have to be the planks of the platform. It’s what kind of human [00:39:00] being are you? And I can’t believe he doesn’t have a sense of humor, Kamala does, like he doesn’t have any pets. I like people who have pets and have empathy and have unconditional love exchanged. You know what I mean?
And there’s so many different ways in which it’s not just him, you’re known by the company you keep. How many times did your parents worry about don’t get involved with the truant, the asshole kid. He surrounds himself with the worst of humanity, not the best. Don’t you get an idea after a while?
And not just him, but the entire Republican Party really seems to have let the craptocracy happen, right? That the shit has bubbled to the top. And there’s so many people that are the worst possible person you could put in charge of education or in charge of energy or in charge. And like, why do we subject ourselves to, they’re not there to run our country.
They’re there to dismantle it, to destroy what we’ve built.
Stephen: So for profit, for money this is every sci fi story about bad worlds that I’ve ever read. [00:40:00]
Alan: And even like in the legal system, I think that we can have some idea that the system that we’ve created based on smart people making decisions and following precedent, because you don’t undo that without having a crying reason that the world has changed or that they missed a big thing, and yet we’ve had people in our current system.
Terribly appointed Supreme Court that have undone precedent for 50 and 150 and 250 years and they talk about it as if I’m a mind reader of dead people. I can go back to what the Founding Fathers really meant and they’re wrong They’re provably wrong about they use that the get Outta jail free card.
When someone says, I’m a Christian, and they act in a very UNC Christlike manner, they act as if they’re really a good jurist, a really good decider of legal stuff, and then they throw out that system work. They throw a basis of how it’s a good,
Stephen: you could say Dunning Kruger doesn’t exist, but I see examples of it all the time.
Alan: Yeah. I’m sorry, you cut out a little bit there. I’m sorry. Oh,
Stephen: [00:41:00] I was saying the Dunning Kruger effect I see examples of that all the time. Sorry, am I cutting out
Alan: to people a little bit just there, but especially it doesn’t have to be about everything. Some people aren’t incompetent in every way, but you’ll see all kinds of people that they think because I don’t know, they’re a good pool player.
That’s something. Suddenly they think. I’m so knowledgeable about mortgages as well, and people not understanding that they have realms of knowledge and that maybe you really need, like the, we’ve talked about this before the disregard, the death of respect for expertise boggles my mind.
I’m well aware of how much I know in various different fields, and I might know a lot about certain things. And maybe I have a lot of fields in which that’s in because I’m this weird information sponge, but I’m well aware that I’m not. The guy that should talk nuclear policy unless I’ve been in the field for 50 years and all of it, whatever you deep dive down to study.
And yet we’ve got all kinds of people. I watched a video and now I’m an expert on the electoral college. You’re not. [00:42:00] Basic humility. Not having that basic sense of self that says I, I should be always learning instead of assuming that now I’m the top dog, provably you’re not.
Stephen: The one on one course is not the expert level course.
Like
Alan: that. Exactly.
Stephen: So you mentioned Mensa. I want to hear about Weim. How’d it go?
Alan: It
Stephen: was
Alan: wonderful. For those, I think we talked about multiple times in the past, for anybody who doesn’t know, Mensa has regional gatherings all around the country, local groups put on a party that they invite all their friends to, and they’re often between 100 and 250 people.
Halloween, which is Mensa in Chicago is huge. It’s 500 people. And so it’s all the good things about Mensa and expanded. Many programs to go. You can learn about, let’s go see a guy who’s been to both the North and the South Pole. Let’s go learn all about pollinators. Let’s go do some improv.
The wonderful variety and the quality of speakers, people who are knowledgeable and passionate about various different topics. I spend lots of my time in the [00:43:00] program rooms and learn so much. A huge hospitality suite with like tons of food and drink and snacks and all that kind of stuff. Tons of games.
They have Diet Dr. Pepper. I almost always get my drug of choice. A huge games room. Tons and tons of games. Exactly that. Like A to Z. Circling the room. And Chicago Aments has a great games collection and they all come out to play. Literally and figuratively. And if you’re looking for people who like playing games, You got a whole bunch of lives ones, if you’re the family guy who’s really good at Scrabble, you are not the winner automatically in Mensa in any game there, because there’s all kinds of other people that love playing, and they have lots of experience. So that is always going on. Tournaments, where not only do you get a chance to just play casually, but you really get to see who’s the winner of Oriel.
I say this every year, Oriel Maxime does a logic puzzle tournament. These things are as good as I’ve ever seen in any book or magazine publication level. The best Sudoku with variations, the best putting [00:44:00] dominoes on a board so that all 36 of a domino set are used, in connection, but it’s hard to describe Latin squares.
A good variety and good difficulty and it’s very, I get humbled every year. You know what I mean? I’m really pretty good at puzzles, but Aurel is really crafty and the variations that he does are just, again, with everybody else in the room also being a puzzle, not a puzzle solving guy. I, it’s very cool to test yourself and be like, It’s a flow activity.
You go in there and you dive into these things and time fades away and you come out of it in two and a half hours. Oh, okay. That’s all I can do. I’m trained.
Stephen: And they also usually have really good talks. Most RGs do have talks, but it’s usually like one, one an hour type thing, but we usually has two going on at a time.
So sometimes you got to choose
Alan: three and four tracks. And as always, I want to see at least the two. So sometimes I’ll sit like. In the back where if my expectation from the description of the program does not turn out to be what it’s about, I can [00:45:00] escape, sneak out, and go to another one that I wanted to hear anyway.
So a great variety of that. The highlights of the event are the costume parade on Friday night, which are tons of visual puns. You know what I mean? And this year the theme of the gathering was road trippin So we had people come out as, Road cones, but as they come up on stage, they’re like quiet and they were cones of silence, that kind of thing.
Traffic cones, getting a little d and d in there too. Nice. Exactly. And just great individual costumes. And they have multiple categories, so it’s not only puns, it’s best traditional, best fun, worst pun, best theme oriented, that kind of stuff. They have group things where I should pull my photos up, but I what comes to mind?
They had, person that came out as Glinda the Good Witch, and actually sang the song from Frozen, no Wicked, right? Wicked. And stayed on key, sounded really good, looked really perfect. It’s wow, that’s cosplay quality costumes for this wonderful costume parade that they have.
Yeah. Aline and I did not dress up this year because we got so involved with the talk that we were doing and [00:46:00] pretentious drinking and all of what we have with going out of town now for a wedding that we just didn’t do something. But I guess we’ve been punny enough in the past that people were like, we really miss seeing the ball tie up there.
And so that’s very kind. We did a talk because of road trip and we finally did our talk about going to all the state capitals. You know what I mean? Long ago, On our honeymoon, we stopped by a Montpelier, Vermont, on the way to Baja Haba, and it was beautiful. And we said, we should go see this at every state.
This is where every state really does it up. And so we did. And it’s not been only about the capitals. It’s that giving that excuse to go all over the United States and see all the national parks and seashores and monuments, and see all the oddities, and see all the historic things, and the science things, and the literate, literary things.
We tried to share as much of that as we could in two hours. We actually did a longer than usual program. Usually programs like an hour and 15. We were like, it’s 50 states. We got a lot of material to get through. We didn’t have that single person leave the thing from, talk fatigue. We had all kinds of good fun slides.
We take your pictures, not slides, on our presentation [00:47:00] deck. Isn’t that, you it’s yeah, exactly. We, the crowd, I like it when it’s not just. We, we talk talk, and then we take crowd questions at the end. Colleen and I were both doing it, and by us having our own back and forth, our repartee, people were also chiming in with, oh, I’ve been there, and hey, have you done this place?
And so tons of good information. Those are the best talks. Yeah it, I’ve always had that theory of, no matter how smart you are, you’re not as smart as a whole room full of Mensons. And so invite that. Don’t try to make it as if you’re the authority guy on, on anything. And so we had all kinds of good participation.
It got, we got a nice ovation at the end, it really, and now we’re going to do it for our monthly gathering, so if you want to see it, please come to CAMS it’s not the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, because that would be often ill attended, because it’s right before the holiday, so they moved it to the first Wednesday in December, so if you want to see this thing, we will refine it, as you might imagine, because I couldn’t stop tinkering with it until the very end.
I had a couple of typos and mistakes, and you know what? Mansons are happy to help you with those. [00:48:00] Oh God,
Stephen: yes. , they’re happy to point, in this particular sentence, s structure, you really gotta put a comma there because of this rule from 1796 it, over in Oxford yeah.
Alan: I honestly, I wish it would’ve been something as obscure is that honestly I put Salt Lake City, New Mexico for whatever reason.
I didn’t even get the right state. You know what I mean? I, I. Attribute it to a little bit of being punchy and bleary eyed by working on it until two in the morning and things like that. And then we did pretentious drinking this year and we talked about that before. We have an event where we get liqueurs and cordials, all the things like in the snooty section of a bar.
And if you want to try it, it’s five, six, seven dollars a shot. We do it that we have this year more than 120 unique ones. Every flavor you can imagine the creamy and the nutty and the flowery and the bitter and everything and it’s a Again, the party has 500 people at least half 250 to 300 people They show up some in their wonderful cocktail dresses, literally some But everybody gets to [00:49:00] sample like five shots and You’re in a safe place, so it’s not hey, come and get drunk with us and then drive your weapon home.
It’s everybody, there’s good camaraderie and people are sharing and oh, have you tried this yet? If you haven’t had the pistachio cream liqueur, you should try it. And just that hubbub, the din of all that wonderful interaction. I got dozens. literally I think we had 22 this year, poor meisters behind the tables, who they know their stock.
And so they’re able to say, what should I try this year? Oh, if you haven’t had the honey liqueur, the Krupnikas, there’s Krupnika and Krupnikas from Poland versus Lithuania. You should try either one of those. Or if you want to compare, you should, like we, we had not one, but two Lithuanian liqueurs this year, because we just went on the Baltic cruise.
It’s I don’t know that many people can say I’ve had a Lithuanian liqueur. That’s cool. And so it. It was a wonderful event. Very well received. Everybody seemed to have a wonderful time. We still haven’t had anybody get drunk and belligerent or get drunk and vomity. It really is because there’s things like, hey, it’s a really good time until somebody Puts the vomit scent into the air because they [00:50:00] couldn’t hold their liqueurs. I just I we’ve been doing It’s either it’s 27th or 28th year. We missed the 25th anniversary because of kovat So one you were just gonna have to declare its anniversary year.
We’ve been doing this for a long time and it’s worked I think it’s one of the longer running Mensa events and it gets better every year my wonderful crew of poor Meisters They really know how to unbox everything make sure that everything is well arranged You know, I bop around like this with a signs are up on the walls, and I make little puns out of everything, it’s all together creamy, and use the force, Luke, or whatever else it might be.
It that’s a great Saturday night thing, and though I try many, like I try to try everything new that I get, and so I often do. between 10 and 20 shots. One of the joys of being a big guy. I really don’t get, I was, we then went and played double deck cancellation hearts and I wasn’t like bonking my head on the table.
I wasn’t making mistakes. I seem to have either because I have so many cells in which to store that alcohol or because I have high tolerance because I’m German and Lithuanian, whatever else [00:51:00] it might I wasn’t silly. And wonderful gathering with so many good people. When we go back to Chicago, I have lots of good friends, and it’s wonderful to get a chance to say hi and catch up.
And besides all the things you can do, the programs and the games and everything, sometimes you’re just sitting at a table in hospitality and loving the quality of conversation, that it pings around on every topic under the sun, and you get to find out that, wow, your grandkid is now doing this. If you’re in your 60s, there’s multiple generations and you get to find out that, hey, smart people, Sylvia, now their grandkid is going to Caltech or whatever it might be.
And there’s
Stephen: things to celebrate. What, one of Colin’s, not at Weem, but one of the other RGs, one of his like childhood favorite memories. Was sitting at one of the tables talking with you about comic books for an hour and a half. And it’s somebody that knew stuff. And speaking of, by the way, there’ve been a lot of things going on in the comic book world.
He’s been telling me about, I’m like, I’ll tell Alan, we need to get you on and just do a whole show on comic books and stuff going on. He would
Alan: be a great guest. Someone that [00:52:00] works on a comic book store and it really is state of the timely and state of the art. I think I mentioned I did put in my first order.
So I’m getting kind of books in December and it was. a little bit of money, but I really wanted to do this survey to then say which things do I really want to read and which things just seem to have, they don’t capture my imagination. They’ve tailed off. I got every Marvel in D. C. because I trust them.
A whole bunch of stuff from Image and Top Collins, various other things where, you know, it doesn’t matter where Neil Gaiman is being published. I’m reading a Neil Gaiman thing. I’m reading Frank Miller and that kind of stuff. But I started off with my order could have been, 970. That’s how much I read and comic books cost nowadays.
And I cut it way back to that, but not reasonably I really had to like, Okay, Colleen, I know that we’re okay with money, and maybe this could be my Christmas present if you let me do this horrible thing! I’m buying comic books! That’s like a mortgage payment! It wasn’t that high. But I just was still It’s not I don’t know people have different kind of rules of thumb I think the career like hey, you can spend up [00:53:00] to 300 and not have to get clearance Yeah, like you don’t want something showing up in the account that the other person goes is this Somebody’s you know, they stole a car.
Did you go
Stephen: to a
Alan: bunny ranch? that And that’s a great one. And, ah! I forgot to mention this from last time, Logstock, MetaBand called I think, Talk to the Future, that we had a very nice conversation while enjoying burgers at the burger place, and they might want to be on the show, because they’re like, not just musicians this album is very Orwellian, and this one is, and so it’s there’s some smarts to them, and I It.
We need to have more than one guest a year. We know so many cool people. Yeah. It’d be fun. We should somebody other than Ted. You’re, you just got done with a 50 year career in chemical engineering. Tell us about what has advanced in the time that you’ve been doing it. You know what I mean?
Maybe that’ll be our
Stephen: New Year’s resolution to get more [00:54:00] gas a month or something like that. Yeah.
Alan: More people that we can share with the world.
Stephen: Definitely get in contact with them. I’d love to talk to a band that most people haven’t heard about that I haven’t really heard about. Go hear some new music and be able to discuss it.
And one of the things just happened to call and I’ll pass on. He just got a comic book signed by Jack Kirby.
Alan: I saw him post that it was when I was out of town, I didn’t get a chance to like glow all over him for that’s pretty cool. You got anything signed by one of the greatest of all time.
That’s pretty cool. Yeah.
Stephen: So yeah, he was pretty jazzed about that one. Exactly.
Alan: So it would be, we beautiful leaves driving back and forth to Chicago, though. Now they’re just starting to get to where it’s past peak leaf. You know what I mean? There wasn’t all the different colors. It was mostly. Yeah.
Yeah, dandelions and spring violets popping up. Oh, something is opened up. Which one are, sorry?
Stephen: Out in the yard with the weather. We had dandelions and spring violets already coming up because of the stupid warm weather.
Alan: Oh, [00:55:00] they’re going to get shocked when you hit cold weather, aren’t they? Hey, I came early and now I Oh boy I We’ve talked about that.
We are in Cleveland, much the beneficiary of global warming that our weather has gotten better. And yet I’m seeing and reading about Things that are pollinators are now not concert they’re not in concert with the flowers that they need. They’re coming up at different times because they have different sun and warm signals, rain.
And so we’re going to start to get like mismatches of things that used to not compete, that they’re actually are going to be do or things that really should be symbiotic are going to be off by two weeks. And how much is that going to affect either the buzzy bee or the crops that they take care of?
I’m hoping and am. Things that pop up like six months early. They’re they’re getting false signals, and I hope they make it through the winter Maybe it’ll make them hardier But it might also, like the orange freeze, Florida never recovered. Remember from that one bad orange freeze back in Anita Bryant days, they had years and years maybe to recover.
[00:56:00] So there’s a name from the past. Let’s bring Anita Bryant up. And it is reassuring. So if you don’t read Heather Cox Richardson, you really should, because she’s great about history, like Ken Burns. It’s really good to be able to show, The United States is resilient. We’ve been through some real crap before.
We had Teapot Dome, we had the Depression, whatever else it might be. And when you get to it isn’t the first time that we’ve worried about Big technological change and how are we going to weather it? Everybody is a little spooked by AI. You mean more spooks than by radio? Then by when we had the industrial revolution and people were first Luddite wise complaining about it, even destroying things because they thought that’s the end of my being a whittler.
You know what I mean? Like it, it’s good to know that we’ve been able to accommodate new technology and new thought that there really have been philosophical changes and practical changes in all kinds of ways. Isn’t that. We will make it through. It might be that there’s that 10 percent that can’t change with the times and they’re going to be sad, but the rest of us are going to [00:57:00] be, wow, clean water.
I’m so happy to not have wells anymore. Let’s all have clean water. Clean water is
Stephen: not important when you have to worry about all the schools doing the gender changes when kids don’t really want it. We got to stick with the real issues here, Alan. Come on.
Alan: Please let’s geek it up for a minute.
One of the joys having going through this election, not to talk about the Phil Philosophical beat up, but the very practical aspects. I love the fact that I can go to whatever.gov and get a sample ballot and really look at the races and do some research beforehand. So I’m not walking into the booth and saying, oh, that seems like a nice name.
I’m just waiting. Let’s vote for the Lithuanian candidate. Oh my God, there’s so much knee-jerk stuff that happens. But instead you can really, how has this judge done? There’s a great thing called, no, darn it. Why I don’t know where I might judge for yourself that has information about who for every judge that’s done things, what are their peers think of them?
What are the judicial publications think of them? What are practicing attorneys [00:58:00] thinking of them? And you really can say, which are the ones I don’t have much knowledge day to day of judgeships, but there really are levels of excellence versus just satisfactory or of. worrisome, bad quality, and you can really vote them in and vote them out and not let somebody really crappy get another term.
Stephen: That’s fascist thinking, Alan. You could be deported. Being an informed voter. Back to Lithuania. You need to go
Alan: away. And same with the board of education. You can read about those people and see it’s not really a matter of party affiliation, but it sure is about, Do you really think we should ban books or not?
Do you, no, we shouldn’t. Do you really think that we should have every child educated, not well, only the good ones. We need to have more vouchers. Good. And I, we, Colleen and I have done our research and there’s good resources like that. This is, I vote for civilization and many things that I’ve read are, if you vote for things that involve Women being equal, having reproductive rights.[00:59:00]
You’re going to have a more civilized society that they’re the ones that keep things stable, that nurture, that take care of things. And so we go to the League of Women Voters and it’s not the rabid crazy site. It really is. Here’s the practical aspects of why you should vote for this person because they have sponsored the education bill and the energy bill and the somebody that knows
Stephen: about education.
Exactly
Alan: like that. And so we really have a sample ballot for, I don’t know, there’s 32 races for our particular zone and district and the other ways you look at that. And it’s not only the big races, people, it’s not only a matter of casting a vote. And it’s funny in the presidential election, as there’s nine candidates.
There’s all kinds of fringe stuff. They’re worried in particular about Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate. And I don’t want to worry about a Green Party candidate. I agree with lots of green philosophy, but who will she take votes for? That’s the way enough. Ralph Nader did that it might actually change the election.
But all those down belt things as to representatives and senates and judges at the [01:00:00] state level. If you’re gonna put a Supreme Court justice in, don’t you want to have the guy that really thinks law works the way it should? Not, I have an agenda that I want to say the Bible is the law. I don’t have a problem with the Bible.
I have a problem with the fanaticism of it, and the, that it supersedes the will of the people, and that it’s Old Testament Bible, not New Testament. And it’s only bits and pieces and partials. That’s right, that they can pick and choose. They can make an argument of anything they want. And it isn’t even trying to be true to the whole spirit of the Bible, which is love thy neighbor and revere, respect appropriately, not cultishly, and stuff like that.
I, please everyone, don’t just do the donkey ballot where you go in and I like, Italian people, I like women, I like whatever else it might be. Honestly, I just Most of the donkey ballot things are, I’ll only vote for a man instead of a woman, and if you’re the guy that thinks that way, please don’t.
Please don’t think that competence is only [01:01:00] that, because competence, level headedness, knowledge, you know it isn’t only in guys heads. You know it’s everyone. So vote that way. Vote. And I’ll say another thing I’ve been hearing lately is all kinds of people that were feeling pressured because they’re in a relationship that might not be easy to, get Say how they’re going to vote.
Folks, when the curtain is drawn across and you’re alone in the voting booth, you could be the biggest Supposed mouth breather guy, but you can say, I want my kids to be safe. So vote for the gun control, not the guns, rampant candidates and ladies, vote for reproductive rights. Even if your husband says you must cleave onto me and I go right through God, you really have the chance to do the right thing because we all have an independent private vote and you shouldn’t lie about it.
You shouldn’t have to hide it, but if they make it that it’s, Vote as I do because I order you to do it. You know what? Maybe you should think about that. That’s not the way that relationship should be. You can do the right thing. Yeah
Stephen: that’s a whole discussion. [01:02:00] A
Alan: whole discussion in and of itself, exactly.
I really am, for all those reasons. Vote smartly, vote wisely, do the research. Wow, one day out of four years, you’re not going to take the time to try to get the right judges in, especially if some of them are elected. Some of them are like for life. Don’t put a bad person in that in two years can do all kinds of crappy precedents.
You know what I mean? Precedent. I judge for yourself, League of Women Voters. You know what I mean? It isn’t just. One lever for all of what party you believe in, it’s worth crossing over. There’s one judge race like Joan Seidenberg, who’s very Republican, but very competent. And I don’t want to turn away from competence.
I don’t think that she’s only a Republican, I think she’s a human being. And then maybe we should follow that she’s smart and has proven that she’s a good juror, that she really does humane decisions instead of let’s see, legislating from the bench is one of the, or who’s paying the
Stephen: most of [01:03:00] your next campaign
Alan: and it can be that well now that we’ve seen that there really are not incorruptible, but there’s all kinds of evidence that they get bribed and influenced, at least in our Supreme Court.
But maybe that’s happening up and down. You know what I mean? Oh take care of your friends, because your friends are the ones that put in a swimming pool for you, and they just happened to once, environmental restrictions lifted so that you got a swimming pool and then 400 people died of cancerous agents in the air because you relieved the coal plants, The filters that stop all that evil stuff from getting into the atmosphere.
Oh let’s see.
Stephen: All I need to get rolling. It’s getting late for me.
Alan: I know I went a little bit late. As always Thank you. It’s thank you a day, but it’s still a joyous day. i’m gonna go outside and The world is still running. We’re going to go for a walk in the forest and it’s all still beautiful.
There’s still Burger Kings and McDonald’s. There’s still libraries. You know what I mean? I should stay away from Burger King and McDonald’s. But that’s a sign of civilization. Isn’t there something about how two [01:04:00] countries that have McDonald’s have never gone to war? It’s like it’s a sign of civilization somehow that Anybody can get a 5 meal.
That’s a good thing, I think. Even if the 5 meal might be like burbling around inside you with all of them. Alright, man. Later. Okay.
You have been listening to the Relentless Geekery Podcast. Come back next week and join Alan and Stephen’s conversation on Geek Topics of the Week.
