I should break these topics into separate posts, but it’s representative of just how much information we news and current events consumers have to deal with on a daily basis. All of this happened on Halloween Day. Civil War Controversy The Twitter day began with controversial remarks by White House Chief of Staff John Kelly about the Civil War. Most of my Twitter feeds (ie. gaming and authors) are *extremely* sensitive to anyone trying to put the Civil War in historical context, so of course it exploded.

I never mentioned the Harvey Weinstein story here, mainly because I generally try to avoid the minefield known as gender topics. But I wasn’t surprised. It’s Hollywood. Stories about sleazy executives go way back, plus we all know that most people are monsters. That’s not an excuse or a defense. It’s just, “Oh, of course Hollywood is like that. Everybody knows it.” It’s why sane people don’t exactly celebrate when their loved ones run off to Hollywood. I’m not blaming the victim, I’m just saying people who try to “make it” in Hollywood should go in with their eyes fully open, and be prepared. You *will* be entering a sleazy industry, and you *will* encounter sleazy situations and sleazy people. It’s a high risk, high reward kind of industry.

Here's what's on my ballot for November 7: Governor Ralph Northam (D) https://ralphnortham.com Ed Gillespie (R) https://edforvirginia.com Cliff Hyra (L) http://cliffhyra.com I don’t think I’ve seen any positive ads at all in this race. Perhaps one from Ralph Northam focusing on him being a doctor. That’s about it. I’m not sure I’ve seen Ed Gillespie speak a single time in an ad. Honestly I’ve been a bit surprised how little I hear about this race on television. Most of the focus seems to have been on the Attorney General.

People are pretty excited this weekend about Mueller filing charges. I saw someone on Twitter who actually thought the president would be arrested on Monday. Now I haven’t read the story so I don’t know what it’s all about, but I would be amazed to see anyone around Trump (today) get arrested. The only people to get arrested are going to low-level nobodys that we’ve never heard of. But I want to go back to the dream that “the resistance” is going to see the president leaving the Oval Office in handcuffs.

The ad campaign for the game Wolfenstein II was brought to my attention in my gaming Twitter timeline. These are not “fine people.” #NoMoreNazis #Wolf2 pic.twitter.com/rT5zVDaU1E — Wolfenstein (@wolfenstein) October 25, 2017 I don’t follow that account and I sure won’t now. Obviously games are marketed toward kids, and kids today think it’s the coolest, hippest thing on Earth to “punch Nazis,” thus an ad campaign for a game with cartoon Nazis is born.

I think public libraries are great, but I found this funny today. Funny in a “people are utterly incapable of putting basic statistics into context these days” kind of way. There’s this guy in the UK who doesn’t like public libraries. https://twitter.com/andrejpwalker/status/922174270347804672 https://twitter.com/andrejpwalker/status/922628584619085824 Then this happened: https://twitter.com/andrejpwalker/status/922928993564856322 People are retweeting his “surrender” and celebrating victory. By my calculations, what on Twitter seems to be an overwhelming outpouring of support by 110,000 people for public libraries in the UK is: 0.2% of the adult population of the UK.

I often get on a roll with posting to this site. A question occurred to me today after I saw a tweet related to the healthcare debate: Is immortality a human right? Some people on the left of the healthcare debate believe access to healthcare is a basic human right, the same as access to food and water. If we assume that the basic purpose of healthcare is to extend human life beyond its “natural” end point, and if healthcare is a human right, does that also mean immortality is a human right?

Here’s a fun one: https://twitter.com/yonatanzunger/status/922202212457070592 That is correct. The meaning is straightforward and literal, and every time someone uses the word “Nazi” outside of a historical context, they disrespect the memory of everyone who died fighting *and defeating* Nazism in World War II. A “Nazi” literally belonged to the Nazi Party, which no longer exists. You can look that up. It’s a historical fact. The correct terms to use today are “neo-Nazi” and “white supremacist,” or if you really want to be precise, the name of the actual radical organization which applies (they do have names, you know). I might even accept Nazist, because it at least acknowledges the issue. But I will not take anyone who believes the word “Nazi” applies in a modern political context seriously, because they are obviously ignorant of history. Or even worse, they are propagandists.

I think it’s great that people are looking into Russian hackers spreading fake news on Facebook. But is anyone looking into Republican and Democratic activists spreading fake news on Facebook? Probably not. This is why the real solution to the fake news problem is to educate people on how to tell the difference between real news and fake news.

So we all know America is hurtling towards a violent break-up, right? Just kidding. Kind of. Actually I’ve been reading a book about the breakup of the Soviet Union and there are some remarkable similarities. Michel Gorbachev was a radical reformist who basically turned the entire Soviet status quo upside-down over the span of six years. The result? Violent protests, internal power struggles, and eventually the end of the Soviet Union and the birth of something new.