Day 1368 – Technology and SAMO
Saturday, October 19, 2024
Okay, I’ve got a small basket of odd facts to pass along.
Fox, Bret
interview with Kamala Harris. It is reported that he showed the wrong clip when trying to trap Kamala. What he showed was not a clip that illustrated the point that Trump has been saying some vile stuff on the campaign trail. Kind of like when – who was it? – got hold of thousands of hours of security tapes from Jan 6th and found one where two guys were standing in a hallway and said, “See. Nothing bad here, just typical tourists.” Oh yeah, Tucker Carlson.
Speaking of old Tucker, his bit about Russian grocery stores and subways. Don’t know much about the grocery stores but the subways? Yeah. They are clean and all that. Somehow he forgot to mention they were built with slave labor and thousands died in their construction. But then that would require a minimum of research and who’s ever accused Tucker or anyone at Fox of really doing research, other than to dig up gotcha quotes and clips?
I’ve been reading Chip Wars. It tells the history of the microchip. Something I grew up with and did not realize all that was going on. During the Vietnam War there was a bridge between North and South Vietnam. Despite numerous attempts the U.S. forces could not knock it out. Their bombs were too inaccurate. Then I fellow at Texas Instruments (TI) came up with a laser guided system that could be attached to the existing bombs. The way it worked was there was a lens on the front of the bomb that could be set to look at a target. This was actually a laser through the lens. There were fins on the back of the bomb. If the bomb veered off course the laser would move out of the frame of the lens. A microprocessor would adjust the fins to bring the laser back into the laser frame.
With this new system the next time they did a bombing run with sixteen planes, twelve hit the bridge.
The U.S. Defense Department strategy to keep up with the Russians was to build smarter weapons. Russia went with volume. When Desert Storm, the Iraqi War, happened the success of the U.S. strategy was well demonstrated with the high accuracy of their weapon systems.
Moving on, we watched The Daily Show last night. A drag queen was on. She pointed out that there are a lot of laws that have been passed in most of the states to try and limit health care for trans kids, most notably in the south. These laws also go after trans athletes. Now I get that you don’t want men who now claim to be women competing in women’s sports. But, that’s a slippery slope and one that has many pitfalls. It seems people are referring to the most egregious cases and passing laws based on them, or on the thought that something nefarious or terrible is going on.
As this person pointed out on The Daily Show when the lawmakers trying to pass these laws were asked for numbers, as in numbers of cases of the type of thing they were trying to prevent, they didn’t have any. In other words, they were making up laws for things that may not really exist, or minimally exist. I remember old Kristi Noem, governor of South Dakota, puppy murderer, and most recently cheerleader for 39 minutes of listening to music with What’s His Name having passed a trans law in her state. It banded trans athletes from competing in female sports. Great. When the head athletic person in the state was asked how many trans athletes the state had the answer was “One” and that was a few years passed.
The woman on The Daily Show, Laverne Cox pointed out that 47 states have passed anti-trans laws and that this has led to an increase in violence against these people. I mean, they are people. You can debate their sex, but not their humanness. She also pointed out that the Republican lawmakers who are passing these laws seem to be fascinated by trans people. This based on the areas of the country that watch the most pornography of trans people. Seems to be an overlay of trans fear laws with trans porn. Huh. Kind of like the Baptist pastors who rail against homosexuality that are caught with gay boys?
by metro area
But, I digress. The question for me comes down to “What do we as a society do?”
There are folks that say there are only two sexes: man and woman. To which I have to raise my hand and say, “Question. When a person is born and they have both male and female genitalia, or if they outwardly look like a woman but have male sex organs internally or vice versa, and this happens a lot, they aren’t male or female, but both or neither. Correct?”
It’s easy to dismiss this, to turn a blind eye, but it happens, and there are plenty of cases. When I was a freshman at Johns Hopkins University (1969) there was a doctor, Dr. Money (Yup, that was his name), over at the hospital. He was confronted with these cases of mixed genitalia. What to do? At that time it was the practice to make these babies one sex or the other, via drugs and surgery. In fact, Dr. Money gave a lecture every fall. It was famous. He held it in the largest auditorium the hospital had. He presented slide after slide illustrating the situations. A penis where you’d expect a clitoris was the one I heard about. (I never made it to the lecture.)
As far as I know Dr. Money pioneered sex change operations. They weren’t really sex change as much as they were “pick one.” Unfortunately, a baby can’t tell you what they want. As some of these people grew up, apparently, they didn’t feel comfortable in their bodies. And, it seems some people, even though born of one sex feel the same. More “situations.”
There have been examples, especially in swimming where it seems a person has declared they are female when before they were male. What to do? It’s a tough call. Some athletic commissions have tried to make decisions based on testosterone levels. But what do you do when a person who is outwardly and inwardly female that naturally has high testosterone levels? This was true with a boxer in the last Olympics and a runner a few years before. In the case of the runner they said she had to take drugs to lower her testosterone. Those drugs made her feel awful, so she stopped taking them. I don’t remember what happened to her athletically.
I don’t have the answers to all of this but I can say that these lawmakers who once again are getting in the middle of this says more about them and their fantasies and prejudices than it does about the people being affected.
Here’s the YouTube replay from The Daily Show:
The same people that argue about the perfection of “his” creations are so quick to defy “him” when it comes to viruses and cancer cells. It’s almost as if their faith is only when it’s convenient.