Maslow's Political Blog

Happy New Year!  For the past few months I've been thinking of getting back into political blogging.  What I'd like to write about is simple: What matters and what doesn't.  I see a lot of people worrying over issues that aren't really worth their time.  Thinking over the past year I think I've been correct about what's worth thinking about and what isn't.  And with Trump returning to office... I worry we're going to see a lot more wasted, aimless worry. So this year every month I'll make a post looking at the news topics of that month and evaluating whether I think they're worth our time.  This will also make it easy for me to check myself as the months roll on - will my analysis hold up? I'll be using a system of ranking importance I am calling the MAIN system - a name I chose with the help of ChatGPT (I'm not good at making clever acronyms).  I'm not going to use ChatGPT for anything else on this blog - unless I decide to change ac...

Obviously, this is chock full of spoilers. Also, it's a reaction, not a review. If you haven't seen the movie, it probably won't make a lot of sense. So go see it if you haven't.  Let's be real, any time a movie has a character announce "I'm the spy" has problems.  Any movie that has a character do that, and then kills them almost immediately has serious issues. I really liked The Rise of Skywalker.  It's a lot of fun to watch.  But also, "I am all the Sith" and "I am all the Jedi" is stupid banter.  And Rey kills The Emperor anyway, so why doesn't she... absorb all the souls(?) of the Sith, like he said.  Why can Ben bring back Rey but Rey not bring back Ben?  Wouldn't it be great to have them each revive each other for like 5 minutes, until finally Luke's voice is like OK FINE MAYBE SOMETIMES SOMEONE REALLY IS GONE! In a universe with spaceships, why even have watercraft at all? My main issue must be laid ...

Human sacrifice is one of the most misunderstood cultural activities.  It seems inherently evil, and socially awful.  How is anyone benefited because someone else is murdered, even with that person's consent?  How is murder ever OK, at all? Now, to be clear, I don't mean to discuss mass killings or revenge killings or purge killings.  Just human sacrifice.  And to discuss this properly, we need to change our point of view.  Because, in the modern world, human sacrifice is indeed a ludicrous thing.  Not just awful, but senseless.  It begs the question, "Wait, why was this ever  acceptable?"  But it was.  So here's what we need to do: Imagine... ...living in a much smaller community ...having a religion you and your whole community believe in ...not even understanding the word 'religion.'  What we call religion, you just call "very obvious."  It isn't even "obviously true," because that implies it could be false. ...

On Friday night, I saw on Facebook a news story that a group called Election Justice USA had released a report that claimed that the Democratic Primary had been stolen from Bernie Sanders, and that without this fraud he would have won the primary "by a landslide."  These are big accusations. But I've never heard of Election Justice USA before.  So I looked into it.  The website was not very comprehensive (It has actually since been substantially updated, which is alluded to in the interviews to follow).  Here is how they describe themselves, in part: " We are a non-partisan organization advocating for voters' rights and standing against election fraud and voter suppression in all forms. Throughout the 2016 Presidential Primaries, Election Justice has been working to combat unprecedented levels of fraud and voter suppression through legal battles in several states and at the federal level. We are also striving to educate the pu...