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This moment from Deadline’s Picard podcast made me laugh: in a discussion of how the various Trek governments mapped to real-world governments, Jonathan Frakes ends with, “And now we have a Pakled as a President.”

Ranking the Democratic Candidates on Black Issues

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The Root ranks every Democratic candidates’ ‘Black Agenda’. Comprehensive, and well worth reading for the details and commentary. But here’s the spoiler-iffic end results, listing the candidates from worst to best (all scores out of 100 possible points)

  • Tulsi Gabbard: 0
  • Amy Klobuchar: 22
  • Michael Bloomberg: 43
  • Bernie Sanders: 50
  • Tom Steyer: 62
  • Pete Buttigieg: 66
  • Joe Biden: 70
  • Elizabeth Warren: 79

There you have it. Elizabeth Warren’s “black agenda” is the blackest of them all. Unfortunately, she also seems to be invisible to everyone except Mike Bloomberg. But that’s only because she keeps punching him in the face during the debates.

Then again, we’ve only counted the white votes.

On This Day: Feb 28

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Since I’ll hit 20 years of blogging this November, this year I’m posting a daily list of anything I published on this day in the past.

There are 30 posts previously published on February 28th

  • 2024
    • Year 50 Day 302 Every office should have a T-rex somewhere in it. ➡
    • My New Osborne 1 Though our full-size Osbornes were disposed of years ago, I'm ridiculously pleased to have this lil' guy on my desk now. ➡
  • 2023
  • 2021
    • Difficult Listening Hour 2021.02.27 Unrehearsed, seat-of-the-pants, let's-see-what-happens mixing. You never know what might fall into one of these! ➡
    • 📚 11/2011: Dance on Saturday by Elwin Cotman ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ #PKDickAward nominee 4/6 A really strong collection of short stories and one novella. I really enjoyed the way these slipped between the real and the fantastic, and between mundanity and surreal horror and humor. ➡
  • 2020
    • The Body Shop is adopting “open hiring”: No interviews, no background checks, no drug tests. When there is a job available, just answer three yes-or-no questions and the job is yours. It’s a new philosophy called “open hiring”—and it works. ➡
    • Bookshop: A centralized shopping website for independent bookstores. Start here instead of at Amazon! Discovered through this Forbes article. ➡
    • This moment from Deadline’s Picard podcast made me laugh: in a discussion of how the various Trek governments mapped to real-world governments, Jonathan Frakes ends with, “And now we have a Pakled as a President.” ➡
    • Ranking the Democratic Candidates on Black Issues There you have it. Elizabeth Warren’s 'black agenda' is the blackest of them all. ➡
    • A “live laugh love”-style sign, but using text from the Long-Time Nuclear Waste Warning Messages. I love this. ➡
    • On This Day: Feb 28 Recognizing 20 years of blogging, here are my past posts from February 28 ➡
  • 2019
    • 🖖 #StarTrekDiscovery S02E07: Yay! No more Spock-teasing! Space squid are fun, and Tilly gets flustered around causality violations. Glad Pike at least mentioned Ash killing Culber. Still really unsure about Section 31, all the Spock stuff, and now time travel, but holding on. ➡
    • Well, now I know who to blame for my dreary fashion sense: Beau Brummell (well, and discovering the goth community in my youth….). I break out of the drab-ness occasionally (my Pride kilt from Verillas, for example), but…yeah. Maybe I could do more. Need to ruminate on this. ➡
  • 2016
    • Weekends should be longer than two days. (59/366) ➡
  • 2014
    • Once again, frozen yogurt for dessert before heading out to a show. :) ➡
  • 2009
    • Dollhouse As evidenced by my recent tweet, I've now given Joss two chances to win me over to Dollhouse, and he's 0 for 2. It just doesn't work for me, and there's a number of smaller reasons that add up to one big fail. ➡
  • 2008
  • 2007
    • The root of the problem… It’s nothing really, but the grammatically preferable version of this phrase is 'for whom I’m supposed to root,' which is the most hilarious collection of words I’ve encountered since 'Academy Award-winning screenwriter Ben Affleck.' ➡
    • Numbers I don't get it: why is the latest Enterprise the NCC-4 8 15 16 23 42? ➡
  • 2006
    • Tuesday Ten (In My Pants) A variation on the 'ten random tracks' music meme, adding in the fortune-cookie game of adding '...in my pants' to the end of the fortune...or in this case, song title. ➡
    • I’m 6.29% Slut Just a cute little bit of web silliness: using the Slut-o-Meter to compute your promiscuity according to Google. According to the Slut-o-meter, I'm 6.29% slut. ➡
  • 2005
    • Keeping New Readers Problogger has a short series of posts with tips on how to keep readers who have stumbled across your site via a search engine hit or some other method. Interesting stuff, though nothing groundbreaking, and as it turns out, I do most of what he recommends already. ➡
  • 2004
  • 2003
    • Search improvements While MovableType does include its own search function, I've chosen not to use it for djwudi.com because I have a number of pages that live outside of my weblog, which MT would not be able to search. However, I'd run into a bit of a problem with the search engine I am using, and I think I've finally got it solved. ➡
  • 2002
    • Where were you? I found an interesting discussion today, and thought it was well worth cribbing to use here on my site. One of the members of the HTF started a thread asking where people were and what they remember about significant dates in history. ➡
    • They fight crime! He's a hate-fuelled misogynist stage actor from the Mississippi delta. She's a transdimensional red-headed nun who hides her beauty behind a pair of thick-framed spectacles. They fight crime! ➡
    • Moving soon I talked to Melvin last night, and got the go-ahead to move into the new apartment, probably starting next week sometime, so that I can be in by the 15th. ➡
  • 2001
    • Shake, rattle and roll I just found out when I got to work that Seattle got quite a bit of a shaker yesterday -- current estimates put the quake that just hit them at 6.8. ➡
    • Radio – and future gigs? My personal moment of triumph was when one person called to tell Nick to quit playing a compilation CD, at which point Nick let him know that it was actually me mixing live. I guess my mixes were going pretty smoothly! ➡
    • Back online Sorry 'bout the recent downtime over the past couple of days...problems with the cable modem. In any case, everything's resolved now, and things are looking good. ➡
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Star Trek: Picard S01E06: Much better than last week. Borg cube action that isn’t just squicky siblings, Soji hits a point of no return, and Picard comes face to face with parts of his past, good and bad. But who gave the Romulans a Lament Configuration? ;)

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Was the Democratic Nomination Rigged? A Reexamination of the Clinton-Sanders Presidential Race by Anthony J. Gaughan: “This article makes three central points. First, it contends that the overwhelming weight of evidence makes clear the 2016 Democratic nomination process was not rigged in favor of Hillary Clinton. Second, this article argues that the Democratic Party rules and state election laws actually hurt Clinton and benefited Sanders. Third, the article concludes that the controversy over the Democratic nomination race reflects a broader, bipartisan decline in public confidence in the integrity of American elections.”

On Bernie Bros

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There’s Nothing Revolutionary About Harassing Critics:

Perfect, superhuman leaders do not exist in life. They exist in propaganda, and what toxic Sanders supporters seem most vehemently interested in is not hurting individual people, but creating a state of play in which only propaganda about Sanders can be spoken without reprisal. By doing so, they’re creating the conditions for a president who acts without accountability, a president who gets to create his own truth and use his passionate following to terrorize anyone who contradicts him—a president very much like the one we have now.

Coronavirus: Don’t Panic!

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Liberally adapted from this Washington Post article, a list of best practices for dealing with the coronavirus:

  • Don’t Panic!
  • The basics: Wash your hands regularly. Cover your nose and mouth when you sneeze. And when you’re sick, stay home from work or school and drink lots of fluids.
  • Keep the shopping cart light: Surgical masks? If you’re not sick, you don’t need to wear them. The main point of the mask is to keep someone who is infected with the virus from spreading it to others. If you’re itching to buy something, you can stick to the typical respiratory-virus medicine: decongestants, anti-inflammatory drugs and acetaminophen for fevers.
  • Practice makes permanent: One of the best things you can do to prepare for any emergency, including a coronavirus outbreak, is put together an emergency kit. It’s also important to have plans in place in case the outbreak disrupts your daily routines.
  • Be mindful of where you are: Health officials have stressed keeping your distance from people who are sick, especially when it comes to respiratory viruses. It is worth considering limiting exposure to large groups, especially during flu season. In confined spaces, such as mass transit, it’s important to look around and see what’s going on, see where everyone’s hands are going and make a mental note to wash up later. But awareness cuts both ways—just because someone has the sniffles or has a cough, it doesn’t mean they have the coronavirus.
  • Watch what you read: Hoaxes, lies and junk science about coronavirus have swirled online since the earliest cases were reported, mostly through social media. Look to trustworthy sources, such as the CDC, the World Health Organization and local health departments, to stay informed.
  • Be kind: As coronavirus has spread, so, too, has anti-Asian prejudice. The WHO has urged government agencies to do what they can to prevent discrimination against specific populations, since stigmatization can fuel the spread of the outbreak by driving marginalized individuals to hide infection and avoid seeking treatment. Remember to not let fear override your common humanity about how you treat other people.