The Heir is wondering whether the app failure in Iowa is a result of that app's marketers convincing a naive election commission about forced obsolescence, that one thing has to replace another.  The marketers may have come in with a big bin that the commission had to dump all their clipboards and calculators into as a condition of taking ownership of the app, i.e., old fashioned tools they may have previously used to tally up election results.  That's what they did in Finland when those marketers came in with a big bin for analog radios as a selling point that digital radios had to replace analog ones, resulting in what the Heir sees as a now informationally blind country.  Now that self driving cars have revealed themselves a miserable failure in high accident rates, that and Iowa the Heir sees as a reason to abandon forced obsolescence as a life's philosophy for the human race.

"At the risk of sounding like an old fart: BTT, back to tradition."

The Heir opposes the Insurgent New Network's fatalistic hyperbole regarding votes on witnesses in the impeachment trial.  He will not forget how they dropped the ball on that network accordingly, the same way he now still holds it against them regarding their put down of Jerry Nadler regarding the Hope Hicks hearings.  They have no hope of living either down.  They cannot tell themselves that they just need to wait two weeks in news cycles and then act like nothing ever happened.  Even worse is how they still insist on having that hack Jason Johnson on half their panels.  They have no stalwart sense of law and justice as long as that guy's on their panels *and* they continue their fatalism.  Because you don't hear them getting behind the idea that if it's not a fair trial it's no trial at all, and therefore Trump was never acquitted because he was never really tried in the first place.  You also don't hear them acknowledging that Trump's impeachment status is a permanent stain on his legacy.  You also don't hear them try to find any hope in a trial on Trump after he leaves office.  No, they will today dismiss *all three of those notions,* and the Heir will forever remember they did so the next time they take the hopeless and cynical path.  Shame on them.

"Just as the Mentor said above: shame on them."

So with the coronavirus, it's plainly obvious to the Heir that the media is just blowing the outbreak out of proportion, and certainly on visual.  Thank goodness he's gotten with audio with the information, and specifically on analog radio.  That medium is not out of the woods yet, though.  But anyway, this is something that the media did with the Ebola outbreak, and H1N1, and SARS.  He doesn't believe that the central government in Beijing sees the media kerfuffle in the West as entirely unwelcome.  It helps give them cover in and distraction from their oppressing dissenters in the guise of quarantine.  I mean, c'mon!  Does anybody *really* believe that that building they're under the gun in building is an actual hospital like they've been telling the rest of the world, as opposed to another labor camp?  The Heir also feels like diBlasio is just an idiot at this point in his participation in that disease hysteria, along with the same with that Iran Armageddon campaign two weeks ago.  Now that he's off the campaign trail, his political IQ is likely to continue to tank.

"To paraphrase my frenemy Flaileef, 'Wake Up Sheeple!'  I only like it when *I* get to say that."

The Heir believes Iran is being two-faced.  For days they've denied that it was one of their missiles that brought down that Ukrainian plane.  They were getting high and mighty in the face of u.s. and Canadian officials, bellicosely demanding, "where is your proof???"  And then they recanted.  But it's too late now.  The Heir is going to remember this sin of theirs, possibly for years to come, the same way the Tsarnaev brothers killed and maimed dozens of people for our once having been in Iraq.

"I can see myself heckling the Ayatollah 20 years from now for what happened in January of 2020."

Happy New Year from The Bachelor!  However the Heir feels as if the politicians did us a disservice by trying to get us all stressed out about a possible war with Iran.  You have Bill diBlasio publicly making allusions to both Hiroshima and 9/11, and then it turns out Iran just lobbed a few missiles at a couple of US army bases.  The Heir waited until now to make a comment on this point because he wanted confirmation as to whether there were casualties.  He tuned into audio this morning, analog radio, and he didn't hear that there were any.  No promise in the future of course but he never really believed that anything big was really going to happen as a response to the death of General Soleimani.  Both the politicians and the media indicated otherwise at the time, and again this serves to take away from the Media's supposed reputation as a so-called fourth estate.  It was kind of a 1% Doctrine on part of the media: If there's even a 1% chance of a major retaliation, act as if it's a certainty.

"Come on, people.  Really?"

The Heir's been watching octopus videos when he's vegging out.  They said that octopi can get bored, and you have to keep them interested with games and stuff.  But the Heir's not convinced that an octopus would play with a given toy unless there's a crab in it or something.  He doesn't think that an octopus would squeeze through a tube or open up a jar just for the heck of it.  So maybe it's not bored but hungry.  He'd like to see a bimac have access to a jarred crab and a non-jarred crab.  He's pretty sure the octopus would go for the unjarred crab first, and would only go for the jarred crab when he gets hungry again.  The Heir's led to believe it's path of least resistance with the octopus, but he'll update if he's led to believe differently.  And so may the octopus.

Hope you're having a good holiday thus far, people.  We're looking at putting out a new episode sometime in the new year.  It's taking a while because the Heir is also working on his DIY music player, with the Third Pillar.  So in the meantime we're putting out increased posts here on our shares base when we can.  We put one out yesterday regarding legal pot, and today the Heir wants to talk about whether or not Russian hackers put out Facebook posts organizing events not directly politically related but proving socially harmful all the same.  There's this form of reckless joyriding called doing donuts and here's the title of a video the Heir has found on it: "Group blocks I-94 traffic to do donuts, mock Detroit police."  Apparently these donut events were organized on Facebook, and Russian hacking involvement cannot be ruled out, particularly if pages out of the playbook for the Cold war are being borrowed now.  Here's a title to a historical video on the Cold war that details the extent to which there were these kinds of petty moves: "How Did the Cold War Start and End?"  The Heir got done with watching yet another video titled as follows: "US Officials Still Assessing Russia 2016 Hack | Rachel Maddow | MSNBC," and then all he did was just put two and two and two together.  What if there's an attempt at increased social destabilization, by increasing the personal corruption of youth?  Now the Heir is not drawing any conclusions just yet, but he's going to think about this one for a while.

"Call me an old fart here, people.  I don't particularly mind."

Another one on the legal pot front.  So in fact it will be on referendum for next year.  Again the Heir is looking forward to voting against it, and since the Heir expects to get a mail-in ballot, he's considering taking a picture of his no vote on that ballot before he sends it in, and putting it here on our shares base.  And here's another reason the Heir has found to be against legal pot.  The very idea itself is already past its time.  We probably should have legalized pot 20 or 30 years ago when it actually mattered, but now as far as the Heir is concerned it's already too late.  Also it's predicted that the referendum will pass between 57 and 62%, so the Heir believes it's unlikely that there will be an effort to reach out to those who voted against it.  There's many many more things to be said about this issue, so please stay tuned.

Update on the Heir's opposition to legal pot.  The politicians in Bachelor Blue State have decided to designate the issue on referendum on next year's ballot, or are trying to do so.  If it gets on there, the Heir's looking *very forward* to voting against the issue on the ballot.  The Heir heard on audio how this is kind of punt to the voters, and in one respect the Heir agrees.  The politicians have figured out that legal pot is one of those Last Taboo type issues, and they see that as a political rabbit hole, so they look a couple steps ahead in trying to debate the issue.  They're afraid that one of them might end up implying that we should legalize sex work if we're going to legalize pot, because why have one and not the other?  Even in 2019 none of them wants to go on record as even *implying* legalizing sex work, so they punted that whole debate to the voters to get it out of the state house.  Legal pot being a Last Taboo is another way of saying that it's not really about social justice, as important as that is.  The Heir's pretty sure that legalizing pot will end up doing next to nothing with social justice.  People will still go to jail for excessive amounts of time, and there will still be inequality in the system.  And while that's going on, teenagers will blow pot smoke in the faces of adults, because they believe the phrase Legal Pot allows them to do so.  There will also be far less support for recovery resources, and peer pressure among teens to do pot will greatly increase.  Again, the Heir makes clear that this is *the* wrong track to go on.

"If Bachelor Blue State legalizes pot, we will *live* to regret it."

Here's something the Heir's following up on with our last shares base share.  Last time the Heir decried the progressive exploitation of the impeachment, but his followup to that is that the progressive movement wants to push an if-not-one-then-the-other logical fallacy in and for the post-Trump era.  They'll try to tell people Trump Bad Us Good, and that Trump is Bad only because he wishes to conserve, *not* because the guy's a criminal.  The Heir hasn't forgotten that it was the actions of the progressive movement vis a vis Ed Snowden and the personal corruption those helped cause that allowed to Trump to rise to power in the first place.  The Heir's sure that if Bob Mueller had enough time, he would have found this out.  So convenient for the progressive movement that he didn't.

The Heir sees a broad-brush anti-cop mood sweeping the country ever since that trial in Dallas.  In one week alone two cops were attacked for nothing more than doing their duty.  One cop got shot by an assailant, and that cop's life just happened to be saved by his bulletproof vest.  Another cop was attacked and possibly killed when an onlooker attacked that cop with a metal chair in a restaurant when the cop was going to make a separate arrest.  About a week ago, cops were again being drenched with a water hose while on the job.  The Heir's hoping that none of those cops find themselves on this Credibility Blacklist that's being spread now.

The Heir's pretty sure that if it weren't for Big Tech, there wouldn't be a "debate" or a "controversy" about whether or not the Notre Dame steeple should be rebuilt in the classic gothic fashion the cathedral was originally built in.  When the steeple burnt down earlier this year, no one ever thought that there was anything wrong with the style by which the steeple should be rebuilt.  And then some Big Tech surrogates on "expert" media cast aspersions on the classiness concept and now everyone feels guilty if the steeple weren't replaced by a Libiskind-style shard.  If we do get this big shard in the middle of an otherwise gothic cathedral, the Heir intends to lend support to those who will rage-quit Notre Dame on the shard alone and continue to worship at the smaller churches they're at now.

"Dang, how many times do I have to tell people: Principle is not just a person who runs a school."

So the impeachment has begun, and the Heir's worst fears are coming true with the Progressive response.  As far as he's concerned the Progressives only want to hoard impeachment for their own political self interests rather than allow the people to have justice for a change.  He sees AOC and Al Green as complicit in that, and he distrusts them implicitly.  He doesn't even like them as people, and he's happy neither of them represents him in Washington.  Also Ed Snowden just came out again in the past couple weeks, and the Heir doesn't see this as a coincidence.  In short, the Progressive Insincerity reminds the Heir that no matter how much he too wants Universal Care and a Living Wage and reform in Affordable Housing and a cut-down on the noise pollution created by leaf-blowers, he himself is not progressive.  He's a skeptic.  None Of The Above.  The Heir's economically progressive, but he considers himself a Law And Justice conservative.  He wants to *conserve* law and justice, and he sees AOC and Ed Snowden as making an insincere mockery of the values of law and justice.  He values sincerity in public servants above so many things, and if he's not going to get it in the election, he's going to find a way of raging quit on them.  So, public figures, let this be possibly your *only* warning, and don't think the Heir's going to say this in late September 2019, and will totally forget about it in November 2020.  You people had better shape up, or you're just going to lose support among the sincere populace.

"AOC I don't think has really known any real challenges politically.  That could very well change depending how things go in the Impeachment Era."

The Heir is outraged by the NYCLU's criticisms regarding New York state's decision to make pot use a fine-able offense, which the Heir otherwise sees as proper.  But this apparently was not good enough for the NYCLU who was the first civil liberties group the Heir's seen in his life to advocate for a for-profit corporate status that the progressive movement has been trying to get under control in most other sectors.  I the Mentor was amazed and astounded when the Heir pointed out that present-day legal pot laws effectively make it all but impossible for a plaintiff to mount a disorderly person's complaint against a defendant who blows pot smoke in their face in public.  The pot laws also don't adequately protect against peer pressure, so as far as the laws are concerned, if a teenager is being pressured by peers to smoke pot, that teen really has no choice but to do so.  A legal pot proposal in Bachelor Blue State failed to get enough votes among lawmakers for the leaders to want to hold such a vote, and the Heir is wondering whether those lawmakers had got to thinking that if we legalized pot in the state, then maybe we should also legalize sex work?  Obviously in our still puritanical society in 2019 the lawmakers weren't willing to go there, so the pot proposal was defeated on a technicality.

"Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater if we truly *need* legal pot."

Just half an hour ago as I the Mentor am writing this, the Heir unmoored Tom Steyer from his activist emails and his National Principle channel.  The Heir's now seeing some Ed Snowdenisms in Steyer's impeachment efforts which he's pretty sure are only going to increase over time, long after Trump leaves office, to the point where there will be another Ed Snowden, who will in turn elect yet another Donald Trump.  As far as the Heir's concerned, this Need To Impeach effectively amounts to a Need To Attack Donkeys.  He's seen this around this time in 2006, which then led to his declaring a none-of-the-above political skepticism in December of that year.  And even 13 years after that point in time, he still takes a considerably different view of democracy's role in society from the rest of populace.  He's cynical about the clause of social agitation, because it's also an excuse for society to pressure people against their sense of principle, mostly just for sport, particularly when there's a main figurehead at the top of that social agitation, e.g., Ed Snowden, who outright disrespects an ordinary citizen's citizenship rights.  The Heir's not suggesting that the Donkeys For The People shouldn't move faster on impeachment proceedings, or not figure out how to better use the I word in the press.  But that last bit is just semantics for the Heir, and the way in which he sees the concept of National Principle as applying to the impeachment debate makes it all too important to discuss semantics or this will-they-or-won't-they hand-wringing on the Insurgent News Network with the Donkeys.  So here's what he's got to say about this one undemocratic function in the democratic process:

"My decisions as a citizen are between me and my God, and me and the people who understand, and are not open to negotiation with Tom Steyer, AOC, and **certainly** not Ed Snowden."