Geeky Bob

As I watch the news and listen to politicians discuss the ongoing investigation into the treasonous actions of the people who stormed the Nation's Capital, they begin to repeat the same old story that they have told many times in the past: "we have plenty of evidence, but we won't prosecute."

Like many of you, I've grown weary of this same "we have plenty of evidence, but we won't prosecute" excuse. For the people who want to see someone (like Trump) go down in flames, such a statement is vindication of their existing hatred even though nothing actually happens. But when no one is ever prosecuted, Washington's "we have plenty of evidence" statements mean nothing. As someone I know pointed out: either you prosecute because you have evidence, or you exonerate because you don't.

This continued tendency of politicians to say whatever they want about someone's presumptive guilt without demonstrable evidence to support their claims borders on slander and/or libel from a legal perspective, while from a personal perspective I disregard the entire fetid mass of political anal fissures currently in office as useless appendages of society. In a related matter, I distrust news sources that will print or broadcast anything as publicly and loudly as possible without verifying the facts when it suits their agenda, and then quietly print a retraction when their duplicitousness is discovered, while at the same time demonstrating their hypocrisy when they demand ridiculous levels of authentication for stories that do not fit the message they want to promote. (But I digress...)

This current situation with Trump isn't the first time we've heard Washington troglodytes claim they have plenty of evidence. We heard the same thing about Hillary Clinton's destruction of government equipment that had been subpoenaed; you might recall the FBI saying, "we have enough evidence, but we won't prosecute," so the AG dismissed the investigation. So was she actually guilty of crimes or not? We'll never know. There was "plenty of evidence" that the Obama administration used the IRS to punish political rivals, but no one was prosecuted. On more than one occasion we heard that someone had plenty of evidence on Bill Clinton for one crime or other; but he was never prosecuted and nothing was ever brought to light. Apart from being a serial predator, was Slick Willie guilty of actual crimes? Once again, we'll never know.

Jumping forward to today, the Washington Post presented ample evidence, and the New York Times has begrudgingly verified, that the Bidens appear to be guilty of some truly nefarious money changing prior to Joe's election to office, which isn't surprising given the fact that Joe and his son built both of their careers upon a steaming pile of dishonesty and lies (see Politics, Plagiarism and the Press and Laptop from Hell, among others). But will these undisputed facts ever see the light of day in a court room? I think not, and it will probably be the same situation with Trump and whomever serves in office after the Bidens leave town.

Despite their mutual loathing and hatred for each other, both sides of the political aisle know this to be true: once Washington finally gets around to prosecuting someone who truly deserves it, the gloves will come off, everyone will be fair game for prosecution, and the entire house of cards will come tumbling down. In other words, the Dems and GOP have détente right now... and neither side wants to cause Mutually Assured Political Destruction.

I recently listened to the NPR podcast "When Women Stopped Coding," which suggests that women and girls weren't into computers during the 1980s due to a lack of marketing, and I disagree with the podcast's assertions. However, I should begin by saying that I used to love NPR; for at least a decade they were my morning and evening source of news as I commuted. That being said, the quality of NPR's reporting has gone down considerably over the past two decades, to the point where I no longer listen to NPR. In my opinion, this podcast is typical of what I mean.

Let me put things in perspective: I was into computers long before the 1984 shift in marketing strategies that this podcast is basing it's thesis on, and here is my personal experience: around 1980, math classes in High School were 50/50 between boys and girls. However, computer classes were almost entirely male. The advertising that is quoted as the cause of this inequity had yet to come along, so what else could have caused this disparity? The answer is simple, although it is unpopular with people who want promote the idea that sexism was the key factor.

The reason why girls weren't into computers in the early 1980s was because there was no "cool factor" to them. If you were a girl in high school at that time, and you were into computers, you were going to be unpopular. Advertising had nothing to do with that; it was all about peer pressure. On the other hand, many guys had no problems with being unpopular, and there was an entire segment of society that sprung up in the late 1970s as the perfect base for the home computing market - the group of social misfits that evolved during that era was known as: the nerds. These were the boys who were into Dungeons and Dragons, played with Rubik's Cubes, and read fantasy books by authors like Tolkien. However, speaking in general terms, girls weren't into those sorts of things, because - for the most part - girls didn't WANT to be seen as social misfits. It is true that Hollywood and marketing types would soon launch a series of movies and advertisements that capitalized on this growing separation within young society, but this social shift is more of a "Chicken and Egg" scenario than NPR's podcast seems to suggest. (e.g. Advertising followed the social trend, and not the other way around.)

The group of boys who were already social misfits continued to be social misfits as they shifted from nerdy games to computers, which were seen as an extension of their nerdiness. While at the same time, girls - even those who were great at math - drifted further away from computers as they grew in popularity.

That being said, it is true that schools could have done much more to promote computers to both genders, and in that respect public education is partly to blame for creating the environment in which we find ourselves. And to that end, it is great to see so many schools today that are promoting STEM subjects to girls at a young age. It is for that reason that my niece is well on her way to a promising career in astrophysics, with a dream of working for NASA one day. In addition, I love the fact that a major part of Girl Scouts' vision is to promote STEM subjects to young girls. I'd love to see the Girl Scouts launch an advertising campaign that says, "Buy a cookie, create an astronaut." (Or a scientist, or a chemist, etc.)

By the way, in the interests of full transparency, one of the people who first mentored me on computers was the girl next door, Ellen. She wasn't typical of the girls at our High School, and I can't say if she was ever considered a social outcast, but I can say this for certain - she clearly didn't care. Ellen was one of the smartest people I knew, and it's undoubtedly a good thing that she didn't know I had a major crush on her at the time, because I would only have dragged down her IQ through prolonged exposure to me. Nevertheless, both her and her brother's influence during my early flirtations with computers are probably why I chose computer science as my career. But as I mentioned earlier, when I took my first computer classes, there were almost no girls in attendance, and this was before Hollywood seared that image into the public consciousness.

In other words, girls like Ellen were into computers "way back when," but it took the right kind of moxie to be willing to go against the flow. And yet, that concept is completely lacking in NPR's story. In that respect, I think this podcast suffers from a problem that's endemic to a lot of NPR's "reporting" these days: it is a bias in search of data.

UPDATE: This post is one of several that I had written that I later discovered had never been set to "public."