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THREE JOKERS isn't getting very good reviews. People find it conventional, predictable and weak. I think it's really good; I think it understands Batman in the way that Zack Snyder so fundamentally does not, in the way that Frank Miller completely fails to grasp. And I think it uses its three 48-page issues beautifully. Spoilers follow...

Geoff Johns has had some setbacks in recent years. His progress from 90s Warner Bros. intern to DC Comics freelancer to DC Entertainment President hit the brick wall that was the failure of JUSTICE LEAGUE. Now Johns is a freelancer again, running individual DC projects like STARGIRL and writing WONDER WOMAN 1984 and consulting on some shows but no longer leading the DC characters. He wrote DOOMSDAY CLOCK in which Superman confronted WATCHMEN's Dr. Manhattan who had turned the DC Universe from optimistic and hopeful to being darker than a Zack Snyder movie -- a story in which Superman redeemed Dr. Manhattan and saved both their worlds.

Standing Apart
DOOMSDAY CLOCK was originally the big event for 2017, but as Johns' falling star had it standing alone without any tie-ins and without particularly influencing the other DC monthlies until after it was done. Now Johns releases BATMAN: THREE JOKERS, another DC Comics publication that is outside the main line of comics and a special prestige product. A standout project, but one that stands apart DC rather than one that is leading it.

Inside Baseball
Like every Johns comic, THREE JOKERS has a strong and meaningful grasp of the heart of DC superheroes. Also like most Johns comics, you need to have some familiarity with other comics written by other people to appreciate it. In this case, BATMAN: THREE JOKERS draws on THE KILLING JOKE (in which the Joker shot and crippled Barbara Gordon and ended her career as Batgirl). THE KILLING JOKE also posited that the Joker was a failed standup comedian who went mad after his pregnant wife died in a home accident. The story also draws on A DEATH IN THE FAMILY (in which the Joker smashed the skull of the Jason Todd incarnation of Robin with a crowbar, then blew him up and left Batman to find the boy's corpse). And UNDER THE RED HOOD in which Batman discovers that due to an alternate universe Superboy pounding on the walls of reality, time was altered to resurrect Jason inside his coffin. And that Jason has now returned to Gotham City to finish Batman's war on crime with lethal force. And on the FLASHPOINT/NEW 52 cosmic event in which Jason's resurrection was altered to Talia Al Ghul wanting to help Bruce Wayne (whom she loves) by resurrecting Jason in a Lazarus Pit only for Jason's brain damage to leave him feral and unstable for years. And the NEW 52 BATGIRL where Barbara regains her mobility and resumes her role as Batgirl. And DEATH OF THE FAMILY in which Batman and Jason (now the Red Hood) come to an uneasy truce where Jason agrees to stop actively assassinating villains unless in the heat of combat. And BATMAN: ETERNAL where Batgirl and Jason develop a flirtation that leads to Batgirl almost kissing him until Jason stops her, saying he knows she just misses Dick Grayson and won't take advantage of her. And that JUSTICE LEAGUE storyline where Batman asked a New Gods computer: "What's the Joker's real name?" and the computer replied: "There are three."

True Identity
With THREE JOKERS, Batman, Batgirl and the Red Hood begin investigating how the Joker staged three violent murders that took place at exactly the same time. They soon find themselves confronting three Jokers: the Criminal, a master planner who is the original version of the Joker. Then there's the Clown, the Joker who is focused on sight gags and pranks, the version from the 60s. And then there's the Comedian, the version of the Joker who has become a grotesque serial killer, further obscuring the mystery that the Bat-Family now wants answered: who is the Joker? Where did he come from? What's his real name?

The Joker Army
And worse -- Batman, Batgirl and the Red Hood discover that all of the Joker's victims have been dosed with the same toxin that first drove the Joker insane and then mutilated to mimic the Joker's hair and frozen smile; the three Jokers are attempting to create new Jokers with one prime candidate being Jason Todd himself. And this is not the first time: it's revealed that the Joker, since the beginning, has periodically sought to duplicate himself by exposing some mentally deranged criminal to his toxin. He has succeeded on two occasions: this is why the Joker has had so many shifts in appearance, demeanor and personality over the years, and at this point, none of the three Jokers can even remember which of them (if any) are the original.

The First Candidate
The Jokers torment the Red Hood by reminding Jason of something that has never been revealed: that when the Joker was beating Jason's head in with a crowbar, Jason begged for his life and even pleaded for the Joker to let him become his henchman and betray Batman if he'd be spared. Jason loses control and shoots one of the Jokers through the head and kills him. Batgirl is horrified and even more aghast when Batman says he intends to allow Jason to get away with murder; he has been all along -- because imprisoning Jason would only ever expose the Bat Family in court. The Jokers express glee at having created the Red Hood who might as well be working for the Joker with all the agony he causes Batman.

The Favourite
The Jokers remind Batman that even if he stops one of them, they'll constantly create more of themselves and then reveal they have ultimately chosen someone to be a new Joker -- Joe Chill, the man who murdered Bruce Wayne's parents who has been dying of cancer in prison until the Jokers broke him out. The Jokers are irritated that Batman's greatest torment is not the Joker or any member of his rogues gallery but instead a convicted criminal who has only ever commited one crime of notoriety. Their plan: they'll expose Joe Chill to the Joker toxin that will restore his health and give him the Joker-madness matched with his status as the cause of Batman's greatest trauma. The Joker will always create chaos; even in death, he'll simply have a successor.

Remorse
The Jokers interview a captive Joe Chill and records it, torturing Chill into confessing why he killed Thomas and Martha Wayne. Chill says he saw the Waynes walking down the alley, wealthy and happy, and he blamed them, feeling that their money and joy could only have come by making someone else poor and miserable. He whipped out a gun and fired, only seeing the boy he'd orphaned after he'd gunned down the parents. In jail, he learned that his victims had been generous philanthropists who'd done more to alleviate poverty than anyone in Gotham and Chill became ashamed. He wrote Bruce Wayne letter upon letter of apology but could never send them, and he grovelled before God for forgiveness only to learn he was terminally ill, a fate he decided he deserved. The Joker taunts Batman, saying Joe Chill will be a Joker who is everything Batman fears, embodying both madness and trauma that will override any order Batman tries to build or offer while condemning the source of Batman's grief to eternal insanity.

Forgiveness
But Batman saves Joe Chill being dropped into a vat of Joker toxin. A terrified Chill thanks Batman for saving him, and Batman accepts the gratitude of his parents' killer. One of the Jokers tries to blow them up, but is shot through the head by the now last surviving Joker -- the Comedian serial killer. This last Joker reveals: he knew it would turn out this way. He let the Criminal and the Clown run their plan and fail, knowing it would end with Batman forgiving the man who killed his parents, healed of his trauma -- and now the Joker will be Batman's greatest terror instead of a sick old man in jail. Chaos to Batman's order.

The Secret
Bruce puts the last Joker in Arkham Asylum and then tends to Joe Chill. He reads all of Chill's letters of apology and accepts them and holds Chill's hand as he dies of cancer and buries him peacefully. Alfred and Bruce begin cleaning up the Three Jokers files in the Batcave and Alfred wonders if they will ever know who the Joker really is.

Bruce tells Alfred: the Joker, before his transformation, had a pregnant wife. A woman he abused horribly. A woman who feared him. She faked her death and went into hiding with her son. She now lives far from Gotham City with her boy. Ever since Batman first encountered the Joker, Bruce has been hiding the Joker's true identity, obscuring the trail from the clown to his wife and child.

Bruce regularly checks in on the mother and boy to ensure that they are provided for and protected. Bruce has known the Joker's secret all along and kept it safe because ultimately, Batman is not a creature of order or rule or law. Batman is a character who can find it in himself to forgive his parents' murderer, a warrior who ensures that his greatest villain's true identity will always be hidden, a hero who uses his power to spare others from suffering and bring them to redemption and peace. To Geoff Johns, Batman is a superhero defined by his mercy.

The last time Republicans tried to suppress the vote in Wisconsin, they ultimately suppressed their own voters.

**

Regardless of my preferences, voting is a vital and personal freedom and each person's choice in the act of voting should never be criticized as that suggests their vote should be taken away from them. Criticism is best reserved for the candidates and the individual voter's conduct after they cast their vote without remarking upon the vote itself. Candidates must earn their votes and if Joe Biden does not earn Temporal Flux's willingness to waive Biden's 44 years in government, then this must be respected as Temporal Flux's choice. I told Transmodiar the same thing.

ME: "Votes have to be earned. It's okay. You can write in Andrew Yang's name on your ballot. This is America, god damn it."

TRANSMODIAR: "Hahah! You scamp. You don't even live in America."

Well, this is very exciting, although please note I am merely the assistant administrator to the owner of this forum, Temporal Flux. Also, please be reminded that "Slide Effects" was a story by Tracy Torme. And The most up-to-date version of "Slide Effects" is a Google Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/11KF … sp=sharing

I'm really happy that you're using "Slide Effects" as you see it. I never actually expected anyone to write any sequels. Even I didn't write any sequels; my subsequent SLIDERS story, SLIDERS REBORN at https://docs.google.com/document/d/19GS … t?tab=t.0, does not take "Slide Effects" into account. I wrote "Slide Effects" for Nigel Mitchell, possibly SLIDERS' greatest writer. He wrote numerous Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo fanfics but told me that he became deeply demoralized with Season 4. He didn't like the new situation, he wanted to keep writing for the original quartet, and he felt like "Genesis" made all of his writing "out of date," as he put it. And I wrote "Slide Effects" to reposition his stories so that now, instead of happening before the events of Seasons 3 - 5, all of Nigel's stories now happen *after* Season 5. (I link to most of his tales here: http://sliders.tv/bboard/viewtopic.php?pid=7548#p7548)

I actually like to think that all fanfics ever written featuring Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo take place after the events of "Slide Effects," even though all those fanfics were published before a single word of "Slide Effects" were ever typed. But I'm happy that there will now be more.

I don't know how well it will fit for a Season 6 to focus on Maggie, Colin, Diana and Mallory's issues after "Slide Effects" repositioned the originals front and center and (politely?) set aside the subsequent cast members. But I confess, despite having repeatedly tried to write those other characters out, my writing inevitably declares that Maggie, Colin, Diana and Mallory are all sliders; it's just that Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo are the Sliders. I look forward to reading your stories and hope you'll do everything and anything you want.

**

TRANSMODIAR: "Did you ever write anything before SLIDERS? Anything when you were in college?"

ME: "Yeah! I wrote numerous outlines and versions of a novella where Quinn is confronted by a cosmic entity called The Avatar who offers to rewind time and restore the original sliders if Quinn will retrieve six magical components that have been scattered across the multiverse."

Transmodiar silently contemplates running away from his house, faking his death, fleeing the country and abandoning his wife and children to avoid having to hear any more of this story. (I'm assuming. I'm not a mind reader.)

ME: "Ultimately, I realized that the best solution was to have the original sliders restored as soon as possible and that the whole story of how they came back to life is never going to be as interesting as having them already alive."

Transmodiar silently thanks God that he has been spared. (I'm guessing. I don't know his brain.)

And now for Tech Talk, with Quinn Mallory:

The charging port in my Samsung S7 phone has been a bit loose, but rather than fixing it, I started looking online for a wireless charging stand. But I decided to check in at the local dollar store where they were selling $3 wireless charging pads and I decided to go with that even if it would take over three hours to recharge from 0 - 100. It charges while I sleep, so it doesn't need to be fast.

**

My iPad battery has been less than awesome lately for watching Netflix in bed or while doing otherwise-tedious data entry at my desktop workstation. But rather than replace the battery, I decided to get a couple 10 feet iPad charging cables, also from the dollar store, so that the tablet can just stay plugged it when being used in places where it's at maximum brightness for hours.

**

My Samsung Chromebook 3 came with an awful TN monitor that was grainy and washed and distorted at even the slightest angle. I ordered a higher contrast IPS screen and it looks the same no matter what angle at which you view the monitor. Except the first one I got had white spots across any black backgrounds. I reported it and their customer service had me package up the screen and send it back to them in exchange for a new one. Which also had white spots across any black background. I reported it and their customer service had me package up the screen and send it back to them in exchange for a new one. Which had blue puddles across any white background. I reported it and their customer service had me package up the screen and send it back to them in exchange for a new one. Which had gray puddles across the lower half of the screen. I reported it and their customer service had me package up the screen and send it back to them in exchange for a new one. Which had white spots across any black colours. I reported it and their customer service had me package up the screen and send it back to them in exchange for a new one. Which was finally okay oh my God I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life exchanging this screen.

**

My mother informed me that she missed being able to play DVDs on her TV because even though she has a home theatre PC running Windows 10 on her television with a wireless mouse and remote for streaming services, she has a small collection of discs. I gave her my external DVD drive for her PC and then started looking for a replacement. There were a lot of cheap external DVD drives on the market for the occasional occasion when I need to burn or open a disc -- but I decided to get myself an external blu-ray drive that can also write data to blank blu-rays so that I would never, ever, ever have to upgrade my optical drive again.

**

RAM is going on sale. My 'gaming' laptop originally came with 4GB of RAM (dear God) and a spinning hard disk (which made it a bit hopeless for gaming even if I really bought it for photo and video editing). I opened it up and upgraded the internals to 8GB of RAM and a small 128GB NVMe solid state drive (while leaving the spinning drive in for storage). I'm wondering about buying another 8GB of RAM to boost the computer to 16GB for a slightly smoother Adobe Creative Suite experience, but I'm also remembering how intricate and annoying it was to open up the laptop to get the new drive and memory in and how if I'm going to go through that again, I might as well bring the RAM up to 32GB and never have to open up the laptop again.

On Twitter, SUPERNATURAL creator Eric Kripke wrote:

After some fan response, Kripe followed up with:

Mischa Collins pointed out:

https://bleedingcool.com/tv/supernatura … one-thing/

Somewhere out there, a certain alt-right Men's Rights Activist Trumpist SUPERNATURAL fan is wailing and shrieking and crying.

There's a scene in Season 10's "Ambush" that I really like where Lois finds her sister, Lucy, kissing Clark. Lois' reaction is to drag Lucy away and tell her to go crush some ice. Lois doesn't doubt for a moment that Clark is faithful to her and Clark says Lucy surprised him. But then they have an argument anyway.

I thought it was a really well-written episode in a well-written relationship that really showed how Lois and Clark were both devoted to each other but still had the capacity to oppose each other in various conflicts.

I liked LOWER DECKS a lot. It was funny, daring, bizarre and it really dispensed with the idea that everyone in the 24th century has to talk like Data.

Haven't gotten to DISCO yet, but I'm looking forward to it.

Transmodiar's view is that Trump is a wakeup call. I gave it a chance. Quinn Mallory gave it a chance.

I think it worked to a degree. The pandemic has also revealed the massive social and economical inequalities in our society. And I think that is as much of a wakeup as there is to be found with this tactic and it's time to find another strategy.

But if Transmodiar wants to vote for Andrew Yang (who is not running), that is entirely up to him. It's his vote. No one should ever be cajoled or coerced into voting against what they feel to be right. This is America we're talking about here. Votes are earned and Transmodiar can decide whether or not Joe Biden earned his vote.

**

I hope you're right about Coney Barrett -- but the truth is that four of the current eight judges voted to throw out any mail-in ballots received a minute after the election day deadline. The stalemate meant that the previous ruling -- a three day extension on the deadline -- was upheld.

When Coney Barrett is confirmed, the four conservative-voting judges will have five among their number to overturn the previous ruling.

In addition, Coney Barrett has proven to be driven not by jurisprudence but by power. Any prospective Supreme Court judge with the vaguest sense of right and wrong would have refused to participate in a superspreader event at the White House. But she went along with it because she wants that seat; she wants power; and the fact that people would get sick and die in the process was fine by her which means she'll be in favour of voting to throw out any ballots for Joe Biden by any technicalities possible to maintain her power on the Court -- a power that would be diminished if Biden were to win the White House and the Democrats were to win the Senate and potentially pack the court with left-leaning judges to remove the five to four advantage.

Now, maybe she'll prove me wrong the way Joe Biden and John Roberts have regularly proven me wrong. Roberts, despite his conservative leanings, has regularly voted with liberal judges to maintain the supposed impartiality of the Supreme Court. Perhaps Coney Barrett will be of a similar mindset. But I'm personally not counting on it; Trump already has four judges who will rule in favour of nearly anything he wants and he's about to have five.

The Trump campaign received hacked texts between Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, who struggled for many years with addiction. The Trump campaign released them through the New York Post, trying to embarrass Biden and damage his candidacy with what I suppose they thought were embarrassing family revelations as Biden was reaching out to Hunter while Hunter was in rehab.

Hunter responds referring to a column by Maureen Dowd in The New York Times describing his life unflatteringly. And and how his ex-girlfriend, Hallie, sent him an angry message.

Biden responds:

Hunter responds:

Joe Biden later writes:

Wow. What a scandal! Joe Biden's son was detoxing, in rehab, being humiliated in the press, being verbally assailed by his ex and Biden wrote to his son with words of encouragement and love and patience. And the Trump campaign got these hacked texts and decided to leak them thinking it would somehow reflect poorly on Joe Biden.

There is something fundamentally wrong with Donald Trump and the people with whom he surrounds himself. They view these messages as damaging. They see Hunter's addiction and Biden's response to it as weakness. They consider these exposures harmful. They see these communications as father and son as something that would somehow harm their reputations. They find fault with Biden's unwavering support of his wayward son; they think it laughable that Biden would embrace a self-confessed liability to Biden's political career; they see Biden's love and compassion for his offspring as a failure to be identified and shamed. Trump and his ilk are a twisted catastrophe of failed humanity.

In addition, the leaked emails supposedly have messages claiming that Hunter set up a meeting between Biden and a Ukrainian energy company executive, a firm that also hired Hunter in an attempt to exert influence over Biden to prevent investigations into their corruption. The Biden campaign denies there was any such meeting. Could they be lying? Sure! But history's pretty clear that Biden demanded the firing of a lackadaisically corrupt state prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, and the prosecutor general of Ukraine subsequently conducted 15 investigations into Burisma for conspiracy and tax evasion, so claiming Burisma had any influence over Joe Biden is nonsensical.

Great October surprise there, Mr. President. You revealed that Joe Biden is a great father.

Politico notes that a Trump victory is still possible. Voter suppression could work. Swing state polls could be off and results could be close enough to be contestable. It's possible for Trump to win much in the same way it's possible NBCUniversal will order Season 6 of SLIDERS -- in that such an occurrence is not likely but would not violate the laws of space and time and the restrictions of the natural world or the binds of gravity and energy.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/1 … ion-430013

Years ago, Temporal Flux wrote an outline for a SLIDERS story. He wrote a story where Quinn becomes his own timer; the technology is implanted into his body, he can see the countdown in his brain, he emits the vortex from his eyes, he is eventually ripped apart by the interdimensional energies of sliding. I loved it and the painful irony where Quinn, a young man fascinated by machines, becoming the very machine he created and dying in the aftermath. https://web.archive.org/web/20010415171 … /ps5s.html

It didn't get a great response in the SLIDERS community which I found odd. I especially find it odd now: one of my favourite IRON MAN stories that I've been re-reading on Marvel Unlimited: "Extremis," a 2005 storyline in which Tony Stark is experiencing guilt over his past as a former weapons designer whose creations have maimed and killed innocent people all over the world. Stark faces a white supremacist militia leader named Mallen.

Mallen has ingested a designer virus called Extremis which re-engineers the human body's capacity to repair itself, heightening the Mallen's ability to regenerate from any injury, raising his reflexes, strength, speed and resilience to the point where a barehanded Mallen is faster and stronger than Stark in the Iron Man suit. Mallen beats Stark so badly that Stark is dying from internal injuries -- until he ingests a modified version of the Extremis virus himself, an altered build that puts the Iron Man suit inside Stark's own body.

The Extremis-enhanced Stark no longer wears the Iron Man suit to increase his strength and speed; he is the Iron Man suit itself, able to perceive, generate and respond to electrical signals and transmissions of any kind by thought alone to control nearly any kind of technology within his visual range. He can combine his new response time with the speed of the Iron Man suit. He can reconfigure the suit itself at will for any situation. He is Iron Man inside and out. He is the next stage of human evolution.

"Extremis" is one of the most popular and renowned IRON MAN stories ever written -- although it's helped by how Iron Man wasn't exactly inhabiting any kind of comics renaissance until "Extremis." Iron Man suffered from being written as a generic superhero with technology-based superpowers, but writers struggled with making Tony Stark as something other than Bruce Wayne with a mustache. "Extremis" started unambiguously playing his weapons designer past as shameful and something for which Stark would forever seek redemption and every subsequent writer stuck with this characterization and continued exploring the ramifications and applications of Stark with Extremis.

TF has occasionally shared his philosophy of good SLIDERS stories: he says it's not about looking at the past and asking what might have gone differently. It's about looking at the future and asking where we might be going next and what could have happened to have turned tomorrow into today.

When TF first outlined this story, we were living in a world of newspapers in street distribution boxes, phone booths on the street and the internet was an alternative to mailing letters. The next stage -- which we are at now -- is to have technology on our faces, in our ears, on our wrists and in our pockets. TF looked past that and imagined technology inside us. He saw the future.

You know, there's another aspect to the election that is a bit underserved on this forum -- privilege. Since most of us have the time to chatter on an internet message board, it's likely that most of us have that kind of free time. In addition, most of us here are men, heterosexual, Caucasian or a model minority -- we are of genders and races unharmed by a Trump presidency, a presidency that has legitimized white supremacists, homophobia, transphobia, sexual harassers, and blatantly encouraged modern neo-Nazi militia movements.

When we declare that a Trump presidency doesn't matter to us or that a Trump presidency won't make America worse than it already is or that a Trump presidency wouldn't be any worse than a Biden presidency or that removing Trump from office wouldn't improve America, we are (unintentionally) declaring that it's fine for the presidential platform to overtly, blatantly and repeatedly boost and embolden hate groups that are paramilitarized against women, people of colour, homosexuals, transgenders -- and anyone who isn't a straight-white man.

I agree that we need to spend more time thinking about how voter participation in primaries is an indicator of enthusiasm in the electorate and that it's an important factor to bear in mind. And that we need to always consider how the Democrats' focus and victories in recent years have been in terms of fundraising rather than policy or political power. I would like to add this other area of consideration -- how the power of the US Presidency affects people who are not in positions of privilege due to their race and gender. And it’s to be considered. I wouldn't make it the only factor to weigh in the state of the world.

Also, a lot of us are prone to issuing predictions and expectations that don't come true because none of us have precognitive abilities. Some of us declared that a Trump presidency was not a big deal and that the presidency was not a powerful position hemmed in by checks and balances, some of us said Trump wasn't really a racist or a white supremacist and that government was too efficient to fail even with an ineffectual president. My personal predictions were that Biden was senile, incapable of mounting an effective campaign, devoid of the progressivism to inspire voters, helpless against Trump's charisma, prone to bizarre outbursts, devoid of any actual policies or ideas for how to face climate change, police corruption, racism, recession, pandemics -- and I have been proven wrong repeatedly.

At various moments, I have felt that because Democrats aren't running on my preferred terms, they don't care about winning; that because the election isn't operating on my parameters, it is a waste of time. But ultimately, that's just me feeling spiteful and the reality is, my imagined 'model' was, like the Primary Model and the 13 Keys Prediction, based on too few factors and not sufficiently open to new data.

I have to say -- while I do not subscribe to the Primary Model or the idea of silent Trump supporters, this has been absolutely fascinating because in looking up more on electoral modelling, I read a lot of informative articles. I can't pretend to understand all of it, but it was so interesting.

**

After the 2016 election, an economics professor built an election prediction model based on the Election Day weather in Bozeman, Broken Bow, Burlington, Caribou, Cody, Dover, Elkins, Fargo, and Pocatello that accurately 'predicted' every election between 1980 to 2016. As Professor Gary Smith explains: any 10 results can always be mathematically predicted perfectly by a model with nine imperfectly correlated explanatory values. That's not magic or prediction; that's a mathematician knowing the answers in advance.

Smith also notes that the Primary Model has actually been retrofitted repeatedly: prior to 1952, it used all presidential primaries. From there to 2004, it used only New Hampshire. After that, it added back South Carolina. The Primary Model can't be said to be infallible in its method if its method keeps changing. When a model is revised, Smith explains, it's because it predicted the past more accurately than it did the future.

There's another limited data model from Alan Lichtman whose 13 Keys Prediction predicted a Trump victory in 2016 and a Trump defeat in 2020 based on 13 true/false questions that has 'accurately' predicted eight elections. Professor Smith points out that Lichtman's model is utter BS as well because several of its true/false questions are largely vague to the point where the response could be subjectively true or false (Was there major policy change? Is the challenger charismatic?) and the 13 questions have been repeatedly revised, meaning it's another model that has had to be rewritten to fit the results and is hardly predicting them in advance.

Professor Arturo, I think, would look at Norpoth and Lichtman and declare that both the Primary Model and the 13 Keys Prediction are stories from the same genre; they are fairy tales cloaked in the guise of mathematics, both operating on the magic of statistics; the magic is that you can make statistics mean whatever you decide they mean. Quinn would point out that no one ever failed to solve a mathematical mystery when they started with an answer and then created the question. Wade would say the future isn't written in our models, but in our choices and actions and we can't try to skip to end of the book. Rembrandt would say he doesn't understand anything we just said, but we gotta get our butts out there and vote and we also need to bring along all our friends.

In the primaries, 18 million people voted for Trump, 454 thousand voted for Bill Weld. 35.7 million people voted in the Democratic primaries, 19 million of those votes for Biden, 9.6 million for Sanders, 2.8 million for Warren -- and I don't think it should be surprising that 18 million Trump supporters wanted to try to keep their unstable cult leader in place to curtail any effort from Republicans to replace him.

And it's true that Helmut Norpoth's Primary Model predicts Trump's 2020 victory and has only been 'wrong' twice since 1912, but Norpoth only started his model in 1996, so he has only ever used it in six actual elections predictively; his accuracy rate merely indicates that (a) he found a model that averaged out the results from 1912 to 1996 and (b) he was right five out of six times at predicting binary scenarios where his prediction had a 50-50 chance of being correct anyway. It's either a Democrat or Republican victory. Norpoth claims he's been predicting elections since 1912 (when he started 84 years later), so his model is inflated by 500 per cent. His model is closed to new information. And his model for predicting history may be superb, but for the future, he may as well be flipping a coin. His model isn't going to warp the laws of probability and reality.

Reality is that Trump's surprise victory in 2016 came after he'd closed the polling distance between him and Clinton to 2.7 points. That he was only a 3.3 per cent polling error from being ahead. That America disliked Hillary Clinton more than it disliked Donald Trump -- a distance Trump has since closed with his bullying persona and non-existent pandemic response and actively trying to get his own voters sick. Reality is that Trump is now in Clinton's situation; he's ahead in Republican strongholds like Texas, Iowa and Maine by a mere 3.1, 1.2 and 0.4 points respectively, a lead that's within the margin of error, tied with Biden in Georgia (!!) and Biden's leads in safe Democratic states is 183 Electoral College votes, 29 in likely Democratic states and 78 in lean Democratic states for a total of 290. Trump could win all 85 toss-up states and still be short of 270. Trump is losing.

At least, I think he is. Look, I'm not a pollster. I'm not even an American. I could be wrong.

And if I'm wrong, I will fly out to visit Temporal Flux when it's possible and buy him dinner at the Olive Garden. In addition, I will write a seventh installment of SLIDERS REBORN for EarthPrime.com. A script entitled "Redemption." Featuring Rembrandt confronting Colonel Rickman. A story which Transmodiar will be obligated to review, edit, comment on just when Transmodiar thought he was finally free of having to ever deal with SLIDERS REBORN again, possibly the most obnoxious and irritating creative project upon which he has ever been forced to labour (and he quit six times and kept coming back and lost two years of his life on it).

If Trump wins, Transmodiar will be forced to endure, at minimum, another four weeks of agonized exasperation over SLIDERS REBORN. He barely survived it in 2015 - 2016! He might end up in a mental ward this time!

And Temporal Flux will get all the pasta he can eat at Olive Garden after we've all been vaccinated.

God bless you, Rob.

The issue isn’t left wing vs right wing. It’s about critical thinking versus cult thinking. Informant is incapable of questioning Donald Trump even when Trump is actively trying to kill him and embraces proven frauds and liars so long as they reassure him in his Republican identity. He is too invested in his cult. If he were still here, he would post falsehoods. He’d say the pandemic is a hoax. That masks don’t protect people. That superspreaders aren’t real. That people aren’t getting sick and dying. That he can deliberately get infected to become immune. That voter fraud is massively proven and people should vote twice. Even Twitter won’t tolerate that level of life threatening deceit from Trump anymore.

Transmodiar and Temporal Flux don’t identify as Democrats. They don't support Joe Biden. But they are capable of criticizing both conservative and progressive positions. Transmodiar called Biden a senile bully and Obama’s presidency a ****show and described Trump as an inept idiot. Temporal Flux called Obama’s message of hope and change “bunk” and also renounced the Republican Party after it chose Trump to represent them while still warning that imbuing all political power with Democrats is simply cult behaviour under another a blue flag instead of a red hat.

While I may disagree a little or a lot, they are exercising critical thinking. They are not closed books to new data. They amend their ideologies to match new information. They don't amend information to match their ideologies.

They might not agree with you or me, but they wouldn’t lie to us or encourage us to believe untruths that could get us or others sick or arrested for voter fraud.

Critical thinkers welcome new information and questioning. Cultists repeat and rephrase what they’ve been told by a narrow set of sources chosen by ideology rather than veracity. I may be supporting Joe Biden in this election, but after he wins, I will be as critical of him as I am of Donald Trump and if he tells me not to wear a mask during a pandemic, I'll turn against him.

On contempt:

I'm starting to observe that one of the worst things a writer can do to themselves is be contemptuous of other writers. It's not a an issue of decorum or conduct. It's more that writers who disdain the talents of other creators are impeding their own gifts and opportunities for growth.

The Most Hated Men in SLIDERS: It's not hard to find people in SLIDERS fandom who will declare that David Peckinpah, Bill Dial and Keith Damron were talentless. However, this simply isn't true. It takes talent to write and sell teleplays that are filmed and aired. Transmodiar once remarked to me that David Peckinpah was a good storyteller and demonstrated great skill in telling his stories; they just weren't the stories that SLIDERS fans wanted to see. I've come around to that and I see Dial and Damron the same way.

Visual Storytelling and Exposition: "Murder Most Foul," "Dinoslide" and "Genesis" show Peckinpah to be a highly capable TV screenwriter with an excellent grasp of immediate visual storytelling, quickly expositing a high tech Victorian theme park, a colony under threat by dinosaurs and an Earth under invasion within a few minutes of screentime. It's unfortunate that Peckinpah also used his writing skills to create violent sexual fantasies about former employees and add absurd backstories to his lead characters.

Subtly in Real Time: Bill Dial is considered the worst part of Season 5, rewriting the majority of the scripts to have characters standing around repeating the same information until the page count is met. But Dial's filibustering is effective in "Prophets and Loss" and "Asylum," both of which feature gradual, slow, character-driven conversations where characters find themselves slowly entrapped as a pleasant conversation shifts into an interrogation or a confrontation. Dial had a gift for unforced, subtle, seemingly naturalistic pacing and conversation, but he misused it in a lazy fashion to pad out scripts for SLIDERS' final season.

Confessional Writing: Keith Damron is one of the most hated SLIDERS writers, but isn't his Year Five Journal a compelling read as an exercise in devastating self-owns and unintended revelations of creative self-sabotage?

Contempt: There is an alarming tendency that I sometimes notice in amateur and apprentice writers: they are caustic towards other people's work in a shockingly insulting manner, attacking not just the product, but the intelligence of other creators. They dismiss the effort, craft, purpose and ability behind the work as well as the work itself. It's one thing to do this if you're simply a consumer of fiction. You're a customer, you wanted SLIDERS stories, you paid for cable to get SLIDERS stories and you did not get what you paid for.

Creators Can't Only Be Viewers: If you are or intend to be a creator, however, this attitude towards other people's work will not serve you. I'm not saying that if you want to be a writer, you have to think highly of David Peckinpah sending Wade to a rape camp or Bill Dial's stalling filler in his Season 5 scripts or Keith Damron's clumsy portrayal of addiction and computers in "Virtual Slide." But a writer needs to at least observe that Peckinpah was good at devising visual information and exposition; that Dial was capable in using dialogue to subtly raise a sense of threat; and that Damron wrote some highly revealing internet diary entries.

Taste Vs. Talent: Whether or not you liked the final product is a matter of personal taste. However, I have sometimes run into would-be writers who take the view that any project not written to their obsessions, their concerns, their worldview and their preferred approach to storytelling is a failure. That any such project is worthless, produced without any ability, interest, care or investment from the creators behind it.

Self-Limiting: For a writer, contempt for the talents of other writers is a deeply self-limiting attitude. No single writer is going to be skilled in every area of writing. A writer with an ear for hilarious dialogue may lack the ability to write physical conflict. A writer with a talent for crafting lively and memorable characters may struggle with science or politics. A writer with a firm grasp of espionage and conveying action and danger may have a limited sense of location and setting.

Be Interested: All writers have limits. The best way for a writer to work through them is to be interested not just in writing their own stories, but also in how other people write their stories. Writers should appreciate their colleagues' techniques. A writer does not need to enjoy the end result; but a writer should seek to know other people's methods and be open to being informed by them. A writer should be able to look at someone else's writing and observe the skillset put into it even if the skill were misused and the product wasn't to their liking.

Contempt for Craft: When writers are contemptuous of other creators, such writers are disdaining not only their colleagues but the craft of writing itself. A writer who dislikes a book, movie or show but then declares that the creators have no talents worth knowing or learning -- this is a writer who believes that they and they alone possess the ability to produce good work. They are declaring that their skillset is complete and whole. That they have no need for additions, revisions or expansions. That they are closed to any perspectives, techniques or abilities outside their own. That they have no interest in how other writers write their stories. And that contempt for writing itself will be palpable in their own work.

Know How Others Work: Good writers respect the talents of other creators even if they don't care for the final product. Good writers are interested in how other writers work -- not to imitate, not to mimic, but to be open, to be engaged in the disciplines of storytelling, and to see what methods they might adopt or modify to tailor to their own projects.

The Triviality of Murder: I enjoy a lot of procedurals: FRINGE, SUPERNATURAL, and even non-fantasy murder mystery procedurals like ELEMENTARY and CASTLE. Shows like ELEMENTARY and CASTLE, however, have had an odd and not always positive effect on the perception of the genre; they've trivialized the craft of creating murder mysteries.

Writing In Reverse: Inexperienced murder mystery writers have been misled into thinking that murder mysteries are written by coming up with a cast of characters, then a setting, then a mystery, then some clues, and then a method for committing a murder that matches everything they wrote before. This is a mistake; a murder mystery must be outlined in the reverse order with the murder created first before coming up with anything else.

The Audience is not the Author: This might not seem to be the case to viewers. CASTLE isn't about the murders as much as Castle and Beckett arguing. The murders are just to give the characters something to work on so that they're not standing around in a plotless vacuum trading quips or barbs.

The Sequentially Written Murder Mystery: As a result, many first time murder writers understandably think that there is no need to put thought or attention into creating a murder mystery. That one creates the character arcs and set pieces first and then throws in a murder as an instigating event.

The Result is Not The Process: That's what these first time writers see onscreen, after all. They see that TV procedurals don't devote much screentime to the reason for the murder, the method of the murder and the means of concealment. They see that these elements serve merely as inciting incidents and seem almost an afterthought. In the writing process, these writers then treat the reason, method and concealment as an afterthought as well, as the last thing to create.

Struggling for Revelations: This is a deeply counterproductive approach to writing murder mysteries. Writers who work this way concoct random clues in a fit of inspiration, but then struggle to create revelations that match the previous information and come up with strained convolutions to make their answers meet the the previous discoveries.

Circling: Most writers who work like this often get stuck, unable to explain how and why their murderer did it. They are pilots flying an underfueled plane with nowhere to land. TV gives the false impression that murder is merely a plot device that isn't important and can be created at the end of the writing process because the murder is explained at the end. This is an illusion.

Murder Mysteries Come in Two Parts: An effective murder mystery writer starts with outlining the murderer's story, working out how and why the killer did it and obscured their guilt, as well as all the groups and individuals in proximity to the murder whether physically or situationally.

Facts Before Theory: Our effective writer then produces a second story outline, the story of the detective solving the murder. In most mystery stories, it's the detective's story that is most present in the final product, but because it is plotted out after the murderer's story, any clues, suspects, victims, red herrings, false trails and genuine truths will be consistent with the solution -- because the writer has already drafted the murderer’s point of view.

Screentime May Not Correlate: Much of the preparatory work might not appear in the final draft. One of my favourite episodes of CASTLE, "Fool Me Once," opens with a victim being murdered live on webcam during a stream of his crowdfunded North Pole expedition which turns out to be staged in an apartment for the web stream. Questions abound: who was this man if not really a North Pole explorer? Who killed him? Why?

The episode doesn't actually devote too much attention to how the victim was a con man of multiple schemes, one of which was planning to marry an heiress and flee with her money. Or how he genuinely fell in love and no longer wanted to rob his heiress. Or how he wanted to finish his last scam and go straight. Or how his partner, furious at losing the con man giving up a payday, murdered the con man during a web stream so that witnesses would assume the body was in the North Pole.

Foreground: The episode is more about Castle's increasingly ridiculous theories about how this con man may have been a spy, about Castle's latest mystery novel and how it has racy scenes that irritate his associate, about various blind alleys and false leads from Castle's theories -- but these most visible aspects of the story are possible because the writers first worked out the plot of the murderer, the victim, the motive and the means -- creating a solid framework in which they scripted Castle's shenanigans.

Labour: A murder mystery can be a triviality within a story. But it is never trivial to construct a murder mystery. Even in a TV procedural where the murder mysteries will be the least important thing onscreen, creating a murder plot itself needs to be treated by the writers as the most detail-demanding and labour-intensive plot element to create.

Write the Murder First: Murder mystery writers need to start with creating the murder; then they have a clear set of parameters for their suspects, evidence and revelations existing within a chain of cause and effect.

When mystery writers create mysteries first and solutions second, the evidence is invariably random and the solutions are inevitably mismatched. Most writers don't even manage to find a solution and end up paralyzed, searching for answers that should have been written at the start.

It is pointless, stressful, self-destructive and self-immobilizing for a writer to conceive a mystery and then try to create a murder that matches the mystery. It is much easier to create a murder followed by the mystery that obscures it until the detective unravels it. Writing the mystery first is not a healthy or productive way to write a murder mystery.

Biden doesn't want to pack the Supreme Court, but he may have to. He has no enthusiasm for altering US institutions in such a fashion, but he recognizes that the court is already packed with Trumpists and Republicans. He doesn't want to eliminate the filibuster, but he may have to if he wants to get anything done. There's also the risk that the Democrats don't win the Senate in which case they can't commit to what they need the Senate to do.

**

Trump won't debate Biden virtually, and won't debate him at all on October 15. Biden has decided to do an ABC town hall moderated by George Stephanopoulos. I don't know about you, but I could go for listening to Grandpa saying vaguely encouraging and comforting things.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/0 … ate-427810

**

I don't refer to Biden as Grandpa to be derogatory. Biden reminds me of my grandfather on my father's side.

Stephen Miller has COVID-19. So does Jason Miller. Couldn't have happened to a nicer pair of Trump advisors and campaign aides.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/06/politics … index.html

Pence also seems eager to get COVID-19, refusing to have plexiglass on his end when he debates Kamala Harris. Harris will have plexiglass. https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/06/politics … index.html

The Supreme Court is now requiring witness signatures on South Carolina mail in ballots, but ballots sent by October 5 and received by October 7 will be exempted. The determinedly conservative judges are looking for any excuse to throw out mail in ballots after they've been sent. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/202 … ature.html

Biden says he won't debate Trump if Trump is still testing positive. I think we can agree there is no point to debating Trump. https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/06/politics … index.html

Grandpa Biden says about an hour of comforting things in a CNBC town hall and I fall asleep listening. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5pPSv_Htgw

I wonder what funny business he could even pull at this point given how all the dirty tricks to steal an election depend on the results being close enough to contest and we're looking at a Biden blowout. Biden and Trump were evenly matched in Florida, but now Biden has a five point lead. Mail-in ballots are counted earlier in Florida. Florida is likely to have a result on Election Night. If Trump wins Florida on Election Night, he wins the 29 electoral votes to possibly scrape a win in the Electoral College while losing the popular vote -- if Biden loses Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

If Biden wins Florida, then Trump needs to win Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania and also two out of three states with Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. And in these states, Trump is only ahead of Biden in Georgia.

The Daily Beast has a (paywalled) article pondering why Donald Trump Jr. is so obsessed with Hunter Biden, constantly calling him a "crackhead" and accusing him of being in Vladimir Putin's pocket. The projection is obvious: Trump and Trump Jr. accuse others of that which they are guilty; Trump Jr. tweeted about Biden's sexual harassment which only serves to remind people of Trump having over 20 assault accusations. Trump Jr. claiming Putin bribed Hunter Biden only reminds people of the Mueller investigation and the Trump impeachment.

But Trump Jr. is so singularly fixated on Hunter Biden himself -- and Molly Jong-Fast at TDB suggests that Trump Jr. is jealous. His father, for all his many, many, many flaws, does not use intoxicants. Trump may eat 5 - 10 hamburgers in a meal, but he reportedly doesn't drink alcohol or use recreational drugs and looks down upon people who do, considers them weaklings and losers. In contrast, Trump Jr. is clearly intoxicated in numerous videos of his public appearances. Trump Jr. was arrested for public intoxication and was reportedly an alcoholic in college. And I'm sure that his father addressed this with his usual belittlement, abusiveness, mockery, cruelty and savagery and their relationship today is based on Trump using Trump Jr. as a surrogate and spokesperson. That's it. That's all.

Trump has no love for his son, only expedience and contempt. To be an addict is to be weak, Trump says, and I've no doubt he's said that to his son and that's why Trump attacked Hunter Biden at the debate and brought up Hunter's cocaine addiction, viewing Hunter with the same disdain Trump has for his own son. But Biden responded, "My son, like a lot of people, had a drug problem. He’s overtaken it. He’s fixed it. He’s worked on it. And I’m proud of him. I'm proud of my son."

Trump would never be proud of his son for battling addiction, would never maintain any love his son even if he had a addiction, didn't love his son even before the addiction. His children are props to him; he uses his daughter to distract men in business meetings, he uses his sons to repeat his own rhetoric. Jong-Fast wonders if Donald Trump Jr. is jealous that Hunter Biden could share some of his failures and still be loved by his father while Trump Jr. is unloved by his own.

Chris Christie, who helped Trump prepare for the debate (?) has tested positive.
https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/ … d7c33e26bc

Trump needed oxygen and at points was having trouble breathing. He is not on the road to recovery (yet?). The White House insisted that he is not on oxygen "today" and wasn't "yesterday" but refused to specify if he'd needed it at any point.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/03/politics … index.html

Look, the President of the United States isn't airlifted to Walter Reed National Military Medical Centre for a mild cough and a light fever. Trump's condition has clearly become serious and while I understand why people make fun, a sick president is an even sicker government. If Trump dies, electoral chaos results. Some states would have voters vote for the deceased and elect the dead candidate's party. Other states would appoint electors without a vote. It's unclear how the results would be weighed, determined or if they'd be respected. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/202 … a=taps_top

Let's not forget how Trump rages against socialist medicine while getting the best medical care with entire sections of the White House dedicated to health care, all paid for by the taxpayer even though Trump himself only paid $750 a year in taxes when he felt like it every once in awhile. Except Trump isn't at the White House anymore, is he?

Instead, he's been moved to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center -- a peculiar choice. The last time Trump was whisked there, he later insisted it was a routine medical checkup, nothing to be concerned about, certainly not all the mini-strokes people were saying he'd had except the first person to suggest it had been Trump himself. And given Trump's aversion to admitting any illness, insisting that he's the picture of health when he's a severely overweight, morbidly obese individual living off 10 servings of McDonalds a day and is 74 years old and has been visibly falling apart physically, the situation is grimly, miserably, painfully clear. Trump is very sick. Nothing else would have made him go to the hospital.

I take no joy in this. I don't respect the man. I do respect the office that your country granted him. An office that Trump administered so poorly and even more poorly in the pandemic crisis that he got himself infected through his forceful unwillingness to engage in the most basic protective measures. He has now incapacitated his re-election campaign and the executive and legislative branches of his government through his reckless disregard for the virus.

Exactly. I just don’t want to take joy in his suffering. I’d rather have fun imagining how Informant will spin this. Informant was bragging on social media awhile back about how he never wore a mask except to get into a store, that COVID was rare, that masks were unpatriotic and a sign of fear and weakness, saying masks hadn’t stopped the pandemic (conveniently ignoring how many weren’t wearing them), basically repeating Trump’s vanity driven refusal for basic safety but with Informant’s wider vocabulary and pointing out how Trump wasn’t sick. I can only laugh when imagining the mental contortions he’ll twist into now to continue insisting masks aren’t needed and are useless when his unmasked leader is in a hospital ward and his re-election campaign is now literally diseased.

That I take pleasure in. Hahahaha!

I take no pleasure in any human being being infected with COVID-19.

...

From MARVEL COMICS #1000:

It's interesting that Trump's actions indicate he doesn't think he needs to win voters over anymore; he'll just suppress mail-in ballots, sue to keep them from being counted and contest the results with the Supreme Court -- except his behaviour in that debate was a flailing, frantic, fretful, fear-driven attempt to drown out any words about the pandemic he isn't managing, the taxes he's been caught evading, the debt he's incapable of paying, the criminal charges he doesn't want to be facing.

Except... if he thinks his measures will work, why isn't he as smug and indifferent to the business of campaigning as he was in 2016 when it didn't matter whether or not he performed better than Clinton or won more votes? Because this time, he desperately needs to win for the presidency to protect him -- and he knows that his voter suppression efforts aren't working, that he won't have any contestable results with the way he's polling, that his smears against Biden's cognitive function or supposed radicalism aren't succeeding, that his search for "suburban housewives" isn't penetrating and that this is an election he isn't winning.

Biden couldn't say more than two words to Trump before Trump shouted him down and Biden doesn't have the Elizabeth Warren severity to put Trump in his place. Biden could have spoken about it when addressing the camera, a maneuver that confused and baffled Trump into silence because he doesn't seem particularly aware of the viewers at home at this point -- but Biden chose not to attack Trump while talking to the people, instead trying to connect with them and leave Trump out of the conversation. Had he criticized Trump while looking into the camera, Trump would have interrupted him further.

Biden is just not a confrontational speaker in a debate. His gift is emotional connection. And he wouldn't have been able to criticize Trump for more than a few syllables at a time and he won't unless future debates can mute a speaker who doesn't respect the rules by shutting down their audio feed while filtering out their voice in real time.

By morning, the Biden campaign had received a whopping $25 million dollars within a mere 10 hours of the debate's conclusion. Trump made an extremely strong case -- to support absolutely anybody else.

Chris Wallace is being rebuked, mocked, condemned and declared a failure for his failure to control Trump. I don't like Chris Wallace. I don't like anyone who works for FOX News. Please remember that when I say that Chris Wallace was trying, and in my worldview, trying counts and I can excuse any failure, even a FOX News failure, if the person was making every effort and simply didn't succeed.