Sanders gets 9 delegates while Clinton gets 4 delegates in the Democrats Abroad primary.

The typical instinct on the Internet is to recoil at any comparison of a contemporary politician to Hitler (thanks, Godwin!) but sometimes you really can't avoid it when someone decides to run on an ultranationalist authoritarian platform.

Another example of how politics sometimes dictates policy:

Godwin's Law becomes extremely unhelpful when discussing actual fascism and despotism. The Nazis may have committed some of the greatest atrocities known to humanity (although the Communists under Stalin and under Mao killed more people) but Hitler is not some incredibly inhuman evil monster that we'll never see again. He may have been evil and monstrous, but his motivations were akin to the motivations of other politicians.

I think the fact that Trump will be a despot if elected and already has an obviously despotic personality is readily apparent to (1) anyone who grew up in a developing country (2) anyone whose parents are from a developing country and quite possibly fled to the U.S. because of despotism (3) anyone who actually paid attention in high school history class.

Issa reminds me about Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, whom I actually randomly met in the U.S. when she was still a Senator, trying to push extraordinarily broad suffrage—where even Filipino Americans who have long been U.S. citizens would be allowed to vote. I remember parts of an interesting conversation with her daughter, which would be quite typical amongst people in their late teens, but which has interesting undertones in someone involved in politics, in fact, whose family has been a political dynasty. (Like George W Bush, GMA is the daughter of a former president.) We were discussing how it is that our parents have so much say in our destiny when it comes to choosing what we end up doing in our lives. In my own case, for example, it is no accident that I ended up in health care. Both my parents are in health care, and so are almost all of my aunts. I swear it wasn’t until I was almost in college that I realized that there were other careers available out there in the world. But I wonder about what that means for someone who is part of a political family. Do you feel inexorably driven to do the same, to seek the power and the responsibility of leading?

Shel Israel asks a very Zen-like question: what is web 2.0? I don’t know, but that’s my personal definition of web 2.0: server-based applications, which Steve Yegge briefly discusses in his article discussing programming language choice and Paul Graham mentions (in 2001, mind you!) in his article discussing programming language popularity.

I seem to always come back to this song.

William Gibson mentions it in Pattern Recognition. A metaphysical explanation for why you experience jet lag is because souls can only travel at a finite speed (akin to how light can't travel faster than 186,000 km/hr.) Jet lag is supposedly the sensation of the astral cord (connecting body and soul) being pulled apart, and it doesn't resolve until the soul finally catches up to the body.