Agnostics decides that they must form knowledge and make decisions knowing that they do not know some things. Some people choose agnosticism out of practical considerations: we really don’t have them mental capacity to know all, that it is most rational to assume we don’t know some things. Other people choose to not learn, consider or even be aware of some knowledge for moral, legal or other intangible reasons.

In practice, the reality is often that the agnosticism is artificial. The subject really do know something but choose to not consider that knowledge: For example any fair employer in America not only has to do it, they also have to declare that their considerations are always agnostic of race, age, sex, place-of-origin and residence.

There are some technical fields that have discovered the effectiveness of using agnosticism. Those that I have heard, things like uninformative priors and maximum entropy principle make an initial assumption that are mathematical representations of knowledgelessness and maximum chaos. Obviously there are words and math, which is knowledge, that described that state, but what is described is with least assumption about what the world is. These approaches, for a time or for eternity depending on whom you asked, have been producing the most useful technologies.

So, when the University of California school system announced, in May of 2021, that college applicants will no longer require ACT/SAT test scores, I thought: That’s great! I hope they’re using all that smarts and technology to make this more agnostic admission process better than before. But sadly, I found out later that this decision was a reactionary response to a law suite that successfully impressed upon the UC system that the use of ACT/SAT adversely impacted black and latino people from exposure to higher education.

I would like to argue that this characterization is possibly biased. Recalling one aptitude test that my 6-year-old took, asked what class of object could a Neapolitan belong to. (The right answer, btw, based on googling and choosing available answer from the multiple-choice test, is that it is a desert) I have to admit, I am too poor to have had that desert ever. I can’t recall ever having desert in a restaurant when I was a child. So is that a test question that is biased against my lack of Italian-American heritage? I mean, if the test asked what a guilinggao is, would that be fair if it has been served in American restaurants publically for possibly more than 300 years?

This question is a challenging one. But a common explanation is that it isn’t really a race based selection but rather a economic-class based discrimination. People who are rich enough to have the curiosity and to have the time to sample enough restaurants to have tried the guilinggao are allowed into universities. Other people who had to work until their bodies and minds are too tired to do anything else will never have a chance.

Honestly, it is quite possible that the preparation for ACT/SAT is just like that–only families rich enough to have the free time and money and curiosity to prepare for it can do well in the tests. Those poor bodies laboring in the cotton fields, or fighting off bullies, or even those who are too busy selling drugs, they all had to make a living before they have the wherewithal to do well on a standardized test. It is not really a choice for any of these poor people.

Looking back, the critical thinker will point out that there are very direct and very organized systems for discriminating against black latinos (and that possibly more for these two groups than other minorities for economical reasons). And that a class-based affirmative action will not sufficiently address the gaping cavity left by generations of discrimination.

I would agree with that claim completely. Yes, definitely more black people were enslaved, beaten, and grotesquely exploited than any other race of people from China or Korea or Japan. There is absolutely no doubt about it. But on the flip side, Asian Americans, like Chinese people, were excluded from arriving and reproducing here. Asian people had far fewer opportunities in America than all those black people, each of whom was an opportunity. And it gets worse from there onward. Think of all the black people who knowingly and actively helped white people in the perpetuation of enslavement of their color. Think of all those people who did not rise up when they could have, think of all the black people who did not speak loud enough over the centuries… And what about the drug dealing, and white-people killing, and riots… Seems there have been some great subtraction from American culture as well. Think of all your white parents, they have behaved in ways we find unacceptably racist their lives, and think of your white grandparents who used the word nigger derogatorily and inflammatorily. (A finding a race-neutral(by today’s standards) white person before a certain point time is like searching for a prostitute with a heart of gold—they DO exist, I’ve definitely seen how that can work out in movies… But immho rarely really well(I would appreciate any feedback in way of counterexamples though) [[EDIT]change to PG version maybe cavity free Easter Bunny would have more apropos hue and chroma] What should these white people pay for their transgressions? Shouldn’t we just kick all the white kids out universities instead? I mean seriously, if you want admission quota, you can take all the Asian-American spots, and it would still far inferior to the piece of juicy meat that is the white student body. I mean wouldn’t that be something worth sinking your teeth into?

Alas, everyone is a sinner and those sins, sometimes sinful thoughts, lead us to sin more. Being an agnostic does not free us from a necessarily evil cycle of sinning if you believe that, but it does give us a break from intergenerational retributions. White kids should be happy, they should not have to pay for the sins of their parents and ancestors. Black kids should be happy, they should not pay for the sins of the white parents and white peoples’ ancestors. And certainly nice happy Chinese-American kids should not have to pay for the sins of both black and white peoples’ parents and their ancestors. We shouldn’t have to pay for a fight that you people could not finish despite centuries of injuries. I mean for Spanish speaking people, some of your ancestors had been fighting with the other white people of Europe for millenniums before America, and you are still at war. You are still discriminating against each other and still racist against each other. (And i should digress here and point out that although I am fervent supporter of space tourism, especially the non-polluting kind, I am completely against colonization unless there is an existential reason to do that. We must resolve our strives before we take the fighting to space.)

Here, agnosticism saves us from a spiral of hatred down to hell. In past generations, many have wronged and many have suffered. But in the present, nobody should have to. Kids should be admitted agnostically without regards to any criterion.

What? You might ask me, are you freaking serious? The university would be overrun with druggies and hippies who stand around the mall and smoke weed and skateboard all day long. You might inform me that if we import that kind of lazy culture that our future society will be ruined! The teachers will be busy teaching high school or grammar school material instead of college material to catch everyone up. I mean, the teachers might be too busy dodging bullets and smoke. How can that possibly work?

But it will.

I have faith that it will.

I am an agnostic to my people’s past in America.

I am agnostic to all past exploitation of minorities in America.

I am agnostic to admissions to twenty-first century academic institutions in America.

I am agnostic to the fact that UC is sued and forced to make this admissions change for two specific minority races.

I will choose not to look back at all the things that happened to Chinese-Americans and look forward to my kids attending UC system(If they choose to) and succeeding in their American lives having benefited from a world-class education!

Previously, we had imagined the United States Federal government would issue sufficient payments for completion of civic duties such being a juror, voting, and other “nice things.” (Kind of like the direct payment of $ for social credit that Andrew Yang campaigned about). In that case, we should actually call the program Universal Basic Jobs (UBJ), construing the civic duties as jobs the government gives to it’s citizens. Today, we envision a new form of distributive allocation of excess societal wealth: It is an UBI with a different ‘I’–namely Universal Basic Investment. In some instantiations, it may even be properly referred to as Universal Basic Investiture.

Typical corporate stock related actions are available to a person: He can split it, reverse split it, make up some new shares, sell some or buy some back, and pay dividends. Derivatives may be issued for his stock. The person may gift some shares, for example, at a baby’s birth, parents may gift shares of their own stock to the baby.

Suppose we issue stocks that represents a person’s worth, with official recording, monitoring and oversight. When a baby is born, it has 1 share and is worth $0. Of course, the parents may choose to gift the child with monetary gifts (that can be taxed), and his money worth at birth can be substantially higher than $0. But for most people, the money value of the person (and therefore his stock price) would be just what’s in the bank account. If the money invested, then a rational investor would value that person’s monetary worth at the value of the portfolio. Now this is considered a public entity encumbered with to-be-established normal reporting and transparency requirements. However, the person is the chief executive of his publicly incorporated entity, able to direct its funds and operations.

For brevity sake, instead of referring to the federal government, let’s assume the Social Security Administration (SSA) or a later instance of that same body of the federal government is responsible for UBI.

In one embodiment, the SSA may make periodic (or continuous) purchase of each person’s stocks at a fixed rate. For example $2000 each month. For babies, the SSA’s shares dilute very quickly as it has to split or create new shares in order to get these monies from the SSA. Notice that by issuing the UBI as equity purchase, we have given the person asset without increasing his liabilities in the accounting formula Assets=Liabilities+Equity. We can also calculate the worth of each new baby assuming guaranteed UBI share purchases by the SSA. Supposing a discount rate of 1%, the NPV of all future proceeds of stock sale is only $200,000. If everyone is to be born Millionaire in a low inflation period having discount of 10‱, the SSA only need to purchase $1000/person/month. For a country of 0.3 Billion people, that comes to 3.6 Trillion dollars each year(That is approximately same as the total 2020 IRS collection.) As SSA gradually invests in each person, it may wish to cap the ownership of each person’s public property to a legislated maximum. As each individuals’ wealth increase, the SSA may end up rebalancing it’s portfolio selling some of their shares instead of buying it from him. Equivalently, this means investing more to the poorer individuals and capitalizing on those that earn or own more. The SSA may also wish to cap the periodic investment for practical purposes.

In another embodiment, the parents may own all or some significant share of a baby’s stocks. In this case, the parents sell the stocks to the SSA for money to raise the child. Later, they may wish to buy some shares back (into their own ownership, or to reduce the amount of outstanding shares) if they realize their child has money-worthy talents. The management of personal stock shares switches ownership to the children at their 18th birthday. In fact, this loss to the parents should be a tax deductible event, their wealth have materially been impacted due to the maturing of their child. The opposite is of course concerning: the birth of a child is a taxable event due to its increase of parents’ assets, although this increase is valued at $0.

In another embodiment the SSA is a market maker for this and will trade in and out of peoples’ stocks so there is some apparent liquidity. It treats everyone equally and must spend same amount for purchase from each person. In order to encourage participation in this market, the SSA is required to make these purchases periodically. If it cannot find any sellers, it will raise purchase price until it spends enough.

It is not permitted to contract a debt convenant over the person’s operation of his stocks.

There could be ETF’s that aggregate peoples’ personal worth.

Much like a company, while the shareholders may retain the ownership of future earnings of an individual, they do not control that individual. In particular, these personal stocks are like the non-voting shares that some silicone valley companies have been issuing. The shares only grant right to the assets of the company but does not control the operations of the company. Therefore, each person is able to go to Vegas and lose it all in one hand of poker. But more likely scenario is that they may spend the money to engage in non-productive(and non-reproductive) activities.

Another interesting aspect of this system is that a person may have rational reasons to refuse the UBI. If the person has sufficient cash(flow), it makes no sense to sell shares to the SSA. SSA should offer to purchase equally, but the seller may refuse to sell. In the case of high cash-inflow but temporary cash shortage, the individual may choose to borrow debt instead of selling his stocks. Of course, there are many financial varietals such as warrants, convertible debts, etc., that combines debt with their stock. This choice for self determination is a fundamental difference between Universal Basic Investment and any other system that permits the government to forcibly own individuals’ future productions and current assets. If the individual choose not to sell out his shares, he can freely do so and no one else can own that individual.

Upon death, the person’s assets are distributed to share holders in dollars. If a children holds shares of parents’ stocks, then they receive the money similar to inheritance.

What’s cool about this is that parents can actually trade in and out of their own kids (and the kids’ friends). And I do declare that I’m not inspired by my kids or other peoples’ kids in any specific way. I have never wanted to short my kids and long their friends in their whole life and never plan to. But with UBI on top of the Stock Market, we actually can!

The advantage of these new formulations is that we forgo the unnecessary but traditional political debates of socialism (or even communism) versus capitalism. This implementation is all capitalism! It is completely based on modern tried and true mechanisms of capitalism: capital based alloctaion, investment for the future, ownership and control, free market, competition as well as principals of democracy: equal empowerment of all citizens. Leveraging present day technologies, it doesn’t get better than this, if I do say so myself.

Ordered a “fighter plane” on Amazon for Christmas. It arrived in a few weeks. But when we opened the plane we saw something unexpected. The foot-long fighter jet was a color that lean towards that of poop than the advertised bright yellow color. But that’s not my biggest concern. The model fighter jet is labeled ARMY Fighter J-15. After googling a bit, I discovered that J-15 is a Chinese fighter jet. This isn’t such a terrible thing per se. I guess I knew I was buying a people-killing, enemy destroying, petroleum fuel burning lean mean machine that could leveraged by a party of some war to fight. It bring a J-15 ought not to weigh me mentally down any more than an F-15. But it does. The down side of a more powerful China will be that it produce these things and will use it to wrangle power worldwide.

This is something we should keep in mind as the openly anti-sino Trump administration departs. I hope the Biden administration can live up to its campaign promises and build toward a more peaceful and collaborative world by growing America.

One day, it might be discovered that we can affect changes to the human body and mind producing an altered mental stage or change there of. One can imagine using an analogy of the “dropout” activation of deep learning neural networks. Suppose a ray gun or a drug or micro- or nano- scale robot are installed so as to cause dropout to happen in the human’s neural network.

That is to say, a scientific (or medical) procedure is devices that at the beginning seems to weaken the learning of a human, but it claims to improve human cognition and emotional stability or quality in the long run and that it prevent all sorts of mental diseases, disorders or other oddities. what shall we say to that?

I for one am very thankful that this has not come to be a problem, and no, I most definitely do not think this is one of those “nice problems to have” situation.

Apparently the Pentagon is about to release some news about UFO’s… so one solution to get over the hump may be just that: an insurmountably dangerous alien existence puts human civilization into survival mode: and we dropout on every child who goes to public school. (Or worse, you have to administer it personally to your child at night because that’s when it needs to happen) or maybe it is a recurring outpatient procedure… or maybe the implant will just drop your signal in a more fine grained manner.

Lacking that, is there any sane chance that we will allow our schools to require dropout to be performed on our children?

From my perspective today, I cannot imagine that I will be subject to this. I will not be whacking my children on the head on a daily basis (or more frequently) just because some stinking scientist did a double blind trial.

I don’t care if my kids friends are all seven feet tall and write to computer at five hundred words per minute and read at 3x that speed. I am simply not going to do that. The thought sickens me.

Right? What do you think? Will you tell your kids? To dropout?

Lets introduce some notations for talking about functions. Since a computer program has to be thought separately from the mathematical or real life objects, we must name those program procedures, they’re largely functions, and call them methods. These methods are functional in the sense that their definition and evaluation cause no side effects. Let the identity brane be the association of types with a set of formal parameter names:

    {
        "first parameter"  : Integer
        "second parameter" : Boolean
    }

The actual parameters, also known as the bindings for these parameters, are typed using $P_f$, the set of possible actual parameters are all dependently typed I-Brane having instances that look like:

    {
        "first parameter"  : 1
        "second parameter" : False
    }

For convenience, we endow and members of with mutators: for some we can write to mean adding a parameter to the formal parameter specification, to mean removing a formal parameter. similarly: with the expression has type belowing to the set of possible parameters and can be used in the full invocation of any method typed Invocation on underspecified parameters automatically curries: applying to a underspecified parameter (here, is a collection of parameters missing ) then .

Finally we type the type signature for the method differential:

Note the should mostly be defined for methods that has as a formal parameter: .

Now then, a method has a formal parameter that is of interest. To evaluate the differential of with respect to , we assert that at any parameter of , the application of differential to a change in the parameter () from to results in the proper change in the output of itself.

Analogously, we have converted the multiplication of to a method and evaluated it at to produce . This conversion is quite native to computer programs. Since there is not a universal way to properly write for all possible as we have in mathematical language, the solution is to encode the change in the form of methods.

Technically, if we encode changes as methods, the full blown differential has type:

And the equal expression of meaning, assuming , will be:

Finally, we introduce a factored version of the program differential:

Requiring that

We may use any of these three as they becomes more convenient.

Constant and Order of Differential

An interesting idea to explore based on this differential is the order of dependence of a function on a parameter. If a method does not depend on a variable, its differential would be the identity function :

This is . But there are also first order terms who has constant, , differential . In this case we can find an equivalent method typed as:

  ^(*)

Where

That it does not depend on any input variables. And certainly there is something resembling , with constant :

Our allows for arbitrarily complex changes in output value even when the input parameter changes are not small. Methods with thusly typed differentials do more than constant functions but are not as dependent on its inputs than functions with non-constant differentials. We are therefore inspired to qualify or even quantify the complexity of dependence a method has on its parameter. It is the complexity of the differential function.

^(*) here, the means, essentially, or for all intents and purposes, the same. This seems like an important idea to formalize, perhaps in a next step of this effort.

Chain Rule

Relatedly, the simple treatment of composition and curried methods is to uncurry them to an essentially equivalent method before computing differential. The actual implementation of that differential can be programmed using the chain rule. For this composition of methods:

And we’d like to compute . After juggling the types and parameters a bit one discovers that the differential can be written directly as the method:

This, then, is the chain rule for program differentials.

Todo: write the proof for this chain rule.

The Limit

The reality of the matter is that the program differential is not quite the equivalent of partial differentiation over real functions. There inside the definition of derivative is a limit. If we could take the limit of programming objects, then we can actually come to a equally localized derivative as we have for real functions. Instead of a limit the program form of the partial differentiation would ask for:

is the identity meaning no change. But that is perhaps work for another entry, to iron those details of program limits. We may yet achieve a unified world where mathematical differentiation is a sub-type of program differentiation:

Well, it’s almost mid 2021, Viacomm/CBS/Paramount seem to have suffered a small fiasco in the stock price. The symbol VIAC was worth around $15 mid March of 2020, shot up to almost $95 mid March 2021, and then crashed down to around the $40’s. I’m not sure why there is so much volatility in this company, but one wonders if it affects how they make shows?

In any case, so far it seems section 31 won’t be happening any time too soon. The replacement show is called Strange New worlds, featuring the once and always almighty Starship Enterprise, sexy number one, conflicted Spock, and always brave and fearless leader in the captain’s chair. Oh, hey cool, there’s even an Asian looking name for supporting actress role.

Let’s be honest. I cannot hide my disappointment that Trek couldn’t make it work with Michelle Yeoh. From the Ready Room chatter, it seemed that Yeoh had been a bit too snobbish for the crew, …, one can beat describe the challenge as a creative chasms. It’s bitter medicine to take hearing ensign Crusher lecture the Empress on her role as an actress, that she should obediently take directions from the action choreographer. Worse, she then tries to explain herself to him in awkward English… so many things needs to be worked out.

Former president Trump, who was elected president, publicly denigrate Chinese people—without making any exceptions for perfectly decent Chinese Americans —with almost zero political consequence. Americans feels and fears the threat of Chinese economy and Chinese culture, and it is amply manifested in politics, “diplomacy”, and entertainment. This, as the Empress eventually acquiesced to Ensign Crusher in her last interview with him, is very much the America of 2020’s.

It was fun while it lasted, as some Chinese people celebrated Trek fever briefly. those Chinese people including me blogging frantically about it, and later Yo-yo-ma playing Alexander Courage fanfare for Star Trek theme song right before Amazing Grace at President Biden’s inauguration. Clearly, there are more Chinese Trekkies than myself.

Let’s be fair to America. if you look at Dr. Who, another multi-generations made-for-tv science/fantasy show about how to be good and how to be better, there’s actually now a whole lot more Chinese and Asian presence on Trek than Dr. Who. What about other western fantasies? I guess there’re some Asians that can assist dr. strange in the whole of marvel-verse. Ahh, okay wait, there’s Minn-Erva, Quake, Melinda May,…, and the Empress, yah, we definitely should give cudos to America for being a very multi-cultural and Asian-American friendly… wow, some seriously hot babes too, oh wow (but my memory might be biased in its recollection…)… bravo!!! Bravo to America! What a wonderful home of multiculturalism ! Wonderful!

And, my faithful readers will also point out that I’m not exactly a big fan of Clandestine operations and organizations. Section 31 based on such clandestine (and morally amorous) organization will surely rub me in the worst ways. So maybe this is all for the best…

Now, if somebody could tell me what the heck is up with VIAC?

Wowah! did a Chinese American women really just won best director?! That’s pretty cool.

I don’t know how Hollywood works, in tech, IMHO, it will be very rare for you to find such a young director as Chloe Zhao directing such an old talent like McDermott… But they make it work. I can’t wait to actually see the pic.

Honestly, the Oscar is so political. Right after the winning announcement, the American news started reporting how People’s Republic of China blocked news of this event and may be suppressing viewing of this year’s Best Picture, the same Nomadland directed by Zhao. It’s unfortunate that this artist has garnered such honor at such a time when Chinese Americans live in fear of being targeted for beatings because of their faces or names. The encouragement to stand up to bullying and to be great Americans is empowering and does liberate as.

Her acceptance speech referencing 三字经, though translates to “3 letter classics” is actually a fairly modern, maybe at most a millennium old. The collection of Chinese wisdom in three-character triplets is written for childrens’ early childhood education. This document is surely controversial: “is that Confucian? ‘Cos we’ve been hearing that the Confucian Institute is a spy and propaganda agency of P.R. Of China, is she here to disseminate subliminal support for communism?” One might overhear… One could also question the provenance of various bits of this extremely abbreviated cliff notes. “Was it really at birth of human? Or was it at creation of human (like in the time of Eden) that humans were kind?” A more erudite person may be heard inquiring. (But for her, it was probably taught as she speaks it, at birth, because communists are not Christian, duh)

But above all those evil noises, she finishes her speech with flourish. What a wonderful award event!

Btw, McDermott’s wolf howl and best actress speech was also very unique… People might interpret her “I like to work…” spiel as meaning that she felt that she did the work to deserve the award of the Best. But from the trailer, it seems that this is a line from the movie, maybe she wasn’t being arrogant, there may be a real message here about nomads and other bigger social issues. I look forward to watching the movie to find out.

I’ve seen the documentary Q:Into the Storm on HBO. Wow that’s some serious allegations! The documentary claims to have filmed the creator of QAnon doing their work leading up to capital riot during the 2021 elections.

The story here is massively entertaining, with characters that are incredibly detailed with funny quirks that you cannot make up. For one example, there was for a brief moment one person who had trouble walking correctly. The right arm would swing forward with the right leg and then left side tries to do the same. The imbalance makes the walk extremely awkward, but once it starts, it takes a few steps to get out of, and in the mean time you’re walking like a badly programmed robot. I’m not sure what kind of brain damage is required for this to happen, but I’ve seen it happen to real nerds. (Probably from sitting around too much or otherwise due to unfamiliarity with walking next other people) It kinda fits with the character having the trouble.

I won’t write too much about the content, leaving that for viewers to experience. But this is some very nice journalism, and honestly, even better entertainment. If the stories and theories are true, it would mean that a lot of politically active Americans, including former President Trump, were all fans of an anti-liberal political persona, who are most likely are organic-food-eating/serving, severely deformed or Asian, manipulates its radicalized American disciples from Japan or the Philippines.

If this story is true, and the perpetrators were found to have broken some law, I hope vigilantes here in America do not take violence to Asian Americans more than Americans have been before we watched the documentary in 2021. Both QAnon supporters and normal people were severely affected by the polarization induced by QAnon orgs, and both side may decide to take it out on Asians living here. Rule of law should follow due process, no wonton assaults, please!

On the one hand, one’s mind wants the stories to be true. They fit the facts they present, and they help to make sense of these things in the news. On the other hand, the stories are so well produced, so rich in details, that one cannot help but wonder if things really happened exactly as described. Most of our lives are filled with events that do not come together and make sense from so many perspectives and with so much detail. The documented events are displayed with so much detailed, that it is like watching 4K Nature show at 2160P—your eyes cannot find visual problems despite objections of your brain that something is very unnatural about what is shown. And all that time, your mind also knows, symbolically—in this usage in the sense of Boolean typed knowledge, that most of what is shown with most likelihood was recorded from something real.

The show reminds me of the time I watched Kingdom of Silence, another documentary on HBO. It shows spy agency media recording of disassembly of Jamal Khashoggi’s corpse after his murder inside an embassy in which he went to to get married. Again, a tragic fairy tale that grips you from start to finish and shoves the brunt of a reality into your every orifices and just explodes it right there and then. Sure makes me feel dumb about guestithizing that this murder was created by Ivy League schools to drown out news reporting of discrimination law suit against Harvard University. But, alas, I was not privy to this kind of information with the kind of clarity and certainty required to launched simultaneous media blasts and company policy changes seeming unrelated to some of America’s, and the world’s, biggest businesses…

In my mind, at that time, the country and its royals had not being investigated, analyzed, prosecuted and convicted. If anyone has the duty to take proper action, sanctioned and mandated by rule of law, that would have been the US Federal government whose resources produced the intelligence that was ultimately exposed in that documentary, and whose leader was popularly elected, in part, to make these types of decisions. To rebel against that seems somewhat un-American!

American self-righteousness is what makes us great. We believe in our convictions and we make others believe it too in the name of justice, humanity and God. However, America is not just hot blooded vigilantism. America as a whole, including the hot hooded self-righteousness, and also including principles, structures, and processes. I do not see these business leaders lead us in anything other than hot-blooded vigilantism. I do not see them personally explaining to the American masses when they reacted quickly and pulled triggers that only they had access to. Years later, watching the documentary of the atrocity, something fishy lingers in my mind about the whole thing: the sequence of events, the flow of information and decision making… it doesn’t all add up. This isn’t an America that I am comfortable with. What ?! Some big guys, maybe a secret Ivy society, have some secret channels of information with American secret police and snoops and spooks, can make these big decisions, informed and on the spot? And, what?! Later, they pay for a documentary to justify their actions to the masses, “look, how great we are, we did something rapidly against injustice,” right ?

I do declare that I very earnestly want justice to be done correctly and swiftly! And yet, under the weight of my increasing incredulity regarding my own past naïveté regarding world events and politics, something in my mind is not in complete harmony with this whole thing. Sorry, good guys, I’m with you, all the way, but you’ve gotta give me more and sooner.

(Ps, for comparison, look at the strong💪🏻arms of America in the contemporary case of Canada catching and prosecuting Chinese Huawei CFO on behalf of American. Look at that spectacle! Due process and all. You know, if you really want to get someone, get their daughter and make an international show of it. Show the world what happens to bad people when they do bad things! (In this case, based on very public bipartisan new reporting, Americans are informed that she is being detained, following rules of extradition treaty, on credible suspicion of aiding declared Enemies of America to build weapons that may hurt us.) And we all knew that right on the day it happened. This event, while it may rouse domestic anti-Asian behavior, does things by the book. No where does one individual go out of his way to make a big fuss about another country. No where are we inspired to act out at our place of work on conflict of principles and international politics.)

(Pps, I apologize for sounding like such a cynic. There is just a lot of physical beatings of Asian people in the news right now. I’ve been assaulted multiple times, in public, because I am America. Chinese. As an Asian American, I do very much wish there is less hot blooded vigilantism against innocent people here in America. I complain about the leadership because, maybe some part of me still believe they have some powers to influence Americans, especially for the better right now!)

(By work place vigilantism, I don’t just mean disparate treatment of coworkers by race and school. I mean actual disparate treatment of customers. For a small example, I took my daughter and mother to Whole Foods to buy a pizza for lunch. While baking a fresh pizza for another, non-Asian, customer the lady behind the counter decides to assemble a “pizza” out of cold slices that have been sitting there all day. The sad part is, we even explained to her that we’re having lunch right then and asked her where the salad is. But she saw fit to give us ice-cold dried-out 🍕. Okay, so she’s thrifty on behalf of Whole Foods, great, but would it not have been somewhat more decent and more professional if she at least heated up the cold slices in that big hot oven roasting her behind like she would for any other customer and like good servers have always done for me before recent anti-Asian violence? But nope, she can just hand me cold pizza with its young and old consumers right there in her plain view. This, if its true cause is anti-Asian vigilantism, is as un-American as not being able to get a hot slice of pizza for lunch! Literally! Life really sucks when people behave like this at their place of work.)

Oft heard muttered at Bay Area parks are parents griping:

I have never been richer in my life, and never have I felt poorer.

You know, there are times when you wish TV didn’t look so real. Now that I’m watching this episode, last of Philippe Georgeo on Discovery, I yearn, subconsciously of course, for the good old days of TNG. A time when the story was soft and smooth and there is a Federation blue halo around the corners of the TV. (Maybe it was just an old TV) But this Tera Forma business is… horrifying.

Consider just a few weeks ago, Burnham was giddy to a spin in the elevator for a new love eye candy.(OMG that slow spin into la-la-love-land, that’s so 1980 Asian rom-act kungfu shows…,) . and now I’m looking at her deranged quivering lips betraying and rebetraying poor old georgeo. I … my mind , I just can’t shift my brain quickly enough to handle this . That blue that you see… that blue is the new intro when DSC goes into mirror universe.

The mirror universe is so glamorous, the uniforms, the foes, the fights. But grinds very very hard on my mind. Georgeo, Emperor Georgeo’s mental changes, her view of how to make her empire work. But alas, too much has her old self done… This heart breaking story, of her killing her daughter a second time for self preservation. This is a poignant illustration to us to all start doing the right stuff… don’t wait a thousand years and come back in time and try to undo all the wrong you have caused. Because it can be too late.

The send off was terrible too. There are times when you just wish fiction weren’t so realistic… too real in too many ways… like a farewell to Yeow…

I have to honestly say, I am very afraid of section 31 series…. it could fail in so many ways. Scripts seem big problem, considering DSC didn’t know for half a season that “Number one” is a nickname and that they should be referred to as “first officer” in most formal settings, who knows what gaffe lie ahead. Ratings popularity is a big problem. I’d hate to see Yeow fail to woo American youths, but, that, as Saru would say rather sadly, seems like a very likely outcome. Another thing that one can’t help but notice, from Ready Room Side Trek, is that Yeow is quite a personality off screen as well. Several collaborators like actors, directors and choreographers mentioned that she gets her way. (And mind you, she is the only one such comments are made about. Are you really going to tell me that there are no “characters” in Trek actors? Seriously? Why single her out in public?)

There is a little bit of a cultural skirmish, as Yeow is older and Star of many non-trek shows, with her fans,…, that she has a less geeky take on Trekverse. She’d rather say Trek things in people words than to say people things in Trek words. Which is fine… but when you see her talk about fight scenes, the geek in her really comes out. It’s kind of a different kind of geekiness. Hard to explain, but anyways, it’s there for the world to see. Honestly, her presence makes me feel her character from Crazy Rich Asian. She is a movie star, in all the ways we mean it in America, but she is a star to other people not American. Now she happen upon this land where her kind(old, female, Asian accented, new to the genre, take your pick),…, is not normally big stars, and people just can’t stand her strutting her stuff around like she’s quite something. She is, just not to these people. And this time, is there a family lawyer or hubby she can call to buy the hotel? IDK.

Having her own show hopefully will also mean some more well deserved creative control. It will be challenging for other producers as well to make it all work—their creativity will surely be properly challenged to make this all work. Asian standards of civility and modernity are going to be a little bit different from Trek’s. Recall China was the federation of its days, it was the one brining medicine and technologies to lesser people. It was the one introducing workable social order to the wild people. There is a certain amount of that pride still ingrained in the cultures of Asia. These Asians, they take pride in being more noble and the bigger person and peace and all that, too. Maybe we can find miraculous synergy yet when you bring in an Asian.

And yes, we still want to keep trek trek and that’s a sure thing no matter what. Somehow, Trek has done it again. It is a microcosm of a macrocosm of our current time world. Here comes a talented and experienced foreign actor, her contributions are greatly appreciable, but we, in America, struggle a little to maintain our cultural identity (the Trekieness of Trek)… this Ready Room action is so meta-meta-meta for me, I am drunk on this reality of reality right now.

But sentimentality aside, we should applaud the Trek overlords that is pushing to make this happen. Hard, impossible, never done before, that is the homeland of Star Trek. We laugh in face of certain death and we cheer for the underdog that has with all certainty of science furious death, we fight monsters a bijillion times more powerful, we reconnect nerves in the CNS with our bare hands by doing it very fast, we entertain extinction as a footnote in our history, we enter radioactive reaction chambers… to save our forever-friends… we must forge ahead, whatever the future, we must keep going, quite boldly, to where no one has gone before!

Let’s go!

(I will appreciate up votes for Saru to make that his action word.)

It’s blaspheme, but so you think to younger kids watching trek that the Burnham-Georgeo farewell in DAC s3e10 is more poignant than the Kirk-Spock farewell in the Wrarh of Kahn)

P.s. I went back to tos and watched the City on the Edge of Forever. It seems that Yeow’s shocking-as-heck-to-me comment about the “goodie two shoes” of Federation characters on DSC s3e10 ready room was a reference. That observation actually also came from Edith Keeler about the Federation officers. Edith Keeler was the girl that Kirk must let die to preserve history. In that tos episode. Wow, people used to fall in love so much faster. Kirk declared he’s in love after very short exposure to this women. But in DSC, Burnham falls in love with book until after a year-long friendship. My, my, how times have changed…