The Daily Kos has the article 26-Year Old Founder of U.S. UnCut Sends Open Letter To Democrats On Young Voter Disillusion.

Contrast the unified Republican message with the profound silence from you Democrats on addressing the trillion-dollar student debt crisis, rampant inequality and underemployment, and your collective fear of openly embracing economic populism, and you cook up what we saw on Tuesday night. Older people showed up, highly motivated to elect war hawks. Younger people mostly stayed home, disillusioned with the only alternative on the ballot who didn’t even talk about the issues affecting our lives every day.
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You Democrats, on the other hand, looked pitiful in the year leading up to the midterms. You didn’t seem to stand for anything in particular, you just pointed the finger at the other guy, told us they were bad, and that you weren’t like them. That’s not enough. Take a risk, be bold. Get behind Elizabeth Warren’s 0.75 percent interest rate for student loans. Allow student debt to be abolished with bankruptcy. Push for single-payer healthcare, or at the very least a public health insurance option. Need some catchy buzzwords? Try “affordable education,” “good jobs,” and “healthy families.”

What Hillary Clinton plan are they clamoring for? Oh, that’s right, they didn’t say diddly about any kind of Clinton.  Apparently they do get excited about Elizabeth Warren’s plans for student debt relief.

I wonder how the Democrats will ever figure out what the millenials want?  Do you suppose they would think of reading the open letters written to them?  Nah, too easy.  Let’s survey how well the things we want to emphasize do with this generation.  What words can we use to sell them on our ideas?

One of the millenials I speak to tells me that what his age group really wants is bipartisanship and centrism.  Funny that the letter didn’t mention any of that.

We saw the movie Interstellar last night.

We thought it was a great movie, but I had forgotten how much effort has been put into having real science in the movie.

NBC News has an article,  After ‘Cosmos,’ Neil deGrasse Tyson Dives Into Science of ‘Interstellar’, that goes into Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s comments about the movie.  There are numerous web links in the article that I am still following.

Here is a little featurette that I found from following the links. Supposedly not full of spoilers. INTERSTELLAR Featurette – The Science Of Interstellar (2014) Matthew McConaughey Sci-Fi Movie HD.

I’ll let you follow your own trail through the links whenever you are ready. Some of them have spoilers in them, so you might want to see the movie first. Just remember that the science is pretty real given that this is a movie and by necessity it has to go beyond what we already know.

Here is a question that perhaps someone out there can answer. What role did Topher Grace play in the movie? We think we have figured it out, but we cannot find anything on the web that definitely confirms what we think. We can find the name of the character he plays, but that does not help us be certain of who that character was. If you have the answer, leave a link to the answer rather than an explanation. we don’t want any spoilers for the people who have not seen the movie yet.

Lot’s of spoilers in the following link

‘Interstellar’ Ending & Space Travel Explained.

You might be interested in the real definition of tesseract after you read the above article.

This article does not answer the question about Topher Grace, but it does explain some things we weren’t sure about. The table of contents links to other pages seem to be broken, but if you read the first page to the end, you will be able to navigate to succeeding pages.

Naked Capitalism has the article Matt Stoller: Why the Democratic Party Acts The Way It Does.  This is another in a series of my posts that drive a few people (at least one) into a tizzy.  The article itself is too long for anybody to read except for maybe one or fewer people reading this post.  Here is the excerpt talking about the recriminations in the Democratic party over the recent electoral loss:

Everything is put on the table, except the main course — policy. Did the Democrats run the government well? Are the lives of voters better? Are you as a political party credible when you say you’ll do something?

This question is never asked, because Democratic elites — ensconced in the law firms, foundations, banks, and media executive suites where the real decisions are made — basically agree with each other about organizing governance around the needs of high technology and high finance. The only time the question even comes up now is in an inverted corroded form, when a liberal activist gnashes his or her teeth and wonders — why can’t Democrats run elections around populist themes and policies? This is still the wrong question, because it assumes the wrong causality. Parties don’t poll for good ideas, run races on them, and then govern. They have ideas, poll to find out how to sell those ideas, and run races and recruit candidates based on the polling. It’s ideas first, then the sales pitch. If the sales pitch is bad, it’s often the best of what can be made of an unpopular stew of ideas.

Still, you’d think that someone, somewhere would have populist ideas. And a few — like Zephyr Teachout and Elizabeth Warren — do. But why does every other candidate not? I don’t actually know, but a book just came out that might answer this question. The theory in this book is simple. The current generation of Democratic policymakers were organized and put in power by people that don’t think that a renewed populist agenda centered on antagonism towards centralized economic power is a good idea.

I am proud to say my blog, here, has persistently put policy on the table as the culprit, much to the annoyance of a few (at least one).  This article reviews a book about how the policy of the Democratic party was turned into what it is today.  This shift started before Bill Clinton became President.  Though Bill Clinton is the most famous person for pushing these changes forward, the man of ideas behind this shift is the author of the book being reviewed.

I have some ambivalence about the book, the movement, and the review.  I had been seduced by many of the ideas for which Bill Clinton became the embodiment, although I had been repulsed by some of the other ideas.  I still struggle with the feeling that there were problems with the Democrats and the party that led to the rise of Clinton who seemed to “fix” many of those problems.  Something did need to be “fixed”, but I have become completely disenchanted with the way they were “fixed”.  I had my doubts about some of these “fixes” at the time, but it seemed hard to argue with “success”.  I supported some of the “fixes” at the time, that I now recognize have turned into disasters.  I also railed against some of the bad ideas at the time they were proposed and enacted.