Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

This is a breaking story, just found out about it five minutes ago and even the news stories on it don’t give a lot of detail, so I will try to rein in my outrage and just make a couple of observations.
First, a lot of the available quotes come from “Community Organizer Frank Nitty.” Sure, it’s likely that he’s a great guy, but my first thought was “when the reporter asked him his name, that’s the first one he thought of, because he probably watched “The Untouchables” last night. Because Frank Nitti was Al Capone’s right hand man and that’s a heck of a coincidence.
Probably just a coincidence, though. It’s a name.
My second thought was ‘this is an interesting case.’ It raises questions. What use are the police, and would we be better off just trusting law enforcement to angry mobs? There are arguments for both sides. On the one hand, even if this one incidence of arson proves to be justified, if the house really was used being used for kidnapping and sex trafficking, then that’s fine, just as well it was burned, but what about next time? Will it be the home of a gay couple who aren’t harming anybody, or will neighbors feel justified in burning down a house if a bunch of homeless people are squatting there? A world of mob rule would be a dangerous and unpredictable world, indeed, but…
According to a lot of people interviewed, the police had been remiss about even looking for the missing girls, and wouldn’t have come to the neighborhood at all if there wasn’t a house on fire.
My opinion on this may shift as more information becomes available, but it appears that cops in the U.S. have completely lost the trust of the people. Up in smoke, as they say.

I had hoped to write a comprehensive blog with the results from some districts where progressives are running. but there aren’t too many results yet, which might be a good sign for the progressives, because when the establishment candidate is even slightly ahead, they usually announce the results before the polls even close, and when the progressive candidate is winning, it can take day, sometimes weeks or even months before the final results are announced.
On the other hand, this might be bad news for progressives because that delay in announcing a winner is a part of the system, a way to give the establishment candidate a chance to cheat.
All we know for sure at this point is that Alexandria Ocasio Cortez was renominated for her seat, despite the DNC’s heavily financed attempt to unseat her, because their whole shtick about how nobody should run against an incumbent Democrat in the Democratic primary is automatically disregarded if the incumbent happens to be a progressive.
Booker should be winning in Kentucky, but they’ve worked hard at denying lots of people the chance to vote, first by reducing the number of polling stations from hundreds down to one (in one predominantly black county) and then they closed the doors while people were still in line. If the Trump-loving McGrath wins, Booker should definitely mount a lawsuit and I’ll be disappointed in him if he doesn’t.
In another district of New York, Jamaal Bowman seems to be leading, but, like I said, they are slow walking the count. There are other races that I haven’t even heard rumors on yet. So, probably more on this tomorrow.

It seems like this whole, horrible election, from now until November, will be Trump and Biden trying to one-up the other in who can say the stupidest thing. Trump has a disastrous rally, and there are lots of juicy revelation’s in Bolton’s new book about how Trump thought Finland was part of Russia, and praised the Chinese president on building the world’s finest concentration camps, so Biden tweets that he’d like to start a war with Venezuela.
Maybe those weren’t his exact words, but he said he’d ‘get tough’ with Maduro and, since we’ve already imposed sanctions, which have not had the desired effect of forcing Maduro from office or getting the average Venezuelan to hate him, any toughening of the U.S. stance is a step closer to war, which there’s no reason for. Venezuela never attacked the United States.
So, Joe Biden is attacking Donald Trump – from the right. You would think, running against Trump, that pretty much anybody could claim the title of “Lesser of Two Evils,” but Biden is failing at even that.

Democrats are positively giddy about Trump’s poor turnout in Tulsa, and with good reason. He didn’t pack the arena, didn’t even come close, had to cancel the speech to the overflow crowd (something Bernie never had to do) because there was no overflow crowd, and all this after bragging that they’d given out a million tickets.
But, before the Democrats, or K-Pop fans and TikTokkers get too cocky, allow me to pour a bit of cold water. Just a bit. As far as Trump getting punked on the number of tickets distributed, I’m sure all Trump people who wanted to attend got tickets as well, and I doubt very much if they were turning anybody away at the door for lack of a ticket. So, your prank was funny, your prank led to Trump making wild claims, but I suspect it’s effect on attendance was negligible. A lot of voters are just suffering from election fatigue, and maybe some are being cautious about Covid-19. I imagine the phrase “Why risk it? He’ll still be running in October, we’ll see him then” was uttered in many a household.
So, that is actually good for Democrats. It means the enthusiasm of his raging hordes is dimming somewhat.
The other thing is that Joe Biden, also, has never filled a 16,000 seat arena. When he called that guy fat and challenged him to a push-up contest, there couldn’t have been more than 100 people in the room.
This might be a very unusual and interesting election. The candidate who can appear in public the least, and give the fewest speeches, is likely to be the winner.

For years, my main social media outlet has been Facebook. I link to this blog on Facebook, so that people who follow me there can always find it. I also post a link to it every day on Twitter, but since I don’t think anybody follows me on Twitter, that’s kind of a throwaway thing. It’s also a writing exercise, since I compose my tweets as a rhyming couplet and, at the end of each year, collect them in a book, which I self-publish using Amazon, and nobody reads.
There have been other sites I’ve dabbled with. I respect Quora, but they suffer from the same flaw as Snopes. They are so eager to come up with one best answer, that the other answers get ignored, or pushed down the list very quickly. I suppose there is a reason for LinkedIn to exist, but it doesn’t do anything for me and the only reason I still have an account with them is that I can’t figure out how to delete it. I suspect that that (in the case of many sites, not just LinkedIn) is the reason they have so many accounts.
Anyway, about a week ago I decided it was time to try Medium, because that seemed to be a good place to get some more exposure for the blog, this blog you’re reading right now, at this very moment.
I was surprised to realize I already had an account, so getting started was easy. For about a week I added my blog each day to Medium. While there, I would sometimes read an article or two. Then, two nights ago, I saw an article which interested me, and tried to read it. “You have reached your limit of free articles,” it said. If you upgrade to a Premium Account, you can read unlimited articles. Well, I took an extra couple of clicks, because if an upgrade is free, I’ll go for it, but they got around to asking for the old credit card number pretty quick.
I suppose I could continue posting my blog over there, but if I can’t read other people’s articles, I’ve got no reason to expect them to read mine. So, my Medium experiment is done.
Although, I suppose I still have an account over there, with links to about a week’s worth of blogs. Because I don’t know how to delete it.