Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Hillary Clinton has announced that she will not be a candidate in 2020, and for this, we can be grateful.  Not grateful to Hillary, so much, just grateful.
It’s not as if, after a long period of contemplation, she decided selflessly that the party’s future would be better served by nominating someone else.  I doubt she has the humility or the self-awareness to be able to say that.

It’s that she didn’t really have much of a choice.  After losing an election to Donald Trump, her credibility as a politician is shot.  Her support  has scattered to the winds, divided between 5 or 6 other candidates, any one of whom would thrash her in a  one-to-one match up.  Her support is at pretty close to zero, and she’s got nothing with which to build it back up.  She lost the most winnable election in American history, and by the time people forget about it, she will be about 150 years old.
She did say she would remain active, and vocal, but I think even that was just a face saving statement.  We actually haven’t heard much from her since the election, and that suits me just fine.

I think we might need to rethink animal intelligence.  Bird intelligence, specifically.  Not all birds.  I have worked with turkeys and chickens in the past, and can assure you they are dumber than shit.  Basically, vegetables on legs.
But, I recently (well, a few months ago) saw a video of some birds, some species of hawk or falcon, I would think, swooping down and plucking up and smoldering piece of grass near the edge of a forest fire, flying with it a hundred meters or so, and then putting it back down – thus spreading the fire and giving themselves a buffet table of crispy critters to dine on.  Of course, in one way, that’s just as stupid as human behavior because it’s forest destruction, and long term that will be even more devastating for birds than humans, but it does show a degree of future planning, and an ability to design and use tools.
Then, a few days ago, I saw a different kind of bird – I don’t know, maybe it was a crow but it looked a bit smallish even for that.  He (or it could have been she – I am using he as a pronoun of convenience) was spitting a piece of bread out of his beak and waiting for a fish to nibble at it, at which point he would get right in there with his beak, quick as instant, and get a fish dinner.  The birds have discovered the concept of bait.
Then, just a couple of minutes ago, I watched a short video of a parrot cutting strips of paper out of a magazine – not ragged strips, but strips any seamstress would be proud to call her own – and using them to make a tail extension.  Ornamentation.  Definitely something archaeologists look for around human skeletons to see how far along the evolutionary path the poor, ancient creatures were.
Now, here’s my question:  Have birds always done these things and human beings were always too stupid to notice, which is certainly possible, or are they actually evolving.  As we speak, as we watch?  Because that would be awesome.

In Bernie’s CNN Town Hall, he was asked a question about reparations.  That is, reparations paid to black people for their ancestors having been enslaved.  40 acres and a mule, so to speak, although 150 years late.
Of course, we know now that the questioners at that Town Hall were not exactly random, so to say it was a gotcha question is not even a stretch.
Then, there is a concern troll type I’m seeing on a couple of the Bernie sites I visit, always posting the same thing: no reparations, no support for Bernie.

Bernie is in favor of Medicare for All, a Green New Deal which will also end homelessness and unemployment, an end to private prisons, reforms to the criminal justice system, free college tuition and legalization of marijuana.

All of those things will benefit black people, at least as much as white people.  They will help poor people, of whom an unfair percentage are black.  They will free a lot of unfairly incarcerated people, a large percentage of whom are black.  Reparations is way down in about 143rd place on the list of things anybody’s talking about.

In fact, I don’t think any candidate at all (except for Marianne Williamson, who has about as much chance of becoming president as Vernon Supreme) was talking about reparations.
This happens in every election cycle in America.  People will be talking about important issues, like war and peace, or the economy, or the environment, and somebody will make some dramatic statements and all of a sudden something else is the major issue – gay rights, or abortion, or guns, or prayer in schools.  Usually something that can trigger defensive reactions, and extreme emotionalism.
Let’s keep focused on the issues: we need to save the planet, we need universal health care, we need to get big money out of politics, we need to stop having wars at the drop of a hat, we need to stop throwing people in jail because some people are making money on it, and we need to save the planet.
Did I say that twice?  Well, that’s because it’s an important issue.  Reparations is not.

Just watched Cloud Atlas and loved it.  I’m not going to say it was better than the book. First of all, because it’s sacrilege, a writer should never say that a film was better than the book. Second, the book was a long book and, I’m sure, had a lot of substance and deep thoughts and, I’m not sure , maybe there was a whole time line left out, its been a while since I read it.

But, the film was brilliant.  The scenes were awesome, from Neo-Seoul to Tom Hanks’ island, and it was in a special category for me of films that are from books, and where I also place The Lord of the Rings and Bladerunner.  This is the subcategory of films which were good to watch because they were a hell of a lot easier to understand than the books they are based on.  Lord of the Rings would carry on with the backstories of families till it was as tiresome as the begats in the Bible, and after a point you just can’t remember who is who any more.  The films were action galore, the good guys and bad guys were clearly delineated, and you never had the feeling you needed to back up a couple of chapters and read that again, just to know what was going on.  And Philip K. Dick, with the way he went on and on with the future’s obsession with fake animals, well, that was just as well left out of the movie.  That just would have detracted from Harrison Ford duking it out with a bunch of robots.
Certainly I understood the time line with the AI, and the timeline with the investigative reporter v. the crooked nuclear power plant, much better in the film.

The kids from the Sunrise Movement who presented Dianne Feinstein with a petition to get behind a Green New Deal fried her ass but good.  Not only was she revealed to the world as a heartless old crone who hates children, but her ‘more moderate and achievable’ (i.e. totally fucking meaningless) bill is dead in the water.
People who are defending her – and I’m amazed to find some people on the internet are defending her – have to go to ridiculous lengths to do so.

One comment on my Facebook today was “It’s wrong to use kids as political props.”  Well, there’s a point there.  We object to a Catholic High School busing a bunch of their students to Washington to attend a march against abortion, so they object to us sending a bunch of teenagers to a congresswoman’s office to give her a petition saying “Could you please not destroy the planet and all life on Earth as we know it.”
Personally, I don’t think it’s a really big deal.  Parents teach their kids their religion, their attitudes toward life, and their politics.  The kids will grow up and hopefully form their own view of the world.  The political experience won’t hurt them.  Whether they have the same politics as their parents or not, they’ll have learned how to organize a political demonstration, and how and where to deliver a petition.
But I think the commenter was missing the larger issue.  It’s the children who are going to have to live with the effects of climate  change.  ‘Using kids as political props’ is not nearly as bad as destroying the environment, making it so those children will have to deal with ever greater hurricanes, constant flooding, wildfires, and bad air.  Their children, in turn, will have to deal with the total depletion of some important resources, food shortages, the loss of all coastal cities, and complete societal breakdown.  And then their children will never be born, and the human race will die.
That’s how serious it is.