Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

He’s still a wretched excuse for a human being.  He’s a morally decrepit, barely literate, socially retarded pathological  liar who is using  the presidency as a means to increase his personal  wealth, and he deserves to be in jail, where I suspect he may wind up sooner rather than later because the last week or so has been really bad for him legally, but, credit where it’s due, he’s doing absolutely the right think in withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria.
It was clear a year ago that Assad was not going to be ousted by the U.S. or anybody else, and it was also clear that the U.S. was aligned with ISIS, even though the U.S. kept saying “No, we’re supporting the freedom fighting rebels, not the evil terrorist ISIS rebels, and we’ve got no idea how ISIS wound up with so much made in America military equipment.”
Trump just said that ISIS has been defeated now, and since that was the objective all along (it wasn’t, but that doesn’t  matter now) it’s time  to go – which it is.  He might have some ulterior motive.  He might be just handing over Syria to Putin, as I’ve seen some suggest.   I don’t really care.   Russian oil companies, American oil companies.  The world has to switch over to renewable energy now, so a bit of squabbling over oil rights doesn’t matter as much any more.
One thing he has done, although I doubt he’s smart enough to  realize this, is he’s outflanked the Democrats to the left, which the Democrats  were dumb enough to let happen.
Even if he gets impeached,  even if  he gets jailed, which I think is now likely, he will go down in history as the president who got us out of Syria, and the Democrats will go down as the party that got us in.

There’s one thing that really irritates me about climate change deniers.  I don’t mean the climate change deniers who live paycheck to paycheck and vote for Donald Trump.  They are morons who actually  think all  the scientists are wrong, so they’re not necessarily evil.  They don’t actually think they are risking the future of the whole human race.  Being stupid is not a good thing, but it’s not a crime, it’s not something people can help.

I’m talking about the boards of directors of the oil companies, and the ‘scientists’ and lobbyists who work for  them.  They know damned well that climate change is real, is man made, is going to become hideously catastrophic very soon, and could be reversed.

The one thing that irritates me is that it wouldn’t even cost them any money to convert to a green economy.  The oil companies, as corporations, have billions of dollars.  That’s enough that they could start investing in things other than oil.  They could invest in real estate, or entertainment, or some up and coming tech firms.  They could invest in space.  Or, they could invest in Green Energy.
With the kind of money they’ve got, they could buy up a big, derelict old factory in every derelict old factory town (and there are plenty of those), convert them to manufacturing solar panels, and have them all up and running inside a year, probably less.  Everybody keeps their jobs, the company keeps making money, and the Earth doesn’t get destroyed.

We are fighting against them because this is a life and death struggle.  They are fighting against us because converting to a Green Economy would cause them a slight inconvenience.

Bastards.

All the trolls get the same talking points, and when you mention Medicare for All or the Green New Deal, they’ve taken to saying “How are you going to pay for it?” which is kind of a bullshit argument in a country where the government can ‘lose’ trillions of dollars and nobody blinks an eye, and “Not every problem can be solved by throwing enough money  at it.”
That is actually true.  Some problems can.  Some problems can’t.  On the personal level, money will  solve all your problems about having a place to live, and getting enough to eat, and being able to go out  in the evening now and then.  But it won’t make people like you, and it won’t make you any smarter or better looking.
On the public level as well, it’s pretty  easy to know which problems could be solved by spending enough money on them, and which not.  Money will not solve the problems of racism, or sexism.  Money will not solve  the problem of money in politics, in the same way that hate won’t stop hate.
But, money can definitely go a long way toward saving the planet, which is the big issue, and what the discussion was about that sparked this.  Money can pay millions of people to plant trees all day long, until  we’ve restored all the forests, reclaimed a lot of the deserts, and every city street is a leafy, shaded street.  Which is also good for the economy, because it means full time employment for millions of people, and if the Green New Deal  administration is paying them $15 bucks an hour, Wal-Mart, McDonald’s and all the others  will have to follow suit or they won’t have any employees.  Money can pay for as many solar panels and windmills as you like, and pay the salaries of the people who install  them.  Money can build high speed mag-lev and hyperloop trains, money can pay  for electric buses, money can establish recycling centers, and bring clean water to everywhere, and establish green communities whose carbon footprint is measured in negative numbers.  Money, used with a little bit of intelligence and imagination, can  save the  world.
Not only that, but it will be money wisely invested.  It will come back,  with  interest.

Like the vast majority of human beings on this planet, I am deeply dissatisfied with our leadership, and with the direction our society is moving, especially because that direction is toward extinction.
So, I often say things like “Let’s bring back the guillotines” ir “it’s time for bayonets and pitchforks,”  or I quote JFK who said “when you make peaceful revolution impossible, you make violent revolution inevitable.”
I don’t actually have a plan for violent revolution and, truth to tell, if one happened I would probably try to stay out of the way.  I’m not a violent person.  Never have been good at it, for one thing.

But, when Joe Biden made his idiot comment about how “500 billionaires aren’t the problem” (when they quite clearly are), I said “Well then, let’s just kill off the first 500, and if that doesn’t solve the problem, we’ll kill off the next 500.”  I wasn’t speaking literally but, just taking it as a thought experiment, I think killing off the first 500 would do the trick.  They have the money and the power to transform the world and make it a much better place – they just don’t want to do it.
But here’s another thought experiment (again, I’m not talking literally, and I know this would be illegal):  let’s just take the top 500 billionaires and strip them of all their assets.  Maybe you could even leave them a million or so to live on.  No need to be vindictive at all.  That may or may not raise enough money to solve all the world’s problems.  I think it would, but it would sure encourage the 500 below them to start divesting.  Sure, they’d try to juggle the books, to put all of their assets into friendly hands, or maybe to invest it.  You would have the economy trickling down so fast it would be a waterfall.  You’d have the richest couple thousand people in the world falling all over themselves not to be in that top group.  It would be enough to solve all  the world’s problems, and carry us into a utopian age.

And nobody would need to get killed.

It’s a simple question, really, and should be a powder puff question for any politician in 2018, but when Beto O’Rourke was asked “Are you a progressive?”, he blew it.  The darling of that portion of progressives who  are influenced by the fact that  he’s young and lean, just like a Kennedy, rides a skateboard, and broadcasts videos from  inside  his car, said something along the lines of “I don’t know if I’m a progressive.”
Wrong answer, loser dude.  It doesn’t matter if you look like a real surfer on  that board, and nobody really cares now if you say fuck a lot, and certainly nobody’s overwhelmed by the fact that you almost beat Ted Cruz.  If  you are uncertain about being a progressive, there’s no reason  any progressive needs to vote for you.
You could have very easily answered by saying “Yes, of course I’m a progressive.” or “I don’t know if I’d call myself a progressive, but I’m  for a Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and getting big money out of politics.”  Either of those statements would have made him palatable to progressives, and the three distinct issues mentioned in the  second answer are all  supported by large majorities of Americans.  Is there  anybody not in favor of saving the planet?  Well,  if there is, they can forget about the progressive vote.

So, I guess Beto O’Rourke is courting the ‘centrist’ Democrats, which is  a huge political mistake,  Put them all  together, as we  saw in 2016,  and there still isn’t enough of  them  to win  an election.

O’Rourke’s only shot was to make it as a progressive, and he just blew it.