Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

I’m no scientist, so I’ve got more questions than answers, and any speculation on my part re the current spate of fires in California is just speculation, but damn, they just seemed to come out of nowhere and spread like …what could  you possibly say a wildfire spreads like to make it more dramatic than a wildfire?  And they were out of season.  I suppose due to global warming California might be in the middle of a more extended drought than usual, but my own personal theory is that due to all the carbon particles in the air, the air has actually become more flammable.  Just throwing that out there.

In any event, I’m glad that AOC and her buddies in the incoming crowd of shit-stirrers have chosen ‘a Green New Deal’ as one of  their main issues.  By phrasing it like that it becomes a jobs program and I’ve got no problem with that.  You could employ every unemployed person in the country planting trees at $15 an hour.  It would cost some money but the benefits would be huge.  You’d eliminate unemployment.  You’d eliminate homelessness.  You’d clean up the air, provide a lot of shade, plenty of fruit and nuts, and make the world a more beautiful and pleasant place.  How to pay for it?  Well, New York state could pass on giving Amazon $2 billion dollars, that would help.  The U.S. could not give any military aid to Israel or Saudi Arabia for a year.  That’s like $20 or 30 billion.  They could legalize marijuana at the federal level.  I’m  not even talking about the money raised by taxing it and stuff.  Just the money saved because you don’t need to prosecute and imprison so many people, which costs a lot.
This ‘how are you going to pay for it?’ argument is bullshit.  It’s necessary.   We need to save the world and if we jump in with a full scale, all  hands on deck effort, it will  be a transformative thing and the world economy will come out the other end stronger than ever, rather like it did with WWII.

There was a moment, a brief moment, when I saw that Alexandria Ocasio Cortez was participating in a protest in Nancy Pelosi’s office, that I thought “mmm, that might be a bit of over-reach.  She’s in congress now, she’s going to need to work with Pelosi, perhaps this is not the most dignified, etc…” and then I quickly got over it because of course this is exactly the kind of thing the world needs and this is exactly the reason she was elected.
It got some publicity and it put the Democratic Party on notice that if they shoehorn Pelosi into the speaker’s position again, it will be mighty rough sailing ahead.
Also, I love the cause that the protest was about.  Climate change.  Citing the U.N. ’12 year’ study, they demanded that the Democrats form a committee to come up with a plan to completely transition to green energy.  This is a great platform.  Who can actually stand up and say they are against the environment?  Not only is it the most important issue of our times, it is a winning issue.
Then I saw Michigan’s new congresswoman elect, Rashida Tlaib, addressing a crowd outdoors in D.C., but a lot of people had the same signs as the people in Pelosi’s office, and it very much seemed to be part of the same protest.  All I’ve got to say is she’s just as cool and inspiring as Ocasio-Cortez, she just hasn’t got as much publicity.
o, though that’s only 2 people out of 435, I sense that there will be a change in tone in this upcoming congress.  And I am totally looking forward to it.

I belong to a few Facebook poetry pages, but I’m only active in one.  I suppose I could post my poems in all of them, but I kind of feel that would be cheating. I’m not sure exactly how it works, but I don’t want to write a poem and then have it appear on my Facebook page like 4 or 5 times, because that would annoy people.  It annoys me when I see it although, as I said earlier, I’m not sure how that works, it could be I’m the only one seeing them at all and people are doing something extra to make them appear.
Anyway, it means I see  a lot of bad poetry, that I generally skim right past.  I only post in the one because it’s a site which encourages criticism, although there is an ingrained problem with that:  criticism isn’t something that anybody likes much.
So, today I caught the tail end of a bit of a kerfuffle on one of the sites I belong to but am not active in.  Everybody seemed to be jumping on one guy, because he was leaving comments about how all of them suck.  At first I was of mixed opinions, maybe they were just being an oversensitive bunch of whiny little crybabies and then I saw a few of his posts.  Could be they were still being an oversensitive bunch of whiny little crybabies wanting nothing but participation ribbons for their mediocre meditations, but it’s 100% certain that he was being an asshole.
Anyway, amid  the comments about how people were leaving the site because of all the negativity (which, I suspect, is a lot like how millions of Americans leave the country forever after every election), I started thinking maybe I should get active over there, post a few poems, and see what happens.
Next one I write, that’s what I’m going to do.

Well, the recounts are  on so Bill Nelson and Andrew Gillum still have a shot, Stacey Abrams is holding firm, she is a heroine to all of us, and Sinema seems to be leading McSally  out in Arizona, so that’s a good thing.
The thing with the Florida elections is it does seem to be coming down to Broward County, and a whole bunch of ballots which were found still  in their boxes, coincidentally uncounted.  Now, the view on the left, the popular conspiracy theory, partially fueled by the fact that we like Tim Canova and think Debbie Wasserman Schultz should be in jail and are all extremely out of sorts with the actual results, is that DWS (who is no stranger to cheating at elections, as we all know), was holding back those boxes of ballots because they were all people who’d voted for Tim Canova.  Since almost everybody who voted for Canova would have also voted for Gillum and Nelson, this cost Gillum and Nelson a lot of votes.  They might still pull through, but if it turns out that’s what actually happened, I do hope it is publicized loudly and longly throughout the land, and not just on Facebook and Twitter where they are talking about it already.  Debbie Wasserman Schultz is willing to risk other Democrats seats to assure her own re-election.  She hasn’t been charged with  that, and innocent until proven guilty is what would apply in a court of law, but this is my blog and my standards of proof are a good deal lower.

She should be in jail for her role in the 2016 primaries, so  I’m not  cutting  her any slack now.

It’s becoming seriously redundant to point out what a complete jerk Trump is, and it’s hard to say what the most egregious thing in the last couple of days has been: was it his ridiculous behavior toward Jim Acosta, banning him from the press corps?  That’s probably the incident that could cause him the most legal trouble.
Or was it his reaction to the wild fires in California: “This is due to terrible forest management so I’m going to cut off funds, because that always improves performance, by golly.”  It’s as if he’s fed up with always being criticized for his incompetent and indifferent responses to natural disasters, so this time he’s just decided to say ‘Screw it.  They’ll get no government response, not even hope and prayers.’
Those are two strong contenders, but then there’s Paris.  He went there because it’s the 100th anniversary of the end of WWI, but then he  bailed on the service at the cemetery.  Because it was raining, as it sometimes does in Paris.  In fact, there were times when it did during WWI, and soldiers would be stuck in it for extended periods, and sometimes they didn’t even have umbrellas, plus people were shooting at them.
I’d like to say that this  is a clear sign of the final unraveling, but it’s not.  His base doesn’t care.  They hate California, they hate France, and they hate CNN, along with a few other states, several other nations and news network, and almost all races and religions.  And it certainly won’t be enough to persuade Nancy Pelosi to impeach, because she’s the most useless individual in the entire universe.