Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Just got home from a poetry reading.  It was the newly returned Spit it Out series, still  at the A Maze in Tchaiovna, and I was glad to see it back, although minus founder and driving force Kae Pillar, who is off seeking other,  weirder environments.  I was a bit nervous as to whether or not it  would have the same energy and, to  tell the truth, the jury’s still out on  that, and I mean the jury inside my own head, I can’t  vouch for anybody else’s opinion.
There were not a lot of people there at the start, and I believe the new host was getting a bit nervous but, power to him, he didn’t waste an absurd amount of time before he rounded up what stragglers he could from the front room and outdoors, for a balmy Indian Summer evening it is, and got things going.
There were a lot more readers than you would have thought possible for a crowd that size (which did grow a bit once things got started) and there were quite a few poets I  liked, particularly the girl who did the poem about ‘resting happy face’ which started off nice and upbeat, and then turned pretty dark in the middle.
My stuff was received about as well as it deserved.  This  concept  poem that’s been rattling around in my head for about a week now, all about magic and science and witchcraft as an ancient art and why  shouldn’t it evolve in tandem with science, it’s all about use of arcane knowledge to alter the environment, and  there are portals to alternate dimensions but we need to figure out how  to find them, wasn’t coming together and I was losing the thread but there were a few stanzas in  there that worked, I chopped it up into two  short poems and left out what I  had to and it  worked fairly well.  I was pleased, anyway.

O.K. here’s a conspiracy theory I’d never heard before:  On November 12th, 1963, 10 days before he was shot, President Kennedy wrote a letter to the CIA requesting everything they knew about UFOs and also requesting they share their information with NASA.
Now, this letter was declassified in 2010, but I’m just hearing about it now, watching a program about UFOs, but that’s the thing about waiting 50 years to declassify something, nobody’s really paying attention any more.
I guess the implication is that the CIA thought, “Uh-oh, that Kennedy fella is getting close to the truth, maybe we’d better whack him,” but there are several reasons I’m skeptical about this.  Just because he wrote such a letter doesn’t mean that was the reason for his assassination.  People had all sorts of reasons to kill Kennedy.  The Florida Cubans were pissed off about the Bay of Pigs, the Mafia might have wanted him dead, either because he was threatening to prosecute some of them or because he was shtooping Sam Giancanna’s girlfriend.  Even if people from the CIA wanted him dead, it probably had more to do with Cuba, or Viet Nam, or something else, other than aliens.
To believe that the CIA killed Kennedy because he wanted info about UFOs, you have to assume that the CIA had information they didn’t want to share with the President of the United States about ALIENS, and the only reason they might have for doing that is if there actually ARE aliens among us, and the CIA is covering for them.  I am always suspicious of the CIA, I think they are a horrible organization which deliberately sows discord and starts wars at the whim of American corporations, but I’m just not seeing the motive here.
I hold with the notion that it was forces within the military industrial complex who felt Johnson was more reliably war-like.
But, it could have been aliens.

12 years is not a long time at all and yet that’s the amount of time some scientists say we’ve got left in order to turn the world around (metaphorically, we don’t need to do a superman thing where we’ve actually got it spinning backwards or something) or else we’re doomed.
The horrifying, unbearable part of all this is that we could, with a concerted effort and very little imagination, pull it off, we could convert the world from a doomed planet to a blooming paradise under the sun, we could create an environment that is stable and sustainable, with oxygen at pre-industrial revolution levels, plastic free oceans absolutely teeming with fish, a tremendous diversity of pesticide and herbicide free, fresh vegetables.
We’ve mostly got the technology, and it’s still improving.  Some of the problems could solve each other.  For instance, we have a problem of rising ocean levels.  We also have a problem off desertification.  So, we need to move the water from the oceans into the deserts.  Of course, it’s salt water.  So, we need to desalinate it, which is energy intensive.  Well, you know what else the desert has plenty of, besides land that’s waiting to be reclaimed?  Sunshine.  Lots and lots of it.  That’s why they’re deserts.  So, put up huge banks of solar panels to power the desalination plants, bring water to the desert and grow all the food that people need and a few problems solved all at once.
Then we need to set up high speed rail all over the world, switch everything over to clean, renewable energy, plant about a trillion trees, and get the plastic out of our oceans, and a few more things.

But most of them will save money, and all of them will have more than a single positive effect.  So, we should start doing all of it, hard core, right now.

Last night I didn’t sit down to start writing my blog until almost 1 a.m., partly because I couldn’t think of a good topic, and partly because I was watching some cool stuff on TV about aliens, which  I’d seen before but it is a very good series, mixing in real science with a compelling story line just the way I like it.  So, when I went to write my blog, suddenly I couldn’t access the internet at all.
That happens sometimes, but most of the time when it happens it seems to be about 1 a.m., and just at the time I’m starting to write my blog.  If I were a more paranoid, conspiracy minded person than I am, I might thing that Mark Zuckerberg and the powers that be are out to get me.  But, I’m sure there’s a more rational explanation.  I’m just not that important.  Which  makes me a little bit jealous sometimes of my Facebook friends who make posts saying “I’m back, I was just blocked from Facebook for a month for posting controversial material” and I think “Damn, I’m more controversial than they are” but that’s not really what it’s about.  They have more followers.  Also, I may feel a bit envious, but I don’t actually want to be banned, at all.

You know who should be banned?  Not from Facebook, although I’ll bet he has an account, but from public office.  Brian Kemp, Georgia Secretary of State and candidate for governor.  He’s managed to put aside 53,000 voter registration applications (70% of them from black people), thus giving him a huge leg up in his run for governor against Stacey Abrams, a black woman.  53,000 is no small amount.  That’s easily enough to swing a close election, and even enough to override a fairly substantial Abrams win.  If he manages to get away with this, she will have to win by an absolute landslide in order to win.
Now, it would be nice to think that the honest, upstanding citizens of the Peach State would rise up in anger and give Abrams that landslide, but I don’t think that’s likely.  Kemp’s supporters, his hard core base, are gun toting, bible quoting, Trump adoring Hillbilly extras from the set of Deliverance, and they are perfectly happy with preventing black people from voting.  There must be lawsuits, and there must be lawsuits now.  November will be too late.

I’m already hearing reports of rather large voter purges happening right now in Georgia, Indiana, and Texas.  It’s shocking but not surprising, and I don’t have a clue what to do about it, I hope some lawsuits get brought, but that’s not the subject of tonight’s blog.
Gerrymandering is a serious problem, but that’s not the subject of tonight’s blog, either, although it’s what made me think of it.  I’m assuming everybody’s seen those memes of maps of congressional districts, if those districts were designed by computer algorithm, instead of by some sleazy weasels in congress.  Pretty impressive, huh?  Radically different, and obviously fair.
Then I thought, what if Supreme Court justices were picked by computer.  The program could filter for a certain amount of experience on the bench, number of cases worked, give extra points for attendance and punctuality, deduct points for any time their rulings were over-ruled, stuff like that.  Party politics wouldn’t even need to come into it.
The only reason this isn’t done is that back when the founding fathers founded the nation, back before that, deep in the mists of time when people started doing things in the way that we know say “we’ve always done it like that,” they didn’t have computers, so it  was up to humans to make the decisions.
And the human beings who make the decisions are almost always assholes.  I trust computers more.