Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Susan Collins, the very unreliable and less than people friendly Senator from Maine, who is quite likely to betray her gender in the next day or two, has said the FBI report on Kavanaugh is ‘thorough.’
That is absurd.  We, in the general public, know it wasn’t thorough, and we aren’t even allowed to see the thing.  So, you may ask, how can we know it wasn’t thorough if we aren’t even allowed to see it?
It didn’t even take a week.  I don’t recall, I was only 9 at the time, but I think even the Warren report took longer than that, and that was a total whitewash.  How much can you even investigate in a week?  Are we going to stop the investigation into a cure for cancer because it’s taken longer than a week?
We know that there are scores of people, including numerous classmates of Kavanaugh, who the FBI has refused to hear.  Not failed to investigate, actually refused to hear.  They were prepared to testify that Kavanaugh was a heavy drinker in high school and college, in fact a nasty and belligerent drinker, which means this whole church-going sober Sam routine he pulled out during the one-day (yes, just one-day) hearing on Dr. Ford’s accusation, was a steaming pile of bullshit.  The legal term for a steaming pile of bullshit, if it takes place under oath, is perjury.  But, the FBI refused to talk to those witnesses.  That’s not very ‘thorough.’
The FBI didn’t talk to either Ford or Kavanaugh as part of their investigation.   They’re the two  people most directly involved in the case. What kind of an investigation is that?  Not a thorough one.
So, when Susan Collins says it was a thorough investigation, she is either lying through her teeth or she’s got a damned strange definition of thorough.  I suspect it’s the former.
But, we’ll never know.  Because it’s a secret.

I often hear the argument, from well-meaning people no doubt, that we (i.e. progressives) should not mock people’s appearance, or make jokes about their names, or call them stupid, or compare them to Nazis, because then we are ‘just as bad as they are.’

This strikes me as nonsense.  Of course we are better than they are.  For one thing, I am sure that, on the average, we are smarter, better read, and better informed on the issues.  I know there are exceptions to this – I know some intelligent right wingers and even more who will advocate one particular position which is at odds with the progressive agenda, and I have known progressives to make stupid arguments, but as a general rule our signs at rallies are correctly spelled, and left wing memes make much more sense than right wing ones.
More important, though, is intent.  We are in favor of preserving the environment, they are in favor of destroying it.  Preserving it would not only be better for human beings, it would be better for any life form that breathes oxygen.
We are in favor of ending wars and living together in peace with all people on the planet.  They are in favor of bombing the shit out of everybody, just because we’ve got the bombs.  An experiment was done once where pollsters made up a country and asked people if the U.S. should bomb them.  A horrifying percentage of people said yes, and it’s as certain as sunrise that they were all right wingers.
We are against police killing black people, they scream about ‘blue lives matter.’  We are opposed to sexual assault. They are apparently, shockingly, O.K. with it.
Of course we are better than they are.  It’s not even close.
It is counter-productive to criticize each other over tactics, or because somebody needs to vent and swear and rant against an unjust world.  We should remember we’re all on the same side, more or less, and keep the movement moving.

I was pretty jazzed when I read that Amazon was giving all its workers big raises, at least all those in the U.S. and the U.K., even part time and seasonal employees.  “Damn,” I thought, “Bernie can make things happen even without being president.  The man is a miracle worker.”

Then I started seeing a lot of bitching in the comments sections, like ‘why should we applaud Jeff Bezos for finally doing the bare minimum’ and ‘he probably won’t do anything to change working conditions’ or ‘ONLY $15.  He’s worth over $100 billion’ and I thought, dang, there’s just no pleasing some people.  This is because I frequent lots of left wing sites, so as left wing as some of my friends think I am, there I am among people who are further left, and angrier, than I.

Then I started seeing something a bit more disturbing.  Amazon employees (possibly right wing trolls posing as Amazon employees, but I don’t think so – they could spell) talking about how  it wasn’t entirely a good deal, since some bonuses and stock options had been cut.  My original thought about that was “The people in the warehouses were getting stock?”  Maybe they didn’t have it as bad as I thought they did.  Hey, can’t afford rent but I’ve got stock.
Anyway, I don’t know how it all breaks down, but I’m guessing not everybody’s as happy with it as everybody else, and certainly Bezos is doing it partly for public relations (which part I’m O.K. with), and maybe he’s taking back with the left hand what was given with the right (which is very uncool, however much of it is true).
But, seems to me, it’s exactly what was being asked for.  $15 an hour.  And that’s kind of a big deal.

I hate to be writing about the Kavanaugh case again, but a quick perusal of Facebook, my usual source for news, indicates that nothing else of significance is happening in the world.  800 dead in Indonesia? eh, whatever.
The sex charges are all he said, she said, and she also said, and her, too, and maybe a couple of  others, but there’s no video, and even that is not enough to convict these days.  Police get away with murder all the time despite being filmed doing it.
So, we all know he’s guilty, but can’t do  anything about it.  Except for the perjury.  That’s a much more easily provable charge, and there’s a ton of it.
The yearbook stuff, for starters.  Everybody knows what the verb ‘to Ralph’ means, and I’m sure nobody thought it had anything to do with his sensitive stomach.  Also, it doesn’t matter whether he ever had beer poured into his asshole – boof does not mean fart, so he lied about that.  Also, Renate alumnus.  Renate, who didn’t know  about the yearbook slander until just now, says he never got anywhere with her.  So, that was a lie, but in the yearbook, so, not under oath.
There were many others.  “Never drank on weekdays,” is contradicted by his own calendar, as is “never attended a gathering like that.”  My personal favorite is when he said he hadn’t listened to Ford’s testimony before appearing to give his semi-coherent, embarrassing defense.  He was listening to it, in  the Dirksen building, with lots of other people present, who have called him on it.  Boom, that’s perjury.  That’s enough to block him from the Supreme Court, that’s enough to get him disbarred and make him lose the judgeship he’s got now.  This would be an eminently satisfactory result.
There’s other stuff, too, from before.  E-mails about government employees, torture, political shenanigans, stuff like that, dating back the the early 2000s.  Stuff he’s lied about, at various times.  Under oath.  That’s perjury.  They should nail his ass for that.  Because they can.

I’m reading ‘We’ by ….well, I think it’s Zamyatin, or something like that.  Russian, from around 1921 or so.  It’s influence on Orwell is obvious, he makes a big deal out of the 24 hour clock, and 1984 opens with ‘The clock struck 13…’  I’m not sure it was the very first sentence, but near.  And of course the setting was the same: a heavily regulated, totally conformist, nightmare society.
I also felt it might have influenced Huxley’s Brave New World (the heroes of both were described as having exceptionally hairy  hands, IIRC), but Huxley said he’d never heard of it at the time he wrote BNW.
Orwell admitted that it was an influence.  I suspect it was somehow on Huxley, too, with the zeitgeist, the spirits of  ideas floating on the mid 20th century air.
It’s good sometimes to look at the present from the past, when we were supposed to be the future.  It’s instructional.  One-state is like the singularity, and they’re talking about sending an ark up into  space, so those are still themes of science fiction, but they talk about the Venutians and Uranians, so it’s a reminder that in 1921 we still didn’t have a clear idea what was out there, had no idea of the atmospheres, surfaces  and temperatures on other planets.  We also had no knowledge of exoplanets, or distant galaxies.
We are expanding, we are not contracting.  The future is brighter than it  is dark.