Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Disclaimer: if I’m talking about American TV shows, I’m likely to be months, or even years, behind current.  Doesn’t matter.  This isn’t a new phenomenon, and I’m sure it’s not going away soon, either.  But, it’s blatant, it’s wrong, and it deserves to be confronted.

As I’m sure everybody has noticed, television is absolutely dominated by cop shows.  Most of them are gory dramas, like all of the CSI and NCIS incarnations, where a dedicated band of lovable misfits does amazing and unbelievable (you’d think all the criminal masterminds would have learned by now not to wrap their dead bodies in  carpets made of fibers that could only have come from one manufacturer in  New Jersey) things with technology to catch the evil psycho.
I don’t believe for one second that the general public has such an insatiable appetite for murder and gore.  If cop shows were 10% of the shows on TV, I’d find it believable.  As it is, though, there has to be another motive for the networks to show these shows over and over again.  It is copraganda.

The government wants us to love and respect the police and so, instead of asking the police to be lovable and respectable (Which is not what they want.  They  just want us to think that) they put out massive amounts of propaganda to say, over and over again, the cops are the good guys, the cops are the good guys, and sometimes they are cops with some supernatural ability, and sometimes they are really hot lady cops, but we’re always supposed to love them.

There’s been an ad on  for the last few days that’s bothered me in  particular.  It’s for a show called S.W.A.T. and it starts with a policeman giving a speech, in somber tones, probably the daily briefing, saying “A 17-year-old youth named Raymont Harris was accidentally shot and killed by team leader Buck Spivey…” and then it cuts to  a cop, the black guy from Criminal Minds, saying “It was an accident…” and I’m sitting here at home, thinking “Oh, no, it wasn’t, we’ve seen the damned video, seen it hundreds of times now, that Buck Spivey is a stone cold racist murderer but he probably won’t do a day in jail or even lose his job because all you pigs are just going to cover up for him.”

I’m sure I’m not the only one thinking that.  But, still, it’s a lot cheaper for them to  keep shoving these shows down our throats than to actually reform the police which, as I’ve pointed out above, it not  actually their objective.
So, I don’t expect to see any changes soon.  But, I think they’ve reached the limits of propaganda effectiveness.  There’s no longer enough of reality  in their presentation to be at all convincing.

I’m surprised that anybody’s surprised by Michelle Wolf’s hosting of the White House Correspondent’s Dinner roast.  It’s a roast.  That’s the whole idea.  The speaker is supposed to make fun of the guest.  It’s tradition.  That’s what a roast is.

Otherwise, they’d have to call it ‘The  White House Correspondent’s Dinner with no roast,’ and that just doesn’t have the same ring to it at all.

My favorite line was “Mike Pence  is  what happens when  Anderson Cooper isn’t gay.”  She had a few zingers,  but as roasts go, it was pretty mild.
Does anybody remember Steven Colbert’s turn as host (by the way, who  is Michelle Wolf?) when George W Bush was the butt of his jokes but he seriously took the press  corps to task, something along the lines of “That’s not journalism, that’s typing.”  I don’t remember the exact line, it was much smoother than that.

Part of the problem is that this  is such a bizarre, and twisted version  of the presidency, that exaggeration is impossible, and exaggeration is an  important element of insult comedy.  You can’t make fun of Sarah Huckabee Sanders for being stupid or fat or having a lazy  eye or lying her ass off as a full time job, because everybody knows all those things.  You can’t make jokes about Trump being stupid and not able to speak English and having to pay for sex and having wee, tiny little fingers because everybody knows these things, and  besides, the big cheeto-head wasn’t even there.

Part of the problem is  that this  administration, this most  comical administration in the history of modern governance, does not,  itself,  have  a sense of humor. Trump  certainly  doesn’t.

We are in  deep shit.

We went for a bike ride today, it was in some ways a lovely bike  ride, we cruised along a little stream, through a lovely  park, stopped for a snack, then again for some ice cream, then…I  had to walk  the bike  home because my chain  broke.

It was weird, just poking along when I heard a ‘bang!’ and then my feet were turning the pedals but I  could feel there was no  connection to movement and since I was going uphill  at the time, that was an immediate stop.
But there was one moment I wanted to write about  and  that was before the chain broke, we were stopped in the park.  Had a ham and cheese sandwich, a small tomato, and a cup  of tea, then  walked over to the little brook.  I began to think of it as a river, which is what it would look like to  little people, like, you know, hobbits or leprechauns and whatever, and I guess part of the reason that whole meme (old meaning of the word) is so prevalent in human folklore: because there are streams, and  children like to play beside streams.  They are like practice rivers.

And that led me to think of scale; the streams are  dwarfed by the rivers, and the world of  the stream suddenly becomes insignificant, and then the river is dwarfed by the ocean and  the  ocean by they  sky, and on  beyond our atmosphere, making the sky  itself seem small, a billion billion points of light are shining out  of an endless sea and we are all very  insignificant  little beings indeed.

So maybe that’s why there are so many ‘little people’ stories.  We are little people.

Now, I know that when I read things from famous people on Facebook, I  know  that thousands, maybe millions of  other people are reading the same thing, across multiple media, and that the famous person is not likely to read my comments personally, but I respond sometimes as if they do.

I am a former fan of Robert Reich and I still consider him intelligent, and a top expert on  economics.  But, it was a simple plea to end the electoral college that set me off.  Now, if I  was forced to choose, up or down, on  whether or not to end the electoral college, I guess I might willingly see it  consigned to the dust heap of history.

However, it is on a long list of issues: Israel, abortion, guns, circumcision, toilet roll over or under, and others, that I just don’t  deem important  enough  to dominate an election cycle.  The important issues are  those that affect everybody, every day.  The economy, the environment, health care and maybe education and infrastructure.
Robert Reich knows that.  He knows that the electoral college is not that big of a deal, and he’s not seriously worried  about changing  it.  He’s just, like all of the die-hard Hillary people, is still trying to rehash the 2016 election, not because of any unfairness in the process, but because his candidate lost.

“Shut up, Reich,” I wrote.  And  I’m sure I’m not the only one.

The comment thread, however, confirmed for me something I’ve long suspected, and it needs to be pointed out.  A lot of people don’t understand what  the electoral college actually is.  It is not a bunch  of people  who sit in a room and decide together who the president should be.  In fact, it is pretty much tied to the popular vote – state by state.

In each state, the major parties appoint a slate of  electors, which I think is equivalent to their number of congressional representatives, which means even Alaska, which has  fewer people than most large cities, has threes.  So, whichever party wins the popular vote in that state, their slate of electors will cast that states number of electors for that party.  So, it’s popular vote, but state by  state.

Theoretically, I suppose, an elector could change their mind and defy their party.   It’s happened once or twice in American history, and never enough to make a difference.
In any  event, Hillary knew the rules and could have  campaigned accordingly, except that she didn’t.  So, there is no use at all  bitching about it now.

Levi Tilleman is a progressive who wants to run for congress from Colorado.  He is a qualified person, has worked in government, and wants health care for everybody.  So, of course the powers that be in the Democratic Party are trying to keep him out.  They have decided that the nomination should go to Jason Crow, the more ‘business friendly’ candidate.  The primary, of course, hasn’t been held yet.  The voters haven’t weighed in.  But the powers that be in the Democratic party ‘have decided.’

This is not just an assumption on my part, or a paranoid conspiracy theory.  Steny Hoyer, a very powerful and well connected Democrat, met with Levi Tilleman recently and tried to persuade him to drop out of the race.  “This is the way it’s done all the time,” he said.  How do we know what Hoyer said?  Because Tilleman had the presence of mind to record their conversation.

Once upon a time, this would have been a major scandal.   It means the primaries are just for show, because the Democrat establishment has already decided who the candidates will be.  For one thing, that is extremely foolish.  It’s why they lost the presidency in 2016, it’s why they’ve lost the House, and the Senate, and a clear majority of the governorships, and it’s why they’re going to keep on losing.  But, foolishness aside, it is totally unethical.  People have a right to vote, and they have a right for their vote to count.

Hoyer (and the rest of the Democrat powers that be) are trying to make sure we don’t have that right.  I hope he gets hit with a progressive challenger in his own district, and I hope Tilleman kicks Crow’s ass in the primary.

Not holding my  breath, though.  These people are deeply entrenched and they’ve got rich backers.  They may have to lose a few more elections before they get the message.