Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

It’s Friday which is wonderful because it’s the day before Saturday and Sunday, so after I finished teaching my Kbely kids, I came home and smoked a big, fat doober.  It’s a normal and natural thing to do on Friday, and I have cut back in recent years from smoking like every day, before classes even, no matter when.  Nonetheless, it’s  not good for productivity.
See, I’ve got a bit of a to-do list for this weekend, which consists of working on two books of poetry which are written, just need to be spruced up for publishing, the good one is almost done and the crap one, Rheets 2017, which is a writing project I do every year made up of one rhyming tweet per day (hence the title, Rheets being a portmanteau word for rhyming tweets), and which is originally meant to plug this blog right here, is in the mid-stages; reading and proofreading a friend’s book, which I kind of started this morning but I’m still on the introduction; choosing some poetry for a reading Monday night and it would be great if I could write something new, but you can’t force the muse; and probably some other stuff I can’t think of  at the moment because one good joint deserves another and before you  know it  it’s half past midnight and I’ve accomplished nothing except a few snarky comments on Facebook, and that neither does anything  to improve the world or even my situation in it, but there it is.  Tomorrow’s another day.

So, Don Trump, Jr.’s wife is divorcing him.  I actually saw somebody say “This is a private matter between two people” and so we shouldn’t comment on it.  Well, screw that.  He’s a dirtbag who shoots elephants for kicks, he’s a big part of the world’s most dangerous crime family, and somebody thinks we’re not going to mock him for getting divorced.  Think again.

It’s uncontested, meaning they’ve probably worked out a cash settlement between them.  I hope she took him for a bundle, but I doubt she took him for enough for it to hurt, or it wouldn’t have been uncontested.
She said it was ‘because of his travel and his twitter presence.’  I can’t imagine what her problem with travel is.  I should imagine the more he travels, the more time she doesn’t have to spend with him, which could only be good for the marriage.  The twitter account comment interests me, though.  I mean, it can’t be just that he has a twitter account.  That’s not an unusual thing.  So, it  must be the things he says on twitter.  That, I can  understand.  Constantly, she is reminded that she married a moron, an obnoxious, offensive, right wing moron, and it probably embarrasses her.
I hope to hear more news on this, but the ‘uncontested’ part means we probably  won’t.

In more lighthearted news, Bernie Sanders showed  up, unscheduled, at a gun control rally in D.C., where the crowd  was mostly high school students, and the crowd went nuts.  Hillary Clinton couldn’t have done that.  Joe Biden couldn’t have done that.  It’s not just that Bernie is always on the right side of the issues and constantly fighting for the people.  It’s that he’s got something damn near nobody in the Democratic party has these days: charisma.  That counts for everything in politics.

He changed our view of the universe forever, and now he is  gone.  Stephen Hawking, 76, passed  away on Pi Day, Einstein’s birthday, early this morning.  It  not that surprising, really.  Doctors didn’t think he’d  live to see 25.
I sometimes wonder  how  much his genius, his  uniqueness, was attributable to  his  disability.  Did being deprived of a normal, physical  life, like  just  the  walking  around part, push  him  to live, and do greater  things, inside his own mind?  Perhaps that’s part of it, but a lesser intellect couldn’t have  done  it, no  matter what.

So, the Big Bang theory.  I’m not really a believer.  Well, yes and no.   I accept that the universe (this universe) began with a big  bang.  Whether all the stars and planets will continue to fly  apart from each other until you have large numbers of  barren rocks stripped of atmospheres, drifting in an impossibly large sea of  empty space, or whether all the stars  and planets will fall back into each other into one impossibly dense singularity, which  explodes in another big bang, and this process goes on forever, I don’t know.

What I believe in is  the  flag paradox.  Say  an intrepid astronaut from the 24th century makes it out to the edge of the universe.  He pokes a flag out over the edge, so now THAT’S the edge of the  universe.  He makes his way out to the new edge of the universe and extends the flag again.  And so on forever because the universe is infinite and it’s turtles all the way down.  Or, he’s sticking his flag  out into emptiness, but suppose you travel another quintillion grazillion light years or so beyond the edge, out into the emptiness, you’re  bound to strike another universe sooner or later.
Because if our universe began with a massive explosion after all its matter was condensed into one small dot, there is no reason to think that other universes weren’t as well, somewhere far away across the silence.  Nothing is forever.

Wherever the human race winds up, however, we will be able to thank Stephen Hawking for leading the way for awhile.  Farewell, brave genius.  You  did well.

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson got fired today, which is not terrible news, because he is an asshole.  How do we know he is an asshole?  He was Secretary of State under Donald Trump.  Of course he is an asshole.

But he wasn’t enough of an asshole for Trump.  He was fired (via Twitter, because that’s how the Donald rolls) because he said that Russia was behind the poisoning of a Russian spy and his daughter in England.  (Both are still in critical condition in hospital)  That wasn’t specifically stated as the reason, but the fact that he said it yesterday and was fired today and Trump never says a bad word about his friend Putie-Tutie is a strong indicator.
He’s being replaced by CIA chief Mike Pompeo, who is no doubt just as big an asshole, and he is being  replaced by torture vixen and destroyer of evidence Gina Haspel.  Apparently,  there is an absolutely endless supply of monstrous people bent on  destroying human civilization.

It’s not an outrageous assertion to say that Russia tried to kill Sergei and Yulia Skripal.  Sergei had been a double agent, selling secrets to the British, and served time for it in Russia before being exchanged, and retiring in England.  The KGB is certainly capable of such an attack (as are MI6 -remember Edward Kelly, the CIA, and Mossad) and had motive.  I’ve heard it suggested that maybe MI6 sponsored the attack, maybe just to make the Russians look bad, or maybe they found out he was a triple agent, only pretending to help the British while secretly still working for the Russians, but that seems a stretch to me.

Occam’s Razor (meaning we’ll probably never know the truth for sure) says that the Russians did it.  Still, I don’t think it’s worth going to war over, or increasing tensions with Russia more than necessary over it.  It’s the spy game.  We’ve all seen the movies.  It’s all about assassinations and counter assassinations and all the big governments do it.
If the question is (and it always should be) how do we avoid this in future, I have two suggestions:  First, maybe Britain needs to do a better job of protecting its assets, like maybe giving them a fake name and not disclosing their address publicly.  Second, and this is the big one, we need less government secrecy all around.  If the Russians and British would just keep each other appraised of what they were doing, they wouldn’t have to employ spies at all, and might even become friends.  Same for the U.S., and everybody else.  There’s no need for secrets unless you’re planning on a war, and nobody should be planning any wars.

p.s. the title  of  this  blog is not original with me.  Somebody posted it on Facebook and I thought it was funny.

It was a very rainy day, and that made it feel even  more like Spring than yesterday, which  was warm and sunny, but I am informed that it’s going to get cold again  and by later this week we’ll be  right back  to freezing our asses off.

I wrote something a few days back about people not retracting fake news after its been shown to be fake, and today I found myself afoul of my own rule, because the internet is a tangled web, with lots of gray areas, and mass communication is something that all of us are learning as  we go along.  So, here is the ethical  dilemma:
I signed a petition against factory  farming which came with a  horror show photo of pigs  in very tight cages, and my very  argumentative nephew said it was fake.  So, a quick check of Snopes (never any  harm in that) shows that the photo is from  China, and the cages are just for transport to market.  So, point for Don.  But, Snopes goes on to talk about  horrific  factory farming conditions in America (and while we’re at it, improving conditions for Chinese pigs is a fair issue  as well), so I didn’t delete the article, even  though I came to it via a somewhat misleading picture.