Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

One of my New Year’s resolutions should be to be less inhibited in my writing because I sit for an hour trying to think of something to write my blog about, wanting to be relevant and all, and the whole point of writing a blog a day should be to break through the wall, to make it so writing comes as naturally as walking to the store, becomes a thing I  can do with my mind turned off, or at any rate in idle, as my fingers move almost by themselves across the keyboard.  It’s like a video  I  just watched of a young  girl who did push ups for 100 days because she was tired of people calling her scrawny.  She filmed it every day, of course, because that’s why I saw the video, but I say of course actually because that’s just what people do today  and that’s good.  A montage of a teen girl doing push ups is as  important to science, in its way, as time lapse photography of a caterpillar metamorphosing into a butterfly.  On the first couple of days, she was struggling to get through a push up or two, but by the hundredth day, she’s getting hands and feet of the grounds and clapping in the air, and doing plenty of them at speed.  Maybe more inspirational than educational, but we need  that, too.

In fact, that will be one of my New Year’s resolutions, because the list I  have now has several specific writing projects, but no that.  No  spontaneity, I mean.  I’m  not going to  start  doing push  ups every day.

Yes, the current administration is a shitstorm.  The great tax swindle, the loss of net neutrality, the hideously incompetent people appointed to so many key positions – it will  be surprising if America survives.

But what does that mean?  The middle half of the  North American continent in not going to slide into the ocean.  It’s not likely to be overrun  by Canadians.  No, the poor will continue to get poorer, and there will be more of them, and some people will die due to lack of health care, but it probably won’t be enough to spark  the needed revolution.  But, there is a bright side.

When Nikki Haley said “We’re going to be taking names,” the heads of 138 nations said “Go ahead, see if we fucking care.”  (those are nobody’s exact words, although Mexico’s former president, Vicente Fox, has said something similar)  That’s what their vote at the U.N. amounted to.
Trump didn’t get invited to an awards ceremony at the Lincoln Center, and he’s not being invited to Harry and Meghan’s wedding.  Even the old bullshit line “you don’t have to respect the president, but you have to respect the office” no longer holds true.  This is a good thing.  People should have, at the very least, sharp suspicions about their leaders.  Withering contempt is probably even better.
And, around the world, if people are not respecting the president, they are not showing the same deference to the United States, either.  This is probably a very good thing.

Countries should follow those countries which are doing good things to preserve the environment, like Costa Rica and Germany, countries who appreciate education like Finland and are striving for a better more humane economy like Iceland, countries that are building high speed rail networks like China, Japan and France, and countries which have totally legalized marijuana like Uruguay.
If the U.S. loses its position of world leadership due to Donald Trump, this will be good for the world and, in the long run, good for America.
It would still probably be a good idea to impeach him though, and if he could be sent to prison and have all his assets seized, that would be nice.

Outside of watching ‘Mr. Popper’s Penguins’ (which was totally predictable, silly  animal  fun) and not a very original film at all (You knew he was going to get back together with  his  family, you knew they couldn’t leave the penguins in the zoo) but it  certainly had some moments, and the Sherman  and Peabody  movie and Monster University, both of which  I’d seen  before, it wasn’t a very stimulating day culturally, although I  had  a few arguments about poetry  on Facebook.

An interesting debate  about whether  William Shakespeare was actually  the author of William Shakespeare’s works (I believe he was).  It started with  somebody  pointing out that there were no books in his will, which doesn’t really  strike me as too odd, there really weren’t a lot of books around at the  time, and he wrote plays and poetry.  Most people of his day wouldn’t  have owned  any  books.  Of  course, it’s a bit odd for a writer, but maybe he’d  given them to  friends before his death, or had some verbal  agreement.
They were saying that there was no actual proof of him authoring all those works, but on the  other hand  there’s no proof of  anybody else  authoring  them  either.  You  get back to the 16th  century and there’s no proof of a lot of stuff.  Was Joan of Arc delusional because of some bacteria in the milk or was she just a religious fanatic?  We’ll never know.  Was Elizabeth I really  a virgin?  We’ll never know.  Richard III, good  guy  or bad guy?  We’ll never know.  And I’m sure I  have written here  several times  my theory of the Gunpowder Plot (false flag, inside job).  We’ll never know.
So, doubters will  continue to doubt that Shakespeare could have been  a great enough genius to have been Shakespeare, and I can’t  prove them wrong.  Nonetheless, I  remain unconvinced.

There were a couple of articles I  looked at today which widened my world view, extended it into  the past a bit.  One about the excavation (I always wonder just how much  time needs to elapse before ‘grave robbing’ becomes ‘archaeology?  I believe there is an Andean Indian language in  which the word for archaeologist is, in fact, grave robber.’  I don’t spend too much time thinking about it, though.  If they dig up my bones a couple thousand years from now, I doubt I’ll be much bothered.) of a couple of bodies in an ancient Roman tomb, and it turns out they’re Chinese.  So, Marco Polo may have had some historical  significance, but it was not exactly  as if  he discovered China or anything.  Regular trade had probably been  going on for  a long, long time before  that.
The other one was the discovery of the ruins of a Roman (originally Greek) port, and it was apparently  a major commercial hub at the time.  I’d like to see it rebuilt, that could be awesome.   Maybe add some themed hotels, a sprinkling of discotheques, restaurants and casinos, and you’ve got ‘Ancient World, the Theme Park.  Just a thought.
The thing is, you piece these two bits of information together and you realize that along with  the Greeks and the Italians, the people on  these docks were merchants from the Orient, Africans, Egyptians, Berbers, Celts, Lebanese, Slavs and other assorted riff-raff.  Not so different from today.

I very often see posts on my Facebook feed railing against the electoral college, and I believe that liberals and, I’m sorry to say, even progressives are taking it way too seriously.  I often get it from Robert Reich, who is someone I’d like to believe is on our side.  His economic positions are right on, and he seems like a decent, fair-minded human being.  But, his pumping up of this  issue makes me think that maybe he is part of the Hillary Clinton-Goldman Sachs distraction machine.

The thing is, the electoral college is not the problem.  Sure, it’s a leftover from the 18th century, but so is paper money, the U.S. post office, and champagne.  Sure, it’s an awkward system that few people really understand, but so is particle physics.  The thing is, the electoral college is NOT the reason bad candidates get elected.  Hitler did not have an electoral college, and he got in.  On the U.S. side, Lincoln, both Roosevelts and Jimmy Carter were all chosen by the electoral college.  (whether they won the popular vote or not is irrelevant, so I’m not looking that up) So, it’s just as likely to come down on the side of the candidate you like as not.
The reason bad candidates get elected is that voters are gullible, there’s a lot  of big money in politics, and an absolutely endless supply of corrupt, greedy politicians willing to exploit those twin  weaknesses.
One candidate who’s been pointing this out (the money in politics and the corrupt, greedy politicians, I mean) for a long time now is Bernie Sanders.  But, I’m sure you all knew that.