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It’s not new news, this has been  the rumor on the left, the big hubbub in conspiracy circles, since before the Democratic convention even.  Sure seems to have caught fire today, though.

I was seeing it all over the place, but I  was checking sources, and most just seemed to be virulently anti-Hillary sites, which I don’t mind reading, I’m pretty virulent in  my  dislike of her as well, but they’re not always the gold standard  in journalistic restraint, if you  know  what I mean.

Then, I saw a piece on it in Forbes, and then read a piece in the Washington Post.  The post set out to try to  debunk the whole story.  The story is this:  Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, approved  sale of a uranium mining company, which comprises about 20% of American uranium capacity, to a Russian mining company.  In return, she  got  a big, fat donation to the Clinton Foundation.
The debunking went like this:  “Well, yeah, sure it’s a huge amount, but Hillary’s name isn’t on anything and there’s no proof she even knew about it, and besides,  Trump is worse, so there.”
I’m not even exaggerating much.

I doubt  very much if Hillary Clinton  will do  jail time over it.  As the Washington Post pointed out, it’s hard to prove a quid pro quo, and it’s even harder to  get a  conviction against a rich, well connected D.C. politician.
But I  do hope  it  gets thoroughly investigated, and I  hope she feels  the wrath of public outrage.  That’s about  it.

On the one hand, I feel  a bit sorry  for Trump.   For weeks, people are carping about what a shitty  human being he is, interfering with aid efforts in Puerto Rico, golfing, not even noticing the wild  fires in  California,  golfing, being an arrogant  fat  prick, golfing, not bothering to acknowledge the deaths of four American soldiers who died in Niger, golfing,  saying Obama never called the families of dead soldiers, golfing, and then when he gives in and calls the families, people start complaining that he wasn’t ’empathetic’ enough,  as if  he’s expected to know  what a word like empathetic even means.  It  must seem to him  that  he can’t catch  a break.

I mean, all he said was “Well, he knew what he  was signing up for,” which is sort of like “he died doing what he loved.”  You just can’t please some people.

To tell the truth, I thought his low point was  when he  was  making fun of the handicapped reporter, but that didn’t keep him from  being elected president.  (of course, the Democrats helped in  that department.  “You’ll vote for me and  like it, basement  dwelling losers” makes a shitty campaign slogan, in  retrospect.)

After that, it’s all been just floundering around oafishly, saying one asshole thing after another, but everyone is so  used to it by now it  seems normal.  I mean, nobody expected him to recite poetry or anything.

We exist on three levels.  Each of these levels has its own rules and characteristics, but each affects the other two in different, and significant ways.   They all exist in  the same time, and two of them share, often uncomfortably, the same space.
The first level is the real, physical world, the water we drink and the air we breathe, the environment in which  we evolved.  The trees, the plants, the animals, the food we eat.  It is the first because it came first chronologically  and, without it, the other two would not exist.

The second is the world of human beings, society, civilization.  It is houses and cities and cars and TV and mobile phones.  Most people spend most of their time at this level and that’s understandable.  We are human and the most important thing to us is to interact with, and be approved of by, other human beings.
People who spend most of their time at level one, like Bear Grills or Cody Lundeen, are entertaining to watch on TV and, if you know somebody  like that, they’d be the first person you’d invite on a camping trip.  In the unfortunate event of the Earth getting hit by an asteroid, you’d definitely want to  have them close by.  However, they really are a tiny minority.
Level three is what Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky and French philosopher Pierre Teihard de Cardin called the noosphere.  It is the world of words, the world of ideas.  Like level one, there are few people who spend most of their time there.  Some artists and dreamers are quite familiar with the place but anyone who spends too much time there finds it difficult to return to level two, and you need to pop back in  now and again for  a sandwich, at least.

Level three is the least essential, but the most interesting.  It contains the blueprints for the future of existences  1 and 2 just as certainly as the fruit contains the  seeds of its next iteration.  Without it, we are nothing more than animals who wear clothes and live in houses.

When Woody Allen made his comment the other day re: the Harvey Weinstein case, saying ‘we shouldn’t let this turn into a witch hunt,’ he was widely and instantly mocked, because that is the nature of  social media, the witch-hunty nature of social  media.  Of course, Woody Allen.  First, he played a borderline pervert in most of his films, at any rate a weird, older guy who inexplicably was romantically linked with smoking hot younger women.  (I, too, am a weird, older guy who is inexplicably married to a hotter, much younger woman.)  Also, he was accused of molesting his step-daughter when she was 7, but it was never proven in court, and might well  have  been  a trumped up charge by Mia Farrow, who was pissed off because he  was having an affair with her adult step-daughter, which everyone found really skeezy at the time but that was 1997 and Allen and Soon-Yi Previn are still married.

A witch hunt, he said.  Well, seeing all of the ‘me,too’ comments on Facebook today, it’s hard to deny there is a serious problem.  Men are often cruder than  we should  be, and some are, no doubt about it, creeps.

BUT.  One of my female friends added an extension to her ‘me, too’ comment saying that men should post and apologize for all  the times we’ve made crude, sexist jokes or stared at a woman’s breasts instead of looking her in the eye.  Partly, I  thought, that might  have been a humble brag on her part, because she is, indeed, a lady with quite ample breasts, but mostly I just felt it was witch-hunty.
Sure, guys need to be a bit classier, not just shouting lewd comments at women they don’t even know, and refrain from touching women who don’t want to be touched, but we’re not going to stop being aware of women’s bodies, or the attractiveness thereof, and the difference between a sex joke and a sexist joke is a fine line, that not everybody draws in the exact same place.

In short:  women are perfectly justified in objecting to male behavior.  They are unreasonable if they actually expect some kind of a change in our biology.

It was an extended family Sunday, which started with a half  written poem and ended with heavy metal.  It was a beautiful day of Babileto, that 5th season in a year that only has four of  them, so that in Babileto, you want to get  outside and do  something physical because, in the words of the Starks, ‘winter  is coming.’  Babileto means ‘grandmother’s summer’, which we would call in America Indian Summer.

It’s true that the day started off with a half written poem, because in my last dream before awakening, I had just taken a turn, and was walking along a hard, dirt path.  I was also wearing a bowler hat, for some silly reason.  Either side of the path, there was a low hedge and a lawn of bright, bright green.  And the single line, which I am certain will eventually be part of a poem, was ‘open your eyes, and see the  hidden green.’

My nephew Dylan was coming to town, he’s the drummer in a heavy metal band, and Helena and I managed to hook up with him about 4, went out for a drink with him and 3 friends, then walked around and showed him a bit of the center.  Then, around 10 p.m., Sam and I went to hear him play.  Good band.  They know how to wail. But, not really  our style.

Meanwhile, Helena went to pick up Isabel, who is back from Scotland.  Then she looped back and pick  us up.  And now, we four are under one roof again and all is right with the world.