Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

These three things are not exactly the same, although which is which is very often  a question of perspective.  My opinions on the whole  matter also tend to be fluid.  Bullying,  of course, is always bad.  The internet variety, some say, is  even worse  than the old  fashioned, hands on variety.  I don’t know  about  that because at least it’s not likely to lead to physical injury, but sometimes people take it too far.  Maybe because it’s not physical so there’s a tendency to think it’s not real, and go totally  crazy with  it, but it has caused suicides.

Doxxing is posting somebody’s contact information, i.e. name, address, phone number, e-mail address.  In my calmer moments, between outrages, I think it should  be illegal.  It’s dangerous.  A mob could gather, somebody could get hurt.  Then along comes somebody like Martin Shkreli, who smiled as he jacked up drug prices, or a cop kills somebody for no reason at all, and I am usually very  happy that somebody publishes that stuff, because screw them.  It’s certainly resulted in exposing some of the Charlottesville Nazis, who the police probably would never have found.  There is a risk, though, of  mistaken identity.

Shaming, though, straight up shaming, seems to work.  I’m talking about  Joel Osteen.  He’s the fuckstick megapreacher who’s got a stadium for a church, seats 17,000, and it happens to be in Houston, near but not in a completely flooded area.

At first, he wasn’t going to open his  church to refugees, but he got so much shit on Twitter and Facebook and all of the others that  he reversed that decision.  Good.  Success.

BUT.  People are not stopping.  Now, I agree that just opening his church and doing  the bare minimum doesn’t necessarily make him a good person.  I don’t think he was a good person  before this, and it’s not proof that he’s had a total change of heart.  But, he did change his behavior.  The shaming worked.
So, people continue to  yammer on about  it is  kicking a man when he’s down.  When you want to housetrain a dog, you might force his nose down to smell his own poop and speak  to him (or her) sternly.  But once they’ve learned, you don’t keep pushing their nose in  it.  That might be counter-productive.
So, let Joel Osteen be for a while.  We can  always start the shaming again next time he acts like a dick.

So, North Korea fires a missile  right over Japan just to show they can do it, I suppose, which is the international equivalent, I suppose, of the  scene in the movie where somebody  fires a shot into the ceiling  and everybody shuts up.  It’s supposed to cause fear and focus attention.

Meanwhile, large sections of Houston  are still  underwater, fire ants are swarming in a weird congregation, it’s not  a mutation, just an adaptation, but great islands of them are floating along on top of the new waterways, and an alligator sanctuary might flood, so you’ve got alligators and fire ants and a chemical plant leaking toxins into the air, it’s like the first five minutes of an apocalyptic film,  and  the President comes down and says ‘Hey, great crowd, great turnout here’ when he speaks, and his wife is stylishly dressed, all in black but with a brown, leather jacket, sunglasses, and pair of heels as high and narrow as any you’ve ever seen.
So, nobody’s paying any attention to the funny, little, fat man with the square cut haircut.  Go ahead, lob all your missiles into the Pacific.  Hope you don’t hit anybody, but whatevs…
Maybe it’s just as well.  Any action taken re North Korea has a chance to go wrong, it’s just that volatile a situation.  A military  response would anger China, sanctions could backfire on the people, and threats and bluster are just counter-productive.

Especially in view of the fact that Trump tends to get things  wrong far and above what the average person would, maybe inaction  is the  best action, and the best way to  secure inaction is just not to pay attention.
Sorry, Kimbo.  Nobody’s got time to  deal with your nonsense right now.

I’ve seen the flooding in  Houston characterized as ‘biblical,’ which means, apparently, really bad, huge, massive, awesome, epic.  Well, as much  as I  dislike hyperbole, this is a big one, for sure.  The city has been turned into a lake.  Overpasses are underwater.  Boats glide the surface over entirely submerged cars.  People are dead.  Tens of  thousands are homeless, at least temporarily  and some probably longer than that.
And it’s still  raining.

You can’t actually blame Trump for the storm, but his anti-government attitude has made the recovery harder and will, going forward, make it harder still.  But Trump is a bump  in the road.  When Bush suffered no repercussion despite his criminal negligence during Katrina, it became almost inevitable that a Trump would come  along.
The larger issue, of course, is  global  warming, and  I still see people arguing that this hurricane is no different than other hurricanes and that we really shouldn’t worry about it.  It’s not the natural world  which  is killing  us.  The natural world is completely indifferent.  It’s the idiots among us, who are actually against trying to make sensible improvements, that will do us  in  in the end.
Here’s the part that  I  don’t understand:  we’ve had the technology to move water from one place to another at least as long ago as ancient Rome, and I’m sure the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians had some ideas  in  that direction as well.  We have pipes.  We have pumps.  How  is it we do not have a comprehensive, world wide system for moving water  from places where it is unwanted to places where it  is?  Why is it that when a city like Houston is suddenly inundated with water – salt or fresh – that that water isn’t immediately drawn off, filtered and purified, and dropped off  someplace where it could be used, like Kansas or Wyoming?
I’m sure it’s a bit more complicated than I’ve made it sound but, if we can put men on the moon, pinpoint planets that are light years away, and have thousands of robots dancing in perfect unison, we should  be able to do that.

Today was a good day.  Not too hot, just about right, didn’t rain – perfect for a bike ride, which is what we did.  Helena wanted to repeat an itinerary we tried last year (I think it was last year, maybe two years ago) but that time we got ridiculously lost and it took us hours and hours to get back to where we  knew where we were, which was still an  hour from home.  This time, we had the kids with us, so even more important to  get it right.

We had a few arguments about which way to go, most of which I lost because nobody trusts my sense of direction, I don’t know  why (yes, I do)  and I don’t know if we took precisely the best route, but we stopped for a while beside a stream and watched two dogs swimming, and had a mini-picnic on the lawn beside a Kaufland, and managed to stay in parkland probably 80% of the way,  and so it was a good route whether or not  it  was precisely the one planned.
Then, at home, accomplished a goal that’s been at the back of my mind for at least a year now, which was to put links to all of my poetry books on my website at http://www.gurukalehuru.com.  Actually, Helena did that, and it didn’t take her long at all, the reason for the delay is just that I’m a moron who doesn’t know  how to use a computer.
Anyway, they are there, they can all be read for free, and I would urge everybody to check them out.

I’m pretty sure every Berniecrat with a blog is writing about this same thing tonight, but I don’t care.  This is important.

The judge, Judge Zloch, in the Beck v. DNC lawsuit which has already been dragged out over a year (justice delayed is justice denied, it seems quite literally in this case) has ruled not to hear the case, even though he wrote in his ruling: “In evaluating Plaintiffs’ claims at this stage, the Court assumes their allegations are true—that the DNC and Wasserman Schultz held a palpable bias in favor of Clinton and sought to propel her ahead of her Democratic opponent”
In other words, he knows they are guilty, but doesn’t care. It’s outrageous.

His justifications were more technical than substantial.  “No concrete injury?”  What did he expect, for the plaintiffs to roll in in wheelchairs with fake neck braces or something?  If you don’t actually get run over by a truck, you’re not allowed to sue?

What the DNC did was way beyond garden variety dirty politics.  They decided the winner before the primaries had started.  Of course, they still had primaries, because they wanted the voters to think they had a choice, even though we didn’t.  If this had been professional sports, somebody would be banned for life.
I certainly hope there is an appeal, and this horrible, horrible decision is overturned.  But today  is a dark day.  No  doubt about that.