Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Well, it’s going to take some time to sort through all the information released by Wikileaks today, and lately I’ve been feeling a bit of the old information overload. Today I was actually watching animal videos and a 13 year old piano prodigy and stuff like that, because my mind is numb.
But, the gist of it seems to be that the CIA is at least as out of control as their worst detractors (I put myself in that category) have long suspected, and maybe worse.
Wasting huge amounts of money, spying on everybody, even American citizens (hell, why not Trump? There’s still no hard evidence of that that I’ve seen, but in view of the long list of shit, it would not be surprising), and spreading malware and viruses. When Facebook fucks up, maybe it’s not Facebook’s fault, eh?
I’m still short on details. I expect to revisit this subject in a day or two.
But my general view of the CIA is that expressed by Dustin Hoffman, in the role of Ben Stiller’s dad in “Meet the In-Laws II,” (not as funny as the first one but definitely plenty of laugh out loud moments) when he said to Robert de Niro “Tell me one thing the CIA has ever done that was a success,” and Robert de Niro (the retired CIA would-have-been-seen-as-a-horrible-monstrous-piece-of-shit-asshole-if-it-hadn’t-been-a-comedy guy) was left speechless, couldn’t come up with a thing.
Starting with the overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953, which destroyed Iran’s chances of becoming the nice, prosperous, liberal democracy it was on its way to being, through the assassination of Lumumba, which just added a few more years of bitterness and suffering before the Belgians were kicked out anyway, Viet Nam which we now know, know for a fact was based on a big lie, the Gulf of Tonkin incident never happened, the overthrow of Allende in Chile, which did not improve matters for the average Chilean, and greatly worsened them for many, especially the thousands who died.
I’m not going to mention the Kennedy assassination or 9/11, as that would require presumption of guilt without proof, but I’ve got my suspicions. (whoops, guess I did mention them.)
If the CIA were disbanded, it’s loss would be a clear gain for all mankind, and its absence would not be noticed at all.

Just got back from Alchemy, my first Monday of every month poetry reading, and it was excellent. New location, again. I liked it because it’s in a basement, which reminds me off the old days at the Napa Bar, before they kicked us upstairs and killed the vibe. It means you’re disassociated from the public bar (there is, at Cafe Soda, a bar in the basement but it was quiet, more or less) where the poet on the stage is competing with private conversations at tables where nobody cares about poetry, even a little bit, or is perhaps even hostile to it.
It was a great evening crowdwise and performancewise, too. I went armed with two short, silly poems and one which I consider a work of great social and political import, as I believe it was Janis Joplin said. But, as the evening progressed, I realized that my poem wasn’t going to knock them out, I was going to be like the busker in the parking lot after a rock concert lets out, people have already heard louder and crazier that evening so there’s nothing you can do, or say, that’s going to top it.
Still, my silly poems got a good laugh and I do like the last one, all about transcendance, moving from one state of mind to another, and higher, it will go in a book at some point. So, that’s a win.
Saw some old friends, made some new ones. A great evening.

I was just glancing at an article about psychology, just glancing, not reading, because it’s such a common theme that it’s boring, and I don’t give it a great deal of credence in any event. The title of the piece was Modern Life is Bad for Mental Health, or maybe it was Is Modern Life Bad for Mental Health, because it’s popular these days to phrase statements as questions, which leaves the author with plausible deniability. This little tidbit stood out to me: “…ever since the 1930s, young people in America have reported feeling increasingly anxious and depressed.”
Well, of course. Since the 1930s, maybe even starting a decade or two later, as the first half of the 40s was not a great time for introspection, that there was any place to report problems like ‘depression’ or ‘anxiety,’ and stuff like schizophrenia was just referred to as “completely nuts” and it was avoided because it would land you in an asylum, which was sort of like prison.
Depression was just ‘sadness’ and a certain amount of it was inevitable. No internet, no TV, and even movies were still in black and white. Swing bands, big bands were all the rage, that was the cutting edge, and rock and roll hadn’t been invented yet. There was no fast food, and the minimum wage was less than nothing. Who wouldn’t be depressed. But, that was not enough to be labeled as mentally disturbed and you wouldn’t what it to have been because, as I said, asylums were like prison.
Anxiety was just nervous, jittery, maybe ‘all wound up inside’ and it wasn’t such an unusual state of affairs. All sorts of things could knock you out of the game, from disease to unemployment to getting kicked in the head by a horse (think about that – pretty much nobody gets kicked in the head by a horse, any more. Progress.)
It’s possible that modern life is making people a bit crazy, but this article did nothing to prove it. There’s a huge difference between what gets reported and what’s really out there, and there always has been.

Honeybees. We need them. It would be an ecological disaster if they became extinct. And we have the capability to make sure they don’t go extinct and it wouldn’t cost a damn thing. Just ban the pesticides which, (we know this, this is not speculation, they’ve tested it and it’s true) are the root cause of hive collapse syndrome. Voila. The Earth is saved.
But, makers of pesticides always have a politician or two on their payroll, and banning damaging pesticides and saving honeybees is not that high on their list of priorities.
But there are at least two solutions to any problem and saving the honeybees is only one of the ways in which this problem (the fertilization of the flowers and the continuation of life on Earth as wee know it, can be solved.
Some scientist are already working on drone bees. Of course, I prefer the natural kind and I think we’re treading on dangerous ground if we implement that solution (as oppose to, say, just banning the damned pesticides), but I can see certain advantage. No sting, for one. But, no honey. Which would suck.
Maybe we could genetically modify the bees, so that they still make honey but never sting.
Or, we could just ban the damned pesticides.

It’s Friday night, the weekend is under way, no train to catch tomorrow morning, no specific time I have to crawl out of bed, I will get eight hours and experience total rejuvenation, waking up somewhere in my 20s, and it was most definitely a spring day, I stood for a while by a pond in a park and watched the ducks and some weird water rodent, it’s not a muskrat, I’ve said that before and been corrected, not a Capybara, not the right part of the world, and not a beaver although something that looks like a smaller version of it but without the buck teeth, flat tail and possibly, engineering skill, but they did seem to have a tunnel network.
So, it is a moment of beginnings, one of those rare intersections of time and space, personal and historical history, when all that went before is sheered away from all that will be, but come to think of it, every moment is like that for somebody, somewhere in the world and, in a very abstract sense, every moment is like that for everybody, in every moment, but that’s O.K.
Love you all. Bonne Nuit.