Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

I saw one post today that was “11 Rules About How to Protest Against Trump” and mostly it was a list of Thou Shalt Nots, i.e. don’t make fun of his ridiculous hair, even though we’ve heard (I don’t think the NYT is an always accurate source, but he hasn’t denied it yet) that he uses a hair drug to which some of the possible side effects are mental problems, don’t make fun of his orange skin, don’t make dumb jokes about his name, etc… I saw another post that said we should not be protesting everything he does because we’ll burn ourselves out and even my current favorite writer, Caitlin Johnstone, (check her out) said something similar, decrying our hyperbolic statements and saying we were crying wolf and we all know how that story ends.
I disagree. There are many reasons to hate, dislike, be revolted by, and have total contempt for Donald Trump. You can hate him for his personality or his politics, his hypocrisy or his alleged illiteracy, his racism or his sexism, his opportunism, his conflicts of interest, his incompetence, or all of the above. We’ll all march together.
75% of the U.S. did not vote for him, and he’s fairly universally despised overseas as well. That gives us a huge pool of people who are willing and able to get out there and protest against him, it’s one of our greatest resources, and it would be a huge tactical error to try and damp down the enthusiasm now.
I will happily march shoulder to shoulder even with Hillary supporters. We can put that argument aside for another day.
Object to his policies, by all means, they are hateful and dangerous policies, but if you want to make fun of his stupid hair, his name, his double chin, his multiple bankruptcies, or the fact that he sounds like a retard when he talks, go for it. Let’s have some fun with this.

I should probably refrain from commenting on facebook threads from people I don’t know, about subjects which aren’t really all that important, with the first smartass comment that pops into my head. I mean, if they like cats, why should I care? If they feel their waitress was out of line and I don’t particularly sympathize with their situation, what good is it going to do to put in my two cents worth, besides which, two cents ain’t worth shit these days.
So, I was pretty pleased with myself today when I refrained from commenting on one.
It was a kind of post which I find particularly lame, but actually lots of people respond to: help me teach my kid how far and fast an internet message can travel. Reply to this post with your name and location. Very often it’s a schoolteacher and I guess the thing is that people don’t want to make the teacher look bad but sooner or later it’s going to happen because, just like with chain letters or petitions, sooner or later everybody just gets tired of it. Many others are from sick people, or elderly people, or somehow pitiable people, ‘help this boy get 1,000 likes because he’s dying of leukemia’ and I kind of feel like a shit for ignoring those but I do, for the same reason I usually don’t give to beggars, because it becomes, very quickly, a deluge. I don’t know how that happens, but it does.
Anyway, this one had a picture of a bag of apples and the guy said “My 6 year old told me this won’t get any response because nobody cares about apples” and my initial instinct, I swear my fingers were ready to type out the words, was to say “Your 6 year old obviously knows more about the internet than you do,” which I imagine is a true statement, certainly my kids know more about the internet than I do, and, although they’re a bit older than that now, I suspect they already did by the time they were 6.
Also, a picture of a bag of apples is a pretty safe thing. You might want to warn them about posting their physical location, or your credit card number, or something like that, so your lesson is worthless.
But, I refrained, and I feel good about that. And a couple of people had commented, with their name and nation, because some people do that.
So, maybe I’m the one who doesn’t understand the internet.

I posted a post today which said “Frederick Douglass died at Bowling Green” and I was just making a little joke conflating the two most extremely stupid statements to come out of the Trump administration in the last two days, except the Kelly Anne Conway cannot claim that it was only bad grammar, or even that she was mistaken over a key detail, like somebody you thought was still alive died long before you were born, like before there were automobiles, or at any rate before they were widespread. Nope, Kelly Anne Conway just flat out got caught making shit up.
I got some good responses to it, most thought it was funny, one woman corrected me, which is O.K., she didn’t get the joke, but, come down to it, it wasn’t much of a joke, just kind of a vaguely jokey statement.
The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that I’d actually stumbled onto a more important truth. After she made the comment about the Bowling Green Massacre (there was never such an event as the Bowling Green Massacre), that was the only thing people wanted to talk about and the Frederick Douglass misquote started getting a lot less play.
The question is “How long does a scandal last?” and Donald Trump has figured out the answer to this question: until the next scandal. So, it’s possible that Kelly Anne Conway was sent out with instructions to say something so comically stupid that people would forget about Frederick Douglass for a while, but it’s more likely just that, by surrounding himself with people who are just as dumb, and mendacious as he is, he can pretty much count on something every day.
I think he’s going to run into trouble, though, because he came out of the gate too fast, he’s been trying to sprint his way through a marathon and he’s not going to be able to pick up the pace.
Nobody could.

I wouldn’t want to tone down the 24 hour outrage, that’s actually a good thing and I hope everybody keeps it up until Trump is removed from office, and probably a bit beyond that because he is, after all, only a symptom of the problem, but I really would like to know if the groundhog saw his shadow or not and nobody’s posting anything on that, at least not that I’ve seen yet.

Anyway, today’s outrage is largely about his Black History Month speech, which was chock full of self-serving comments, tokenism, bullshit and rambling. But, tonight’s blog is specifically about one sentence in that speech, i.e. “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I noticed.” His use of the present perfect instead of the simple past in the first part of that sentence indicates that he thinks Frederick Douglass is a living person, which would mean he has no idea who Frederick Douglass was, which makes him pretty darned uninformed, at the very least, and the fact that he made a blooper like that in what should have been a meticulously prepared, rehearsed, and fact-checked speech makes him stupid.
Others might say it was just a mistake in grammar, but the way I see it that makes him stupid, too.
They say that learning a foreign language makes you a more intelligent person, actually expands your brain power, and I suspect that’s true, although speaking two or more languages is not necessarily proof of a high IQ. With a lot of people, it’s just a question of exposure. Still, if you only speak one language and you don’t speak that one properly, that is a pretty clear sign of being a moron.
On the one hand, I suspect he actually had no clue who Douglass was and thought he was still alive, because that is a grammar mistake that few native speakers would ever make, whether they know the grammar rules or not. It just does not usually come out of our mouths that way.
On the other hand, he made the same mistake at the end of the sentence when he said “I noticed” instead of “I have noticed,” so that would indicate that he truly is illiterate, but maybe knows who Douglass is.
It’s sort of like the “Is he stupid, or just immoral?” question which has been leveled at many recent presidents: Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Bush, for instance. I hate that question, because it is a rhetorical mindfuck. If you call them immoral, they say he is merely stupid. If you say ‘anybody that stupid should be removed from office,’ they say ‘he’s not stupid, he’s just immoral’ and you can never win.
The point is, either stupid or immoral should be enough to get them removed from office.
With Trump, we’re not even arguing about that, although his immorality is pretty clear. The argument at the moment is just ‘what kind of stupid is he?’ and it still shouldn’t matter. Either kind of stupid is unacceptable.

Whenever I get a notification that somebody has shared somebody’s memory, I think for a second that somebody has died. Facebook should really be more careful with their language.
Then again, who am I to question the tactics of this global juggernaut, which seems to be creating a new universe all of its own?
But, if it’s creating a universe all of its own (and it is), why is it such a conflicted universe, obsessed with trivia? A: because most people are trivial people, obsessed with our own obsessions, and nobody is seeing the big picture. Oh, a lot of people say they do. They talk about the Rothschild’s and their gazillion dollar fortune, which somehow seems to have eluded the fact finders at Forbes, or Putin’s plans for pipelines (there might be something to that one, but still, it’s not the only thing going on in the world) and they call everybody sheeple and they say ‘Wake up! Wake up!’ like a bad alarm clock, but the truth is that nobody knows the truth, not the whole truth, because the universe, even this single aspect of this tiny corner of it called human civilization, is just way too damned complex.
There is politics and economics, to be sure, although we’ve got multitudinous various definitions of what those even are, but there is also art, music, animals, sports, technology, cinema, gardening, travel, fashion, food, wine, herbs and drugs, color, traffic and so many other things going on and each field has its experts but even they are not infallible, the whole thing is expanding and tendrils shoot out this way and that and intertwine with each other and every now and again you look up and it’s a different world.
I wish you all a happy and successful future, but I have no clue what’s going on either.