Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

A few minutes ago I was called petulant on Facebook because I am not voting for the warmongering anti-environmentalist Hillary Clinton. I am not petulant.
I have often been called childish and immature for the same reason. It seems Hillary encourages this, with comments about how all Bernie supporters are living in their parents’ basements and such, but the childish charge doesn’t bother me too much. I am not always the most adult adult in the room.
But I am not ‘petulant.‘ This is not a ‘snit.’ I have thought about this long and hard. There is an important principle at stake here and if we elect Hillary Clinton we are violating that principal.
It is the principle of fair play, which is, despite our sins against the native American and African races, the basis of American democracy. It is the principle that people’s votes count.
In the Democratic primaries, the people’s votes did not count. The DNC selected Hillary Clinton as the nominee before the primaries even started and what they did to stop Bernie Sanders from getting the nomination went way beyond a bit of harmless bias. It was election rigging, plain and simple.
If Hillary Clinton becomes president, we will have validated that violation. We will have said the even though we were cheated out of our voice, our part in the process, we will go ahead and vote for whoever they tell us to vote for, because the alternative is so much worse.
Make no mistake, I am well aware of how horrible Donald Trump is. Nonetheless, he won his party’s primary fair and square. If he wins, we will suffer egregiously for four years. But if Hillary wins American Democracy is over. We will have surrendered it without a fight.

Yesterday afternoon I was going through some papers, the massive mess of papers that has accumulated on the shelf underneath our glass topped living room table that stares at me constantly as a reminder of what a disorganized pack rot of a slob I am, and I came across a poem, and I wasn’t sure if it was a completed poem, one I’d actually performed somewhere or included in a book or presented in any way for public consumption.
So, I resolved to look into that but had, at the moment, places I had to go.  Last evening I looked for it again and couldn’t find it.  Went through all my old notebooks, found a great many things that needed to be thrown away, but I didn’t find that and went to bed with the feeling that maybe I was losing my mind a little bit.  (just a little bit.  Actually, I’m quite used to losing things and slept quite pleasantly)
Now, we have to leave in about 10 minutes to go to the cottage but I decided to have another search.  Still didn’t find it because I’m pretty sure the thing I was looking for was written in pen and ink (what a silly, redundant phrase) and that’s part of the reason I don’t know if it was ever completed, but I did find another very long poem, along with two or three short ones, all good, and checked my last two books and didn’t find them in there so either they are very old, like over two years, or I’ve never published them, so that’s cool, a little hidden treasure found among the clutter, but the other one is still out there.

I think I’ve figured out why Donald Trump didn’t pick Chris Christie for his running mate.  It’s because Chris Christie is a fat pig.  Think about it.

Tomorrow morning we’re headed up to the cottage.  We means me and Sam, Isabel and Helena left this morning.  I think I’ve just about got it down to my ideal, which is 4 cottage visits a year – one  in Spring, one in Summer, one in Autumn, one in Winter.  Actually, might wind up doing two this autumn, because this trip is for my father-in-law’s 70th birthday, and we usually go up for Halloween.

It’s a beautiful place, I just get bored.  You’ve got  so much outdoor natural beauty all around, and everyone sits around and  watches T.V.  Which I shouldn’t bitch, it’s what I do at home, but it’s a language thing.  Maybe partly a cultural  thing, too, I’ve just never developed an appreciation for Czech T.V.
Right now I’m watching ‘Strip the Cosmos’ and they’re talking about Martian geology, which I guess would be Areology, technically.  I don’t know how they know some of the stuff they know, like what’s below the surface of Mars.  Sure, we’ve got little robot rovers roving around, and they may have taken soil samples and stuff, but I’m sure they haven’t gone more than a meter or so down, tops, and here they are talking about lava tubes under the  surface and, while there might be some evidence, we can’t really know that.
I’ll write a quick blog tomorrow  morning before we leave so I don’t miss a day of blogging, and then I’ll be back Sunday afternoon.

I’m not an environmental optimist but I am hesitant to accept today’s news that  we have pumped so much carbon into the air that global warming  is  not irreversible and the human  race and life on earthas we know it is basically fucked, but my  objections amount to wishful thinking:  the  scientific word on the street  is that we are, indeed, well  and truly fucked.

However, the  human capacity for invention is  damned near infinite, and we are inventing computers that are even smarter  than we  are, so there’s that.  The main problem, of course, is that there are just too many people but, there is some evidence that mankind’s obsession with computer games may actually be reducing the birthrate – whether this is radiation sterilization, the inability of gamer geeks to form relationships (nothing really new there) or what, I don’t know, but I see it as a positive trend.

Obviously, we need to reduce the number of cars on the roads, but  this could be accomplished by driverless cars, better public transportation (trains, mostly), electric cars, and better city planning.

We need new devices to suck the carbon out of the air, and a revival of the old classic, i.e. trees.  A few hundred billion more of those guys planted here and there and it just might reverse the trend.  Also, we need to stop cutting them down, like immediately.  Nobody needs wooden furniture, or even wooden homes.  I understand the aesthetic, wood is beautiful, no doubt about it, but if a hundred year moratorium is needed in order for the human race to survive, I think we can learn to live in brick and concrete buildings and eat off of metal tables.
Paper?  Hemp makes really great paper.

The problem is that, even with today’s news, we aren’t  even starting to move in the right  direction, and probably won’t  until we’re choking to death, or the ocean swallows Florida, whichever comes first (I’m rotting for the ocean in this contest , by the way)
I hope  it won’t be  too late.

I am a fan  of Michio Kaku, in  the same way  that I am a fan of Neil deGrasse Tyson, Phil  Plait, Michelle Thaller and  many others of that  type.  Once upon  a time there  was Carl Sagan, and people pointed to him as a rare phenomenon, a scientist who could actually talk to people normally, but now  that is rather a common breed.
But, tonight’s blog is  about Michio Kaku.  He seems a bit more broad based than  some of the others, and speaks  of  robotics as easily  as  of astrophysics but, to tell you the  truth, I have no  way  of knowing which of these guys are really  ground breaking scientists, which are flakes, and  which are considered flakes by  the scientific community but will turn out to be the  true cutting edge scientists in the end, because  I don’t really know that much about  science.  I’m just a fan.

Anyway,  I was watching Kaku’s show the other day, I believe it’s called “Science of the Impossible” and he talks about some interesting stuff, but I kind of hate the format.  He’ll take some impossible task, like say time travel, or building a faster than light ship, and  spend the hour explaining the physics of  it and then come out to a studio audience of whom have are  dressed like Darth Vader or some shit, and say “Today, I invented Time Travel” and give  like  a 5 minute explanation and then they’ll interview audience members who all say “Wow, dude, that was like so awesome.”  Really, they should leave the audience out of it.  I  don’t watch those shows to hear what a bunch of goobers, who aren’t any smarter than I am, think.
Anyway, the topic the  other day was portals into alternate universes.  Both Michio Kaku and the audience members said the same bullshit thing, which strikes me as indicative of  not knowing what the word ‘alternative’ means.  “Maybe in an alternate universe I would be a huge rock star, or married to Miss Universe, or  have billions of dollars.”  Well, no, because  the you in an alternate universe isn’t you.  You are the you who is right here in  this  universe, reading this blog, right now.  There might  be somebody who sort of looks  like you, has similar parents and  siblings and back  story, but it is still someone different.  You don’t feel  what’s going on inside them, you don’t share  their emotions, because  you just  don’t.  You’d know it if  you did.