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I was just trying to read up on the events of the day in Dallas before writing my blog about it, after watching it on TV this morning and reading about it on facebook all day, complete with the conspiracy theories (I am as pro-Sanders as anybody, but I don’t believe Hillary set this up to make it easier for police to crack down on protesters in Philadelphia), and I am confronted once again with the fact that the mainstream media is shit.

It’s not just that they have their own agenda, it’s that they are so lame at information gathering.

Most of the good footage of the event in real time, that they showed over and over again on CNN, came from some guy with a cell phone hiding behind a tree.

3 of the 5 dead have been identified.  Come on.  You’ve had all day.  I’m sure they were identified as soon as they got shot.  They were wearing uniforms.  Probably had a name tag and everything.

This morning they were talking about multiple gunmen, now they only talk about one.  Maybe that’s because that’s the only one who’s dead, and they certainly don’t want to talk about any who got away, but who and how money got away is a matter of great public interest.  And safety.

I saw a couple of news stories about how the gunman was killed by a bomb disposal robot.  How would that even work?  Did it extend a robot arm and clip a couple of wires in the gunman’s head?  Was the bomb disposal robot itself carrying a gun?  If so, being a robot, shouldn’t it be programmed to shoot to disable and not kill?  I mean, the robot can’t exactly claim it was in fear for its life, now, can it?  Not like all those weenie cops who kill unarmed civilians.

And shouldn’t it be programmed to follow Asimov’s 3 laws of robotics, and not kill anybody?  It’s a robot.  It can be trained to hit somebody in the knee every time.  Every single time.

In conclusion, this case, so far, has a lot more questions than answers.  And nobody will be able to figure out solutions to this problem until we do have all the information.

So, now we find out that in Hillary Clinton’s 3 hour interview with the FBI, she wasn’t actually under oath (not that that would have made any difference.  She is a lawyer.  She can lie  like  a pro.) and that no record was kept of what  was said, which strikes me as just shoddy.  I’m guessing they just had  coffee and chatted about this  and that.

Just watched a thing on Discovery Channel about Mao Tse Tung. It’s kind of amazing how much we don’t know  about what happened in the  world even  within our own  lifetimes, if it  was  just outside of our view.

Two police killings of black men in two  days.  We only heard about them, of course, because there were witnesses  and cell phone footage.  One  of  my facebook friends wrote “I don’t want to be that woman who’s just posting about all racism all the time, but then I realize that America is all  racism all the time.”

I did a  lot of work on my upcoming  poetry book today, aligning  the table  of  contents with the book.  Of course, you  can’t just glance at the titles and  work like a data entry machine, if so, I could have finished the job in ten minutes.  But, every poem I see, I wind up rereading.  Some  of them,quite honestly, are crap.  Some very short ones which could  have been bathroom wall graffiti.  Others, I fall in love with all over again.  All of them, though, rhyme and have something, at least some little thing, to say.

Home again, home again and glad to be back.  Picked a lot of fruit today, two kinds of cherries and lots and lots of red  currents, saw three deer who looked at me  and hesitated before they crossed the road, like pedestrians trying to gauge  traffic before running  across the street, and in many ways it was quite a pleasant  visit to the cottage, but I’m glad to be home.
More on the Comey speech, in which he  declined to prosecute but, in every other sense, made clear that he thinks Hillary is a liar.
Here’s one key bit, which a lot of people are talking about:

To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions, but that’s not what we’re deciding now.

“That’s not what we’re deciding now,” of course, raises the question of “what are they deciding now?”

They are deciding, apparently, that Hillary Clinton is above the law.  They are deciding that the law is only for little people.  They are deciding to take whatever deal Bill Clinton offered Loretta Lynch in their private meeting on the plane last week.  They are deciding that they don’t  want to wind  up like John Ashe, dead on a bench with a barbell pressed down on their neck.  They are deciding that  they’ll totally ignore the rule of law if told  by somebody high  enough up.  They are deciding that, since  Bernie Sanders might go ahead  and  appoint somebody else, they’ll go with job security.

It is absolutely shameful.  If I had not already  decided to never vote  for Hillary Clinton, this would have done it.

So, James Comey, head of the FBI, says Hillary was careless and mishandled e-mails, but he’s not going to prosecute, because he doesn’t think he can get a conviction.  If I recall correctly, that’s the same excuse Democrats in congress used to not impeach George W. Bush.  My first inclination is to say of James Comey what I said of them then.  Weenie.  Loser.  Pathetic coward.

But I’m sure that’s not entirely accurate.  If this campaign has made one thing completely clear, it’s just how rigged and controlled the system is.  Cops don’t denounce other cops, no matter how many civilians they kill, and politicians don’t go after other politicians.  He’s not afraid he couldn’t get a conviction. He’s afraid one would be unavoidable.

We’re at the cottage today  and took a trip with the kids, and Isabel’s friend from school, to a castle, high up on some rocks.  Frydštejn.  I recognized the location once we got close to it.  We were there a couple of years ago, rafting, and I wrote a poem about the campsite, starting with the old weir and working out, with the idea being that rivers, and if fact anything else, divide the universe into two parts, i.e. that which is to one side of them and that which is to the other.  It is in 155 Sonnets.  But, we never saw the castle that time, because we were rafting.

It was a long damned hike up through the forest, quite pretty but I was puffing and panting before we even got started and then it started raining and the kids got way ahead of us and we lost sight of them and when we eventually found them I was super pissed off with them for being irresponsible and getting separated, when the truth of the matter is we just couldn’t keep up with them.  Little mountain goats.

The castle, which was really just a big, rock turret, amazing defensive position, was built in the 13th century and abandoned by the 16th.  Kind of puts things in perspective.

I’m American, but not much of a patriot.  I live in a foreign country, and I’m damned happy about it.  Health insurance, better schools for the kids, clean drinking water straight from the tap, almost never any mass shootings, etc…

Philadelphia, 1776

Also, I believe that all the world is one and we should start thinking about it that way.

Still, today is the 4th of July, so it’s a good time to talk about what that means to me.  It’s not my least favorite holiday, but it’s certainly not my favorite (that would probably be Halloween).  I like the barbecues, could live without the fireworks although if I were in the U.S. I’d probably go to a display and enjoy it, and am downright disturbed by all the flag waving and jingoism.

But, let’s go back.  July 4th, 1776.  The war had been going on for over a year already (we probably should celebrate April 19th as Independence Day, but whatever) when a few brave souls met in Philadelphia to declare independence from Great Britain, which was probably enough to get them hanged, if we’d lost, so kudos to them.

The importance of it is not just American independence from Great Britain, but the very idea of independence.  It was (not exactly July 4th, 1776, but the result of the whole war, which didn’t end until 1783) an end to monarchy.  The French Revolution happened a few years later, with even bloodier results.  Come down to it, it took over a century for the idea to spread worldwide, there were actual, functioning monarchies right into the 20th century, but the American Revolution was the beginning of the end of them.

Of course, there had been Cromwell back in the 1600s, but he was such a tyrannical asshole and religious killjoy that he actually made people want the king back, any king, so the American Revolution was the first that worked.  It meant independence from kings, and the first modern democracy.

For all its flaws (Brexit, George W. Bush, Hitler) democracy  is, in the immortal words of Winston Churchill (who churned out a lot more immortal words than effective battle plans if you want to know the truth) “the worst system of government ever invented…except for all the others.”

That right there is a good reason to be proud to be an American.