Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

There was  a cute,  little story I saw today  about a baby gorilla born at the Prague zoo.  What made the story interesting was that zookeepers hadn’t even realized the mother gorilla, Shinda, 24, was pregnant.  They’d noticed she’d put  on weight, but that was nothing new.  Shinda was known to put on a few pounds now and again and for a while, they’d even had her on a diet.

So, I look in the comment section, and a couple of  self-righteous types were going nuts about the zoo’s negligence, how could they not have known, and then why do we have zoos at all, what  a horrible place.

Well, that’s kind of another argument, but Prague zoo is not a bad zoo, as zoos go, and the gorillas have  plenty of room to wander around in.  Mother and baby are doing fine.  So, chill.

Then, I dared to correct the  grammar in  a post, and it wasn’t one of the  commenters, this was in the headline of a newspaper article they were reposting. (This is How it Looks Like Today)
There was a long stream of comments about grammar Nazis (example:  Fuck Off, Willie Watson) and how much absolutely everyone hates them and not one of them added a smiley face.  It was weird.

Then, I saw an article that said  we’re going overboard with mourning dead celebrities.  I didn’t bother to read that one, but I thought “You fucking asshole, when somebody dies, people mourn.  If they mourn a lot, it’s because the person who died meant a lot to them.  What kind of a heartless lump of a human being are you to suggest that people are mourning too much?

My point here, my connection in all these stories, is that some people are never satisfied.  They quibble over trivialities.  They make a big deal over nothing.  They see something good and it’s not good enough.  They look for a point of weakness, something they can criticize.

Because they are assholes, I guess.

Some of the Clinton people I know (a rapidly diminishing number, since a fairly mild rejoinder will often get you unfriended) accuse us Sanderistas of  re-using right wing memes against her.  Since it’s just about  the only point they make that I agree with, my blog tonight will list the acceptable, and unacceptable, arguments against her.

Ben Ghazi is not a legitimate argument.  She did nothing inappropriate in the Ben Ghazi situation.

The e-mails.  Come on, you’re going to criticize her for taking work home?  Everybody does it, and most of the stuff that’s classified shouldn’t be classified.

Anything to do with her husband’s affairs.  Hillary’s not the one who had sex with any of those women.
Vince Foster.  She didn’t pull the trigger, she might not even have ordered it.  It was ruled a suicide, and suicides do happen.  Of course, as was implied in “Primary Colors,” an excellent film, he may have committed suicide after realizing what a shit couple he’d dedicated his life to, but that’s just speculation.  Let’s  stick to the facts.
Travelgate, Whitewater, any of that shit.  Let it go.

It is legitimate to criticize her for her Iraq vote, her Patriot Act vote, her support of fracking, offshore drilling and, until the campaign started, the Keystone pipeline.   It is legitimate to criticize her for her huge speaking fees, and who she got them from, and any votes in favor of the corporations which paid those fees.  It is legitimate to criticize her for taking money from private prisons and saying “we need more time to study marijuana.”  That’s bullshit  Studies have been done in Colorado and Washington and legalization  is a huge success, on many fronts.  The only reason  for keeping it illegal is to feed aforesaid private prisons, and that is a really ugly thing to do.  It is legitimate to criticize her for keeping the minimum wage down to 31 cents an hour in Haiti, and supporting the coup in  Honduras.  It is legitimate to criticize her for lying about Sanders’ position on guns and saying that Vermont is responsible for sneaking illegal weapons across the border into New York.  It is legitimate to criticize her for making a super lame racist joke.  It is legitimate to criticize her for using a super pac to troll the internet with spam.  It is legitimate to criticize her for  voter suppression and other dirty, underhanded tactics.
That’s quite a bit.  Oh, and one other argument we shouldn’t use against her was going around facebook today.  Apparently, when she was a practicing lawyer in Arkansas, she defended a man who raped a 12 year old girl, and got it reduced to a lesser charge. He only spent about two months in jail.  She was his  lawyer.  She did her job.
We have enough reasons to hate Hillary without  that.  More than enough.

 

Today is the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, and  also the day that we seem to have settled on  as his birthday, although  that’s mostly because  it makes a nice story.  He wasn’t famous at the time of his birth, and  they weren’t as thorough at keeping records then as now, so we realy don’t know.

 

Anyway, his birthday provides an excuse for me to plug one of my own books: 155 Sonnets. Of course, I’ve never written any plays, so this is the one area where  I’ve exceeded him, and only in raw numbers, although I do feel that my sonnets are pretty good.  At any rate, they are all genuine sonnets, which use  iambic pentameter, have the right number and distribution of lines, one of the three acceptable rhyme schemes, and a clear point at the end.

It’s available on Amazon, or on Kindle, but for every real, paper copy sold through  Amazon I will donate $2 to Bernie Sanders’ campaign.  It’s a win-win-win.  You get a great book, 155 gems of poetic wisdom, some money will go to a good cause, and I’ll get some sales.

Let me include here the  first sonnet in  the book, which was also one  of the first  written, I think about 1992.  Apparently, at that  time, we were  using the date of April 14th as his birthday, because that  is the  title of the poem.  There’s one other  way in which the world has changed greatly since then.  You’ll see it in the poem:

April 14th

The modern world calls out for modern words

and modern words fall into modern rhymes

the message from the medium is inferred

the words we choose speak plainly of our times

 

While singing songs of post-industrial gloss

Our Rock and Rappin’ rhythms seem to fit

Yet truth is truth the universe across

and love and beauty haven’t changed a bit

 

Five billion people people  now the Earth

live lives of  jubilation and despair

Four more than at the time of  Shakespeare’s birth

Yet, I can’t think of one I would compare

 

For language, so expressive and sublime

He speaks to us across the space of time

 

 

 

I’d like to address tonight’s blog to any  Hillary Clinton supporters among my acquaintance:  Surely THIS is a step too far.  I mean, I know you weren’t terribly bothered by her little  racist  joke (which was definitely her joke, not DeBlasio’s.  She set it up, she got the punchline.  Do you honestly think they didn’t rehearse that?), and you were positively gleeful about  160,000 Brooklyn Democrats being denied the right to vote.  You’ve  blown off our charges of shady political activities in Nevada (push polling) North Carolina and  Massachusetts (campaign infiltration, election  place engineering) Missouri and Illinois (weird ballots, actual vote  flipping) and voter suppression , with Arizona and New York being the most blatant examples, and Rhode Island already announcing that only a third of their polling places will be  open on Tuesday’s primary.
Oh, I know you’ll brush this off, too.  It’s just one Super Pac.  It’s only a million dollars.  How is this different from phone banking?  It’s probably not even  illegal.
Well,  it’s only one Super Pac and only one million dollars that we know about, and if it’s not  illegal that’s just because it’s a new use of technology and nobody’s ever thought of being this sleazy before.  And the  way it’s different from regular phone banking is that they are not just trying to spread the good news about their candidate, they are trying, through sheer weight of numbers and persistent repetition of falsehoods to brainwash the public.

It is truly a frightening turning point in human history.  I’m hoping that, at least for some of you, this is  the step too far, this is  the moment you’ll look up and say “Oh, my, she really is a monstrous cheat, isn’t she?” and throw your support to Bernie Sanders.

For the future. For the world.

Because it’s after midnight, I’m done arguing politics for the day, watching Gost Shark but really just want to crank this blog out quickly and see no reason at all to see Ghost Shark to it’s logical conclusion, seeing sexy young surfer ladies eaten by  the shark one  by one.

Of course, I suppose I could change the channel.  Would that we could change the subject on reality.  But, I promised not to talk politics, that’s not what I want the blog to be every night.

And, in fact, when you do change the channels on reality, you find some cool stuff.  It was a lovely spring day today, and so as I waited for Isabel to finish her tennis lesson I could sit outside and read.  That’s one of the great things about the great outdoors.  You can do anything or nothing, and you have the  added benefit of being outdoors.

I just saw an internet meme, 10 things you need to lose to be happy, and thing number 1 was ‘Limiting Thoughts’ and when you think about it, that’s what a ceiling is.  Whatever blocks the sky limits your thoughts.

Or something like that.

That’s all.  Short blog tonight.  Hope the shark eats them all.