Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

I’m sitting here,  it’s late at night, I’ve no idea about what to write,

politics is a waste of time, it’s important but it’s like going out into the middle of the desert where nobody could possibly hear you and then screaming at the top of your lungs, I’ve notice I get more readers when I just write about my day which I think is weird because my days tend to be routine and my day is no more illuminating about all our days than anybody else’s day is, so I don’t want to write about that.  Sometimes I like to write about celebrity scandals, or at any rate I used to, lately the celebrities aren’t having the really good scandals any more, except for Bill Cosby, and I agree with the majority on that, guilty as hell, but I don’t know what can be done about it now except to make it known, he’s an old man, even if he goes to jail now, he got away with it.  Sometimes I might go deliberately looking through all the news articles, especially the science stuff, hoping I can find some breakthrough on talking with  elephants or discovery of  a habitable planet or robots with superpowers, but instead of that I’m just going to let this blog be tonight and this is is.

For a couple of months now, I’ve been getting lots of memes and comments on my facebook page saying that whether you’re a Sanders supporter or a Clinton supporter, you must vote for the Democratic nominee, whoever it  is.  I agree with that.  Sometimes I comment that I agree with that, and then pivot to making my pitch for Sanders.  Usually I just scroll past because there are so many of them.

We heard what you said, Hillary. Now explain to us how that’s not what you meant.

I’m pretty sure they come mostly from Clinton supporters.  I’m not keeping a list or anything, but I have a rough idea of who the Clinton supporters and who the Sanders supporters are on my facebook page (and the handful of very out of place Republicans).  Also, there’s often some comment about how immature and divisive Sanders’ people are.

So, Hillary Clinton has some explaining to do after this , which sounds a whole lot to me like “If I don’t get the nomination, I’m supporting Bloomberg.”

Those weren’t her exact words.  Her exact words were “He’s a good friend of mine.  The way I read what he said is if I didn’t get the nomination, he might consider it. Well, I’m going to relieve him of that and get the nomination so he doesn’t have to.”

She might not actually be saying she would vote for Bloomberg (who is a Republican), the same way she maybe didn’t mean anything nasty about Bernie’s grandkids (yes, she did), the way she maybe didn’t mean she wished Obama would get assassinated when, in 2008, she said “We all remember what happened in July of 1968.”

Maybe she just has a way of saying nasty, petty, passive aggressive shit accidentally.  But, I doubt it.  What she said, if you think about that last line, that ‘so he doesn’t have to’, is “You cannot elect the president you like.  They must be approved by corporate America first.  That’s the deal.  What, did you think America was a democracy?  How cute.”

Hillary owes the Democratic party a clarification of this statement, and a pledge that she will support the Democratic candidate, even if it’s not her.

Tonight I am going to waste this blog responding to this piece of nonsense, which I didn’t actually read, but just the headline indicates that the author is a negative Nellie, a Debbie Downer, a person of little faith in the infinite potential of the universe.  It’s this little thing, which appeared in  the Huffington Post and was undoubtedly written by a professional taker up of space. (that’s not  a pun  on outer space; it just means they take up space, in this world, without really providing any social value and write stuff for websites which takes up space, and the time of everyone who reads it, without imparting any useful, or even well thought out, information.

The idea is that maybe the reason we haven’t found intelligent extraterrestrial life yet is because it doesn’t exist and the reason it doesn’t exist is because once a civilization develops  enough  technology to wipe itself out, it does.

This is such multi-leveled horseshit I barely know where to begin.  First of all, it’s projection. We think that because we are constantly teetering on the brink of destruction, every other technological civilization would be, which totally ignores the possibility that some beings out there might be kinder, or at least less aggressively suicidal than we are.  A foolish assumption.
I’m quite certain that at that point in the Drake equation (number of technical civilizations who manage to become spacefaring before they extinct themselves to death) ,the number of intelligent civilizations gets divided into two groups. I’ve no idea what the percentages are, but there are undoubtedly some who do and some who don’t, because both are within the realm of physical possibility and all that is within the realm of physical possibility actually happens somewhere in infinite time and space.

Secondly, it’s not as if we’ve been exhaustively examining the universe for millenia.

The airplane was invented just over a century  ago.  How many centuries was it between the invention of the boat and Columbus’ discovery of America.  A hundred centuries?  At least.

Give it a bit  of time.  There’s no reason to give  up on the search just yet.

Let me waste tonight’s blog on the idea that Michael Bloomberg might  enter the presidential race.  And I say waste because I’m pretty sure it’s not going to happen.

TR had the Bull Moose party, I’m going to start the Bull Shit party.

The headline said (and the headline is all I read, which is how seriously I am not taking this) that he was forming an  exploratory committee.  He’s a billionaire, and forming an exploratory committee takes him about as much effort as it takes me to write this blog, and costs about the same percentage of his income  as I would spend  on  a Snickers bar.  So, forming an exploratory committee doesn’t necessarily mean he’s going to run.

Secondly, the headline said he was going to run as an independent, and aforesaid exploratory committee is likely to come back and say “Sorry, Mr. ex-mayor, nobody has ever won the presidency as an independent since George Washington, and that’s only because they hadn’t invented political parties yet.  The country was still young, and innocent.”

Beyond that, though, I don’t think he’ll run  because he doesn’t have a base.  Trump is not leading in the polls because he’s  a billionaire.  Trump is leading  in the polls  because he’s a loud mouthed, crude, racist billionaire, and the teabaggers eat that shit up.

Who likes Michael Bloomberg?  A few other billionaires, maybe, who might see him as an alternative to Trump.  Perhaps a few old guard Republicans, like Lindsay Graham, who has  said he’d vote for Sanders over Trump.  Still, you put those two demographics together and you couldn’t fill the bleachers at a high school gym in Indiana.

In the event that he does run, spending  a billion or so of his own money, he’s only likely to take votes away from Republicans because he  is, you know, a Republican.

So, I don’t see him as being a serious threat to my main man, Bernie Sanders.  But, you never can tell.   If he decides to go for it, I will read up on him a bit further.

With Iowa only  about a week away, Sanders is surging, Clinton is  flailing and I couldn’t be happier.

I’ve  often  said that this is a replay of 2008, but I’m starting to suspect that Clinton’s  campaign will unravel even quicker this time.  She had a crowd of 1,000 gathered to hear her in Iowa City, so a college crowd, and she spoke for about 5 minutes and  split.  She wrote a letter saying how Sanders has ‘not thought through’ a lot of foreign policy situations, and got 10 ‘defense experts’ to sign it, but it didn’t take long for people to figure  out that half those ‘defense  experts’ were actually defense contractors.

I watched Sanders’ America ad, and I’ve got mixed emotions on that.  For one thing, it really is a vacuous piece of nothing.  It looks like it was put out by the Iowa Tourism Board.  It’s nice, lots of pictures of cows  and  smiling people; nothing anybody can attack.

It’s an ad.  Anybody that wants to learn about his positions,  his voting record, or his life story can  find out on the internet easily enough.

It will probably be a real effective ad, and for that, I like it.  Also, I get the feeling  that Bernie’s strategy at this point is just to assume the win, which can be a really great strategy.

There was another thing  I saw  today that  encouraged me greatly.  Not a TV ad, an internet thing instructing people on how to caucus in Iowa.  I loved it because that’s exactly what they need to be doing  now.  Letting everybody know when and where the caucuses will be, and how easy it is to participate  in them.

One thing that strikes me is how much the Iowa caucuses have evolved since I went to one, in 1972.  It was a cold night, with  plenty of snow on the ground.  There was me, T.K. and Gwen (they were a young, hip couple, he was an activist preacher) there for McGovern, my brother who was too young to vote but just wanted to watch, and the elderly couple who were hosting the event.  They were uncommitted.  I suspect they were for Muskie, and just trying to be nice and non-confrontational.

They’re apparently a lot bigger lately.