Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

One of my recurrent  fantasies is that some  day there will  be an internet comment thread with just the right people on it to get an actual back and forth going of ideas and information, such a collection of intellect and information and inspiration that it goes on for days, maybe weeks, at the frantic pace of a ping pong game between the Chinese and the Robots, and at the end of it you have a thorough, well thought out, serious plan for solving all major world problems which are, of course, totally interconnected.

It’s the group mind thing.  We’re not there yet, there’s still a lot  of lol and WTF going on, and we will probably never be rid of cats, but I think progress is being made.

Here are a couple of  things facebook friends of mine have started recently:  One woman, who I don’t actually know in real life although I find her updates interesting, and entertaining, has a thing going all she calls “Friday Wins.”  Every Friday, she invites all of us to reply with news of something that’s  going right with their lives or some recent accomplishment or whatever.

A friend I actually know in real life started an “Ask Hillary” page, where people pose questions for Hillary Clinton.  Of course, this friend is writing  the answers and, since he hasn’t actually changed his name to Hillary Clinton, it’s pretty  clear right off that he’s writing the answers.

It’s probably not  going to sway the upcoming eloection, but it’s funny as hell.

Another friend, who I also know in real life, had a status update today that said:  “Today only!  Free encouraging words.”  That’s actually kind of brilliant. Eveybody needs encouraging words.

Facebook has  introduced a new  feature, which I find a bit  irritating…..but….

Anytime they introduce a new feature, because of facebook’s unique and transitional role in the evolution of human intelligence, it has a unique result, we learn something new about the hive mind.

I love the birthday reminder feature.  It’s led to birthdays being much, much more widely recognized, and that’s a good thing.  Whenever you say Happy Birthday to somebody, there are two people in  the world who gain  a little bit of happiness: you and them.

I’m not  real big on the personality quizzes – who were you in a past life, what Harry Potter character are you, etc… I take them more often than I’d like to admit because I usually  don’t post the results.  I took one today, which had some actual, concrete results: what words have you used  most in the last year. Go, think, know, just, good.  So, I’m pretty bland.  I’m not going to publish that.

The new feature I’m talking about, though, is where they give you the chance to repost something you posted 3 years ago on this date.  Since I usually just post a link to this blog, I thought ‘this is going to be kind of boring.’  Two days ago it was about a couple of conversations I’d had in class and how a teacher needs to be a bit sensitive and not say the wrong things to the wrong students and it was interesting because it brought me right back to that day and those conversations, it was more than a photo because there was dialogue, and plot.

Then yesterday, it was how surprised I was that the Tea Party hadn’t collapsed yet, where is the bottom, where, oh, where is the bottom, and an example cited was Marco Rubio.  Remember, this was from 2012.  Then, today, it was ‘Geez, won’t the Republicans EVER shut up about this Ben Ghazi nonsense.’

I don’t know how long this feature will remain interesting.  What it proves, though, is that nothing at all has changed in the last 3 years.

So, what Obama said was something along the lines of “They were afraid of moderators asking them tough questions and now they are afraid of some 3 year old orphans.  What a bunch of fucking weenies.”  (nb. he didn’t actually say ‘bunch of fucking weenies, although the implication was clear)

Ted Cruz responded by saying “Oh, yeah.  Come here and say that to my face” as if we were all in the 3rd grade, and as if he and his fellow baggers haven’t been saying far worse for ages.

This is the 21st century, Ted.  We can insult you on facebook, and twitter, and in blogs, and all sorts of ways.  If you’re a candidate for president, you’re going to have to learn to deal with it.

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What the hell does Ben Carson have to do before people realize he is a full blown moron, the intellectual equivalent of Sarah Palin, and by that I mean not just not bright, but aggressively, creatively stupid.

The latest was a map his campaign put out showing in which states governors are saying they will refuse Syrian refugees (which is just hollow, hate mongering rhetoric because they can’t, legally, do any such thing and they all know it.  Well, maybe not Paul LePage, he’s really dumb, but most of them know it.)  Anyway, on the map he had Vermont orientated East-West instead of North-South, and that screwed up the location of a few other New England states as well.

This wasn’t just a Fox News style fuckup, that time they had Iraq labeled as Egypt (or was it the other way around?) or the numerous times they have labeled an R a D, particularly when there was a scandal involved.  To make this mistake they had to look at an actual map of the U.S. and then redraw it, incorrectly.  Some work went into it. (my theory: Carson said to his graphic design team “Do something to make Vermont look further to the left,” and they took him literally.)

Sociologists, psychologists and political scientists will be studying the phenomenon of the Ben Carson campaign for years, maybe centuries to come.  Might as well get started now.

I saw a couple different articles today about bees, fascinating little creatures that they are, so bees is the blog topic for tonight.
Just now I saw an article saying archaeologists have found evidence of beekeeping as early as 9,000 years ago, which I guess is earlier than originally thought.
I’m not surprised.
From about 4 or 5,000 B.C. back to about a million B.C., it’s all the same as far as I know. If you talk about any pre-industrial invention – the domestication of dogs, the first canoes, the wheel, stringed instruments, etc…- you could place it anywhere on that line and I wouldn’t know the difference.
Actually, I’m a bit surprised it’s so recent, because bees make honey in the wild, we could observes apes, and bears, eating it, and it tastes so good.
But, the article made me think of what we’re doing to the honeybees. It would be a damned shame to throw away a relationship we’ve been in since 7,000 B.C.
The article I saw this morning talked about African farmers who are hanging beehives on their fences because elephants like getting stung by bees as little as anybody. So, the hives saves their crops which also saves the elephants from getting shot, and everyone is better off.
There is also the recent invention of the hive which gives honey on tap, which I think is absolutely brilliant. I hope they become popular, because if the company sells a million hives, that means a million defenses against honeybees going extinct.
I’m not particularly bothered that they will be saved by the profit motive. Whatever it takes.

It’s hard to see hope for the future in a world where a bunch of crazy guys with automatic weapons can burst into a rock concert, or a restaurant,and just start killing people.
It’s hard to see hope for the future when you see how tightly the big corporations control things.
It’s hard to see hope for the world when scientists tell us, straight up to our faces, environmental disaster, maybe catastrophe, is looming and it’s imperative that we totally switch to non-fossil fuels, plant about a hundred billion trees and get this shit cleaned up immediately,and everybody just shrugs and says “eh, whatever.”
It’s hard to see hope for the future when police murder people, beat people up, and treat people like crap in a hundred different abusive ways, it’s all caught on camera and they STILL don’t get prosecuted.
Then you turn off the TV and take a walk outside. The leaves have almost all fallen from the trees, which is right on schedule and exactly what should be happening at this time of year. You see kids playing. You see old people sitting on park benches and doing nothing. You see a construction site that’s a bit further along than it was yesterday.
You see plenty of hope for the future.