Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

I just saw an article (Well, I saw the headline.  This  is a big difference from reading  old print newspapers where you’d see the headline and your eye would just automatically go down and scan the story.  Now, you actually have to click, so often I don’t.  You can read a couple dozen headlines in the time  it  takes to read one  article.  Some misinformation, sure, but there’s some outright lying  in the articles, as well.) about how Mark Zuckerberg is “working on” adding a dislike button to facebook.

I don’t get that.  “Working on.”  There’s a like button.  A dislike button, it seems to me, would employ exactly the same technology.  It’s a question of implement or don’t implement; not a question of ‘working on.’

I don’t know how much I’d use it.  Maybe a lot, because there’s a whole ton of shit on my facebook page I don’t like, and it would certainly take a lot less effort than explaining to each, individual teabagger why they are deluded, a fact of which they remain unconvinced no matter what you say.  It would  be less effort, but even more of a waste of time.

Another thing  I don’t get  is how many  people post status updates saying something like:  This is my page!  It is not a democracy.  You cannot come here and post disrespectful or offensive stuff or I will defriend  you immediately.

Damn.  People are mighty thin-skinned.  Here’s what I say:  you can comment on my comment any way you please.  You are allowed to use bad language.  You  are allowed to disagree with me, and call me an idiot if you feel that to be the  case.  Be prepared to back it up, I will argue with you.  But I won’t defriend you just for saying something rude and obnoxious.  Maybe if you post seriously stupid stuff consistently over a period of time but, basically, I’m here for the debate.  Bring it on.

Just an ordinary day, but so much happens in the course of an ordinary day.  In the morning I took Isabel to school, then came home and had maybe half an hour of facebook time before going to the dentist, which I’ve been dreading, but it went rather quickly, and the pain I’ve been feeling since my last visit is mostly gone.

I walked home, because it was a lovely morning for a walk and it’s not really far.  I didn’t need to leave for my class until noon so I actually had time to get stuff done, there’s a book I’m supposed to be writing, but I didn’t.  Just facebook again.  Having a bit of a dispute with one character who objected rather strenuously the other day when I called him a Republican, and yet every other post of his is extolling the virtues of John Kasich.

Then it was time for my lesson with the 11 year old Iranian girl.  It had been raining, so I took an umbrella, which turned out to be unneeded.  Just a few light drops, I never even opened it.  The lesson went fairly well,her parents are making sure she gets some intensive lessons before they go home next week, and I think intensive pays off.  You can see a bit of progress day to day.

After that, I went to pick up Isabel, then home.  Defriended the Kasich supporter, and different things appear at the top of my feed.  Change is good.  Wrote a poem for my Poems about Paintings page, which I put up right away – I much prefer working with dead artists.

That’s it.  An ordinary day, with one good poem.  Not too bad.

It may not make headline news, because anything that’s positive for Bernie Sanders usually isn’t, but Sanders is now leading Clinton not only in New Hampshire (where he now polls over 50%), but also in Iowa, by a very solid 43%-33%.

Bernie Sanders, Frontrunner

This is important, of course, because Iowa goes first in the candidate selection process.  At the beginning of the race in2008, I was one of those who said “We’d better go for Hillary, because America is just not going to elect a black guy as president.”  But, he did really well in the Iowa precinct caucuses, and I (and no doubt a lot of other people) started saying “Hey, maybe American WILL elect a black guy.”  After all, you don’t get much whiter than Iowa.

I see this year as very much a repeat of 2008.  (Sanders isn’t black, but he is Jewish, and a socialist – same kind of thing.)  Hillary  Clinton, once again, is running on a platform of “Hey, I’m the front runner, I’m the one everybody’s heard of.  I want to be President  real bad, vote for me.”  Once again, it is not working, and she has no plan B.

David Axelrod, who was Obama’s campaign manager, said something along the lines of “Hillary can still win if she comes up with a clearer message.”  Which is the  same as saying she can’t win.

Because the message people want to hear is the message Bernie Sanders is already delivering.  She can cite her experience, but her experience is not greater than his, and she’s had a lot more wrong votes.

Unless she has  something really special up her sleeve (and I suspect she doesn’t), Hillary Clinton is toast.

Depending on how you count, there were between a dozen and  two dozen human species walking the Earth at some point or other, most between about a million years ago and something like 60,000 years ago (I’m not going to actually look any of this up – if my dates are wrong, lt me know in the comments. In this case, that wouldn’t affect my conclusion.)

Homo Naledi (best guess -we’ve got fossilized bones, not photographs

There were the Neanderthals, and the Denisovans, and the Hobbits (Homo Floresiensis), and Homo Erectus, and Australopithecus, and Australopithecus Africanus, and people like that, none of whom have survived until modern times, unless Bigfoot is real, and I kind of doubt that.

The latest  find comes from a group of scientists in South Africa, who’ve found the bones of approximately 1,500 individuals from human beings they are calling Homo Naledi.

It would be way  cool if some of those species were still around.  We could undoubtedly learn a lot from each other, and we might serve as a check on each other’s excesses.  But, no, we had to kill them all off.

And, I’m sure that’s what happened.  Oh, sure, maybe the Neanderthals starved or froze to death, and maybe Floresiensis all doied during a typoon, but not ALL of those species.  Genocide is the only explanation that makes sense and would be applied to all of the species.

This is why I think the aliens won’t speak to us.  Here’s the theory:  Maybe the evolution of intelligence is a pretty common thing, out there among the planets.  Maybe members of  the Inter-Galactic federation have rules, like “Don’t stop at any planet which only has one advanced, technological species.  They killed off all  the others.”

So, if we ever want to sit at the big kid’s table, if we expect to join the other intelligent species of the universe, maybe we’d better start improving the way we communicate with Chimps, Gorillas, Chimps, etc…

So, it’s September 11th again, like September 11th every year, and time for me to re-iterate why I believe it was an inside job, and any Americans who are still angry at the whole Arab world are angry at the wrong people.

WTC 7: Never Forget

First, there is the PNAC (Project for a New American Century) mission statement.  This was a group of top conservatives whose basic idea is that America should, without question, assert it’s dominance over the whole world.  Their mission statement included an admission that they would need a “Pearl Harbor style event” to get the public behind them.  It strikes me as odd that the casualty count from 9/11 is very, very close to the casualty count from Pearl Harbor.

2. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld.  Does anybody doubt that these are truly horrible, evil people?  They willingly, happily killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, imprisoned and tortured people without any trial or evidence of guilt whatsoever, lied about their reasons for doing it every step of the way, and never showed the slightest bit of remorse.

3. The coincidence of Bush speaking to an elementary school class at the time.  What a convenient photo-op.  I’d be much more inclined to believe it was a terrorist attack had he been golfing, watching TV, riding his bicycle, or ‘clearing brush’ at his ranch; any of the things he spent most of his presidency doing.  I imagine the set-up went something like this:

“Governor, the vice-president’s on the phone.”

“O.K., put him through.” “Good morning, Mr. Cheney.  What can I do for you?”

“Mornin, Jeb.  We want a nice photo-op with your brother a couple of weeks from now.  The morning of September 11th.  What can you set up?”

“How about talking  to a bunch of elementary school kids?”

“Sure, that’d be great.  Make sure there’s a nice, racial mix.”

“No problem.  So, what’s up?”

“Just as well you don’t know.”

4.  The plane that hit the Pentagon.  The part I can’t wrap my head around is this: It disappeared from radar out over the Atlantic, although that’s an area of seriously heavy traffic and there’s lots of radar.  Then, it looped around in a descending arc before hitting the Pentagon.  Let’s say it was traveling at 200 miles an hour when it hit, because slower than that and it probably would have been seen on security cameras, which it wasn’t.  200 miles an hour is a bit over 3 miles a minute.  So, 60 seconds before hitting the Pentagon, that plane was 3 miles away, at a startlingly low altitude, especially for not being near any airport.  There should have been thousands of witnesses.  It should have damned near blown cars off the freeway.  It should have rattled the windows in nearby apartment buildings.  If any of that happened, I still haven’t heard about it.

5.  The investigation.  It wasn’t an investigation, it was a cover up.  Why was the lead investigator only allowed to question Bush in the presence of Cheney, with no taping allowed?

6.  Of course, there’s building 7.  Watch the damned tape.  That building did not collapse due to fire.

There is much, much more.  You could wonder about the relationship between the Bushes and the Bin Ladens and why they were all whisked out of the country so fast instead of being interrogated which would be standard FBI procedure, you could  question Larry Silverstein’s huge insurance payout or his strange statement  about building 7 which could almost be construed as a confession, you could talk about things firefighters heard; there were hundreds of weird and suspicious things that happened on that day.  But this is only a blog, not a book.