Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

April 8th, 2020. It was the day that hope died. Bernie Sanders, realizing that the fix was in for senile old racist Joe Biden, threw in the towel. A lot of his supporters, including myself, felt that he should have taken it all the way to the convention, but he has always been a political realist.
His policies are realistic, too. They would have been affordable, implementable, and may have been the only thing to save the U.S. from complete societal collapse and the entire world from choking its own carbon emissions.
The world is a worse place because the centrist Democrats were so unwilling to relinquish their hold on power they did not allow for a fair primary – which came as no surprise, really
It also comes as no surprise that – now that Bernie is no longer a threat to them – the Democrats have no intention of raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, providing Medicare for All, or doing doodly-squat to help protect the environment. As far as getting money out of politics, forget that. Nobody’s even talking about it any more.
And the left, it seems, is at war with itself. That does surprise me. But, I think we’ll come through it. Good ideas do not get quenched that easily. The Bern is not, at the moment, a raging flame, but it is millions and million of stubbornly glowing embers.
His ideas will continue to exist forever. Some day, and I hope it will be soon, the fire will be rekindled

Two days ago I wrote a blog about how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez bears a large part of the responsibility for the current war (mostly on the internet) between her and the left, and if she wants to defuse that, she’d better offer at least an explanation for her actions and give us some proof that she’s still on our side.
I can never tell which of my blogs will get a lot of comments, but this was one. I got some support, and some attacks, which were mostly of the “we shouldn’t be fighting” variety. I admit, it would be nicer if we weren’t, but ‘say no ill of a fellow leftist’ sounds a whole lot like Reagan thinking. Admittedly, that’s been very effective for his party, and they have accumulated an enormous amount of power, but they have also turned into a useless blob which is directed by the most severely mentally disabled among them. Also, there’s some question about who they mean when they say ‘we.’
But the type of comment I want to address in today’s blog are the ones who say ‘you have no authority to speak on this subject.’ I got ‘you have no authority to speak on this subject because you voted for Trump’ (I didn’t. I voted Green and have always been very public about that), ‘you have no authority because you’re not a voter in her district,’ and, my favorite, ‘you have no authority because of what you said about Star Trek.’ What I said about Star Trek was that Kirk was the worst captain, and the original series was the worst of all the series, which I stand by. Janeway defeated the Borg, Cisco ran an entire space station instead of a mere starship, defeated the Cardassians, and was revered as a deity by the Bajorans, Picard was the epitome of cool in all situations, and Archer, well, there never would have been a Federation of Planets if not for Captain Archer. Kirk just got into fistfights and had brief affairs with women across the galaxy.
I suspect that comment was at least partly tongue in cheek. You never know, though. Star Trek people take Star Trek very seriously.

I have just finished binge watching Star Trek: the original series, which means I have completely binge-watched, since joining NetFlix, all of the major Star Trek series: TOS, TNG, DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise. I tried watching Star Trek: Discovery, but found it unwatchable dreck and don’t consider it part of the series. I’ve never seen The Orville, Picard, or Lower Decks either, so none of those are included in this review.
In rating the 5 series of which I’ve now seen every episode, I confess to what is probably unpopular opinion among Star Trek geekdom: The original series is nowhere near as good as any of the others, and Kirk is by far the worst captain.
Sure, it gets credit for being the start of the whole thing, and it was very welcome at the time. The only sci-fi program on TV before that was Lost in Space, and that was so incredibly bad that even sci-fi fanatics like me, who were watching it because it was the only sci-fi on TV, knew it was bad and justified our watching of it by saying ‘it’s so bad that it’s funny.’ But, we yearned for serious sci-fi and when Star Trek debuted in 1966, we were overjoyed.
Looking back on it now, though, it may have been better than Lost in Space, but not by that much. It took them a couple of episodes just to get the uniforms to fit right, and the aliens were amateurish – people today put more work into Halloween costumes than the props department put into the original Klingons. A bit of brown shoe polish and some stringy, fake beards, that was about it. Of course, their computers look ridiculous to us these days, but you can’t really blame them for that.
What you can blame them for is the ridiculous amount of sexism, the cultural stereotyping (Chekhov), and the fact that, even with all of the technology available to them, nearly every episode contains fist fights, which were often quite essential in determining the outcome.
It was landmark television, and it led the way into bigger and brighter Star Trek universes. Today, though, it looks -like the 1960s – very flawed.

When Jimmy Dore first attacked AOC, for not putting any pressure on Nancy Pelosi at all to act like a decent human being, I leaped to her defense. That’s largely because I don’t care for Dore’s strident, one could even say hysterical, tone. I find him hard to listen to, and I put Lee Camp and Nikko House in the same category. 90% of the time I agree with them, I just find them hard to listen to.
But, after a day or two, I had to admit that Dore’s argument made sense. It appeared AOC had turned her back on Medicare 4 All, and on a $15 an hour, minimum wage, just to appease Pelosi, who none of us on the left want to see appeased.
Now, there comes the revelation that AOC is actually fund raising for Democratic candidates who don’t support any of our goals at all. The dividing lines are the same as they were before. A lot of people on the left saying AOC has sold us out, and a lot of other people on the left saying we need to stop the AOC bashing, because that is tearing the left apart.
There is little doubt that the left is in disarray. We were crushed in South Carolina and the aftermath, and we are being marginalized in the current congress. We are not likely to accomplish any of our goals soon, or by political means at all, with the possibility of the legalization of marijuana. But even that is very much slowed down to a state by state thing now.
Once again, I find myself siding with AOC’s critics. AOC needs to decide which side she is on. If it is the left, she owes us all a clear and detailed explanation for what she has done, and what her strategy is going forward. Just saying “Don’t bash AOC!” over and over again isn’t going to cut it.

Today is Easter Monday, which is when the holiday is actually celebrated here, so it’s as good a day as any and better than most to discuss the differences between Pagan (People Against Goodness and Normalcy) and Christian Holidays. I don’t actually celebrate myself. As far as the whole Christ is Risen thing, I basically think Christianity is nonsense. It’s a spring holiday, a celebration of resurrection, to be sure, the grass is growing, flowers have appeared, there are green buds on all the trees, and it’s possible to go outside without a winter coat. Thousands of years ago, when the holiday was a new thing and clothing was less sophisticated, it was possible to go outside without dying. So, it’s obvious that there would be a holiday at this time of year, and it’s obvious that it would be chock full of fertility symbols, like eggs, and rabbits.
Same with Christmas. The church leaders do not have, nor have ever had, any way of determining Christ’s birthday (and historians have no actual proof that he ever existed, it’s sort of like Robin Hood or King Arthur, a hodge-podge of stories that were written down later, back before photography or DNA tests), but they saw all these pagans they were conquering in the north celebrating with gifts, decorated trees, fires and copious quantities of alcohol, and rebranded it. Smart move, you have to give them credit for that.

Still, if I had to choose to worship anything, it would be trees, rivers, eggs, rabbits, birth, and the sweet, sweet sunshine that comes back around every time this year.