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I am not a fan of Hillary Clinton.

Sure, she is smart.  From what I’ve heard, she’s kind of crazy smart, and that’s a good quality.  She’s got enough experience.  Actually, I think experience is overrated as a criterion, anyway.  Nobody in the world has prior experience at being President of the United States until they get the job.  No matter how long you’ve been in Congress, or what state you were governor of, the Presidency is going to be something new.  Also, if you did the research (and I’m not going to do it now.  If you disagree, put it in the comments) I suspect you would find that Presidents with scant prior political experience have donejust as well as those who had lifetime political careers.

Please Don’t Run

But,  in addition to being a total tool of Wall Street, she is out of touch with the  common people to an almost Romneyesque degree.  Her recent statement that her and Bill were “dead broke” when they left the White House is getting a lot of flak from Republicans.  That is no surprise, they would criticize her if she got a haircut, but it doesn’t sit too well with this Democrat, either.

It’s possible that it’s technically true.  Their debts, at that point, may have been greater than their assets.  But I’ve been dead broke, Hillary.  Lots of Americans know what dead broke looks like, what dead broke feels like, and you aren’t it.  So, not exactly a lie.  Just a seriously insensitive, boneheaded thing to say.  It’s like a skinny girl saying to a fat girl “Oh, I’m so overweight.”

It reminds me of her statement during the 2008 primaries about being on diplomatic missions to foreign countries as First Lady, and “dodging bullets.”  She may have thought of that as just standard campaign rhetoric, but when called on it she didn’t back down right away.  It was an unforced error.  Basically, Hillary just doesn’t realize what she sounds  like.

Of course,  if she gets the nomination, I will probably vote for her.  She is way smarter than Rand Paul, and from a less sociopathic  family than Jeb Bush.  But, despite her  intellect, she might lose to either one of them in a debate.  Because all it takes is one unfortunate choice of words.

Seriously, the Democrats have to start looking for better options.

In April, the Bureau of Land Management decided to back off and let Cliven Bundy get away with not paying anything to graze his cattle on government land for the last 11 years (freedom, after all, means not having to pay), because they didn’t want to see anybody get hurt. In view of this morning’s events in Las Vegas, that seems not to have been a good decision.

Jerad and Amanda Miller

One of the teabagger whackadoodles who was out there defending Cliven Bundy’s god given right to have his cattle fed for free was Jerad Miller. He even got interviewed on TV, because Jerad Miller was most definitely not camera shy.  There are all sorts of videos online of him ranting about the government and  weeping and moaning about getting arrested all the time because, after all, a man  should have the right to break the law.

This morning Jerad, and his crazy wife Amanda who, it turns out, was probably the more deadly accurate marksman of the  two of them (markswoman?) killed two police officers who were just sitting in  a pizza place eating lunch, shouted something like “This is the beginning of a revolution!”, then walked across the street to a Wal-Mart, where they killed a guy who pulled out a gun to try and stop them.  Then, as police closed in, Amanda shot Jerad and then killed herself.

Of the 5 people who died in this incident, every single one of them was carrying a gun.  So much for the argument that having more armed people on the street will make Americans safer.

If the Bureau of Land Management had called in the National Guard, and they had taken down all the gun waving teabagger morons at the Bundy Ranch back in April, there would have been an outcry – Obama would have been called a murderer, as Bill Clinton was after Waco.

But Alyn Beck, 42, Igor Soldo, 32, and Joseph Wilcox, 31, would still be alive.

facebook friend Wayne wrote: if the 1% were to disappear overnight, just simply cease to exist; the world would continue on with minimal interruption.

If the middle class and poor were to disappear overnight, just simply cease to exist; the world’s economies would collapse, and mankind would die off within one outbreak of flu.
What’s the difference between them, and us?
We don’t need the 1%, and they can’t survive without us.

This is how they dealt with the 1%, back in the day

In a way I agree, in a way I don’t.  If everybody but the 1% were to die off (which is an outcome certain members of the 1% seem to be actively trying to bring about) the world would have a population of about 70 million, with lots and lots of vacant land.  Admittedly, they’d have to learn to get their hands dirty, and they’d no longer have their chauffeurs, their cooks, their gardeners, and so forth, but most of them would survive.

Contrariwise, if there  were a sudden outbreak of onepercentitis, or a resurgence in the popularity of the guillotine, the world would indeed continue on, but I think there would be a noticeable effect: the ‘trickle down’ effect, as Reagan so lovingly referred to it but which has never happened.

Think about it.  One percent means one out of one hundred.  For  every one percenter who disappears, his (or her) immediate relatives are going to inherit bucketloads of money, valuable doodads, and huge properties.  Of course, some of them are in the  one percent as well, but then  it goes on to the next.  Also, their colleagues are going to benefit.  Vice presidents will move up to become presidents, partners will become vice presidents, rookies will become partners.  Most of these people are going to go on at least a bit of a spending spree with their newfound wealth, which spreads the money out to car salesmen, drug dealers, and waitresses at Hooters.  Those car salesmen, drug dealers, and waitresses have families, too, so that’s more who will benefit.

If, for every one  percenter gone, 5 or 6 people reap a huge immediate benefit, the ‘trickle down’ will eventually benefit 99 people, easily.

I’m not saying we should kill all the rich.  Killing is morally wrong, and it might be kind of hard to stop once you got started.  After the first hundred or so noblemen got guillotined back in the early 1790s, it just kept going because by that time people were kind of into it.

I’m just saying that it would have a financial effect.  An extremely positive financial effect.

It was an extremely hot day today.  So, I am feeling quite lethargic.  Not just lazy.  I am always a bit lazy.  I am the world’s worst procrastinator.  Which is why this blog usually gets written about 11 or 12 at night. (it’s 11 p.m. now)  This is deeper than lazy.  This is like my mind, as well as my body, is working slower.

So, no main theme tonight, really.

One of the 5 Taliban members released in the exchange for Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl has said he will continue the fight against the U.S., and the right wingers are saying “See, we told you they shouldn’t have been released.”  The way I see it, he is now in Afghanistan.  If we want to be completely safe, all we have to do is stay out of Afghanistan.

If American corporations want to do business in dangerous parts of the world, let them hire their own security.

Scientists have discovered a strange new formation of rock, washing up on the worlds coastlines.  It is a conglomerate of igneous (volcanic) rock and plastic.  Yeah, plastic.  No matter how much shit we throw at this old planet we live on, it adjusts.  That’s why it’s not technically correct to say the world is going to end because of the extinction of the honeybees, or global warming, or the air becoming unbreathable, or a supervolcano, or a meteorite strike, or even the 3rd World War that could develop if Vlad the Bad can’t keep his greedy little hands out of Donetskistan, and NATO insists on taking itself literally.  It may well be the end of the human race, but the Earth will survive just fine.

Maybe that’s why we haven’t found any alien life so far.  Maybe civilization advances to a certain stage before the planet learns to deal with it’s own garbage and starts spewing up  plastic rocks, like planetary phlegm, and that is the beginning of the end.  Or maybe we’ll survive this and in the future, nobody will need to drill for oil.  We’ll just wander along the beach, picking up rocks and becoming oil millionaires.

I’ll end with this.  Because I liked it.  I eat meat, I wear leather, and am not a particular sentimentalist about animals, but there are certain animals I think should be off limits just because of their awesomeness.  Among these are dolphins, and elephants.

p.s. fingers crossed for Tracy Morgan, who is in critical condition after an automobile accident.

Once again, science proves to be stranger than fiction, or at least as strange as.  A museum in Germany has tracked down some of Vincent Van Gogh’s DNA (from an envelope he once licked – seriously) and grown a replica of his ear.  Which is, of course, the plot of Jurassic Park, except that Van Gogh’s ear was never a terrifying velociraptor from hell.

Sellf-Portrait After Chopping His Ear Off -Vincent Van Gogh

I don’t really know what the point of this little exercise is, except to prove they can do it. Which is, in the absence of any reason not to do it, entirely enough.

The part of the article I found humorous was where they wrote, in parentheses, like this: (he was believed to suffer from some form of mental illness).  Believed to?  I would say that cutting off your own ear is pretty much proof positive of not rightness in the head.  Also, killing yourself is usually an indicator, although there’s some speculation now that he didn’t -that it was some young hooligans, or maybe just kids fooling around.  Could be.  Vincent was the local weirdo, the kind such kids would choose to torment. 

Anyway, the ear thing, and the whole story of his life, is enough.  Vincent was loopy.  It’s not too hard to understand why.  First of all, he was a genius, and a misunderstood genius at that.  That has to be rough.  Second, he had really bad luck with women.  Even prostitutes would sometimes turn him down.

There were a couple of reasons for that.  One is that whole misunderstood genius thing.  It made it really hard for him to communicate with people.  Second, he was not a particularly attractive man.  So, he felt alienated from the human race, lonely, bitter, and unhappy.  He dealt with that by painting pictures of flowers, and fields, and stars in the sky at night.

Elliot Rodger also had really bad luck with women, but mostly just because he was a spoiled, whiny little asshole.  He dealt with his loneliness and alienation by killing six people.

So, there’s mental illness and there’s mental illness.