Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

I’ve been watching YouTube videos of all the Trumpistas being kicked off, or just not allowed on, flights, and it is an endless source of comic delight. I hope when they eventually wend their way home, they will also be met with appropriate derision. Anyway, I wrote this poem about it, which I’ve already put up on Facebook and Rattle’s Anything Goes poetry page, so this blog is a bit of overkill, perhaps, but it’s an appropriate topic for today, so here goes:

They raise their guns above their heads

chanting very loud

They’re bold and they are fearless

defiant, fierce and proud

but when they’re at the airport

and they’re not allowed to fly

it’s embarrassing to watch them

as they whimper and they cry

The storming of the Capitol

was their last, their golden chance

Now, they’re going home alone

and pissing in their pants

and here’s a short compilation video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CegNO9waSSc

I just read a very informative article about Q anon, written by somebody named Rabbit Rabbit, which is almost undoubtedly not the author’s real name, because it’s probably not anybody’s real name. However, the article was extremely informative.
It was also super long and, I must confess, by the end of it I was just skimming the paragraphs. But, it did get me thinking. Basically, the idea of Q anon is to nurture conspiracy theories by allowing for apophenia (Jesus in a piece of toast) and encouraging people who find things like that. The author described it as ‘a game that is playing the players.’
So, I’m thinking if it’s that possible to manipulate outcomes just by encouraging people to see what they can see, it should be possible to come up with a site which would actually encourage people to exchange relevant statistics, facts, logic, and the occasional bit of anecdotal evidence because that does add in the human factor, which is important, and figure out a path (because that’s what Q anon does, if I’m interpreting it correctly. It creates a path for those people who want to go straight into Cuckooville) to get from where we are now to a happy, healthy, self-sustaining civilization and environment without war, or poverty, or crime; which would not be a democracy of ideas, but a meritocracy of ideas. A site which would not determine the most popular answers, but the best answers.
A site, or a game, or whatever you will that could do that would be a tremendous thing for the human race. And if designers were to draw on the success of Q anon to build such a platform, that would add irony and humor to the whole thing.

My big news of the day is that my latest book of poetry, A Country’s Just a Place, is now available on Kindle, either for 99 cents U.S., which I think is a darned good deal, it’s only a bit over a penny a poem, or for nothing. I’m not sure if there’s some difference, like maybe 0 is a read only version and the 99 cent version you can keep, or if this is just a special, one time introductory offer, but if you’d like to own one of your books but you’re a broke bastard (as I know a lot of people who like poetry are), just hop over to Kindle and order your free copy now.
Elon Musk had an even better day than me. He made like $20 billion and has overtaken Jeff Bezos as the world’s richest person. I’m a bit surprised. Once Bezos passed the $100 billion mark I thought “Damn, nobody’s ever going to be able to catch that.” Just letting his money grow for him without making any risky investments, he’s probably ticking over another billion every few days, and each increase increases the rate of increase, and so on.
But, the value of Tesla stock went up a little bit and now there are two people in the world with over $180 billion, we may well have the world’s first trillionaire within a couple of years, and there are still people in this world who live in poverty. It’s bloody ridiculous, is what it is.
Not the part about Elon Musk having so much money. The part about other people having so little.

I just finished watching Wild, Wild Country and I want to write this blog while it’s fresh in my head. It’s a 6 part documentary about Bagwhan Shri Rajneesh and the Rajneeshi’s attempt to build a utopian community in rural Oregon in the ’80s. I recommend it.
Bagwhan (later in life known as Osho) is often quoted on Facebook, nice little platitudes about letting go and becoming one with the universe and sunshine and flowers and stuff, and that’s all pretty harmless, but up until now I’d usually responded to those comments with something along the lines of “Yeah, but what about poisoning the well, and having a million Rolls Royces?”
At the time it was happening, it was a distant news event to me, and the few facts I knew made the Rajneeshis look pretty bad. The documentary changed my mind.
Sure, Ma Anand Sheela was a little bit nuts there, as things were falling apart, and poisoning the salad bar at Shakeys was a very nasty thing to do, but the people of Antelope and the governments of Wasco County and the State of Oregon started the problem, and everything that happened was their own damned fault.
The Rajneeshi’s bought the property legally and, in the beginning, were nothing but friendly with the people of Antelope, but they were met with instant hostility. Basically, these uptight people could not stand the idea of nudity and sex and people enjoying themselves only 9 MILES away.
If the redneck villagers hadn’t done everything they could to limit their development and threaten their eviction, they would not have bought homes in Antelope. They would not have bought the café and started serving fried bananas instead of bacon. They would not have taken over the city council, and changed the name of Antelope to Rajneeshpuram. If they had not started walking the perimeter of the encampment shooting off guns at random to scare the orange robe wearing hippies just like the Trump loving assholes who they, and their descendants, undoubtedly are today, Sheela would never have started stockpiling guns, or started her weapons training classes. And they probably wouldn’t have gone to America’s big cities and recruited several thousand homeless people which, by the way, was a goddamned humanitarian gesture and all of those cities should have sent them a thank you note and a big fucking check, but they didn’t.
Bagwhan (Osho) was eventually driven out of the United States and Sheela and a couple of her followers spent a few years in prison, but he still has followers. And I, for one, will not make any more sarcastic comments on Osho posts.
The scandal was not him, and it was not his people. The scandal is how they were treated.

Admittedly, the storming of the capitol made for a great show and, admittedly, five lives were lost, but…and this is a big but…everybody’s making too much of a big deal about it.
It was not a coup, and if it was an ‘attempted coup’ it was the most poorly planned attempted coup in the history of attempted coups. They did not have the support of the military, they did not take over a single TV station, and they had no end plan. They took over the capitol for a brief time and some guy posed for photos sitting in Nancy Pelosi’s desk, and some dude in fancy dress became a viral internet sensation, but that’s not actually a coup.
The left has a long tradition of occupying public spaces and holding sit-ins, sort of like the one AOC staged in front of Pelosi’s office shortly after arriving in D.C., although no windows were broken and no lives lost in that one. That’s all this was, plus a lot more shouting and threats and a lot less Kumbaya.
The media has used one word a whole lot to describe this, and that word is ‘unprecedented.’ Not really. There have been lots of large demonstrations in front of the capitol. There have been lots of political demonstrations in which people have been killed. Kent State comes to mind, and more recently the demonstrations in Minneapolis, in which a right winger murdered two people on the left. And, as the president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, pointed out: this happens all the time in other countries, supported by and often instigated by the United States. It’s almost identical to what happened in Bolivia, when they threw Evo Morales out and established a short-lived right wing dictatorship.
Anyway, this incident has passed. There will be another outrage soon. There always is.