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OMG, vandals! Blood, Pig’s Head, Radical Slogans, Nancy Pelosi’s house. First of, I wouldn’t feel too bad for Nancy Pelosi, even if it was as bloody as the stories make it sound. She’s got a net worth of $120,000,000, and she could not give a rat’s ass if people get a $2,000 stimulus check, a $600 stimulus check, or a boot up the backside. She is against Medicare 4 All, and will do everything she can to block it. If poor people die, poor people die. She totally failed to impeach Donald Trump with her stupid ‘narrow focus,’ and she refused to even try to impeach George W. Bush. She referred to the Green New Deal as “the green dream or whatever.” Wouldn’t bother her a bit if the environment became totally unlivable. She’s got $120,000,000. That’s enough to buy you an underground shelter, with a generator and plenty of extra canisters of oxygen, and a cellar full of high priced champagne.
But it’s not really as dramatic as it sounds. There were some slogans, and anarchist symbols spray painted on her garage door. And what the press is calling ‘something that looks like a pig’s head’ in the articles and ‘a pig’s head’ in the headlines, actually, in the photo, looks like a little plastic figurine, or maybe papier maché, of a pig’s head. It’s way too small to be a real pig’s head.
Of course it’s illegal, and I’m not saying it should be legal to spray paint shit on other people’s garage doors, but personally I hope whoever did it gets away with it. Because Nancy Pelosi is truly a pig.

Despite Brexit, Covid, and whatever fresh hell they are brewing up in the central swathe of North America, there is some cause for optimism in the coming year, and we might as well keep focused on that.
There is a vaccine, although it may have some flaws, and so chances are good that this quarantine will come to an end in 2021 and we can get back to eating in restaurants, meeting up in bars, and riding on public transport without masks. It may even be possible once again to travel to other countries, which I do miss.
Science is continually making advances, in the fields of archaeology and marine archaeology, robotics and cybernetics, and space. Both China and Saudi Arabia have Mars missions planned for 2021. Although people, and the capitalist system, are absolutely determined to fuck the planet, there is still the hope that technological solutions may be found.
In my own life, things are good. We’re all healthy, and that’s the main thing.
Also, I’ve got another book of poetry coming out soon. It’s almost finished, that is, all of the poems are written, and now it’s just a question of putting it together and finding a nice picture to put on the cover. It’s pretty good, too.
As far as New Year’s resolutions go, I’m not making any this year. Because I never keep them anyway.

I know I promised in yesterday’s blog that I would write a sunnier, more optimistic end of year blog for New Year’s Eve and I will do that, later tonight, but for now I want to rant about something I saw yesterday that pissed me off.
It was a comedy show on Netflix called Death to 2020. Now, it’s logical that they would do a big end of year special, and it’s certainly fair that they would characterize 2020 as a year that sucked more than most. I think everybody agrees with that.
But, we (Netflix and I) have a rather extreme disagreement about precisely why it sucked so bad. They got through January and February without mentioning politics much at all, except for a couple of Brexit jokes, but then they talked about South Carolina and Super Tuesday. Admittedly, my shields were up, my sensors were alert, because we Bernie bros are used to being shat on by the press, and that’s exactly what happened. They narrowed the whole race down to “an anarchist grandpa against a guy who sniffs hair” and talked about Bernie’s support shriveling away and Joe Biden emerging triumphant.
Well, I can’t object too much to ‘anarchist grandpa.’ It’s only half untrue, and mildly funny. It’s the dismissiveness of his whole campaign, compressing the hopes and dreams of millions of people for a better world into a couple of lines, the failure to acknowledge that that, right there, is the main #1 reason why 2020 sucked. Up until that point, it had had a fairly optimistic air to it.
I hope that some very diligent historians, looking back at 2020 from, say, 2120, will look at this year, will look at the months of March and April, and say “How did this happen? Was there any misstep or inflammatory statement from the Sanders campaign? Was there some grand proposal from the Biden campaign which suddenly inspired millions? What was the catalytic moment?” And they will find that there wasn’t one. And they will wonder, as I do, how that happened.

2020/2021 will not be the dramatic change a lot of people are hoping for. It’s a date on the calendar, an arbitrary point.
Sure, the Corona Virus will probably be ended, now that there is a vaccine. But, the environment will keep spinning out of control because nobody’s doing a damn thing to address it, and that means 2021 will be another year of forest fires, floods, hurricanes, desertification, and, yes, new and dangerous viruses, bacteria, and all around ill-health.
Capitalism will continue to reign supreme, as the president elect of the world’s so called superpower has said nothing will fundamentally change, which means that billionaires will continue to pillage the Earth.
I hope I’m wrong, and I intend to write a more optimistic blog tomorrow night, filled with New Year’s resolve and optimism, but I’m going on the record now: 2021 is going to suck pretty bad, too.

Big spoiler alert, because I’m totally going to reveal the ending of this movie, because that’s my biggest beef with it. The Midnight Sky, with George Clooney, is a good movie in many respects. It’s beautiful, both visually, and in it’s study of human nature, and in its respect for science. The ship making its way back from a totally colonizable moon of Jupiter, which they showed in one scene that turned out to be a dream but it was very pretty, was a very believable cross between what is actually achievable with current technology and Star Trek. So, if you think this film might be something you’d like to watch, read no further.
They were super vague about the ecological disaster which was destroying all life on Earth, and the whole idea that everybody would abandon the arctic research stations to go back home and die quicker strikes me as a Hollywood interpretation of human nature. I reckon the flood of refugees would be moving the other direction, trying to stay one step ahead of their ultimate doom.
But, it was a plot device to put George Clooney all by himself as the last lone voice that could save humanity by contacting the ship and telling them to turn around. It reminded me a bit of ‘Silent Running’ with Bruce Dern slowly going crazy alone in outer space saving the trees. That was a great movie.
But, oh, wait, he finds a little girl hiding under a table, and she never talks, but she helps him through. I couldn’t see anything but a tragic ending. It wasn’t bad to think of George Clooney dying, because he was an old man, with a terminal disease (a totally unnecessary addition, because everybody was dying anyway), but it was sad to think of the little girl either dying, or else being the last living human on Earth, somehow surviving to old age alone, in the frozen north.
But, no, she was just a figment of his imagination, his daughter who he’d never known because he was, despite being a brilliant scientist, a shit father, and his actual daughter was all grown up and on the colony ship and pregnant (that’s important). He contacts them and she and her husband turn the ship around (gravity slingshot) and head back to colonize K-23, I think they called it, I’m sure there was a K in there.
The old Adam and Eve ending, so popular in apocalyptic movies, and so unbelievable. Even assuming they have several more kids, they are going to grow up with only siblings for mates and the species is going to degenerate and probably die out due to lack of diversity. One couple is just not a big enough gene pool. They should have just had a bigger crew on that ship, and the problem would have been solved.