Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

It’s official. Nina Turner is running for an open congressional seat, representing Cleveland. The current representative, Marcia Fudge, is leaving to serve in Biden’s cabinet.
That should light a fire under congress’s ass. I don’t know anything about her opponents, but I love Nina. She’s an ardent Berner and a hell of a great public speaker. Bernie has endorsed her, as have Corey Bush and Ro Khanna, according to one story I read. So, the DNC will probably be working against her. Still, she is wildly popular with Sanders supporters, so she’s got a built in base.
She will be a strong voice for Medicare for All, and I think progressives should really make that a litmus test.

That’s the whole blog for tonight. I will be following this story.

This is not such an original thought, but it is an amalgamation of a couple of different thoughts, which had to have been at some time original thoughts to somebody, and since I thought of it just now, I’m writing about it.
It has been said (this was probably Freud, but maybe it comes later, but even if so, it is just an extension of Freud) that every character in your dreams is yourself. That much is obvious when you think about it. Even if you have a dream about someone else you know quite well, the dream is being created inside your own head, therefore that person is the mental image you have of them, and anything they say or do is originating in your own mind.
Well, I was just scrolling through Facebook and saw something on the Ferengi rules of acquisition and the thought struck me that the same is true of the Star Trek universe, on a macro scale, i.e. all of the characters actually are human. The Ferengi, of course, represent our greed and our love of money and material possessions, the Klingons represent our basic, most physical emotions, if they were actually Earth humans they’d be getting into fights in bars and such. I think that’s why Klingons are so popular, we all just want to hit somebody sometimes. The Vulcans are what we know we should be like, but I know I wouldn’t actually want to be one. They are not much fun at parties, you almost never see them smile, and they only have sex once every seven years. I suppose they represent our conscience. The Betazoids are kind of the opposite, they are all about emotions, and romance.
Maybe I’m stretching the analogy a bit far but, on the other hand, maybe I’m not stretching it far enough. TV, books, sports, music, or a walk in the park, anything can be a Rohrschach test. Give 10 people the exact same experience and you will get 10 different reactions, and that will tell you more about those 10 individuals than it will about the experience itself.

I do not mind arguing with Trump supporters and right wingers. In fact, it’s easy. That’s both because their positions are completely illogical, often self-contradictory, and it’s easy to find their flaws. It’s also easy because I have no reservations about putting them down, we are so clearly on opposite sides. There is no ambiguity. It’s a bit more difficult to argue with friends and family who consider themselves liberal, but are actually not, according to my definition, which includes Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, etc…
However, even if I’m not entirely comfortable with it, I’ve become used to the argument, and I just have to accept that we are not on the same side. Not even close, really.
But I really hate it when progressives fight with progressives. We’re on the back foot now, anyway, and it is counter-productive, as well as nasty. It’s like a sports team that has talent enough to win, but half the players hate each other, and spend the whole game figuring out who they should blame for their loss.
I am not happy with Jimmy Dore right now, because he is being quite vehement in his criticism of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who I admire greatly. Calling her a phony, and a sheepdog, and things like that. On the other hand, I agree with his specific criticism.
Dore says AOC should not give Pelosi any support, should refuse to back her as speaker unless and until she gets a commitment to bring Medicare for All to a vote. Now, it might not be a winning vote the first time around but what it would do is force every Democrat in the House to either vote for it or against it. That way, every Democratic candidate who votes against it will have a target on their back in 2022, and so they should. The only way we’ll get universal health care is by threatening these people’s jobs.
I just hate it, though, when he makes it a personal attack. I want to like both of them, and Jimmy is making that really fucking hard.

When I first read the headline, I thought “Well, that’s a bit sensationalist.” That’s because I was reading the word ‘biomass’ and I was thinking ‘mass.’ Obviously, no matter how many buildings and roads we layer the planet with, it’s not going to outweigh the mass of the planet. The planet is way thick, and made out of solid rock.
Having read the article, it’s still kind of scary, but it doesn’t tell us much we don’t know. Human beings are a blight on the planet, we destroy the environment and, unless we stop it, we ourselves will be stopped. Things have limits, and our biospheres limits are being tested harder and harder. At some point it will break.
I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing that human constructs outweigh the total biomass of the planet. We live in a world of our own construction and, as long as it doesn’t interfere with the environment in which we evolved, I’m not against it. I enjoy living in buildings, and all the other little luxuries human technology has to offer.
Still, it’s a major milestone, and a sign that we have gone too far and should do a U turn. How, is the question.
A bit of minimalism might go a long way. Pretty much everybody in the developed world has more junk than they need. Also, a bit of co-operation. More trains and buses would reduce the number of cars on the road, for sure. Reducing our population would be a good thing, because although humans themselves count into the biomass, most of us own products that outweigh ourselves, by quite a bit. Our little car outweighs our entire family. And increasing the biomass by planting about a billion trees, and converting a lot of our deserts into vegetable gardens, would also help.

China has achieved fusion. This is a really big deal. This is massive. If it turns out to be safe, cheap and reliable this could save the world. But, those are the problems.
Safety first. One way is which fusion is superior to fission (the current method) is that there’s no nuclear waste, no spent rods that have to sit in a swimming pool forever, or be buried out in the middle of the desert where whoever lives in the area is going to sue somebody sooner or later, or, as was the case in Fukushima, dumped straight into the ocean. We’re still dealing with unknown forces and I suppose we could, at some point, blow up the whole world. However, I’m certain that the Chinese scientists are taking precautions against that and at least one, initial experiment has gone well.
Reliable, well, the first experiment went well. We’ll know it’s reliable after they’ve built a plant and it’s been running for a couple of years. Knowing the speed and efficiency with which the Chinese can build things, that may happen quite soon. Cheap, of course, is also a matter of time. Initial construction is probably going to be expensive, I’m sure the research up till now has been expensive as hell, but once a few plants are up and running, the price of electricity will drop dramatically. It’s not a fossil fuel. Fusable atoms are all over the world. They are in water. Once this is up and running, it means unlimited, and therefore, very cheap energy.
With unlimited energy, desalination becomes cheap, and greening the world’s deserts and ending hunger forever becomes an easy thing. Running a worldwide network of trains, using electricity, would also become a very economical affair.
So, a very big deal. I wish the Chinese all the luck in the world.