Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

O.K., so sue me. I don’t always link to the articles and sometimes just respond to the headlines. So many topics, so little time. But this particular headline, “New MTA Rules of Loitering and Defecating Unfairly Target the Homeless, Advocates Say,” first made me laugh, because sometimes political correctness goes over the top and, quite frankly, I don’t think anybody should be allowed to take a dump on the subway platform, I am very much in favor of there being a rule against that.
But then, between the time I decided to blog on how funny that is and the moment I actually started typing, I realized there’s probably a great deal of truth to the statement. Laws against loitering, laws against taking a dump in places not specifically designated for that purpose (e.g. toilets), do not affect the rich, or even most of the working class, at all. If you have a home, you can hold it till you get home. If you have a job, you can hold it until you get there.
My next thought is that no rule will solve the problem. If they are going to lock people up for 30 days, or 30 years, for defecating in a public place, yet there is no public toilet nearby, people are going to go where they have to go. You cannot keep the shit inside your body forever. Eventually, you will either shit, or die. What’s needed is more public toilets, and not the kind you have to pay for. Maybe add in public showers, because for sure the homeless could use that.
It’s a basic flaw in human thinking. When looking for a solution to a problem, bureaucrats and politicians will think of a new rule, or a new law. Instead, we should be trying to think of actual solutions.

There is so much wrong with Joe Biden’s statement the other day:

I beat the socialist. That’s how I got elected. That’s how I got the nomination.”

First of all, it was a slap at Bernie Sanders, a man who always referred to him as a friend, the man who he deprived of the nomination, and a man who has been campaigning for him for more openly, and far more persuasively, than he has been campaigning for himself.
Second, it shows that Joe Biden is either in complete denial, or just blissfully unaware of how he actually did get the nomination: a few phone calls from Barack Obama to get some people to endorse and almost everybody to drop out, Mike Bloomberg dropping half a billion dollars, and the whole billionaire owned mainstream media chiming in with one voice. He certainly didn’t beat Bernie on his ideas, or his inspiring speech making, or because people just love, love, love his policy positions.
But the big thing, which just struck me this morning, is what it reveals about the kind of person Joe Biden is.
He is not the school bully. That is Donald Trump. He is the weenie kid who always sucked up to the school bullies. “I’m not a socialist, I beat the socialist” is exactly like “I’m not a nerd. Look, I just hit the nerd,” or “I’m not a faggot. Look, I just pushed the faggot down!”
I remember kids like that from school. We all do. Do not vote for one.

There is no low so low that they won’t go. There is no bottom to the well of police racism, nor to the complicity of the courts. It is a shameful time to be an American. It is a terrifying time if you are black.
A Louisville judge has let all of the officers involved in Breonna Taylor’s death off the hook. Well, one was charged because one of the bullets accidentally went through a wall and into the apartment next door, so ‘reckless discharge of a weapon’ I guess. I’m not sure what the penalty for that is, but I’m pretty sure it’s not ‘spending the rest of your life in jail,’ which would be appropriate.
That was the only charge. None of the officers were charged because of the bullets that ‘accidentally’ entered Breonna Taylor’s body, killing her. Her life meant less to them than a hole in the neighbor’s wall.
Then there was this, from the BBC article: The subsequent police report contained errors, including listing Ms Taylor’s injuries as “none” and saying no force was used to enter, when a battering ram had been used.
Those were not errors. Those were lies.

There are a lot of people who don’t like the new Facebook layout and I am among them. In fact, I have not yet heard a single one of my 1,480 Facebook friends say “I like the new format. It makes things much easier,” or “This new format is awesome! It’s so much more appealing aesthetically!” Perhaps they are out there and I just don’t know them, but I’m fairly certain the New Facebook is very much like the New Coke, back in the day, which was so unpopular the company just scrapped the whole idea and went back to Status Quo Ante.
So, why did Facebook do it? What were they thinking?
Here’s how I see it. Maybe Zuckerfucker isn’t the almighty genius everybody always thought he was. Maybe he’s just kind of a monosavant programmer who had one great idea in college, which spread like wildfire, for reasons even he didn’t fully comprehend.
Maybe he doesn’t know what to do next, but feels he has to do something next, which puts him in the same position as most people wasting their lives away pushing paper in an office cubicle.
He could, of course, just relax, in a swimming pool filled with billions of dollars and expensive jewelry, and stop worrying about Facebook, which is doing just fine under its own momentum. For some reason, rich people almost never choose that option. The world might be a better place if they did.

I wrote a poem the other day, a nice poem, just one of my usual 4 liners, and I posted it on a poetry site and checked this morning and it had slid way down the list and had zero likes, zero comments, and zero shares.
I am not surprised at that. I often get only a couple of likes, sometimes some comments but not always, and my work almost never gets shared. A bit frustrated , for sure, as I think I’m one of the best writers on the site, if not the best, but I suppose all writers feel that way. If someone doesn’t feel that their writing provides a unique and brilliant insight into our existence, why would they write at all?
Anyway, I liked the poem, so I am going to talk about it here. It goes:
Imagination only goes so far
it cannot change the way things really are
But, what it can change, for all to see
Is the way that things are going to be

It was originally a much shorter poem. The first two lines just popped into my head, as I was out on the balcony smoking a joint. I love it when that happens. I am of a mind with Gertrude Stein, when a reporter asked her why she liked to write, she said “I don’t like to write. I like having written.”

But, it was a negative thought, a poem just saying imagination is pointless, and that is not me at all. So, I forced out the last two lines, which I also like. It’s the old AA mantra, about having the courage to change the things you can’t accept, the patience to accept the things you can’t change, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Well, one of the things you can’t change is the way things are in the present. The forces that shape the present already took place in the past and are well beyond our power to change. We will never prevent the rise of Hitler, we will never erase the stain of human slavery, we will never bring back the Tasmanians, or Homo Florensis, or the Neanderthals.
The history of our species is not pretty. Nonetheless, we have potential. The future could be better than today, and seeing it that way is the first step.