Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

There is little doubt that the American left is in disarray. Bernie Sanders has been kneecapped, sidelined, and the powers that be are doing all they can to ignore his ideas and sweep them under the rug.
His supporters have been scattered, there is no unity among us. Some, trying to stay as close as possible to Bernie’s ideals and goals, are voting Green. Others are following the lead of Bernie himself and succumbing, reluctantly, to Biden. Some have washed their hands of politics all together and will sit this election out. A small percentage have gone over to Trump, apparently with the idea that the quicker everything is destroyed, the quicker we can recover, and a still smaller handful are throwing bricks through windows and committing arson, although I suspect the majority of those instances are agents provocateurs. The Overton Window has been slammed shut, and reopened somewhere to the far, far right.
It is a darned shame, no doubt about it. But, one important thing to remember is this: the greatest gift that Bernie gave us was each other. Despite decades of hearing “America is a right wing country, there’s nothing you can do about that” we now know that there are millions and millions of us with a very similar left-wing mind set. We believe that sick people deserve to be made well. We believe that the planet is worth saving. We believe that rich people should pay their fair share. We believe that working people are entitled to a satisfying life. We believe that people should be judged on the content of their character and not on the color of their skin. We believe that poverty is unnecessary in a world as technologically advanced as ours, and should be eliminated.
These are good ideas, righteous ideas, and they are not going to go away. Sure, we need to take some time, evaluate why we lost (yes, I think we were cheated, but we need to evaluate how we were cheated and figure out how we can prevent that in future) and begin strategizing for the future.
We will be back. We will always be back. And, eventually, we will win.

Using a teleprompter during a speech is no big deal. It’s expected that your going to do it. Before teleprompters were invented, people read their speeches off paper, or at least had notes of the major points.
An interview, or a question and answer session, is a little bit different. You’re expected to have an answer to whatever question is asked. If you use a teleprompter, that means one of your staffers is listening to the question, formulating an answer, and typing it out for you. That staffer is the one who should be running for office. Reading from a teleprompter in that situation is pathetic, an admission that you are no more than an empty shell, a mouther of words.
That being said, I just watched the Biden interview with James Cordin, the one a lot of people are up in arms about, saying Biden used a teleprompter. I don’t know. I didn’t actually see proof of that. But, it was a lame interview and James Cordin should be ashamed of himself. “Hey, Mr. Vice President, why don’t you just hold up some pictures of your family and talk about how much you love them and your son was in Iraq and you’re all super patriotic and dedicated and good stuff like that?” That was basically the whole interview. Not a single word about policy.
Even at that, it wasn’t an impressive performance. He slurred his words a bit and sometimes lost the thread of the conversation. If he was using a teleprompter, it’s even worse, of course, but this was bad enough. And James Cordin totally co-operated with it.

I just watched Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas for the first time, believe it or not, although I read the book a long time ago. It was about what I expected, and reasonably entertaining, but not a great film.
A few weeks ago I watched On The Road, or at least a little bit of it. Good Lord, what a ridiculously boring movie.
The fatal flaw is the same in both of them. The appeal of the books was in the brilliant writing (I wouldn’t so much call it stream of consciousness as a flood of consciousness, an outpouring, a rant) and not so much in the plot. A movie needs a plot. With On The Road, the whole plot is a couple of guys hitch-hike around America, do lots of drugs and drink lots of booze and listen to awesome music, and have sex with women and steal cars. The main plot of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is two guys do an absolutely insane amount of drugs and go to Las Vegas.
The thing is, it’s a lot of fun to do lots of drugs, but not really anything special to watch a film about people doing lots of drugs. As I said, the books were great because of the writing.
I give Fear and Loathing a 4, maybe a 5 out of ten. I give On The Road nothing.

Usually I tend to see a news item and have a strong opinion on it one way or another, right away. Sometimes all it takes is a headline. I should probably be a bit more cautious about jumping to conclusions, but I’m not.
However, on the Bob Woodward thing, I’ve kind of gone back and forth. His announcement that he interviewed Donald Trump and has proof, as in a tape of the session which definitely counts as proof, that Trump knew how deadly the virus was ages ago, like before it had entered the public consciousness even. Not too surprising. He gets briefings, even if he generally doesn’t understand them.
It’s kind of a bombshell, which has been somewhat tempered and deflected by the fact that Woodward waited months to reveal this information, likely because he’s got a book coming out.
At first I didn’t think much of it, and then a lot of people started being angry at Woodward, saying if he knew this he had an obligation to report it, and I was ready to jump on that bandwagon. Haven’t been a fan of Woodward for a long time. Good job on Watergate, I guess, but he was pretty much asleep through the whole Bush administration. As journalists go, he’s not exactly Julian Assange.
But, on the other hand, lots of people knew in the early stages. Scientists, for instance. The public wasn’t listening to them, either.
So, did Woodward do anything unethical? Maybe, a bit. He certainly didn’t do anything illegal.
It’s almost as if we’ve moved past saying there are certain things journalists can’t say and now we’re into there are certain things they MUST say, and I’m not quite ready to sign off on that. The CDC should have an obligation like that. An independent journalist, not so much.
In any event, Woodward’s not the main story. Trump is.

I haven’t researched this deeply, but looking at all the pictures friends up and down the American west coast have posted, and looking at a map of where the fires are raging, I’m starting to wonder if this will be as bad as the fires in Australia, which ran from June of 2019 to May of this year, or the California fires of 2018, which killed over 100 people.
I sure hope not, but it’s not looking good. In fact, it’s LOOKING terrible, as I see photo after photo of orange skies, days without daylight. One picture that’s becoming rather iconic (or viral, if you prefer) is of the Golden Gate bridge. One truly brilliant meme that’s making the rounds uses this photo, accompanied by Nancy Pelosi’s infamous quote “The Green Dream, or whatever they call it.”
Well, we call it the Green New Deal, but Green Dream will do. I dream of a day when more trees are planted than are burned down. I dream of a day when we can employ technology that already exists to get water to where we need it when we need it and thus prevent wildfires, floods and drought. I dream of a day when we have electric trains and electric buses linking all of the places in the world so that we’re not pouring carbon into the air and inviting our own extinction.
A great start would be if these fires inspire the citizens of San Francisco to get rid of Nancy Pelosi, who has nothing but contempt for the environment, and who has enabled Donald Trump just as she enabled George Bush before him.
There is no one person who is solely responsible for this situation, but there is no doubt she is a big part of the problem.