Tag Archives: politics

January 25, 2017 · 3:57 pm

The Oxford Obfuscation

queen-elizabeth-iIf you are going to entertain a completely absurd notion like, “Shakespeare wasn’t really written by Shakespeare”, then you have to have some knowledge of the times and the context within which such a profoundly counter-intuitive thing could possibly be true.  And it also helps to understand more precisely what the “writing of Shakespeare” actually means.  Now, I know it is not particularly fair to confuse you, dear reader, right before I try to dazzle you with my complicated and over-thunk lackwit conspiracy theory, but that is, after all, what obfuscation actually means.

The plays, sonnets, and other poetry of William Shakespeare reveal the mind of a genius.  Whoever wrote the works has to be a complicated man living a complicated life.  He has to be a sensitive, empathetic, highly intelligent, observant, and troubled man.  You don’t write the dark and deeply troubled suicidal tragedy of Hamlet without ever having thought of taking your own life.  You cannot portray the madness of King Lear without ever having experienced the turmoil of the mind that threatens to tear your soul apart.  And you don’t write about the complexities of love found in As You Like It or Romeo and Juliet without ever having experienced the massive thunderstorms of the mind that go along with falling in love.  And we are talking true love, not necessarily the domestic love you have for the wife you are stuck with.   You see what I did just there?  I put you into the head of the writer, and started you thinking like you yourself are Shakespeare.  As goofy a mental gymnastic exercise as that is, bear with me and keep thinking it.

At the time of Shakespeare’s ascendancy as the Bard Laureate of English Literature, England was not a safe place to be either a noble or a playwright.  Queen Elizabeth’s mother had her head cut off for bad politics even though she was married to the King of England at the time.  Lady Jane Gray, one of Elizabeth’s predecessors, lost her head when she was no more than a sixteen-year-old girl.  During Elizabeth’s reign, one of her court favorites, Robert Devereaux, Earl of Essex, attempted to seize the queen herself after a riot fomented by a performance of Shakespeare’s play, Richard II, at which eleven of Essex’s noble supporters were said to be present stirring up the emotions of the crowd.  It was a near thing for the writer of the play (about the life of a king whose reign ended in controversy about succession and which led eventually to the War of the Roses) to escape without also being caught up in the rebellion’s failure and round of executions that separated Essex from his head.  Elizabeth banned numbers of plays with religious or political content, bans that never seemed to touch the writer of Shakespeare’s plays, even when they touched on political themes.  You didn’t have to rebel against the Queen to lose your head either.  Elizabeth was trying to reinstate Anglican Protestantism against the critical tides of Catholic Europe.  You could be banished, put to death, or impressed  by force into the English Navy for being suspected of ideas that were too Catholic.  And witchcraft, or consulting with witches, as Macbeth depicts, earned you a nice warm fire in the public square to cleanse your immortal soul.

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Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford

So, if one were to be both a playwright and a nobleman, known to and beloved by Queen Elizabeth, might there not be good reason to write under a pseudonym?  And numerous people who write about Edward de Vere mention the fact that he wrote poetry and plays, and the plays were very popular.  Some scraps of poetry by the Earl of Oxford still exist, but whatever happened to the manuscripts of his plays?  It is a conspiracy theory so delicious, that I have to take at least one more bite.  (You understand, I try to stick to a 500-word target for these posts, and even this 600+ is really too long.  So that means there has to be an Earl of Oxford Part II at least.)

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January 16, 2017 · 4:59 pm

When You Can’t Laugh at the Clowns

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It is sad that Ringling Brothers, Barnum, & Bailey will be closing for good this coming May.  I have personally gone to the circus and enjoyed the spectacle under the big top (though actually in arenas) about fifteen times, first with my parents and then with my own kids.  I loved the elephants, the wire-walkers, the lion tamers, and I laughed at the clowns.  And now that will no longer be possible.  I have gradually lost more and more of the most important things in my life as I have gotten older.  I lost mobility with arthritis.  I have lost financial security through health problems.  I have lost the ability to do the job I devoted my life to and so deeply loved.  And now I can no longer laugh at the clowns.

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The problem is not that there are no clowns left, even though most of the greatest ones, Emmett Kelly, Bob Keeshan, Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, and the man who played Bozo, have all passed on.  The problem is not that my kids are afraid of clowns, scared to death of people who aggressively get right up in your face while theirs is covered with grease paint (especially since my kids are now grown and can sock the clown in his painted mush if he gets too close).  The problem isn’t even that the clowns are not funny any more.

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The problem is that the Clown in Chief has killed the laughter.  He has become an agent of instability and chaos.  When he is mocked brilliantly by Alec Baldwin on Saturday Night Live, he has to mount a tweet storm on Twitter and uses his limited twit-wit to angrily denounce and threaten and belittle instead of laughing at the jokes as other politicians like the current President and Vice President have graciously done, even sometimes using self-deprecating humor to get in on the jokes themselves.  Even notoriously humorless political clowns like Ted Cruz and Sarah Palin have more grace in ignoring mockery and smiling at insults than this Great Orange Face that we put in charge of the country’s most serious business.

The ability to laugh at oneself is a very serious thing.  When the whole “golden showers” business made it into the national debate, this manic moron did not make it seem mere political hum-buggery by laughing it off.  No, he got deeply offended and defensive, the same way a person who is actually guilty of the accusation would react.  So, if it is not true, the Crybaby in Chief has only bolstered our belief that it is most probably true.  As ridiculous as the accusation sounds, you have to admit that Trump’s behavior in the past makes you at least entertain the possibility that it is a true thing that he has done.

And now, he has over-reacted again, this time to the very real concerns raised by Congressman John Lewis, an honest-to-God civil rights hero, with cruel and crusty criticism that lowers my respect for Trump as well as lowering all future expectations.  The man isn’t even sworn in yet, and he has already shown such bilious badness in his character that I truly dread living in this country under his rule.

I am a man who lives to laugh, and laughs to live.  That is how I overcome the things that bother me as well as the things that hurt me.  I use laughter as medicine, not as a weapon.  And I hate to see the viruses in our society that I have always been able to inoculate myself against with humor become totally drug-resistant in that way.

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January 11, 2017 · 3:56 pm

Bittersweet Irony

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“Mickey, you nerd!  Your jokes are not funny!

You’re not clever, you’re stupid, and not even punny!”

 

 

–wisdom from a Twitter troll who admires Dr. Seuss

I will admit, I was not joking when I said the world ended when Trump won the election.  I believe climate change is beyond our control when stupid, vicious, greedy people control 100% of our government.  They are busy already, before Obama even left office, with sealing our doom.  They recently passed the REINS Act, which is intended to not only curb but roll back government regulations.  The Republicans will no longer simply allow regulatory agencies like the EPA to control which toxic chemicals go into our food and drinking water when it might cost the taxpayers (especially RICH taxpayers) money.  They passed a rule that if corporations want to inject batrachotoxin into hamburger meat to increase profits short term, the FDA can’t regulate and prevent that without first having a congressional committee in each of the houses of congress voting their approval of the ban.  This with the aid of Tea Party sandbagging and temper tantrums to grease the gears toward refusal to turn.  Batrachotoxin as every congressman surely understands is the chemical in poison dart frogs that will will kill you if you kiss them.  We certainly need more of that in hamburgers to make the meat look tastier.  So, they will quickly and efficiently ignore the issue and fail to allow the regulation.  We are doomed, dear ones.

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Turtle-boy, pictured here, shows off his favorite flat iron of visual-sarcastic irony which he uses to throw at the heads of dumbnutz who don’t get what irony is.

Irony is when everything you held in your heart as an expectation and looked forward to as something you could depend on for the rest of your life comes abruptly to an end and the opposite is what actually occurs.

Republicans now hold all power in the US government.  Again!  Eight years of Lonesome George the Rodeo Clown, a Wall-Street meltdown and resulting Great Recession, two nearly-endless wars fought over false intelligence about WMDs, and eight years of obstructing everything the other side tried to do to fix their mess was not enough to satisfy Lucretia Borgia’s party of poison and greed.

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Senator Turtle-man McConnell doesn’t get irony.  He doesn’t understand now why Democrats don’t get on board with all the legislation and confirmation hearings that the GOP wants to push through right away.  Why would they want to obstruct legislation that helps people by reducing their social security benefits and ending not only the Affordable Care Act, but doing away with medicare as well?  It’s what the people voted for, isn’t it?

I have instructed Turtle-boy to throw the flat iron of visual-sarcastic irony at Turtle-man’s head.  But he must do it quickly and accurately, or the slow-talking Kentucky Senator will pull that big turtle head back inside his shell, as he has done so many times before.  And even if the flat iron hits squarely, it will not change anything.  We have lost and the future is lost to us and all our offspring.

I do still have some hope of survival of the human race and life on Earth.  Ironically that is because I am just as soft-brained and hopelessly stupid as the rest of my kind.  And I believe in savoring the time we have left.  I intend to cast off political worries into a sea of forgetfulness.  We shall have to see what sharks that attracts.  But hopefully, the sharks that actually eat us will die of food poisoning.

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January 9, 2017 · 4:04 pm

Explaining the Words… Part Three

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This is the last part of this monstrous political potpourri, I promise.  Because even a nattering nabob of liberal claptrap like me has to reach a conclusion sooner or later.  If I don’t, then sooner or later Donald Trump is going to hear that I may have called him a Fascist, soon to be followed by a Twitter Tweet Storm from Hell.

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But the only part of the continuum of political terminology I haven’t explained is the center of the horseshoe.  Yes, I said “horseshoe” because it is not a straight line continuum.  The two extreme ends, the crackpot communist end and the freaky fascist end both bend towards chaos and destruction.  The safe part is in the middle.  When you mount a horseshoe over the kitchen door for luck, the middle part goes at the bottom.  This way the horseshoe holds the good luck in.  If you tip it upside down, the good luck all drains out.  And for my extremely conservative friends in both Iowa and Texas, that is a metaphor, when you use one thing to mean something else completely, or compare two unlike things to get at a deeper meaning.  So please don’t break your brains trying to figure that one out.  It is just more of what you call, “loony liberal stupidity”.

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I have always thought of myself as a moderate, at least until recently.  The right side of the equation has skewed the numbers so badly that moderates are now liberals by comparison.  Republicans since Reagan have really turned Eisenhower into a liberal.  What once was a moderate conservative Republican in the 1950’s would have to be considered a liberal Democrat today if he or she maintained their core values.  I have the Bushies who are really proto-fascists peeking in at the right side of the moderate cartoon because they both started as moderates, and are really pretty much to blame for pushing moderates to the narrowing left as they ballooned the more evil aspects of the right.

In truth, the old Greek idea of “Moderation in all things”. also provably a Biblical idea, is really the best approach to politics.  Liberals aim to change things for the better (which we desperately need them to do in the next four years) and conservatives aim to preserve everything that already exists that is good.  We need both of those sides in a political debate.  But good governing happens always in the middle.  Remember, chaos happens at both the extreme ends.

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Eisenhower is a good example of the kind of moderate I am exalting as the best political sort of thing.  He was a moderate conservative Republican.  But if you substituted Barack Obama’s picture and name on this quote, my conservative friends would start hooting and hollering about the communist Muslim president from Kenya.  The idea itself is what they have been taught is communist liberal claptrap.  I may have mentioned before that I see Eisenhower policies and politics as virtually a synonym for the policies and politics of Barack Obama.  Obama is a moderate.  As is Mitt Romney whose Republican healthcare plan as governor of Massachusetts Obama stole to turn into Obamacare.  Jimmy Carter was a gentle Christian gentleman who was not only a moderate, but the first presidential candidate I was ever eligible to vote for.  I could easily have lived with Bob Dole, the moderate Republican senator from Kansas as president.  Moderates, in my estimation, are a very good thing for our country.

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Harry Truman was also a moderate, though he was very much on the conservative end of the moderate bench.  Still, what he said in this quote is really more true now than it was in his own time.  I would rate Truman as more conservative than Eisenhower.

So there is my essay on politics in three complete parts.  I have said my piece, and am now ready to be called a “stupid fear-mongering liberal”.  Let the throwing of overripe tomatoes begin.

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January 8, 2017 · 5:21 pm

Explaining the Words… Part Two

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Yesterday I tried in my very best loopy-liberal reasonable voice to explain what liberals are, their inherent characteristics and flaws, and the reasons we should not simply shoot them on sight.  So today I will try to make the case for what I believe conservatives are really all about and why we should not automatically shoot them either (or shoot them with automatic weapons so that Ted Cruz can cook more machine-gun bacon.)

Remember, I explained liberals and liberal philosophy as being an instrument of change.  And I identify myself as a liberal in these times of the Trumpster, Chaos Clown of Making America Sweat Again.  I think change is needed.  I had hoped for that with Obama, but the conservatives were victorious in their primary function of preserving the status quo.  Now, I do think there are times in history when conservatives were absolutely essential to our government.  The 1950’s is a good example of that under the Eisenhower Administration.  (But not for social reasons like the struggle for equal rights, rather the economic situation of growth and innovation and positive spirit… along with the invention of Rock and Roll.)

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Conservatives are meant to preserve what is workable and good, beneficial to all.  Unfortunately, some conservatives fall into the trap of wanting to preserve their own power.  That leads down dark paths to Fascism.  In my cartoon of conservatives immediately above, I should point out that I have included only the cartoon characters that have fallen at least partially into the Fascist tiger trap.

George Herbert Walker Bush is the son of Prescott Bush, a politician and banker whose New York UBC bank (he was president of the bank at the time) in 1942 had funds confiscated from it on the grounds that it was Nazi money funding the Nazi party in Germany and allowing the funny-looking failed painter from Austria with the toothbrush mustache to become the ultimate Fascist leader.

George W. Bush, his son, also known as Lonesome George the Rodeo Clown (mainly by me), continued the Nazi tradition by introducing the Patriot Act, reducing American civil liberties and establishing the surveillance state that we now enjoy.

Definition of Fascism from Webster’s; 

  1. often capitalized :  a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition

  2. a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control <early instances of army fascism and brutality — J. W. Aldridge>

Richard Nixon had a direct link to the good conservativism of President Eisenhower, having been Ike’s Vice President and even being related by marriage as Nixon’s daughter married David Eisenhower.  But he also had a streak of paranoia and panic that caused the entire Watergate kerfluffle and his eventual flight from power into ignominy.

Donald J. Trump is, to be fair, still pretty much an unknown quantity.  But everything he has demonstrated in his business history and presidential campaign suggests he will be an even stronger Fascist than anyone I have named so far.  He puts on a show like P.T. Barnum, and horrifies and fascinates his audience.  But we never made the mistake of electing a liar and a con man like P.T. Barnum to the highest office in the land before.  And the paranoia and excuse-making through denial of reality we have seen so far in the Russian hacking scandal, makes me fear the worst.  Trump is more paranoid than Nixon.  He will probably do much worse things than Nixon did as a result.

The KKK has a place in my cartoon because their history is one of trying to preserve the status quo through violent repression and terror campaigns.  Their suppression tactics are the same as the Nazi brown-shirts on Krystallnacht and the Gestapo throughout WWII.  And through the Steve Bannon connection, the KKK has a firm grip on the underlying philosophies of the Trump Administration.

So the possible end point of the conservative push toward Fascism is the same sort of chaos you get on the far left end.  The leftist idea of constant revolution ends in violence or Fascist dictatorship.  Fascist dictatorship squeezes everything it tries to control so hard that it breaks, and Fascists try to control everything.

So, I fear both ends of the political spectrum.

Though I apologize to Bernie.  I would’ve voted for Bernie.  He was just the farthest left Joker meme I had to choose from for this metaphor.

As you have probably guessed by now, I intend to write one more post about this whole mess of political nonsense.  I have talked so far about the doom on both ends of the horseshoe, and so far ignored the middle, the part that holds the good fortune.   So, being well over 500 words once again, I will leave you until my next horrible political post about the world just prior to the Apocalypse.

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January 7, 2017 · 7:27 pm

Explaining the Words

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I used to have political arguments all the time with my father that would end only in frustration… for me.  He was happy to see his offspring boiling over ideas with smoke coming out of both ears.  Because no matter what I said, he would always take the opposite position just to oppose me.  I know this because I tested it.  I would counter an argument he had just made by rephrasing it so that it was in different words, but meant exactly the same thing he had just said to me.  Naturally he came up with opposing views immediately.  One time I even flat out stated, “I agree with you!”  Which naturally led to an immediate and complete reversal of the position on his part.  I think now that he was training me to think more deeply about things than just parroting talking points heard on television.  Either that, or he really really loved to argue.

The most important thing I learned in the endless arguments about Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole, Two Bushes, and Bill Clinton was that you have to establish the meanings of the terms you are using.  Hence the reason for this post.

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The words that made the most difference in my discussions with my father were “liberal”, “fascist”, “conservative”, and “communist”.  When my dad used those terms, “conservative” always meant “good guys” and the other three words meant “bad guys”.  But when I listened to the policies and concerns he wanted to talk about, whenever he said the word “conservative” he was really saying “moderate”.    And because he was pretty much in the center of the political spectrum, he thought of fascists and communists as being the same thing.  If my father ever was truly wrong about anything political, it was when he followed Ronald Reagan’s affable, smiling “Morning in America” politics towards the far right and abandoned the moderate principles he held dear.  He had been deceived by Nixon, and regretted it… in fact, we all were deceived and we all regretted it.  But that did not prevent him from being deceived by later Republicans.  We both have had a long-standing admiration for President Eisenhower, Senator Bob Dole, Senator Chuck Grassley, and Senator John McCain.  They represent the moderate wing of the Republican Party.  But the GOP has marched relentlessly towards fascism and oligarchy of the rich, and we both feel that has tainted both Grassley and McCain.  My dad ended up voting for Barack Obama twice.  Obama, to him, is Eisenhower reincarnated.  The problem, we both agree, has come anytime American politics have moved away from the center.

So let me begin defining terms by ridiculing the Loony Left.c360_2016-12-26-23-19-35-929aa

Being liberal means promoting change.  Hence, the Marxist devotion to revolution and the desire to have an on-going revolution of constant change.  Unfortunately constant change is another way to define chaos.  That is the main reason that communist-socialist experiments have generally ended in violence, economic collapse, and fascist-type strong-man oppression.  The poor raggedy communist in my cartoon, standing on the left end of the spectrum is always doomed to poverty and violent death.  If you don’t believe that, just ask Leon Trotsky if it isn’t so.  Oh, wait, you can’t.  Stalin had him murdered.  Stalin ended the Russian experiment by cracking down on everything, making himself the antithesis of actual socialist ideas.  I included the ultra-liberal philosopher and hedonist Alistair Crowley on this end of the spectrum because he fought against all social norms and rules.  That sort of religion leads to sexual depravity, vice, and corruption to a degree that got Crowley labeled “the Most Evil Man Who Ever Lived” in a BBC documentary.

Sometimes being liberal is needed desperately.  Then you get the kind of liberal change agents that JFK was (and thankfully, LBJ carried out his liberal changes to an American society crippled by racism and xenophobia).  Martin Luther King Jr. was also that kind of agent of change.  Bernie Sanders is a parallel agent of change to JFK in that Barack Obama’s policies are almost a mirror image of Eisenhower’s in the 1950’s.  What the media today labels as a liberal is equivalent to moderate Republicans before Nixon.  Very similar changes are needed in social and economic areas today.  We have yet to see if Sanders can get elected in 2020 and then assassinated shortly thereafter.

You can probably tell that this article is not yet complete.  I have a lot more loony liberal pontificating to do (and please note, I said “pontificating” not “defecating”.  I am not a Trump voter.)    But I am well past the 500 word goal for today, and so, I must leave the rest of the crap to be said in a part two article.  Maybe also a part three.  Please stop me before I reach part twenty-six.

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I do so enjoy making fun of Trump and his tiny, tiny hands.  So here I am sharing another lampoon at the expense of the Great Orange Face of America.

 

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December 21, 2016 · 4:27 pm

I Do Not Love Thee, Mr. Trump

Okay, I gave the monster a chance to prove that he wasn’t as bad as I thought he would be.  But he has proven to be worse than I thought.  We always think that if we had lived in 1930’s  Germany, we would’ve stood up to Herr Schickelgruber.  (Fun fact; Alois Hitler, Adolf’s father, was born out of wedlock to Maria Schickelgruber and later took the name Hitler from the man who married his mother.  So legally, the Fuhrer was actually Adolf Schickelgruber… a fact that humorists of the day used against him to get themselves exterminated.)  Well, now is the time to test that resolve.  There are eerie similarities between that old Fascist dictator and the incoming one. (Another fun fact; Trump’s family name was Drumpf in the old country.  His grandfather, Friedrich Drumpf came to this country at the age of 16 and English-ified his name to Fred Trump.  This is a fact I learned from comedian John Oliver.  Proof at Snopes.com  You should remember the name John Oliver.  He is both informative and funny, and when Donald Drumpf changes the libel laws to include the death penalty, Oliver will be one of the first to go.)

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I started this blog to promote my humorous science fiction novel, Catch a Falling Star, and to write humor in the gentle, toothless way I always admired in Red Skelton, George Goebel, and Jack Benny.  Self-effacing slapstick and subtle funny is funnier than insult and bite funny that is all the rage now… at least in my opinion.  But there are also things that happen that galvanize history itself, and you have to respond appropriately.  You have to take a stand.

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My entire life has been dedicated to educating kids.  I sacrificed my youth and health… and part of my sanity to it.  And now, this re-heated Twinkie with delusions of grandeur and epically bad hair has put an enemy of public education in the cabinet as the Secretary of Education.

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In fact, he has chosen cabinet officials specifically for the purpose of deconstructing their departments.

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“What?  The EPA controls nukes?  I couldn’t even remember this danged department!

His transition team represents a total contempt for the democratic duties of government to protect and empower the people who voted him in.

So, I have resolved that I will never recognize this man as my President.  I am part of the resistance that stands against him.  I will not address him as anything but Mr. Trump.  He didn’t earn the title fairly under that cloud of Russian hacking, collaboration over oil between Trump and Putin and Exxon who now runs the State Department.  He didn’t earn that title fairly when the Director of the FBI wrote a letter announcing more emails to Congress right before the election, and then later revealed there was nothing important in them.  He didn’t earn that title fairly when he failed to denounce white supremacists who supported him and after the election win were emboldened to commit hate crimes while shouting his name.  He will be the worst president in history, though I think he will be an heir to the throne of world’s most pernicious dictator that Herr Schickelgruber could be proud of.

I Do Not Love Thee, Mr. Trump!

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December 14, 2016 · 3:40 pm

Holiday Mixed Nuts

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I know what this is.  This is Grandma Aldrich’s holiday nut bowl with nut-cracker and silver walnut picks.  It brings back fond memories of Thanksgiving Day and Christmas reunions that were filled with nuts.  And, yes, I mean that figuratively as well as literally.  I tend to really love nuts.

And one of the most insidious things about Facebook is the fact that it connects you to all the nuts from your checkered past, and memories like this can come back to haunt you any day or any month… not just at holiday family gatherings.

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I probably don’t have to remind you that the incredible spray-tanned intellectual-fartgas-container this country elected as its next leader is not, and will never be, my president.  I reject him in his every detail.  He is anathema to everything I stand for and believe in.  And some of my lovely Iowegian Facebook friends are responsible for for helping him win.  I have not unfriended anybody as they may have done to me.  I am still constantly amused by them and their families, even though their choice offends me.  But I do get tired of being bombarded with Brazil nuts of “He won, get over it!  We endured 8 years of your president!”  I hate Brazil nuts.  They are difficult to crack open, especially with the skinny, silver nutcracker you see in the picture above.  And after you go to all that effort, they don’t taste very good.  Brazil nuts are always the last nuts in the nut bowl because nobody actually likes them.  And besides, I don’t remember Republicans in Congress accepting defeat under Obama gracefully.  They kicked and spit and shut down the government in a hissy fit.  What do they have against the government trying to make healthcare affordable, anyway?  Still, I get those big, hard, oddly-shaped nuts in my Facebook feed constantly this time of year.

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My sister posted the meme you see above on my Facebook wall.  She says it is actually quite easy to become a complete master of doing what the meme suggests, by which she means me more so than her.  I like walnuts.  They are hard to crack, but not impossible like Brazil nuts.  And once you have split them into two haves, two separate turtle shells, you still have to pick the walnut meat out of a hard, spiky labyrinth of dastardly convoluted walls of interior shell.  But you end up with something delicious if you put in the time picking things apart.  I fondly remember singing goofy Christmas carols with my two sisters and half-dozen cousins at Grandma and Grandpa Aldrich’s farm this time of year.  Elaborate versions of “I’m dreaming of a pink-and-purple-polka-dotted Christmas…” and “Jingle bells, Batman smells…”  My sister is often critical of me and doubts my sanity, as a good sister should, but in the long run, we have some sweet memories to share, good times and incredibly goofy nonsense to look back upon.

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But, of course, everybody’s favorite nut is the peanut.  Those are the first to disappear from the nut bowl.  Holiday gatherings are mainly about eating, but the most important second-place thing is everybody’s self-generated house apes… the next generation of little Beyers and Aldrich’s and Fimblegrubbers and Pumblechooks (yes, I know I am not actually related to Fimblegrubbers or Pumblechooks, but I like funny names, and I have to live with the funny-named people who attend our family gatherings).  We all enjoy watching them play games of “infuriate your sister” or “chase Grampy’s dog till it bites you” because they are funny, adorable and cute.  Sometimes they even play with mutant toy Elmo-looking things like the one in the picture, though I didn’t draw this from a family member, and I added the mutant features to avoid questions of copyright infringement.

Anyway, holidays are notoriously full of nuts, both literal and figurative.  And we really have to learn to appreciate them all.

 

 

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December 4, 2016 · 4:08 pm

Finale – Why The Bad Guys Always Win

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There is ample reason to believe that rich guys always win because they have enough money and power to change what is true.  I don’t believe for a second that John F Kennedy was killed by a lone gunman.  But rich oil men, other politicians, CIA operatives who were fighting for their continued existence after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the FBI, and probably Vice President LBJ all wanted us to believe that, so it is still the official story today.  And don’t get me started on 9/11 with that whole bag of spiders and incongruous inconsistencies that Dubya refused to investigate further.

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There are a lot of evil Bond villains out there, but the 007-type superhero agents don’t really exist.  No one is thwarting the things that seriously need to be thwarted.

Converting from oil and fossil fuels to solar and other renewable energies does not profit the Moonraker schemes that are going on out there.  Some rich folks have even talked loosely about schemes to reduce the population of the planet to make the damage to the environment into a more manageable mess.  After all, what are the Georgia Guide Stones really all about?  You can look up what is actually written upon them.  It is worrisome.  And who is advocating for us, the common people in these sorts of schemes?

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The truth of it is, no matter what we do, or who is out there trying to advocate for us, the United States will not last forever.  Neither will humanity as a species. Neither will life on Earth.  Forever is simply not in the realm of the achievable.  Only destruction and renewal are guaranteed.  So, in some ways, it is okay if the bad guys ultimately win.  My life will end in the next few years no matter what.  And my children will not last forever either.  But the ending of the book does not take away all goodness and value to be found in the main text.  I have lived a good life, and not even God Himself can take that away.

That is not to say that we are without hope.  As I said, we don’t actually know who is out there standing up for us now.  There are some very good and noble people putting  immense effort into the task of securing our future.  We don’t know what adaptations and breakthroughs are yet to be made.

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Here are some things to think about.  It is statistically almost certain, given what we know now about life science, that there is life on other planets in this vast universe.  And if there is life, there is almost certainly intelligent life, some of it far more advanced than we are.  And if interstellar distances can in any way be crossed, then they already have been.  If time travel is possible, then time travelers already walk among us.  The only reason we don’t have actual proof of these things is that someone doesn’t want us to know.  It is possible that they don’t want us to know for our own good.  Not all of the most powerful and wealthy among us are evil.

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So, while it is true that bad guys always win because the system is rigged, and they are the ones who rigged it, that doesn’t mean that there will be nothing for the rest of us.  There is a limit to how much money you can actually benefit from owning.  There is also a limit to how much pain and suffering a single bad guy  can inflict upon us.  And even if they band together in large, powerful groups, there will always be more of us than there are of them.

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December 3, 2016 · 4:28 pm

“Because I Said So!” (Why Bad Guys Always Win – Part 3)

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Didn’t you hate it as a kid when Mom or Dad used to pull the royal decree maneuver on you rather than give you the real explanation?  “Why can’t we get a new dog to replace the one the junkyard dealer ran over with his truck?”  “Because I said so!” 

Yes, they pull rank or site ultimate power of authority or simply bully you into letting them win the argument.  Nixon said, “If it’s the President of the United States who does it, then it is legal.”  Remember, though, that Nixon was forced to resign shortly after that.

Now, Donald Trump says, “The President can’t have a conflict of interest,” by which he means that he doesn’t have to sell off his international real-estate holdings and put his assets into a real blind trust (not one run by Ivanka).

Does he get away with it?  It will mean, according to ethics lawyers from both the Obama and Bush administrations, that he will be in violation of the Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution as soon as he takes the oath of office.  So, of course he will.  Just like Mom and Dad after we buried Scamper.

Obama, as President, was forced to do most of what he did by Executive Order because he was a Democrat, and to a Republican Congress, that means he is automatically in the wrong.  Still, he managed to enforce his will with the I said so’s at least until the righteously heroic Republicans achieved their miracle victory with President-Elect Babyhands Von Clownstick.  Now, of course, his overreaching abuse of the I said so power to do terrible things, like allow undocumented children fleeing from violence and persecution to take shelter in this country, will now all be undone.

Of course, when a Republican is President, that’s different.  Republican Presidents are automatically good and patriotic and protecting the people even when they are lying to create a profitable war in Iraq to benefit Darth Cheney’s Halliburton interests.  Lonesome George the Rodeo Clown when he was President issued all sorts of Executive Orders that were not questioned even by Democrats, let alone opposed or reversed.  In the hands of a Republican President, I said so power is more absolute than Emperor Palpatine’s use of the Dark Side of the Force.

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So under President Donald J (for Joker, revealing his secret identity as a Batman villain) Trump, the “Because I said so!” will be absolute.  Rosie O’Donnell, Bill Maher, and Jon Stewart had better get used to the idea of waterboarding in Guantanamo.  We had all better get used to the idea of the White House being plated in gold leaf.  And I had better hope, having written an essay revealing the Cinnamon Hitler’s actual super power, that nobody actually reads this blog anymore.  If you would like to help ease my fears, you could always leave a comment in the comment section that includes the words, “I did not actually read this post.”

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