Monday, May 15, 2023

MAGA Thinks Ahead

At the moment America has more jobs than workers. In some states child labor laws have been altered so companies can put 14-year-olds on night shifts. Meanwhile tens of thousands of people seeking hard work are lined up at our Southern border, but we won't let them in--because many of them are not of 100% European ancestry.  

The Corporate-MAGA think tanks plan decades ahead. Part of their plan is to keep people of color out of our country and its textbooks. 


also on FB



Saturday, May 13, 2023

CNN

My wife caught me watching CNN this morning, or she thought she did. Actually I was watching YouTube, which carries a few bits of CNN at times. 

Until recently I followed two commentators on CNN. The new owners fired one and shuffled the other into a closet.  Not MAGA enough, I guess. Did not fit the new business plan. 



Friday, May 12, 2023

Your Money Or Your Life

Climate change is making parts of the USA less safe. But which parts? Which sections of the nation will suffer most from humid heat, storms, hurricanes, floods, etc? 

To answer that question, experts ask which states are gaining population. Americans are moving to the worst possible climate places, mostly the Gulf Coast of the USA, including Florida and Texas. Many voters are drawn to regions where life is cheaper in every way and cognitive inadequacy goes unnoticed. 

People are leaving overpopulated areas with mild climates like San Francisco and Sonoma County. Too expensive.

 


 



   

 


Monday, May 8, 2023

Paperclips

John Roberts (Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court) and Justice Clarence Thomas are, reporters tell us, afloat in the river of cash being funneled to their wives by billionaires. In short, Roberts and Thomas are as bent as paperclips.

Both men and their wives got rich thanks to the old Republican Party, which was saner but even more corrupt than the bug-headed MAGA types. 

I've seen a Democratic senator defending the right of the Supreme Court to not regulate itself.  Most likely the Democrat is defending his own wife, who is also helping herself at some rich dude's ATM. 

There are around 800 billionaires in America. If one billionaire gave every spouse in the senate a million dollars, he would still have at least 900 million dollars left. And his oil field investments would make up the loss. 

Can we have billionaires and a democracy at the same time? 

 


Tuesday, May 2, 2023

White House Plumbers

WHITE HOUSE PLUMBERS, an HBO series, has aired its first episode, and it is funny. The fictional E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, incompetent bunglers, are molded from the stuff that made Laurel and Hardy legends.  

At the time we did not find Hunt and Liddy amusing, but 50 safe years later they have become ineptly hilarious. And you can bet that many years from now Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis will be major roles in a comedy series, two squabbling goons unable to find their own butts with both hands. 

Friday, April 28, 2023

Nikki Haley's Goal

Yesterday politician Ms. Nikki Haley told us that if we re-elect Joe Biden, he will likely die before finishing his second  term. Her unspoken point was that if President Biden dies in office, he will be replaced by a woman of color! And what could be worse.

Susan pointed out that Nikki, a woman of color, is running for President to keep a woman of color from becoming President. 


Monday, April 24, 2023

Gender Queer

Two nights back Susan and I went with Marty Renault to attend a tribute to her late husband, Dennis Renault, the former editorial cartoonist for the McClatchy newspaper chain. This was a small event made up largely of people devoted to artistic printing, setting type by hand. Dennis, once my roommate at UCLA, had owned an ancient press, and he had printed wonderful items that people appreciated. 

About 30 people showed up at North Bay Letterpress Art in Sebastopol.,One of the informal speakers was a printer named Maia Kobabe, author of GENDER QUEER. She was quite interesting. She told us about her work at the printshop and about how GENDER QUEER had been something of a success until attacks on the book by crackpots had propelled it into a major event.

This morning I read that the American Library Association has named GENDER QUEER as the most banned book of the year. Susan and I feel like we've  met royalty. 


Wednesday, April 5, 2023

Melodrama

My local newspaper had a subhead this morning that read "A tragic moment in some ways." It referred to the arrest of Donald Trump for 34 of his minor crimes.

A tragedy is about the downfall of a good person, usually someone of importance. He's brought down by a personal failing and circumstances he can't defeat. In a sense a tragedy teaches us a truth: even the best among us is imperfect and faces death.  

The downfall of a shitty crook is not a tragedy. It's melodrama. I don't feel fear and pity for Trump. The candle of the wicked shall be put out. With pleasure. 


Tuesday, April 4, 2023

Falling


I am amazed by how fast I fall. My bike flips or I step in a hole, and I am flat on the ground before I can blink. Then comes the shock of pain, which usually lasts only, say,  5 or 10 minutes. After that I get up, and I'm okay. (I did break my ankle once, so I now employ, while walking, a half-numb foot that cants a little to the right.) 

When you get old, you start falling. I had a friend named Lucy who reached 100; she fell and lay on her kitchen floor for 14 hours. 

When I got into my 80s I began to fall from time to time. And then my wife fell. But we are fine. 


(Report from Old Age)