Saturday, July 30, 2016

Guns And Sirens Redux

Being  afraid seems to have replaced living.

I continue to refuse to join the march of the fearful lemmings.

Being afraid continues to seem to me to be tantamount to being dead.

And I guess that is what the Islamist nuts are trying to accomplish: wrapping liberal western civilization in a funk of fear probably can bring it down; if we let that happen we deserve it.

Speaking to America solely: what happened to that John Wayne shit?

Or is trump your replacement for that fictitious bravado that we were all supposed to possess?

Are you now all going to slink into your little rat hole houses and let the self proclaimed strong man make it all better?

How pitiful.

A Digital Suggestion

I have evolved to using what I have decided is my logo for any trump observations I make over the next 100 days.

I hope I cease having reason for using the logo on the hundred and first day.

The logo is:

the clown trumpl

I am pointing this out because I just had an idea.

The hat, obviously, is my creation.

I created it using Adobe Illustrator.

One of the good things about an Illustrator document is that they are vector files, not raster (bitmap) files.

That means they can be almost infinitely scalable.

They can at least be scaled to billboard size.

Which is the basis for my idea.

I’ll be happy to email the Illustrator document to anyone who wants to use it in conjunction with a bitmap editor – like Photoshop – to create their own trump ridicule logos.

But wait; there’s more.

A good Illustrator artist could do a trump caricature in Illustrator– which would be almost infinitely scalable – and, using my hat, could create some interesting content.

That might even include billboards.

If somebody comes up with that combination, perhaps we could do a Kickstarter campaign to fund some boards.

Better Than A Monkey?

A friend of mine sent me an email today with the following story:

“My wife saw an ad on one of her websites for a kitchen clock that she liked.  It had been priced at 50 dollars and was reduced to 9.99 as clearance. 

She read the reviews and many of them faulted the product as it came unassembled and had no instructions. They had to return it not knowing how to assemble it. 

She ordered one any way. 

It arrived a large circle brightly colored with the two hands and a second hand in a cellophane wrapper. 

The mechanism was attached to the back of the clock face. 

So the assembly, for which there were no instructions, was to push the three hands onto the spindle which was on the face of the clock. 

For that someone needed instructions! 

Perhaps they had never seen a clock before and only used sundials.

And these people vote too”.

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This little tale moved my mind immediately to a story I had just read in The Week.

In the science section of the current issue there was an article about a discovery about a specific colony of capuchin monkeys.

The discovery was that 700 years ago the monkeys began using specially shaped rocks to crack open thick shelled nuts; they put the nut on a flat rock and hit it with their tool and got the contents out of the broken shell.

The discovery was further that the monkeys stored their tools in the vicinity of the trees that produced the nuts.

The article finally pointed out that the scientists think that the humans in the area learned how to crack the nuts by watching the monkeys.

I’m not kidding.

Thursday, July 7, 2016

Perception Is Reality

Hillary Clinton is, as far as I know, the most qualified candidate to run for President in a long time, maybe ever.

But the republicans appear to be winning their 30 year campaign against the Clintons: she may be unelectable because of the never ending bogus investigations which have never found anything; but people are stupid; if you assert the bogus long enough they believe some or all of it.

So it has been with Hillary until yesterday.

But the truth was, until yesterday, all the bad stuff was the bogus invention of the republicans.

So its impact was confined narrowly.

However.

Yesterday Hillary was officially found wanting in an inexcusable way: as Secretary of State she showed amazing lack of judgement in dealing with classified information.

So now the republicans have something tangible to point to.

They can say, will say and are saying that the bad judgement finding proves that all the bogus witch hunts were also true.

And vast hoards of the stupid nod and take a catatonic step forward.

None of this would matter if it weren't for the fact that a lot of us - probably a large majority of us (if you include the large numbers of us excluded from voting by the republicans' voter suppression laws) have been depending upon Mrs. Clinton to win the Presidency and continue to move the country forward.

That expectation now looks to be seriously threatened by a nightmare confluence of the bogus, the stupid and the voter suppression laws.

Could we nominate John Kerry again?

Or President Gore?