Screen Saver 060117

I Have Decided To Become A Fake News Generator

It may build me a “platform” and sell some copies of my books.

Here is the first fake news item:

*********************************************************************

I hear there is a top secret task force, headed by Jared The Princeling, tasked with the project of looking into whether having donnie personally execute, rather than deport, a room full of "illegal immigrants" - slicing them asunder, hither and yon, with an ancient Viking broadsword - would continue to shore up his standing with that all important minority of the American electorate that now pretty well runs the country.

**********************************************************************

Pretty fake, don’t you think?

Donnie The Dildo Renamed

A friend of mine recently strenuously objected to my chosen nick name for the forty fifth.

Which I thought odd, because that friend is a woman.

But all of us have complex sensitivities, I guess.

Anyway, her castigation of my language caused me some thought.

Dildo just seemed to fit as a nickname for an asshole who thinks grabbing crotch is foreplay.

***************************************************************

Join me here in a non sequitur.

***************************************************************

Drones are the male bees that don’t do anything, but are necessary for the insemination of the queen bee.

So that the hive, if the right decisions are made, will continue.

Given those facts (or fake news) I have never really understood why we have chosen to call remotely guided aircraft that kill people drones.

At least grabbing crotch must be fun, I guess.

I don’t know; I have never had the pleasure.

I have chosen others, later in the foreplay process; and they don’t establish dominance.

Which may explain my antipathy for donnie.

**************************************************************

Given all that, for what I am about to announce (donnie is currently doing the same announcement deferment as a drama ploy in his reality TV presidency –you know, the Paris Climate Deal) I am invoking the bee definition of drone.

From here on out, donnie is donnie the drone; and his compatriots are donnie and the drones.

I really liked donnie and the dildos.

It sounded like a doo wop group.

Which is the best I can say about it.

Great Is Bunk

Here in the PNW in the last few days we have had a guy on a light rail train in Portland accost two young women with hate speech.

Then he killed two of the three young men who tried to intervene.

Then in court he yelled that Portland needs to defend free speech.

Apparently in the trump era freedom of speech includes multiple murders.

A few days later a pickup truck driver shouting racial epithets ran down and two young Native Americans.

One of them died.

He just recently got caught so we haven’t yet had the chance to hear him invoke the new freedom of speech of the trump era.

But he will.

********************************************************************************

I am not saying that these people have suddenly sprung up like toadstools in the rain.

They have always been there.

I have run into them off and on throughout my life, and they have always TALKED a great racist line.

But that was usually in the format of being the guy two guys down the bar at happy hour.

Now they are on light rail and driving their trucks through parking lots trolling for victims.

And the two I have alluded to are only the most recent, close to me, hate driven acts of violence.

Since November 9 they have been everywhere.

It’s good to see that the new president’s promise to make America great again is having immediate effect: those who have always been there now feel fully enabled, endorsed and approved.

How nice.

********************************************************************************

My plan is to periodically comment on all of the various manifestations of this post trump era re-emergence of America’s greatness: things like getting back to the job of massively polluting the rivers, lakes and oceans, and making sure that the financial system can leverage itself into insolvency so those of us who are giving up health care so that the rich can have more money to leverage the financial system can bail the financial system out.

You know: great stuff like that.

I hope to interleave them every now and then with the Screen Saver of the day.

Ying and Yang?

The hate thing has been a nice start.

Screen Saver 053117

Screen Saver 053017

Screen Saver 052917

In Memoriam: When We All Were In It Together

I am one of several million Americans from last Century who were drafted.

Actually I volunteered to optimize my military experience, but I volunteered with the hot, fetid breath of my draft board pulsing on my neck.

I guess the draft was first used by Abraham Lincoln.

After the war I think it went away.

As did Lincoln.

Then it came back for our entry into WW I and stayed around more or less until it went away with the advent of the all volunteer military.

It reached a sort of sociological crescendo during Vietnam.

Every one of us caught in its net had his life changed unalterably; no path was taken as one would have done; every path was taken as dictated by the draft and its terms of implementation.

A lot of us went to college who might not have gone to college; many who didn’t flunk out of college stayed longer than we might have; some moved to Canada; some became terrorists; some of us just hunkered down and took it after all the years in college to avoid it had been exhausted.

Ultimately we all either served or vacated normal American life.

Most of us served.

An awful lot of us ended up in Vietnam

Some carried guns; some didn’t.

But we all experienced a life we would never have chosen.

Fifty thousand or so of us died in Vietnam.

Most of us didn’t.

All of us were made to feel like criminals when we came home.

So, on balance, the draft seemed to me at the time, and for a long time afterward, to have been a really bad thing.

And I was a vocal proponent for the all volunteer force.

Interesting though, in retrospect: the draft reached down into the great American mélange like some kind of cosmic materiel scoop.

It took that mélange in all of its marvelous heterogeneous complexity, put it into several military organizations, and told it that it had to figure out how to talk to one another, work together and win a war.

And we didn’t

Win the war.

But we did.

Get along.

Mostly.

In retrospect that gives the draft one very important positive characteristic: it took a huge piece of America – all America (some kids of the white elite were able to avoid it – but many, even of the privileged class, chose not to) was forced into one place and told they had to figure out how to get along.

And we did.

And a lot of that now aging segment of America still do.

Get along.

But mostly only with each other.

And “each other” is still a heterogeneous mélange.

But the American tribes that have replaced that briefly heterogeneous, but mostly unified America – the Vietnam era draftees - all seem to be just that: tribes; they only gather with people who think and talk and look the same way.

And the all volunteer military has created a population segment (tribe) who come from circumstances with few, or no, obvious options alternate to military service (there are many exceptions – a lot of young people with many options do see military service as an obligation to be fulfilled prior to commencing the rest of their life – but there aren’t very many; most of the all volunteer force come from a demographic that sounds a great deal like the trump base) and they do their time and then they return to civilian life, and then they face the same grim realities that drove them to volunteer in the first place, and the one option that seems most obvious to them has already been tried and terminated.

Suicide as a final solution is not surprising.

And all the while that is going on, the other, more privileged, tribes pursue life as usual and shore up the walls that keep other tribes away, and America becomes more and more a place where honest, intelligent, negotiative discourse doesn’t exist.

I would like to get that great cosmic scoop back so young Americans once again are forced to have to figure out how to talk to one another and move forward with the common good.

The draft is good social policy, I think.

Screen Saver 051217

Screen Saver 052717