Monthly Archives: August 2018

Symptoms of Hate   (2018Aug07)

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Tuesday, August 07, 2018                                       2:11 AM

Symptoms of Hate   (2018Aug07)

It’s so weird that hatred is having a ‘comeback’ around the world—and in the United States, which has historically moved forward on this front—slowly enough, surely—but never before backward. I hope this ‘blue wave’ thing materializes—not because I’m a Democrat, but because it will show that most of us are not on board with this new ‘fad’.

I think the gleeful braggadocio of their chanting and rallying for Trump shows that they are as shocked as we were—when ignorance and attitude won out over substance. These neighbors of ours knew that their day had past—that no one in America was going to play the racism game in public anymore, because the fight was over. Obama’s two terms proved that.

They couldn’t believe their luck—no one ever expected the White Nationalists, the Republicans, and Russia to pull a popular criminal out of their collective ass and make him POTUS. He announced his candidacy with hate speech—if you remember (I think the news showed it a few times). And then he won the Electoral College—suddenly, someone as supposedly disgraceful in his ideas as they were—had gotten the biggest validation a person can get. And ‘Leader of the Free World’, no less.

So of course the hate clubs are not only revived—they see a lot of press attention—and there’s no such thing as bad press, when you have a bad president. (If it’s bad, it’s fake.) Now young people are reportedly being indoctrinated into hate online—hate in many flavors, fear in countless conspiracy theories—it’s an explosion of self-loathing.

Everyone knows that bullies are acting out because they are themselves being mistreated at home or elsewhere—that’s what makes all bullies cowards. It has also been pointed out that many of the most hysterically anti-gay Republicans, Conservatives, and Evangelists are often found, in time, to be confused gay people—taught to hate what they are—and driven slightly loony thereby.

Well, Hate is no different. It’s as obvious as if they had it written on their faces. People who insist on division and prejudice (of any kind) can only be so extremely exercised over this viewpoint—because they are full of self-loathing and need to insure that at-least-someone is beneath them. They have so many people in their lives that make them feel inadequate (or at least it seems so to them) they suspect that they may be just the least-worthwhile person, ever.

And, while it is nice and convenient to hate the Haters—just as it is to hate criminals—there is more to it than the end-result: a racist, an anti-Semite, a misogynist, an elitist, a criminal—or some horrific combo of all the above. If someone taught these people to hate from a very young age, then they also taught them that people can be hated without being met—they taught them that everybody is supposed to judge everybody else. You can’t teach children to ‘hate a group’ or ‘disrespect women’—and expect their minds to stop there. And those other, unintended lessons will mess with a kid’s head, I’d be willing to bet.

In closing, I would point out: People who are taught to love their neighbor without condition or exclusion—virtually never switch to a life of hate and bigotry. Conversely, many people who are raised in a culture of prejudice have grown to reject that tradition and embrace love. Trump or no Trump, racism has had its heyday—and will continue to fade away, occasional road-bumps notwithstanding.

Not for nothing: ‘Zero Tolerance’ is just a ‘spin’-onym for Intolerance.

 

Improv – Story Told (2018Jul25)

 

Improv – Virgin Press (2018Jul31)

 

Improv – Story Story Night (2018Aug03)

 

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Things Change—And Stay That Way   (2018Aug05)

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Sunday, August 05, 2018                                         3:32 PM

Things Change—And Stay That Way   (2018Aug05)

New tools used to be the goal, not the threat. Population used to be the goal, not the threat. All-you-can-eat used to be the goal, not the threat.

We used to herald new inventions—concrete, steel, steam, civil engineering, cars & lightbulbs—now, we fear the AI singularity, the Higgs-Boson reaction, the super-flu, the stealth-nuke, the EMP apocalypse—and, what’s more, we find our old inventions are toxic—and we must restrain ourselves, or choke on our own waste.

We have already crossed the red-lines of prevention for global climate disruption. Now, we need to begin to ameliorate the damage and cut back our carbon emissions even more harshly than we would have had to, decades ago. Yet the wealthy and empowered continue to neglect this threat—because its solution requires not competition, but cooperation.

We used to treasure a bumper-crop of babies. Past nations would often call upon its females to reproduce profusely, for the good of the country. (And if that isn’t chauvinist enough, just remember that male children were the hoped-for result—to replace all the young men lost in some recent war, usually.) In a sense, I’d call the Baby Boom of post-WWII America the most prolific effusion of spontaneous nesting, post-war, the world has ever seen.

Now, we have an inflated global population that can only be sustained by the global economic machine that makes it possible. As feral human tribes, humans required acres of land per person for a sustainable diet. Later agricultural techniques would lower that land-per-person ratio. Only modern agricultural technologies and powered systems of transportation and storage make it possible for huge metro-areas to concentrate people by the millions.

If there were a catastrophic interruption of the global economic machine—say a war, perhaps—it would be game over for all the city people. Without a regular influx of food and water—without waste removal—even if the electricity stayed on and the elevators kept working—it wouldn’t matter.

But don’t worry—I’m not advocating population-control—only crazy people think they can do stuff like that. What I’m saying is, the global economic machine needs to be carefully adjusted.

We obviously need major changes in our social structure, now that we are all connected on the internet. Controlling access to the internet is self-limiting, because people’s productivity corresponds to their internet access.

But an open internet is an invitation to disaster—bad actors can tear the whole thing down, if not countervened by ‘good’ actors. I use the word ‘good’ advisedly.

Humans evolved with an instinct to eat as much as we can—because food used to be harder to get to. There’s even an interesting book or two about how early civilizations had different staples, which influenced their development based on their amounts-of-protein and the amount-of-work-to-get-the-food. Early mankind lived a video game called Get The Food. We never had full tanks, back then—except on rare occasions.

We still have holidays. We still try to celebrate by consuming with gusto—but it’s not the same, if a full belly is our nominal status 24-7-52. Human ingenuity has gotten itself tangled up with human nature. Our urges and instincts come from a very different lifestyle—long, long ago. For just one or two centuries, we’ve been playing with our new toys.

Uranium, Petroleum, Plastics, Combustion, and Explosives—they comprise our modern world, with all its blessings and miracles. While we hypnotize ourselves with I-Pads, I think we are avoiding facing the real issue.

We don’t need to hunt anymore. We don’t need to fight anymore. We don’t need to get sick anymore, practically (i.e., relatively). Our lives got soft. It’s good—I’m not knocking it. In fact, as a disabled person, I have a vested interest in a soft, secure civilization.

We need to be raised to function in our society. That involves a lot of teaching by example and correction—we need to learn to wait for the walk light, learn not to lick the sidewalk gum, learn to look at a tiger in a cage at the zoo, instead of running for our lives.

All of this goes against our instincts. So when people say ‘you can’t change human nature’—I don’t buy it. That’s all society does—constrain instinct. And it is long past time society recognized the present threat—we cannot throw out community, just because the wealthy spit out words like socialism or communism.

It wasn’t just our democratic government that held capitalism in check—it had behind it a sense of community. That bond came of the need to work together—which characterized all successful settlements in history. Go back far enough and there’s a point in history where being outcast from a community was virtually a death sentence. Even today, being unpopular in one’s community can be very uncomfortable, even if you don’t know most of them.

The hyper-capitalist fascism we face today is illustrated by two things: (1) Trump’s recent Intolerance Policy that kidnapped children without even keeping lists of contact info—and—(2) Trump’s quote from the other day—that “if gas costs more—people will drive less—and that will be safer”.

If we’re electing people who’ll just sit in Congress and do nothing—while that level of insanity is perpetrated—mustn’t we be electing the wrong people? This era has taken the community out of politics and turned the whole thing into a game show. It has placed politics at a remove from our actual lives. People are being pandered to, with hate speech, and they are lapping it up. What gives?

There’s a lot of atheists out there—I’ve been one since I was eleven. I think it is important to recognize the sense of community and morality that religion helped to channel—it strengthened communities. If we no longer concern ourselves with the religious minutia, and the repressive authoritarianism and misogyny, we should still seek to maintain that communal bond—because it is what makes normal the lack of anarchy.

Rule-breakers, like our current Prez, invite the anarchy. All the quick-buck grabbers are inviting the anarchy. We Americans are so fixed on our freedom—what the hell’s it worth, if it’s the freedom of falling off a cliff? Empathy and community are the only bedrock for society—when money ceases to be a part of that balance, and becomes opposed to it—money becomes a threat. We all used to want the money. Now the people with all the money are trying to kill us all—without meaning to, of course. But does that matter?

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The President Is A Loser   (2018Aug03)

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Friday, August 03, 2018                                           5:20 PM

The President Is A Loser   (2018Aug03)

For those of us who weren’t fault-finding with intense scrutiny (though god knows there were plenty of those) President Obama’s eight years were rather legendary. His financial recovery efforts worked phenomenally—his Affordable Care Act passage was heroic. Oddly, those who would benefit the most were its most ardent opponents—and many Republican voters are now on record as supporting the ACA, but dead-set against ‘Obamacare’.

People will say that Obama didn’t stand tough enough—as if Bush-43 hadn’t already ‘toughed’ us into bankruptcy. All I can say is—he was tough enough to kill Bin Laden—and it’s a lot easier to defend a legacy as first black president who-didn’t-start-a-war, than as first black president who did.

My point, if I have one, is that Obama did a great job—and Hillary was the front runner in the last election because she promised more of the same. It wasn’t until the dog-whistling, lying Republicans teamed up with the lethal Russian GRU that people started chanting ‘Lock her up’ (as if they knew how their own damned emails worked).

Trump must concede the truth of Russian election meddling, because it is laid out in several indictments, literally step-by-step. But Trump and his Republican cadre can never admit that Trump’s election to office was the Russian’s victory—and a blow against the United States. Can you blame them?

Trump’s frighteningly-large number of followers—are people who cherish the United States’ traditional failings, and are uncomfortable with our historic, constitutional ideals. They wish to roll us all back to a less perfect union. Any change for the better is something they’ll embrace for themselves, but denounce for anyone else—their idea of a community is focused on the fence around it, not the heart at its center.

The founding fathers feared party and partisanship would quickly subvert the American Experiment into corruption and elitism. Scholars have questioned the dangers of our current two-party system—but, in the end, it seemed so perfect, like Yin and Yang. Conservatives and Progressives—one to hold on to the wisdom of the past and one to reach for the promise of the future—how, indeed, could we fail to have two parties?

But there’s trouble in this Eden—what if the Conservatives are not really conservative? What if they have had their paradigms swept away by a society and a culture changing at ‘ludicrous speed’? Have they been warped, even crushed, by the illogic of Conservatism in an age of vanishing industries, vanishing storefronts, even vanishing wires?

And what about Social Media and Conservatives? Has Conservatism been a false front for Elitism, all along? Does the transparency of a YouTube-world make it impossible for elitists to maintain their fictions of benign objectivity?

Hey, wouldn’t it be better to release a doctored video of Planned Parenthood doctors, trying to make women’s health care seem like a criminal enterprise? That’s conservative, right? When did they first jail Margaret Sanger? 1916, I think. The Conservatives of that time could arrest the woman. Those of our day are reduced to lying about her—so, that’s progress, I guess?

Anyway, Trump is a liar—to himself more than anyone else. Can you imagine the lack of self-awareness that allows him to think of himself as our president—without feeling any shame at all? Can you imagine being one of his supporting Republicans—pretending Trump is fit, Trump is innocent, Trump is sincere? When they know in their hearts that good people don’t have to lie that much. Yes, we are the victims—but we should thank heaven we aren’t the perpetrators.

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I’m Back Again   (2018Jul31)

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Tuesday, July 31, 2018                                             6:48 PM

I’m Back Again   (2018Jul31)

Family and friends advised me to take a step away from the cable news-shows and give myself a break—after I wrote my last, deliriously-frustrated rant-post. I don’t post to blog every day—I try to post as seldom as possible (excepting the exceedingly rare inspiration for an up-beat subject). My political-backseat-driving is an obsession that even I have grown tired of.

As an example, I decided in May that I would try to post the word ‘Impeach’ on my Facebook Wall, every day. I knew I wouldn’t reach anyone besides my own friends and relatives, but I felt that Facebook, being at least nominally a Public Forum, made me responsible to treat it as such, inasmuch as a private nobody like myself was able.

Here are my almost-daily posts from that day to today—you’ll see that my style of posting evolved over time. In virtually all of these FB posts, I was constrained to just a line or two of characters—because I kept all of them short enough to allow the new-ish Facebook meme-background-style (it turns off, if you keep typing/editing your FB-update past a certain number of characters).

These are not meant to be wise or hilarious or great writing of any kind—they are simply the way I broke up the monotony of the task I had set myself. I hope (and I’m fairly sure of that hope, lately) that someday soon, that word ‘Impeach’ will be on everyone’s mind, every day:

Chris Dunn updated his status.

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20 May 2018 14:13 :

Impeach   –  (pass it on)

Impeach !

Impeach !  (Yes, there ARE two sides:  good vs. evil.)

23 May 2018 13:27 :

Impeach !

Impeach !  (GOP = Band of Traitors)

Impeach !  (We don’t look good in swastikas)

Impeach !

Impeach !  (President? More like Putin’s puppet)

Impeach !  (It’s enough already)

Impeach the PO(TU)S !

Impeach !  (grant a Pardon to the voters for being so gullible)

Impeach !  (His lawyers are sure he’ll commit perjury)

Impeach !  (Claims ALL the power, NONE of the responsibility)

Impeach !  (mental illness is not a political platform)

Impeach !  (I’m not wrong…)

Impeach !  (how long does ‘unfortunate’ remain acceptable in a president?)

Impeach !

Impeach !  (Or at least ask Putin to send someone else)

10 June 2018 01:05 :

[People keep talking about ‘what Trump said’, as if someday it’s going to be right, or true, or wise–but I believe that life is too short to waste that kind of time. So, instead, I have my own one-word statement which, as far as I can tell, is the only thing left to say: “Impeach!”]

10 June 2018 14:14 :

Impeach !  (he’s unfit, dishonest, and he’s got a screw loose)

Impeach !  (He’s not a president–he’s a wanna-be strongman)

Impeach !  (Nice try–woulda been nice–shoulda studied?)

15 June 2018 17:28 :

Impeach !  (Could be YOUR kids, next–how would that be?)

Impeach !  (The president is a criminal)

Impeach !  (You STILL think he’s a Good Guy?)

Impeach !  (Unfit is one thing, Monstrous quite another)

Impeach !  (I miss being proud I’m American)

Impeach !  (because, Yes–we do fuckin Care)

Impeach !  (Who needs a compulsive liar?)

Impeach ! (Or maybe a crooked, perv bully DOES represent US?)

Impeach !  (make the world a better place)

Impeach !  (Muslim Ban is Un-American)

30 June 2018 15:27 :

Impeach !  (I’m so tired of all this winning)

Impeach !  (or just keep on lyin’ to me, baby)

Impeach !  (he said ‘elite’, I think he meant ‘illiterate’)

Impeach !  (then, news-media can stop being his baby-monitor)

4 July 2018 11:24 :

Impeach !  (or shove an M-80 up his ass–I don’t care anymore)

Impeach !  (or explain why you side with a criminal)

Impeach !  (before the kidnapped, crying children are Yours)

Impeach !  (Congress, UR famous 4 doin 0, but now, 4 doin Wrong!)

Impeach !  (Lock him up—and free Reality Leigh Winner!)

Impeach !  (irresponsible + president = disaster)

11 July 2018 13:57 :

Impeach !  (he breaks his oath of office every damn day)

Impeach !  (Let Putin have him)

Impeach !  (go ahead, wait til after today’s secret meeting with Putin)

Impeach !  (at this point, claiming ‘innocence’ is confessing to blindness)

Impeach ! Impeach ! Impeach !

Impeach the Traitor !

Impeach !  (next time, let’s go with a public servant instead of a monster)

Impeach the Traitor!  (he’s created a ‘safe space’ for stupidity and racism)

Impeach !  We need a Real president

Impeach !  (We don’t need no ‘useful idiot’)

Impeach ! (Yes, I’m repeating–but at least I’m not repeating lies)

Impeach !  (He can tweet us into war, but he can’t tweet us back out)

Impeach !  (The Liar edited his Summit transcript–and the video!)

Impeach !  (He won’t correct the WH transcript or video of the Summit–unwelcome reality bites)

Impeach !  (The Racist decided to keep over 900 of the kidnapped children–that’s over 2 in 10)

Impeach !  (In today’s speech, the Idiot ridiculed the press for paying too close attention to everything he says)

Impeach the Traitor !  –  (or be one yourselves)

Impeach !  (while we wait for decency to return, indecency is redecorating the house)

Impeach !  (Let’s not be led around by our Dick)

 

Now, that last one—I actually posted today. After I posted it, I thought to myself, ‘It would have been better to say “(Let’s stop being led around by our Dick)” .’ but that just goes to show. I spend too much time thinking of public statements to make against Trump—and too little time remembering that my media platform (that is, my personal FB page) is only nominally a public forum—it isn’t really seen by the public, it is only available to be seen.

So I have added a Quixotic element to my online activity—I’ve been tilting at the windmills of my Facebook friends-circle, while the real monster is far away elsewhere, untouched by my efforts, no matter how I phrase them.

This past weekend has been a restful step back from all the political/media chaos—that stuff deserves far less room inside my head. It’s all so childish and not-smart—these politicians really expect a lot of ‘cover’ from a dark suit and a red tie.

Sure, it looks professional—but at some point, those expensive suits morph from lamb’s-clothing into exclamation-points of corruption. Part of the ‘suit’ image is the expectation of knowledgeability—and when the words coming out of their mouths are so bereft of intelligence, they expose themselves as being ‘empty suits’.

That is just one item from the long list of things that beggars my belief—how can people go on taking this stuff seriously? Our president is mentally unstable, compulsively dishonest, and has the mind-set of a career criminal (though not necessarily a successful one). Trump approaches governing as a megalomaniacal CEO would—he approaches the Justice Dept. the same way a criminal does. He blames the cops, he claims he was framed, he claims the other guy did it, he claims he wasn’t there—and even if he was, it’s not a crime to be part of a crime.

I knew that son-of-a-bitch was a criminal when he wouldn’t let go of the birther BS—before he even declared. I have watched in traumatized puzzlement as the stupidest people in this country ran to the voting booths—and the supposedly more-intelligent people sat at home, or voted for Berny, or even joined the cattle—voting for Trump despite their glimmers of consciousness. And don’t tell me ‘She won the popular’—yes, she did—but that psychotic moron should have been outvoted by a landslide.

It’s been a long series of disappointments—finally realizing that the Congress is so partisan, it wouldn’t impeach Trump no matter the madness and danger. I’m still waiting for sanity to be restored. And I am doing my best to hang on to what’s left of my own.

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