Cautiously Optimistic (2016Oct12)

Posted by XperDunn on October 12, 2016

Wednesday, October 12, 2016 10:42 AM

This is more like it. I don’t feel like a lone voice crying in the wilderness anymore. Most people seem to have caught on—electing Donald Trump would be just like electing a hog because it had won the blue ribbon at the Iowa State Fair. That’s a good pig—that’s a pig above its peers—but it’s still a pig.

Donald was (and is) a scheming skeeve, first as a real-estate conniver and Manhattan ‘playboy’, then as a reality-TV star who entertained by being pompously cruel. That he had fourteen seasons is a sad commentary on the American TV audience—but enjoying his perfidy, as semi-fictional guilty pleasure, is a far cry from finding him fit to lead the nation.

Cmdr. Spock could have told you right off that a human doesn’t indulge himself at the expense of others for seventy years—and become a model public servant the next day. He’s not a plotline, he’s a person—he doesn’t ‘pivot’, or suddenly transform in any other way—anymore than you or I do. Thus we conclude that his candidacy was nothing more than a quest for self-aggrandizement and power—in other words, an ego-trip.

And I can forgive Trump and Billy B. for their lewdness on the tape—I can even forgive Trump running for President, for the most venal of motivations, and pretending he’s been ‘called’ to public service, out of idealism. I can forgive all that. To forgive is divine. But I ain’t gonna vote for him—no, that’s a fer piece beyond forgiveness.

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, began her life with a passion for helping children. As her life brought her to positions of influence, she used that influence to help children—and learned that helping families is a great way to do that—and found that a community (or ‘a village’) is a great model for raising every American to a place of opportunity, security, and freedom. Thus her passion for children and her love of country melded into a single driving motivation.

Comparison between the two candidates is laughably unequal. Those who hate Hillary Clinton have very vague and diffuse rage against the status quo—the hysterical intensity of it marks it as a prejudice, rather than a reasoned judgement. When they try to tell me that Hillary is ‘just as bad’ as Trump, I can’t think of how to answer them—except to call them ‘dumb people’ (which rarely helps).

I truly think that the world is getting too complicated for a certain segment of the populace—they view the election as an unfair test—a test they are afraid to fail, as if life had become one long math class—and Trump is waving at them, saying, ‘Easy answer!—Over here!’ They are voting their frustration, not their judgement. Emotions and Democracy don’t mix, any more than emotions and the judicial system, or emotions and the practice of medicine. Passion has its place in politics, but only as passion for good, for the truth, and justice.

Has thirty years of campaigning, media fire-storms, scandals, political infighting, and partisan attacks blunted Hillary’s idealism? I should hope so. Imagine, if you will, what such a ‘refining fire’ would do to your dewy-eyed, youthful dreams, or what it did to mine (and I’m just a regular guy). A battle-scarred pol may seem an uninspiring option to the young absolutists—but we should keep in mind what fights she fought while earning those scars.

They were not legal tussles with creditors and unpaid workmen and excluded minorities. She fought to end school segregation. She fought to get disabled kids the right to be included in our public education system. She fought for health care for people who weren’t rich enough, or healthy enough, to get their own. She has served the public her whole life.

Trump, at the 2^nd debate, said she’s been in power for thirty years and ‘has nothing to show for it’. That’s right, Donald—by your lights, Hillary has nothing to show for a lifetime of public service—she hasn’t become a billionaire, or a celebrity TV bully, or cheated decent people out of payment for the work they gave in good faith—nothing to show for her life. Well, except maybe millions of grateful people whose lives have been improved, even saved, by her work—and the respect of decent people like myself.

I was very excited about seeing Hillary Clinton be elected the first woman president of the United States. I didn’t think the Republicans could field an opponent that had a chance against her. I was pretty shocked to realize that the campaign to impugn Hillary Clinton was not only alive and well, but had become rabid—and that the majority of Americans were starting to believe, through sheer persistence of repetition, everything her opponents were accusing her of—no matter how wild.

This was complicated by the fact that Hillary Clinton—the actual human being—is indeed less than perfect. She has made mistakes—and she has been a politician—and decades of attack have spurred her to a few unfortunate verbal rejoinders. I get the feeling she doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Neither do I. But none of that—and certainly none of the hogwash peddled by her haters—changes the fact that she is a whip-smart, doggedly capable person—and we’d be hard-pressed to find a better leader for the next eight years.

But enough—28 days from now, we’ll vote, and then we’ll, finally, know whether we are safe. Vote as if your life depended on it. VOTE.

Playing Grown-Up (2016Oct08)

Posted by XperDunn on October 8, 2016

Saturday, October 08, 2016 2:00 PM

What a roller-coaster of emotions. Initially, of course, disgust and mind-boggle-ment. Then an unattractive glee over this ethical implosion (but we were so frightened he might become our president—you really can’t blame us). Then back to disgust—but this time, over the fact that our politics have come to this. Then an overwhelming sense of relief—as in ‘he can’t win now.’ Then a chill of worry—after all, his cult following isn’t going to care—their support has no relation to judgement. Then ‘self-reassurance’, because he can’t win with just his existing base of zealots.

I’m positively dizzy with disorientation. But, as Rachel Maddow says, “You are awake. You are not dreaming. This is really happening.” I’ve long since stopped thinking about Trump at all—it became painfully clear that the problem is in the vast numbers of voters who see him as presidential material. People like Trump (and Trump himself) have always been there—but they’ve never had a shot at the presidency before. People have never been accepting of such a filthy, perverted creep before. Sure, there was Nixon—but he had the presence of mind to hide his lack of character as well as he could, not to revel in it.

But let’s not overlook Julian Assange completely—he has waited for the perfect moment to drop his ‘bomb’ on the Clinton campaign. Well, the Billy Bush video kinda messed up that timing—but even without it, we are hard-pressed to understand how he could have thought Hillary’s speeches to businesses would destroy her. I’ve read what he leaked—it’s all pretty reasonable stuff, assuming your life is not dedicated to despising Hillary Clinton.

We are mature enough to watch Trump’s damning video—surely then, we’re mature enough to grapple with the paradox of democracy. An elected official needs to present themselves so as to be elected—if the right thing to do is unpopular, you only talk about it in private. That’s the crux of what is revealed about Hillary in this latest leak—small potatoes compared to the revelations about Trump’s character (or total absence thereof).

The truth is—I don’t really know enough about international trade agreements to gainsay the people whose job it is to formulate such things. I do know that Europe has seen borderless-ness as a goal for generations—a sign that civilized people can live side by side without armed guards and walls. In examining their history, we may find ourselves embarrassed to be fixated on so bad an idea as a Big Wall. It’s a really stupid idea—and in so many ways.

I’m so desperately hoping this election comes out right—democracy has shat the bed twice, recently—first with Brexit, then again with the Columbians voting ‘No’ to peace with the FARC. It would be nice if the cradle of democracy could score one for the good guys. My nerves have had it.

Catchphrases work well as political tools, but they are worthless as policy. If NAFTA is unfair, we should modify it until it is fair. Killing it is a simple idea—but rather simple-minded, if we remember that there were reasons why NAFTA was created. TPP is neither good or bad, either—it is an agreement, which can be changed if it is unfair. And, our experience with NAFTA will tell us what problems to look out for.

In the same way, the Affordable Care Act was a vital bill—that has been revealed to be flawed. Now, we can throw it in the trash—bumping 20,000,000 people off of health insurance—or we can modify the bill to be fair and economically feasible. Legislation and Trade Agreements are complex works which can be modified when faulty—but in using them as political footballs, we reduce the question to ‘live or die?’ We don’t want to trash these things—we want to tweak them until they work. You don’t fix a computer by taking a hammer to it.

The Republicans are slippery on this—sometimes their objections are that the bill doesn’t work, sometimes their objections are that ‘socialized medicine’ is bad. In the end, they conflate both arguments, and say that we have to repeal Obamacare. Not that we have to fix it. And honestly, everyone knows that the Insurance Lobby blocked the single-payer-option because it makes the industry more competitive—and everyone knew that blocking the single-payer-option would make the bill a nonsensical mish-mash. They don’t want to fix the bill, now, for the same reason they fought the bill’s passing.

Tomorrow night’s debate should be fascinating. I hope Hillary knows that she’s already won—she should take it easy, not for his sake, but just because she’s gracious in victory. Then again—let’em have it—he’s earned it. Making us all look bad—grumble, grumble…..

October Surprise Number One (2016Oct07)

Posted by XperDunn on October 8, 2016

Friday, October 07, 2016 11:38 PM

Well, that ought to do it. Not that I didn’t recognize Trump for what he was thirty years ago, or whenever I first saw his bullying-entitled-looking face on TV—sort of an Eddie Haskell/Biff Tanner nightmare, grown spoiled and rotten by lack-of-consequence and by age. Bless his billionaire heart. And here we are, with some states already in early voting, with concerns about the southeastern seaboard being able to pull itself back together in time to vote—something that seems to trouble Florida, even without a hurricane.

I’m seeing some frog-in-a-pot-of-cold-water-type behavior in the Trump surrogates now—they have slowly been expected to cover for greater and greater breaches of decorum and decency—and they reached a point, with this new avalanche, of flailing blindly for any rationale that can either distract from or excuse the inexcusable. I’ve said before that Trump is a person I wouldn’t have in my home, much less the White House—but now I have a chorus of TV pundits saying the same thing. My blog posts have been railing against the GOP nominee for almost two years straight. Now I feel I wasted all that time—Trump didn’t need me to lose this election—all he needed was some public scrutiny .

Which is what I’d suspected all along—my posts were mostly exasperated expressions of disbelief that such a horrible creature could get so near our highest office—that so many people could be taken in by his shtick. So, I guess I’ll be blogging again tomorrow—about all the people who are still with him, in spite of today’s disclosures. I actually find his insistence, against law and science, that the Central Park Five were wrongfully acquitted by DNA evidence—and shouldn’t have received compensation for unlawful imprisonment—even more damning, in some ways, than the video of his sleazy banter confessing to his predatory sexuality.

Not that both aren’t disqualifying—please don’t misunderstand me. But the naked bigotry of his obsession with those wrongly-accused children, twenty years ago, and today, is an uglier surprise than the Billy Bush video—it’s not as if we didn’t know he was a sleazebag already. We had less warning of his deeply racist motivations—though that, too, is no great surprise. The surprise is that he would raise the issue himself, weeks before Election Day.

My only concern now is that low poll numbers for Trump might suppress the Democratic voter turn-out, rather than pump it up. It would be the ultimate irony if he got himself elected by proving himself un-electable.

Law and Order My Ass (2016Oct01)

Posted by XperDunn on October 1, 2016

Saturday, October 01, 2016 1:22 PM

Unregistered charities, illegal envoys to Cuba, allegations of rape of under-aged girls, fraudulent ‘universities’, tax cheating, bribing DAs with campaign contributions—yes, Trump makes an excellent “Law and Order” candidate—the writers could get a season’s worth of episodes out of his life story. And if lying were one of the qualifications for politics (which many people maintain is the case) then certainly, Trump is the most qualified candidate ever to run.

He’s as fit to be president as any obese misogynist could be. He knows more about government than Sarah Palin—and she’s a career politician. His intelligence and literary credentials are proven by the book he had ghost-written about how to lie and cheat your way to success. It’s a fascinating book about all the ways in which one can cheat in business—it’s a shame that governing operates under different principles.

If only he had the presence of mind to continue pressing the conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton invented by the Alt-Right—just about 90% of the country believes in one or all of the accusations levelled at her—that stuff is working like gang-busters. If he would just stop making his candidacy about himself—it’s a losing strategy, displaying in real-time all the faults that he would have us believe reside in his opponent.

I see Trump constituents being interviewed on TV recently—they have this deer-in-the-headlights look, as if they like the ignorance Trump promotes, but they don’t want to be the ones seen publicly agreeing with the specifics of his campaign. They know in their hearts that they should be ashamed of supporting him—and being on camera suddenly brings that into sharp focus. They answer in curt, impatient growls, as if someone is trying to steal their ‘ignorance’ bone while they’re still chewing on it. It would be amusing, if it weren’t the fate of the world in their resentful, bitter hands.

But, Republicans, you’re on the hook for this, too. Have you noticed that all the serious people in your party have disowned it for the duration of this election, for the duration of this particular candidate? That’s because Trump is a bridge too far. In reaching for the ignorant and the resentful, in stoking their belief that progressivism is to blame for all that’s wrong in this country, in denying science and education, you have created this Frankenstein’s Monster. In cultivating a small-government, Tea Party, birtherist, vote-suppression, anti-gay, nationalist mentality, you opened the door to an ignorant demagogue. And instead of admitting your mistake and turning away from this shameless political agenda, you’re sticking with the whore that brung ya.

Trump has exploded your party. I don’t think much of the GOP ‘platform’—if it even deserves that term—but neither does Trump. On the conservative issues, he’s as much a Democrat as Hillary, but without the political know-how. He has disrupted your core ideals—yet you cling to your political strategies, as if they existed in a vacuum rather than a complex society. Thus, while he makes a joke of your tenets, you display a moral bankruptcy in sticking by him, just to win the election. Trump may turn the whole world upside-down, if elected, but he will do (and has done) much worse to the GOP. You guys have had it.

Try living in reality. Try reading a book. Try to see Trump for what he is—or spend the rest of your lives being ashamed of how you voted in 2016.

Huffington Post – Child-rape charges against Trump?

Banana Time (2016Sep30)

Posted by XperDunn on October 1, 2016

Friday, September 30, 2016 11:08 PM

Where is the love, people? Where is the love? Are we so afraid of something bad happening that we can’t spare a moment to consider something good that might happen? We can argue about the size of government and try to make that the issue, but—communities used to do a much better job of taking care of their own—states used to subsidize their state colleges enough to keep tuition down to a reasonable fee, instead of a small home mortgage. Welfare was roundly condemned for having a few bad apples—but back in the welfare days, a company had to pay a de facto minimum-wage that was high enough above welfare to make it worth working full-time, instead of collecting checks.

And why are we starved for jobs when the infrastructure of all fifty states is either unsafe or outmoded? We could spend money on infrastructure and count it the same way a homeowner counts home improvements, as a good investment—with the added bonus of jobs aplenty. The enhanced infrastructure will spur business growth.

I don’t know if you’re old enough to remember—when Eisenhower started the interstate highway construction, commerce exploded. In the New York metro area alone, the bridges and highways that made all of Long Island to the South—and all of Westchester to the North—brief, pleasant drives to and from the city, turned lazy little backwaters into bedroom communities for city-workers. The construction boom alone lasted decades. The commerce both in city-to-suburbs, and in services industries for these exploding communities, was part of what made my early years a time of seemingly endless growth, here in New York, and all over the nation.

And, believe it or not, if the economy booms loud enough, you start to see a labor shortage. Labor shortages are good for labor—increased demand forces increased salaries. If you want to grow the middle class, get the economy growing at a rate fast enough to create a labor squeeze—we haven’t seen a labor competition in a long time. But, let me tell you—it is a beautiful thing. When employers simply can’t get enough workers, they start paying people more money. You should see it—beautiful, I tell you.

I sometimes suspect the rich actually suppress growth to keep the 99% on the back foot, demand-wise. And then there’s foreign labor—that’s us turning a blind eye to unfair conditions in other countries, just for cheap stuff at K-Mart. Big mistake, long-term—not to mention ethically blind. Don’t buy shit from China.

But this is the world we live in now. Who ya gonna believe, my facts, or the other guy’s facts? It doesn’t matter—I write for the pleasure of hearing myself talk (in my head). There’s a shit-ton of infrastructure in this well-developed country—but it’s all pretty old by now, a lot of it needs re-furbishing or outright replacing. Add in the clean-energy industry, and the need for a modernized power-grid from coast-to-coast, replacing half-a-nation’s worth of lead water-pipes (and disposing of them safely), and a resurgent manufacturing sector—you’re talking about a lot of jobs.

So I expect Hillary to do something immense with infrastructure projects. If the government invests in the country, I’m sure American businesses can take care of finding a use for a vibrant, modern business environment. And if she taxes them for the privilege, well, it’s about damn time, is all I can say. I’ve heard enough rich-folk mumbo-jumbo about ‘trickle-down in my face and call it rain’. Pay your fair share, you sleazy bastards. It’s all take, take, take with you scumbags… Well, break-time for you—reality check. Even rich folk don’t get something for nothing.

I blame a lot of this on the media—those people are always chasing after the butterflies, they never show us the onrushing train of current events, just a bunch of sensationalist trash. But it’s our fault too—they go by ratings, and we have no one to blame for high ratings but ourselves. But we don’t expect TV or the internet to be serious, like a book—we expect it to give us escapism, like opium. That’s what we want, so that’s what they air. We have to want information to get information. But we’re just a bunch of monkeys—we don’t care, as long as we get our banana on schedule.

Now, here’s a little something I played earlier today:

Hope it suits.

…Russ, and Joey, and ?, ?, ?

Sex Matters (2016Sep29)

Posted by XperDunn on September 29, 2016

Thursday, September 29, 2016 3:20 PM

Let’s discuss presidents and sex. I don’t want to go back too far—let’s start with FDR. That great man was confined to a wheelchair and he still managed to have multiple affairs while in office. Truman, a great man as well, was also a good man—no known affairs, though he enjoyed drinking and gambling. Then there was Eisenhower—definitely an affair while SCAEF, but I’m not historian enough to know whether he fooled around in office.

dwight_d-_eisenhower_official_presidential_portrait

Then we had Kennedy—I think we can put him in the plus column. Then we had LBJ—no affairs that I know of. Same with Nixon—though we’d be hard-pressed to call him a ‘good’ man. Then Ford—another no; then Carter—another no, though he ‘lusted in his heart’. (And what hetero man doesn’t—or gay, come to think of it?) And Carter was followed by Reagan—two wives, but no known affairs.

Then we had Bush-41—a definite no. Bill Clinton was then the fourth modern president with publicly-known, documented affairs—but he was the first to be hounded for it while still in office. Then Bush-43 came along as the matching Puritanical bookend to his father. (If we can call a hard-partier like the young Bush-43 ‘Puritanical’, it is only in the fidelitous sense.) And last but not least, we have our present President—who, like Mary Poppins, is practically perfect in every particular (and certainly doesn’t have affairs).

So there you have the modern roster—affairs aren’t exactly common among presidents, but then they aren’t exactly uncommon either. And, if we are honest about it, the Presidency is one of the few jobs where such a thing would still impact one’s position. Married men having affairs is no rarity. In today’s society, no one goes to jail or loses their job over infidelity alone—with the exception of politicians and priests. Likewise, in today’s society, Divorce has very little baggage—heck, Trump’s on his third marriage and nobody says boo about it—even with him as presidential candidate for the Conservatives.

Yet as a man with five kids by three wives, he seems to be considering bringing up Hillary’s husband’s infidelity as a black mark against Hillary—he claims he denied himself that ‘weapon’ at the debate because he had scruples about embarrassing Chelsea. Bringing up Chelsea’s name in this context seems like the sensitive way to go, alright. But I still need to have explained to me what Bill’s peccadilloes have to do with his wife running for office?

Is Trump going to criticize her for not abandoning her family when she suffered the embarrassment of Ken Starr dragging this affair out over two years’ worth of prurient headlines? That’s how Trump advised his daughter—saying that if she were sexually harassed at work, she should quit her job and find a new career. Does he believe that Secretary Clinton, as a woman, is also supposed to run away when a man hurts her feelings?

Or is he going to try to blame Bill’s behavior on his wife? A lot of stand-up comics have gone that route, suggesting that, if Hillary had been more sexually inventive, Bill would have never strayed. I can see Trump going that way—it would fit with his apparent theme: ‘no lie too big, no statement too idiotic’. And his advisors clearly have trouble explaining the difference between a presidential campaign and a stand-up routine to the GOP nominee. Wait—scratch that—stand-ups rehearse their acts.

I don’t know how Trump is going to tie Bill Clinton’s notorious hound-dogging to his wife’s character. Still, he blames the last thirty years of federal governing on her alone, without any problem with the logic of saying so. But even Trump supporters are going to have trouble with tarring a wife by her husband’s affairs—at least the women, I presume. The married ones may even resent such an implication—if Trump supporters even hear the words that come out of his mouth in the first place. There is no evidence of that at present.

The world, and especially the media, await this idiot’s next words with baited breath—though for the life of me I can’t understand why. There’s no reason to fear this clown—we fear only the crowd that supports him and will, apparently, vote for him to be President of the United States—and the education system that is so broken that these crowds exist. President Clinton (the faithful one) will have to work on that.

Thirty Years (2016Sep27)

Posted by XperDunn on September 27, 2016

Tuesday, September 27, 2016 11:27 AM

Of all Trump’s bombastic BS, the ‘thirty years’ attack is the most exasperating. Trying to turn Hillary Clinton’s preparedness into a negative is as convoluted an argument as his claim that an unprepared ‘outsider’ is what this country needs in a leader.

Let’s take a page from Seth Myers and take ‘a closer look’ at this ‘thirty years’ nonsense. Hillary Clinton earned her law degree and was active in public service long before she became the First Lady of Arkansas, never mind First Lady of the United States (FLOTUS). Beyond that, of all the people who ‘serve at the pleasure of the President’, I think we can place FLOTUS at the head of that list.

In other words, while First Lady, Hillary Clinton tried to help her husband’s work, succeeding in creating (and passing) the Children’s Health Care bill and other notable good works. She met with elected officials from around the country, with foreign dignitaries, and with charitable efforts leaders, learned about the workings of the White House and the challenges of governing—but she did not govern.

After the White House, she won election to a Senate seat from New York—and was an able partner to the senior Senator from her state and worked diligently with both sides of the aisle—but she did not govern—she wasn’t even the minority whip.

Then she became Obama’s Secretary of State. Again, serving at the pleasure of the President—not governing.

So, all this experience is excellent preparation for becoming the President—but never gave her any opportunity to make her own decisions. I won’t deny that those were positions of influence—but influence is not power. Any decisions made by her husband, by Congress, or by Barack Obama, were theirs, not hers. And she couldn’t even publicly talk about any disagreements she might have had with the two presidents she worked beside—people don’t do that.

So the last thirty years of Hillary’s life have been an historically excellent preparation for the job of President—but they haven’t been thirty years of governing, as Trump would have us believe. He is simply trying to turn one of her greatest strengths into a negative.

Well, two can play at that game—Trump, you’ve had seventy years to engage in public service and you have never once bothered to care about other people—what’s makes you think you can convince us that you suddenly do care? Seventy years of self-serving, sometimes fraudulent, piracy have prepared you to do nothing other than lose to a qualified candidate. No amount of bombast can change that.

Questions, anyone?

Desperate For Change (2016Sep26)

Posted by XperDunn on September 26, 2016

Monday, September 26, 2016 1:47 PM

Desperation is like panic—always a bad idea, in spite of our being tempted by both on a daily basis. I always try to resist them—I consider desperation a dangerous mistake, more dangerous in the end than the thing I became desperate over. Some people seem to want to go there—to give themselves permission to make a choice, whether good or bad—like an itch that needs to be scratched.

We live very inhibited lives—signs are posted, regulations must be obeyed, dress-codes must be observed. Desperation is a holiday from that reality—that is why there is something of hilarity about people in an emergency—no matter how bad it is, it is still a break from the ceaseless rule-following. This is only natural—we are, after all, animals with clothes on.

Doom-sayers, conspiracy-theorists, and provocateurs attempt to create emergency conditions in the midst of normalcy—that’s why we both despise and are fascinated by them. They offer the ‘holiday’ of a world turned upside-down. Their followers are their cheerleaders—they like their thinking, and realize that they only need to propagate the message, to popularize and legitimize it to the point where it becomes an emergency.

We want excitement—we crave it. But if we want our complex, but very comfortable lives to continue, we have to learn to compartmentalize our thrill-seeking from our judgment. An election is a popularity contest—yes—but it is also a judgment call. We are handing over our most prized possession—we want to award it to the most impressive person. We are also handing over a fragile, delicate clock-work—we want to entrust it to the most steady-handed and clear-eyed craftsperson.

One Fine Day (2016Sep24)

Posted by XperDunn on September 24, 2016

Saturday, September 24, 2016 12:43 PM

It’s a fine day. I just finished hearing Obama’s dedication address at the opening of the Smithsonian Museum of African-American History and Culture on C-SPAN. Stirring, inspiring, as always—isn’t that strange? Our president’s default setting is ‘stirring, inspiring’—I don’t think he can give a speech without sending a thrill through his listeners. Very strange. The combination of ‘president’ and ‘cool’ is almost overwhelming.

And Stevie Wonder sang and Patti LaBell sang—it was an eye-tearing, joyous celebration. When President Obama finished speaking, he introduced a family of four generations—a 99-year-old woman, daughter of a slave, her son, his son, and that man’s little daughter—and they rang a bell from the first African-American church, in Virginia, which was echoed by bells all across the country—a further echo of the bells rung all across the nation to celebrate Emancipation, a century and a half ago.

I love it when I can spend a day being proud and loving this country, for what it has done, for what it is, and for what it will become. And the sun is shining. And a gentle breeze is blowing. Life is too good.

The New York Times came out with an endorsement of Hillary Clinton today. I was pleased to read it—it said much of what I’ve tried to say in my blog posts (but better, because, let’s face it, it’s the Times). And I started to think about how the conservatives rail against the media as a bunch of lying propagandists. It’s not true. I’ve never been lied to by the New York Times—they may not always be perfect, but they do not have an agenda, per se, beyond journalism itself. Neither do many of our media staples.

The social media, guerilla journalism, and cable news—those people are new to journalism as an idea—they have it confused with show business, with capitalism, or with political gamesmanship. You can indulge in that stuff, if you don’t mind having to fact-check everything they tell you. But the Gray Lady, the Washington Post, and other traditional sources are no more biased than they were in the days before Tweeting. Anyone dismissing their reporting as ‘spin’ is trying to hide from the truth, not reveal it.

In the same way, the authorities in Charlotte, NC have claimed that the video from body-cams and dash-cams is inconclusive, yet still feel the need to hide the video from the public, even after the family of the murdered man requested its release. This is not transparency—when you hide something, it says you have something to hide—it’s as simple as that. The Charlotte community marches night after night, demanding this evidence be made public—yet still the authoritarians hide the evidence. Release the videos.

It’s a fine day for me—but not for everyone. There is still work to be done.

But You ARE Deplorable (2016Sep23)

Posted by XperDunn on September 23, 2016

Friday, September 23, 2016 10:10 AM

An Ohio Trump campaign chairwoman resigned yesterday after sharing her delusional world view with a reporter—a view that seemed to blame Obama for the existence of racism. (Thanks Obama.)

Trump supporters have many self-serving delusions—they see in Trump an authority figure who legitimizes their particular crazy. It makes them feel better. They see the present as a travesty, brought on by those who just don’t understand the ‘rightness’ of their racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, and islamophobia. Hillary got in trouble recently for being too straightforward in describing this phenomenon (and, for some reason, using the word ‘basket’).

Secretary Clinton was just being honest. Dangerous for a politician, granted—but it seems outrageously unfair that Trump’s steady stream of disinformation gets lovingly massaged by the media, while Hillary’s momentary frankness becomes her ‘biggest mistake’. Sorry, half of Trump supporters (or whatever the precise fraction may be)—but you are deplorable.

When our country once faced a similar crisis, FDR told us they only thing we had to fear was fear itself. Donald Trump wants to undo that tradition—Trump thinks fear is good stuff—he tells us to be very afraid. And you deplorables are listening. Trump tells you that inclusion is weakness, that mercy is foolhardy, and that action is better than thought—and you believe him.

Trump tells us that we don’t need to see his tax returns—we should trust him. He tells us that his indebtedness to other countries won’t affect his decision-making. He tells us that his family business won’t create a conflict of interest with his presidency—well, he’ll be right about that one—there’s a lot of people like me in this country who will do our damnedest to ensure he never gets near the White House. Vote for Hillary.

A Good Breakfast Ruined (2016Sep22)

Posted by XperDunn on September 22, 2016

Thursday, September 22, 2016 11:35 AM

Breakfast—is there anything sweeter than a hearty breakfast—and a handful of pills? Well, the pills are something I’ve acquired over time—what I really like is the bacon and eggs and hash browns—and then the sour of orange juice washing it all down—and then the hot, steamy, rich coffee (I take mine with lact-aid milk—the half-n’-half of the lactose intolerant).

And the best thing about it is that one isn’t supposed to have a hearty breakfast—all those nitrates, and fats, and the salt—OMG. Heaven forfend! But that just makes it taste better. And no breakfast is truly enjoyed without a newspaper, or at least a crossword puzzle or something—so you feel like you’re preparing your body and your mind for the day ahead. Well, the rest of the day—I don’t usually get around to breakfast until noon-ish—I know, I know—but it takes me a couple of hours just to wake up all the way. I’m kinda punchy for a while, at first.

Now, take a look at this picture of my niece holding my granddaughter—just look at the smiles on these two gals. It’s quite a photo, no? I stared at it for a good few minutes—it’s as good as a TV show.

But before I have my breakfast, I’ve uploaded this morning’s improv—it came out pretty good because I wasn’t entirely there. See, I tend to overthink things—so, when playing the piano, the more asleep I am, the better.

Thursday, September 22, 2016 12:43 PM

Aaah—so satisfying. Now that’s a breakfast. I made the mistake, however, of substituting the TV-news for a newspaper. When really bad stuff starts to go down, I realize I didn’t know how good I had it, when it was all presidential election claptrap—they were just filling time because they had no news—and no news truly is good news.

I see video of a pack of Tulsa police gunning down a stalled motorist in the middle of the highway in broad daylight. I ask myself, ‘what the hell is it like, living in Tulsa?’ I ask myself, ‘what would it be like if our cops just shot people down in cold blood like that?’ I find myself grateful, not to live in Tulsa—what a stain on this country. Then the stain running for president, the Donald, becomes the first Republican to hassle the cops about shooting black people. Why? Because, this one time, the shooter is a woman—Trump’s not castigating the police, he’s saying women don’t have the balls—a very different issue—but Trump’s an ass, and wouldn’t know the difference.

Meanwhile, in North Carolina, the cops shoot another black man—this time they say he had a gun—his family says he had a book. The cops won’t release the video—they had one excuse yesterday—today they have a different excuse—they’re saying they’re just following the law. But the law about releasing cop videos just got rushed through their state legislature—so it doesn’t take effect until next week—and on the hypocrisy goes. But that doesn’t stop the media from drooling in anticipation of more violence during community protests there—so they can say there’s violence on both sides. Vultures.

I must confess—if the cops made a habit of shooting at me, I’d be tempted to shoot back—but I’m white, so maybe I just don’t understand the situation? Regardless, it sure ruins a good breakfast.

I’m an escapee. My disability sidelines me from the distractions of life, so I get to watch the rest of humanity go about its business. It’s a disturbing show—we’ve got a lot of chaos going on in the world. You who have jobs and other distractions are lucky; you don’t spend the day poring over the problems of the world.

I’m an escapee. I already died once, so my concern over dying is not the big deal it once was. Everyone knows we all die someday—but we don’t usually accept it—and that’s a healthy thing. I’ve accepted it—and while that tones down the fear of dying, it also detracts from the ambitions of living. Plus, I’ve gotten old, so any ambition of mine would just annoy people. My day is past, just like Dr. Evil holding the world hostage for a million-dollar ransom, in a time when a million bucks barely pays for a new house.

I’m an escapee—even from myself. I used to be very intent, very tightly wound—now I have trouble concentrating, so I’ve let go of all that OCD behavior, as much as I could. I enjoy playing the piano when I first wake up, because I’m not all there yet—I don’t get in my own way as much.

We’ll all be escapees in November, when Hillary gets elected—we will have escaped an unholy confluence—NBC Universal, The Republic Party, and the Alt-Right movement have created a monster out of a joke. In truth, Trump remains laughable. It’s the half of the country he’s bamboozled into supporting him that’s scary.

We’re also beginning to escape from our past Conspiracy of Silence shielding police misconduct in the persecution, and murder, of minorities. For generations, certain police in certain communities have indulged their bigotry in a calculated and cold-blooded fashion. For generations, minorities’ claims of unwarranted search, seizure, arrest, beatings, and killings have been waved away with a ‘he said, she said’ and a ‘who you gonna believe?’

But now we have video. The old tradition, the evil conspiracy, is being shot through its own heart—its secrecy—and I confess to a certain glee as I watch these criminals-in-cop-clothes try to explain away the truth as it plays on a screen in slow motion. The thin blue wall of silence doesn’t work against YouTube footage—bigots, your day is come.

Unrest will be part of this process. The unwillingness to absorb this age-old confederation of persecution, even while it plays on our TV sets, faces tremendous inertia among white people. We don’t want to believe that such villainy has been sniggering behind our backs while we trusted our men and women in blue. And we recognize that many police do their jobs with pride, competence, bravery, and integrity.

But our respect for the police as a group cannot be a shield for this pernicious evil that resides within it. Black communities gather in outrage, risking harm themselves, to protest this cancer within law enforcement, and within the hearts of communities. Evidence is plain to see—yet we do nothing but debate talking points.

Changes must be made. Perpetrators must face consequences, even when they wear the uniform. Improved training and community outreach must become the norm—as must criminal prosecution for these brazen killings committed under the guise of ‘keeping the peace’. Ironic, and unacceptable—and most of all shameful. Shame on them. And shame on us if we don’t root out this corruption with the same intensity with which we support our cops.

But I see all this as ultimately good, as progress—an ancient evil has been caught in the light of day and, if we do right, will be hounded into non-existence. Trump points to this unrest and other violence, and tries to say that violence and crime are increasing—statistics, as usual, make a liar of him—but that’s how he wants to frame our reality, so we’ll all get scared and vote for a bully. Crime and violence are at historic lows. The recent unrest is a part of making the police a force for good for everyone, including every shade of skin.

This is important work, not cause for hysteria. But, regarding Trump, that could be said about many of his positions, on just about every issue.

It’s Kinda Complicated (2016Sep21)

Posted by XperDunn on September 21, 2016

Wednesday, September 21, 2016 1:14 PM

One of my friends wrote a poem. One of my friends died. One of my friends came to visit. One of my friends got divorced. I don’t know how to feel. I wake up every morning wondering.

As a young man, the life I live today would have made me crazy with restlessness—but I see chaos all around me and all I can think is, thank god the tornado missed me today. Not that I’ve ever even seen a tornado, except on TV—a big storm is the worst it ever gets around here—no earthquakes, no floods, no disasters (not since 9/11, anyway).

Some morning I’m going to wake up and everyone will be busy at work; all the kids will be studying in good schools; all the countries will be trying to get along; and things will get better. Well, maybe not—but if other people can play Lotto, I can dream too.

The world keeps going faster, getting more complicated. A lot of people aren’t embracing that—they’re running away from it. Maybe we have to start thinking of two new groupings of people—those who want to intern at Google, and those who want to live in a meadow—if you know what I mean. The world is sprinting forward—maybe some people would rather be left in an enclave of simplicity. If we don’t recognize this schism, it will become a point of friction. If we do recognize it, we have a shot at working out a compromise.

Maybe there’s a way to have our science-fiction future come true for some of us, and leave a bit of Lothlórien behind for the rest of us. We have to start thinking about this stuff—not everyone wants to live in Nerd Paradise. Just as robots are assuming manufacturing jobs—raising the question of where to find consumers when there are no jobs?—we need to address the fact that human IQ averages are not going to grow in proportion to Moore’s Law.

In olden times, when no one typed except secretaries, and making change was the big science/math challenge, lots of people had trouble dealing with even simple arithmetic. Now we expect every adult to choose a health insurance plan, apply for a bank loan, file a tax return, remember ten or twenty passwords, pin numbers, SSN#’s, and devise a retirement investment strategy. Our devices have manuals. Our phones contain more answers than questions. Our online footprints are at risk from hackers. What’s a C student supposed to do? Grow an extra brain?

Back when computers were new to the office environment, I was the computer guy. Every else asked me what to do when the screen confused them, or when the printer jammed. That seemed natural—thirty people, and only one of them had the interest or the intellect to get into the details of using a computer—now we’re all expected to learn it in grade school. And most do. But we are still asking a lot more from humanity than the last 30,000 years have asked of them. And we have to address that.

Seneca and Me (2016Sep17)

Posted by XperDunn on September 17, 2016

Saturday, September 17, 2016 12:58 PM

Wow—even I’m tired of me—I can’t imagine how fed up you must be, dear reader. But it’s the weekend now, so I’m going to do my best not to say anything until Monday, maybe even Wednesday—who knows?

Our granddaughter has a wonderful new toy in her crib—a small keyboard that she can play with her tootsies. Punkin sent me a video of it, so I’ve made a new video of the two of us playing together. Enjoy. (I’m the one in the green shirt.)

It’s No Fun If You Can’t Share (2016Sep16)

Posted by XperDunn on September 17, 2016

Friday, September 16, 2016 10:04 PM

When one group fights against another, someone wins and someone loses. We see this in the trouble-spots of the world—two sides which will fight until one or the other of them wins—beyond reason, beyond humanity, the absolutism of one group against another seems basic enough to overcome civility.

I’ve been thinking today of our strength as a nation—the melting pot that makes any one group a part of the larger whole—whether they like it or not. Immigrants to the United States know that the rules are different here—feuds from the old country don’t count here; authoritarian prerogatives once enjoyed by men over women, or one class over another—in their homeland—are forever null and void, here in the land of the free.

America has never fought for conquest or territory—only for the Right as we saw it (and a few mistakes, undeniably). And indeed, who could we attack? Where is there a country that isn’t already a part of ourselves? Reel off the role of the United Nations’ 193 countries—not a one of them fails to be represented by a segment of our population. Even those whose governments are seen as ‘bad actors’—their people, too, are a part of who we are—the Russians, the Chinese, the North Koreans, the Iranians, the Libyans, the Syrians—you name the place, and chances are high that the United States contains the largest number of any country’s population, outside of that country.

So, as we recognize that inclusion must be part of our domestic social policies, we also recognize that all nations are siblings—and that our nation is the glaring proof of that truth. We attract immigrants for many reasons—but I believe that most come here because, in the USA, you own yourself. Nobody tells us what to do. Nobody says we have to ask permission to try a new idea. We say whatever we want, and if you don’t like it, you say whatever you want back.

We take personal freedom very seriously here in America—sometimes, some of us even get a little crazy, pushing the bounds of propriety and safety merely to demonstrate the fullness of our liberty. In its own way, it’s pretty rough and tumble. But the acme of the ideal is not merely to have freedom—it is to accord it to everyone else, even when you don’t like it—even when it gets in your way.

And we certainly see abuse of the concept—many people are only too glad to take freedom, and less enthusiastic about giving it to others. Liberty isn’t always obvious—it doesn’t shout, it waits for you to notice it. Some people willfully turn away, and use ‘Liberty’ cynically, hypocritically, as a cudgel attempting to carve out their freedoms at the expense of others’ rights. But they will run out of hot air before America runs out of people who treasure its ideals.

In the end, our immigrant heritage not only strengthens us as a nation, it bonds us to all nations—not as a competitor, not as a threat—but as a family of humanity, all collected together in the great experiment of America. While our capitalists and generals may sometimes lose their perspective, and get lost in the struggle for power, remember this—all most of us want is to share our freedom with the rest of the world. We don’t want other countries to belong to us, we just don’t want to hog all the good stuff for ourselves—it’s no fun to be happy if you can’t share it with everyone else.

A Word About Arithmetic (2016Sep16)

Posted by XperDunn on September 16, 2016

Friday, September 16, 2016 1:46 PM

A Word About Arithmetic (2016Sep16)

As the polls stand today, HRC has a slim lead over DJT in a head-to-head, but they are dead even, when the poll includes Johnson and Stein. People tell you to vote your conscience—and that is very good advice. However, judgement is also a factor—if you vote for someone who polls at or below ten percent, you are casting a vote for your conscience—but you’re not electing anyone.

Someone will be elected, but it won’t be Johnson or Stein. They could be angels come down from heaven, their policies could be solid gold—they are not getting elected. That’s arithmetic. Either HRC or DJT will win the election. So while you vote your conscience, ironically, you are also abstaining from voting for who will be elected.

And that would all be hunky-dory, if you don’t care which major candidate wins. Since there are big differences in the two major candidates, it is unlikely that anyone has no preference of one over the other—but if you really don’t see any difference between them, go on and vote your conscience. But, personally, I would also add—go and get your eyes checked.

Trump continues to hide his taxes. He just announced that he’s giving up the birther conspiracy—but no apology or explanation was given for the years of racist (and ludicrous) aspersions cast on the serving President. I could write all day and still not complete a full list of his nonsensical posing as a serious adult, and his unfitness for a position of responsibility. I’d need another entire day to review the lies he’s told, not just about his opponent, and his President, but about nearly everyone and everything.

To be fair, a lot of it is just ignorance—he actually believes some of his own lies. But most of it is purposeful manipulation of the people he looks down on—yes, I’m talking about you, Trump supporters—you poor, deluded suckers. He’s pushing your buttons, hoping you’ll push the button for him in November—and once you’ve done that, open that envelope from Reader’s Digest—‘You’ve just won a Million Dollars’! Ha!

Hillary Clinton has been unfairly attacked, over and over, for thirty years—but no one has ever taken her down, because she’s legit. We’ve all been lied to—she’s no monster, no criminal, no liar, no inept bumbler, no traitor, and no fool.

Here’s an easy point to make—Secretary Clinton, over the years, has been accused of so many things that they contradict themselves. She can’t be a monster and a weakling; she can’t be sneaky and a fool; she can’t be helpless and be the most dangerous person on the planet. In their over-enthusiasm to smear this fine lady, they’ve called her mutually exclusive things—so at least half of them are lying about her, right off the bat, by the sheer logic of it.

We’ve all been to high school—we’ve all seen the mean kids say mean things about the nice kids, and get away with it. But that nonsense doesn’t fly in the real world—with the one exception of Hillary Clinton. She’s got a mob of very good people, all vouching for her—no, shouting her praises—are you going to believe them, or Donald Trump and Fox News? Please explain your answer. If only to yourself.

Pete and Joanna — In That Order (2016Sep15)

Posted by XperDunn on September 16, 2016

Thursday, September 15, 2016 6:50 PM

A long and productive day—Pete came by, we recorded most excellent musical diatribes, but he had to cut our visit short and return to the world from whence he came. Then Joanna came by to see Pete—moments too late, very frustrating—but she and I had a pleasant visit, at least. This time I remembered to take a picture:

Today’s posts bring my total YouTube uploads to 2,005. Of those, 59 are videos of Pete Cianflone and me, collaborating together on improvisations and song covers. The audio-cassette archives of our 20^th-century recordings are lost in the mists of time—after many years of pursuing separate paths, we resumed our monthly journey together in January, 2014. It’s all on YouTube: Pete n’Me playlist

I’ll grant you, it’s an uneven catalog (always with the caveat that the problems are all mine—Pete’s a professional who’s nice enough to indulge me) but as we’ve gone along, Pete has figured out an impossible trick—drumming for a pianist with no sense of rhythm. He always makes me sound better than I sound by myself—it’s really something. Today’s videos are a perfect example—no matter how badly I mess up, Pete keeps things going.

Well, it’s been a very busy week. I think I’ll go back to bed for a few days.

Balance (2016Sep14)

Posted by XperDunn on September 15, 2016

Wednesday, September 14, 2016 1:45 PM

La-dee-da…. I don’t care. Let it all swirl around me. I usually feel obligated to pay attention, to try to sort the wheat from the chaff. But it all roils on, with or without me—I could live the rest of my life without a glance at the world and no one would ever notice. I could stop watching TV or going online, wait until November, vote for Hillary—and the result would be the same as if I had obsessed over all the political reporting, day and night, leading up to election day.

Those of you with the health and strength can rush down to campaign headquarters and volunteer to get out the vote—you may even decide that you’ve found in Politics a lifetime career—you can make a difference. I am unable to do so—but that’s okay—like I said, my lack of involvement frees me from worrying about my level of engagement.

We live in a media-centric culture. It is a mirror that we hold up to ourselves—and so our lives are judged not just on what’s happening, but whether we find ourselves entertained. It’s a lot to ask of ourselves—as if the whole family-of-man was driving its car down the interstate, admiring itself in the rearview mirror, trying to keep one eye on the traffic and the road signs. We must pay attention—but there are some things that don’t require our attention—they get in the way of the stuff we must keep watching for—dangers, opportunities, and responsibilities.

Not that we don’t need entertainment—I’m not saying that. Ever since fireside storytellers lit the imaginations of their tribe to mark the end of the day, people have hungered for entertainment. It is a part of who we are—just as much as eating or sleeping. In modern America, we’ve found that an overabundance of tempting foods can transform nutrition into a health threat. By the same token, it seems that we have the ability to over-indulge in entertainment to the detriment of our mental health. Sensationalism leads us on, to shorter attention-spans, lack of exercise, sleep deprivation, and carpal-tunnel syndrome.

As a bookworm, I was an early-adopter of today’s media overload. Long before it was popular to spend the entire day staring at a rectangle in your hand, I was reading a book during every free second of my time. Even back then, I found that reading books (a supposedly relaxing activity) could become a binge activity. I’d reach a point where the eye strain, stiff neck muscles, and headaches made it necessary to stop awhile—even at three in the morning, with only one chapter left to find out the ending.

I got a lot out of those books—I learned a lot and I was exposed to new concepts and perspectives that broadened my understanding. But I also missed out on a lot of other things—the kinds of things other people did—which narrowed my understanding. It’s that whole ‘balance’ thing—it always bites us in the tush. And when it comes to the popularity and ubiquity of the I-phone, balance goes completely out the window.

People in olden times often resisted having a phone put into their home—if they wanted to talk to someone, they would go and see them. Nowadays, landline home-phones are only remarkable in that younger people have begun to feel landlines are superfluous. And, as in those days, we have many people today who don’t wish to ‘be online’—if they want to talk to somebody, they’ll call them on the phone. But like the people before, their children are using texts and Twitter and Skype, et. al., to keep in touch—so they are forced to adopt the new tech, if only to talk to their kids.

But what if you’re among the millions of people without the money for gadgets, without access to the internet, perhaps without even literacy? We are creating a divide between the digitally-enabled and the dark-zoners—and these two groups live in worlds that the other cannot comprehend, much less share.

We are approaching a point where digital illiteracy and lack of access will become more disabling than a lack of money. It is a new form of what film-director Godfrey Reggio called ‘Koyaanisqatsi‘ or ‘life out of balance’. Only, in this case, it is specifically Humanity that is putting itself out of balance.

Prototypical ‘wild’ humans evolved to live a life of constant struggle and frequent deprivation. We have built civilizations that free us from such rigors—but being free of the necessity of fleeing from predators, free of hunting, gathering, and finding water and shelter—that doesn’t change the way we evolved.

We still need to exert ourselves. We still need to balance food with activity. We still need to bond, to form social groups, and to share stories. We still need to keep these animal bodies of ours balanced on the tightrope of biological function. Any extreme unbalance of exertion, food, leisure, entertainment, or self-regard causes problems—as lack of balance always will.

So, in the end, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with eating McDonalds or playing Black Ops or Tweeting—the danger lies in imbalance, in overdoing any one thing to the exclusion of a diversity of activities. Just as a conversation must include both talking and listening, our lives must balance our pleasures with our requirements. We take our bodies for granted—but we ought to stop using them occasionally, just long enough to listen to them and give them what they need. But I should talk—I collect unhealthy habits like they were baseball cards.

Okay, videos for today—one new one, and one from a week ago that I’ve put off posting.

So I’ll see you tomorrow.

Visitors (2016Sep13)

Posted by XperDunn on September 14, 2016

Tuesday, September 13, 2016 7:50 PM

What a day—what a beautiful day. Lorraine Gengo and Joanna Binkley came by today, bought me lunch, and we sat and talked about cabbages and kings, just like the old days. All the high school years I spent chasing them around like deer—and just as hard to keep up with. And now they invite themselves over. Wonders never cease.

Of course, it’s a sad occasion—we were all good friends with Cris, and Cary still. He was a very striking personality and we all feel his passing. Still we talked of other things, too—catching up on forty years is both plenty to talk about, and nothing to talk about, but we made do.

I usually spend the day trying not to wear myself out but today I don’t mind being exhausted—I don’t get out much. Seeing people from the olden times really lifts my spirits. I’m kicking myself now, that I hadn’t the presence of mind to take a picture! And me making a movie every damn day…

Seneca’s latest video came out adorable, just like they all do. She’s got two outfits in the new pictures—one says, “Dad and I Agree—Mom is the Boss” (a nice fantasy—everyone knows the baby is the boss) and the other has a whale on it. The teddy-bear looks like a permanent fixture—it’s so cute the way little’uns have ‘sidekick’ dolls or toys or blankets that cannot leave their sides.

I’m happy also to note that my granddaughter continues the family tradition (well, my tradition—Bear is a normal person) of wearing mis-matched socks. I think it adds a certain panache, don’t you?

Pete’s coming! New videos from the Buds-Up Consort coming soon—watch this space….

Get Well Soon (2016Sep13)

Posted by XperDunn on September 13, 2016

Tuesday, September 13, 2016 11:22 AM

Okay, that was uncalled for—whenever I write one of those profanity-laden posts—the ones that sound like a transcript of one of Donald Duck’s hissy-fits, I know that the poisonous insanity of Donald Trump’s campaign has gotten to me. I know I should be better than that. But my outrage is real. The divisive delusions, the media repeating gossip—and reporting on how they can’t stop repeating gossip, and the orange Godzilla trampling the landscape of our ethics, ideals, and traditions—eventually I just snap.

‘I know you are, but what am I?’—now there’s a campaign theme to be proud of, right? The only candidate ever to refuse to show his tax returns—no, that’s no biggie—we can just take his word, can’t we? So many, many things wrong, so many disqualifications—you get bored, hearing people like me drone on about them, don’t you? What an ingenuous strategy—horror overload. It’s new—it’s dynamic! He’s ‘looks’ like a leader too, doesn’t he? Bullies always have that stubborn expression on their face. One gets the impression that, when Trump loses, it will be the first time anyone will have ever told him ‘no’.

Let’s talk about something pleasant. I hope Secretary Clinton is feeling better today—she’s so nice. I really like her. And she’ll need all of her strength when the Democrats sweep the election. Without the obstructionists in Congress, she’ll be rolling out bills and appointments like a hurricane. People can stop complaining about government inaction, and start complaining about what the government is doing, like they used to.

Just think of it—infrastructure repair, so many jobs we’ll have a labor shortage, fully-staffed SCOTUS, EPA, federal agencies galore—and Hillary will scare the crap out of all the bad actors, heads of backward countries all taking the hint from ourselves—disrespecting Obama, and rattling their machetes. Let’em try that nonsense with Hillary Clinton—it will not end well for them.

America is headed for a very good morning—and I can’t wait for this endless night to be over.

Finger-Pointing (2016Sep10)

Posted by XperDunn on September 10, 2016

Saturday, September 10, 2016 3:01 PM

I am a bitter, angry old man. Have you ever wondered what an angry old man does with his time? Well, here’s how my day usually goes:

I get angry at the media for forcing a fifth-grade reading-level on public debate—and for lunging at any wisp of sensation. But then I tell myself that the media aren’t the problem, Trump is.

So then I get angry at Trump for trashing our global image, for sowing ignorance and fear, and shredding any solemnity we still felt towards our quadrennial ritual of choosing the Leader of the Free World. The gravitas of holding the fate of the globe, of humanity, in the palm of a single hand—is totally lost on this grubby con-man. But then I tell myself that Trump isn’t the problem, the Republicans are.

So then I get furious with the Republicans for choking the breath out of our government. Their obligation to lead their constituency is forfeited, for craven pandering to the most vocal, extreme, ignorant minority, for fear of being criticized by a mob of besotted malcontents, who hate the USA as it is, and yearn for a ‘return’ to some fantasy, fascist past.

Blocking appointees to vital offices and judgeships, strangling our economy with a sequester that punishes Democrats for the crash the Republicans made—and keeps that crash lingering, well… I could go on, ad infinitum, about the neglect and cynical sabotage the Republicans call ‘service’, but we all have things to do. So, anyway, I get mad. But then I tell myself that the Republicans aren’t the problem, the voters are.

And then I realize that calling half of American voters gullible, clueless, and deluded is not going to make me any friends—neither will it change anyone’s mind. Then I get mad at humanity in general, for its propensity towards destructive and lazy ideas—ideas that contain more inertial persistence than our rare insights into love, and all the work it entails. I get mad at the super-rich for toying with the whole of humanity, absent of any ethics and overcome with selfishness. I get made at the NRA, the arms-makers, and the arms-dealers for profiting on death. I am enraged at the injustice of seven billion mostly good people, used and misled by a mere handful of greedy, hateful pigs.

Then I go lie down and try to get my pulse back to normal. So what’s your day like?

Media Backs New Hitler (2016Sep10)

Posted by XperDunn on September 10, 2016

Saturday, September 10, 2016 11:26 AM

Is there anything Trump can do or say that will deter people from voting for him? Is there anything he can say that will finally push the media to report it as a lie, instead of just reporting his quote, and having a debate over it? Will this toxic confluence of media sensationalism, nationalism, and misogyny actually propel a border-line-psycho ignoramus into the Oval Office, edging out the best potential leader our country has ever seen?

They say the best way to win a fight is to act like a madman—it unnerves the opponent. This is the first time that strategy has been employed in an election campaign—because, prior to now, people who act crazy have been disqualified by the voters. Apparently, we now have voters for whom ‘crazy’ is acceptable. When fact-checkers report that 95% of what a person says is False, that usually disqualifies as well. But in this election, it actually helps Trump, because one of his lies is that ‘we can’t trust Hillary Clinton’.

I admire the way Trump obscures his total lack of experience by accusing Hillary of not fixing anything for thirty years—yes, she has done the hard work of public service, for thirty years, and more. But she hasn’t been President for thirty years—blaming her for all the (supposed) mistakes of her husband or Obama or Democrats generally—that only works on Survivor or The Apprentice. It shouldn’t be working in an election—it should be disqualifying in an election.

If a seventy-year-old visits one black church for the first time in his life, does that erase his racism? If his close friend, the alleged sex-assaulter, isn’t an ‘official’ member of his team, does that erase his chauvinism? If the one unchanging feature of his ‘supporter-commentators’ is that they never answer a direct question, does that make him a man we can rely on?

One thing that Hillary has done for thirty years is study policy—most of Trump’s policies (if you can call ‘secrets’ policies) are thirty days old, if that. When are we going to stop harassing Hillary about non-issues, like her emails, or Benghazi, or the CGI—and start asking questions about the millions of dollars wasted on investigating, interrogating, and always, eventually, vindicating her?

And, speaking of, why is Hillary the only person in America who can be accused, investigated, cleared—and still be guilty? That’s not a conviction, that’s a wish. And the media, apparently, is in the wish-fulfillment business—always talking about Hillary’s unfavorables as if she had earned then, when they’ve been dishonestly smeared on her, and embraced by people who ‘just don’t like her’. Hillary’s unfavorables say nothing about the woman herself, they are a verdict of ‘ignorant’ against the public. Why do we never hear discussion about why people are gullible enough to fall for dirty-tricks politics?

Media people, enjoy those high ratings—much good may they do you when our new Hitler takes the oath (with his fingers crossed, no doubt).

Dumber or Smarter (2016Sep08)

Posted by XperDunn on September 8, 2016

Thursday, September 08, 2016 2:14 PM

Has Trump’s candidacy made the whole country dumber or smarter? For the most part, he has suppressed our intelligence, particularly where news pundits are concerned. The title-chiron ‘Trump Supporter’ has come to represent a talking-head as cornered animal. Because media ‘requirements’ give equal time to opposing views, these people make up half of what we watch—a daily symposium on obstinate rancor and half-truths. What do we learn from this? We learn ‘never answer a question directly’. Actually, make that ‘never answer a question’. And we learn ‘when in doubt, shout about the opposition’.

We are smarter in one specific way—Trump’s easy victory over the crowded GOP primary field points up the weakness of having a party that relies more on talking points than public service, or common sense. And we learn that, no matter how modern we consider ourselves, we are eternally under threat from demagoguery.

Trump’s similarities to infamous fascists and other strongman despots have not stopped the angriest and most frustrated citizens from taking his populist bait. Governmental and political professionals, take note: if you neglect the common welfare in favor of the wealthiest, and do it long enough to turn discomfort into resentment and anger, any old bully with a smooth line can capture the electorate. Democracy, a system that relies on judgment, will always be vulnerable to strong emotional tides in the masses.

The dysfunction, frustration and anger can all be traced back to Republican obstructionism of the most flagrant, over-the-top quality. While the media drones on, echoing the rock-throwing harpies who haunt Hillary, and legitimizing the GOP’s novelty candidate, I’ve been driven to watching CSPAN2.

I’ve been watching Democrat senators beg the Senate to unjam the appointments back-log. Garland is just one of the appointees being ignored—hundreds of empty benches are causing a crisis for the few judges struggling to handle caseloads. The GOP’s refusal to confirm nominations prolongs massive vacancies in both federal judgeships, and agency and department heads. The vacancies in leadership can make it as though certain agencies don’t exist—effectively shutting them down, and makes a travesty of our institutional systems. This is government by forced unemployment.

Democrat senator after Democrat senator rose on the floor yesterday to declaim this political, cynical affront to public service and the most minimal bipartisan action, only to be answered with the word, ‘Objection’. That’s the response from the GOP.

Today, Senate Democrats gathered to honor Joe Biden (whose speech was cut off after mere seconds by GOP-controlled cameras). They also took the occasion to put it to the American public that the Senate managed to work out a bipartisan Zika-defense bill, sent it to the House, and the House Republicans added rider after rider, attacking Planned Parenthood, endorsing the Confederate flag, and other political BS that had no place in an national emergency funding bill. Then they doubled-down on this amorality by claiming the Democrats ‘voted down a Zika bill’. What kind of a dick does that? They all seem shockingly comfortable with this kind of childish evil.

It’s a sliding scale—GOP Senators seem to feel an occasional pinch of conscience, just enough to be embarrassed, not enough to act; GOP Representatives feel no shame at any of the bullying nonsense they pull; and the GOP candidate for President has lifted ‘bullying nonsense’ to an art form. But they’re all guilty of obstructionism and gamesmanship for its own sake, while the people they swore to serve languish in extreme distress.

The Democrats may blunder. The Democrats may get confused. But the Democrats never base their agenda on the opposition, they base it on getting shit done. Even a dyed-in-the-wool Conservative must recognize that a nation’s government must maintain what it already has. Even if you don’t want anything new, you still want to keep our roads, our schools, our military and VA, our justice system—you want to keep the nuts and bolts working. You don’t shut down, sequester, and obstruct any attempt to maintain the nation’s needs—that’s as good as treason—that’s an enemy within, more than any kind of public servant.

When Obama was elected, he doubtless felt a great weight on his shoulders—not just the weight that all presidents feel, but the additional weight of knowing that many would consider his presidency as a test of his race. Well, Barack Obama passed his test with flying colors—but we, the rest of the nation, have failed it miserably. Insidious bigotry and divisiveness in an effort to somehow deny President Obama the full honor of the office to which he was twice elected, especially birtherism, has made a sorry display of American politics these last eight years—and I am ashamed to be one of you.

Now, this orange clown, seeing the racism and nationalism ramping upward throughout Obama’s two terms, thinks he can win by running on the Nazi ticket. I mean GOP ticket. A debased and doddering tycoon hopes to bamboozle us all into ignoring the most able candidate—and the first woman candidate—that America has ever had. So says Barack—and so says her husband, Bill. And for what—a wall? Cracker please.

So, does Trump make us all Dumber or Smarter? I suppose that remains to be seen. November will tell the tale.

How Smart Do You Have To Be? (2016Sep07)

Posted by XperDunn on September 7, 2016

Wednesday, September 07, 2016 12:34 PM

Debates are coming. Can Trump hide ignorance with sheer bluster? Can Hillary Clinton overcome public awkwardness to reveal her inner beauty? We shall see.

People say ‘if Trump wins, I’m moving to Canada’—but for me, it’s more like cause to slit my throat—America is the greatest thing on Earth—we just can’t give it to a jerk who can’t see that greatness, who wants to replace it with his own conceited idea of what ‘greatness’ is.

But if there is a God (and even if there isn’t) Hillary should kick his ass. (And here I insert the obligatory reminder that we shouldn’t take it for granted—we must Vote—and get out the Vote.) If the world is made right again in November, and Hillary does win, I will feel a warm glow inside, knowing that America is safe from that bullying charlatan. But…

Here’s the thing. We have ‘checks and balances’—the tripartite nature of our government is meant to prevent excesses in any one branch—including the Executive. It is not meant to paralyze our government. And it never has before now, when subtle racism has made the Legislative branch into a stone wall preventing the Executive branch from any action, not only in legislation, but even in filling the complement of the Judicial branch. This is cynical politicization of government beyond the bounds of responsibility, or of shame.

After the disaster of Bush-43’s presidency, the GOP did an autopsy to see why their bankrupt ideological platform wasn’t getting any votes outside of their carefully gerrymandered pockets of influence. They solved the problem, and then ignored the solution, because the solution was to be more like the Democrats—that is, ‘decent human beings’. Not their scene, apparently. So they went down a rabbit-hole of lies, rationales, and bluster against the Democrats.

That conglomeration of ignorance and dog-whistling became so threadbare that a reality-TV celebrity was able to outshine them—when he should have been laughed off the primary-debate-dais by the contrast between himself and a dozen serious politicians. But by that point, he wasn’t facing rational, reasonable, serious politicians—he was facing Jeb, Marco, and Ted. Plus, the GOP had curated themselves a base of yahoos before the primary even began—so Trump won. They’re sorry now—but still, not because of their platforms, but because Trump made fools of them.

Now, these people are saying, “Okay, vote for Hillary if you must—but make sure to vote the party on the down-ballots, to provide a ‘check’ against Hillary”. In other words, if the GOP can’t govern, no one else should—and Democracy be damned. I say, if you’re going to elect a President, elect people who will work with her. We’ve had it, we little people—let someone get some goddam governing done. If the Dems fuck it up, elect a GOP president and Congress to replace them, but let somebody do something.

‘Small Government’, in a highly-developed country, in the 21^st century? Yeah, that’ll work, alright. ‘Nationalism’, when we need the injection of fresh blood that only immigration can bring—and when we need the real Muslims, as our greatest defense against extremist murderers? Yeah, that’ll work, alright. Ignorance and Science-denial, in the midst of a cyber cold-war and increasing automation and AI? Yeah, that’ll work, alright. I know, I’m an egghead—but how smart do you have to be, to see the hypocrisy of the GOP or the unfitness of their candidate? How ignorant do you have to be, to fall for it?

The Struggle (2016Sep06)

Posted by XperDunn on September 6, 2016

Tuesday, September 06, 2016 1:23 PM

Two months is a lot of time—I should be experiencing it; I should be savoring it; I should be reveling in it—especially at my age. An old friend of mine died yesterday—and he was the latest in an ever-growing list of people who are gone from my life forever. Until the day I join those old acquaintances, I owe it to them and myself to wring the juice out of life to the best of my ability. I resent the media making me wish for the next two months to go by as quickly as possible—I resent the media making the simple act of turning on the TV a painful experience.

My resentment glowers at their false equivalency between the con man, Trump, and the target of cynical, misogynist con-men, Hillary Clinton. I smolder at the easy passes they’ve given the Ignoramus, and the sensation-biased scrutiny they’ve given a woman who could fairly be described as our most prominent statesman—statesperson, that is. For instance, if I were running for president, I would hope that I, like Hillary, would have policies backed by decades of experience and consideration—not policies that I’m still struggling with at the eleventh hour. Presidential candidates don’t get a learning curve—that’s why we’ve never seen a tyro run for president before—it’s not a trainee-level position.

But there’s a bigger, longer story behind the present scuffling. Bush and the GOP got us into a war we should never have started—or, having started it, should have ended. They let the financiers play their games until the economy crashed and burned, leaving millions unemployed, evicted from homes, and robbed of their savings or retirement nest-eggs. Then they let their racist colors fly proudly while our first black president tried to fix their mess, obstructing every remedy he proposed, every move he tried to make—even when they wanted the same things—out of pure venal spite.

The GOP is not called the party of the rich for nothing—their lip service to the true values of this country has become ever more cursory; their demeaning of science and sense in favor of the cold comfort of profits have left them with no honor—and due to their incompetence, no profits, either. This country is in a mess—and anyone who blames the Democrats for this simply hasn’t been paying attention. Now a demagogue, with no thought for public service, hopes to ride the rage and despair nurtured by his own party into the White House. The few decent people left in that party have felt compelled to accept their party’s utter failure, and stand with Hillary Clinton.

This not only belies the false equivalence shored up by the media—it also proves that the GOP’s attacks on her are only for show. Sensible people of either party see Trump as the death of the American Dream—and rightly so. Hillary Clinton (who, being human, has faults) is as vulnerable to criticism as anyone with a fifty-year resume—but fair-minded people can only marvel at all she has gotten right and all she has accomplished. Trump is having a grand time criticizing others for how they do a job he’s never done—and no one calls him on it. His record is spotless—because it is a blank sheet of paper.

But let’s suppose that Hillary Clinton were just an ordinary politician—nothing special, no life-long history of experience especially suited to the job she hopes to win. Let’s say we criticized the former Secretary of State for her mediocrity, rather than her brilliance. Her opponent is still a horrible man. Far from voting for Trump, I wouldn’t even let that man in my home. Trump has no values, no ethics, no decency—he is a greedy, self-serving cretin. I’d sooner vote for anyone else—not that the Stein or Johnson votes won’t help Trump more than Hillary—that’s just another way the GOP is trying to worm their way into office. So, make that ‘anyone else with a chance of beating him’.

And even if he weren’t a monster, he’d still be ignorant and inexperienced—not just for the office, but in general. He has no experience of life as people live it—he is a yapping lap-dog without an owner. He’s mean-spirited, pompous, and selfish. He’s a billionaire who claims to be the salt of the earth. He’s a racist who claims Hillary is a bigot. He’s a crook who claims she’s crooked. He’s great at firing people. He’s great at putting people down. He’s the insult-comic dog candidate—a joke that wears quickly but won’t go away.

Watch Trump’s old interviews, when he’s asked if he’ll go into politics—he spent his life avoiding the hard work of public service—he’s not interested in being a mayor or a governor or a senator—he just wants to win the reality show that is the presidential contest. He doesn’t want to do the work. He doesn’t even want to study the issues. He just wants to pursue his celebrity to new heights. What will he do as president? He’ll do whatever the hell he feels like. He won’t know or care about the ripple effects of his actions. Oh that’s bold, alright—but it’s pretty stupid, too.

(Photo credit should read BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images)

Americans, if you vote for Trump, you will get exactly what you deserve—and it won’t be pretty. Naturally, I’m with Her. But you don’t have to share my admiration of our potential first woman president—you can vote for her just to save the nation from a con man. This country has so much history, so much greatness, so much potential—why would you hand it over to a conceited, spoiled, sorry excuse for a man, like Trump? Do you really want to vote for a GOP presidential candidate that promises to make Bush-43 look like Solomon? Help me and all right-thinking Americans keep George W. Bush as our stupidest and most inept president—vote for Hillary.

ta-ta. (o wait–one last thing):

Response to Derek Sivers (2016Sep04)

Posted by XperDunn on September 4, 2016

Sunday, September 04, 2016 6:59 PM

Response to the Derek Sivers Article: Why are you doing?

Goals are for the young. Their goals allow them to push themselves, to experience the ups and downs of life, and to learn who they really are and what they’re capable of. Having achieved a goal, one looks back and sees the entire journey differently for having reached its end. Do that often enough, and one becomes an adult.

Adults come to see life not as an Olympic event, but as a group activity—being a good, supportive family member, being an engaged employee of your workplace, being a contributing member of your community. Goals in this context are what one does with the interstices—diet and exercise, continuing education, workbench projects, artistry, whatever. Thus I find the whole subject of goals difficult to get my arms around.

But exceptions abound—entrepreneurs, visionaries, activists, geniuses of one type or another—such people include disruption in their life plan, while still trying their best also to be the ‘adults’ described above. That’s a tall order—which is why there are not more of such people. Only the truly driven have any reason to make life even more challenging than it already is. The rest of us tend to make a goal of finding something pleasant to do during our leisure time, and making as much of that leisure time as we can.

I thought myself exceptional—until I’d become more familiar with the world and realized that, out of seven billion, exceptional isn’t always automatically ‘rich and famous’. I found my exceptionals to be balanced neatly against my weaknesses. I found ‘rich and famous’ to be a silly goal, because both balance their advantages against their hassles. And I found that personal, private success is hard to enjoy when there are so many people with less comfort, less wealth, and less opportunity.

On the other hand, saving the world is a tall order—and I’m not that ambitious. I would have to satisfy myself with being engaged in my family’s, and my community’s, welfare—but then I became disabled and found myself the target of support, rather than the source. Surprise! Nothing educates like vulnerability. A great chunk of my ego was carved away. A great load of gratitude was grudgingly taken on. I went from dreaming of doing things no one else could do, to wishing I could do what any average person could. I was, as they say, ‘taken down a peg’.

We don’t choose our goals any more than we choose our talents or our failings—goals accommodate themselves to the size of their container, if you will. But I appreciate your advice—whatever the goal, we should all be seeking maximum joy and personal growth—and time is short, so whatever we want to do, we better get busy doing it.

Thus endeth the lesson.

Daddy’s 1st Dance (2016Sep02)

Posted by XperDunn on September 2, 2016

Friday, September 02, 2016 7:10 PM

I finally got in a file-folder from Bear, containing over 100 Photos of Seneca showing off his daughter, Seneca, at his Restaurant—he appears to dance about the place, introducing the Princess to all his co-workers. It’s beautiful—so I made a video of it. I can’t speak for the piano music—my fingers were a bit tired from photo-shopping all those pics—but I think it will do.

The photo sequence repeats once, because I only show each picture for 0.75 secs. That left me with a-minute-and-a-half for the whole sequence, but the music is three minutes. It’s driving me crazy to be in New York while my baby granddaughter is growing up in California—it’s just so wrong. They’re going to visit at Christmas time, so I’m very impatient for the holidays. Meanwhile, I have to settle for photos. Arggh!

Well, anyway, that was a full day’s work—and I think it came out okay—but I think I’ll use these pictures again, more slowly, on my next video. I like the way this one suggests movement, but it’s a little frenetic. I’d like to see the pictures come more slowly. Next time.

ttfn.

Confusion Reigns (2016Sep01)

Posted by XperDunn on September 1, 2016

Thursday, September 01, 2016 1:56 PM

I’m confused. I like Hillary Clinton a lot—but everyone else seems to hate her. A person accused of endless atrocities, but never proved guilty of any of them, is a rare and wondrous thing. If she is truly guilty of all this criminality, then she is unbelievably clever. If she is not, then she is the target of the longest, most intense smear campaign in history—and yet continues to be the favorite for the upcoming. That would make her unbelievably tough. Clever or tough, or both—I like that—and I don’t see where all the spite is coming from.

I’m not confused about all the free media Trump gets—everyone knows: if it bleeds, it leads. Trump’s campaign has been bleeding (out of his wherever) since he first announced his candidacy by calling Mexicans rapists. Everything he says is full of entertainment value—he’s shocking. I’m shocked that, with all he has said, he has anyone willing to vote for him—and we are all shocked by his hate-speech, his rudeness, his trashing of American ideals, and especially his ignorance—considering the job he’s asking for.

Consider this: many people who know and work with Trump have been telling people that he is a narcissist, a cheat, and a bully. No one who has worked with or knows Hillary Clinton has anything bad to say about her. The people who vilify her are always people who don’t know her. Even Republicans she has worked with have testified to her competence and ability—and never accused her of duplicity, as her detractors do.

So, if Hillary Clinton is a villain, she’s not only clever enough to never be proven guilty, she’s also clever enough to fool everyone she’s ever met. And that’s too damned clever—that’s beyond the limit of credibility. One has to wonder. Is it a coincidence that these same people hate her husband, Bill, or her former boss, President Obama? That sounds a lot like the attitude of an angry Conservative, not the indictments of an objective observer.

These would-be angry-mob-leaders blame Hillary for the deaths in Benghazi—even after Ambassador Stevens’s sister said, “We all recognize that there’s a risk in serving in a dangerous environment. Chris thought that was very important, and he probably would have done it again. I don’t see any usefulness in continuing to criticize her. It is very unjust.“ The GOP do a disservice to the late ambassador’s heroism—yet the public still makes it a black mark on Hillary’s ledger, eclipsing the memory of Chris Stevens and the honor of his sacrifice.

That one bugs me the most—but there are two sides to all the accusations made by her enemies—and, as with Trump, only the most shocking and sensational sides are harped-on in the media. No one, to my knowledge, has ever done an in-depth analysis of the Hillary-smear’s long history, or the pros-and-cons of each smear, to expose this nebulous far-right propaganda machine for the ‘doubt factory’ it is. Sixty Minutes, where are you when we need you?

We should remember that her accusers are the same people who brought us Climate-change Denial, Reverse Racism, and Trickle-down Economics. They are the liars, not her. They are the criminals, not her. They are the bigots, not her. That should be clear to everyone. It is not. I’m confused. Are American voters such empty-headed lemmings? Can a horror-show like Trump really worm his way into power, when we have Hillary Clinton as an option? Someone explain this to me.

And while you’re at it, explain to me how people so judgmental that they disapprove of Hillary Clinton can elect a Congress full of village idiots. Those are the good guys? And Hillary is the Wicked Witch of the East? Very sound, everyone—extraordinarily wise—well done. Shit. Nice to know the country is just crawling with intelligence.

The world loves Hillary, but America doesn’t. The world believes in Climate Change, but America doesn’t. The world is dead set against using nuclear weapons, but Trump is considering it. How am I supposed to love my country, when it is so tightly-packed full of morons? I am confused.

bye now.

Exam (2016Aug30)

Posted by XperDunn on August 30, 2016

Tuesday, August 30, 2016 12:24 PM

A list of key-words, a chart of interconnections, a graph of differences—the idea of Algebra tries to worm its way into life. I used to make myself to-do lists, back when I did things—I’d have Top Priorities (things that needed doing right away), Regular things (a sort of ‘daily chores and maintenance’ list), Non-Work things (commitments I had made to people), Long-Term Projects (often becoming a list of things I never got to), and so on. Late at night, I’d still be scribbling away like John Nash from “A Beautiful Mind”—the list became its own project, keeping me from doing the things on the list.

Analysis can become a rabbit-hole from which there is no escape. Philosophical discussions that devolve into semantics—finding, at the end, that language is more personal than universal—can only be enjoyed so many times before we realize that life is to be lived. There is just as much value to experiential data-gathering as there is to mental wool-gathering, perhaps more—and certainly more stimulation.

Yet ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’—or so philosophers would have us think (no pun intended). So we think about what we’re doing while we do it. Occasionally we’ll find that we need to sit and think, to put down what we’re doing and ponder a question—maybe even draw a diagram or blueprint. My least favorite thing is to realize, in the middle of doing something, that I’m doing it wrong—or, worse yet, that I don’t need to do it.

Life is like a deep wood—we follow the trail without too much care, but where the trail ends, or forks, we have to stop and consider our options. Sometimes we have to trail-blaze where there is no path; sometimes we have to gamble on which fork leads in the best direction. Sometimes we have to micro-manage, such as making camp before the sun goes down; sometimes we have to macro-manage, such as planning where to get provisions over the next month’s travel. All activity involves thought, planning, decision, and judgment—we humans are rarely wholly physical—our actions are the physical complement to our calculations.

Examination, though, is a special case—it has no boundaries. We can examine something forever, if we wish. We can opt not to examine something at all—taking for granted that it is a known quantity or a known object. To walk the ‘tightrope of examination’, to do it well, being aware of the world around us without losing the context of our lives—that’s the trick. Too much or too little are both dangerous ground.

I’ve been speaking, so far, of learned debate—where people try to agree on terms and their usage, where both sides are actively engaged in a search for truth or meaning. Most of our public examinations, unfortunately, are not like that.

When I see a news-show’s panel of commentators about to debate the presidential election, I know I’m in for a heaping helping of snake-oil and tap-dancing. The pretense of fairness and balance becomes a shambles of illogical carping and condemnation—insisting on their opponent’s evil while excusing the same evil in their champion. It’s a virtual ballet of slippery memes, with a dash of shouting and derision. Both sides hold up their ‘true facts’ while we, the voters, recognize neither’s claims as either true or factual—we call them ‘talking’ points, not ‘thinking’ points.

One of the candidates has latched onto the new Media-philosophy and has based his platform on the idea that what he says is more important than whether there is any earthly reason to say it. His constituents are no better—a recent poll reveals that, of those who will vote for Trump, 4% think he can’t be trusted with nuclear weapons. As Rachel Maddow pointed out last night—that means that a certain number of Trump supporters don’t trust him with nuclear weapons, but want to give them to him anyway.

A hilarious recent article in the New York Times made the point that Trump supporters are loyal to a fault. In it, a supposed Trump advocate scolds the rest of us for pointing out Trump’s faults, assuring us that nothing anyone says will change the minds of his base. Funny as hell, except for the part about it being true–nothing can destroy democracy quite so thoroughly as an evidence-proof electorate.

The hypocrites in the GOP, the ones who, for years, have been shoving reason through a black hole, so that it always comes out backwards and upside-down, are caught flat-footed. They like Trump’s hypocrisy a lot, but they’re nervous about how unabashedly he exposes it, without a whisper of the usual serpentine reasoning they usually like to use, to confuse the issues.

He just says the stupidest things—and liberals are confused. They’re used to having a debate with someone who injects a lot of false data and emotional blackmail into their policy, requiring an exhaustive review of what’s actually true, to rebut. Trump’s bald-faced “Build a Wall” or “Ban the Muslims” leaves them with their jaws hanging, unable to process such public abandonment of adult responsibility. It’s an unexpected gear-change. Trump no doubt mistakes it for awe, or something.

Trump supporters and far-right wackos of all kinds worry about an invasion of ‘foreigners’ in the USA. But people like me see past the surface of a person’s skin color or faith—we worry about an invasion from within, by the ignorant. America believes in equality—so the ignorant have as much of a say as any high-school graduate or PhD. Even the willfully ignorant, proud of their dismissal of science and logic, proud of their bigotry and chauvinism, eager to kick over the sand-castles of the liberal progressives—even these troglodytes have an equal say in the making of America. They are the cup of sugar in the gas tank of democracy.

Nothing I say will change them. Nothing I write will even propel them towards thought or questioning. So I’m not writing for them—I’m writing for you. You can grade my examination now.

36th Anniversary (2016Aug29)

Posted by XperDunn on August 29, 2016

Monday, August 29, 2016 9:57 AM

For some reason, 36 years ago, I married a Bear. She married a Clown. We did the things that other families do—house, kids, pets, Christmas, birthdays—but we did something you don’t see too much of—we were silly. I find silliness to be precious—it’s something a lot of people don’t have time for. Some people even have an aversion to silliness—though that makes them the perfect people to be silly in front of.

Bear is not always relaxed enough to get silly—she spends most of her time being quite serious and busy. She’s lucky she has me—I know the value of silly. I’ll check—but I’m pretty sure she feels the same way—yeah, pretty sure…

I told her last night that I had forgotten to get her a gift. Bear doesn’t care—Bear doesn’t like a lot of gift-giving. She likes Christmas presents and birthday presents and she doesn’t mind a box of chocolates for Valentine’s Day—but that’s it. No Mother’s Day, no Easter, no wedding anniversary, nothing where she feels a gift would cheapen the day. I try to get gifts anyway—silly ones, of course—but when I forget, it’s not the end of the world.

She said, “When I go shopping tomorrow, I’ll get myself some flowers.” That’s what we do—I tell Bear I didn’t get her a present, and she gets it for me (for her). I think she prefers to do her own shopping and decide what she wants—silly gifts are all well and good, but….

To the outside observer it might look like I get most of the benefit of being married and Bear gets most of the work—but only because it’s true—and I have an excuse—and a note from my doctor. But I do bring something to the table—old world queens had their court jesters—and Bear has her Clown. Plus, I kill spiders and fix toilets.

I don’t even want to think what my life would have been like without her. So that worked out pretty good. I am the lucky one.

Sunday, August 28, 2016 12:33 PM

It’s Addictive (2061Aug28)

I’m having trouble getting any work done on the computer. My wife is having trouble leaving the house. Friends come over and when they try to leave they just can’t walk out the door. It’s a real problem. We’re all addicted.

I’m a nerd by trade. My usual PC-monitor backgrounds and screen-saver slide-shows have always been NASA images—false-color galactic spectaculars, grandiose launch-fireworks, awesome celestial bodies—you know the drill. But I have recently received an influx of my granddaughter’s baby-pictures, which reminded me of younger times, when my computer graphics included our own infants—before they grew old enough to be self-conscious about being on daddy’s screen-saver. So, now, only occasional close-ups of solar storms or galactic star-cradles interrupt the steady stream of baby worship.

If you’ve had kids, or grandkids, then you know that your baby pictures are the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen—and it’s hard to look away. This is especially true when the actual enfant is on the opposite coast, unavailable for grandparental doting. Well, it turns out that having a slide-show screen-saver of such images is pretty close to graphics heroin.

I finish my typing or Facebooking or whatever, I go to leave the room, and I find myself caught, in glancing backward, by the full-screen splendor of our little Seneca. I walk into the same room later on, and I can’t bring myself to hit a key, stopping the screen-saver—I just sit and watch. When Claire (or anyone, really) tries to walk past the computer on their way out the door, they find themselves stopped in their tracks. She’s a cutie, what can I say?

I have piano recordings I’ve put off for days now, because I won’t edit the video without some fresh Seneca graphics to replace the image of me sitting and playing (with over 1,900 YouTube videos, I’ve seen more than enough of myself). Claire is holding out on me—but that’s between us, we’ll work it out. In the meantime, I have one recording that I really like—I may have to post them as is—or at least this latest one.

The universe is a big place (he said, apropos of nothing) and if we are honest with ourselves, our individual selves are such a minute part of the planet—itself a minute part of the whole—and we must accept that ego is entirely a biological-evolution thing—it is as misleading as our perception of the Earth as a flat surface—ego is a special case, only valid to one person in a specific point of time and space—certainly not any part of the larger reality around us.

We accept ego as a driving force, giving us the confidence to move forward, the sense of self-worth that allows us to believe in our goals and dreams—just as we move across the earth as if it were a table-top—it’s practical. But an overabundance of ego in one person is usually recognized in those around him or her—as delusional. So we conclude that ego, like glandular balance, is a healthy thing, and egotism, like any metabolic imbalance, is unhealthy.

Our egos are like our faces—other people see them clearly, while we cannot. And there is no mirror for an ego—except perhaps the brick wall of harsh reality, though sometimes even that has no effect. I’m not sure how big my ego is—I can’t be certain if my ego is in balance or not. It troubles me. But then, I’m out of shape too—no question, yet I can live with that—more easily than I can get myself to exercise every day. Sometimes I have to accept that I am what I am.

My point? I don’t know—my point is that it’s hot—too hot for this heavy, long-sleeved shirt I wore in the air-conditioned part of the house. My point is that I’ve gone down the rabbit-hole of presidential politics and it’s virtually impossible for me to write about anything else. But it’s Sunday, so I’m trying to take a day off from all that. Still, I catch myself nibbling around the edges of it.

For me this political ‘rumpus’ is about human nature, about character, about strength of purpose and clarity of vision—it’s not a party to me, it’s not a hootenanny where I get off on the sheer emotional energy of it. I’ve always been too damned serious—and this election is an exaggeration of that side of me. Don’t think that, because I’m taking a day off, that I don’t have a lot more scolding and griping to do—but that’ll wait.

In the meantime, I only have eight measly photographs with which to make four videos—I guess if I can’t squeeze any new shots out of Jessy or Claire, I’ll have to fall back on photos I’ve already used—we’ll see.

Alt Right There (2016Aug27)

Posted by XperDunn on August 27, 2016

Saturday, August 27, 2016 10:28 AM

Every once in a while, someone remembers that electing our first woman to the presidency would be an historic breakthrough—and immediately, someone else will pointedly comment that they’re not going to vote for someone just because she’s a woman. We suffered from no such timidity when Barack Obama was elected the first African-American president. Sure, people would carp that Obama was ‘half-white’—but, that being a distinction no racist had ever before bothered to parse, no one took them seriously.

And much has been made of late about the racism of the Alt Right fringe—as if these troglodytes were mostly concerned with what Larry Wilmore calls “The Unblackening”, i.e. replacing President Obama with a Caucasian. But what both the Clinton campaign and the media are overlooking is the Alt Right’s far greater interest in maintaining male chauvinism. Both Trump and his new campaign-head, Steve Bannon, have been explicitly and publicly misogynist in both word and deed.

“All men are created equal” was confined to men-only for so long that there are women alive today who were born before women had the right to vote. The discrimination against women in America—even after Suffrage was granted—included property, banking, police protection, the workplace, and exclusion from any social or business group or meeting place deemed ‘men only’. And the feminist movement has made slow, tortuous progress towards gender equality for the last fifty years—but even gay men were allowed to serve in the military before women were accorded the same privilege in full—what was it, days ago? Maybe weeks ago?

One could easily make the case that, when the Democrats nominated a woman presidential candidate, the GOP was taken over by the “He-Man Woman-Haters Club”, known today as the Alt Right. They must have pinched themselves when a man renowned for his public misogyny (and not ‘just against Rosy O’Donnell’) was nominated by the Republican Party. How perfect for them that an enemy of ‘political correctness’ was able to slip his chauvinism under the media’s radar. Even better, the Democrats have mistaken them for racists, when their true, core agenda is the unwinding of Women’s Liberation.

How else does a woman, who statistically is more honest than most politicians, find herself confronting an electorate that has 63% of its number believing her to be wildly dishonest? Why else would a woman whose first job was sneaking into Southern schools to expose their refusal to de-segregate, end up being called a ‘bigot’ by the most morally bankrupt opponent ever to run for office—and the media repeats his claim 24-7, as if it has even a whisper of credibility?

Now, full disclosure—I want a woman. I think our entire political system can only benefit from an increase in femininity. Women are less likely to internalize power—and more likely to remember the weak and helpless, and, of course, the children. They are at least as smart as men—and far less likely to lose sight of their goals by getting involved in dick-measuring contests. Men consistently point to menstruation, pregnancy, and child-rearing as ‘handicaps’ of the opposite sex—but ask yourself this: Would you rather have a human race that doesn’t bother with all the inconvenience of reproduction? That’s a short-lived dynasty, bub. Just because women do all the work of perpetuating the species doesn’t mean that creating new lives is some sort of ‘accessory’ that only girls fool around with. Get a clue.

We worry about national defense, upholding the law, strength and power—we forget that life also requires caring, sensitivity, and tolerance. Men can even feel embarrassed for showing any recognition of these necessities. Yes, a lot of women would be embarrassed to show strength and toughness—but it’s not as overwhelming a barrier to women as men’s desperation to maintain their machismo. The most important strategic value of the female broadness of vision is that they are more likely to see both sides of an issue—they are less likely to pick a side and fight blindly for conquest, without any regard for other points of view. I don’t want to profile, but it would be ingenuous to pretend that the sexes think the same way, or perceive things the same way.

But forget all that difference business. Let’s say men and women are exactly the same—for argument’s sake. By that logic, it doesn’t matter what gender our president is—only that they are fit for the job. So let’s say the Democrats had a candidate, a man, with a lifetime’s experience in public service, with a stellar reputation among his peers, and accolades galore from nearly everyone he’s ever helped or worked with. Would you vote for that guy—or would you vote for Trump? Better yet, imagine that Hillary Clinton wasn’t a political nerd, a policy wonk who is uncomfortable in the public spotlight—imagine she had the charisma of Trump, or her own husband. Imagine she had a voice like honey and the presence of Angelina Jolie—would you vote for Trump? I don’t think so.

The trouble with Hillary is that she is our national medicine—it would help us, it would make us all better—but we don’t want to swallow it. We want something more fun, more attractive. Yet the things that make Secretary Clinton so desirable as our head of state are the very things that make it hard for her to appeal to us on a ‘popularity-contest’ level. She is serious. She is tough. Worst of all, perhaps, she is very intelligent. Of course we don’t want to vote for her—we don’t even want to date her. But this isn’t a date. This election is serious business—I would appreciate it if all my fellow Americans would be serious about their vote. That would not only be one more reason to vote for Hillary, but also one more reason not to vote for Trump. Let that poisonous clown bleed out of his ‘wherever’.

I Can’t Look (2016Aug25)

Posted by XperDunn on August 25, 2016

Thursday, August 25, 2016 12:08 PM

Slowly we turn, step by step…. Please, God, let this fuckin election be over. The Congress decided to sleep for eight years and the media have decided the people should sleep through these last two years (in solidarity?), mesmerized by the incessant drumbeat, ‘Clinton or Trump? Clinton or Trump?’

Completely outside the issue of that question being similar to ‘Gourmet Meal or Shit Sandwich?’, surely there are other things, other issues, other people in this world that we could spare a few seconds of attention on. I am constantly frustrated by so-called journalists reporting on the squeaky wheels of the world—has Research become completely forbidden? Is it impossible for newspeople to report anything other than the voices of spin-doctors, to find a story that doesn’t already have armed camps facing each other with oppositional memes? You know—actual news (as in new information).

The TV News has a tradition of arriving at the scene of an event, finding the stupidest person on the sidewalk nearby and asking their ‘opinion’ about what just happened. Nobody likes it, nobody gets any smarter because of it, but no one can seem to stop them from this exercise in inanity.

But today, they have a new thing—they don’t have to go looking for the stupidest person anymore—they just quote Trump’s blather-of-the-day, and call it news reporting. That’s beyond lazy—especially as they inject no hint of judgment or fact-checking—they simply parrot his words—as if they had meaning. News Fail. Get it together, cable news.

The thing that really gets me is when the media harps on Hillary Clinton’s ‘untruthfulness’—they can’t say her name without repeating this popular theme. And don’t get me wrong—I’m not saying she’s a paragon of honesty. But if they must add that ‘popular opinion’ to every mention of her, can’t they also always add that studies find her exceptionally honest compared to other politicians? Can’t they add mention of the fact that while it’s popular to call Clinton a liar—it is also incorrect? Why is that so hard? Are they afraid that confronting their listeners with the facts might turn them away?

This bothers me because I empathize. If the world thought me a liar, and I wasn’t, and all I heard from the news was repetition of the opinion that I lie, without any mention of the fact that I didn’t lie—well, I’d be pretty unhappy about that. Wouldn’t you? And what ever happened to being wrong? If Hillary Clinton says anything that turns out to be incorrect, she’s never wrong—she’s always ‘a liar’. If we follow that logic, we must elect Hillary Clinton—we could use a president who is never wrong.

I wouldn’t even be writing this rant right now—I was trying to relax and watch the news on TV. But rumor, fallacy, and claptrap are not my idea of news reporting. I can’t watch it. But I keep going back, vainly hoping for some common sense. What a fool I am. Journalism as a popularity contest just doesn’t work—telling people what they want to hear instead of what they need to hear may be profitable, but it hurts us, where it used to help us. It distracts us where it used to inform us. Like reality TV, it shows a semblance of reality that has been curated for entertainment value.

The death of print journalism has gutted the research departments of all the great journalism sources—the news today practically feeds on itself, working as hard, now, to share from other sources as they used to work on out-researching other sources. Reporters are flying blind, with virtually no back-up troops to dig into records, archives, interviews, analysis, or do good old shoe-leather research.

Yet the media has more news-channels and more hours of the day needing to fill those channels. It’s not a good situation. The public is no longer being informed—we are being curated by different media-moguls, fighting each other to indoctrinate their audience in their private agendas—journalism as a public service is nothing more than a legend from our glorious past. I miss Huntley & Brinkley. I miss Cronkite. I miss the news.

Your Brother (2016Aug23)

Posted by XperDunn on August 23, 2016

Tuesday, August 23, 2016 12:24 PM

Your brother and I are very stubborn-minded, and we have very different ideas that may keep us from agreeing on any political issue. But that doesn’t stop us from recognizing each other’s respectability—in an emergency or a disaster, we would work shoulder to shoulder, politics be damned—in a social setting, we would both behave and be polite—and do our damnedest to avoid discussing politics. In that way, politics is like religion—people can differ and still get along, as long as we don’t go out of our way to look for an argument.

For there are plenty of arguments to be had. People argue, sometimes for no other reason than to pass the time—if it’s a civil argument, I actually enjoy it—but nobody argues when something important comes up. If I am hungry or thirsty, I’m not going to argue with anyone, I’m just going to ask them the way to the nearest diner. If someone gets hurt, no one argues—they call 911, and argue later.

Take Hillary Clinton’s emails, for instance—why should we be surprised or upset if a lady older than we are (and we’re no spring chickens) didn’t fully understand about her email account? Only kids understand email fully—I was forty before I heard the word ‘email’. If Hillary’s IT techs were under investigation for being lax about security, that might make some sense—but to act like Hillary Clinton installed her own hardware, set-up her own network, and had full knowledge of everything there is to know about email—to shout, “lock her up” because she sent 30,000 emails and one of them was clearly marked ‘classified’—that’s hyperbole. That’s something you argue about when you have nothing else to do but kill time and gossip.

Yet because of this, we have 64% of Americans judging her to be untrustworthy—some reward for busting her ass in public service for fifty years. Plus, who tells the truth every single time? People lie like rugs—for politicians, it’s part of the job description—and for this grease-spot of a GOP candidate to crow about her ‘untruthfulness’—well, pot calls much smaller kettle on that score, in case no one noticed. P. T. Barnum’s got nothing on this clown.

Donald Trump’s inner circle consists of a white supremacist, a sex offender, and a pollster—they recently jettisoned their Putin mole. He’s a billionaire with a history of defaults and frauds who won’t release his tax returns. He owes money to China and gets financing from Russia. He’s an ignoramus who doesn’t even keep up with world events—and he’s never done any public service before—yeah, he should definitely be leader of the free world—what the hell do we have to lose? Well, except for civility, honesty, world opinion, economic security, national security, and our self-respect.

He’s a spoiled brat of a bully hiding inside the body of a seventy-year-old man. He doesn’t know or care about the office of the presidency, he just wants to ‘win’. What an ass. And he has the balls to criticize the most capable, accomplished politician of our time—not to mention criticizing everybody and everything else—and she can’t criticize his career in politics—because he doesn’t effing have one. He has a history of a business career—and not a glowing history, by any means. If we want to improve our economy by cheating everyone we deal with, including each other—then Trump is the ‘business-savvy’ leader we want—but why would anyone want that? It’s obviously left him so bored and brain-dead that he decided to run for president, like it’s some contest. Give us a break.

But I’ll tell you what inspires this venom in me—Trump is the whole Republican party, writ large. All their ingrown, paranoid policies point to one end—and Trump has unzipped their fly and is waving it around like the village idiot. They don’t like being exposed this way—especially by a narcissist who doesn’t appreciate how much damage he’s doing to their decades of careful rationalizing over the same stupidities. He destroyed the fifteen other candidates by ignoring the niceties, the pretensions that must go along with public support for wrongheadedness—he took their complicated stupid, and did them one better, with just plain stupid.

So my frustration is doubled by the fact that, once we’ve dealt with Trump, we still have to go back and deal with the GOP—hopefully without forgetting that their base is comprised of people who like the cut of Trump’s jib—and that the GOP curated them to be that way. The most malleable and knowledge-adverse Americans have a champion in the GOP—and Trump is the king of the knowledge-adverse. But your brother and I can vote differently and still remain friends—hell, I know one guy who thinks the earth is flat—that’s his business. Why should I judge him?

Political Work-Out (2016Aug22)

Posted by XperDunn on August 22, 2016

Monday, August 22, 2016 1:47 PM

Now that the ‘ill wind’ of the GOP has bloviated sufficient extremism to fill a Gag Reel of non-presidential character, or lacking character of any sort, really, we might be deluded into sitting back and breathing a sigh of relief—but that would be a mistake. Trump sprang from the mulch he grew out of—the GOP itself is the same cold-blooded, empty-spirited anti-Americanism that Trump is—he only ‘let it all hang out’, rather than the GOP’s normal tactic of ‘teaching the controversy’, or as I like to call it, hyper-bullshitting.

Vainly trying to find rationales for the worst side of people—exclusion, xenophobia, isolationism, and heedless greed—the GOP has played Devil’s Advocate long enough for us to drop the ‘Advocate’ and call them by their true name. Paying taxes for the good of the common welfare is no sin. Welcoming those who thirst for a better way of life is no crime. Insisting that the least of us get the same rights and respect as the rest of us is not faintness of heart—neither is being unable to succeed, through no fault of one’s own.

They reach into our darkest desires and fears—they tell us to blame and to suspect—they take advantage of our desperation, dangling false promises in our view. The GOP are the orcs to the Democrat’s elvish. How anyone can fall for their nonsensical prating eludes me—it is an abandonment of reason and judgment that I would not think most people capable of—yet it deludes a good half of all Americans.

I would have thought the ‘whoops’ war, and the cratered economy, would have woken up voters to the glaring truth. Failing that, one would hope people noticed the Congress they elected has devoted the last eight years to neglecting the people –with an iron resolve usually reserved for doing something productive. And if all that wasn’t enough, you have the specter of Trump—the high prince of unreason—leading them into a tomorrow full of open, blatant hate and fury.

If you vote for any GOP candidate this election, Trump or otherwise, I wash my hands of you as an American—I don’t know where the hell you came from, but you can go on back now. Just kidding. That’s what the ignorant tend to shout—‘Go back where you came from’—even though they shout it at their neighbors, hence their ignorance. I get it, though—if I blame someone else for my problems, then it feels good to shout at them to go away.

I’m sick and tired of this election—I’ve always seen Hillary as the obvious choice; I’ve always viewed Trump as a nothing with an ego; and the longer this circus drags on, the more ludicrous the coverage becomes. But I’m angry at the glacial time-frame of political change—our lives change overnight, and have done for a long time.

Our politics have got to become more pragmatic—we have to talk about grown-up stuff and shunt aside the childish whinings of those who want to turn back the clock (but only in their favor). We have to demand transparency from government, we have to start expecting results, and we have to start voting for people who hold themselves accountable—because we sure can’t do it, after we elect them. With all the work that needs to be done, I really don’t want to hear any more bon mots from the Donald. I don’t want to hear people give Hillary any more crap—you try running the effing State Department—or help run a global charitable foundation.

I don’t suppose it occurred to any journalistic geniuses to research what, if anything, the Clinton Foundation has done—that story doesn’t grab clicks, I guess. But as a viewer, I wouldn’t mind hearing about it—even if it was just boring stuff about trying to make poor people’s lives better. But no, better we stick with vague suppositions about financial hanky-panky—that makes a better news chyron. But at all costs, please don’t inject anything other than the presidential race—that would imply that it isn’t the only thing that matters to everyone. Where would that leave your ratings?

The entire state of Louisiana got flooded and sixteen people died—that’s a tragedy—not to mention tens of thousands of homes destroyed, or at least their contents and first floors—nearly the same thing. But 1,245 victims died in Katrina, 233 deaths were attributed to Hurricane Sandy—much smaller disaster areas—that makes 16 a pretty small number, President Obama—go on with your golf game until your scheduled Tuesday visit. It isn’t the presidential presence that makes the difference—it’s the preparedness and the organization of the relief effort—and Louisiana gets a gold star. The Katrina disaster was an education as well as a tragedy.

I found it amusing these last two weeks that many news shows, especially the NBC network family, were able to suspend their laser-focus on the presidential race to watch the Rio Olympics in awesome detail. But then it was right back to all politics all the time. Would that all the news shows would have the integrity to continue to report on the rest of the country, and the world, and still find time for Trump and the stupid things he says. Perhaps Hillary will be caught on tape, hiccupping during a speech—think of the infinite attacks springing to mind among the Trump campaign staff. But you journalists have minds too—maybe you can find other things to report besides Trump’s latest hiccup-gate comment.

In My Prime (2016Aug19)

Posted by XperDunn on August 19, 2016

Friday, August 19, 2016 6:21 PM

Once upon a time I supervised thirty employees and ran the computer systems all by myself—I made and spent money like a lord, because times were fat—People thought I was a computer genius, and in that context, I kinda was. Along the way, I had married, we’d had two kids, a dog, three cats, a house, and two cars. We live in a lovely, woodsy neighborhood with a beach on the lake, just north of New York City.

I worked hard, long hours on the hardware, the software, the supplies, training the people (people didn’t know what to do with a computer back then—and, to be fair, all the computers were different, with different, custom-made programs). I talked to clients and suppliers on the phone. I talked in meetings. I talked to individuals if they had a question or problem. I kept everything going and, on the side, de-bugged programs or wrote new applications. I was often brought in on a big closing as the resident nerd—back then, if you had your own nerd, you could get ahead of the competition using those new ‘computer’ gadgets. I was big stuff—in a small way, for a short time.

But I had my own corner office, with a beautiful view. I had a nice chair. I was happiest when I was just sitting at my terminal, writing code. That was the easiest part of the job. Dealing with customers and co-workers was never my strong suit. I was younger than a lot of employees, and that could be awkward for both of us.

On my birthdays, a group of friends and family would join me at a fancy restaurant. We’d eat fancy food and drink pricey wine—it was very sumptuous, not hard to take at all. Eventually, we’d toast to my birthday and everybody would say, “You are the lucky one!” It was said half-joking, ironically, because there wasn’t anything too special about me, but I was undeniably enjoying a lucky life—and it was a night to celebrate.

But I believe it. I said it to someone just recently. They looked surprised. They said, “You? You’re the lucky one?”, incredulously.

I said, “Yeah. I should have died ten different ways by now but I’m still breathing. I should be a grouchy misanthrope hiding in a solitary cave somewhere but (and here I looked at my wife) I live in this wonderful place with wonderful people. I have everything I want and nothing I don’t.” Now, that may be a slight exaggeration, but not much of one, not in any way that really matters.

I do believe it. There are so many ways in which the twists and turns of fate could have put me up against it, but that has never happened. Fears arise, troubles come, but with time they all fade, and a better day dawns—every time. If that’s not lucky, I don’t know what is.

And yet it isn’t much different from your life, is it, dear reader? We are all tremendously lucky to be waking up to this day, eating food, being with others, cruising around, reading books, whatever you like doing. It’s good, right? I mean, it could get worse. That would suck. That would be bad luck. But meanwhile we swim in a stream of good luck, barely noticing the miraculous moments go by. I am the lucky one. Say it with me.

No, You’re Still Not Getting It (2016Aug19)

Posted by XperDunn on August 19, 2016

Friday, August 19, 2016 8:48 AM

Trump has expressed regret for ‘being too honest’ while still happy ‘to make the powerful uncomfortable’. You’re still not getting it, Don. Belligerence is an ugly thing—most people who make a habit of it find themselves without many friends—only rich people get to be belligerent, towards the people they work with, because they pay. And even then, some bosses feel shame for being belligerent and try to curb themselves—only the entitled and self-absorbed glory in it the way you do.

Yeah, Don—we billionaires have to ‘fight the powerful’—you and me, Don. (Oh wait—I’m no billionaire.) And when we are ‘too honest’ about ourselves, we often have to walk it back—I’m sure you do regret that. It must be hard, trying to apologize, when you’ve never done it before, don’t know how to apologize, don’t truly understand what it is that offended everyone to begin with, and don’t actually feel any sincere contrition.

Yes, Don—this whole political discourse thing is new to you—as is public service, as is the presidency. But you’ve still got eighty-one days left to learn all about it and prove yourself more prepared than a life-long public servant. Let me help. Lesson one: America is not a business and the president is not the boss of America. Lesson two: Our military protects us all at the risk of their own lives and safety—we owe them gratitude and respect—even the ones who get caught—even the mothers of the ones who die with valor and glory.

Lesson three is rather important, so pay attention: Inclusion and tolerance are watchwords of the American culture. Even those of us who are not threatened by white supremacists should recognize that they are anti-American. Even Christians must recognize that Islam is a peaceful religion, even when terrorists claim allegiance to an extremist sect of Islam. You do not paint an entire religion with their brush—you recognize that their violence and destruction are aimed as much at moderate Muslims as at America. After all, of all the people the terrorists kill, Muslims are by far the greatest in number.

Lesson four is a sad one: No one can decide, after becoming a senior citizen, that it’s time to give ‘ruling the world’ a try. A business person never hires someone without experience—why would the American public vote for a President without the first clue about politics, governance, or public service? You say you’ve never had to campaign before—and that’s why you say such stupid things—well, imagine you became president—imagine what stupid things you might say or do. You’ll be having a great learning experience, while the rest of us are watching the country go to hell. I don’t think so.

Lesson five is a classic from Lincoln himself: “You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time —but you can’t fool all the people all the time.” You’ve got your base—they cheer for you at your rallies—you’ve fooled some of the people. But, thank god, not nearly enough of us. This latest attempt to put on a humility you’re incapable of feeling—that will only work on the people who haven’t paid attention to you for the last year.

If it weren’t for the rest of the country, I’d gladly watch you get inaugurated, Don. You have never had a clear picture of what the presidency is, just as you have no understanding of the ethical infrastructure of the American spirit. At the end of four years you’d be huddled in a corner with a blank stare and a little drool coming out of your mouth. The presidency isn’t power, you asshole, it’s a responsibility—responsibility you can’t handle or even comprehend. Go back to bullying people with your bags of bucks—you can’t handle public service—you don’t even know what it is.

Go back to business, Don—and take the white-supremacist, the Putin mole, and the spokes-goblin with you. Foxnews is starting to back away from the real crazies—now’s your chance—start a rival media empire and get your base to pay instead of vote—that’s much more your style. Let’s face it, you never had a chance, anyway. Bush-43 already showed us what happens when we elect a moron. That was bad enough, without electing the moronic and the morally bankrupt.

Yes It Pours (2016Aug17)

Posted by XperDunn on August 18, 2016

Wednesday, August 17, 2016 5:28 PM

Two months ago, when our daughter’s pregnancy (and on the west coast, yet) lurked in the back of my mind—and it still looked like we might get taken in by Trump’s big con—and I was smoking too much and doing too little—back then, I resumed my anti-depressant prescription. That’s how bad I got.

But a half-a-pill a day of that stuff really pole-axed me. Yes, I smoked a lot less, because a lot less of me was there—I was zombified. But the cutting back on smoking was good for me—I felt much better. The only trouble was that I wasn’t doing anything else, either—and I wasn’t upset about that. I was very far from upset about anything at all.

Now, if I had wanted to spend my life on drugs, I could do that all by myself—and with much fun-ner drugs. So I compromised—now I take a quarter of a pill every day—and only until October, when I will stop altogether, and see how it goes. There’s a reason I stopped taking them, after all, and if I can do without, I’d really prefer that.

So, back then, it wasn’t just raining anxiety—it was pouring. But now, with our brand-new, cute-as-a-button granddaughter, I’ve been inspired to play new piano improvs. Claire’s trip has inspired me to get out and do more—like doing my own shopping. The influx of baby pictures has given me lots of busy-work in photoshop, making them fit into my YouTube videos. I enjoy my playing more when I’m looking at photos of that beautiful baby instead of myself—I think it makes me sound better.

Then Pete came by today—Hooray! I was pretty disappointed with last month’s recording, because of the anti-depressants making me punchy and basically out-of-it. But we made up for it today.

We started with a request: “Jesu—Joy of Man’s Desiring” by J. S. Bach. (That’s two requests in August—for me it’s been a banner month for music.) I played it slow, so I would make less mistakes—but Bach is good that way—it’s still pretty, even slow.

Then we did a couple of jams back-to-back. That video is called “On A Wednesday Afternoon”. I enjoyed it much more than the title might suggest—I guess I was going for the ‘soft-sell’, there. No Pete Cianflone session would be complete without a bunch of weirdness in the video—blame it on Jessy—if she had sent me a bunch of baby-pictures, you wouldn’t even see us on the video.

Then Pete suggested we cover a Golden Oldie from the 60s, so we played “Let’s Live For Today”. Now, about “Let’s Live For Today”:

Songbook from “Great songs…” series, titled “of the Sixties – Volume 2″ gives the following credits:

“Let’s Live For Today”

But Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia gives the following credits:

“Let’s Live for Today”

Writer(s): Michael Julien, Ivan Mogull, and David Shapiro. “’Let’s Live for Today’ is a song initially recorded by the English band The Rokes in 1966. The song was later popularized by the American rock band The Grass Roots, who released it as a single on May 13, 1967.”

I leave that mystery to someone else to solve, but we had fun playing it—it’s not really a piano piece, but we made do.

The last bit of improv was bang-ish, so the video is called “Monstrous”. Pete said he might be able to come back next week, so we may get two sessions for August—who knows? We toasted the baby—well, I did, Pete doesn’t drink. A good time was had by all. I hope it’s as good to listen to. Enjoy.

As I was saying—new baby granddaughter, clearer mind, more piano music—and having more fun at the piano, baby-picture photoshopping, regular shopping… and it looks like there’s no need to worry about Hillary being elected—(but Vote anyway!) Suddenly, it’s not just raining good things, it’s pouring. Ah, life. That’s what I say. Ah, life.

Dear CNN (2016Aug16)

Posted by XperDunn on August 16, 2016

Tuesday, August 16, 2016 9:31 AM

Dear CNN:

Since when did crazy-stupid become the ‘other side’ of the issue? In my day, we called that the ‘wrong’ side—and we didn’t broadcast it to lower the IQ of every viewer.

You’re presenting a narrative: “See the clash of ignorant belligerence against mature probity!” That’s not news, that’s story-telling. When a presidential candidate cites the National Inquirer as his information source—that’s news. The cotton-candy he spins from it—that’s not news.

When a grandmother faces down a prosecutor-packed congressional inquiry for nine hours—and sails through, leaving them the more exhausted side—that’s news. Childish carping that she may not have ‘stamina’—from a seventy-year-old who ought to know better—doesn’t meet that threshold.

CNN, you have fallen into the bad habit of reporting on what Donald Trump says as if he is not purposely manipulating the public—as if his words have the substance they lacked in his last hundred statements. Come back down to Earth and join the rest of us, who know that his pouty vitriol is an expression of venom, not a pronouncement from some learned sage.

You have made the chiron-title ‘Trump supporter’ a synonym for deluded neurotic—they are like the old zoo-animal ‘guests’ Johnny Carson sometimes had on the Tonight Show—they can make a brief TV appearance, but they need to be ushered off before they bite someone, or poop on the news-desk.

We thought we were considering a serious GOP candidate for president—why is it exactly like having an argument with a petulant pre-schooler? I know that you want to support democracy in America—which makes it impossible for you to admit that there is only one person to vote for this election. Democracy has to be a contest. In that sense, I suppose Trump has let CNN down as badly as he has the GOP. I sympathize.

But ask yourselves—does ‘fairness’ exist without reference to common sense? Does ‘balanced’ require the acceptance of every convoluted, partisan serving of word-salad? Have you any idea how hungry we are?—how badly we need to hear one of your anchors say to one of these spokes-goblins, “Enough! You make less sense than a monkey doing mathematics. Get your ignorant, unethical, nonsensical mouth off my set.” How we would cheer.

Monograph (2016Aug15)

Posted by XperDunn on August 16, 2016

Monday, August 15, 2016 9:52 PM

Why do I always do this? I post a blog-entry about my rage over politics, full of invective and damnation—then, later in the same day, I post another blog-entry swimming in sweetness and light—usually to go along with my new granddaughter’s latest photo-shoot, hopefully with accompanying piano video using said photos. It’s ridiculous—no one who wants to read one could possibly want to read the other. What am I doing?

Truth is, I’m just being myself. I try not to get worked up about the election, but then I watch CNN or whatever, get a whole new bee in my bonnet, and I’m off to the races. I’d much rather spend the day doing what I did this afternoon.

Bear and Punkin have been emailing me regular albums of virtually daily baby pictures. Today’s batch of eleven photos inspired me to create a new frame for the photos in my video. I work in photo-shop (the Corel version) with screen grabs of medieval illuminated page borders and fancy capital letters (which I used to create a monogram-inset for the royal princess’ picture-frames), going to extra pains to ensure that each photo is the same size and in the same position. Otherwise the video doesn’t flow as well.

Our old friend, Chris Farrell, came by to tune the baby grand today. I waited until his visit before I played today’s piano improvisation. I hope you’ll notice the clarity of pitch—it should stand out, compared to the ‘sour’ recordings I’ve been making these past few weeks. I have to watch that, because frankly my ear isn’t good enough to notice, but I know musicians who actually suffer, hearing an instrument played out of tune. Today’s video does not have that problem. As they say, all mistakes are mine alone…

This is one cute baby. I have trouble sometimes finding inspiration to record my 2,000^th improv (actually, my YouTube-uploads total is more like 1,976). However, knowing that I need an audio track for my baby-pictures videos makes it seem easy—but then again, I don’t try as hard—I just try to play something a baby might like. Today’s piece ends with a lullaby of sorts, hence the title.

Bear tells me that Lil Sen watched my previous video on YouTube—out in California—and seemed to think it was okay. Talk about inspiration. I’ll be playing piano improvs until further notice, no problem. Bear returns this Thursday—poor Bear, I’m sure she’ll be sorry to say goodbye (just for now) to our little sweety-pie. Though I’d better come up with a different nickname—I doubt Jessy wants to be called our ‘old sweety-pie’! But it’s bound to be confusing when your baby girl has a baby girl. I’ll work on it.

G’night….

Enough Already (2016Aug15)

Posted by XperDunn on August 15, 2016

Monday, August 15, 2016 10:43 AM

This weather is unbearable—extreme heat warnings in the tri-state metro area for days—and no end yet forecast. Floods and fires in too much of the rest of the nation. Riots in Milwaukee—not to make light of that situation, but did the flash point have to center around a rare ‘justified’ shooting? Talk about muddying the waters. But then ‘justified’ is a relative term to most people, in spite of the law-enforcement definition of it. I like to remind myself that Milwaukee’s population isn’t likely to explode at a single incident—there had to have been some previous incidents that elicited a sense of injustice among the residents. People don’t just rise up when the cops shoot an armed criminal with a long record.

Yet there is one thing that I have had altogether too much of—and for way too long. How long are we going to talk about Donald Trump as if he isn’t just a bad joke? Newspeople say totally misleading things, such as, “Trump will be giving a speech on the economy.” Or “—on national security.” Or “Trump will release his new three-point plan to fight ISIL.” Why can’t they be honest? Just say ‘Trump hopes to remain coherent and sound reasonable for a full day on Tuesday before returning to his usual bloviating that requires apologists on every news channel—no word yet on how superficial and ignorant his ‘reasonable’ will be’. I’d like to hear that.

The trouble is the GOP nominated him for president. This leads all the media to feel obligated to comment seriously on a running joke (no pun intended). I feel that Hillary, way back in the primaries, hit the nail on the head, saying, ‘All the GOP candidates are ‘Trump’—Trump is just better at it than the rest of them’. This also explains why significant numbers of GOP leaders are being shamed into switching parties—conservatism in America has always maintained a minimum level of BS, but there’s a limit to magical thinking—especially among business leaders—even in the GOP.

Here we have an entitled, capricious blue-nose whose normal relationships with others consists of bossing them around. He laughs at the idea of debts and obligations—a tactic which, in business, is merely seedy—but which, in public service, amounts to nihilism. Nihilism in public service is, of course, just what the Tea Party ordered—but for the vast majority it is terrifying—and should be.

Some of his madness is plagiarized straight from the GOP. The GOP administration oversaw the birth of ISIL and the destruction of our economy—but they hope to blame those very problems on the Obama administration—as if American history began eight years ago. It’s the virgin birth thing all over again, but this time the baby is a demon.

He also one-upped the GOP’s persistent dog-whistling to Islamophobes, homophobes, racists, misogynists, and bigoted, ignorant haters of every flavor—by openly courting such people, sans subtlety. His base is such a distillation of miserable people who want to blame others for their problems that they are invulnerable to evidence or reason. They’ve been told they’re wrong for so long—and here’s a guy who says they’re right. You can pry Trump out of their cold, dead hands, in effect.

His campaign rhetoric, while failing to build a majority, still manages to damage our foreign relations, our economic stability, and our faith in government in general. He has decided that if he can’t be crowned king, he’s going to leave a bruise on America—one way or the other, he’s leaving his mark. When he said he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose a single vote, I have to wonder if he was making a point or voicing a long-treasured fantasy.

As I’ve written before, Trump lived for seventy years without any interest in public service—I find it highly suspect that he wants to do it now, but only if he can start at the top, by running the free world. I would make a terrible president—but I’d be better than Trump. You’d be better than Trump. Anyone on the outside of a mental institution would make a better president than this horrendous excuse for a human being. He’s made traitorous statements. He’s made criminal statements. And he lies much more often than he says anything true. But he laughs it all off—pure nihilism.

But Trump doesn’t exist in a vacuum. There are a lot of ignoramuses and crooks and haters and hypocrites out there—and they’ll all vote for Trump. Still, most people are basically good—and they won’t vote for Trump. He has overlooked the main thing the GOP uses to brainwash us into accepting their garbage—the appearance of civility. Thank God he didn’t have the subtlety to pull that off or, like most GOP candidates, we wouldn’t have known what a jerk he was until he’d been inaugurated.

Journal Entry (2016Aug14)

Posted by XperDunn on August 14, 2016

Saturday, August 13, 2016 8:04 PM

Okay, I give up. Yes, the computer room needs an air conditioner. In this heat I waver from wanting to stay in the cool bedroom, or coming out here to the hot-box and typing on my PC. I can be comfortable and bored, or engaged and sweating like a pig. Neither one is working right this minute—and I always decide I need A/C on the weekend, when I have to wait until Monday to order one. What a schmo.

I just got back from the supermarket. Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee pastas and Progresso hearty soups—it’s a can festival. Also some hot dogs. Now that I know I can make it into next week without shopping for a while, I feel better—plus, call me picky, but I like to eat dinner almost every day. I bought dill pickles and pickled sausage bites and some Laughing Cow and those round cheeses in the net-bag.

I found the world’s best microwavable breakfast—Eggo’s bacon-egg-and-cheese waffle-meals. And I grabbed some Polar Bears (Heath bar flavored). I was worried about getting those two things home and in our freezer before they were ruined—I think I made it.

Sunday, August 14, 2016 12:48 PM

“98.6” by Keith—what a great tune. It lifts my spirits. I collect one-hit wonders—the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not of the music world—strange artifacts that belong to no movement or genre but their own personal musical ‘ear’. There are a surprising number of them—and it’s sad in a certain way. Think about it—you can try for a musical career, spend a few years touring local bars and clubs, then peter out from lack of determination or lack of audience interest—or you can get lucky and hit it big, get signed to a label, tour big venues, the whole nine. But with a one-hit wonder, the artists are served the success-banquet and then have the whole thing snatched from their mouths after the first course. The same amount of grueling giggery, PR, lawyers, fans, and yet more giggery—then the promise of fame and fortune—then the almost instant fading of it all—how hard that must be. I love one-hit wonders—but I truly feel for the artists that make them.

And it begs a question that often haunts a sixty-year-old would-be artist like myself: Is there a finite amount of creativity in each of us, to one extent or another? Would Beethoven’s Tenth have been anti-climactic? Did Van Gogh kill himself because he had used all the colors in every way he could imagine—and was loathe to repeat himself? Was Dickens’ last novel just ‘more of the same’? In olden times an artists could be satisfied with just one single ‘masterwork’. Of course, if one is capable of that, there was probably a bunch of stuff one could do—Michelangelo did sculpture, painting, architecture, and poetry, but he did some things better than others.

But today, with the ‘industrialized’ arts, if you can have a hit record, contracts are drawn up by the money-people, as if to say, “Well, anyone who can please the public can continue to do so forever”. There is no recognition of the possibility that what makes someone creative may be the same thing that bridles at being expected to play those songs every day for years, or come up with another whole album of ‘more’. What the hell is ‘more’ when dealing with inspiration? And how can we expect inspiration to stick to a release deadline?

We think of art as a job. It was never a job. The musicians that played at weddings and dances were just the folks who had a knack for music—they had day jobs. The artists of old weren’t working on canvas—they were carving sculptures into the furniture they made, painting landscapes with glazes on the pots they were throwing. The ‘career’ thing started with court appointments—Michelangelo was part of his Pope’s court, Bach worked for his church choir until his fame made him a member of the household of the Duke of Brandenburg.

These early artists didn’t do anything but their art—but they were servants to royalty, at their beck and call—even with regard to subject matter and style. No artists made a living from their art except the travelling troupes of entertainers—and they were mostly fugitives, working sub-rosa in a culture that forbade merriment in general—criminals of art, in effect. No individual musicians made a living concertizing until the nineteenth century. The monetization of art has a fascinating history—but it is a history of the deformation of the original impulse to art.

Sunday, August 14, 2016 6:48 PM

I’ve made a nice video that contains our granddaughter’s latest pictures and, in between the two improvs, a piano cover of Cole Porter’s “Tomorrow”—so I tried to throw in some entertainment. It’s difficult to create a video under these rolling thunderstorms—I’m a computer hack since back in the ‘80s—lightning is my mortal enemy. I always rush to power down the PC when the lightning gets too proximate.

Usually a storm comes and I call it a day, computer-wise. But with this kind of late summer weather, I can either play the margins or wait for Fall—intermittent thundershowers are forecast for the foreseeable future.

So, I’m going to upload my video and get off until tomorrow—it’s hot and muggy even when the sun breaks through. Only a fool gets stressed on Sunday. Bear returns next Thursday, thank goodness.

ttfn.

The Doldrums (2016Aug12)

Posted by XperDunn on August 13, 2016

Friday, August 12, 2016 8:36 PM

Oh my. Did someone order a steam bath? What kind of ungodly weather is this? Wait, I remember now—every year about this time of the summer, it gets obnoxious enough that we almost feel grateful when the cold comes back. I hate the cold weather, but even I get fooled this time of year. Whew! I can’t stop sweating through all my clothes—it’s yucky.

Bear remains on the West Coast with her daughter (and her daughter) so I’ve been running around like a healthy person. I get so wound up I can’t sleep at night. Then I don’t wake up until noon. It’s getting me confused. I try to read books as much as I can—but that only lasts the length of the book. Then I have to wait until I’m ready to start a new one. You can’t just close one book and open another—it’s a rule, I guess. But I don’t like it.

The only bright point in this long wait is that my granddaughter’s pictures come in a fairly steady stream. I could stare at her all day—she makes me smile like an idiot, just sitting here by myself. Just knowing she exists makes my life a pleasure. After the first bunch, I requested some pictures of Sen with her eyes open. Oh man—I don’t know—it took me two days to process them all for a video—and I had to play eight minutes of piano improv to last the length of the final movie. I hope you enjoy it.

FLASH: Trump Does Daughter (2016Aug12)

Posted by XperDunn on August 13, 2016

Friday, August 12, 2016 5:46 PM

A whole lot of people have been burrowing into Hillary Clinton’s life—some of them are PR-whores and some of them are faux-‘institutions’ whose only mission statement is ‘screw the Dems and their Witch-Queen’. Then there are the ones who really matter—the FBI, the Justice Dept., the House, and the Senate. But Hillary is not charged with any crime or misdemeanor–she’s free as a bird. Hmmm. She couldn’t be innocent could she? Everybody says she’s a liar–I hear it ten times a day. Yet reliable sources call her the most capable candidate for president in history. How confusing. I wonder if liars can be found elsewhere? Two out of three ordinary citizens would be in prison by now, under the same magnifying glass. Just ask the African-Americans in Baltimore.

And speaking of racism—Merrick Garland, whom the GOP adored before Obama nominated him to the SCOTUS, is still waiting for a hearing, and Miami is still waiting for a Zika-defense aid-bill, while the House is on vacation. These bigoted bastards helped Bush-43 start an accidental war and bankrupt the country, then spent eight years keeping ‘the black guy’ from fixing their mess—just so they could blame it all on him. Yeah, we’re stupid enough to entertain that fallacy—no wait—that’s the media, not the public. Any GOP that accuses Obama of doing too little ought to have their tongue ripped out. Lying bigoted bastards….

Temper, temper, Mr. Dunn. That’s their trick—they say something childishly stupid for two days, then give a shit-eating grin and say, “I was being sarcastic”. This makes sensible people want to break something—these punks would pull the whole government down around our ears, just to forward their bankrupt agenda. Then they send out the Giuliani-brigade—the mob of nitwits that go on talk-shows and add polish to the lies and the rumors and the bullshit. Good job, Rudi—you complete and utter waste of air-time. I’m measurably stupider every time I hear your voice. Keep on polishing that turd—maybe you’ll believe the words coming out of your mouth someday.

They want to ‘lock her up’. Yeah, the hell with presumed innocence. They want to ban Muslims. Yeah, the hell with religious freedom. They want sexually-harassed women to run away and find a new job elsewhere. Yeah, the hell with gender-equality. They want to build a wall to keep out Mexicans. Yeah, let’s institutionalize racism—that’s the American spirit—let’s melt down that plaque on the Status of Liberty and make it part of the wall.

News12-Westchester FB-post: “QUESTION OF THE DAY! We want to know if Donald Trump’s controversial comments are affecting your vote?”

I answered: “A year in, I’ve depleted my vocabulary: dangerous, deluded, demented, dishonest, clown, ignoramus, demagogue, narcissist, misogynist, bigot, racist, bankrupt, rip-off, embarrassment, fool, idiot, disgrace, traitor, tax-cheat, buffoon—he is just what the GOP ordered—I hope they’re happy with him.”

mmmm…baby!

How about this: Trump fucks his daughter every night. Trump certainly fucks his daughter every night. Trump definitely fucks his daughter every night. You better believe Trump fucks his daughter every night. O, hey—I was just being sarcastic. Lighten up, guys. But you paid attention, didn’t you? Hey, it works! How about that? He’s right—say whatever fool thing, whatever disgusting lie you want—as long as people pay attention, where’s the harm?

I’m sorry, did I just waste your time and offend your sensibilities? I sincerely apologize. But I felt obligated to point out that what’s sauce for the Trump is sauce for everybody else. If he can dish it out, he’d better be prepared to take it. But he probably won’t have to. Why? Because people don’t act that way—only jerks like him and me will cross that line. Trump wants attention—well, he’s getting it. I see you Donald, you filthy pig.

Pro and Con-fidence Man (2016Aug10)

Posted by XperDunn on August 10, 2016

Wednesday, August 10, 2016 3:47 PM

Donald Trump tells us that America is broken, America has failed, it’s just a big pile of junk—and that he can fix it and make it ‘great’ again. America does have serious problems—no one could refute that. But is America the sum of its problems—or is there something more? Well, I think it’s pretty clear that there is more to America.

Over 94% of workers are earning a paycheck—that doesn’t change the millions in poverty, but it does mean that the vast majority of 300,000,000 Americans are actively engaged in the economy. That’s not nothing. And Trump’s desire to throw out all the rules and turn it all on its head would far more likely disrupt the economy, throwing more people out of work—and have no effect on the unemployed other than making their plight even more intractable.

Trump says China is ‘raping us’ because of our debt—he wants to use his bankruptcy tricks to reduce that debt. China has $1.24 trillion in Treasuries and Japan has $1.13 trillion. All foreign investment in Treasuries comes to a total of $6.1 trillion. US Treasuries are the safest investment in the world—it’s where everyone puts their savings. That’s why American citizens, our corporations, and our local governments hold $2.8 trillion in Treasuries. If Trump staged a Treasuries default to cheat China, he’d be bankrupting you and I—and the whole world—as well.

Trump wants to segregate Muslims, erasing two centuries of our proud tradition (and constitutional law) of embracing all religions equally. But Muslims are part of us—the 99.99% of American Muslims who embrace tolerance and peace are our strongest bulwark against terrorist infiltration. Over three million Muslim-Americans own businesses, police our streets, serve in our military, teach in our schools, and raise their families with the same values as every other American. Only an idiot would marginalize these loyal citizens because of hysteria over ISIL. Their children are being targeted by online terrorist propaganda—do we really want their parents to feel victimized by our government? No one hates the ‘Islamic-extremist terror groups’ more than the real Muslims. Paranoia has never been a virtue—and inclusion is among America’s highest virtues. We are left to wonder if Trump simply hates America, as it is, and wants to take it over and run it like a dictatorship.

Trump says we are wallowing in a swamp of political correctness—and there is some overreach by the nit-pickiest PC-police types—but when he calls for hatred against all Muslims and fear of all Mexicans, he simply makes the PC-police’s case for them. Advising his daughter to run from sexual harassment and find a new career elsewhere is proof that the PC-police still have a lot of work to do. And dog-whistling for snipers to take pot-shots at his political opponents is proof that Trump’s objection to political correctness is that it prevents him from saying whatever outrageous bile spills from his mouth.

It seems likely that this election will not be a choice so much as a sociological survey of the mentally unbalanced in America. By the time we reach November, Trump’s voters will have been winnowed down to only the most backward, bigoted, spiteful high-school drop-outs—and this will provide important data for the mental health care community. Using the voter stats from GOP down-ballot races for candidates who still stand by Trump will help further refine the input. We will know, for the first time, exactly how many of voting-age Americans are sane, how many are apathetic, and how many are just plain bat-shit crazy.

America has many troubles—no one denies that. But with the most prepared, experienced, smartest, toughest president to ever take office in charge, we have our best chance of rising above our issues and finding solutions. Vote for Hillary. And let’s hope we get enough sensible legislators in Congress to untie her hands, so she can get done what needs to be done. We can’t go on with a Congress that goes fishing while Zika establishes a beachhead in Miami, or keeps a Supreme Court nominee waiting for a record full-year for a Senate hearing, and on and on. Who votes for these snail-trails? Kick’em out—put the Congress back to work. Eight years of racist paralysis is enough—we don’t need another four years of misogynist paralysis there.

Why Hillary? (2016Aug09)

Posted by XperDunn on August 10, 2016

Tuesday, August 09, 2016 8:07 PM

Several people, mostly Bernie supporters and Republicans, have put forward the thesis that ‘the lesser of two evils’ is a false choice and that evil is evil. This is prompted by their firmly-held belief that Hillary Clinton is some kind of monster. They all agree that they won’t vote for Trump—and who can blame them?—but they stick at turning to Hillary. I respect ethical staunchness—I’m a big fan. And I won’t wade into the morass of a politician’s long lifetime to parse her sins, venal or cardinal—though I would point out that truly villainous politicians often get caught and convicted—and seldom accomplish any meaningful governance.

Plus, no matter what you accuse Hillary Clinton of doing or saying—she has in her off-time, as Family Advocate, First Lady, and Senator, done some planning, some consensus building, and helped pass several pieces of notable legislation—and, as Secretary of State, she obviously pleased her boss, the President—and didn’t let the world fall into anarchy or let anyone invade the USA. So she has experience, ability, and a firm grasp of the realities of the U.S. government—she has been, to some extent, mentored by two presidents.

Compare that to the Independent party or Libertarian party candidates. Those two may have more experience than Trump, who decided at the age of seventy to give presidenting a try, but they are still pigs-in-a-poke compared to the most qualified candidate in history. Neither have endured one percent of the scrutiny of the candidate they challenge—and I don’t vote for somebody just because I don’t know anything bad about them—not if it’s because I don’t know anything about them.

So that leaves ‘not voting’. Don’t choose that, please—it’s un-American. Because ethics are ethics, chess games are chess games, and annoying chores are annoying chores—but politics is part ethics, part chess game, and partly an annoying chore. There are thousands of people out there, screaming at the top of their lungs—and since long before the primaries began—that Hillary Clinton must not be elected. Why are they so desperately trying to keep her from the presidency? Well, because they thought that Jeb Bush would oppose her in the general—or some other GOP with even less chance of beating her—it’s all political messaging.

If Hillary was as bad as critics paint her, serious, thoughtful people would be criticizing her—or charging her with some actual crime—or at least saying that they don’t think she would make a very good president. But no serious, thoughtful person is saying that—only her political opponents are saying that. And this may be extra confusing, right now, because serious, thoughtful are saying bad things about Trump. If it helps, try to remember that only one group disses Hillary—everybody disses the Donald. There is a difference between political mud-slinging and objective criticism. Media-savvy Donald knows this—and tries his best to turn all criticism into politics—accusing his accusers.

America is a big complicated place—there are a lot of people out there with a vested interest in their own agenda. I accept that politics is a rough business and—bottom line—Hillary Clinton is no angel (or if she is, it’s that one with the big flaming sword). But we don’t want an angel as commander-in-chief. We don’t want an angel across the negotiating table from Putin. We want a smart, serious, no-fucking-around grandma whose been there and done that. What we don’t want is a little imp with a big mouth. Or one of two strangers that wandered in late. And we certainly don’t want a bunch of goddamned Americans whining that their conscience is telling them not to vote.

If your ethics are that disturbed by the present race, then you started late—you should have been out there the last four years getting ready, finding a good candidate and helping them towards the presidency. Don’t show up in the summer before the election and say you’re not pleased with your choices. You Berners—he announced his candidacy on May 26, 2015—and all of you high-and-mighty reformers were sitting around doing nothing until your friends dragged you to his rallies. Hillary started ‘stealing’ the nomination in 2008. So get over it—if you really got inspired—good. Do something with that going forward—if you really believed what he was saying, there’s no reason to turn your back on politics now.

And you can start by voting for the candidate that didn’t come from a millionaire’s family—try Hillary—how do you know you won’t like it, if you won’t taste it?

O–and BTW, there are new baby-pictures in my latest video. Please enjoy:

Merrily He Goes Along (2016Aug09)

Posted by XperDunn on August 9, 2016

Monday, August 08, 2016 11:33 PM

I get it now. For the longest time I was frustrated—I thought, ‘Why don’t journalists out this clown?’ But, here’s the thing—they’re hamstrung by journalistic ethics—they can only report what Trump does and what he says. They cannot follow that up with their honest opinion about what he just did or said—that’s against the rules—even if an entire roomful of journalists are asking themselves, ‘Could this man seriously believe he can lead a nation?—He’s out of his mind, or an evil super-villain, or both.’ They can’t say that. They can only report the facts, ma’am.

This is important not just because it explains the press’s failure to call the Donald what he is—but because it also means that Donald Trump has created the firestorm over his fitness and temperament all by himself. With his own words and deeds he has demonstrated his ignorance, bigotry and general unfitness for arguably the most important job in the world. Everyone talks about him ‘walking back’ the reputation he has made over a year of campaigning—but you can’t un-ring a bell. This leaves the vilification of Hillary Clinton as his one and only job—his last, desperate shot at liquidating his final rival.

But Donald Trump has zero experience in government, zero understanding of the global checks and balances that maintain the status quo—and by ‘status quo’ I mean holding back World War III, mass starvation, nuclear winter—or all three at once. Donald Trump has zero understanding of public service—he has spent a lifetime in the bare-knuckle private sector and now he supposes that governance is just another ‘business’. He wins a popularity contest—but he is forcing American voters (perhaps for the first time) to question whether the one they like the best is really the best person to vote for. And his cumulative statements seem to be answering our question with a resounding ‘no’.

Trump started out with an easy job—decades of Republican mud-slinging had already made Hillary Clinton unpopular, to put it mildly—and he should have easily made the case that she should not win. But now he has raised the bar much higher—he now has to show that Hillary is more unfit than he is—and that’s a much tougher job. As a Hillary supporter, I’d like to think that people had wised up to the unfair defamations of Hillary—and seen through Trump’s lack of seriousness, and his narcissism. But I’m afraid that’s not true. I’m afraid that people have simply had their noses rubbed in the outlandish antics of Trump to the point where even the staunchest Republican has to ask, “Is that really the American way? I didn’t think we were that ugly.”

Being outrageous about his rivals during the Republican primary was fair game—we enjoyed it. But being outrageous about the national spirit, about the constitution, about war crimes and nuclear bombs, about dead soldiers and POWs?—whoa, hold on there, fella. Let’s take a beat. Nobody’s laughing any more.

There was an article in the New York Times today addressing the issue of journalists whose heads explode at the paradox of Donald Trump. Journalists are supposed to be non-judgmental—that’s their job. But what do they do with a man who dances on the edge of insanity and enormous ignorance? When Hillary questions his mental stability and fitness, she is responding honestly to his wild clown act. But when the Donald turns around and, in effect, says, “I know you are but what am I?” journalists are obligated to print ‘Trump Questions Hillary’s Fitness’ as if the statement had been made by a rational adult.

There’s a method to Trump’s madness, though—he really knows how to work the spotlight. He only trips up when substance or ethics or empathy intrude on the conversation—such areas are quicksand for the glib and superficial. Trump can tap-dance like mad—it will be interesting to see the debates. Can his media-savvy outshine the emptiness inside his head and heart—or will Hillary’s command of the subject become painfully obvious next to his vague notions of which country is which, and what cabinet bureau handles which subject?

As a Hillary supporter, I hope for the later. But bluster and venom are deadly debate strategies—and Trump is a past master of both. He also likes to make stuff up in his head as he goes along—fact-checks afterwards be damned. If Hillary is as big a liar as everyone seems to think, she’s going to need it to stand up to the man who makes his reality up as he goes along.

Heart of Light (2016Aug08)

Posted by XperDunn on August 8, 2016

Monday, August 08, 2016 3:03 PM

“’You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;

‘They called me the hyacinth girl.’

-Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not

Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,

Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

Oed’ und leer das Meer”

— (from “The Waste Land” (1922) by T.S. Eliot)

I know that all you working stiffs hate the start of the work-week, but I’m enjoying the beautiful weather and my good mood. The sun is shining. I’m free as a bird—and I’m a grandpa now, too—it’s really too sweet. Claire is, I presume, enjoying her beautiful granddaughter Seneca and spending time with her Jessy, and Big Sen.

I don’t know for sure because, when you’ve been together for 37 years (36 of them married, end of this month), two weeks away from the sound of my voice is the best vacation Bear could possibly ask for. So I don’t call. I’ll see her in two weeks. Besides, there’s no news here to report anyhow—unless you count the fact that Spencer and I haven’t starved to death without someone to look after us.

I always start to really love the summer when it’s just about to end. It seems so cruel that all the beautiful plants and flowers and all the leaves on the trees will all fade and fall. Soon I’ll have to close the windows—sacrificing fresh breezes for warmth—I think that’s the part I hate the most. Sometimes, in winter, I open the bedroom windows for as long as I can stand it—just to get a little re-oxygenation.

But temperate climate is where it’s best—yes, you get winter, but it’s harder to live in temperate climes, so you don’t get the profusion of jungles, insects, and creepy-crawlies of various kinds that make the tropics so claustrophobic. Winter is like a broom that sweeps away the ephemera that can only live in the hot sunlight—herding the irresistible force of Life into a dignified annual cycle, rather than an eternal riot of birth and rot—what Joseph Conrad called the “Heart of Darkness”.

But we still get a taste of the easy life, every summer—just a tease, but enough to fuel our dreams through the long winters. I love having all the doors and windows open all day—especially on breezy days, when the whole house breathes with the weather. Those flowers which haven’t already done their business are at peak bloom, blousy and vulnerable to wind—the last fireworks of nature’s annual explosion—so beautiful, and so sad, for their grandeur means the end is near. As they should correctly say on Game of Thrones, ‘Autumn is coming’. Right? I mean, who has Winter without first a Fall, for crying out loud? Why don’t the Game of Thrones people ever say, “Fall is almost over.”? That’s show-biz, I guess.

I’m going outside—all this talking about the outdoors has made me restless. See ya.

Crickets (2016Aug07)

Posted by XperDunn on August 8, 2016

Sunday, August 07, 2016 9:51 PM

The summer night is soft and cooling, but noisy—what with all the crickets calling through the screen door. It’s peak summer—quiet as a tomb. If you had somewhere to go, you’re already there. Me, I like to stay home usually. Spencer’s kind of the same way. It’s a Sunday night—it doesn’t come any quieter, if you don’t count the crickets.

I don’t watch the Olympics—not alone, anyway. I’ll linger on an event in the midst of channel-surfing, but that’s about it. And no programmer in their right mind would air anything good while the whole world’s on vacation and the Olympics are on. So the usual tired offerings on Sunday night are exhausted on a Sunday night like this.

I made some videos—one of them uses the pictures Bear took, out the window of her airplane as she flew to California. The other is the first request I’ve had in a dog’s age—someone asked me for a melancholy tune—so I’ve done my best to be absolutely drippy in that one.

I’m trying to make chicken noodle soup and blog at the same time—I’m likely to burn up a pot and go hungry. Wait a second—I’ll go check on it…. Still a minute on the timer. Oh no, another thing I forgot—Roadies is on—I’ll be back.

Sunday, August 07, 2016 11:36 PM

Here I was complaining about nothing being on TV, and I remembered that I like to watch Roadies, and then John Oliver, on Sunday nights. Man, TV goes by fast when you’re watching good stuff without commercials! It’s so rare on regular TV—I can see why people switch to binge-watching whole series seasons online. It’s much more satisfying—and if you don’t like it that much, you can just move on. I have a few Netflix series that I started and got tired of—I told myself for a while that I’d get back to them but as time passed I realized that wasn’t going to happen. But I’ve watched some really good stuff on Netflix, every season, all the way through—like Stranger Things, or Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt —bingeing is great!

So now I’ve got one last improv to post before I call it a day.

Monday, August 08, 2016 12:27 AM

I got my bowl of Liptons, in case you wondered—there’s a timer app on Windows 10—good thing, too, because I never heard the kitchen timer go off. Imagine—I can cook and PC at the same time now—hmm… This opens up all kinds of possibilities.

See, I used to multi-task—like a normal person. But I have no short-term memory—or I have advanced absent-minded-ness (I was always absent-minded). Anyhow, I go for a long time without looking up from the keyboard—but with a timer?—oh, man.

I think our trip to the store yesterday helped ‘wake me up’ a little. I can do things—but then I get tired or I muck it up. So I get to a point where I stop doing stuff. But I should really make more of an effort to go outside and move around a little, every other day at least. I’m only mostly useless—I have to remind myself I’m not entirely useless. Not entirely. Not yet.

Okay, enough, the video is uploaded and it’s late—more later. Good night all.

…

If Hillary Is Satan, Then So Am I (2016Aug07)

Posted by XperDunn on August 7, 2016

Sunday, August 07, 2016 11:18 AM

Spencer and I went to the supermarket yesterday and spent $300 on spaghetti, hot dogs, and Eggos (plus my snack foods). This is probably why Claire does the shopping—she buys what we need, I buy what I want. Spencer did all the driving, so I thought the trip was easy. I get too stressed out trying to drive a car these days—but I love to go to the store. It reminds me of the good ol’ days when I made too much money and went shopping just for fun.

Claire is still out west—but she’s sending pix of Lil Sen, so I get to see. Oh what a beautiful baby our baby had. Every time I see California fires on the news, I get worried. I ask Jessy, “Are you near the fires?” and she always says, “No, don’t worry.”

One of my conservative Facebook friends posted a meme today—it had a list of accusations about Hillary Clinton. I thought to myself, “OMG, why didn’t I hear about any of this?” So I googled each one—and Snopes.com explained how each accusation was false or misleading. I left the Snopes URLs in the comment section—but you know how it is with zombie-lies—they never die, they just keep roaming the earth.

That’s why it bothers me that the media is always saying things like, “The public still thinks of Hillary Clinton as untruthful.” Have some self-respect, newspeople—don’t report on what people think, report on whether they’re correct or not. This whole thing with the email-servers just bugs me.

Some talking heads say that the main problem is that she had a separate server in the first place. Well, (1) she wasn’t the only government official to do that, (2) email was still fairly new tech—there is no “email division” in the state department, and (3) have you seen Hillary’s life? She’d been attacked by the far-right for decades—I’d have been paranoid about privacy, too.

As far as her lying about it goes—she said publicly that no confidential emails were on her private server. FBI director Comey said that out of 30,000 emails, he found three marked confidential—two with a ‘c’ at the bottom (which everyone knows means confidential) and one with a confidential ‘heading’. One confidential email, no evidence of being hacked, and no obstruction of justice—yeah she’s a lying bitch, alright—or maybe she’s just a human being. I prefer the human being explanation—but then, Hillary Clinton is not an existential threat to my yahoo mind-set, so what do I know?

When questioned about it (for the zillionth time) Hillary attempts to explain herself—but then the talking heads say, “She talked like a lawyer—parsing the details in a complicated way.” Well, first, she is a lawyer—not necessarily a bad thing, when in public service. And secondly, why is it okay for her accusers to nit-pick one email out of 30,000, but Hillary is evasive when she talks about details? Even MSNBC, supposedly the anti-FOXNews, goes after Hillary for her ‘untrustworthiness’. It’s the mother of all zombie-lies, and its roots are found deep within misogyny and humanity’s inherent need to knock down those who rise high.

Hillary Clinton is a politician—and compared to other politicians, she is the picture of transparency. Yes, she tries to spin things when attacked—that’s what politicians do. Yes, she makes mistakes—but then, people do that. Painting Hillary Clinton as Satan incarnate—that’s just hysteria. Her lifelong efforts in service to families and children have been entirely discounted, replaced with a mountain of BS from people who are themselves demonstrably dishonest—that the media climbs on board with it all is proof that they care more about sensationalism than information.

The media are also all in agreement that Trump is wrong to do anything other than hammer away at the false charges leveled at his opponent. They overlook that his charges against her are without foundation. They overlook that a candidate who can only attack his opponent must not have anything good to say about himself. And the latest thing they do is try to equate the two candidates’ attacks on each other—I’m sorry, but Trump’s non-stop blustering against Hillary is not the same as Hillary’s stump-speeches, in which she outlines her detailed plans to help the country, calls for unity, equal rights, and community among all Americans—and then ends her talk with a short review of the horrible things that Trump has said—and pointing out that his comments show ignorance on too many levels to count.

The whole thing makes me tired and not a little disgusted. Vote for Hillary—or be a victim—your choice.

Not So Good (2016Aug05)

Posted by XperDunn on August 6, 2016

Friday, August 05, 2016 2:21 PM

Okay, so call me a starry-eyed optimist. I always reach for the moon—yesterday I was day-dreaming about a Clinton presidency with a Democratic-controlled legislature—with bill after bill, just sailing through—and changing the face of our future. But I just saw Hillary Clinton give a press conference in DC that was co-hosted by the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists —and Hillary said that even if she wins, and even if Dems take the Senate, there will still be a GOP majority in the House.

For at least two more years, she would have to contend with Paul Ryan’s Mad-Hatters Tea-Party. She recommends that supporters write their congresspersons to let them know we’re watching, let them know how we feel about obstruction of important bills—and of course to vote for Democrats in 2018 (though she didn’t say that last part—she has to stay on message about this election—she only alluded to the low voter turn-out in off-year elections, which allows the GOP to keep sneaking in).

Thus it won’t be all peaches and cream—even if there’s a Democrat blow-out in this election. The GOP will be able to continue their policy of obstructing the Dems and claiming the Dems can’t do anything. I don’t know why people keep falling for this. Massive misinformation campaigns in targeted demographics—that’s my take on it—the GOP can evert any issue—they can take the simplest cause and turn it on its head. Their reasoning never survives close scrutiny, but if they hammer half-truths into their base, over and over—their nonsense starts to sound like sense.

People are suffering. People are angry. Why people blame Hillary for this is beyond me. Hillary doesn’t control the government—legislation goes through the GOP—or never makes it past the GOP, more like—so why do people still believe them when they blame Obama? They’ll try the same thing if Hillary wins—but maybe people will catch on. Maybe people will see that an adversarial two-party system is deadly—only a truly bi-partisan system that does its work, and leaves the differences on the sidelines, has enabled our government to function throughout its first two centuries. We cannot continue with the GOP mind-set of winner-take-all. It’s bad for everybody.

Still, I remain optimistic. Our government will inevitably embrace the 21^st century and all the digital magic that comes with—and streamlining data-collection, analysis, communications, and policy-making will do for bureaucracy what it has already done for our military—state-of-the-art tools for finding trouble-spots, creating solutions, and implementing those solutions, with digital monitoring that allows real-time feedback on its efficiency, will allow our government to change as quickly as the times—all we need to do is make sure the right people are deciding on our heading. Will America be run to please the wealthy and big businesses—or will we be governed in terms of what’s best for everyone—rich or poor, big or small? We decide—one way or another, we will not enter into our future without having anything to say about it—we just have to believe—and act appropriately.

The GOP and the lobbyists rely on political inertia and public indifference—the USA has run so smoothly for so long that many people feel our elections are just going through the motions. Let’s prove them wrong—let’s all vote—in every election—and get involved in politics more, locally as well as nationally. It’s a government by the people—but if the people lay down on the job, other influences take advantage. We have to fight back—no matter how boring or tedious the process may be. Vote for Hillary—and if you don’t like her, vote anyway—vote for somebody. Get off the sidelines. This isn’t a football game that we watch at home—this is reality—get involved.

***

Better (Same Day)

Enough. I’ve been hanging out here with Spencer—just us guys. Claire has found the way to San Jose and is holding her granddaughter as we speak. Lil Seneca is happy and healthy and Jessy is well also—Big Sen had to return to work. Lately Claire has taken some art classes including life studies sessions, pencil technique, pastels, charcoals, and even watercolor. I get a free art show every time she comes home—in one of today’s videos I share two of my favorite Life Studies with you.

I remember my teens—I was a pretty needy kid. I wanted to make friends in the worst way. One way I tried was to make my parents’ house a sort of Grand Central terminal for all the kids in my class who wanted to hang out somewhere, without their parents, and with other kids to hang with. Sometimes, when my parents weren’t around for awhile, we’d get some really heavy traffic going through the living room. After some time it became annoyingly clear that I had started something that I couldn’t stop.

Well, we never get that kind of traffic in our living room today. But since it is the room I record in, I often catch Claire or Spencer walking past the piano during a video—I think it adds character to the show. I have one today that shows the merest glimpse of Spencer, so I’ve called it Dunn & Son, Ltd.

Lastly, my piece de resistance, Granddaughter, is frustrating to post—I have all these beautiful pictures of our new baby, but I’m not sure I’m happy with my piano-playing on this video. The pictures make up for it, but I wish I liked the music better.

ttfn

Am I Dreaming? (2016Aug05)

Posted by XperDunn on August 5, 2016

Friday, August 05, 2016 12:03 AM

What is this winsome magic? Don’t tease me, now. Don’t say it unless you really mean it. Can the entire nation have finally begun to see the madness of a Trump candidacy? Will I be saved from the dread of suspecting that a majority of my country-people were foolish enough to be taken in by that ‘salesman’ who is selling his heart out? America has about 300 million people in it—about 13 million of them are hard-core Trump supporters—so roughly 4.3% of Americans are yahoos—yeah, that sounds about right.

I don’t want to jinx anything—but news reports now say Hillary Clinton is leading, even in battleground states—and that even congressional and senate seats are looking vulnerable, because of disarray in the Trump GOP. It just might be that Hillary would win—and—be working with a Democratic Congress.

The GOP handed Obama a nation in the ditch, miles from the nearest phone—and despite that, our President managed to helm a slow recovery. What he couldn’t do was pass any significant new legislation, with a GOP Congress sitting on its hands just to spite him. But if the Democrats get back the legislature, we could see an almost FDR-like wave of economic reforms. We could see jobs, growth, wage hikes—hell, all kinds of good stuff—who knows?

Now, that twit, Julian Assange, is planning to dump some sort of scandal into the news cycle sometime soon—you’d think a coder could see through Trump’s façade of BS—so, it’s still a tricky business. We’ll have to wait and see just how crazy Debbie Wasserman Schulz got—and whether any of it can be directly connected to Hillary. But a dream has sprouted in my mind—a future full of progress and prosperity—a return to American exceptionalism that isn’t just bluster—a serious effort to see equal justice for everyone, in every community.

I’d like to see Hillary do so well that future Republicans will have to make ‘compromise’ and ‘bipartisan productivity’ a part of their appeal. Four years from now, I want to see Hillary run for re-election with the slogan, ‘this is what happens when government does its job’. I want to hear the GOP disavow their era of obstruction and subtle bigotry. And I want them to change the subject, for the rest of my life, whenever anyone brings up the Donald.

I’ve been so terrified that we wouldn’t see through him until it was too late—I’m hesitant to think about this nightmare being over—there are still ninety-something days until Election Day. I can’t take the suspense. I keep telling myself to stop watching the news, just let it go until November—but then I just have to check and make sure we’re still heading in the right direction. Auggh! (As Charlie Brown would say.)

He Couldn’t Do It Without You (2016Aug04)

Posted by XperDunn on August 4, 2016

Thursday, August 04, 2016 3:00 AM

Trump uses the word ‘sacrifice’ very loosely—he doesn’t get that the military uses that word to mean spilled blood—shot, bombed, wounded, maimed, killed, brain-damaged. That’s sacrifice. That’s why we thank vets for their service and thank disabled vets and gold-star families for their sacrifice.

Trump is very glib—he says whatever comes out of his mouth; if you call him on it, he says he didn’t mean it the way you heard it. You’re not listening. He’s speaking very well—everything is going to be perfect, no matter what words he uses—believe him. It doesn’t matter what he says—he knows how to do things—he’s very successful. He had beautiful bankruptcies—you wouldn’t believe how much money he has. But his tax returns are none of your business. And don’t criticize—you don’t have the right to criticize him. It’s gonna be great, folks.

But Trump himself is just an annoyance—a major annoyance, but someone to laugh at, not to fear. It is his supporters that keep me up at night. It’s the bell-curve thing—a certain percentage of American voters are, unavoidably, of below-average intelligence and/or lacking in education. They understand our government and our constitution no better than he does—therefore his wild, ignorant statements make no difference to them—they cheer him for it. They see no great risk in putting this old fart in office—he can run a business (they believe) so he can run the country too (they believe). The rest is details that eggheads like to cry about—temperament, civil liberties, international diplomacy, financial stability—all just complicated bullshit that no real ‘Murican gives a shit about. They’re gonna take back their country and make America great again.

After all, Obama did nothing for eight years—and the Congress did all the actual, hard work of keeping him from doing anything. We’ve got to get rid of him. And Hillary—imagine what she might try to get done—jeez, what a nightmare. We all hate Hillary, right? She’s a bad, bad lady who ruined the whole world—without being president. Just imagine if she got the job—we’d have to spend another four years, at least, calling her a liar and making sure she doesn’t ruin the country by getting anything done, too.

Trump supporters are a bunch of yahoos that want permission to be bigots, to be ignorant and fearful, and to blame the government. None of them have a dime in the bank, but they’ll fight to the death to defend the wealthy from higher taxes. None of them would dream of doing manual labor—but they resent industrious immigrants for ‘taking their jobs’—I think they really just hate those immigrants making them feel lazy. Hell, immigrants make me feel lazy—but I don’t blame them for that—I’m lazy.

Trump’s trump card is, of course, that he makes it okay to be an idiot—when his supporters hear him speak, they hear themselves. Trump never accepts criticism—and they don’t like criticism either. Trump believes that being rich and entitled makes him a potential president—and isn’t that the American dream? Anyone can be president—without law school, without experience, without listening to anyone else’s opinion. What’s the big deal? If you’re the president, you get a bunch of people to tell you stuff—you don’t have to know anything—you just give orders. And being rich makes him an expert at giving orders. Right? Only he can save us all—ask him, he’ll tell you.

Trump is good at running a con—if he wins, that will mean that the majority of voters are dumb enough to fall for his scam—which will mean that Trump won’t have to ruin the country—it will have already failed.

Dossier (2016Aug02)

Posted by XperDunn on August 2, 2016

Tuesday, August 02, 2016 5:01 PM

You know me—quick trigger finger when I hear about injustice.

Right now, I’ve been compiling a dossier on Hillary Clinton. I tried to find reliable sources for the main conspiracy theories that paint her as the devil in a blue dress.

I must admit, she’s no saint—but neither do I find anything worthy of the hysterical venom directed at her.

Let’s remember that I am saying nothing of the innumerable good, and even great, things that Hillary Clinton has done in a lifetime of public service—I think people forget sometimes that the blips below arise, and could only arise, from someone who is deeply involved in the administration of our government. And, like the government, we are prone to stress the problems with Hillary Clinton without remembering all the good things we take for granted, every day, year after year.

Also, I would be remise if I didn’t mention the cretin who conflates, lies, insults, and accuses not just Hillary Clinton, but our president, our military, our vets, our minorities, our Muslims, and our women. He has made a catalog of every stumble in Hillary’s career, true or false, and blown them out of all proportion. Hillary can’t respond in kind, since he has no public service experience of any kind, at the age of seventy. She can point out his execrable business practices, but it’s not quite the same thing.

So, here we go—the worst of Hillary Clinton.

Source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitewater_controversy

“David Hale, the source of criminal allegations against the Clintons, claimed in November 1993, that Bill Clinton had pressured him into providing an illegal $300,000 loan to Susan McDougal, the Clintons’ partner in the Whitewater land deal. Clinton supporters regarded Hale’s allegations as questionable, as Hale had not mentioned Clinton in reference to this loan during the original FBI investigation of Madison Guaranty in 1989; only after coming under indictment in 1993, did Hale make allegations against the Clintons. A U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigation did result in convictions against the McDougals for their role in the Whitewater project. Jim Guy Tucker, Bill Clinton’s successor as governor, was convicted of fraud and sentenced to four years of probation for his role in the matter. Susan McDougal served 18 months in prison for contempt of court for refusing to answer questions relating to Whitewater. The Clintons themselves were never prosecuted, after three separate inquiries found insufficient evidence linking them with the criminal conduct of others related to the land deal, and Susan McDougal was granted a pardon by President Clinton before he left office.

The term Whitewater is also sometimes used to include other controversies from the Bill Clinton administration, especially Travelgate, Filegate, and the circumstances surrounding Vince Foster’s death, that were investigated by the Whitewater independent counsel.”

Source:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/25/us/politics/25clinton.html

By PATRICK HEALY and KATHARINE Q. SEELYE – MARCH 25, 2008 – The New York Times:

“BLUE BELL, Pa. — As part of her argument that she has the best experience and instincts to deal with a sudden crisis as president, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton recently offered a vivid description of having to run across a tarmac to avoid sniper fire after landing in Bosnia as first lady in 1996.”

“Mrs. Clinton corrected herself at a meeting with the Philadelphia Daily News editorial board; she did not explain why she had misspoken, but only admitted it and then offered a less dramatic description.

Mrs. Clinton said she had been told “that we had to land a certain way and move quickly because of the threat of sniper fire,” not that actual shots were being fired.

“So I misspoke,” she said.”

Source:

http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/04/14/hillary-clinton-has-no-regrets-about-libya/

“On the campaign trail, Clinton has not shied from defending her decision to support the intervention that toppled dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi. “I think President Obama made the right decision at the time,” she said in the first Democratic debate in October as she pointed to the 2012 General Assembly elections in which Libyans voted mostly for moderate parties

But that answer focused on the more promising days of 2012 – before the killing of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and the country’s descent into civil war. We are now, of course, in 2016. How does Clinton make sense of what went wrong in Libya in the years since she left the State Department? Her answer to that question is one of the keys to understanding how she will approach the Middle East if she makes it to the White House.”

Source:

http://www.state.gov/secretary/20092013clinton/rm/2012/09/197628.htm

Statement on the Attack in Benghazi

Press Statement

Hillary Rodham Clinton

Secretary of State

Washington, DC

September 11, 2012

I condemn in the strongest terms the attack on our mission in Benghazi today. As we work to secure our personnel and facilities, we have confirmed that one of our State Department officers was killed. We are heartbroken by this terrible loss. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family and those who have suffered in this attack.

This evening, I called Libyan President Magariaf to coordinate additional support to protect Americans in Libya. President Magariaf expressed his condemnation and condolences and pledged his government’s full cooperation.

Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet. The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. Our commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation. But let me be clear: There is never any justification for violent acts of this kind.

In light of the events of today, the United States government is working with partner countries around the world to protect our personnel, our missions, and American citizens worldwide.”

Source:

http://www.factcheck.org/2012/10/benghazi-timeline/

“About 10:00 p.m.: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issues a statement confirming that one State official was killed in an attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. Her statement, which MSNBC posted at 10:32 p.m., made reference to the anti-Muslim video:

Clinton: Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet. The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. Our commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation. But let me be clear: There is never any justification for violent acts of this kind.”

“Sept. 12: Clinton issues a statement confirming that four U.S. officials, not one, had been killed. She calls it a “violent attack.”

Clinton: All the Americans we lost in yesterday’s attacks made the ultimate sacrifice. We condemn this vicious and violent attack that took their lives, which they had committed to helping the Libyan people reach for a better future.”

“Sept. 12, 3:04 p.m.: Clinton calls then-Egyptian Prime Minister Hisham Qandil and tells him, “We know the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack — not a protest.” An account of that call was contained in an email written by State Department Public Affairs Officer Lawrence Randolph. The email was released by the House Benghazi committee. EMAIL:

http://benghazi.house.gov/sites/republicans.benghazi.house.gov/files/documents/Tab%2079.pdf

“Oct. 15: Clinton, in an interview on CNN, blames the “fog of war” when asked why the administration initially claimed the attack began with the anti-Muslim video, even though the State Department never reached that conclusion. “In the wake of an attack like this in the fog of war, there’s always going to be confusion, and I think it is absolutely fair to say that everyone had the same intelligence,” Clinton says. “Everyone who spoke tried to give the information they had. As time has gone on, the information has changed, we’ve gotten more detail, but that’s not surprising. That always happens.”

Source:

https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/statement-by-fbi-director-james-b-comey-on-the-investigation-of-secretary-hillary-clinton2019s-use-of-a-personal-e-mail-system

“Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”

“While not the focus of our investigation, we also developed evidence that the security culture of the State Department in general, and with respect to use of unclassified e-mail systems in particular, was generally lacking in the kind of care for classified information found elsewhere in the government.

With respect to potential computer intrusion by hostile actors, we did not find direct evidence that Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail domain, in its various configurations since 2009, was successfully hacked.”

“In looking back at our investigations into mishandling or removal of classified information, we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts. All the cases prosecuted involved some combination of: clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice. We do not see those things here.”

“I know there were many opinions expressed by people who were not part of the investigation—including people in government—but none of that mattered to us. Opinions are irrelevant, and they were all uninformed by insight into our investigation, because we did the investigation the right way. Only facts matter, and the FBI found them here in an entirely apolitical and professional way.”

***

So, there you go—food for thought—even, perhaps, food for suspicion—in the highlights of these and other over-inflated ‘scandals’ that the media and the GOP both feed on. But do remember that Secretary Clinton has gotten up every morning of her life and worked hard, achieving no small amount of good, week after week, month after month, year after year, and decade after decade. The above is the very worst that her enemies can say about her.

I don’t know—maybe our country’s most admired politician would make a bad president—well, second most admired (let’s not forget the guy she’s replacing). Maybe we should try four years with a vicious, vacuous clown? Naaah!

***

One last point, on the wording of Comey’s statement:

“All the cases prosecuted involved some combination of: clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice. We do not see those things here.”

He could just as easily have said:

“We did not see clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; we did not see vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; we did not see indications of disloyalty to the United States; and we did not see efforts to obstruct justice.”

But he chose not to. Perhaps that’s apolitical, perhaps it isn’t….

I Can Dream—Can’t I? (2016Jul31)

Posted by XperDunn on July 31, 2016

Sunday, July 31, 2016 3:06 PM

It’s very damp and cloudy today—but not as hot, so I shouldn’t grouse. I am so glad that there’s only a hundred days or so until the election—I’m tired of being tortured by the media—no reasonable person at this point could take Trump seriously as a candidate, or even as a man—he is seriously dangerous to our mental health, never mind our country. I love Hillary—but go ahead and hate her if you must—just don’t vote for the GOP’s psychotic demagogue, please (even they don’t like him).

That’s where I am with this election—no more finely reasoned arguments, no more he said-she said—the question has been answered many times in many ways and I’m done. Trump can issue as many more lies and as much more bombast as he likes—I’m not listening anymore.

So, let’s get back to ourselves. Forget the candidates. What would I like to see happen? That’s my new question. I’d like to see us build and renovate and repair. I’d like to see us hire and train and start new businesses and invest in new things, new ideas. I’d like to see us get serious about cryptography, hacking, firewalls, malware, and all the other threats of modern business and warfare—maybe a whole new branch of our military devoted to cyber-defense, with enough funding to tempt the top mathematicians and coders to civil service.

I’d like to see better training and oversight of the police—especially in trouble zones where police brutality against minorities is endemic. I’d like to see pot legalized, and other addictions treated as illnesses, not as crimes—and I’d like to see our prison system shrink down to where it is no longer a profit-center. In fact, it would be nice if our prisons could become actual rehabilitation centers that prepare inmates for re-entry into legit public life, preferably with voting rights and a chance at employment.

I’d like to see free public health care and free tuition to local and state colleges. I’d like to see the rich have to pay more taxes—or any taxes, come to that—same with corporations. I’d like to see a full bench on the Supreme Court. I’d like to see legislators get elected who will pass laws—any laws—and it would be nice if they didn’t shut down the effing government, too—as long as I’m wishing.

I’d like to see a lot of changes in the world. But change is hard—if it wasn’t hard to change, I’ve have abs instead of a pot-belly. But I can dream, can’t I?

I’d like to see community shops that are partially social settings—places that offer internet, coffee or other beverages, newspapers, maybe hot food—places where you don’t have to buy anything to hang out there—perhaps a sort of partially public-funded ‘town square’ for the twenty-first century. Maybe there could be a bunch of low-cost housing nearby, and bus stops or subway stations. Imagine a mini-mall that’s more about community than commerce.

What choice do we have? All commerce is happening online mostly now—and, absent Pokemon Go, everybody is sitting at home. We have to find new social interactivities or we’ll all end up in closets with VR headsets our only window on reality.

And there’s something else the 21^st century needs—we have to face the fact that working for a living, in an age of automation, robotics, and partial AIs, is an outmoded concept. We have to start thinking in more socialist ways—we have to accept that everybody deserves a decent life, and an occupation—even when all the old work is being done at the push of a button, and is owned by a handful of autocrats. I’ve talked about this before—it’s just common sense, with a teaspoon of extrapolation.

‘Earning one’s way’ in life is an old tradition—it won’t be easy to work out how we all live in a world where we don’t have to work—where we can’t work—and it’ll be even harder to convince the super wealthy that they don’t own the Earth or the Human Race. But I can dream, can’t I?

From yesterday:

ttfn.

Original Content (2016Jul30)

Posted by XperDunn on July 30, 2016

Friday, July 29, 2016 7:45 PM

Okay, enough politics—what do I know, anyway—other people are already saying anything I have to say—people who get paid for it. I’ve been so swept up by the spirit of the Democratic National Convention—it was thrilling. But patriotism is something only idle people have a lot of time for—most people have stuff to do. So—time to stop obsessing over the TV and C-SPAN, and go back to reading books and watching movies and talking about myself. I know I’m not interesting, but I am interesting to me—and I like to write—or I should say type—I actually hate to write. If I had to do this with a pen and paper—I wouldn’t bother. But in an age of digital records, there is no saving of effort or of paper—there’s just ‘original content’.

Original Content means something you wrote yourself—without reference to Star Wars or Orange Is The New Black—something no other reasonable person would want to sue you for stealing. Be warned—if you do write something profitable, unreasonable people will come out of the ‘word-work’ to lay claim to it. But most writing has little value—so as long as you know you wrote it, you shouldn’t worry. If you’re serious about money—apply for a copyright. It’s easy—it doesn’t cost much (if you really expect to make money)—and it’s the first thing any serious professional writer does.

Original Content also applies to photos, artwork, music, and especially video. If you generate original content, which then generates a lot of clicks—you’re supposed to get paid for that. But mostly that stuff is generated in-house, so it’s not like you can just shop stuff around—although that might be a possibility, I suppose—but you’d have to go meet people. You can’t do business online—not all business, and especially closing a deal. When the Internet was young, sharing stuff was a big deal—now everyone wants to make a buck online—it’s no easier than most office jobs, unless you get a lucky break.

But I’m retired. I generate writing, artwork, and music and I just post it online. I don’t want someone else to use it without my permission—but I have no plans for a cyber-empire. I just want to be a part of it. I can’t do what young people do—posting photos of my junk, making dates on the dating app (damn, what is it? I wanna say ‘Rascal’ or ‘Heartify’…), or multi-player gaming—which I assume is tough on ‘grandpas’ like myself, especially if your hands shake. Most of the new online stuff is ‘young people only’—they don’t say that, but old people who try to fit in ‘with the kids’ are just as creepy online as they are in person. So I do ‘grandpa’ stuff and I post it. I post my piano-playing on YouTube. I post my essays on WordPress. I keep in touch with friends and relations on Facebook. I posted my old drawings on Pinterest, but I rarely have cause to add anything new.

I don’t expect a lot of people to listen to or read my stuff—some nice people do, who know me and don’t mind sleep-inducing stuff. I’m basically just putting my work out there for my own satisfaction—I like to do it. I used to have a spark of ambition—not much of one—I used to think maybe I’d become a great artist. Then I thought maybe I’d become a teacher. Eventually, I decided I just wanted to live a life without a specific goal—that’s a bad approach, but I was lucky. I ended up with a loving family, surviving a fatal disease, and cancer, and becoming an actual grandpa—oh, and I eat regular. I can’t complain.

Sometimes, after I had done a good drawing, I’d Xerox it—and the Xerox copy would look more professional than the original. There’s something of that in my postings—they just seem more substantial for being online for the world to see. I’ve actually had people tell me not to post stuff—you can’t post online without encountering trolls—but I pay them no attention. It’s like they used to say, “If you don’t like what’s on TV, change the channel.” That’s even more true of YouTube posts—if you don’t like my piano-playing, don’t watch it. I usually listen to classical music, myself—I usually only watch my own stuff once through, to check that it uploaded okay. Or I listen to it on CD, when the radio isn’t playing anything I like. It’s my fallback music.

So, Claire is flying to CA soon to meet our new granddaughter—Spencer and I will have to rough it on our own for two weeks—I hope we survive. Jessy and Seneca and Seneca are doing great. My mom had her 85^th birthday today, down in Hilton Head, SC. I saw party pics on Facebook and wished I could have been there, instead of just calling to wish her a happy one.

I’ve gotten calls from Kevin Bouricius lately—he’s up in Massachusetts, trying to quit smoking. There’s a book of his oil paintings for sale online—it’s expensive, but the paintings are incredible. (http://www.blurb.com/b/4506248-paintings) He also has actual paintings, if anyone wants to go up there and buy one.

I’ll have to call Pete to set up our August jam—we usually try to post once a month, and I feel like I didn’t do too well this month, what with starting on anti-depressants at too high a dosage—I’ve halved it and I feel like I’m fully conscious again—although it was a great relief to be brain dead for a few weeks.

I was thinking, since Claire and I have our 36^th anniversary coming at the end of August, about how our tradition used to be that Claire took the kids to Cape Cod or somewhere, and I’d stay home and work—we spent our anniversary in different states for years. I know it’s a weird tradition—but we’re slightly weird people. Well, the kids are grown, I don’t work, and Claire does—so that tradition has lapsed in more recent years—but if Claire stays with Jessy long enough, maybe the old tradition will come back one more time. I love the weird traditions, the ones that our just our own, the best.

I’ve been letting my muttonchops grow out lately—I look like I guy who shouldn’t have muttonchops but grew them anyway. Hey, you get bored when there’s so little to do. I shaved all the hair around my ears yesterday—I look like an idiot—and the muttonchops only make it stupider. But I stay indoors all day, so nobody sees it—just like my weird clothes. It’s kind of funny when I do go somewhere in public—people look at me sideways, but what’s the use of being sixty if I’m going to care how I look?

I have no new videos. Here’s a reprise of some recent ones:

Time Is A River (2016Jul29)

Posted by XperDunn on July 29, 2016

Friday, July 29, 2016 3:15 PM

Hillary Clinton’s opponents try to characterize President Obama’s administration as a failure—pointing to exported jobs, employment woes, wage woes, and economic inequality, pointing to threats from terrorism at home and abroad. And they hammer away at every questionable action taken by either Obama or Clinton (we’re all sick of hearing about them because there are only a few, out of all the good both have accomplished).

Cherry-picking data is a favorite sport of the GOP. When they talk about Obama’s poor economic stats (which aren’t all that poor) they never mention Obama’s starting point—or rather, the end of eight years under Bush-43. We were in economic hell—there’s no other way to spin it. And the fact that most economic stats are at record highs, eight years later, with unemployment down to nearly reasonable levels (there is still work to do) makes it ludicrous that the GOP could pretend to any understanding of economics—or any ability to fix the problems. They created the problems—but you won’t hear them own up to that. They’ll even complain that Obama’s recovery was ‘too slow’—hey, maybe if you didn’t create the problem, you’d have the right to back-seat-drive the recovery.

The same is true of terrorism. Bush went to war with another country—by mistake—and then screwed the landing. He turned Iraq from a developed country into a chaotic free-for-all—and then doubled-down on military forces instead of addressing the hard work of re-building the country’s infrastructure and brokering between all the different factions a truce that had a shot at lasting long enough to get Iraq back to what it was. Now it is a wasteland, a breeding ground for ISIL—can they blame that on Obama or Hillary? No, but they can criticize the administration’s attempts to deal with the problem. It is childishly self-serving to spill milk and carp at the person wiping it up.

Our history did not begin at Obama’s inauguration. The GOP earned their total shunning in 2008—they had us all in a very bad place—and how they ever wormed their way back in two years later says more about our educational system than it does about their merit as civil servants. And since their majorities in the House and Senate, they have sabotaged the gears of government—just to try and embarrass Obama. Now they want to point to him and say, “He didn’t get anything done.” Well, that’s right—he only got done as much as he could those first two years (AHA and banking regulations and saving the auto industry) and then went on to do as much as a president can do alone, while the Congress jerks off. I’d say half of them are just cynical pols—and the other half are simply cracker bigots. How else do you explain more than half of our 500 legislators deciding that their job is to block anything the president tries to do?

Notice there is no qualifier to that goal—even if they really want something the president wants to pass, they’ll still block it. The proof is in their denial of Supreme Court nominee Garland a Senate hearing, for a year and counting—before he was nominated, the GOP wrote nothing but love letters about him—now they don’t want to know him. Politics can be nauseating.

So, if Obama’s administration has failed in important ways—he hasn’t done it in a vacuum—or rather, he has, though he shouldn’t have had to. The GOP created more than one crisis in this country, then they spent eight years blocking efforts to right the situation, then they spent the last two years working on one thing—trying to destroy Hillary Clinton’s image. From the polls, I have to admit they’ve done a great job—but again, that says more about our educational system than it does about their merit as civil servants.

I don’t know—maybe there’s something in uneducated people that wants to be taken advantage of. Other polls seem to show that no one with a college education will vote for the clown who hijacked the GOP. People who need dramas in their lives will hang on to all the propaganda, resurrecting the zombie lies for the nth time, making out as if there’s a real contest here. I’m sorry—this election was over when Trump said Mexicans were rapists. Even if Hillary Clinton wasn’t a great woman, and wouldn’t make a fantastic President—we’d still have to vote for her, just to keep him away from the big button—yikes.

Belated History (2016Jul27)

Posted by XperDunn on July 27, 2016

Wednesday, July 27, 2016 12:50 AM

Yesterday’s nomination of Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic party’s presidential candidate and, with a little luck, the first woman president, was a major historic event—undercut only by the fact that it took us two hundred years and 44 male presidents to get here. The UK’s first woman leader is already a quaint bit of nostalgia—and many other democracies have been graced by women leaders—and we’re just getting around to it.

That’s the trouble with America—we’ve done so much—yet there is even more still left to be done. Michael Moore recently made an entire movie about good ideas that originated in America, were adopted by other countries (who benefitted greatly) yet failed to catch on, here in the land of the free and the home of the brave. And every time a progressive puts forth a good idea for making America a better place there’s a stubborn autocrat who finds a reason to block progress. Democracy is slow, grinding work—especially when it’s swimming upstream against the Citizen’s United ruling that opened the lobbyists’ coffers.

We saw an old lady at the convention who was a little girl in 1920, when the nineteenth amendment gave women voting rights, and lived to vote for the lady who we hope to be our nation’s first Madam President. Barack Obama’s presidency has given the empowerment of dreams to millions of African-American children—Hillary Clinton is in line to do the same for half our nation’s citizens, and every little girl in America. The GOP wants to minimize this aspect of Hillary’s candidacy, but our President is first and foremost a symbol to the world—and it’s about time we broke the gender wall. Everyone calls it a ceiling, but that’s just to emphasize the unfairness of holding women down—it’s really a wall and we need to break through.

I was also pleased to see so many details of Hillary Clinton’s long and selfless service to the people of America—state after state credited her with making a positive difference in their lives. The truth about her civil service only makes the GOP smear campaign, over the decades, that much more reprehensible. And after tonight’s endorsements from her friends, her constituents, her colleagues, and her husband, the idea that the GOP nominee can stand up to any comparison is ludicrous.

As president, one is expected to interact with Congress—that’s 100 Senators and 435 Representatives—over five hundred legislators—it helps if you’ve been to law school. As president, one is expected to make decisions about things happening around the globe, things happening in science, education, health, farming, industry, energy—and business. Knowing about business is great—but knowing a lot about a lot of things, knowing a lot of people, knowing how government works—these are all important, too. The presidency is a tough job for a qualified person—for a newbie trainee, it would be a tragic farce.

I was always a problem student—I grasped concepts at once, and got very restless waiting for the rest of the class to catch up—my notebooks had more doodles than notes. Nobody appreciates the egghead who screws up the bell curve. But trust me—I’ve already solved this little multiple-choice problem and I am more than restless—I’m scared to death that the rest of the class might not catch up by November.

Yes Mindy, There Is A Hillary (2016Jul24)

Posted by XperDunn on July 24, 2016

Sunday, July 24, 2016 3:42 PM

I agree with you, Min—choosing Pence for a VP pick was lucky for Pence, since his anti-gay and anti-abortion legislative efforts have angered his Indiana constituency—not to mention his resistance to a free-needle program to stop the spread of AIDs in his state—and it was unlikely that he could win re-election as Governor. On the other side, Hillary has chosen Tim Kaine, whom The New Yorker’s Adam Borowitz jokingly said, “exhibits none of the outward characteristics of a sociopath or clinical narcissist”—meaning he’s never had a scandal or an investigation or a fraud charge, so how can we take him seriously as a politician?

He is a lot like Joe Biden—when you go to smear him, you realize there’s no mud on the ground. A seemingly decent person who works hard as an honest politician—it’s confusing, I know.

I also agree with you about the legislature—both the house and senate GOP swore they would block anything and everything Obama tried to do—just so they could call him a ‘do-nothing’ president. But the Democrats did manage to regulate the banks and pass healthcare reform before the GOP slipped back into Congress—so when the AP did a fact-check on all the doom and gloom of Trump’s acceptance speech last week, they found that he lied about most of it—the economy is better, employment is better, crime is down, Iran can’t manufacture nuclear weapons, we have our first global climate-change accords, relations with our neighbor Cuba are being normalized (with Congress blocking the dropping of the fifty-year-old embargo, of course) and Obama has appointed a fantastic Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, who has just set a record for the longest an appointee has ever had to wait for a Senate hearing (almost a year now—and counting).

And let’s not forget that the origin of our financial woes came from the GOP’s spendthrift war-mongering and lax banking oversight—they left Obama with quite a hole to dig the country out of—but he did it, and has us back to better than before the bank crashes. So ‘just more of Obama’s policies’ sounds pretty good to most people—just think what a Democratic president could do with a working legislature.

To get that, we need more than just Hillary Clinton for president—we need some more Democrats in both houses of Congress. Both Clinton’s and Kaine’s Senate records show that they worked well across the aisle—so even if we don’t take the House or Senate, they still have a shot at some real governing, unless the GOP’s thinly-veiled racism simply transforms into thinly-veiled misogyny. Their acceptance of the orange Mussolini makes me feel that nothing is beyond them any more. They supposedly did some re-thinking after Obama won his second term—maybe when Trump gets his ass kicked, they’ll do some thinking worthy of the name.

Book Report: “The Jennifer Project” by Larry Enright (2016Jul24)

Posted by XperDunn on July 24, 2016

Sunday, July 24, 2016 2:59 PM

(NOTE: This review was previously posted to amazon.com)

I’m sad to have just read the last page of “The Jennifer Project” by Larry Enright—check that box on the good-read checklist. This is a light-hearted romp—the dated nerd vernacular of the hero is almost embarrassingly comforting, like listening to your old stoner uncle. Jennifer herself shows some nerdy wit—and super-intelligence that acts more like magic than tech. Still, there is enough tech-speak and buzz-word scientifical-ness to help the willing suspension. Thrilling concepts are explored as if they wouldn’t need a book-shelf’s worth of ground-breaking new physics to implement—something I truly enjoy in my science fiction.

Terribly fast-paced—I read this book the same way I eat potato chips when I get the munchies—it must do without any tremendous amount of depth. The characters are what one would expect them to be—and we know little about them beyond their actions in advancing the story. The story’s ending might be too obvious to the experienced fan, but with the rush of words, one reaches the end before it becomes irritating. As with the better science-fiction, if you’re paying too much attention to the people and not enough to the ideas, you’re missing all the fun.

Larry Enright is a consummate speculator on future possibilities—and he knows how to entertain his readers. He’s sort of a cross between Harry Harrison and Michael Crichton. I will be reading as many more books like this as he cares to write—don’t miss out.

Pinocchio (2016Jul22)

Posted by XperDunn on July 23, 2016

Friday, July 22, 2016 9:08 PM

The popularity contest that is a presidential election doesn’t treat intellectuals very well. People such as Al Gore get tagged as ‘college-boys’ with lots of smarts but no experience or heart. And I find it ironic that we have, in Donald Trump, the real threat that such fear supposes—he is an incredibly clever man—but he has no experience and no heart. These top-tier wheeler-dealers of our financial stratosphere are well-known to pride themselves on their heartlessness. And business tycoons like Trump have a very narrow, very one-sided view of what government is and what it does. Business owners rarely get to own billions-of-dollars-worth of assets by virtue of their tender humanitarianism or their sense of civic duty.

That he is manipulative is proven by the fact that he has taken a woman whose life is indeed one of tender humanitarianism and a sense of civic duty—a public servant virtually all her adult life—an educated, experienced, competent lady and a doting grandmother—and reduced her to a satanic conspiracy of lies and greed. Not too long ago, Trump claimed he had sent a team of investigators to Hawaii to dig into President Obama’s birth records and expose him as the foreign-born Muslim intruder the GOP wished he was. This was after the election—when President Obama was already serving his term. This was after President Obama had already released his birth certificate. Trump actually claimed that his investigators were finding ‘incredible things’.

But a few years have gone by, at least one or two—since he splooged that particular bit of narcissism—so let’s forget that he tried to smear the President just to get attention from the media. Let’s ignore the fact that he has yet to show any interest in the day after the coming finale—I mean election. Let’s just take his word that Hillary Clinton, without leaving any evidence, has spent her whole life trying to destroy America. We’re much better off with the world’s worst boss, I figure. He’s so entertaining—why shouldn’t I listen to him?

But that is a question. Everyone who has ever worked for Hillary Clinton just goes on and on about what a sweet, thoughtful boss she is, how smart and caring. We don’t hear a lot from Trump’s underlings (I assume he thinks of them that way) and there’s a good reason for that. NDAs. NDAs are non-disclosure agreements—they are legal papers some people make you sign before you can work for them. Trump can sue anyone who tells the world what it’s like to work for the guy. Not that he wouldn’t sue just about anyone—he has a long list of former litigants. And that’s another question—we’ve had lots of lawyers who became president—but we’ve never had a litigious businessman—I wonder which countries Trump would sue first? I wonder if I could bring myself to sue someone for telling the truth about me? Hmm.

Here’s how I see it—Hillary Clinton couldn’t possibly be the Machiavellian super-villain her detractors paint her as—and that’s not to deny her imperfections. She simply doesn’t have any of the symptoms of a person who only cares for herself—she’s not nearly as comfortable huckstering herself to the public as Trump is (or her husband was)—she’s too sincere for that. And the fact that she has it in her to be sincere—too sincere perhaps to be comfortable tap-dancing in the public eye—disqualifies her completely from being anything near as bad as her detractors would like to believe.

Trump however reminds me of nothing so much as the barker who inveigles Pinocchio into joining the after-party at the carnival. The American public is the Pinocchio in this scenario, you understand—and we’ll all wake up with asses-ears, being loaded into a truck like cattle. At today’s rally in Tampa, Hillary told the crowd, “I never thought I’d say this—but Ted Cruz was right.” She was referring to Cruz being booed at the RNC convention for saying “Vote your conscience.” I don’t care for Cruz, but right is right—we could all probably use a Jiminy Cricket right about now.

Unconventional (2016Jul19)

Posted by XperDunn on July 19, 2016

Tuesday, July 19, 2016 5:59 PM

There’s something very ‘high-school’ about this Republican convention in Cleveland. In a way, Trump’s entire race has had the childish aspect of someone who can’t be tried as an adult—and knows it. And this freedom isn’t due to his own youth, but to the uncritical thinking of his supporters, and of RNC boosters generally. Just before the convention began, Trump excused his running mate, Pence, for his vote on the Iraq War, with rationalizing that belied his claim that Hillary Clinton’s vote on the same was criminal incompetence. He can’t see his own random snap-judgments as anything but strength of personality—the childish clinging to one’s preconceptions regardless of any evidence of alternate interpretations. Stubbornness is a strength—but it helps if you’re right to begin with.

The convention itself incites us to compare it to one of Mickey and Judy’s attempts to ‘put on a show in the old barn’. But that would insult the memory of those fine performers—what the RNC is putting on in Cleveland is closer to the Little Rascals’ put-on-a-show episode—or a high school dance. Queen disclaimed any authorization for Trump’s use of “We Are the Champions” in a complaint-tweet—and Stephen Colbert remarked on the oddity of Trump choosing the song of a bi-sexual foreigner.

Melania ‘borrowed’ some of her more personal remarks from Michelle Obama’s speech of eight years earlier—but they were, in her defense, excellent phraseology. And it’s nice to hear Republicans applauding Michelle’s thinking, even if they were tricked into it.

The most high-school aspect of this unconventional convention, though, is the level of discourse. Various speakers laud the goodness of Trump—where we who have witnessed earlier conventions are used to hearing about important geopolitics, economic policies, social justice concerns, et. al. When the speakers run out of adjectives in praise of Trump, they damn Hillary Clinton as if the woman were in the dockets at Salem, lo these centuries past.

The feistier ones will take the occasional poke at Obama, too—but it’s hard to hack through both his positive stats and his immense approval rating to find cause for blame and shame. I heard Scott Baio actually question Obama’s Christianity, pointing out that he had a foreign-sounding name—“Does that sound Christian to you?” he asked. Oh-Em-Gee, Chochi—that was last election—and absurd, if you remember that one of the first things they tried to tag Obama with was his lifelong relation with his ‘activist’ Christian minister.

Giuliani shouted out that we had to “protect our police”. Several officers have been killed by madmen in recent days—but Giuliani’s tone left me wondering if he wanted to protect them from armed madmen—or from criticism of their tendency to shoot unarmed minorities. I think our police forces will survive the criticism. The unarmed madmen—well, they’ve been to schools and movie theaters and nightclubs from coast-to-coast—police are just their latest fixation. Black Lives Matter has not been arming anyone, so far as I know—that’s all on the NRA and the second amendment.

I could never understand the Conservative agenda—but the fact that significant numbers of the far right are Stop-Trump-ers indicates that this is not a left vs. right election. This is something else—something that defies description—and sometimes beggars belief. I imagine it’s similar to what people felt in other countries, when they saw their countrymen falling for a demagogue’s over-heated rhetoric and quailed at the thought of the destruction to come. But, in this convention, we are seeing a consensus—an alliance of bullies backing the head bully. High school bullies are bad enough, in situ—make one the President of the United States and –watch out!

Summer Daze (2016Jul16)

Posted by XperDunn on July 17, 2016

Saturday, July 16, 2016 4:38 PM

Summer is supposed to be hot and lazy, but I’m finding this summer kinda nerve-wracking. Our geopolitics are simmering dangerously close to a full boil—at this point it would be easier to list the countries that are stable and enjoying business-as-usual, if indeed there are any, rather than compile the list of trouble-spots and terror attacks. On the domestic front, we seem to be having a presidential race that is more a referendum on fact-based democracy than a choice of parties. The gun violence has hit record highs without anyone having a clue as to how to stop it. Violence of every kind piles atop itself, barely a day going by without a new atrocity in the news—it’s actually pushed our obsessive election polling off the top-stories-list these past few days.

I saw a Medium post this morning—a tongue-in-cheek essay listing the many horrors of the last six months, claiming that ‘due to extreme disapproval ratings the rest of 2016 has been cancelled’. I applaud this blogger—she or he has succeeded in finding anything funny to say about the first half of this year. I wish I could. The only positive message sensible folks like President Obama or Secretary Clinton can offer lately is ‘things aren’t as bad as they seem’, and ‘we all have to work together’. I can’t disagree—my life, compared to the average American, is just a bowl of cherries—and I’m far better off than the usual unemployed sixty-year-old.

And I would far rather welcome refugees from war-torn countries, and make allowances for long-term undocumented workers, especially those whose children were born here. Those who face these ideas with fear and anger are forgetting that none of us are native, except Native Americans—and they are overlooking that the net effect of all immigrations is always a plus for America. We have never failed to integrate and welcome any group into our nation before (well, eventually, of course) and I don’t see why we should start now. This nonsense about building walls, deporting masses of people, and banning religions—it’s not just un-American, it’s stupid. It’s a mistake we’ve never made before, so some people can’t envision just how horribly such ideas would work out in practice. With one exception—we’re still pretty embarrassed about the Japanese-American camps at the start of WWII. That failure of our national nerve still pinches—and it gives us a good idea of what extreme nationalism can do to the spirit of this country.

Our national spirit is a fragile thing—like many valuable treasures it can easily be misplaced or damaged. It can also be warped to the purposes of a charlatan—jingoism masquerading as patriotism, capitalist greed masquerading as national security, discrimination masquerading as religiosity, and other tap-dancing by power-seeking narcissists. Practicality is often used as an excuse to stifle our national spirit—we can’t afford it; it’s too dangerous; it threatens our children; it abridges our faith—but in the end, more of us are willing to trust in our spirit, our humanity, which is how we’ve gotten to our present level of social justice, work-in-progress though it may be.

Other nations marvel at our freedom of speech and of the press—they don’t really believe that such freedom can exist. Other nations marvel at our gender equality—women’s rights are severely curtailed in many nominally ‘developed’ countries. Even in Europe, many of their foreign nationals aren’t nearly as integrated into the fabric of their communities—they exist in separate enclaves that exaggerate the separation of cultures rather than combine them into a whole. America has its failings—don’t get me wrong. The persistence of racial division is undeniable and women are not yet fully equal in pay rates and other stats. The power of the wealthy is undermining our governance, our culture, and the economic divide is ever widening. And guns—boy, do we have a problem with guns.

For Americans, guns are the good guys. The colonists used guns to defend against the ‘savages’ and the many four-legged predators of the New World. The revolutionaries used guns to win our liberty as a nation—and one of their first new rules was ‘everyone can have a gun’. Guns made up both sides of the Civil War, and afterward, guns went west and made it wild—until other guns came and tamed the Wild West. Then we used guns to win the War with Spain, the First World War, and the Second World War. America wouldn’t be America without guns—and lots of’em.

Curiously, at present, we virtually ignore our armed military, those who are facing action in at least four other countries—and focus on gun misuse by Americans against Americans. Mental health seems to be a major factor—but I sometimes wonder whether the crazed gunman isn’t at least partly a product of a crazed community. The whole country is kinda gun-crazy—the mass murderers are getting their ideas from somewhere—and they’re getting their arms from somewhere too. I wish I had a solution to offer, but I’m as stumped as everyone else. I’m just on the lookout for those ‘better angels of our nature’ that have seen us through tough times before.

It’s looking like a long, hot summer. Here’s some music to help cool off:

…

A Fool Can Ask (2016Jul13)

Posted by XperDunn on July 14, 2016

Wednesday, July 13, 2016 9:44 PM

They say a fool can ask more questions than a wise man can answer. As a political strategy, this seems to be working for Trump. David McCollough and Ken Burns have started a Facebook page “Historians on Donald Trump” , a forum where various historians can discuss Trump’s divergence from American Values and American History. In yesterday’s New York Times, McCollough explained, “I’ve always said, ‘My specialty is dead politicians.’ In that way, I could sidestep the question without getting myself involved. But this time around, I don’t feel that way any more.” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg has also thrown the traditional reticence of Supreme Court members to the winds to lambast the presumptive GOP nominee in no uncertain terms.

Much was made on today’s news of whether or not Notorious RBG behaved improperly or not—and I can see where that might seem the most sensational angle to take. But I can’t help thinking that there’s a larger question here. What would make people, whose careers virtually require silence on such current politics, feel required to speak out and warn people?

George Will, longtime conservative columnist and lifelong champion of Republicans, has quit the GOP over Trump’s candidacy saying, “This is not my party.” Many GOP figureheads will not be attending the convention, leaving the Trump campaign scrambling for speakers to fill the three days’ ‘festivities’. Elected Republican legislators run from reporters who might ask them to explain Trump’s daily statements. The “Anti-Trump” movement is still viral within the party, even though everyone agrees it has little chance of blocking his nomination.

Even foreign governments are getting nervous at the thought of a Trump presidency. In a way, Trump is like Climate Change. Anyone with expertise will warn you against it—the Democrats fear it, and the rest of the globe fears it—only the GOP finds either phenomenon acceptable. I think Hillary’s campaign can run attack ads simply by airing 1930s newsreel footage of Il Duce—Trump’s role model, in both manner and ideology.

Why his apparent success? Well, people are unhappy—that much is crystal clear. Plus, Donald Trump isn’t really running for President of The United States—he’s running for Most Popular. When people sincerely run for President, they usually lay some groundwork in law and politics. Trump has hired lawyers and thrown parties for politicians—maybe he thinks that’ll do. But basically Trump’s message has been, “I can be mean.” His implication is that he’ll be mean for us, but I think he’ll just continue to be a mean person, a bully—and most bullies are cowards, with little interest in the common welfare.

But I think what maddens the educated, knowledgeable people, like historians, columnists, and Supreme Court justices, is the tremendous gulf between Trump’s ears when it comes to America and what American government is really about. Trump, being without experience in anything but deals and sales, doesn’t have the breadth of vision to encompass the enormity of the task he’s asking for. He’s not just too ignorant to do the job—he’s too ignorant to know what the job really is. He may win the popularity contest in November, but his presidency would make Brex-regret seem like a mild hangover, compared to a suicidal impulse. After centuries of glorious liberty, Trump is poised to make American democracy eat its own entrails.

Huzzah! (2016Jul12)

Posted by XperDunn on July 12, 2016

Tuesday, July 12, 2016 7:40 PM

Don Pietro del Cianflone has returned from summer hiatus—sing laude and strike the tambor! Here, we have the Buds-Up Semi-Ensemble wreaking havoc with the laws of both rhythm and harmony in a spectacular display of bongo-osity and piano-tivity. If you spot this duo—notify the musical authorities at once. If you hear something—you’ve heard too much!

The rest of this is just me—nothing to see here, just move it along…

That’s that, for now. A big thanks to Peter Cianflone for the jam session!

Icarus (2016Jul06)

Posted by XperDunn on July 6, 2016

Wednesday, July 06, 2016 3:14 PM

I’ve been watching the PBS series “The Greeks”—fascinating stuff, and it ties together the ancient history of Greeks with their present-day, and ours. In last night’s segment they touched upon the myth of Daedalus and Icarus, father and son. Daedalus was a legendary scientist and engineer, forced by King Minos (so the legend goes) to design and build the great maze which imprisoned the Minotaur and the monster’s victims—a group of young people sent annually from the other islands of King Minos’s reign, to be sacrificed to the Minotaur in tribute to the king.

Daedalus didn’t care for his bloodthirsty, despotic boss—neither was he too pleased with being a captive employee—Minos had forbidden him to leave. So Daedalus invented marvelous wings made of wax and feathers, etc. He intended for himself and his son, Icarus, to escape the evil king by flying away to another island. He warned his son, before take-off, that the wings would get wet and fall apart if he flew too low, too close to the sea—and melt and collapse if he flew too high, too close to the sun.

Icarus’s flight is a popular tale—he ignores his father’s advice and is drawn towards the Sun, flying too high. His wings melt and his father, Daedalus’, joy at successfully reaching a free island—is dashed by his grief at watching his son plunge into the sea and die. Everyone has seen a picture or painting of this iconic scene—in my art-study days, I even drew or painted a few myself.

PBS’s “The Greeks” makes a connection between the fall of Golden Age Greece and Icarus—they, like most, take from this myth the lesson of Hubris—an overweening pride. I can’t argue with their interpretation of Ancient Greece’s fall—they got rich off the backs of their over-taxed protectorates—transforming the powerful unity of democracy into an elite that abused their power. They did indeed forget what it was that made them great to begin with. And one of their over-taxed satellites was Sparta—you know you’ve gotten too big for your britches when you go and make Sparta mad.

But Icarus I see quite differently. To me, the story of Icarus is the story of wisdom, learning, and maturity creating sophisticated mechanisms that can’t be trusted in the hands of the young and foolish. Daedalus invents a machine—a machine that, according to legend, he was able to use as it was meant to be used. But in sharing it with his son, he put a power that required responsibility into the hands of the irresponsible. It is, in a way, the story of modern man.

No genius ever invented the next big thing and thought to himself or herself, ‘what will the dumbest kid in the world do with this?’ No, they just invent new things, find new powers—and present them to the human race as a whole. But our technology does eventually end up in the hands of the dumbest among us—with predictable results. To me the story of Icarus teaches us that a wise man can invent more than a foolish man can be trusted with.

A Chat With An Old Friend (2016Jul06)

Posted by XperDunn on July 6, 2016

Wednesday, July 06, 2016 10:29 AM

It was convenient for Hillary that no charges would be filed—but it was equally convenient for the FBI director to cast aspersions on her without the need to prove them in a court of law. He says there’s no evidence that she was spied on, but that she MAY have been spied on. He says that out of 30,000 emails, about one hundred held classified info—but only eight held info that was classified at the time of the email—plus, he doesn’t give us anything regarding how HE decided this stuff was classified. Basically, Director Comey said ‘no harm, no foul’ out of one side of his mouth and ‘shame, shame’ out the other. It seemed a little partisan to me.

If you look at the email-server findings and the Benghazi findings, they both condemn the State Department. One wonders if it isn’t a little too easy to have someone be the head, the Secretary of State, and then, once he or she is done, lay a bunch of incompetence and malfeasance at their feet. An under-funded beltway bureaucracy, two centuries old, that gets a new boss appointed every few years—there’s your real bad guy.

Bill, the big dog, was less than circumspect in visiting aboard Loretta Lynch’s jet in AZ—but it sounds a little forced when people howl with laughter at the thought that these two could talk for thirty minutes about personal stuff. Really? You can’t blow a half-hour bullshitting with a friend? Has Bill done anything but, since he left office? Trump-eters who hail this as a sign that our ‘entire government is rotten to the core’ are being just a little bit hysterical. Nothing new there.

As always, the GOP witch-hunters who failed yet again to make a legal case against their nemesis have found ways to tag little PR addendums onto the statements clearing her. Politics is a rough game and no two ways about it.

Logos and the Summer Reading List (2016Jul05)

Posted by XperDunn on July 5, 2016

Tuesday, July 05, 2016 1:03 PM

Kindle Purchases as of July 5, 2016:

Title Author

Super Extra Grande Yoss

Infomocracy: A Novel Malka Older

Mechanical Failure (Epic Failure Book 1) Joe Zieja

Illuminae (The Illuminae Files) Amie Kaufman

Porgy Dubose Heyward

Shakespeare’s Sonnets William Shakespeare

Wandering Stars Sholem Aleichem

The Noise of Time: A novel Julian Barnes

Into Everywhere Paul McAuley

Something Coming Through Paul McAuley

Little Machines Paul McAuley

Insistence of Vision: Stories David Brin

The Technician (A Novel of Polity) Neal Asher

Dark Intelligence (Transformations) Neal Asher

Not Alone Craig A. Falconer

The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories Ken Liu

Ruined (TCG Edition) Lynn Nottage

As Good as New: A Tor.Com Original Charlie Jane Anders

Six Months, Three Days: A Tor.Com Original Charlie Jane Anders

The Fermi Paradox is Our Business Model Charlie Jane Anders

Hello World Peter Cawdron

This Long Vigil (A Short Story) Rhett C Bruno

Saturn Run John Sandford

Against a Dark Background Iain M. Banks

Excession Iain M. Banks

The State of the Art Iain M. Banks

Use of Weapons (A Culture Novel Book 3) Iain M. Banks

The Player of Games (A Culture Novel Book 2) Iain M. Banks

Been There, Run That Koplovitz

Apex: Nexus Trilogy Book 3 (Nexus Arc) Ramez Naam

The Artificial Kid Bruce Sterling

Seeds of a New Birth (Kindred Series Book 1) Orrin Jason Bradford

The End of All Things (Old Man’s War Book 6) John Scalzi

The Dark Forest (Remembrance of Earth’s Past) Cixin Liu

Among Others (Hugo Award -Best Novel) Jo Walton

101 Great American Poems(Dover Thrift Eds) Am.Poetry&Lit Project

Armada: A novel Ernest Cline

The Golden Transcendence (Golden Age Book 3) John C. Wright

The Phoenix Exultant: (Golden Age, Book 2) John C. Wright

The Golden Age John C. Wright

Idempotency Joshua Wright

To Stand or Fall: The End of All Things #4 John Scalzi

Can Long Endure: The End of All Things #3 John Scalzi

This Hollow Union: The End of All Things #2 John Scalzi

The Life of the Mind: The End of All Things #1 John Scalzi

Mysterium Robert Charles Wilson

A Bridge of Years Robert Charles Wilson

Pandora’s Brain Calum Chace

Schild’s Ladder Greg Egan

The Girl With All the Gifts M. R. Carey

The Turing Exception (Singularity Series Book 4) William Hertling

The Last Firewall (Singularity Series Book 3) William Hertling

A.I. Apocalypse (Singularity Series Book 2) William Hertling

Avogadro Corp: TS.. (Singularity Series Book 1) William Hertling

Nexus (The Nexus Trilogy Book 1) Ramez Naam

Crux (The Nexus Trilogy Book 2) Ramez Naam

Cards of Grief Jane Yolen

The Alien Chronicles (The Future Chronicles) Hugh Howey

The Essence of Aptitude (CorpusChronicles Bk1) Esha Bajaj

The Defeatist Sophie Bowns

The Fold: A Novel Peter Clines

(R)evolution (Phoenix Horizon Book 1) PJ Manney

Curse 5.0 (Short Stories by Liu Cixin Book 7) Cixin Liu

The Water Knife Paolo Bacigalupi

Taking Care of Gods (Short Stories Book 10) Cixin Liu

The Wandering Earth (Short Stories Book 2) Cixin Liu

The Three-Body Problem(Remem.of Earth’sPast) Cixin Liu

Seveneves: A Novel Neal Stephenson

Vessel Andrew J. Morgan

H2O Irving Belateche

The book of the courtier Baldassarre Castiglione

The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci Complete da Vinci

Godless Nerdistry: Or How to be a Bag of Chem Dale DeBakcsy

Consider Phlebas (A Culture Novel Book 1) Iain M. Banks

Fear the Sky (The Fear Saga Book 1) Stephen Moss

The Lost Starship (Lost Starship Series Book 1) Vaughn Heppner

Stars & Empire 2: 10 More Galactic Tales Jay Allan

Stars & Empire: 10 Galactic Tales Jay Allan

Fluency (Confluence Book 1) Jennifer Foehner Wells

The Road to Hope Crissi Langwell

Edge of Eternity (The Century Trilogy, Book 3) Ken Follett

Robogenesis: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) Daniel H. Wilson

A Burnable Book: A Novel Bruce Holsinger

Wool Omnibus Edition (Wool 1 – 5) (Silo series) Hugh Howey

Wool: The Graphic Novel #1 (Silo Saga) Hugh Howey

YES Leonard Chance

The Fault in Our Stars John Green

The Divergent Series Complete Collection: D,I,A Veronica Roth

The Nostalgist: A Tor.Com Original Daniel H. Wilson

Electric Blues (Arty Book 1) Shaun O. McCoy

Ride of the Late Rain (Vergassy Chronicles Bk 1) James Young

The Pattern Ship (The Pattern Universe Book 1) Tobias Roote

After Shock: (Lucy Guardino FBI Thrillers Bk 4) CJ Lyons

The Forgotten Land Keith McArdle

The First Kipjo Ewers

The Princess and the Goblin (Illustrated) George MacDonald

The Water Babies [with Biographical Intro] Charles Kingsley

The Shriver Rpt:A Woman’s Nation Pushes Back Maria Shriver

Wicked Sci-Fi Pulp -From1954 The Real Stuff Ill Philip K. Dick

10 Lost Vintage Sci-Fi Short-Story Masterpieces Chet Dembeck

Linked List of over 350 Free SciFi Classics Morris Rosenthal

Distraction Bruce Sterling

Vege Press-Cooker-50 Recipes for Busy People Maria Holmes

The Seventh Science Fiction MEGAPACK Robert Silverberg

The First Science Fiction MEGAPACK Robert Silverberg

The Second Science Fiction Megapack Robert Silverberg

The Third Science Fiction MEGAPACK Fritz Leiber

The Fourth Science Fiction MEGAPACK Isaac Asimov

The Fifth Science Fiction MEGAPACK Gardner Dozois

The Sixth Science Fiction MEGAPACK Johnston McCulley

Weird Science Fiction Tales: 101 Vol. 8 (civitas) Various

Weird Science Fiction Tales: 101 Vol. 7 (civitas) Various

Weird Science Fiction Tales: 101 Vol. 6 (civitas) Various

Weird Science Fiction Tales: 101 Vol. 5 (civitas) Various

Weird Science Fiction Tales: 101 Vol. 4 (civitas) Various

Weird Science Fiction Tales: 101 Vol. 3 (civitas) Various

Weird Science Fiction Tales: 101 Vol. 2 (civitas) Various

Weird Science Fiction Tales: 101 Vol. 1 (civitas) Various

The Edmond Hamilton MEGAPACK 16 Tales Edmond Hamilton

The H. Beam Piper Megapack: 33 Stories H. Beam Piper

The Works of Alan E. Nourse [Illustrated] Alan E. Nourse

Over the last two and a half years I have read some books—not as many as I would have back in my ‘bookworm prime’, but I still enjoy reading better than almost anything else. The above list is not exact—in the sense that I have not read every book—or every word in every book—just most of them. (Let he who reads every book he buys cast the first stone.) Also, a few of these listed are just Kindle duplicates of books I read long ago, and subsequently re-read as e-books. But by and large my reading list for the past coupla years is fairly represented above.

I could not tell you what most of these books are about. I read them and forget them, as far as details go—if I retain the main concepts and story arcs, I figure I’m doing well. My memory does not work well—I often have trouble, during a big book, keeping things straight as I read—remembering stuff afterwards is a bonus for me. I can re-read a book and get a few chapters in before the sense of familiarity starts to come to me—I’m often disappointed to do that, because the more I read, the more I remember, until I give it up and go looking for a new book. Memory is weird stuff—especially when it’s as dysfunctional as mine.

You’ll notice I mostly read Sci-Fi books. Science Fiction isn’t exactly educational in the strictest sense of the word—that word ‘Fiction’ tells you why. But Sci-Fi does have the advantage of letting science-educated people play with the concepts they were taught—and there is great value in that.

Real math and science are very complex, they’re taught in school (often by uninspired teachers to unwilling students) and they tend to be thought of as rote data. But the sciences are a living thing, growing and changing with every day—and Science Fiction provides a safe space for playing with scientific concepts and ideas, clarifying their meanings and highlighting their possibilities. It can be a thrilling peek at the future or a dire warning to the present—but my favorite aspect of Science Fiction is that it can conjure fantasies about what the human race can become.

And Science Fiction has a strange habit of deciding, every once in a while, to become Fact. It is not so strange that speculation on the future can become prediction—even fortune-tellers get it right sometimes, and Sci-Fi writers have the extra advantage of not talking in general terms, but of extrapolating aspects of real science into stories about where that science might lead. Star Trek once speculated on the idea of hand-held communicators and, lo and behold, we now have I-phones (an actual improvement, since I-phones can do much more than allow conversations between two people). Arthur C. Clarke once wrote a story about a geo-synchronous satellite used for communications—and thus his name appears on the first patent for a communications satellite. I could go on—the historic connection between science and Science Fiction is long and full of anecdotes.

Science Fiction can also lead to greater interest in Science. Among the print books left off the above list are some biographies. Recently, I have read “Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel” (2006) by Rebecca Goldstein and “Joseph Henry: The Rise of an American Scientist” (1997) by Albert E. Moyer (which I’m still reading). I’ve also recently read “Henry James: A Life” (1985) by Leon Edel and “Beethoven: The Man Revealed” (2014) by John Suchet. I’ve read James, but truthfully I was intrigued to read his biography when I read, in Henry’s bio, that he was a tutor of the young Henry James in 19^th-century Albany, NY. The Beethoven bio was a gift from friends who knew I liked classical music and reading.

So I do have other interests—Sci-Fi is simply my favorite genre. Biographies are great, too—but, being works of intense research, it gets tricky finding someone who can dig up the info and also write well. Biographies can be fun—some historical figures have whole bookshelves of biography written about them—I’ve read three different biographies of Einstein, for example, and learned as much from their differences as I did from their explicit writing.

Sarah Vowell, Barbara Tuchman, Jared Diamond, and Laura Hillenbrand are some of my favorite writers of general history. I’ve also read some lackluster histories by other authors, but I have found that, with biography and historical non-fiction, the lack of literary talent can be balanced out by one’s interest in the subject. I have read some terribly boring books, simply because I was fascinated with the subject matter. Plus, they help me appreciate the really good writers.

In the Gospel of John we are told “the Word was with God and the Word was God”, the word ‘Word’ having been translated from the ancient greek ‘Logos’, which means “a ground”, “a plea”, “an opinion”, “an expectation”, “word”, “speech”, “account”, “to reason”—later becoming a philosophical term meaning ” a principle of order and knowledge”. Thus Logos has always held a fascination for modern writers and thinkers. The interface between words and meaning is a slippery one. Semiotics become complex. But the struggle between what we mean and what we say (or write) goes on—words may be amorphous, but they’re the best tools we have. And so, this summer, go and get your words on.

Happy Fourth (2016Jul04)

Posted by XperDunn on July 4, 2016

Monday, July 04, 2016 2:33 PM

I like the idea of a public hearing—it could even be a new cable-TV channel—regular folks get up and say what they’re going through and what they would like to see the government do about it. Each statement could be followed by the names of the speaker’s town officials, their state officials, (with contact information so that people could call or write in) and the relevant legislation and programs that already apply, and a list of legislation that has been proposed but not passed. There could also be additional segments about legislation that was passed solely on the impetus of lobbyists—why they passed it, what the corporations get out of it, and how it deteriorates the public good.

That governor who recently got his corruption conviction overturned by the supreme court—he may not have done anything technically illegal, but with segments on our new show that link politicians to major campaign contributors, we could get rid of these jokers the old-fashioned way—by getting the word out, so they don’t get re-elected.

Of course, the same old problems apply—who would run such a TV channel and whose pocket would they be in? It would have to be very strictly administered to avoid the possibility of it being co-opted by a single group. And the financial needs of a TV channel would make it nearly impossible to avoid the same kinds of malfeasance that politics itself suffers from. Still, I like the idea.

Charles M. Blow wrote an editorial in today’s New York Times called “Giving Clinton Her Due” and I thought, ‘well, finally, some journalism about all the great stuff that Hillary Clinton has done over the decades’. But I was disappointed—the article was all about how well her campaign has done over the last month, compared to Trump. I just can’t fathom how people can pretend there is a comparison to be made between one of our most notable statespersons of the last four decades—and someone who hasn’t done squat, ever. Am I crazy or is this not the stupidest thing in the world today?

Even if Trump were sane, sensible, and thoughtful—wouldn’t it still be true that a complete novice, a green newbie like him, is a poor chose for ‘king of the world’? Add in the fact that he’s a narcissistic, psychotic imbecile and I have real trouble understanding how anyone can say his name, in conjunction with the election for Leader of the Free World, without laughing out loud. I can understand the talking heads—they get paid to say ridiculous things with a straight face—but regular folks? I just don’t get it.

And don’t tell me Hillary is a liar—who the hell isn’t a liar? Name another president who never stretched the truth—it’s practically a job skill in that regard. And the question isn’t just who is lying—it’s also who are they lying to? In the case of Trump, it’s a lifelong record of lying to everyone, for money. In Hillary’s case, when she misspeaks it’s usually in defense against the lies being spread by her enemies—she’s not lying to us, not the way Trump is. She’s just being a politician. And besides, let he or she who is without lying cast the first stone.

So get out there and set off some ‘works, everybody—happy Fourth of July!

Be The Government (2016Jul03)

Posted by XperDunn on July 3, 2016

Sunday, July 03, 2016 5:46 PM

Well, this is embarrassing—I wrote my Fourth of July post yesterday and now I want to write something else—but it’s still the day before Independence Day, so what am I supposed to do, pretend it’s not happening and just write about random stuff? Yeah, that’s the plan. So much for topicality.

Oh, it’s funny—and kind of exhilarating—when you look back at stuff that pissed you off and had you all off your game and under the weather for days—and you realize that your memory isn’t good enough to really remember what all that was about, so who cares anymore. If I can’t interface with the Internet without somebody getting in my face, then I just play Snood for a while and the whole thing’s forgotten—I’d like to take the credit, but honestly, it gets forgotten whether I like it or not.

Sometimes time moves too fast (usually) and sometimes time moves too slow (that’s the worst so I’m glad it’s the rarer of the two). Sometimes time seems to stand still—but if you wait awhile, you’ll need to go to the bathroom eventually. For me time has always been a little too elastic—my musical friends are always trying to encourage me to use a metronome—but that really just makes it worse—I get confused about the time between the clicks. So I made a deal with myself long ago—that even though music is primarily about rhythm, it was okay for me to do everything without a good rhythm, anyway—we’ll just call it an overabundance of rhubato, that’s all. It’s not that I don’t want to be rhythmic, it’s just that I can’t—time won’t let me, as they say.

I mean, I can feel an anger inside me—but through a combination of not remembering and not wanting to go there, I really have no idea why. Lots of things make me angry—I have an itchy trigger finger and a short fuse. Must be the Irish in me. Back in the day you could pick one thing to be angry about—the War, or Nixon, or Nuclear weapons, or the Ecology. But now there are just too many things going on, both good and bad—not getting angry is becoming an important skill, because the media will latch onto to that and make you watch TV all day or surf around the Internet until your eyes bleed.

Yes, there are problems out there—it’s time we stopped getting scared about it, or angry about it, and started getting serious about leadership instead. We are about to have an election in which a miserable, dangerous candidate has a shot just because people are so angry and so uncomfortable—and so poor. And that’s on our establishment, no question about it. They’ve been lying down on the job—doing everything but their job. It’s time we elected new people—but not the worst person in the world, just because he sees an opening.

We need to elect local officials who are not wealthy or corrupt, who have public service in mind. Then we need to do that with our state officials, then our congresspersons. Only when we have regained control of our political infrastructure can we do anything about the big dogs—the governors, the senators, vice-president, and president. Those things are just shiny objects for us to jump up and reach for while all the real work gets done behind our backs.

A vote won’t do it. People have to start going to town meetings, state party meetings, I don’t even know what kinds of meetings—that’s the sad part. The NRA’s zombie army all have the itinerary—surely the rest of us can start to realize that the crazies need to be beaten back at every river ford and mountain pass, that the lobbyists need to face down protestors outside their offices and in the halls of government. The reason we have such bad government now is because we have taken it for granted—but it needs work, just like your house or your yard—and they are overdue for a lawnmowing.

We don’t get paid to participate in our government, local, state or whatever—we may not even get what we want, personally, by participating. But if we think of it as an appliance that works when you push the button, then we get a government that has no brain, no heart. Only when large numbers of regular people show up will our government ever resemble our desires, or even our needs. We don’t need smaller government or bigger government—we need to be the government.

The Revolting Day (2016Jul02)

Posted by XperDunn on July 2, 2016

Saturday, July 02, 2016 12:22 PM

Considering the time of year, I guess we can’t really criticize the UK for Brexit—there were a lot of naysayers back on that first Independence Day. In fact, we rarely talk about the Tories—early Americans who took exception to the colonists’ decision to flip George III the bird. Back in the day, their lives weren’t worth a plugged nickel—especially once the Revolutionary War really got started. It must have been strange to move so far while standing still—one day they are patriots—good citizens of His Majesty—and the next day, traitors—dirty turncoats who sided with the lousy Redcoats.

We can never tell how history will paint our portraits. Benedict Arnold, a much maligned figure in our history, was one of our greatest military officers—a fierce fighter and brilliant tactician—he found the Continental Congress of his day just as useless and frustrating as we do ours today. He saw them being negligent and inept, more concerned with their own well-being than with the fate of the young country. The rebels were suing the French government for military aid and financial backing—and Arnold felt that we were better off sticking with the British, bad as they were, than turning our country over to the French. So he turned spy—but with the best intentions. History, however, was definitely not on his side.

And ever since, we have had historical figures who, at first blush, were labelled traitors, troublemakers, and insurgents—anyone who tried to see things from the Native Americans’ point of view, anyone who condemned slavery, anyone who worked towards votes for women—were all roundly booed, sometimes until long after the injustices were irreversible. There are even people today, over two hundred years later, whose parents have raised them still to belittle Native Americans, African Americans, and women of any type. More recently, the late Muhammad Ali was branded a traitor for refusing the draft, as were many anti-war protestors. Good isn’t ‘good’ until it wins the PR war and gets the imprimatur of history. It is not so much that history is written by the winners as that history is written by the winning.

Like religion—source of humanity’s greatest comfort and engine of its worst atrocities—America has a wonderful, idealistic side which we use to block out the memory of all the horrendous reality that we’ve chalked up since we first gave out those poxy blankets, long before we decided to write declarations about human rights. We like to get on our high horse about the great American Experiment—but the nation that invented Public Education celebrates its big day by having the ill-educated go out and blow off their extremities with explosives—if they survived the car trip to the picnic area, that is.

It’s lucky I’m gonna be a grandpa soon—here I am grumbling about firecrackers on Fourth of July Weekend—what kind of American am I, anyway? I still approve of barbequed hamburgers and hot dogs—even though I can’t decide which has more carcinogens—lighter fluid or maple wood chips. And I still like the flag—even though I can’t fly ours because a tree branch grew across the flagpole and the powerlines are too close (I think it’s a really old flag pole, so it would probably fall down with a flag on it anyway).

Plus, I’m retired—holidays suck once you’re retired—what good’s a day off if you don’t have any days on? The biggest change for me during holidays is the theme that Turner Classic Movies uses to mark the occasion in their day’s programming.

Diminishing Returns (2016Jun27)

Posted by XperDunn on June 27, 2016

Monday, June 27, 2016 11:20 AM

Diminishing returns—that’s what I’m dealing with here. My hands shake, my vision is blurry, my head is all kinds of discombobulated. I’m weak. I’m short of breath. I get kinda squirrely whenever I have to talk to people in person—I just get into a loop, second-guessing myself and them—basically, I’ve just lost the ability to deal. I used to be a shut-in because I didn’t have the strength to walk around—now, I think I hide indoors because I know that regularly interacting with people will expose my insanity and get me committed.

Smoking is a problem—I shouldn’t smoke, of course. But I don’t have that much else to amuse myself with—being damn-near dead—so it’s hard for me to rationalize quitting to save my life. What life, without a smoke to pass the time?

Loved ones—sure, I have those. But they have actual lives—they’re busy, they’re engrossed in their own stuff—and any leaning on them takes away from that. I think one person stuck in a frustrating place is sufficient—I can’t see dragging them into this. The paradox of age and infirmity—I’m supposed to be all that more grateful for my continued existence, even as it loses more and more of the features that constitute an actual life. When people congratulate someone on reaching their ninetieth birthday, all I can think is ‘That poor bastard—what must his day be like?’

Not that I’m promoting euthanasia—I’m not paging Dr. Kevorkian. It’s just that younger, healthier people think of old age as ‘extra additional years’, as if their seniority will be as full and engaging as their thirties or forties. But it’s really a matter of diminishing returns—to a certain extent, we fade before we die. And fading isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Yes, I’m still breathing and I’m still watching TV and eating my breakfast every morning—but I’m used to more than that, or I was—I want more than that.

Pain? Yes, certainly. I mean, it’s not like someone amputated one of my limbs or anything—but there’s definitely pain. The headaches are the worst because it makes it hard to think of something else—which is my go-to remedy for other pains. But let’s face it, with the back spasms, the stiff neck, the random nerve pains and restless leg—thinking about something else only gets me so far for so long. The gas pains from my messed-up guts are usually the sharpest—sometimes the cry coming out of my mouth is the first notice I have, it’s so sudden. I usually try to morph it into a sentence, as in “AAH-ow ya doin’ this afternoon?”—just so I don’t scare people into worrying about me.

My close acquaintance with my old friend, pain, makes me a big fan of OTC pain relief—my favorites are aspirin and ibuprofen. But those things only work for a short time—and the next day, I have nerve-endings that are even tenderer from the after-effects. I reach the point where it’s impossible to up the dosage any higher, and the pain is that much worse—it’s a dead-end solution with a high price-tag. Stronger drugs are out of the question—the same cycle, with far greater costs and risks.

My life is so sedentary I spend most of my time watching TV—and it embarrasses me. TV is such a festival of stupid. So I turn it off and start reading. A few hours later, the pain behind my eyes reminds me why I don’t read like I used to—it’s amazing how much physical effort it takes to read. I used to think it was the most relaxing thing in the world—how healthy I must have been!

Here are three poems I stole off a few poetry sites:

Cacoethes Scribendi

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

If all the trees in all the woods were men;

And each and every blade of grass a pen;

If every leaf on every shrub and tree

Turned to a sheet of foolscap; every sea

Were changed to ink, and all earth’s living tribes

Had nothing else to do but act as scribes,

And for ten thousand ages, day and night,

The human race should write, and write, and write,

Till all the pens and paper were used up,

And the huge inkstand was an empty cup,

Still would the scribblers clustered round its brink

Call for more pens, more paper, and more ink.

The Birthnight

Walter de la Mare

Dearest, it was a night

That in its darkness rocked Orion’s stars;

A sighing wind ran faintly white

Along the willows, and the cedar boughs

Laid their wide hands in stealthy peace across

The starry silence of their antique moss:

No sound save rushing air

Cold, yet all sweet with Spring,

And in thy mother’s arms, couched weeping there,

Thou, lovely thing.

Moonrise

Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1844 – 1889

I awoke in the Midsummer not to call night, in the white and the walk of the morning:

The moon, dwindled and thinned to the fringe of a finger-nail held to the candle,

Or paring of paradisaïcal fruit, lovely in waning but lustreless,

Stepped from the stool, drew back from the barrow, of dark Maenefa the mountain;

A cusp still clasped him, a fluke yet fanged him, entangled him, not quit utterly.

This was the prized, the desirable sight, unsought, presented so easily,

Parted me leaf and leaf, divided me, eyelid and eyelid of slumber.

Why poems? I don’t know—it just came up. Poems are nice—when they’re short enough. I used to read epic poetry—whole books of the stuff—I don’t have that kind of concentration anymore. I own many different English translations of the Iliad and the Oddysey—I prefer the ones that don’t go too ‘prose’ and don’t go too ‘lyric poetry’—it’s difficult to retain just enough of the poetry of it that you don’t lose the pace of the storytelling—a subtle balancing act, which is why there are so many versions. I wonder what it must be like in the original Ancient Greek?

I always wish I’d learned more languages. Languages are the most liberal-arts thing there is—it’s hard to see how they can be of practical use, yet those who learn them have a great mental advantage over the monolinguist. I studied French in high school and college—I never became fluent because I never used it. But even in an English-speaking environment, I’ve run across some Latin roots and French phrases that are gobbledy-gook to other people—so it wasn’t a complete waste. It’s still the easiest way to be the smartest person in the room—knowing a language that no one else does, when that language pops up. And wouldn’t it be nice to watch a foreign film and not have to read the captions?

I got a new TV recently—I switched to LCD because my old Plasma screen acted as both television and space heater—very convenient in winter, but a real pain in the ass come summertime. My old buddy, Flippy, came by today to take the old monster off my hands—I hope he’s going to use it in a well-ventilated area. It was a huge, expensive TV, so I’m happy that it didn’t end up in the junk pile.

The new TV is disappointing—I bought a 32′ diagonal Sony LCD because I figured if I moved it closer to the bed (the big one was all the way across the room) it would have the same apparent size as the big one. But Sony tricked me—the screen is 32″, but the picture is much smaller, unless I go full zoom, which fills the screen but makes the picture grainier. Consumerism is such a bait-and-switch con game. Plus, the TV was surprisingly inexpensive, until I realized that I now need a sound system for it (the old, big one had it built-in) and the sound systems price out at about the same price as the new TV! So now, instead of being happy with my purchase, I’m watching a tinier screen with tinnier sound. Argggh!

One good thing about the new TV is that it’s Wi-Fi enabled. That means I can switch to Netflix or Hulu—I can even watch myself on my YouTube channel videos—that’s pretty cool.

Okay, here’s one of my favorite Bach pieces:

and since it’s a really nice composition, and I don’t play it that well, here’s the link for Glenn Gould, playing the same piece, but properly–and beautifully:

Enjoy.

Think Fast—Too Slow! (2016Jun25)

Posted by XperDunn on June 25, 2016

Saturday, June 25, 2016 5:40 PM

Think Fast—Too Slow! (2016Jun25)

Politics is so complicated! We’re seeing two kinds of Trump spokesperson making the news-talk rounds. The first type of Trump- spokesperson, as you’d expect, is the flaming yahoo, wielding a sword of misinformation and a shield of denial—a true-believer whose gonna win that argument because God told them so (or whatever voice is in their heads). The second type of Trump- spokesperson is the slick old PR veteran who debates with their wits, their ethics (if any) firmly under lock-down.

I’d like to see one of each get accidentally booked for the same panel—It’d be a hoot to see them get confused and start contradicting each other. Contradiction is a mainstay of any campaign—but when I look closely I seem to see a difference in those who defend their stance based on well-thought-out arguments discovered in the course of looking for real answers—and those who have ‘picked’ a side and are just trying to win the argument. Now, winning the argument is the bottom line—and there are many arguments won by the simple expedient of out-shouting the opposition—so we see both sides trying to win however they can.

The difference is in what you don’t hear. The side that’s thought through their position will grudgingly admit to things that can’t be denied. The side that’s all about winning will never admit to anything, no matter how obviously true it might be. That seems to be the easiest way to tell where someone is coming from. If you’ll admit to something damaging and then try to move on, you’ve got your eyes on some future prize—if you never give an inch, even when it’s ridiculous not to, you’re just trying to win—and, of course, you’re relying on the voters being too slow to see through you.

It Was Easy (2016Jun23)

Posted by XperDunn on June 24, 2016

Thursday, June 23, 2016 4:33 PM

We had it easy—our biggest worry, back in the day, was the commies shooting off their ICBMs and making a crater of the globe (with the help of our retaliatory strikes, of course). But it was called MAD for two reasons—the obvious acronym, Mutually-Assured Destruction—but also because it was literally madness even to contemplate—and everyone knew it. We could worry about a madman getting hold of a bomb and starting something that would quickly get out of hand—but that was a long shot, mentioned mostly in novels of the ‘thriller’ variety. And no one seriously expected our governments to find any rational use for their nuclear arsenals—MAD, remember? Purely defensive, or so we would have it—don’t start none, won’t be none.

We didn’t worry about the environment—most of the pollution, and all of the data, would come later. Rachel Carson had made an iron-clad research project out of proving that the American Bald Eagle and other birds were endangered by the use of DDT as a pesticide, which caused egg-shell thinning and premature hatching. But we all took “Silent Spring” as a special case, a one-off complication. We were still fine with lead paint and asbestos insulation. Even the ecologically-minded were unaware of the build-up of consequences our civilization was beginning to have on our environment, and on ourselves.

We didn’t worry about energy—gas was pennies to the gallon—‘cruising’, the act of driving one’s car around just for fun, was a popular tradition among American teens—we wouldn’t have our first gas shortage until 1976. And even as we worried over OPECs surprising stranglehold on oil production, our concern was mainly over reliable supply-lines and the economic implications of foreign-oil dependence. Catalytic converters were invented only to reduce smog in crowded, car-choked cities—we were still decades away from any concerns over carbon-footprints and greenhouse gasses.

We didn’t worry about recycling—the first recycling drives were reliant on the need to do something with all the garbage—we were busy picking up trash along the highways or vacant lots and it all had to go somewhere. Lots of it was bottles and cans—and so a push began to make them all deposit-return containers—to compensate the collectors. Recycling as a concept, as a way to mitigate against runaway consumption, came later.

We were focused on trying to “Make America Beautiful”. At the time, it was considered more important to raise the fines and enforce the laws against littering—doing something with all that trash that used to line the highways came much later. I can still remember a time when, on family trips, the end of a fast-food meal was the act of jettisoning all the trash out the car window, at speed. Nor did we have to undo our seatbelts to do it—nobody wore those things. Of course, without them, or a speed limit, Americans on the highways were dropping like flies. Today’s highway fatalities, while still the number four killer, are nothing compared to our old stats—today’s roads are baby-proofed in comparison.

We had worries—sure. But we trusted our leaders. We thought the world too big to be vulnerable to our industry. We thought that faraway people who hated the USA only affected our travel plans, not our national security. Everyone watched the same TV shows—everyone listened to the same radio stations—we were connected as a culture. And we still felt that oppressing women and minorities and the disabled was just the way of the world—and being gay was still the ‘love that dare not speak its name’. It wasn’t right—but boy, was it simpler. The fine judgments of the politically correct were still decades away—on the other hand, we didn’t laugh at its complexity yet, either. We were still busy trying to laugh it off, deride it back into invisibility.

Part of our difficulty with the present is that our many problems, and our social progress, contribute equally to the growing complexity of life. Complexity is a big problem. You give everyone a computer network that they can carry in their pocket and what do they do with it? Well, some of us plan trips to Mars, sure—but most of us use it to meet for drinks or play games. You offer greater complexity to the human race and only a few will dive in—the rest will look for the ‘easy’ exit, like Twitter, Snapchat, or Angry Birds.

Complexity is a deceptive indicator—we don’t want our problems to become more complex, but we are okay with the needs of social justice making our interaction more complex. Well, perhaps we’re not ‘okay’ with it, not all of us, certainly—but we accept its inevitability. It stands to reason that making sure we override our assumptions, forcing the equality of persons who may have never enjoyed equal status—is a complex process. The political correctness of our speech is nothing compared to the complexities of legislating equal rights, not to mention enforcing that legislation. And all of this is working against the inertia of generations of handed-down bias and hate.

Certainly it would be easier to get rid of all that hate—then we wouldn’t need to legislate social justice. But some things need to be brought out in the open—people can be childishly secretive, especially when their hearts tell them there’s something not quite right about their behavior. Domestic abuse, child abuse, corporal punishment—these things are still problems that trouble us—but the numbers are way down. Not so long ago, beating your spouse or your children—that was a personal decision you made behind the privacy of your own front door. And if things got bad enough that the authorities became involved, they turned a blind eye to whatever madness the head-of-the-household was indulging in. Now it is recognized as the felony it always should have been—and for the most part is treated that way (though pockets of ignorance persist).

My point is that if such obvious evil has traditionally been hugged to the patriarchs’ bosoms throughout most of history—if denying them that outrageousness is so relatively new—then we can see how much more difficult it is to try to limit prejudice and bias (merely mental violence) in our daily lives. The fact that some people ridicule political correctness just demonstrates how small they see that evil as being. They target the most progressive view possible, which admittedly can often have paradoxes and growing pains from being so new a concept—and deride the least thought-out aspects of it, as if that negated the value of social justice itself. Niggling whiners—they cherry-pick the weakest faults of the new, yet have beams in their eyes when it comes to the monstrous faults of the familiar, old ways.

Evil has time on its side—and tradition. Human civilization grows like a goat-path, retaining every kink and twist of its caveman days—the push for social justice is an attempt to straighten some of those pathways. And not only because it is right—though it is justice we seek—but also because society is more efficient when it affords choice and opportunity to every individual, when the weak are not oppressed by the powerful.

Human nature is on the side of evil—we are naturally greedy, selfish, and demanding creatures. The history of legislation is the history of people trying to outmaneuver the rules—so of course it becomes very complicated. Everyone has got an excuse why they should be exempt from the sacrifices implicit in fairness. Even those who benefit from new legislation will sometimes seek ways to get more than their fair share of opportunity. We are none of us saints—even the downtrodden have urges. Make a rule, any rule—and you’ll find you need to make five more, to modify the first—then ten more, to modify the other five.

In truth, legislation only enables the bare bones of justice—it is only when our culture has absorbed the spirit of the law and begun to live in that spirit, that the rules work properly—and, ironically, that’s when the rules become extraneous, their job completed. Take seat belts—people began using them to avoid getting a ticket—now they do it for safety, and teach their children to use them, too.

Even seat belts have their complexity. At the advent of seat-belt legislation, many complained that wearing the original lap-belt was as likely to cause harm as prevent it. The head rest and the shoulder strap were added, which made seat belts effective safety measures under virtually any conditions. It wasn’t until after these improvements that seat belt legislation could be enforced (because the cops could see the shoulder strap)—but it also made wearing seat belts the sensible thing to do.

Yes, everything was easier in the old days—but not better. We often yearn for simpler times—but they were simpler because they were dumber—we were dumber. Nobody used to use a keyboard—except stenos, secretaries, bookkeepers, and keyboard players—we wrote things down with a pencil—and if we needed two copies, we wrote it down twice. Nobody knew how to connect up wires on appliances—if appliances needed wires, they came with—or an expert installed them. Now toddlers hook up their own video game consoles. People used to disappear from our lives forever—just by moving far away. If you really wanted to, you could write them a letter (with your pencil), glue a stamp on it—and a bunch of people would pass it back and forth until it ended up in a mailbox. Imagine. You can still do that, you know—I wonder if anyone does?

We didn’t worry about climate change—oh, it was happening—we just didn’t have a bunch of satellites collecting sensor readings on the atmosphere over years of time—or recording time-lapse proof of the shrinking of the polar ice and the glaciers. All of that information is very new—which is why backward-looking folks can pretend it isn’t real. Old folks call it new-fangled—but new-fangled information is still data—it won’t go away—we can never go back. Yet it’s hard to blame them for trying—I’d like to go cruising again, myself.

Be Leaders (2016Jun22)

Posted by XperDunn on June 23, 2016

Wednesday, June 22, 2016 9:27 PM

I was criticizing a Brexit supporter online today, telling him that it made more sense to remain in the Union and work for change from within, rather than turning away and making the problems bigger through greater fragmentation. I suggested that they ‘be leaders’.

It wasn’t until after I made the comment and logged off that I began to think about what I meant. At first I figured I was just projecting—isn’t that how we Americans feel, that we need to lead by example? Sure, we’ve lost sight of that, or at least our government has—preferring to lead by intimidation, diplomacy, and military intervention—but our ideal is that we lead the world forward by exemplifying how much better things can be if we all get on the civilization bus.

But in considering that, I realized that there’s a more ‘boots on the ground’ aspect to leadership. We see it in the extraordinary stranglehold the NRA has on gun control legislation—and even on CDC studies of gun violence. This tiny group of followers show up for every meeting, every hearing, every vote—while the other 97% of us quietly bemoan the problem as we stare at our TV screens.

But the gun control problem is just the worst-case example of how small groups of activists can jam up our legislative machinery. The other lobbyists do equally people-unfriendly things—giving breaks to corporations, cutting off compensation for those wronged by corporations, strangling important agencies of safety regulation, turning a blind eye to Wall Street excesses, closing women’s health care centers—the list is long and daunting. Rust never sleeps.

And yet for most of us, the issue of politics boils down to ‘getting out the vote’. I think it’s clear now—voting is the first baby step. Voting only has real power when it is the end of our involvement, not the sole locus of our contact with it. When Bernie Sanders told his followers recently to run for office, he was saying something similar—just being a voter isn’t enough. There are dark forces out there—and they are doing much more than just voting every four years—they’re working all the time.

Leadership is involvement—involvement is leadership. The old analog process of town hall meetings may be passé. The NRA and other corporate lobbyists may have deep war chests. But if the Tunisians or the Egyptians, with nothing but the internet and some cell phones, can overthrow their governments, then we can certainly have some influence over our government, too. The only difference is the level of involvement. And if you think we are any less faced with demagoguery as an alternative, you haven’t been paying attention.

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