Actually I did several things this weekend. The one that's unusual, that I'll probably remember longest, was using Rajani Radhakrishnan's list of National Poetry Writing Month prompts to schedule at least the outline of a post for every single day in April. I felt some trepidation about this because, if anything happens to me or my computer, some posts will go live in a baffling incomplete form...but I will try to work ahead of schedule so they'll all be complete and beautiful, apart from the Petfinder posts, which are filled in with photos as close as possible to the time they go live.
This scheduling also provides for some bonus posts, to make up for the ones that weren't posted during last winter's hiatus.
And I also found some links. And did some knitting, while reading a new e-book. And buried some kittens, on whom Serena's judgment had been "I'll do what I can but I really don't think they have a chance," and she was right. (But she was sad about it; after a last attempt to revive the calico kitten, by which time the ginger kitten had died, she solicited a purr-and-cuddle session, which is not something Serena normally even tolerates. Meh. Cats who adopt kittens aren't planning to have more kittens of their own and, precious though "Serena-Seralina's" kittens are, it would be nice if glyphosate were banned before she gave birth to any more fur-covered tragedies...one year one little head was not even fur-covered.) And burned some vines. And even found a way to celebrate the most important feast day in the Christian calendar (however badly the calendar mangles it--see below). It was a deliciously busy weekend, if not altogether delightful.
Animal
Cheetah photo from Roberta-writes.com:
Cheetahs are a wildlife species I like. They can be tamed, not as cuddly pets, more like hunting dogs or watchdogs. They're fast, and they look adorable.
Books
Well, I sort of called it...I wanted to review this book, instead of the one about the sociopathic clergy-woman's love-hate relationship with the teenager she's helped-harmed. Botheration. I still haven't read it yet; if any of you readers have a secondhand copy to spare, I'll trade--your choice of a vintage Stephen King, a vintage Louis L'Amour, or whatever else you fancy that I still have for sale.
Music
One of the wholesome raps. There used to be such things, as Dom Lucre recently reminded the world. The sound of rap may be inherently aggressive, just as the sound of a limerick may be inherently goofy--at least those associations are strong enough that it would be very hard to write a sweet song of motherly love in rap style, or a serious poem in limerick form. Nevertheless there used to be raps, from Run-DMC to Queen Latifah to this delightful song to the school song one of my sisters' classes performed, that said something loud and clear, something bold and in-your-face, without being about vice and violence. It is possible to rap out messages like "This is fun!" or "Hang in there!" or "Behave yourself!" or, as here, "I'm succeeding!"
From the other end of the spectrum of "modern":
These are twelve-stringed electronic instruments played more or less as guitars are played...
Politics (Election 2024)
For young, healthy presidential candidates, the tradition of picking a running mate as life insurance has worked well. For Biden, Trump, and Kennedy...well, McCain picked a running mate as a statement that "a vote for me is a vote for her," and although he lived long enough that a vote for him would not in fact have been a vote for Palin, we can see why that failed to become a tradition. Candidate Shanahan clearly has life insurance value, but does Kennedy look healthy enough that the voters will accept her as life insurance?
Trump could sooo easily take up Glyphosate Awareness. Bayer really is offering a glyphosate-free version of "Roundup," though all "pesticides" breed more nuisance species so their use should always be avoided, and other chemical companies are seeing the need to get this insidious poison out of the food supply too. Trump and his family have health concerns that are known to be aggravated by glyphosate--virtually all chronic health concerns are. Among the health-conscious, highly literate, tech-sophisticated cognoscenti who form Kennedy's base, seriously, Trumpistas, Glyphosate Awareness is not even an issue any more. It's a given. It's like "We've known all of this stuff for years, why can't we move on to more groundbreaking research on the peril of mRNA vaccines, what is wrong with the people who aren't 100% behind a total glyphosate ban and why do we even need to talk to them, and how far back must we go if we do?" Whether we feel like it or not, we are an elite class and must resist the tendency to elitism. By joining Glyphosate Awareness--no worries, we don't ask for money, and how elite is that?--Trump and his supporters would merely show that their brains have not completely fossilized yet, that Trump is more aware of what's going on now than his official opponent is. By being part of the broader backlash against the global-dictatorship agenda that has given Kennedy a base, Trump would be doing the genuinely Christian thing, and would also get the support of a large part of Kennedy's base.
I think that would be the best outcome, myself. Robert Kennedy started out in life as a spoilt brat who did a lot of damage to himself and others, and it shows. As a mature man he's done a lot of good to others. He's been a real Irish Chieftain in the movement, rallying a broad and diverse network of people of every religious, political, and philosophical persuasion and even from different interest groups in aid of a whole array of good causes. It didn't always look as if he'd inherited his father's and uncles' charm and talent, but he has. They were real leaders. So is he. Real leaders sometimes work better in other positions than the figurehead role of the Presidency--especially when their voices are raspy and their faces look "old."
We have no real historical precedent, beyond Andrew Jackson's completely different leadership in a completely different situation, for a leader having personal reasons to challenge a very sensitive and dangerous component of "the system" itself. Candidate Kennedy has already challenged the most dangerous group of people in Washington. He is certainly qualified to make the statement I've asked all people who are publicly active in Glyphosate Awareness to make: "If I die tomorrow, I'll still have lived longer and done more than most human beings ever did; if I live another fifty years, I'll still have a long list of things to do." Still, if Trump and the Republicans could absorb enough new information to realize that Glyphosate Awareness, and the COVID vaccine backlash, and the more general awareness that children need to be active outdoors, and the more severely handicapped "mental health movement" toward a better understanding of Prozac Dementia, and the True Green (as distinct from Poison Green) movement itself, are for their benefit too, they'd have the greater part of Kennedy's network and they'd have the election.
Biden...I am sorry to say this. I don't know that he's ever been a bad man so much as a thoughtless, go-along-to-get-along, less-than-he-ought-to-have-been sort of man. He first achieved fame by letting his staff get away with dishonest work, then kept his job by doing whatever his party told him to do for the next forty years, and has most recently let his party make a public display of his growing "old" with considerably less grace than Ronald Reagan did. I think, in his case, most of the bad things about his administration can be blamed on other people more than him, and at least he's been gentlemanly enough not to use people's youth or minority status or controversial views to make them "fall guys" for all the unpopular things his administration's done. But his administration has been almost as easy to hate as his son is. I don't know why the Ds are even bothering to propose him and Mean Girl Harris for another campaign. In anything resembling an honest election, they have no chance; their nomination has the smell of a dishonest election strategy. I think we are looking at a Trump--Kennedy race, which, if some people have their way, will be followed by an election blatantly dishonest enough to be the first election that actually is disallowed.
I hope youall checked out that link to John Scalzi's blog. I hope you noticed his blog's "wallpaper" and have heeded its message. I think Scalzi feels about Trump very much as I feel about Biden and Harris; I don't like Trump, but he's demonstrated the ability to get into the White House and behave with some sense of the dignity of the office while he was there. I think we all need to get out and vote against the present administration. I'm not asking you to vote for Trump; I'm not asking you to vote for Kennedy. Vote for a Libertarian. Write in "Abraham Lincoln" or "The Maryland Terrapins" or "Ford Fairlane." I just think Old Joe needs to retire, and the tormentors who've been telling him not to retire need the experience of counting ballots and saying to one another, "We're not quite running last--we seem to be in between 'the dog who played Old Yeller' and broccoli." The world needs to know that this administration is soooo o-vah.
The voters can remember, firsthand, that COVID-19 was only just barely more noticeable than coronavirus always has been and will be. It was a chest cold. You knew your health was below par if you could tell when you had it. Few if any working people would have had any difficulty working all the way through it. We dutifully did our quarantine, and enjoyed days of...I don't know what you did, but I moved furniture and pruned trees. The idea of locking down everything "to slow the spread of the virus" came from outside our country, with a clear intention of damaging our national economy, and that it certainly did. Our elders died of pneumonia, as most of them would have done anyway, only we weren't able to receive their last blessings. A lot of businesses are still closed. A lot of young part-time workers are still unemployed, and on welfare. And then we got "the clot-shots." And while a lot of people simply saw no need to bother with a vaccine for a chest cold forpityssake, while the vaccine campaign in Virginia used the "People in other countries need this vaccine" in a way that generated a reaction like "Well, since it's a vaccine against a nothingburger of a 'disease' I just enjoyed a two-week vacation with, those people are certainly welcome to mine!"...nevertheless. The Biden administration killed a lot of people's relatives and, I emphasize as an administration, now it must die.
The quickest way to kill it would be for Trump to read up on the science in the CHD literature. Not that the Children's Health Defense's daily or weekly newsletter is a science journal. It's anything but. It is a 'zine, like the Blaze or the Daily Kos, with some summaries of material from real science journals, some news stories, some blog posts, and some possibly misguided rants about what some people perhaps erroneously think is contributing to their chronic illness. A fundamental presupposition of the CHD newsletters is that their readers can tell which is which and don't need to have the voices of private people censored. But Trumpistas have enough campaign funding to buy the science journals CHD cites. I don't, and I don't ask for it; they have it, and they should use it. Do the science.
After doing the science the Trumpistas will, if they have children or grandchildren, feel inclined to support CHD. It's about children's health, not politics; it's a movement that has managed to unite the Far Left and the Far Right on specific issues, for factual reasons.
So then I say we keep Trump at the top of the ticket, because he is older and because the name "Kennedy" sounds almost as perilous, to voters old enough to remember, as the name "Bush" does, in the context of the White House. We need no more blood-feud wars on Bushes and we need no more homicidal maniacs screaming about family curses on Kennedys. (If they ever had one, other than the normal effects of being reckless young men, Senator Teddy broke it.) Let Trump make a deal with Kennedy about whichever position of influence he wants--Vice-President or Cabinet Secretary or whatever else. Put them on one ticket, and there will be no way for the Bidenistas to cheat. In precincts like mine, where people who've bought outdoor campaign signs bring them to the polling site, the front of the polling site will be a solid mass of whichever color the Trump-AND-Kennedy supporters choose--red, green, or orange. It won't be possible to map multicolor districts as blue because there won't be multicolor districts.
We need diversity in leadership, which means we probably need two or more parties for the folks in Rio Linda, and the Democratic Party has a long and sometimes even honorable history, but the Ds have painted themselves into a corner with this idiocy of trying to reelect Biden and Harris. They need a shut-out election to let the paint dry, regroup, and choose a more moderate and rational course than they've followed in the last twenty years.
And Shanahan...needs to go back to school. She has talent. If her miseducation can be corrected she may accomplish some good in the world some day. She does not need to be Vice-President now.
Writing
Prompts for those doing NaPoWriMo...Will I do it? We shall see. Just looking at the list gives me some ideas for dreadfully cute introductions to the running-theme posts. It won't be the first time I've done Petfinder posts in verse...
No comments:
Post a Comment