#NeverTrump to the end

At this point, Trump’s words and positions no longer matter. His campaign speaks for itself.

He has run the most vile, disgusting, scurrilous, childish campaign of lies I have ever seen in my life… and I’m from Chicago! He cannot be allowed to hold high office. He shouldn’t even be allowed in the door of a government office. He is fundamentally unfit to be Commander In Chief and the nation’s top police officer. His character deficiency, as evidenced by the campaign he has run; is not arguable, fixable, or defensible.

He does not deserve my vote any more than Hillary does, and it will be a cold day in Hell before either one of them gets it.

#NeverTrump to the very end.

There is no giant band of dead rock stars in Heaven

Everyone who knows me knows I’m a huge prog fan, especially ELP. Keith Emerson was the best there has ever been, at synth and keyboards.

He literally had a God-given talent. He was a musical prodigy, composing at the age of 6. By his early teens he was touring as a star.

He was credited by Dr Robert Moog as being a prime mover behind the development of synthesizer technology that we take for granted today; we can buy a keyboard at Walmart today that would have needed a semi truck and small staff 4 decades ago. The Walmart beater is far more capable, too.

Along the way, new genres of music sprang up from his work. Techno and electronica are 2 of them. ELP has been called ‘The Grandfathers Of Techno’, and it’s not because of Greg Lake’s bass riffs. Very few musicians can claim new branches of music. He was one of them.

And yet, he died alone and in despair. He had come to such a state that he put a gun to his head. He had done a lot of drugs and that had taken its toll. I don’t know if he was saved or not; I’d guess not. That saddens me greatly.

There is no giant band of dead rock stars in Heaven.

And there ain’t no electric guitars in Hell.

Or even a place to plug them in.

Trump exposes the rot in our culture

It’s not that Trump’s crypto-fascist campaign is unusual in and of itself. There have been many dangerous fringe candidates in the past, from Eugene Debs to Lyndon Larouche. None of them really had a chance, ultimately. The reason was that the message didn’t resonate with the voters. Perot, the one standout, managed only to guarantee a Clinton win. We’ve been down this road before. But this time, there’s a big difference; an audience receptive to fascist overtones and undertones.

 

A portion of the American electorate is openly espousing a philosophy that died with Mussolini 71 years ago.  That’s the truly scary part. Of all possible factors to blame, I would submit that the first is public education. People with fathers and grandfathers that died fighting this philosophy and rooting it out of Europe, now proudly their love for it with a hand in the air and a puffy dictator to wrap in their flag. With raucous voices like a mob from The Simpsons, they call for ridiculous and even illegal fixes to problems they themselves supported creating in the first place. They cannot be reasoned with, and have rejected rational thought. Formerly thoughtful men have become chanting drones like some nightmarish and real version of The Pod People.

If we don’t stop this Dictator Baby Hands now, we certainly won’t be able to in January. The problem isn’t with him so much as it is a problem within us. The shameful rise of this Fraudulent Asspumpkin is an indictment of our culture.

Worth Fighting For.

A beautiful Saturday morning. I’m drinking fine quality coffee, some of the best ever to grace the palate of man.

It has been shipped from the other side of the planet; where it’s tomorrow already.

With my coffee habit alone, I help employ some cool people along the way, who work at the same place I met my wife… the best wife a man could ever want.

I’m inconveniencing trillions of electrons, communicating with anyone on the entire planet in a heartbeat, just to make this note, and I can do it on a whim.

Not the richest man in history, nor the mightiest king or terrible conqueror, was able to do this before America….

… before capitalism.

I can watch submarines probe that city deep under the Dead Sea, or stream live video from some guy on the top of Mt Everest.

It occurs to me, that even with all that’s wrong, can go wrong, will go wrong…

I am still blessed in ways that would be hard to ever imagine.

Even concieve of;

before America.

Before capitalism.

Yes, I think we should look at it in a different perspective.

It’s “God blessed America”.

It means something.

We were blessed in ways humans had never known, and it’s worth standing for.

Obama’s Gay Marriage Gambit

Obama’s sudden ‘evolution’ on gay marriage should have been, ultimately, about as surprising as a sunrise. Any analyst worth his salt can see that it accomplished very little; and probably hurt his chances in November. Those who were going to vote for him anyway were not the kind of people turned off by the prospect of gay couples playing kissy-face for photos in every courthouse in America. It did, however, galvanize and energize Evangelical voters in the South, helping woo them towards the Yankee Mormon that they aren’t particularly enamored with.

He knows he’s fighting against 30+ states that have passed pro-hetero marriage laws. The timing, coming the day after yet another win for opponents of gay marriage in North Carolina, was not accidental. He is attempting to capitalize on leftist outrage and maximize his own base turnout. But he knows that’s not going to save him against a much larger wave of outrage from the other 2/3rds of the electorate over his handling of the economy, foreign policy, Fast & Furious, the shabby treatment of Israel, and support for the terrorism-inclined socialists and anarchists of the Occupy movement. Oh no. This was not about winning in November at all.

What is Barack Obama, really? He is, as much as anything else (and probably more), a narcissist. Faced with the prospect of possibly being on the losing end of the biggest landslide since Reagan, he has started to contemplate how history will judge his presidency. He must have concluded he needed something historical; as if one policy stance could outweigh reams of data showing that he has been a complete and utter catastrophe, economically and militarily speaking. It wasn’t so much an act of desperation, as it was an attempt to accentuate something ‘positive’, such as it were. He needed at least one ‘positive’, and this was what he came up with. It really and truly was, the best he could do.

Even a high school kid understands that no Federal Law concerning marriage at all will pass Constitutional muster, and any fight will lead right back to the states. Even if he could unilaterally impose such a law, it wouldn’t be worth the paper it’s printed on and the issue would find its own equilibrium. Most states would still ban gay marriage, just as they do now. There is no way he could progress the issue, even with his beloved Executive Orders. It just wouldn’t stick. He’s not being delusional, he’s being afraid. Afraid of running out of time to have something chiseled on his political tombstone other than ‘First Black President’ and ‘Destroyer Of The Economy’.

The problem with seizing the narrative is, you have to be able to do it every day. He has seized it for tomorrow’s headlines. He just plain doesn’t have a follow-up for the day after that, or next Monday. He’s gonna need a lot more George Zimmermans and Trayvon Martins and Gay Marriages over the next 6 months.