The Thing about Getting Old: part III

Current events still piss you off but matter less, so you start making art that is more abstract, more personal and less legible.

Old people are selfish.

The Thing about Getting Old: part II

I've made uncompromising choices based on perceived knowledge at the time I made them that have brought me to "the now".  I don't particularly like the now, but I enjoyed the journey.

The worst of both worlds: trump follows bernie's advice on Carrier deal

A while back I hoped that fate would spare us from having either a president Trump or a Sanders:

two bad worlds

Well it seems like fate has given America both of them with Trump following Bernie's suggestion on the Carrier deal.

Yay.

Commie Capitalism

In the report I link to above, the reporter points out that the way Trump bullied Carrier into keeping some jobs in the US is no different than the sort of things France does.  Hell, I love France, but if we are going to run our incentives as they do over there, we better be prepared to accept 24% youth ("youtt" in New York-ese) unemployment.

France Stats

recount

One has to wonder what the Clintons have promised Jill Stein for her to stir up all this recount business.  Moreover, what do they expect from it... Maybe they just want to screw with The Donald to the point where he proves, even to his converted, that he is totally unfit for the office.

Prediction:

They will fail.

I want to be President

What it feels like but without the happy ending:
minute 18:37 to 19:45




Of course a similar scenario is what Trump was inciting while he was running...  And now, apparently, actually winning the presidency is just not enough for him:

"I want the popular vote"

one more prediction

Trump will make Hilary and the Clinton foundation look positively honest

conflict, what conflict?

The Thing About Getting Old: part one

Yesterday the Ranting Economist was watching CNBC, as he is wont to do when he comes home from work, and the talking heads “du moment” were discussing the new Snapchat glasses.  One of them was wearing, testing, and testifying about one when I looked up from whatever corporeal haptic thing I was doing and said, not wistfully but objectively, “I am finally old.”

I am finally old because I could give a fuck about Snapchat and its glasses.  And isn’t that what old means: to no longer give a fuck about young people’s entertainment forms and to pay attention to them only in so far as their stock value is concerned?   … Though I have no doubt that the youth of today who dream up these platforms are themselves thinking of valuation while most of the users just want to have fun as they become one more set of statistics at which to direct ads to… 

So I’m old, not proudly but matter-of-factly, and it’s not all that bad.

The Future

Donald Trump will spend a great deal of the next four years

tweeting about all the ways the media has wronged him.

mark my words

Lets just hope he does not jail its members 
as so many of the world leaders he seems to admire do.

What now?

Now that Leonard Cohen is dead, who's gonna keep us honest?





I guess it's up to that other old jew...

The protests are unfair?!!!

Trump tweets that the protests against him are unfair.  Here is a man who has no conception of what he has just done by winning this election. For the first time I am politically very afraid, and I was born and lived under a dictatorship until I came to this country.

Desenfranchised Shmenfranchised

The truly disenfranchised in this nation are those of us in the great middle who are always faced with having to make a choice between the devil on the right and the devil on the left.  Voting in a country where no one is willing to compromise about anything has become a most unpleasant Sisyphean task.  I am so tired of voting for the person I find less unpleasant and only likely to infringe on some of my rights instead of all of them.  We have been doing this for decades and all that has happened is that people have become more polarized and uglier while the country and the planet have literally been falling apart.  I am really sick and tired of it; and now with Trump in office I fear the parties will only get even more polarized with the left trying to win by going Warren and Sanders way, and god only knows where the right will go next (!).  I'm just sick of it.

good morning america

holy shit

Last Week at Orsay

I did not visit the Louvre; I can only imagine the sea of phones in front of the little Mona Lisa!

Lawrence Weschler wrote a book about Robert Irwin called Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the thing One Sees, these days one might just write a book called Seeing is Forgetting to Look Altogether...

A Provincial Reading of Half Truths

Hallo blog, long time no write about overheard conversations in the locker room of our local pool.  Not that I haven’t gotten pissed off in general mind you, it’s just that I have not had the desire to relive those moments in written words; but today’s overheard conversation is still rattling around in my over-tired brain that has not fully accepted the fact that two days ago it was in Paris and now it is back to the provinces where once upon a time I felt at home but in my old(er) age no longer have the patience for, so here goes:  

Today, as I started peeling off my bathing suit in the shower, I heard the voice of A, a very sweet woman from other shores, say to B, a not so sweet woman from these here parts, “I saw a documentary about Brazil yesterday, it was awful!  It was about… what are those people who live on the hills called?”  …. My mind is silently screaming, “favelados” and I am thinking, “Here we go again, all the clichés and sensationalist unbalanced bullshit that the media likes to dole out.”  And I am cursing, “Goddamn it Brazil, couldn’t you just have been satisfied with having the Copa (World Cup)?!  You barely pulled that one out of your ass and you just had to have the hubris to bribe your way into having the Olympics too!?”  It’s been a long time since I have been to that beautiful land, but I was born and raised in it and to see it fail so miserably saddens me profoundly.

Back to the shower…  

While A is trying to remember the Brazilian word for slum, B, who apparently has hosted a Brazilian student in her house at some point, says, “Yes, Brazil is in a world of hurt.  Now, that’s socialism for you!”  At which point I no longer can contain myself and say from behind my shower curtain, “Brazil is not socialist.”  “What are they?” she asks.  I respond with, “They are capitalists like us, they just have a very corrupt government.”  I refrain from saying, “It’s just that their government is even more corrupt than ours.”  I also refrain from saying, “Norway is a socialist country and they don’t seem to be in a world of hurt, you do the math.” 

B did not respond to the world shattering news I had just delivered from behind my shower curtain; and while A kept talking about open sewers in the favelas, B kept on spouting about how even rich Brazilians don’t have central heating or air-conditioning, all the while assuming it to be one more national failure instead of questioning why it is that so few people have either.  In a place where it never freezes and where opening the windows pretty much cools you off, people might not need climate controls.... Granted, climate change is affecting temperature extremes all over the world and it is indeed very cold in parts of Brazil this year; if this continues, residential construction practices will catch up to the changes, commercial ones already have, and people will eventually have air and heat because, contrary to popular American belief, not all Brazilians live in favelas, no matter how the media is spinning it at the moment….

Playing with some crazyass colors today

The Future

Amazon warehouse

My husband uses CNBC as the de facto background sound of our home life, so for a week now I’ve been hearing news of the demise of retail businesses because people are doing their shopping on Amazon.  Today, again, numbers for companies were spouted out and the numbers for Target were terrible.  Upon hearing this, my husband started his usual diatribe against the store, something like, “Yeah, they used to have nice stuff now they’re just eh.”  I retorted with the fact that they still had nice stuff tucked between the mountains of average crap, but like all retail, they are being killed by Amazon; in fact I just got an email from Amazon telling me that I will get free 2-day shipping on any electronic item I buy from “IT”.

All of a sudden I had a clear vision of our not so distant future landscape.  Picture miles of our derelict infrastructure dotted with the empty shells of the warehouses where we presently consume our high margin goods made in China.  These will become the roofs under which a great portion of the population who no longer can find decent, let alone meaningful, employment will seek shelter while they shoot up the free heroin doled out by the government.  The heroin will be paid for by the revenue from taxes paid by a tiny middle class, the members of which will look like giant blobs of flesh* attached to computer terminals, making their purchases on line from Amazon, whose warehouses will be manned by robots and whose goods will be delivered by drones. Brave New World indeed, though Huxley’s was clean, orderly and pleasant compared to what I see will be ours.  

Mark my words.

*  I confess this part of the vision was aided by an episode of South Park in which the kids got addicted to a video game and turned into giant disgusting blobs of flesh whose bodily needs were attended to by their mothers.  On South Park it was hilarious.

Obama goes to Riyadh to tell them what's what.

Anyone who happens to improbably fall on my blog because they were searching for the word "Obama" knows I am not a fan of the man as president.  President Obama is an abysmal president/manager/CEO of THIS particular country, The US of A as it was designed and the way it developed historically.  However, as bad an executive as I think he is, I just can’t help it, I more often than not agree with his impulses...

Obama goes to Riyadh

Lost in the Supermarket

While waiting to pay for my bag of onions, I  got saved!  

So many miracles!

yep...

Chris Chritie's endorsement of Donald Trump just confirms his lack of good judgement...  ...though he might just be vying for the vice president slot, after all he is sneaky and impulsive...

Isis in Lybia?

Another of President Obama's foreign policy pearls

out of touch

The Republican establishment either under or over estimated the American public. It either underestimated it by thinking it was too stupid to vote for anything other than the grand ol' status quo or that it was too smart to vote for something so out of left field as a Donald Trump,   What they certainly did, as did the Democratic party was underestimate the power of a good populist message on either side.

I blame Hollywood

Reality TV is the undoing of this country. Ironically, the liberals in California Studios have brought this about.  Years of profitable advertising for Trump. 

Congratulations Hollywood.

mmoment

What's Reality Got to Do With It? ...Or Bolsheviks for the Apparatchick

...In this first primary a lot of people, many young ones with no sense of history among them, are excited by Bernie Sanders because they see him as revolutionary and anti-establishment.  I am sitting here wondering what exactly that means.  The man has been suckling at the establishment tit for 25 years; he has been in congress for twenty effing five years ()!, even if representing the tail end of its distribution.  He is the establishment.

We've been living on hope for eight years while the world has been falling apart around us, and all some people seem to be able to do is vote for Napoleon?   ...Both Trump and Bernie are certainly populists and would surely win if they ran together... ...Fate help us either way.