El Blog Que Es Un Poquito Màs Macho Que Fernando Lamas. A Companion to the Assassin Bug: On Baseball, Jews, Baseball and Jews, Politics,Politics and Baseball, the Musical Genius of Susanna Hoffs, Books, Plutocracy, and Piano Music, scribbled by an unapologetic liberal. Lately, including posts on parenting, divorce, moving, and my bad attitude. Contact at themetabug@gmail.com
Back to the workaday world.
Just a few links about our ever-crumbling separation of Church and State. And I do mean Church, because it ain’t gonna be synagogues, mosques, or temples.
Mexico’s not paying.
The residents near the border don’t support it.
The Pussy Grabber is losing popularity, therefore power and clout.
Caveat: If he builds a wall like the Stonehenge replica in Spinal Tap, it doesn’t count.
One of the saddest images in the world is that of the person who has thrown a party, yet no one has come. In fact, this fear is so great, so strong, so devastating, that even the #socalledpresident, the man commanding the world’s most powerful military, a man who truly believes that he is the pinnacle of human evolution, lives in such dread of it and its implications that he’s willing to drop everything else and obsess about it in front of the entire world. I guess the only thing sadder would be if he tried to throw a party every day, and the same Groundhog Day Fiesta Flop kept recurring.
But that’s not why we’re here today.
The editorial staff of the Meta-Bug was in crisis the other day. We were looking at our numbers for March, and while some of us were rejoicing over our biggest month ever, others were saying, Hey, look, bozos, you had a total of 900 views. One month, 900 views, which means even fewer visitors. And half of those were probably family. So big deal. If someone’s kid had his whole high school look at one single post on one single day (suggested post: kitten videos combined with pictures of a young Sophia Loren), that would have beaten the entire number for March by a more than double. To look at it another way, there were just 29 views per day in our busiest month ever. More people in just Framingham look at their Kleenex each to see if they have a sinus infection, and probably found analyzing their nasal discharge more interesting than reading our constant complaints about the country going to hell in a handbasket, occasionally interspersed with new and astounding revelations that divorce takes a toll.
We thought about this. We agonized about this. We pondered: Is all this writing and rewriting worth doing? Does the effort make any difference? Then, we all retired to the backyard to cry, while pretending to rake the leaves that we were too distracted to deal with last fall. Our answer: Of course it makes no difference!
But using logic here at the Meta-Bug is hardly our standing operating procedure. Nor, for that matter, is wise allocation of the limited amount of time we have on this earth. It appears that we do what we will, and let the buffalo chips fall where they may. (Generally, right next to the bowl of extra-picante bile salsa we are eating. Yum!)
Well, damn the torpedoes. We have decided to carry on. People practice their instruments for years and never get on stage. They have fun doing the practicing, and do not worry about people pointing to their accordion lessons and say, Aha! Evidence of a Crazed and Diseased Mind! And that’s the reason we wrote this post in the first place, right?
Happy Monday! We hope the weather, wherever you are, is suitable for turning grapes into raisins!
Evil Twin on the loose
They relish, they love, they bask in the glow of being able to say “Fuck You!” for 8 years.They hate what they’ve become and they have found their scapegoats in liberals who envision a fairer and more decent view of America. It’s not that they have any evidence to think that Der GropenFührer is anything other than the huckster he has proven himself to be. They just hate liberals. They hate they idea that a few lazy people scam the system while multitudes are helped–It’s so much easier than looking at how the plutocrats control their lives. They love the idea that any worth they have in life is only due to solely their own pure virtue, and can disallow the idea that luck might have had something to do with where they are in life. They now don’t have to admit that their own difficulties are due to inequities they are powerless to fight, but can instead blame it on the misguided good will of others. They can revel in their greed, and the uber-Gordon Gekkos of the world will tell them that that is all just and right. They can inflict their religious prejudices upon the minority by playing the victim. They can indulge their gut feelings that their genes are at least better than someone else’s. When we go to war, and other Americans pay the price, they can stand up for “G-d Bless America,” say that they support the troops, and feel absolved for making others pay the price for their jingoism. This is the triumph of the selfish minority. When the masses realize, if ever, that they’ve been cheering their own exploitation, it will be too late.
“Tomorrow is the Women’s Strike, the fourth of ten actions that have been called for by the organizers of the Women’s March on Washington. The strike was planned to coincide with International Women’s Day, and the march organizers, in tandem with a team organizing protests in forty countries around the world, have asked women to take whatever form of action their lives allow for. Take the day off from ‘paid and unpaid labor,’ including housework and child care, if you can, or avoid shopping at corporate or male-owned businesses, or simply wear red in solidarity. There will be rallies in at least fifty cities around the United States.”
OK, boycott the corporate masters for a day. I love boycotts (against companies I dislike) as much as the next liberal (or conservative, I suppose), but the fact is that they don’t really work. But the smaller the business, the greater chance it has for success. Can someone explain to this liberal male why the organizers would risk marginalizing or outright alienating a small-business owner by including this? (I’ll deal with the anti-Israel part at a later time).
The part about male-owned businesses is not in quotes, so I don’t know whether to attribute it to Ms. Tolentino or the organizers of the strike. Comments are open, folks, but be polite and, if you can, well-reasoned.
I’m occupied with other things today, but there’s always time to make it look like I’m actually paying attention.
From the NY Times, on feminism’s embrace of anti-Zionism–which although they will scream to the heavens that it isn’t, indeed is actually a form of anti-Semitism–and the bind that it puts Jewish feminists in;
From the Atlantic, on why being poor in Bangladesh might be better than being poor in Mississippi;
This, from Vox.com on the Republicans’ plan to make us get sicker and die faster;
And this, about our increasing military involvement in Iraq and Syria.
The comment was in response to my last post, where I said that #45 had bugged the phones of anyone who ever tweeted ‘#notmypresident’, and then snidely remarked that there is no way anyone can disprove it. It’s the laziest and most obnoxious form of argument in the world (that was my point), because it’s impossible to disprove a negative.
The post was in response to #45’s completely unsupportable and absurd tweet that Trump Tower was bugged by the Obama administration. The tweet appears to be more a child’s lashing out than a well-founded accusation based on evidence.
Someone on WordPress found the post, and told me, simply, to go to hell.
I have to admit I was, and am still disturbed by this. A total stranger, someone who knows neither me nor my friends and family, wishes me dead, ostensibly for having a strong opinion that he or she doesn’t like. Hardly anybody reads this third-rate blog. It serves mostly as what I think of as my Walt Whitman space, but far less eloquent, poorly reasoned, and if it were on paper it would be guilty of the old insult, “not worth the paper it’s printed on.” (Let it be said in its favor, it does have bad pictures to go with it.) Yet someone found it, and then was so incensed by what I wrote that s/he wants me to not only die , but suffer in eternity as well.
I didn’t approve the comment for publication under the post for the simple reason that there are plenty of places on the internets where people can hurl invective at each other; it’s not my responsibility to provide more.
But I do have to admit: I am disturbed by this and wonder what the something is that’s happening here.
My iPhone gave up the ghost yesterday, which will definitely aid in giving my weary psyche a rest. I bought a replacement plan, but the phone is back-ordered, so I’m phoneless for a few days. I’ll survive.
The kids are with their mother this weekend, and do I miss talking to them. In their teenage distraction, they do NOT miss talking to me. I’m OK with that. I hope that they’re having fun.
This weekend the Republican Jewish Coalition is meeting in Las Vegas, at Sheldon Adelson’s (Jews We Wish Were Gentile) Venetian Den of Iniquity and Gambling Hall. Among the assholes that the RJC wishes to honor are Dick Cheney, whose qualifications are promoter of false intelligence, war profiteer, torture advocate and guilt-free accomplice in the death of over 4,000 American soldiers and marines and who knows how many civilians; Cheney’s evil homophobic spawn; and Mike Pence,champion of turning the United States into a Christian theocracy yet sell-out to perhaps the most un-Christian president in US history. FYI to Jewish Republicans: Christian theocracies have not been good to us. cf. Spanish Inquisition vs. Golden Age of Jewry in Spain.
The “condescending crumbs” quote comes courtesy of the Anne Frank center.
As for tRump finally saying anti-Semitism is a bad thing:
wow. gee-whiz. Of course, the real news is that even if you are ultra-Orthodox that you’ve never met anyone that is as anti-Semitic as tRump. Who’da thunk?
To which we say:
NB: I’m not writing about Yiannopoulos. This is already too much recognition.
The Meta-Bug 
