Walkabout Throughts #41

My thoughts, Stream of consciousness, rough and ready, while walking off long Covid and listening to podcasts…from Tuesday, June 13, 2023.

Weather for the day… 58 and overcast and although I can’t see it, I can feel I’m walking through a very sparse mist. It has 20 or so percent chance of rain in the afternoon so I’m hoping I don’t get rained on and want to finish 5 miles today like I did two days ago.

Podcast for the day podcast “Pod Save America“ episode, "Re-Indicted And It Feels So Good (with Hillary Clinton!)".

Interesting about January 6 in the 1930s in France, today known as "January 6" as it is here in America now, because of a similar occurrence. Interesting how damaging binary thinking is. It forces non-gender specific people painfully into a mold they don’t fit. It leads to religious abuses. It leads to, as we see today, toxic conservatism and overtaking of the Republican Party by whatever group is able to subvert it. The Tea Party, MAGA, whatever the hell they've got available in some whiny autocratic abusive cruel criminal. As we all know this time, it’s Donald Trump. 

I’m not saying we need to dive into absolute non-binary thinking. Myself I am a confusing mixture of ideologies founded in the concept of right and wrong, but as a guideline only. As heterosexual, cisgendered, somewhat old-fashioned in many ways in my fundamentals. I was raised out of the 1950s and having moved to autocratic Franco, Spain in 1958 with a stop from Tacoma in Philadelphia where the bulk of our family lived. Perhaps also being born ADHD with a mother who had a very interesting character herself, but very accepting of others. I've tried all my life to see outside of standard, black and white, binary thinking. Some of that came from my solid foundation in my nuclear family being repeatedly broken up in various ways, moving at three years of age to another country, which alone was interesting I suppose. 

After a couple of years with our family in Philadelphia, in 1960 we traveled back to where I was born in Tacoma, Washington with our mom’s new husband (whom at 4, I begged not to marry), with a new baby. Have you ever been introduced to the marvels of a modern city and then taken back a backward town and told this is your new (old) home (again)? That was Tacoma, Washington, in 1960. The Seattle Worlds Fair in 1963 was a saving grace.

Before we moved back to Tacoma in Philadelphia, mom and her new guy took my sister and I to see a museum. We actually walked through the giant heart and saw an exhibition where you could literally get into a rig and feel like you’re walking on the moon, with a moonscape as background. Then we move to  Tacoma and we go to the town museum. It had various standalone wood and glass displays around an empty wooden room. To me at the time, at 5, it was horrific. 

I learned (and acquired) my mom’s love of vampire movies in the late 50s when I entered the world of horror, films, and science-fiction via late night movies on TV when I woke up one night and watched a film with her in her room (alone, no new husband yet). Later in Tacoma, as soon as I could get someone to teach me to read, so I could read the Sunday newspaper comic section to myself without having to wait for everyone else to read the newspaper first… I dove into learning to read better as fast as I could. Eventually, in my grandmother reading me sci fi fiction novels, I got into reading some of the greatest science-fiction writers of all time. 

These were mostly men who presented advanced concepts, not well established in the human society of  America in the 1950s or 60s. But they also did their best to explore the world and the potential universe at large taking us beyond our petty beliefs and mores. Offering us insight through alien encounters, and venturing into other dimensions. As a parent. when my youngest declared they were gay and then trans, through difficult and at times scary, high school years, these were all things not in my experience as a kid, or an adult. 

As miserable as my childhood could be at times with a stepfather who really didn’t like me much, and could be a scary SOB, I refused ever to even think about suicide. Self harm? Just never came to mind. And I never knew anyone who did that as a kid. I never heard about it until a couple of decades ago. Though I have to say, one of my kids did point out I seemed to have had suicidal tendencies growing up. However, I pointed out back to them that what I did back then in my risk seeking behaviors, was to do it professionally. 

An adult once told me when I was a child, when I said I was scared of going in our basement… "Face your fears or you will forever be running from them". Well, I wasn’t gonna put up with that! So I faced my fears, which eventually led to thrill seeking behaviors. Or “dangerous behaviors“ as some saw them. But I also saw it, as my grandmother taught both my mother and I, to find the best and most professional teachers and instructors you can to learn from. 

So I learned from some of the best. My risks were calculated and thought out, while others may have seen them as, dangerous behaviors. I don’t see how that’s being “suicidal“. While to the outsiders, it may have appeared suicidal. This has a parallel to our non-binary thinkers today. I was different because of ADHD. As in my failing math in grade school. I could calculate math in my head, but I couldn’t do it on paper. So we in our binary, cookie cutter, 18th or 19th century, anachronistic, factory oriented school system to feed industry, I was told I had to show my work. They couldn’t correct my math if I didn’t show it. If you don’t show your work, you can’t see where your mistakes are. 

That’s great and everything. But it caused me great misery over a long time. I have to wonder, had they not thought in a binary fashion, had they taken what I had intrinsically and built upon those skills, what could I have done in my head and would I have succeeded in math/ Rather than failing math all through K through 12? Recently, I read in my DNA analysis that I have exceptional mathematical skills. If that’s true, then they were squashed as a child. Because I couldn’t do in it the way other kids did. I thought, differently...and that was "wrong". Why?

But they needed me to be the same as everyone else. Back in the 60s, the deficient or seemingly deficient, and the exceptional, had to bring themselves into the center of their class as an average to make it through that cookie cutter style of education. It happens when you don't have enough money in a school system to deal with all involved and that was the model and today still is in many ways, in many places and from how many thing. It's very American Republican. 

I learned recently through Temple Grandin in a talk she gave recently that in my spectrum of autism being ADHD, I’m a visual thinker. Which I actually tried to explain to others when I was younger, but it made no sense to anyone. She said in her talk that when you’re like that, you’re a bottom/up thinker and you need a lot of information up front. Which is exactly what I’ve seen. When I would share that with others, I would typically lose them. 

So yeah back around to the beginning… I get what non-binary thinkers are saying, in many ways. I understand where the LGBTQ+ people are coming from. I was long an advocate of alternate lifestyles, at least for a heterosexual cisgendered orientation, my orientation. Well, I don’t understand many of their provocations and insistence on being overly focused in sexuality, eroticism and performance but it's a choice, to be sure. The older I get, the less I find that interesting or fascinating. 

Though I get what They're doing, pushing back against the tidle wave of everything against him. And they’re doing everything they can to explore and exemplify their differences. Doesn’t mean anyone needs to hate them, doesn’t mean anyone needs to pass thousands of anti-trans bills, some of which can kill them. Or the tide of ignorance that literally has killed them and still does. Or in not even thinking outside the box just allowing women to have their rights over their own bodies, rather than oppression if not death, in anti-abortion laws. Taking something fundamental to females and skewing that into abuse through religious, nonsense, which we should’ve matured through hundreds if not thousands of years ago, is ridiculous. And many of them know that, but they do this for power and political purposes, disregarding our citizens and their rights.

If you wonder why non-binary people can be so extremist or hypersensitive? Let me kick you hard any place you prefer and then let me kick you repeatedly until you can’t take it anymore, then let me walk away and sneak up on you and kick you there again, and see then if your version, your reaction, isn’t extremist and hypersensitive. That’s what we're seeing with these people, these non-binary thinkers, these LGBTQ+ people, who go through this abuse every day of their life, making them ever wary and more frightened, literally because their friends have been beaten to death. It all becomes much more understandable under those considerations, doesn’t it?

So while I don’t live their orientation, I don’t get all of their world? I get my own, and there's room for others in it. Since childhood, I have not just tried to think outside the box as they say, but wonder why we’re thinking in or around a box in the first place? I never saw that a glass is half full or half empty. Rather completely full and always, unless it’s out in space somewhere, in a cold vacuum. In which case it’s half full of frozen water and half full of a vacuum. (I should say here, as some don't get this concept, the original question is, "is the half glass of water half full or half empty?", which is another question altogether but people take advantage of being asked the question incorrectly, so... what I'm saying here is relevant)

But, can you see where I’m going here? One could argue that’s non-binary, but in our binary thinking society, it’s non-binary to them. And that’s the point. Much of non-binary thinking really is binary. You just have to be seeing it through the filter or a paradigm, that isn’t anachronistic and preferred by the majority.

Wow, if that wasn’t a brain dump…

From the new Rachel Maddow, MSNBC data and news podcast talking about the French, January 6, 1934. Apparently flyers went out that said things like "you should show up it will be “wild“." Echoing from our past with Donald Trump's, January 6 insurrection, and today with his indictment of the tweets that went out saying to "show up and be wild!" Seriously. Fuck these people and their corrupt idea of America and their anti-democracy ideology, fetishizing violence, autocracy and theocracy. Those are in no way, American. But they are indeed, concepts of our enemies. Both foreign AND domestic.

We have thought since our reason for creating this country in the first place, and in seeking independence, and fighting a war, and breaking away from what was once our great Britain...then fighting a Civil War for similar reasons, against an oppressive south (who saw the north as oppressive), whose entire economy was built on slave labor. To be fair, the south saw the north as oppressor as they wanted to change the status quo. While the north was evolving into the understanding that slavery was indeed, bullshit. Things needed to change. We were America. Past time to act like it.

Slave labor, which the country profited from, but finally through grassroots efforts, people started to see how slavery didn’t fit what we saw as our country based on our US constitution and our civil rights, granted by God? An anachronistic concept that was used since the birth of humankind, in order to wrest power from unruly groups, to establish some kind of order, so as to allow for evolution in farming and cities and  society. Why would we now be going against all that for a populous belief in a politically fetishized desire for one narcissistic criminal, from a damaged (Trump) family, whose patriarch (Fred) once worked with Hitler?

Understand, these "Walkabout Thoughts" blogs are done through voice to text, as I walk, fighting off long Covid, while listening to podcasts and just ruminating about things they’re talking about and, things in my life. Some things from my past and some about my creative endeavors. Do not in anyway think though, that what's contained in these blogs are in any way indicative of the quality or substance of my other non-fiction, fiction, or any of my professional works. These random stream of consciousness, are my sharing my thoughts with you, and not to be any kind of a academic, or well-formed or presented set of considerations. Easiest way to read them is to just zip on through them, maybe reread something if you don't get it right off, and then move onto the next item. 

If you can get by that, I think you’ll find some interesting things in these. Cheers!

From Rachel’s podcast: All my life I thought, probably because of old movies about the French WWII Vichy government in France, they they were a bunch of cowards who surrendered to the Nazis. Now I know better, because of this podcast, that it was a bunch of French wannabe Nazis before Nazis existed, who signed up with invading Germany to become that notorious Vichy government in France. Which might explain the strength and endurance of the French Resistance during that time. How would we feel if Trump’s MAGA took over and turned us into their Handmaid‘s Tale version of "Gilead" or Hitler’s Germany? I wouldn’t doubt we'd form a resistance, and eventually we'd end that nonsense?

This is cool. I mentioned in a previous blog that I put my latest non-fiction book, "Suffering. Long Covid" in a little free library that’s on the road that I walk here on my street. Last week somebody put a book out so you could see the face of the book from the street. A big bigger book about houses and remodeling or something. The next time I passed it, I put it away, replaced it with my book. Later on that walk, someone had already reset my book, side-by-side with the rest so you could only see the spine of the books. I thought, I’ll just put my book back out front. But then maybe that’s not cool? So I just left it. 

Today when I started my walk, I saw it still there. No one had picked it up yet. On starting my 3rd mile I noticed someone had pulled it out a little bit, which was what I had been thinking of doing. Not setting it out front, just pulling it out from the crowd a bit to make a little more noticeable. But somebody else did that. My feelings on that were that it either showed others had looked at, or had looked but not taken it. So, which is worse? Make it look like it’s repeatedly not being taken? Or make it more obvious than the others to be seen? 

I didn’t touch it, but left it pulled out a more noticeable by a couple inches than the others. So I’m good. Also, there’s some important new information about long Covid that’s recently come out that I was thinking of putting out in a second edition. Or leave it? Not sure yet. One could be doing this all the time and that's not really cool. But, maybe I will. I mean… they have discovered that Covid makes nerve cells conjoin, which might explain things like a loss of smell. Until the brain pathway/route is replaced to go around that or that they are somehow re-separated, which is something else they’re working on being able to do. Pretty important as information. And a little terrifying.

On January 6… It’s interesting to note in 2021 that there were journalists in France who were gearing up to report on the reoccurring 1934 French January 6 insurrection date and celebration, when suddenly in America... our nonsense happened. When they noticed what was going on in America lit completely blew the French version out of the water, as far as news to be covered at that time. Sad, but interesting.

Just to add a caveat to all my blogs going back to about 2010 and now at around 1500 of them so far, I’m always saying what I believe in. Frequently, I’m saying what I believed in all my life and applying it to current issues today and insights about today or pointing out growth I have made intellectually or emotionally. But I’m also a writer. A nonfiction and fiction author. A screenwriter. And a filmmaker. With a university degree in psychology and phenomenology. And I understand communications. So while you may be able to pick apart some of my blogs to point out where I'm being problematic, I would argue that you may well be right. You may find I’ve changed my mind in later blogs. But also that I may be showing a window or a filter, or shading in somethings in such a way so as to communicate what I’m trying to get across to people. 

Especially when I know sometimes that it won’t get across and I have to frame something in a way that people will understand in order to see or accept, the rest of what I’m saying in the light of that, and maybe it will click in their minds in how I state it. But if you were to grill me about that, I might say that in my actual belief, I would say it a different way. I’m just pointing out that one should understand that what I’m publishing here is, communication. And no matter who does that, when you later question them? You’re going to get at least a slightly different insight into what they actually believe. Although I doubt it would change in substance, if they’re honest and have any kind of a craft in writing.

To be clear about the French national front movement, it is basically the dark ugly underbelly of French society, showing its diseased genitals to the world and yet... some praise them for that. Pretty much an exemplification of what we see with Donald Trump's MAGA in America.

More January 6 news about France in 1834... Between the fascists taking over in 1940 when the Nazis invaded France, those who were not fascist, all came together across the country and decided that this is just nuts! They started pushing back. Had Nazi Germany not invaded? Well, you get it. So the hope there is that with what we’ve seen here in America, we will go through the same kind of thing which... we’re already starting to see. Trump and MAGA are decreasing. Barring an invasion by a massive force like Nazi Germany against France in World War II, we may well just put this down and evolve beyond it. MAGA is an evolution into less than we are. That’s what autocracy is. It’s an ant hill society, and as power corrupts, absolute power in an autocracy, always eventually corrupts completely and utterly.

I’m on mile four now walking. I just switched podcasts as the Rachel podcast ended. Excellent podcast and I look forward to the next one about Florida and how they’ve seen this nonsense they’re going through, before. 

I’m switching now over to Pod Save America a show from last night which is a live version probably on stage and with an amazing guest cast, including Hillary Clinton. So I guess what this podcast episode is about? Trumps indictment today. So on this indictment, not the previous one he lost, or the next few coming up, he could either go to prison for the rest of his life for 100 years, which ever comes first, or become president. Or potentially be president within prison. What a country.

Jon Lovett on the podcast said he sides with Trump on one thing, that he’s more willing to go to prison than to clean out his closet.

About that one box at Mar-a-Lago, displayed out across the floor with at least one classified document visible, which in the photo they redacted a line on it indicating it’s important. One wonders who knocked it over? Agent of Trump? Would they have picked it up? Or agent of a foreign enemy? If they were caught or if they had to leave quickly and didn’t have time to fix it because they sure wouldn’t want to leave evidence and would only if they had to. So the possibility of agents of foreign enemies of America haven’t gotten in of their being there in having filmed at least some of the documents. This is so close a bet to have already been done that it's nearly at 100%. It’s almost not worth discussing or debating. I mean to disagree with Donald Trump‘s contention by so many of his supporters, some in Congress, who shouldn’t even be in Congress, the risk assessment of a foreign agent accessing these documents at Mar-a-Lago is so close to 100% that one might just as well just except it as having being done.

So if you remember, they did arrest one woman at Mar-a-Lago for trespassing. They checked her room and found basically spy equipment, your basic spy equipment. And as you know, it’s spies if you find evidence of one there’s more. And if you find evidence of an attempt you have to except out of operational procedures that somebody got in and got what they were looking for. As for that woman’s accoutrements, they found nine jump drives, a Sim card, etc., I mean, come on. From the article:

"When she was picked up at Mar-a-Lago, Zhang was carrying four cellphones, a laptop, an external hard drive and a thumb drive later found to carry malware. In her hotel room, investigators found nine USB drives, five SIM cards and a “signal detector” device, which could possibly be used to detect hidden cameras."

According to John Brennan, the CIA assessment may never be concluded about the danger of these documents at Mar-a-Lago. Because the only way to prove it was compromised (other than to just accept it must have been, Occam's Razor...) is to have someone tell what happened. Which could happen with an eventual agent/defector, etc. It’s happened before. The only time someone takes a physical document is if they can’t make a copy. And if these were originals that Trump had box after box after box of, there is your person that couldn’t make copies and just took the originals. There is your national traitor. There is the crime. There is the damage to America and our agents across the world. We have to wonder of those who have died since Trump left office, how many deaths are on his head? And how many on our head? And on our government's excuses for a criminal former POTUS, offering him the respect only a POTUS deserves. But he was never a real and actual POTUS in understanding that title and procedures he refused to follow like a petulant child. He was in essence, a foreign agent of industrial espionage.

Jon Lovett has a good point for those who think Donald Trump has evidence of extraterrestrials. No he doesn’t. Because if he did, he would’ve tweeted it out or told everyone even if he was warned that he might destroy the planet.

Totally off-topic… You know psychics always seem to be reborn from someone famous or a famous person speaks through them, or they were once a Napoleon, or something? I did my family tree years ago on ancestry.com and believe it or not, it was traced back to a once king of England, which in a way, is that so unusual over this much time? As a kid, I felt there was something weird about my life and that would explain it. When I got my DNA done by them and another group, the new lab (CRI Genetics) had some very interesting things to say on that, regarding my mtDNA Haplogroup (Mother Lineage) which linked me to some very interesting people. Who? 

Ötzi the Iceman, Mike Nichols, Craig Venter, Meryl Streep, Katie Couric, Stephen Colbert, Harry Connick Jr., Maggie & Jake Gyllenhaal, Ramesses III, Nelson Mandela, Sir David Attenborough, Lyndon strong. Johnson, Caravaggio, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Napoleon Bonaparte (I know, I KNOW!), The
Wright Brothers, William Harvey, Albert Einstein, Steven Pinker, Nicolas Cage, Larry Page, Zinedine Zidane.

Weird, right? Not to mention my lineage tracing led back to Alfred the Great (848/849 – 26 October 899). Good grief.

Jon Lovett has a good point on the podcast, don’t bother talking to any MAGA friends and family you have about this stuff. Talk to those who are MAGA curious or somehow on the fence about it. And obviously reinforce the support for those who believe in reality and democracy. Oh yeah, and that other thing what is it? Oh yeah, the rule of law.

Wow, a newer Chevy Impala just drove by me. Looks a little different than my first car in 1972, a 1967 Impala.

OK! I am at mile 4.5. That means I’ve done 10 miles this week so, far walking. I think I can say that without finishing the last half a mile yet because I still have to walk home and it’s actually after this last, half a mile, then another 2/10 of a mile from the stop sign down to my house :-)

Oh, so Pod Save America is in New York, because they say they’re bringing out "your attorney general Tish James", now. To thunderous applause! She takes Trump to trial on October 2, 2023 in New York.

What’s so funny about Trump's defense of his crimes is they’re all based on lies and ad homonyms. While those prosecuting him are basing their indictments on facts and evidence. Gee, I wonder who has a better chance of winning in an actual court?

MAGA lone wolves are no longer 100% Lonewolves, nor have they ever really been, when they’re being inflamed by lies and propaganda online and in media. But now there’s also unconstitutional private militias involved with their own lies and propaganda, and in some cases, even equipping people.

Wow, that's enough for this time...

Cheers! Sláinte!