with paper before me and
a pen in my hand
a cloud is
rising blooming billowing scudding
cumulus nimbus a thunderhead
dark foreboding airy bright
with paper before me and
a brush in my hand
a cloud is
gradients reflective limned
shadowed grey sunlit white
rounded flat-topped
with paper before me and
nothing in my hand
a cloud
is
Posted in Poetry | Tagged creative writing, modern poetry, nature, painting, Poetry, Serenity, travelogue, Writing | Leave a Comment »
Republicans are blaming the Democrats for the shutdown and, following the standard congressional “I’m rubber, you’re glue” playbook, Democrats are blaming the GOP in turn. That’s a weak, schoolyard response, and I’m sick of that game. Here’s what I want to hear from Democrats:
“You’re goddamn right we’re responsible. We are shutting this shit-show down, using every tool we can muster, using the power of the minority (just as you have done so many times over the years) to obstruct, to delay, to thwart, to frustrate, to discomfit, to drive a wedge between y’all and your base, to amplify our voice and blast our message, and our message is this: We will not be complicit!
“We will not be complicit in making health care unaffordable for millions by raising premiums and cutting services (and don’t trot out that bullshit lie about us wanting to provide health care to undocumented immigrants, because you know folks need an SSN to apply for Obamacare, and the undocumented, by definition, don’t have one). People are having a very tough time, right now, and we won’t help you make it worse. We won’t. You’ll have to sit down with us. You’ll have to take the damned meeting. You’ll have to negotiate. You’ll have to fucking govern instead of strutting around like a bunch of mooks in cheap suits running a protection racket.
“Moreover, we will not be complicit in supporting your destruction of our society. We won’t support this rogue militia you’ve created out of ICE and CBP, a force that rappels from BlackHawks down into American cities to round up people indiscriminately, en masse, without warrants, destroying property, terrorizing communities, citizens and immigrants, adults and children alike. No. We won’t.
“We’re not going to just stand by and wring our hands and think back fondly on gentler times while you erode our most basic rights. No, JD, we’re not going to be ‘civil’ in the face of your incivility, we’re not going to be silent and meek when one of the tenets of our founding documents enshrines our freedom to tell you that you’re wrong and we’re right and why.
“And we’re not going to just bite our tongues when you call everything an ‘emergency’ so you can raise the cost of goods with tariffs, withhold funding appropriated by law, extort businesses and universities into silence, prosecute individuals because they made you look bad, and slap the ‘terrorist’ label on anyone exercising free speech.
“No. We’re not. We’re going to shut this down, and we’re going to do it loudly and unapologetically. We’re going to make governing this nation as difficult as possible until you come to the table, sit down, and negotiate. We are doing this because of the real and lasting harm you are perpetrating against our nation. We are doing this because we fucking can, and because the American people need someone to protect them, to look out for their needs, their health, and their lives.”
That is what I want to hear. That is what I think we need to hear.
k
Posted in Culture, Politics | Tagged blame game, civil rights, congress, freedom of speech, government shutdown, ICE, politics, senate | 2 Comments »
I was born of Pacific waters
bathed in their colors of stone and sky
swam their frigid swells and troughs
to return awakens my heart’s connection
to walk the firm yet yielding sand
to wade knee-deep through the rip
to comb a fiver’s worth of unbroken dollars
to have my ankles caressed by sea foam
to greet the sunrise and kiss the sunset
to hear my father’s words echo
“Never turn your back on the ocean”
though I do, if only to see my world
as the ocean views it
a dark forbidding challenge
to its unparalleled power
the Pacific is the edge of my existence
it flows in my veins
it nourishes my soul
Posted in Creativity, Poetry | Tagged beach, creative writing, modern poetry, Pacific ocean, Poetry, Writing | 1 Comment »
I write to express my strong support for your recent vote to REJECT the continuing resolution to fund the government, and I beg you to hold fast and continue to fight for a negotiated bill that will undo some of the worst effects of the GOP’s efforts to strip American’s in need of their Medicaid and ACA assistance.
Moreover, I am also in support of the broader position that we cannot continue to fund the GOP’s efforts to dismantle the federal government, nor the administration’s obvious predisposition to limit, ignore, and outright deny American citizens their constitutionally-protected rights. A vote for the CR would make us all complicit in our own demise, and would be nothing less than appeasement of this the president’s growing autocracy.
I know that the president has threatened mass firings/layoffs should a shutdown come to pass, but I have two things to say about that.
First, he threatened this the last time, and Democrats blinked, wanting to avoid the unnecessary hardship that firings would cause to thousands of government employees. However, that concession, that concern, got Democrats nothing but a black eye and a reputation for not having the resolve to match their rhetoric.
Second, firing those employees would be the president’s choice, not a necessity, as he has the option of furloughing them instead. If he does fire thousands, yes, it will cause those employees harm, but how much harm will be caused by the loss of Medicaid and ACA subsidies? We must weigh the difference between employees losing their jobs and citizens losing their lives.
So it is with knowledge of the painful ramifications a shutdown would cause that I plead with you to stand your ground for as long as it takes to bring your GOP colleagues to the table, to push the president to take your meetings, and to force this administration to govern by negotiation and consensus, rather than by fiat.
Thank you for your past service to our state and to the nation.
In hope,
k
Posted in Culture, Politics | Tagged ACA, affordable care act, autocracy, continuing resolution, medicaid, Obamacare, politics, senate, subsidies, Trump | Leave a Comment »
With my reputation as a life-long and somewhat outspoken liberal, some can be excused for assuming that I was glad to hear that Mr. Kirk was assassinated. This is not so. I am most definitely not glad of it.
Primarily, having lost a parent in my youth, I empathize with the loss his wife and children are suffering. Though his children are younger than I was—I was almost six when my mother died—such a loss effects the entire family, and for a long time. I still feel the effects of my mother’s death, a lifetime later, and given Kirk’s large-sized life and the manner of his death, I know his family will feel it forever. Nothing to be glad of, there.
Also, I lived through a period marked by political assassinations. From JFK and MLK and RFK to Milk and Moscone and Sadat, I’ve experienced the gut-wrench of seeing a hero struck down, the rage of having one man’s bullet steal the hope of multitudes, and the despair as that rage boiled up, spilled over, and engendered an escalation that led to more violence, more hatred, more division.
And then there’s the fact that political assassinations never bring about the result desired. Assassins see their act as the simple solution to a complex problem, but all their crimes do is create new sets of problems and embolden their victim’s supporters, exacerbating tensions and giving new life to old hatreds. We see this happening now, too, and I am not glad of it.
I was not a fan of Kirk’s outlook and philosophy, and found much of it backward-looking and hate-filled. However, I’ve learned that there are many in my circle who, before this week, had never even heard of Charlie Kirk. It’s reasonable to assume, therefore, that there are many right-leaning folks who were likewise ignorant of Kirk’s message and activism. Until now. Thus, rather than silencing Kirk’s message, this assassination has the unintended effect of amplifying his message, presenting it to more people who might find it acceptable. It transforms messenger into martyr, and I don’t see this as a positive.
Amid all this, there’s the ridiculous tendency for pundits and politicians and performers to keep score. An assassin’s motives are, to my mind, largely irrelevant, because the crime is indefensible. So, regardless of whether Kirk’s assassin was an alt-right reactionary or an ultra-left-wing anarchist, the end results are the same. Understanding motives is only relevant when discussing radicalization in the aggregate; when we talk about individuals, it only serves to rile and enrage and justify finger-pointing tirades.
Finally, there’s the permission structure the assassin has provided Kirk’s supporters. By murdering a man who was—let’s face it—simply exercising his rights to freedom of speech, Kirk’s assassin has given our nascent autocracy the perfect excuse to ratchet up their own rhetoric, prosecute political enemies, label criticism as “hate speech” (which is protected by the First Amendment and legal precedent*, by the way), attack/doxx/fire private citizens for expressing opinions, and manipulate corporations, markets, and media that don’t hew to the prescribed orthodoxy.
None of this—none of it—makes me glad. None of it is good. None of it is helpful. None of it solves anything.
So . . . what to do?
The only thing that has helped me avoid absolute despair this week is this: be kind. Especially—and this is the hard part—be kind to those you encounter who may be grieving over the death of someone they admired. Why? Because a lot of people who admired Kirk are unaware of his more incendiary and regressive views, having only been exposed to his more faith-based and patriotic messaging. Also, there are those who, as mentioned, were unaware of Kirk in general, but who see the assassination of a right-wing firebrand as an attack on their world view. Being kind to these folks, right now, might allow you to have a reasoned discussion where everyone is able to agree that Kirk’s assassination is not something that makes us glad, even though we disagreed with him. Naturally, there are those who are wholly on-board with what Kirk was laying out there, but even then, being kind is useful, as it protects us from entering into useless arguments.
That’s my take on things. I will never be glad that someone is assassinated.
*Info on the SCOTUS precedent (for what it’s worth these days) can be read about via this link to Matal v. Tam
Posted in Politics | Tagged assassination, Charlie Kirk | Leave a Comment »
AI; the grift that keeps on grifting. Feed it, press a button, and (in the immortal words of our president) “Bing Bong Bing,” there you have it: AI slop.
It’s everywhere, now including your bookshelf. If you’re not careful, that is.
And we weren’t.
We wanted to read Robert Reich’s new memoir, Coming Up Short, so we went to the Evil Empire (aka Amazon) and searched. “What format?” was the question. Hardcover, Paperback, Kindle, or Audio? Paperbacks are easier on our ancient hands, so that’s what we picked. And there was our first error. I did not see the red flag, did not twig that this was a new release, available in both Hardcover and Paperback? That never happens. If you get a hardback deal, publishers aren’t going to undercut that with a simultaneous paperback release. Sadly, all we saw was the reduction from the hardcover price (expected in a paperback), so we dropped that turd into our cart and hit the checkout.
My bad on that score.
When the book arrived, it was (as my wife described it) like opening a door to an alternate universe. I was coming up the stairs as she first viewed our purchase, and all I heard her say was, “….the hell?” The cover (pictured, right) was unlike anything we’d ever seen on a new release from a major publisher. It was also about half the thickness of a major release (150 pp vs the 400 pp of the hardback).
….the hell? Indeed.
What we had purchased was a bunch of AI slop.
Someone—definitely not Shem Grant, the named author of this tripe, whose magnum opus has now been de-listed from Amazon—fed a bunch of open source info into an AI chatbot, had it spit out enough slop to fill the 150 pages required to give it a spine, slapped a cartoonish rendition of its subject on the cover, and voila, instant grift. I’ll admit, I’ve not read this “product,” but in skimming through I found it repetitive, composed much like a high schooler’s book report, and rife with errors (within three minutes I fact-checked two: Reich was born in Scranton, not New York, and he was a Rhodes Scholar, not a Marshall Scholar).
Yup . . . AI slop.
Is this a thing? I wondered. Heading back out to Amazon, I executed similar searches for new memoirs and found similar AI-generated knock-off versions:
In addition to these obvious attempts to con buyers by piggybacking similarly titled slop onto the sales of new releases, there were many self-styled “biographies” that had dubious authors, were listed as “independently published,” and often had obviously AI-generated covers (some that were really bad, and I mean like embarrassingly bad).
So, this stuff is out there, and there is a lot of it.
Remember when self-publishing became a thing? Remember how everyone wrung their hands over that? “There’s already enough crap out there in the book-sphere, and now everyone who can hold a pencil is going to think that they’re a writer!”
Hehe. Good times, eh? Because now, not only can anyone with enough grip strength to hold a pencil pose as a writer, but all those who are too lazy to even pick up a damned pencil are able to churn out utter rubbish, slap a fake name and an SEO-optimized title on it, send it into the Amazonian jungle to sting the unwary, reap the grift, and move on.
It’s enough to make one want to give up.
But, lesson learned. Once burned . . . .
k
Posted in Creativity, Hi Tech, Politics, Writing | Tagged ai, AI slop, ai-generated books, amazon, ardern, books, booksellers, cheney, kamala, knock-off versions, publishing, reich | Leave a Comment »
I took my nose on a walk, today, and let it lead me from one memory to the next. It was a cool overcast midsummer morning, the land still damp, leaves still plump from yesterday’s sudden rain. Flowers nodded heavily, leaning from tidy beds over paved walkways like old men rising from a heavy sleep. Birds sought ripening berries through branch and bramble, and dogs led their owners from spot to spot, following their own noses.
First I tramped uphill over needles and cones, a well-trod path winding beneath conifers that lost their heads in the lifting fog. The air was redolent with resin and bark, soft earth and dew-soft ferns, and my nose remembered my time as a student at music camp, days and nights spent tucked up amidst giant sequoias, so close, so tall, that their height could not be seen, and my mind echoed with the opening beats of Copland’s Fanfare, an unexpected reveille to wake teenage musicians and fashion a memory never to be lost.
I walked onward along the ridgeline as the morning cleared, the slanting light breaking through the southern sky, the avenue warming with the summer’s rising sun. The scent of August grass, dry and seed-heavy, a mixture of soil and wood and hay and warmth, took me back to the rolling hills of my youth, slick and golden, begging us to take our cardboard squares to their tops and slide down their gentle slopes.
Farther, I passed beneath a plum tree, the path beside it filled with fallen fruit. The air was thick with a sweet, sun-stewed aroma that filled my brain with scenes of kitchens and bushel baskets and Mason jars and food mills and sacks of sugar all at the ready, as the thick preserves bubbled quietly on the stove.
Heading home, I walked along the main boulevard, wide and now sun-drenched, busy with cars and trucks. I sniffed the scents of diesel exhaust and hot pavement mingled with dust and the wafting aroma of brewing coffee. I closed my eyes and was met with the image of Jerusalem streets as I walked to the bus stop on my way to morning classes. The only thing missing was the adhan, broadcast from minarets, blaring across the awakening city.
It was a wide-ranging journey, though found within but a few miles on foot, a surprising trip through time and distance.
Posted in Seattle, Writing | Tagged creative writing, Life, Memories, nature, Travel, vignette, walking, Writing | 1 Comment »
Kurt R.A. Giambastiani 